Caribbean Creolization

Caribbean Creolization Caribbean Creolization Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity Edited by Kathleen M. Balutansky and Marie-Agnès Sourieau LibraryPress@UF Gainesville, Florida Cover: Map of the West Indies, published in Philadelphia, 1806. From the Caribbean Maps collection in the University of Florida Digital Collections at the George A. Smathers Libraries. Reissued 2017 by LibraryPress@UF on behalf of the University of Florida This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial- No Derivative Works 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. You are free to electronically copy, dis- tribute, and transmit this work if you attribute authorship. Please contact the University Press of Florida (http://upress.ufl.edu) to purchase print editions of the work. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). For any reuse or distribu- tion, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of the above conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the University Press of Florida. Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author’s moral rights. ISBN 978-1-947372-00-9 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-947372-01-6 (ePub) LibraryPress@UF is an imprint of the University of Florida Press. University of Florida Press 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611-2079 http://upress.ufl.edu The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series In 2016, the University Press of Florida, in collaboration with the George A. Smathers Libraries of the University of Florida, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mel- lon Foundation, under the Humanities Open Books program, to repub- lish books related to Florida and the Caribbean and to make them freely available through an open access platform. The resulting list of books is the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series published by the Li- braryPress@UF in collaboration with the University of Florida Press, an imprint of the University Press of Florida. A panel of distinguished scholars has selected the series titles from the UPF list, identified as essential reading for scholars and students. The series is composed of titles that showcase a long, distinguished history of publishing works of Latin American and Caribbean scholarship that connect through generations and places. The breadth and depth of the list demonstrates Florida’s commitment to transnational history and regional studies. Selected reprints include Daniel Brinton’s A Guide- Book of Florida and the South (1869), Cornelis Goslinga’s The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (1972), and Nelson Blake’s Land into Water—Water into Land (1980). Also of note are titles from the Bicentennial Floridiana Facsimile Series. The series, published in 1976 in commemoration of America’s bicentenary, comprises twenty-five books regarded as “classics,” out-of-print works that needed to be in more libraries and readers’ bookcases, including Sidney Lanier’s Florida: Its Scen- ery, Climate, and History (1875) and Silvia Sunshine’s Petals Plucked from Sunny Climes (1880). Today’s readers will benefit from having free and open access to these works, as they provide unique perspectives on the historical scholarship on Florida and the Caribbean and serve as a foundation upon which today’s researchers can build. Visit LibraryPress@UF and the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series at http://ufdc.ufl.edu/librarypress. Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series Project Members Library Press@UF Judith C. Russell Laurie N. Taylor Brian W. Keith Chelsea Dinsmore Haven Hawley Editorial Advisory Board Gary R. Mormino David C. Colburn Patrick J. Reakes University of Florida Press Meredith M. Babb Linda Bathgate Michele Fiyak-Burkley Romi Gutierrez Larry Leshan Anja Jimenez Jane Pollack Danny Duffy Nichole Manosh Erika Stevens This book is reissued as part of the Humanities Open Books program, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 Antillean Journey, by Daniel Maximin 13 Part One: Creolization and the Creative Imagination 21 1. Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization? 23 Wilson Harris 2. The Caribbean: Marvelous Cradle-Hammock and Painful Cornucopia 36 Carlos Guillermo Wilson 3. Who's Afraid of the Winti Spirit? 44 Astrid H. Roemer 4. Three Words toward Creolization 53 Antonio Benitez-Rojo 5. Dominicanyorkness: A Metropolitan Discovery of the Triangle 62 Sherezada (Chiqui) Vicioso 6. Where Are All the Others? 68 Erna Brodber 7. A Brief History of My Country 76 Lourdes Vazquez Part Two: Creolization, Literature, and the Politics of Language 87 8. Writing and Creole Language Politics: Voice and Story 89 Merle Collins 9. The Stakes of Creolite 96 Ernest Pepin and Raphael Confiant 10. Creolite without Creole Language? 