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2005 Renaissance Models for Caribbean Poets: Identity, Authenticity and the Early Modern Lyric Revisited Lisa Gay Jennings

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RENAISSANCE MODELS FOR CARIBBEAN POETS:

IDENTITY, AUTHENTICITY AND THE EARLY MODERN LYRIC REVISITED

By

LISA GAY JENNINGS

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English i n p a rtial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2005 The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Lisa Gay Jennings

defended on April 4, 2005.

______Daniel Vitkus Professor Directing Thesis

______Jerrilyn McGregory Committee Member

______Bruce Boehrer Committee Member

Approved:

______Hunt Hawkins, Chair, Department of English

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Daniel Vitkus for his help with all matters scholarly and for his infinite patience when I would fall prey to procrastination and discouragement. Thank you also to Dr. Jerrilyn McGregory for her patience and Dr. Bruce Boehrer for agreeing to serve on my committee. Thanks also to Dr. Marcy North for her invaluable critique during the early stages of this process. Without the encouragement and prayers of the following friends I would still be gnashing my teeth. Thanks to Angelita Streeter for her “by any means necessary” attitude in getting me to believe in myself and this project, and her willingness to review my work. Thanks to Na’Imah Ford for her ability to see joy even in the darkest moments. Thanks to Alys Jordan for generously opening her home to me while offering the best gourmet food available. Thanks to Hyunsue Kim, Kelly Hall, Alex Vargas, Andres Johnson and Robert Powell for always believing that I could do it. Thanks to Dr. Christopher Okonkwo for enthusiastically commenting on my writing and always seeing the potential. Thanks to the Florida Education Fund for providing financial assistance and intellectual support. A very special thanks to my parents, especially my Mother, for her constant encouragement and the foresight to instill a love of reading within me. Thanks to my husband, Sean Godfrey, both for his ability to endure trial and tribulation and for his unwavering faith. Finally, I thank God for the painful and joyful lessons learned, and the strength to endure.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT v

INTRODUCTION 1

1. A BORROWED RENAISSANCE: 12 THE GENDERED AESTHETICS OF UNA MARSON

2. “TO RANGE A BLIND FIELD FOR A BOUGH OF 23 LAUREL”: RENAISSANCE AMBIVALENCES IN THE POETRY OF ERIC ROACH

3. THE SWEET ENEMY: PETRARCHAN DISCOURSE 33 IN THE POETRY OF CLAUDE MCKAY

CONCLUSION 45

REFERENCES 49

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 54

iv ABSTRACT

Chinua Achebe has remarked “that the English language will be able to carry the weight of [his] African experience” (103). However, he warns that “it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings” (103). This project examines the ways in which twentieth-century Caribbean poets, Una Marson (1905-1965 ), Eric Roach (1915-1974) and Claude McKay (1889-1948) “alter” Renaissance forms and poetics in order to suit their own subversive objectives. Each poet demonstrates that their use of certain Renaissance forms sufficiently shoulders the burden of their unique Caribbean “experience” while simultaneously challenging social injustices. Therefore, by appropriating forms traditionally associated with whiteness and privilege, the poets defy socially- constructed notions of authenticity and point to the revolutionary potential of language. Nevertheless, due to their choice of literary form, each poet has been marginalized to some degree. This project is partly a recuperative effort to restore these poets within their rightful place in the Caribbean poetic canon. Through their poetic output, Marson, Roach and McKay reinforce the need for post-colonial scholars to create alternative theories that will account for the complexity of not only their work, but the work of similar Caribbean poets as well.

