VOLUME 56, No. 1. March, 2009
The Unity is Submarine
Guest Editor: Marie-Jose Nzengou-Tayo and Velma Pollard
Foreword iii
Rex Nettleford
Editorial
Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Velma Pollard
Early Groundings for a Circum-Caribbean Integrationist Thought.
Ileana Sanz
“El país que no se parece a otro”: negotiating literary representations of Yucatan in narrative texts written from within and without the region.
Margaret Shrimpton
Writing Bridges of Sound:
Praise Song for the Widow and Louisiana
Velma Pollard
“Visions of Hell: the Representation of the Continental Caribbean in Alejo
Carpentier’s
El siglo de las luces and Maryse Condé’s La vie scélérate.”
Odile Ferly
La colonie du nouveau monde: Condé’s Pessimistic Views of a Caribbean Utopian Community
Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo
Harlem NEW YORK – Haarlem PARIS: America-Martinique: Daniel Picouly's Caribbean Bridge over the Atlantic
Françoise Cévaër,
BOOK REVIEWS
Notes on Contributors
Abstracts
Information on Contributors
Velma Pollard, Guest Editor is a creative writer and a retired Senior Lecturer, Department of Educational Studies, UWI, Mona.
Ileana Sanz is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, UWI, Mona, and a former professor from The University of Havana, Cuba.
Françoise Cévaër is a Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, UWI, Mona.
Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo Guest Editor, is Senior Lecturer and Head of Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, UWI, Mona.
Margaret Shrimpton is Professor of Literatures, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán
Abstracts
“The Unity is submarine:” Island – Continent Connections through History, Migration, Language, Music and Literature. Today, with the globalization of the economy, Caribbean island-states are invited to link with the continental shores of the Caribbean Sea. However, people from the Caribbean did not wait on their respective governments in order to explore the circum-Caribbean region. Since the 19th century, inter-island and island-continent migration has shaped their lives and cultures. These encounters are translated in music, poetry, stories. They also laid the ground for the emergence of a pan-Caribbean thought. Papers in this issue of Caribbean Quarterly seek to define the basis for a circum-Caribbean thought as well as analyse literary representations of the ordinary Caribbean person’s
experience.
Groundings for a Circum-Caribbean Thought, Ileana Sanz
This paper focuses on the 19th century essay which saw the beginnings of an autochthonous thought with Jose Marti’s definition of Nuestra America, which pointed to the awareness of otherness, and is used as the pivotal text in this study. The commonalities and connections with certain areas of the continent challenged intellectuals to redefine the limits of the Caribbean spaceand broaden it to the Circum-Caribbean region. Since the nineteenth century intellectuals from the Caribbean developed a substantial corpus of ideas which have contributed to forging links within the region as well as to grasp the need to insert the Caribbean within the Other America.
“El país que no se parece a otro”: negotiating literary representations of
Yucatan in narrative texts written from within and without the region.
Margaret Shrimpton
This paper aims to confront two readings of Yucatan: the construction of a regional identity in texts written by authors born and residing in the area; and, the representation of Yucatan in texts written by authors of Yucatecan origin but
raised outside of the peninsular. How do the latter recreate Yucatan as a cultural and geographical space in their narrative? Can we speak of a Yucatecan diaspora or are we closer to a neocolonial, metropolitan vision of the region? This inside-outside confrontation raises issues long debated in the Caribbean: the concept of borders; authenticity and regional autonomy; hybridity and the construction of a regional identity.
“Writing Bridges of Sound” Velma Pollard Most Caribbean writing includes reference to the Black Diaspora. The relationship between Africa and the Americas is an inescapable part of the historical/cultural mindscape of the writers. What is interesting is the different strategies they use to evoke relationships with each other and each with Africa.
This paper examines the use of sound to establish diaspora connections in Paule Marshall’s
Praise Song for the Widow and Erna Brodber’s Louisiana.
“Visions of Hell: the Representation of the Continental Caribbean in Alejo
Carpentier’s
El siglo de las luces and Maryse Condé’s La vie scélérate.”
Odile Ferly
Alejo Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces and Maryse Condé’s La vie scélérate are both novels that reflect the wandering of the Caribbean people, on the individual as well as collective level. These two works explore intraregional connections,more specifically between Cuba, Guadeloupe and French Guyana at the time of the French and Haitian revolutions for Carpentier’s novel and between Guadeloupe, Panama, and California in the early twentieth century for Maryse Condé’s novel. What is striking is the way in which, what with the climate and the hard working conditions endured by the new migrants, the continental Caribbean figures as an earthly version of Hell in these works by Antilleans.
“
La colonie du nouveau monde: Condé’s Pessimistic Views of a Caribbean
Utopian Community.”Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo
Since the late seventies, Haitians have migrated toward the Eastern Caribbean and sometimes as far as the Guianas. Today, Haitian communities are present almost everywhere whithin the circum-Caribbean region. Isolated and
estranged from the local population, Haitians try to survive and assist their families left at home. Invisible and humiliated migrants, they appear in fictional works very often as symbols of the predicament of the region. This paper examine the part played by a group of Haitians who join a community led by a Guadeloupean ‘guru’ in Maryse Condé’s
La colonie du nouveau monde
It seeks to identify the symbolic meaning ascribed to their experience
by Condé.
“America-Martinique: Daniel Picouly on the Path of Chester Himes: Intertextuality and Transnational Identity”Françoise Cévaër
Diasporic writer Daniel Picouly poses as Chester Himes’ heir in his novels
Tête de Nègre and
L’enfant léopard. Constantly using intertextuality, he revisits the famous crime novels of the African American writer particularly by displacing the
famous detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger from New York to
Paris and transplanting Harlem to the France of the Revolution. The plot is
used as a background to analyse the place given to Blacks in Western societies
thus prolonging Himes’ problematic which denounced the marginalisation of Blacks in a White America. Finally, it is the concept of transnational identity and the representation of a still recurring racial marginalisation and violence which reunites the two writers beyond time, borders and languages.