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West Indian or Caribbean literature comprises of several authors spanning a

period beginning in the sixteenth century. The authors, responding to the complex

demographic and cultural reality of the region, sought to articulate the concept of

Caribbean identity through art. Many authors had different and outright contradicting

views that were transposed into the aesthetics of Caribbean literature. Caribbean identity

itself is comprised of various concepts: a fragmented self, hybridity of the individual, the

need to re write history, and a fluid evolving identity or a shared one based on ancestry.

The different views are embodied in Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home,

Brathwaite’s X/Self, Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics, and Walcott’s The Prodigal.

Caribbean identity is often viewed as fragmented into many different, often

opposing selves. The identity is describes as schizophrenic, as the Caribbean person

grapples with an ancestral identity rooted in the Old World and a creolised one based in

the region. In addition the creolised identity itself is fragmented into the urban versus the

rural, a foreign one based on migration and a feminine identity that is stigmatised and ill

defined. The fragmentation of the individual is seen by Edward Kamau Brathwaite as

essential to understanding identity, “piling up is the most suitable technique for exposing

a reality that is itself being scattered” (Josephs). That is why X/Self is a continuous

narrative of different individual voices and histories.

The Caribbean identity is viewed by many artists as pastoral in nature. The link

between the landscape and individual is not confined to subsistence or monocrop

farming. Instead the colours of the fauna populating the region provide a rootedness in

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the region the different diasporic peoples have been brought to. The rural-urban drift that

has taken place in the region is viewed as abandonment of the peasantry. Eric Roach has

glorified this class in his poetry as being essential to national development. Roach

describes the peasant as being able to survive harsh conditions; the very survivalism that

the peasant possesses creates the backbone for the entire nation. Roach writes, “Look on

the sower and the seed / That thrives between rock and rain” (134). Existence in the

urban areas is seen as a step towards the metropole, the urban life is characterised by

confinement and cramped conditions. Despite the emergence of the steel pan and calypso

from such a backdrop it is seen as “the crampedness of the yard which allowed little

poverty;”” (Rohlehr, 381). Walcott, in his poem “Laventille”, describes the impact of the

stifling urban conditions on the lives and sense of identity on the people living in the

area. For Walcott, it has no opportunity as “lives revolve round prison, graveyard,

church” (“Collected Poems”, 86). The urban squalor revolts Walcott, as with it comes

amnesia of one’s past and the assimilation of an alien culture:

climbing, we could look backwith widening memoryon the hot, corrugated –iron seawhose horrors we allshared. (“Collected Poems”, 86)

The move from the rural to urban is seen as a loss of innocence. The characters of

various authors seek to regain the metaphorical lost garden. This process is undertaken as

a means to recover the serenity that nature provides but that is sacrificed in moving to the

city. However, the return home is not often triumphant or glorious. The biblical prodigal

son returns after a harsh reality and is forced to account and repent at home. This

characterisation is seen in Gardening in the Tropics and The Prodigal. The very things

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that the urban areas boast, separate characters from the rural roots. Nellie in Jane and

Louisa Will Soon Come Home feels a separation from the urban people and views their

culture as insignificant, far removed from the rich folk heritage of the proletariat. “Those

people throw dice, slam dominoes and give-laugh-for-peasoup all day long. They have no

culture, no sense of identity, no shame or respect for themselves” (51). Therefore the

urban person must redefine the link to the landscape. “Education destroys Nellie’s link

with the village and the past which it represents but also apprises her or her true

relationship with the segment of the society towards she is being pushed” (Walker-

Johnson, 51). Therefore the response is a renewed yearning for the pastoral. The rejection

of the land is seen as a rejection of the pastoral heritage it is a severing of the umbilical

cord that provides the soothing balm of nature. The rejection of Mass Stanley by David is

described by Brodber as a betrayal of the entire way of life of Mass Stanley, “the soul

that he will pass on to his son and his son’s and for his one and only child to come and

rebuke him about it, to tell him that his life was nothing, he could not take” (Brodber,

106).

