Editorial Volume 9 Nos 1 and 2
It is hardly a surprise to us that articles received for this ninth
Volume of The Arts Journal all speak to issues of identity. The early
1960s saw the emergence of nation states in the British West Indies as
individual colonies, one by one, gained independence and freedom from
an identity as colonial. However, affirmations about the certainty of
nation-building and notions of the unity of the nation from political
leaders, are undermined by narratives of the fragility of lives lived,
more so in societies of diverse cultural compositions. The
contributions in this issue offer, not the official version of
nationhood but the alternative, subversive reinterpretation of the
novelist, the vision of the poet and the visual artist in our midst,
and also the illumination of critical analyses. Discussing cultural
identity
remains fundamental to human development in the region.
Emeritus Professor Clem Seecharan, in “Bifurcated Nationalism: African
and Indian Identities in Colonial Guyana in the 1930s”, examines in
dispassionate manner the composition of society in colonial Guiana and
traces the evolution of “race consciousness” and “communal pride”,
evident since the 1930s, as necessary precursors to the formation of a
Guyanese national identity.
Lee Johnson’s essay, “Derek Walcott: Poet of the Exiles” brings a fresh
perspective to the question of identity and belonging. While this
article has distinct relevance to that large community of nationals
living outside the Caribbean, away from home, it has equal relevance
for those of us who stuck it out at home all these decades hoping and
waiting for a better life.
This essay seeks to reexamine Walcott’s poetry, from “In A Green Night”
to “White Egrets”, from the viewpoint of how it has helped to shape,
codify and interpret the experience of being a part of the West Indian
Diaspora, with its often-dual identities and places called ‘home’. It
highlights the poet’s emphases on the tensions and contradictions of
escape/exile/flight – away from the “urine stunted trees” and “malarial
light” – with the resulting sense of loss and alienation such flight
engenders. It shows how, over the course of his work, the initial
escapee – the castaway – morphs into the adventurer or wandering
Odysseus; how the anomie of departure evolves into the elation of
Crusoe, the fortunate traveller, and finally to the changed, returning
prodigal.
Central to Walcott’s poetry is his search to uncover those common
threads that knit together a sense of what it means to be West Indian.
And over the fifty years of his writing, his perspectives on race,
history, language and landscape are the fundamentals that map out a
vision of identity in the West Indies. They are also the same
fundamentals that help lift the reader above the squalid and the
cynical and offer West Indians the potential to be nothing less than
“the receiving vessel of each day’s grace”.
Emeritus Professor Kenneth Ramchand’s “A Bong Coolie Poonith: A Quest
for Knowledge and Self-Discovery” is a review of a book (written by
Poonith’s 8
grandson, Harold Phekoo) that attempts to recapture one man’s life
story, and those of his descendants, over three generations from 1885
to the 1960s. Significantly, this work covers the same landscape as
Walcott’s poetry but from the perspective of the Indian-Caribbean
person trying to find accommodation in the New World. Phekoo’s desire
to explore the meaning of his life and his family’s in many ways also
reflects the history and evolution of Trinidad itself. This article is
structured in sections that make for easy reading in very accessible
language and it will have resonance for all those “who came”. It is an
interesting example of oral history and of community history.
Marianne Bessy’s “You are Haiti, too”: Negotiating “Haitianness” in the
works of Women Writers in the Diaspora” examines writings of
contemporary Haitian female authors who write, in English, about
migratory experiences from Haiti to North America (USA and Canada). The
aim of the article is to analyze how these authors illustrate the
negotiating of “Haitianness” for the Diasporic Haitian subject and how
they make us consider anew the struggles inherent to transnational
identities in an adopted homeland as well as the longing for home that
haunts one’s exile status. Specifically, it analyzes images of
“home”/Haiti and accounts of Haitian history created by these authors
so as to examine the sometimes conflicting feelings of nostalgia,
rejection, pride, and celebration that seem to surround Haiti and
Haitian identity in the Diasporic imagination. An overall trope in
these works is the collective desire to understand the past and the
present by inventing, creating, and celebrating an imagined homeland.
