UWI

J O U R N A L
OF
WEST INDIAN
LITERATURE

Volume 18 Number 2 April 2010

Published by the Departments of Literatures in English
The University of the West Indies

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JWIL gratefully acknowledges the generous support and funding of the West
Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies
(WIACLALS).
CREDITS
Cover Design
Marielle Barrow & Adam de Silva
Book Design/Layout
Jacinta Jessy Mitchell
JWIL is published with the financial support of the
Departments of Literatures in English of
The University of the West Indies
Submissions and enquiries should be sent to
THE EDITORS
Journal of West Indian Literature
Department of Literatures in English, UWI Mona
P.O.Box 186, Kingston 7, JAMAICA, W.I.
Tel: (876) 927-2217; Fax (876) 970-4332
e-mail: victor.chang@uwimona.edu.jm
michael.bucknor@uwimona.edu.jm
OR
Professor Evelyn O'Callaghan
Faculty of Humanities, UWI Cave Hill Campus
P.O.Box 64, Bridgetown, BARBADOS, W.I.
e-mail: evelyn.ocallaghan@cavehill.uwi.edu
Books for review should be sent to
Dr Curdella Forbes
Department of English, Howard University
Washington, D.C. 20059, USA.
SUBSCRIPTION RATE
US$40 per annum (two issues) + US$4 (postage and handling)
Copyright 2010 Journal of West Indian Literature
ISSN: 0258-8501

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JWIL
Volume 18 Number 2
April 2010

GUEST EDITOR
Jean Antoine-Dunne
FOUNDING EDITOR
Mark McWatt
CHIEF EDITOR
Victor L. Chang
EDITORS
Jean Antoine-Dunne
Michael A. Bucknor
Richard Clarke
Evelyn O'Callaghan
BOOK REVIEW EDITOR
Curdella Forbes
EDITORIAL BOARD
Edward Baugh, Maureen Warner-Lewis, Alison Donnell
EDITORIAL ADVISORS
Funso Aiyejina, Laurence Breiner, Stewart Brown, Ted Chamberlin, Rhonda
Cobham-Sander, Daniel Coleman, David Dabydeen, Daryl Dance, Merle
Hodge, Louis James, Mervyn Morris, Susheila Nasta, Sandra Pouchet Paquet,
Stephen Siemon, Faith Smith, Helen Tiffin

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THE JOURNAL OF WEST INDIAN LITERATURE is a twice-yearly publication

of the Departments of Literatures in English of The University of the West
Indies. The Editors invite the submission of articles that are the result of
scholarly research in the literature of the English-speaking Caribbean. The
Editors will also consider the publication of articles on the literatures of the
non-English-speaking Caribbean, provided such articles are written in English
and have a clear relevance to the themes and concerns of Caribbean literature
in English or are of a comparative nature, comparing Caribbean literature in
another language with that in English. JWIL will also publish book reviews. All
articles submitted should be in English, typed and double-spaced.
Notes, also double-spaced, should be gathered at the end. Manuscripts should
conform to the styles and the conventions set out in the MLA Handbook, and
if coming from outside the Caribbean, should be accompanied by
international reply coupons and a diskette. Please also submit electronic
copies in MS Word.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is the first volume of the Journal of West Indian Literature to be edited from
the St Augustine Campus of The University of the West Indies. It is therefore
an occasion for celebration. I want to thank the Dean of the Faculty of
Humanities and Education, Professor Funso Aiyejina, for his generosity in
making this event possible and the Head of the Department of Liberal Arts,
Dr. Paula Morgan, for providing additional funding and support for this
project.
This volume has been enabled by many people, not least its patient
contributors. The copy editor, Ms Maureen Henry, provided swift and efficient
help in the final stages and my colleagues in Liberal Arts, in particular
Professor Barbara Lalla, added their comments and their support. I wish to say
a special thank you to the readers whose careful and incisive critiques were so
useful in bringing this work to completion.