Migration, especially towards the metropole, has served to further create a

fragmented self. Upon leaving the region, the Caribbean person is faced with the need to

assimilate into the unwelcoming, temperate states. This further complicates the question

of identity as it adds a new dimension to the existing polar influences on the concept of

self. The region’s authors too had a similar experience that Brathwaith described as: “the

writers at home wrote of their islands on the one hand, but wished for exile (in spirit or in

fact)on the other, and where the writers in exile embraced and recoiled from their foreign

status in the same gesture as it were” (qtd. in Rohlehr, 467). Brathwaite laments the

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acquisition of foreign tastes which is seen as a betrayal of the Caribbean values, “they

dream of Rubenstein of vogue and Guinevere at Camelot at Arthur’s fogey castle”

(Braithwaite, “X/Self” 16). Migration for Brathwaite is a double edged sword, while the

nostalgia provides material for the creation of art, the separation from ones roots divorces

one from the source material and more importantly the people for whom the literature is

thought to represent.

The female is described in Caribbean literature as being even more fragmented. In

addition to the different selves there is the female self that the female as dissuaded from

embracing. In growing into adulthood the female is not adequately prepared to deal with

individual sexuality and its expression. The education system in both the written and

hidden curricula does not adequately prepare for leadership, purpose and service. The

female is trapped in Brodber’s “kumbla”. In Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home,

Nellie has to seek self expression in different ways, among them dance, which was

previously off limits. The dance itself is a journey back into the rural, free self. The

dancehall is a “surrogate version of the rural kumbla, its relative absence of rules and

rites means that it is less constricting, less prescriptive, less demanding than the

communities and pseudo communities of the village” (Rohlehr, 500). The rural kumbla

may be difficult to live in but for the woman it is better than the urban one, however

because she cannot truly express herself both spell the same pain. The Caribbean woman

is brought up to passive, to avoid conflict with societal norms and to carry on despite

abandonment by men. The schizophrenia that Nellie faces is the struggle to leave the

kumbla and face the confusion of the world or stifle in it like her maternal ancestors. The

woman is therefore left with no option but to achieve wholeness and self expression

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through leaving reason, she has to go mad. Only as a mad woman does society dictate

and force her to suppress different aspects of herself. Senior also shows that the mental

breakdown of the woman is the means to escape the constraints on her. In “Hurricane

Story 1951”, a woman migrates leaving her son. The only link they have is the ocean that

links Jamaica and the Metropole, however when she realises that all she needed for a

better life was not migration and material gain she breaks down having cut herself from

her home and son. Senior writes;

I must go to my-stripping off her clothes

-son

in Aenon Town, Jamaica-

stepping intothe water(as the rushedto restrain her)

-my sonmy s – (Senior, “Gardening”, 41)

The passage into adolescence is shrouded in mystery and proverbs. The emerging

woman grows to view her sexuality as dirty and mysterious. ““Woman luck de a dungle

heap” they say, “fowl come scratch it up”” (Brodber, 17). This creates a rejection of men,

as the fragmented psyche of women is viewed in binaries by men. Nellie is an innocent

virgin girl then a sexual being that must be guarded against. Nellie responds to the

situation by calling her father a “clown”, referring to his hypocritical pandering to her.

The self is further fragmented with racial identity, to be one of a multiple of

ethnicities in the region, or more problematically to be of mixed descent in a region

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fixated on ethnic identity. The question of race has spawned one of the great debates in

Caribbean literature, the Wasafiri debate. Dubbed after the journal in which the opposing

views were published, the debate cantered on the inclusion of Jean Rhys, a Caribbean

person of European descent in the Caribbean literary canon. The question of the validity

of race as a criterion for Caribbean identity was sparked by Brathwaite’s statement that:

White creoles in the English French West Indies have separated themselves wide

a gulf, and have contributed too little culturally, as a group, to give credence to

the notion that they can, given the present structure, meaningfully identify or be

identified with the spiritual Sargasso Sea. (Brathwaite, “Contradictory Omens”.