v INTRODUCTION

In one of his earlier poems, “A Far Cry From Africa,” Derek Walcott asks, I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool How can I turn from Africa and live? (26-33). 1 Here, Walcott succinctly articulates a question that has far-reaching implications for post- colonial writers. That is, in terms of literary expression, what language should one write in? How do you choose between a “Native” tongue and that of the colonizer? Caribbean poets such as Una Marson (1905-1965 ), Eric Roach (1915-1974) and Claude McKay (1889-1948) faced the same questions as they began their literary careers. For me, what connects all of these poets is their struggle to define the meaning and purpose of their work and to channel their anxieties about writing good poetry — they did not want to produce mere “protest poetry” devoid of any aesthetic value. Furthermore, many of their poems indicate a struggle to define the proper purpose of a poet. They posed the question of purpose in this way: is a poet one who writes about aesthetic matters only? Or should a poet engage in social commentary or protest? Can a poet do both? And their acknowledgment of their Renaissance predecessors marks this struggle. To contextualize their struggles even further, I will briefly cite Caribbean scholar, Edward Kamau Brathwaite and his concept of “nation language.” Brathwaite attempts to answer the question of which language to choose. He declares: Paradoxically, in the Caribbean (as in many other “cultural disaster” areas), the people educated in this system came to know more, even today about English kings and queens than they do about our own national heroes, our own slave rebels— the people who helped to build and to destroy our society. We are more excited by English literary models, by the concept of say, Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood, than we are by Nanny of the Maroons, a name some of us didn’t even know until a few years ago. And in terms of what we write, our perceptual models, we are more conscious (in terms of sensibility) of the falling of snow– than of the force of the hurricanes which take place every year. In other words,

1 we haven’t got the syllables, the syllabic intelligence to describe the hurricane, which is our own experience; whereas we can describe the imported alien experience of the snowfall. It is that kind of situation that we are in. (8) Brathwaite then goes on to define or rather to describe what he terms “nation language” as an alternative and necessary solution to the problem of literary expression for Caribbean writers. He describes nation language as a language that is derived primarily from the oral tradition and is the “submerged area of that dialect that is much more closely allied to the African experience aspect of experience in the Caribbean. It may be in English, but often it is in an English which is like a howl, or a shout, or a machine-gun, or the wind, or a wave. It is also like the blues. And sometimes it is English and African at the same time” (13). He also attempts to distinguish nation language from dialect because dialect has often been viewed in a pejorative sense (13). However, his distinction between nation language and dialect is at best blurry. Charles Bernstein agrees that “In Brathwaite’s account, [ ], dialect is better called ‘nation language’” (7). And as Belinda Edmonson informs us, other “exasperated” critics such as Evelyn O’Callaghan have “noted [ . . .] Brathwaite’s essays cannot be ‘pinned down’ to a particular ideological agenda” (110). So, for the purpose of this thesis, I shall proceed with the notion that Brathwaite’s nation language is in fact dialect.2 Brathwaite’s essay has had an important impact on how post-colonial critics read Caribbean poetry. Edmondson states, “Edward Brathwaite [ is one ] of the most influential Pan-Africanist thinkers on Anglophone West Indian Literature” (110). That is, in terms of literary expression, Brathwaite’s essay has become one of the models used to determine Caribbean literary value, measured in terms of its purported authenticity. However, Edmonson also asserts, “As politically revolutionary as [his] theory has been, it has also led Brathwaite’s literary critiques into a sort of orthodoxy of blackness” (114). Indeed, considering the brutality of English imperialism, slavery and colonialism, Brathwaite’s offer of nation language / dialect is a positive recuperative effort in terms of orality, identity and literary expression. And as Edmondson asserts, “black aesthetics ideology has provided a powerful vehicle for uniting and forwarding the political and cultural concerns of the Caribbean” (112). But his approach still limits and marginalizes Caribbean poets who do not use afro-centric or nativist language. Where then does this leave poets who fall outside of his formula? Again Edmonson affirms, “Brathwaite’s attempts to reconcile the political necessities of Caribbean aesthetic ideology with Caribbean cultural ideology [. . . ] are not particularly synonymous” (117). So, while motivated by a politically progressive intention, Brathwaite’s definition of a fixed Caribbean literary aesthetic is unnecessarily limiting. Brathwaite’s paradigm inevitably reduces questions of identity, subjectivity, and language to a binaristic, essentialist model. Edmondson concurs: “Black aesthetic ideology in and of itself, therefore, is not necessarily problematic in the West Indian context: the tension resides not in this inherent ambiguity but in the stabilizing theories that would impose upon the complexities of the West Indian experience a binary framework of blackness” (119). The notion that nation language is the sole authentic language of the Caribbean people is problematic on a variety of levels. In my analyses of the Caribbean poets that I have chosen for my study, I hope to show the limits of Brathwaite’s formula. My thesis will demonstrate that Stuart Hall’s theory of Caribbean identity construction serves better than Brathwaite’s more highly publicized notion of “nation language” because Hall’s theory of an evolving Caribbean identity can include writers such as