101 Maryse Conde 11. The Victory of the Concubines and the Nannies 110 Frank Martinus Arion 12. The Process of Creolization in Haiti and the Pitfalls of the Graphic Form 118 Jean Metellus 13. Race, Space, and the Poetics of Moving 129 M. Nourbese Philip Afterword, by Yanick Lahens 155 Notes 165 Works Cited 173 Contributors 179 Index 185 Preface The idea for this anthology was born while the editors were both at the University of Virginia, collaborating on several projects linking the francophone and anglophone Caribbean. As we discussed the growing in terest—in American universities and colleges—in the cross-cultural real ity that governs Caribbean literature and culture, we noted that much of the critical and theoretical writing on the subject is produced by scholars from North American and other universities. These scholars, furthermore, tend to focus on a single cultural and linguistic corpus, or to rely on the critical or theoretical work of a few writers from the same linguistic and cultural Caribbean affiliations. This concentration, though understandable and often inevitable, has the unfortunate effect of limiting our students' understanding of the interconnectedness of the process of creolization in the entire Caribbean region. Our increasing interest in providing a truly cross-Caribbean assortment of opinions that could fully disclose the intri cate nature of creolization as a cross-cultural and transnational phenom enon led to this anthology. The essays collected in this anthology are written by prominent writers from the English-, French-, Spanish-, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean, whose literary corpus has represented their insights into the process of creolization. However, this is not a collection of fiction, poetry, or plays but a series of reflections on the cultural dynamics of language and literature and the in terrelation (to use Edouard Glissant's term) of these dynamics in the Carib bean. Our main goal in developing this collection was to provide a much- needed forum for reflections on current notions of creolization (that is, creoleness, Antillanite, Creolite, etc.), in Caribbean literature and culture. Although we expect that most readers of the anthology will be scholars and students of Caribbean literature and culture, we hope that the collec tion will also be of interest to a general public eager to understand the complexity of multiculturalism in the New World. vii viii - Preface We thank all our contributors for their generosity and patience with the long process that brought the collection to realization. We also want to thank Saint Michael's College and Fairfield University for their financial and institutional support during the last stages of the project, and we ex tend our thanks to the members of their respective staffs who cheerfully performed various administrative tasks that facilitated the production of the manuscript. We are grateful to Walter J. Petry, Jr., and William M. Abbott for their insightful suggestions. We are particularly grateful to John Howland, Jr., for his comments and invaluable advice throughout the various stages of the editing process. Introduction If we assume that metissage is generally the result of an encounter am\ a synthesis between two different components, it seems to us that creol ization is a metissage without limits, the elements of which are mani fold, its outcomes unpredictable. Creolization diffracts whereas some forms of metissage may concentrate once more.... Creolization's most manifest symbol is the Creole language. Its genius rests on its being always open; that is, maybe, its becoming fixed only within some sys tems of variables that we will have to imagine as well as define. Thus, creolization carries in itself the adventure of multilingualism along with the extraordinary explosion of cultures. But this explosion of cultures does not mean their scattering nor their mutual dilution. It is the vio lent manifestation of their assented, free sharing. Edouard Glissant, Poetique de la relation, 46-47' I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad. Derek Walcott, The Antilles1 To the uninitiated, the process of creolization that Glissant and Walcott describe above may seem obscure, exotic, or defined by a specific geo graphical and historical context—the continental and insular Caribbean. However, far beyond its geographical specificity, Caribbean creolization offers a glimpse into a phenomenon that is fundamental to the New World experience. The term creolization may indeed be new to those not familiar with the historical and literary study of the Caribbean and Central and South America, but it is at the heart of historical, social, and literary discussions that have taken place in the Caribbean for several decades. For those who, both inside and outside of academia, continue to grapple with the slippery aspects of what has been called diversity, multiculturalism, transculturalism, or hybridization of our New World cultures, an understanding of creol ization may shed some light on the elusive and ominous social, political, and even economic meanings of emerging American identities.

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