38).

This stems from the scene in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea when Antoinette looks at

Tia, during the burning of Culibri, yearning for solidarity and friendship. Brathwaite’s

statements are not necessarily fanatically nationalist or racist; the question of race being a

part of the identity of the Caribbean person is explored. Race is important, not as defining

identity, but its question forces the individual to look at its previous role in shaping social

relationships in the region. Race “has always been at the heart of Caribbean culture, and

it was the British, along with other Europeans, who firmly put it there from the

beginnings of their residence in the region” (Savory, 33). By raising this, power relations

are removed and the Rhys being from the region and writing about the region are taken as

characteristics of Rhys Caribbean identity. In addition, there is the real issue of the

shunning of the black in favour of the glorification of the white. Nellie’s aunt does this as

she believes that the constant lightening of the complexion of her children will bear social

mobility and status. Brodber’s novel opens with the listing of the generational attempt to

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lighten the complexion to produce “khaki” children. “So we were brown, intellectual,

better and apart, two generations of lightening blue-blacks and gracing elementary

schools with brightness” (Brodber, 7). The characteristics of high status are identified as

colour which is directly proportional to education.

To address the fragmented self of the Caribbean person, some authors have

sought to create a hybridity of the multiple histories that have shaped the region. The aim

is to forge a new Caribbean identity out of a history of migration, exploitive labour

systems, colonialism and neo imperialism. Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s X/Self explores

the possibility of forming an identity out of the region’s common ancestry, which

demographically is African. Brathwaith subdues the fixation on the multiple ethnic

composition of the region and seeks to create an identity out of the existing situation of

the region. The title itself suggests a process of formation that the region itself is at a

junction in which it must choose a path. This junction represents the different history and

culture of the region. “By recognising a shared past, Brathwaite sets the ground for a

collective Caribbean present and future” (Josephs). X/Self is autobiographical as the

author approaches the question of his identity he realises that he is investigating the

Caribbean identity. However, the shared history is from the African and Neo Indian

cultures.

A hybrid society existing in the region draws criticism as it is looked as at forcing

a concept unto the people and a denial of the Caribbean’s ethnic demographic reality.

Hybridity is viewed in two ways by different authors. Brathwaite seeks to create a shared

history based on common ancestry while Walcott seeks a superficial one, in which it

occurs to create an individual that comprised the entire region. This yearning to melt is

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described by Shalini Puri as forced poetics. The attempt to force a hybrid identity on the

Caribbean is described by Puri as “an attempt to create a space in which to explore and

reinvent aesthetics of equality” (85). In Walcott’s The Antilles, the author describes an

ideal Caribbean city having inhabitants that “intermarry as they choose from instinct, not

tradition, until their children find it increasingly futile to trace their genealogy” (18). The

vision of Walcott is idealised and arguably impractical given the Caribbean’s history of

attempts of national and regional unity. Puri accuses Walcott of using his aesthetics to

fulfil a political dream. “Walcott’s strategy is to use the erotic power of language to make

his readers willingly enter the poetic dream when they have been abandoned by the

political dream, applying to politics the balm of beauty” (Puri, 89). What is sought is a

creolisation rather than assimilation. The creolisation process would have the various

groups in the region adopt common values from the region; thereby enriching the culture

brought with them to the New World or in the case of the indigenous people is

establishing a rootedness in a region that has become strange. One process of creolisation

is the creation of “nation language”, which Brathwaite does with Creole.