2 Marson, Roach and McKay. Hall suggests, “instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practises then represent, we should think, instead of identity as a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. This view problematises the very authority and authenticity to which the term, ‘cultural identity’ lays claim” (222). In light of Hall’s theory, I want to examine how each poet wrestles with and complicates the notion of identity. Moreover, I hope to answer the earlier questions with which these poets struggled. Subsequently, the thesis will investigate the following questions: how should we read or study Caribbean poets who A) use Renaissance models in their work and / or B) who don’t fall within an easy category of an organic Caribbean authenticity? And, while the thesis illuminates the intertextuality between Early Modern and Caribbean Poetry, the primary focus will be issues of identity, race and gender and the poets’ struggle to navigate, define and explore these issues while using Renaissance forms. Some critics (such as Alison Donnell, Laurence Breiner, and Barbara Griffin) have examined the English literary precedents in the poets’ poetry. Donnell discusses the sonnet in Marson, Breiner discusses the English Romantic tradition found in Roach, and Griffin discusses the sonnet in McKay. Moreover, there is a vast body of scholarship in the area of Caribbean identity and authenticity.3 And yet, it would be difficult to find a scholar who has examined the works of Caribbean poets and their use of Renaissance forms in terms of identity construction and the implications for Afro-Caribbean authenticity. My work serves to remedy the lack of scholarship in this important area. In order to examine the poetry and the attendant issues of authenticity, identity and language, I will employ close reading of the poems while utilizing post-colonial and new historicist theory. For me, new historicism is useful because I believe that poetry originates not only from the individual but from the social, political, cultural and historical context. Furthermore, as Cristina Malcolmson asserts, “new historicism, along with feminism and cultural materialism made possible a renewed attention to lyric and history as well as an analysis of the role played by the lyric in the production of early modern and modern versions of selfhood, or what is termed subjectivity” (2). Additionally, I will proceed using the following definition of what post-colonialism should examine: “ . . . the various institutions of European colonialisms, the discursive operations of empire, the subtleties of subject constructions in colonial discourse and the resistance of those subjects, and, most importantly perhaps, the differing responses to such incursions and their contemporary colonial legacies in both pre– and post-independence nations and communities” (Ashcroft 187). In chapter two, I explore the work of Una Marson, whose poetry reflects both womanist and feminist sensibilities. Alice Walker coined the term “womanism” in response to what was seen as a failure on the part of feminism to address the needs of non-white women and women in developing countries and traditional societies.4 I draw upon womanist theory because Marson’s poetry demonstrates her concern with giving women a voice in early twentieth-century Jamaica. Moreover, her work manifests a concern with the status of women not just in Jamaica but also around the world. Thus my use of womanism to illuminate her poetry.5 Nevertheless, Marson has also been called “. . . the first black British feminist” ( Delia Jarrett Macauley vii). In terms of feminism Marson’s poems disrupt categories of gender and question the “naturalness” of marriage, sex and love.