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements......................................................................................... iii
Introduction .................................................................................................... vii
Jean Antoine-Dunne
Maps Made in the Heart: Caribbeans of Our Desire ............................. 1
Edward Baugh
Youll find no finger posts to point you to our place:
Mapping the Literary and Critical Terrain ................................................. 20
Evelyn OCallaghan
Pote mak, sonje .............................................................................................. 32
Rose-Ann Walker
Youll Soon Get Used to Our Language: Language, Parody
and West Indian Identity in Andrea Levys Small Island .......................... 45
Cynthia James
The Caribbean Writer as Nomadic Subject:
Spatial Mobility and the Dynamics of Critical Thought .......................... 65
Sandra Pouchet Paquet
Sound and Vision in the Caribbean Imaginary ......................................... 95
Jean Antoine-Dunne
(Un)clothing Maccomere Man: Female Body as Detour
for New Language Space of Male Homosexuality ..............................115
Charleston Thomas

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From Beowulf to Bounty Killa:

Or How I Ended Up Studying Slackness ................................................ 131
Carolyn Cooper
Vultures, Vixens, and Villains: Women Negotiating Identities
in Hispanic Caribbean Short Narratives ................................................. 145
Nicole Roberts
The Half has Never Been Told:
Revisioning West Indian History in Myal ................................................ 160
Michelene Adams
BOOK REVIEW
Jennifer Rahim. Songster and Other Stories ................................................. 181
Jean Antoine-Dunne
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ...................................................................... 186

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Where is Here? Remapping the Caribbean

INTRODUCTION
The posing of the question Where is here? foregrounds the difficulty
of fixing the Caribbean, or even of defining the Caribbean subject given
the complex layers and negations that have accumulated over time.
The Caribbean as a site of multiple belongings, encounters, migrations
and negotiations, flight and diasporic identities cannot be easily
conceptualized. The very designations West Indian or Caribbean,
as Edward Baugh suggests in the first essay in this collection, signify
part of the problem of self definition. Baugh notes the unease that has
accompanied the demarcations between West Indian (Anglophone) and
Caribbean and the growing tendency to make one (Caribbean) absorb
the other and suggests that this is part of the story of the mapping and
remapping of the Caribbean. The question of where is here or who
are we is therefore not one that simply takes into account geography
or history, but considers language, exile and the migratory tendencies
of the region and the ways in which such movement engages the writer
in acts of reconstruction. The idea of Caribbean identity as plural,
various, its boundaries shifting (Baugh), is indeed central to this
volume.
Where is home? or even Where is here can also be re-formulated
as Gordon Rohlehr pointed out in one of the keynote addresses at the
25th Anniversary Conference on West Indian Literature, as What jail is
this? or Who are we? The search for belonging or the desire to claim
ones space might in fact lead to a recognition of the horror of the
present; the cultures of dread and terminality that have emerged
throughout the post-Independence decades and intensified since the
start of the new millennium (482). Rohlehr uses the dance as a figure
that signifies the desire to escape, as well as the act of reclamation and
that brief moment or still point in the constant quest for spiritual
grounation. The quarrying of the metaphor of dance enables him to

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read the work of several writers and calypsonians as responses to this

merging of dread and desire or as a philosophical vehicle through
which a writer such as Harris enables the flow of the myriad resonances
that emerge from the confrontation of cultures across time and space.
Catastrophe, trauma and displacement engender persistent quests for
the ground of identity in Rohlehrs reading. Today, the sense of urgency
quickens in the wake of global economic decline with its terrifying
impact on the economic structures and livelihoods of the Caribbean
nation states. Furthermore, in the aftermath of Haitis 2010 disaster,
our relationship to each other as well as our relation to the wider world
increasingly give rise to questions of ethics such as those raised by
Rose-Ann Walker in her essay, Pote mak, sonje. Her analysis of
Danticats work involves a call for a new empathy and a voicing of
distress and a reflection on Literatures role in uncovering the
interconnectedness among Caribbean peoples. How does the shaping
of the nation as a pebble, identified in Pouchet Paquets mapping of
national discourses in her essay The Caribbean Writer as Nomadic
Subject, disrupt the possibility of a sense of a shared destiny, that is
somehow hidden in the very act of asking such a question as Where is
here? If for Lamming there is already a federation through familial
relationships across the region, what prevents a fluidity of passage
from Guyana to Barbados as OCallaghan queries in her essay Youll
find no finger posts to point you to our place: Mapping the Literary
and Critical Terrain? For Rohlehr the movement of peoples into and
out of the Caribbean was inaugurated as a dance of possession by
Columbus and we are still dancing to that tune (2007).
The question of Where is here, therefore, assumes many shapes in
this volume. It is explored through location, language, gender and spirit
and through the need for an ethical response to our people and their
situation as outsiders as well as their suffering. It is answered as a way
of investing departures and encounters with particular meaning by
exploring the ways in which women have shaped their lives as
Caribbean peoples in other places, whether the metropolis or other