The history of the region, as written by the colonisers, continues to affect the

notion of identity. Some authors reject the imposed version and aim to re write history

encompassing the entire region’s people and highlighting the abuses that have silenced

many into acceptance of imposed values. The romanticised version of the colonisation of

the region is sought to be dispelled by authors. In Walcott’s “Another Life” the

protagonist, now mature, begins to see the indigenous inhabitants who resisted the

Europeans as “iconic heroic ancestors” (Rohlehr, 464). Brathwaite too re writes history

through the description of the conquistadores in X/Self. The European conquerors are

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shown a cracked by the need and desire to conquer; it is represented through a crack in

the verse itself:

makes me vomit out destroy destroy though they were never chantments like those heard or told in cadiz

The new perspective of history and aestheticisms described by Brathwaite as:

Dear mummauh writin yu dis letter

wha? guess what! Pun a computer O

kay? The rewriting of history is a means to combat the amnesia that the Caribbean

person faces. According to Walcott, “amnesia is the true history of the New World. That

is out true inheritance” (Walcott, 40). This is why Brathwaite constantly retells history,

giving the perspective to those silences by time. He focuses on the neo Indian and

African whose primordial culture has remains despite enslavement and genocide, “was

this the fleet my pride unfurl? / pirates in smiling ships. They rob the world I rule” (31).

Senior describes the native inhabitants’ interaction with the European:

but we were peaceful thenchild-like in the yellow dawn of out innocence

so in exchange for a string of islandsand two continents

you gave us a string of beads an some hawk’s bells

“Meditation on Yellow” (Senior, 11)

Senior also encompasses a larger region than the Caribbean, for her the history of

exploitation is not bound geographically or temporally. For Walcott history itself is

divided into the official learnt one and the natural one that is causal and bears the

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repercussions of past events. Walcott distinguishes both by the use of the capital and

common “h”, the capital one is learnt, the common one happens:

... under the arcadesThe beggars slept, unshifting as History.There was the city, then there was the magical echo of the city’s name and the same sulphurous mirage of its double created history, (“The Prodigal”, 47)

Brathwaite also vilifies the oral over the scribal. The oral tradition is the root of

the Caribbean literary tradition; however, the European fixation with record keeping has

glorified the scribal as truth. The oral is eternal and resilient, “we make this narrow

thread of silver spin the long time of sand” (Brathwaite, 101). The oral however, is

“narrow” in “sand”; it may be suppressed but not erased. The making of the scribal oral

allows the reader to grasp all the meaning of the word. This oral tradition has the Anancy

archetype which is used by the authors. Anancy is associated with the kumbla, he is “a

maker of finely crafted kumblas” (Brodber, 124). The Anancy figure’s use of language

that is humorous to the extent that is disarms the reader’s inhibitions is utilised by Senior

in “Pineapple”:

we welcomed youto our shores,not knowing inyour language“house warming”meant “to takepossession of” and “host”could easilyturn hostage. (Senior, 64).

History alone must not be re written but the presentation of the aesthetic must be

re formatted to accommodate the new expression. This is seen in Brathwaite’s attempts to

make the words of X/Self concrete by casting tem in a new form and rhythm. “In X/Self

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the shapes seek to mirror the actualities of history” (Antoine-Dunne, 145). In addition to

the audio-visual aesthetic that must be re written the language of expression must be used

deliberately to confer the new historical reality. This language is Creole, which was

viewed as “unaesthetic, limited and limiting in its expressive and ideational range, and

restrictive in its communicability with an international readership” (Warner-Lewis, 26).

In the works of all the authors discussed in the paper, Creole is integral to identity as a

means of resistance to oppressive influences. The international reader is nevertheless

accommodated as the Creole utilises popular spellings to aide pronunciation. Brathwaite

is more concerned with the regional audience. “The writer in fact, has a special

relationship with his own people, his own native public, and they should have a special

kind of attention for him: because it is together that they create the work of art”

(Brathwaite, 201).

Brathwaite’s montage method shows that he rejects prescription to a particular

style or genre. His compilation of the different images and cultural references creates

what Paul Naylor calls a “creolisation of those traditions” (Josephs). Creole is viewed as

being true to the Caribbean. Senior says, “I use Creole to be true to my characters and the

place I come from” (“Interview”). Self discovery is in the rediscovery of the past. This is

seen in Nellie’s re discovery of her African heritage. In addition the indigenous church

with its regional influences must not be seen as evil, as the Baptist one is in Jane and