3 Unfortunately, Marson has not been considered part of the canon of Caribbean poetry. Her work has been largely ignored for a variety of reasons. In the only biography of Una Marson, Macauley explains: Una Marson is a major figure in twentieth-century feminist, black and literary histories. Her story arcs toward untouched visions for black people and for women, and confronts the complexities of ‘identity’ in the modern world. And yet it has been erased because it is alternative, and discredited because it is critical. So often, even now, black women of Una’s stature appear only as token women in black texts or as token blacks in feminist ones. Where their contributions are noted, they might be represented as superwomen— separate from their peers. (viii) In fact, Erika Sollish Smilowitz, who claims that “Marson’s poetry, in general is worth studying,” also goes on to categorize Marson’s poetry as “. . . of uneven quality,” that “. . . barely rise above the level of greeting card doggerel and hardly belong in any serious discussion of serious poetry” (22).6 Reviews such as this clearly point to the need for more study of Marson’s ouevre. Nevertheless, despite the paucity of scholarship on Marson’s work, Donnell rightly concludes, “By communicating both version of female destiny, Marson is able to disclose the multiplicity of identities, breaking free of the fiction of a ‘unified self,’ to reveal the complex and contradictory constitution of a black woman’s subjectivity within a colonial and patriarchal society” (“Gender Consciousness” 193).7 In chapter two I will demonstrate that Marson’s work is not simply imitation or “greeting card doggerel” but rather a conscious appropriation of Renaissance texts, forms, and ideas, that offers a nuanced and complex rereading of those ideas in order to make a statement about feminist and womanist issues and other social inequities. Marson’s poems demonstrate her complicated vision of female love and desire, and simultaneously interrogate the concomitant issues of feminism, patriarchy, power and colonialism. In chapter three I explore the poetry of Eric Roach. Roach was born and grew up in the countryside of Tobago and at fourteen was forced daily to leave the love and comfort of home for “a Crown Colony education” in the harsh world of the city (Rohlehr, “Strangled City” 108). It was while in the city that Roach received the education that would forever influence his poetic oeuvre. Due to his British Colonial education, Roach initially felt disdain for Caribbean folk traditions and African affinities. In fact, he became dismayed at what he saw as “bad,” “fanatical” or “protest” poetry tied to a psuedo-African sensibility. Roach “stressed the artist’s need to learn his craft and to write out of the fullness of his experience” (Rohlehr, “Problems of Assessment” 317). Roach felt that “simple rhetorical protest. . . retarded rather than liberated” poetry (Rohlehr, “Problems of Assessment” 317). But Roach later changed his perspective on the formula for poetic excellence and as Breiner informs us, “Roach became progressively better informed about Africa. . . and he rose to prominence with politically conscientious poetry grounded in acute observation of Caribbean experience” (Introduction 159, 133). Furthermore, scholars such as Lloyd Brown find that “in a clean break from the set formulae of the Caribbean pastoral Roach’s imaginative perception of his landscape goes hand in hand with an innovative use of his English literary precedents” (69). Thus, Roach’s poetry changed and developed. Speaking of Roach and other poets like him, Brown asserts, “. . . the forging of an identifiable West Indian identity is complemented by the self-confident handling of the culturally diverse

4 materials at the disposal of the poet” (74). Sadly, however, it was at the height of Roach’s poetic brilliance and achievement that he committed suicide. But now, years after his death, Roach has finally been established as one of the premier poets of the Caribbean. Nonetheless, the reception of Roach’s poetry has been marked by struggle and controversy. Furthermore, his poetic complexity is highlighted by the competing views on what his poetry represents. Scholars such as Breiner see in Roach affinities to the British Romantic Period and a keen sensibility to “nature, folk culture, and history” (“History, Nature and People”, 43). And, in addition to the previous concerns, scholars such as Brown also see in Roach’s poetry political protest and an acute sense of Caribbean identity. However, it would be difficult to find a scholar who has attempted to delineate or illuminate Roach’s ties to poets of the English Renaissance. The purpose of this chapter then is similar to that of chapter two; that is, it is an effort to recuperate and analyze Roach’s complex Renaissance affinities. Highlighting Roach’s Renaissance intertextualities is not in and of itself an attempt to validate his poetry. Rather it demonstrates the complicated nature, life and work of a poet growing up in a post-colonial context. Ian McDonald also states “What Roach derived from the English Poetic tradition was strength not jingling flabbiness” (9). Roach greatly admired the works of the Renaissance poets. But he struggled to reconcile the beauty of the English literary tradition with the brutality of slavery, imperialism and colonialism that was produced by the same English culture. His struggle to express his own poetic identity and to cope with literary and colonial history is worked out in several of his poems and it is this struggle that I investigate. In chapter four I explore the poetry of Claude McKay. Like Marson, McKay traveled extensively, visiting countries such as France, Russia, Morocco and Spain. And unlike Roach, who was unsure about his poetic role, McKay had no doubts about his. At the beginning of his autobiography he acknowledges: I was intent on my own role — I a waiter — waiting for recognition as a poet. It was seven years since I had arrived in the States from Jamaica, leaving behind me a local reputation as a poet. I came to complete my education. But after a few years of study at the Kansas State College I was gripped by the lust to wander and wonder. The spirit of the vagabond, the daemon of some poets, had got hold of me. I quit college. I had no desire to return home. What I had previously done was done. But I still cherished the urge to creative expression. I desired to achieve something new, something in the spirit and accent of America. Against its mighty throbbing force, its grand energy and power and bigness, its bitterness burning in my black body, I would raise my voice to make a canticle of my reaction. (4) Clearly, McKay had “something to say” and he was determined to say it, loudly.8 McKay also reveals the economic difficulty of being a black Caribbean poet in 1920s Harlem.9 He recalls how he resolved to support himself and his poetry: And so I became a vagabond – but a vagabond with a purpose. I was determined to find expression in writing. But a vagabond without money must live. And as I was not just a hard-boiled bum, it was necessary to work. So I looked for the work that was easy to my hand while my head was thinking hard: porter, fireman, waiter, bar-boy, houseman. I waded through the muck and scum with the one