These accounts of Diasporic imagination offer an inspirational roadmap
for the shaping of both personal and national identities.
Melody Boyd Carričre “Petra’s Underworld: Rational Speech in Rosario
Ferré’s The House on the Lagoon” analyzes the complexity of Petra’s
character in this novel (1996). The foreword to Ferré’s novel includes
a quotation from Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseus, through a blood
offering, is allowed to speak with the shades of the Underworld.
Petra’s character in Ferré’s novel is both “Other” and godlike, for
despite her African ancestry, which puts her in a subordinate position
in Puerto Rico, the powerful and elite figures of the Mendizabal family
descend to the house’s “Underworld” to seek counsel from her. This
paper explores the connection between the Odyssean reference and West
African tradition by comparing Greek myth to the Orisha gods. The paper
also examines the significance of José Luis González’s essay, “Puerto
Rico: The Four Storeyed Country” which underlines the racial hierarchy
that exists in Puerto Rican society. The ideas in González’s essay are
central to Ferré’s novel, for the layers of the house on the lagoon
mirror those found in Puerto Rican culture. In Ferré’s work, her
protagonist Isabel exposes the racial hypocrisy in this society through
her manuscript about the Mendizabal family. The manuscript gives to
figures like Petra a voice in a culture that confines them to
marginalized spaces.
The Arts Journal is happy to extend its reach to the non-English
speaking Caribbean, to societies with a background of French and
Spanish history, at the same time offering its readers wider and deeper
exposure to the region’s cultural idioms.
In “As New and as Old”, art commentator Alim Hosein makes an
instructive statement about Bernadette Indira Persaud’s steady growth
from the 1980s up to her current work that re-possesses and re-imagines
the landscape of the “rainforest” in ways that challenge the imperial
configurations of Ralegh, Schomburgk, and more recent popular imaging
of tropical exotica. As Hosein notices, “Persaud’s work fuses excellent
painterly and artistic skills with personal experience, political
morality, strong personal opinion, and perceptive vision into paintings
of tragic beauty.” Her paintings have epitomised difficult moments in
Guyanese history, succinctly capturing the public and private pain of
life in Guyana. Persaud makes a valuable contribution to the debate on
the evolution of Caribbean society and the question of identity of its
multicultural peoples.
Kenwyn Crichlow’s “Imaging Transition” discusses three Trinidadian
artists whose works give expression to forces that animated the
post-war period of transition from colonialism to national independence
in that island: Ralph Baney’s Baptist Shouter speaks to the years of
colonial persecution imagined as a source of cultural empowerment; this
sculpture stands as testament and witness to an emerging vision of a
liberated Trinidad and Tobago. Baney, together with Edward Hernandez
whose passing is also mourned in this year, and MP Alladin whose
private art collection was recently disposed of, are among the pioneers
and cultural innovators who set out the imaginative terrain upon which
we continue to rethink identities in the 21st century construction of
multi-cultural Trinidad and Tobago. For example, Hosay Tadjah “raises
questions about identity, culture and one’s sense of place in the
world. More prosaically, he asks: what does it mean to be East Indian
in the increasingly cosmopolitan urban place of Trinidad?”
Similarly, as founding curator of the Trinidad Museum, Hernandez
articulated a new narrative of society, history, and culture that
displaced arguments that the
history of Trinidad and Tobago began with the occupation of the land by
European colonisers and that post-emancipation society was without
tradition. In “Names and The Self”, St. Hope Earl McKenzie takes us
through a process of self-discovery based on the unfolding saga of the
names he has been given, his struggle to discover their origins and
meanings, and their effect on his sense of identity.
Book Reviews of six new works of fiction and non-fiction close the
issue. It is significant that in a Region where it is evident that
people, especially young
adults, are no longer reading, a few new books still manage to be
published, with two significant works by authors who live in Guyana.
Ameena Gafoor
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