IDENTITY AND HOME IN THREE CARIBBEAN AUTHORS By HARBHAJAN S. HIRA Bachelor of Science Guru Nanak Dev University Amritsar, Punjab (India) 1974 Master of Arts in English Hamburg University Hamburg, Germany 1987 Master of Arts in English California State University, Stanislaus Turlock, California 2001 Master of Arts in Education California State University, Dominguez Hills Carson, California 2007 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY July, 2020 IDENTITY AND HOME IN THREE CARIBBEAN AUTHORS Dissertation Approved: Dr. Timothy Murphy Dissertation Adviser Dr. Katherine Hallemeier Dr. Martin Wallen Dr. Alyson Greiner ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Several persons have helped making this project successful. My thanks go to Dr. Katherine Hallemeier, who provided feedback with an unprecedented speed in the final weeks of writing. Thanks are due to Professor Emeritus Martin Wallen as well. In spite of his retirement in 2019, Dr. Wallen kindly agreed to stay on the committee and help me get across the finish line. I also enormously benefited from his course on species, race, and surveillance, where I first discussed theorists such as Du Bois and Fanon. I want to thank Dr. Alyson Greiner of Geography too, who provided all the support that can be expected of an outside committee member. A big THANK YOU goes to Dr. Timothy Murphy, however. As my advisor and chair of the committee, he has been instrumental in securing the success of the project. He meticulously read and commented on every single chapter over the past year and a half. He also provided other help in navigating the graduate school. Finally, I appreciate the generosity of the OSU English Department that supported my studies financially by providing teaching assistantships through all these years. iii Acknowledgements reflect the views of the author and are not endorsed by committee members or Oklahoma State University. Name: HARBHAJAN S. HIRA Date of Degree: JULY, 2020 Title of Study: IDENTITY AND HOME IN THREE CARIBBEAN AUTHORS Major Field: ENGLISH Abstract: The search for identity is a major theme in modern literature. It is particularly prevalent in societies that have historically been colonized where the colonizer has sabotaged the values of the colonized that are at the root of identity formation. These values, as a result, have weakened and the colonized has been obliged to partially draw upon the values of the colonizer to construe a self. The situation has foisted unequal relations on colonizer and colonized, with the former being on top of the hierarchy. The disparity has given rise to colonial difference that defines the existence of the colonized. The writers from the colonies variously employ colonial difference, and the condition of the colonized it engenders, to explore communal and personal identities in their works. Within their explorations, they may emphasize various concerns – social, political, psychological, or personal – as they go about searching for a new self. This dissertation first lays out the psychosocial base of identity as social norms and values play a decisive role in the forging of self. It then uses this base to discuss how identity and home manifest themselves in the selected works of three Caribbean writers, whereby home encompasses both a material and metaphorical entity. George Lamming uses colonial difference to explore the reorganization of a Barbadian community in In the Castle of My Skin (1953). He underscores a social revolution in his search for a new identity. Vidiadhar S. Naipaul traces the cultural reorientation of indentured sugar laborers from India in A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). His emphasis falls on psychological confusion and cultural syncretism as he explores the dynamics of a new identity for his subjects. The Mimic Men (1967), another novel by Naipaul, concentrates on self-identity of its protagonist, who feels that colonial difference has diminished his existence to mimicking the values of the colonizer. Finally, Derek Walcott uses difference as a discrete cultural value, on which he bases a multicultural self for his characters in his epic poem, Omeros (1990). Social intermingling in the poem occurs along multiple axes of difference – including social, racial, and geographical difference. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................1 II. IDENTITY AND HOME ........................................................................................13 III. RESISTANCE AND REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE: IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN (1953) .................................................................................................................34 IV. CULTURAL DISPLACEMENT AND CULTURAL SYNCRETISM: A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS (1961)……………………………………………………………85 V. “SHIPWRECK,” LONDON, WRITING, AND SELF-IDENTITY: THE MIMIC MEN (1967) .........................................................................................................................135 VI. DIFFERENCE, IDENTITY, AND MULTICULTURALISM: THE CASE OF OMEROS (1990) ........................................................................................................176 VII. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................205 WORKS CITED .................................................................................................. 216-24 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION George Lamming, Derek Walcott, and Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul are all writers that hail from the Caribbean. Their work attests to an extraordinary variety that includes fiction and travel writing, political analysis and epic verse. They deal with topics ranging from cultural politics in the wake of colonization to the conditions of modern existence in Africa, India, South America and Europe. Above all, they engage the basic question of their existence in a region to which their ancestors came, for the most part involuntarily, through the historical processes of slavery and indentureship. These processes resulted in these writers inheriting a history that, as the Trinidadian historian Cyril Lionel R. James observes, is steeped in “coercion” and “exploitation” (The Black Jacobins 3-5). After Christopher Columbus landed in the New World in 1492 at what is now Watling Island in the central Bahamas at the behest of the Spanish Crown, he contacted local Amerindian tribes of Lucayans and Taino in the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola. In Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti), he saw a girl wearing a golden nose ornament. Given that gold was on Columbus’s mind from the outset – was, in fact, the leitmotif of his voyages ever since he had read the travel accounts of the Venetian Marco Polo about the 1 riches of the East – the sight of the precious metal was an encouraging sign for the Genoese sea captain. On further inquiries, Columbus was shown – as the historians F. R. Augier et al. record in their book, The Making of the West Indies (1960) – to the “local Indian cacique,” who assured the navigator that “much gold was to be found on the island” (9). Columbus took some gold from the islanders’ possessions and brought it back, along with a few natives, to Spain. The Spanish that subsequently rushed to the New World in search of more gold and wealth systematically enslaved Amerindians. When Don Nicolas de Ovando supplanted Columbus and became the new Spanish Governor and Supreme Justice of the islands and mainland of the Indies, in 1502 – with the approval of the Spanish sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella – he introduced the so-called encomienda system. According to F. R. Augier et al., the encomienda system authorized that “a Spanish colonist [a number of whom traveled to the Indies with Ovando] could be awarded a number of Indians to work for him. In return, the colonist was responsible for teaching them Christian principles, paying them wages and looking after them generally” (13). The system smoothed the way for systematic enslavement of indigenous populations and in as little as half a century, “[i]n effect the Indian population of the islands was enslaved and . practically exterminated” (13). Of course, not all enslaved Indians died of inhumane rigors of the physical labor coerced beyond human endurance; many fell victims to fatal diseases such as small pox, too, because of their interaction with the European intruders. The bottom line is that, from the mid-sixteenth century on, the reduced presence of indigenous peoples on the islands did not stand in the way of the colonists’ reckless exploitation of the islands in the Caribbean. The colonists would replace the numbers lost in the deceased Indians in time by transporting millions of slaves from overseas. 2 Kenneth Ramchand, while tracing the development of the novel in the West Indies, observes that, “[w]ith the European discoveries ‘the natural and originary inhabitants’ of the West Indies were virtually eliminated; the small communities which survive in Dominica and Guyana today are regarded as marginal to society” (164). Their marginality, according to Ramchand, accounts for their non-existence in the literature of the region: “Indeed, the fiction in which the contemporary [native] Indians do appear either registers them as detribalized individuals in the towns (‘Bucks’) or portrays them as exotic groups in the interior” (164). The other European powers – the Dutch, British, and French – that