5 objective dominating my mind. I took my menial tasks like a student who is working his way through a university. My leisure was divided between the experiment of daily living and the experiment of essays in writing. If I would not graduate as a bachelor of arts or science, I would graduate as a poet. (4) It is clear from this statement that McKay’s overriding goal was to become a poet. But as a poor black poet he had many obstacles to overcome, not the least of which was racism. Nonetheless, Brathwaite declares, “In order to be ‘universal’ McKay forsook his nation language, forsook his early mode of poetry, and went to the sonnet” (20). Other scholars such as Nathan Huggins have argued that, “Thus, race conscious, yet torn between the particularity of race and the assumed universality of poetry, McKay resorted to form which he could not manage and vagueness which obfuscated and blunted his statement” (219 - 20). Huggins also alleges that McKay’s poems display a “persistent egocentrism” (217).10 Other critics have contended that McKay was not sufficiently conscious of color. Such misunderstandings point to the need for a deeper study of McKay’s poetry. In fact, McKay was not ambivalent about color consciousness but rather about his duty as a poet. Deeper and closer readings of his poetry reveal that he is he is trying to balance the weight of being a poet with the weight of being black. McKay’s desire not to be stereotyped or pigeonholed in one narrow category does not negate his commitment to his race. He was actively involved in protesting issues of racial injustice. One cannot read poems like “The Lynching” “America,” or “White Fiends” and believe that McKay was not concerned with color and race relations. McKay simply wanted to transcend binaristic constructed categories of race and ethnicity, and he struggled to overcome the limitations of race placed on him by both blacks and whites.11 Nevertheless, my purpose for this chapter is not to engage in a debate as to whether or not McKay’s poems were universal, Caribbean, individualistic or even communal. Rather I want to examine how the Petrarchan elements in his poetry, specifically his sonnets, reveal McKay’s poetic paradoxes. A close examination of McKay’s sonnets reveals that the Petrarchan elements in these poems illustrate not only McKay’s struggle with racism in America, encapsulated by the metaphor of America as cruel mistress, but also his desire to transcend the limitations of race as a poet. Leonard Forster states that “Petrarch had forged for posterity a poetic idiom of great flexibility, which could be non-committal or serious, as desired; which could be used to parade fictitious emotions or to conceal real ones; which permitted intense poetic concentration or endless elaboration” (8). It is my contention that McKay uses these Petrarchan conceits in order to conceal and express his struggle with the poetic limitations placed on him because of race. Clearly, for these three poets the question of poetic form was complicated by issues of race, gender, identity and social injustice. Moreover, their choice to write using Renaissance forms further complicated their dilemmas. By form, I am referring specifically to these poets’ use of the Renaissance sonnet, the blazon and Petrarchan conceits. I am interested in how they reacted to and redefined these models. These Caribbean poets are also linked to their Renaissance predecessors through the ways in which they situate form and gender. Specifically, in reference to the Petrarchan tradition Heather Dubrow remarks, “The tradition not only stages but also represents a series of paradoxes; its poems are, for example, more likely than texts in many other genres to be either singularly conventional or strikingly transgressive or both, and they may variously celebrate and subvert ideologies of gender” (Echoes 15). It is my contention