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islands; and the importance of language in these renegotiations of

identity as in Cynthia Jamess discussion of the responses of women to
migration in Youll Soon Get Used to Our Language: Language,
Parody and West Indian Identity in Andrea Levys Small Island.
Pouchet Paquets discussion of nomadic subjectivity suggests that
movement in space and in the imagination allows for a rejection of
entrenched ideas of exclusivity and enables a recognition of the
sovereignty of the imagination that has been the dynamic principle at
play in the works and intellectual practices of writers such as Lamming,
CLR James and Walcott. This location in an elsewhere is a fact of
existence for many academics, artists and entrepreneurs who live in two
places, sometimes in two hemispheres and who exist, as does Walcott,
as a traveler whose traversing of the earth yet enables him to hold the
Caribbean as a cherished place. The questions that such traveling and
nomadism engender remain pertinent in particular as the Caribbean
faces increasing violence both from its indigenous population and from
outside forces, and as that violence affects in fundamental ways its
economic base. We still need to understand the social and political
implications of situating ourselves in relation to elsewhere, and to
recognize the prevalent desire of many Caribbean people to privilege
that outside over what originates and exists within our own
hemisphere: and this includes economic, intellectual and academic
matters.
This is the note struck by Evelyn OCallaghan in her essay. Her
cartography of discourses on diaspora, hybridity and the poetics of
displacement leads to a concern that ideas of deterritorialisation and
transnationalism may prevent a focus on the specificity of where we
are, in terms of location and the particular political and social problems
that exist within the region itself. She argues (citing Puri and Donnell)
for a located cosmopolitanism that might act as a corrective to
discourses that really are not concerned with historic injustice or
contemporary loss. OCallaghan draws our attention to the new

mappings that increasingly reshape the canon of West Indian writing

and that engender new emphases and balance.
The pushing of gender boundaries and constructs into new territories
as Caribbean masculinity studies and queer theory gain currency is
exemplified in Charleston Thomass essay (un) clothing Maccomere
Man: Female Body as detour for new language space of male
homosexuality. His deconstruction of the calypso as a genre that can
hide ambivalent attitudes to aberrant sexuality and as a vehicle for
exposing such contradictions is a timely intervention in the debate
about same-sex desire and the homophobia that attaches itself to social
decorum in public discourses. Maccomere Man by Calypsonian Patch
exemplifies the doubleness of the language of calypso and the duplicity
of society.
If sound is an indicator of how Caribbean society sees itself, then film
makes visible the many constructions of the person that have engaged
thinkers, artists and social commentators for well nigh a century.
Antoine-Dunne discusses the processes whereby film-makers from the
Anglophone, Francophone, Dutch and Hispanic Caribbean have
constructed ideas of Caribbean identity within the context of various
movements relating to ways of seeing the Caribbean. Her essay sees
film as a way of moving beyond linguistic barriers and of demonstrating
that writers and filmmakers share similar concerns and ideas in their
various attempts to interrogate identity.
Nicole Roberts in her essay, Vultures, Vixens and Villains: Women
Negotiating Identities in Hispanic Caribbean Short Narratives
discusses the use of sensuality and eroticism as vehicles for dismantling
the stereotypes of the acquiescent, pliant and virginal female in the acts
of identity construction by Hispanic Caribbean women writers. The
writer, Mariela Varona, for example, shows that the patriarchal order
continues to dominate the lives of the women in her stories, but creates
an optional ending to her story of violence, mutilation and sexual
gratification by assuming the right to tell such stories. She therefore

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achieves a special kind of power that is hers alone, and not that of her
female characters.
Empowerment is also the subject of Michelene Adams essay on Erna
Brodbers Myal. For Adams, myalism as conscious radicalism is seen
by Brodber as an act of resistance to erasure and negative power
structures, but one that enables the syncreticism that is possible within
Caribbean societies.
The essay by Carolyn Cooper in its consideration of Creole as a
language of academia arguably points to the overarching emphasis of
the entire volume. In graphing the journey from the veneration of
tradition exemplified in Beowulf, to the claiming of the Caribbean word,
she is articulating what many of the writers in this volume address, that
the movement, tensions, the search for the Caribbean, have engendered
creative appropriations, subversions, resistances, re-conceptualizations
of the canon, and redefinitions of the very notion of an artistic and
intellectual tradition.

WORKS CITED
Rohlehr, Gordon. Transgression, Transition, Transformation. Trinidad:
Lexicon, 2007. Print.

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