Louisa Will Soon Come Home. The musical nature of Brathwaite’s and Senior’s poetry

affirms a break with the European form. Even when the protagonist in X/Self uses

Prospero’s or the Western tools of expression, he still questions its validity:

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But is like what I tryin to sen/seh & seh about muse-in computer& mouse& learn-in prospero lingage & tingnot fe dem/not fe demde way calibandonebut fe wefe a-we

The need for an authentic language that represents the region is also echoed by Wilson

Harris who believes that the language that truly represents the people substitutes the splendour

and history the inherited literary tradition has but does not bestow upon the region. “The real

hope for man lies not in promises of splendour or in virtuosity but in the revelation of original

and authentic rhythms within the gloomy paradox of a world” (Harris, 15). Walcott on the other

hand asserts that “by openly fighting tradition we perpetuate it” (38). Hence the language of The

Prodigal is closer to the Standard English.

The re writing of history involves the rejection of the Western linear concept of

time, it must be made cyclical. “In X/Self the past and the present co-exist because in the

shaping of the image, the past and the present flow into each other” (Antoine-Dunne,

138). This is seen in the juxtaposition of the historical with the contemporary “but

Claudius her husband never is at home/ at grapetime tv supper time or when she takes her

pills” (Brathwaite, 12). To deal with fragmentation, some authors have sought to create

an identity not bound by spatio-temporal constraints. Olive Senior when interviewed said,

“I live inside my head” (“Interview”, 25). Walcott writes “Dates multiplied by events, by

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consequences, are what add up to history” (“The Prodigal”, 83). He focuses on the causal

nature of history that focuses on the lasting impressions of man’s actions.

In addition to what constitutes the Caribbean identity, there is the debate whether

identity itself can be clearly defined as shared by all in the region or that the Caribbean is

so diverse that identity is fluid and constantly evolving. The protagonist in X/Self is fluid,

is shifting through time and person, however the fundamental aspect of the character is an

African one, that journeys through history. The case for a common identity is found in

Brathwaite’s concept of “Nam”; it is associated with resistance and rebellion. It is this

inner self of the Caribbean person that is forged from the common history of the region.

The aspects of a coherent Caribbean culture are explored by Brathwaite. He attempts to

do this as the common culture “may not be conscious, but the idea is to make it

conscious, to protect it by stating/naming it” (Josephs). At the same time Brathwaite’s

poem illustrates the ongoing process of defining identity. X/Self is described a s tidalectic

in which the movement of the poem moves, this is deliberate as Brathwaite’s Sycorax

text seeks to concretises and convey meaning of the words themselves other than the

semantic meanings. Though it may be desired to have an identity in which all Caribbean

people share, that will be superficial and result in an array of groups suppressing

individual histories. Stuart Hall points out that “cultural identities come from somewhere,

have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant

transformation” (394). Brodber embraces a fluid identity, Nellie undergoes a process of

identification and indigenisation, and this can only occur if the individual is willing to be

moulded in the process. The voice of truth in the novel, Baba tells Nellie “that our

solutions lay in our liquidity. He had spent a good long time in teaching me that,”

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(Brodber, 69). Both Senior and Brathwaite embrace the African spirit. Senior invokes the

African gods for inspiration in her poems.

Walcott’s The Prodigal is a case for the superficial hybridity. The journey through

the poem involves travel to Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. Identity is being

forged out the historical commonalities and interactions of the regions. A balance is

important to Walcott, “O Altitudino, And my fear of heights” (“The Prodigal”, 96),

shows his fear of ignoring any influence in the region.

The Caribbean identity can therefore be described as still in a process of

definition, however this definition will constantly chance as the inhabitants do. What can

be gathered from the question of identity is the desire by the artists to find its most

comprehensive expression so as to create an aesthetic to match. From the works

discussed several concepts are derived. Firstly, the Caribbean person is fluid , consisting

of different fragmented selves, also hybridity occurs in the region, though not through

ethnic mixing but a creolisation of the different cultures. And finally, to truly grasp the

Caribbean identity, the individual must be ready to release the historical baggage carried

and form a new history