6 that the Caribbean poets under study are enacting the same type of “transgressions” and “conventions” that Dubrow posits. Furthermore, J.W. Lever points out in his account of the Renaissance sonnet: As a succinct, fourteen-line poem the sonnet served many purposes. Frequently it was used for dedications, formal eulogies, or political and moral epigrams. It could express amity or antipathy, . . . its essential function was to chart the intimacies of personal experience. Hence its very limitations gave it strength. Unlike epic and drama, which presented a wide range of characters, it could investigate selfhood at the nodal point where intellect and passion, desire and spiritual aspiration intersect. (1) The sonnet, because of its inherent paradox of flexibility and restraint, becomes a very useful form for the poets to interrogate issues of identity, social injustice, race and gender. Most importantly for my purposes, Lever notes that the sonnet: . . . was preoccupied with an over-riding, all-important engagement of the self with an other; hence with the exploration of a polarity. That ‘other’ might stand in the position of mistress, friend, or even godhead; in any case a relationship was created which drew into its magnetic field the poet’s whole personality; his sense of his environment; his response to nature, time and mutability; his political, religious or philosophical beliefs. Moreover poetry itself, however personal, was seen as a way of mediating experiences that all could share. (3) Whether it is a fictitious lover in Marson’s poetry, imperialist England in Roach’s, or America as mistress in McKay’s, it is this sense of a self engaged with an other that we see so clearly in their poetry.12 And it is their skillful “mediation” of these “experiences” that unites their poetry. It is my contention that if the lyric was so flexible and politicized in the Renaissance, it is even more so for the Caribbean poets. They used the form to protest racism, sexism, and other social injustices. And in using the Renaissance forms-a form traditionally associated with privileged white males-they enacted a subversion that results in their own unique style and voice. Nonetheless, because of their use of Renaissance forms, all of these poets were criticized and accused of being mere imitators without a true organic Caribbean voice. These accusations regarding poetic authenticity and identity have been inherently linked to the debate regarding Caribbean identity and authenticity.13 And, if we examine Frantz Fanon’s assertions about the effects of colonialism in a post-colonial world, we can see why these ongoing debates have been at times necessary. Fanon declares, “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it” (154). Edmondson also recognizes the motivation to create a Caribbean literary aesthetic: “The urgency to establish a Caribbean aesthetic is not surprising, considering the radical political and social implications of such a concept for a Third World / postcolonial society” (112). However, considering the limited scope of this project, I cannot fully explore the broader political context in which these poems were placed. Rather, I want to examine how the poets engaged these issues in their poetry. By doing this type of analysis, my thesis recognizes some of the more intricate interchanges between England and the Anglo-Caribbean. Moreover, an examination of the complexity of these interchanges does not deny the brutality of slavery and colonialism but

7 rather demonstrates the resourcefulness of those oppressed by these systems and the limiting and oppressive nature of categories that seek to map out or locate notions of authenticity. Nevertheless, the new theory emerging in Caribbean discourse and poetics points out that Caribbean identity is more fluid, unfixed and evolving.14 It is this fluidity of movement that these poets illustrate, as well as indicating the dangers that can happen when we place limitations on identity. Their use of Renaissance forms illustrates that the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is not always a simple matter of oppression and helplessness produced by the pressure of white hegemony over black people. Through the work of these poets we see that colonialism was horrible but that Caribbean people were able to rise above it and find a voice that demonstrates Edouard Glissant's contention that Caribbean identity is continually unfolding (Britton 18). According to Celia Britton, in order to describe the diverse culture of the Caribbean, Glissant utilizes the metaphor of "rhizome” (18). Rhizomes are small roots which reach out to other roots (18). Glissant uses this metaphor of roots to describe Caribbean identity. According to Glissant, “identity is no longer a permanence or ‘root’ but ‘a capacity of variation, yes, a variation controlled or frenzied’” (Britton 171). Therefore, “The subject is constituted within this fluid and multiple, ‘relayed’ circulation of identifications,” (Britton 171). One of these many roots of Caribbean identity is of course the connection to Englishness. However, as colonialist culture cut back Afro-Caribbean culture, Afro-Caribbean culture grew and survived underground, but also in forms that seized and adopted English culture’s conventions, in order to speak within and / or against certain English values or histories of oppression and capitalism. Thankfully, these Caribbean poets are part of this underground.

8 Endnotes

1. “A Far Cry from Africa” is from one of Walcott’s earliest collection of poetry In A Green Night. These poems were written between 1948 and 1960.

2. I am aware that dialect is a politically charged and contested term. Other substitutions for dialect range from “Creole language,” “vernacular,” to “local speech.” In fact, Louis James refers to dialect both as a “Creole” language and “West Indian English”(123). My use of dialect is by no means pejorative, but, I am also aware of the negative connotations associated with dialect. Braj B. Kachru maintains, “English does have one clear advantage, attitudinally and linguistically: it has acquired a neutrality in a linguistic context where native languages, dialects, and styles sometimes have acquired undesirable connotations. Whereas native codes are functionally marked in terms of caste, religion, region and so forth, English has no such ‘markers,’ at least in the non-native context” (292). Nevertheless, the arguments and issues surrounding the use of dialect is varied and beyond the limited scope of this project. Therefore, my use of dialect is restricted in order to facilitate the exchange of ideas and augment our understanding of Brathwaite’s terminology.

3. See Stuart Hall, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, and Wilson Harris.

4. For more on womanism, see Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens:Womanist Prose.

5. It might be considered anachronistic to apply these terms to Marson. Yet Marson displayed the attributes of a feminist and a womanist long before the term was in vogue.

6. Smilowitz came to this unfavorable conclusion regarding Marson’s first publication of poetry, Tropic Reveries 1930, despite her assessment that “Marson leaves her contemporaries behind, set in their pastoral cliches, while she explores issues of womanhood, race and identity”(22). Rhonda Cobham also sees poetic immaturity in Marson’s first collection: “Such poems are of slight literary merit but their use of other literary sources is indicative of the wider scope of women’s education during this period. Indeed the poems, like most parodies of this nature, were probably written while Marson was still at school for the entertainment of school friends who would have been familiar with her literary sources as well as appreciative of her poetry’s theme”

9 (208).

7. In order to avoid confusion, I have utilized the following abbreviations for authors with more than one text. Alison Donnell, “Contradictory (W)omens? Gender Consciousness in the Poetry of Una Marson” as “Gender Consciousness.” “Sentimental Subversion: The Poetics and Politics of Devotion in the Work of Una Marson” as “Sentimental Subversion.” For Laurence Breiner’s An Introduction to West Indian Poetry, I have used Introduction and for his “History, Nature, and People in the Poetry of Eric Roach” I have used “History, Nature, and People.” For Heather Dubrow’s Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses I have used Echoes and for her work titled Genre, I have also used Genre. Finally, in the case of Gordon Rohlehr, I have employed the following abbreviations: “My Strangled City: Poetry in Trinidad 1964-75” is “Strangled City” and “West Indian Poetry: Some Problems of Assessment I,” is “Problems of Assessment.” In the case of the poets I believe that the context will be self-explanatory.

8. I have borrowed this phrase from Dr. Darryl Dickson-Carr’s mini-lecture on the Harlem Renaissance.

9. Although I am aware of McKay’s pivotal role in the Harlem Renaissance, my assessment of his poetry stems from his liminality as a Jamaican migrant. Heather Hathaway “purposely distinguish[es] McKay as a migrant (one who moves from place to place) from an immigrant (one who moves to another region to settle) because his very inability to settle, his very need to ‘keep going’— as he would have liked to title his autobiography – provides the key to understanding how this complex man could embody [‘A Thing Apart’ and “Out of Time’] during his lifetime” (29). Hathaway also notes the disconnect between McKay’s status as a Jamaican and his status in anthologies on the Harlem Renaissance, “Nearly all anthologies, despite the growing acknowledgment of his “outsider” status in relation to the African American elite in the twenties and thirties, continue to present him as a pivotal player in black American arts during this era” (9).

10. In terms of his critical views on the Harlem Renaissance, Huggins might be considered dated. However, this does not mean he should be overlooked. Contemporary scholars still engage his seminal text Harlem Renaissance, in their discussions. While Huggins maintains that the Harlem Renaissance failed in many aspects, he still acknowledges the spiritual repercussions of the movement and cites it as a major note in terms of African American identity. More recent scholars such as Hutchinson and Baker read the Harlem Renaissance in terms of modernism.

11. For example, Walter Jekyll, a white Jamaican and close friend of McKay insisted that McKay write in dialect (Hathaway 33-34). Yet in my opinion McKay could not master this form and so he turned to the sonnet.

12. I am aware that the speakers in the sonnets are not the poet themselves. However, because the speakers often appear autobiographical; I deliberately conflate the speakers with the poets.

10 13. This argument cannot be fully understood outside of the historicity of twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean literature. Nevertheless, that historical exploration is beyond the limited scope of this project. For more on the development of a Caribbean aesthetic, see Breiner, An Introduction to West Indian Poetry. Breiner states, “West Indian poetry certainly opened up in an unprecedented way to elements of popular culture–rural and urban, African, European, and East Indian, atavistic and creole. The change went far beyond mere subject-matter. There was widespread adaptation of traditional oral forms and also of specifically musical forms – from reggae, calypso, traditional folk music, and even the music of the churches. Moreover, the extraordinarily limber language West Indians actually use transformed or displaced the traditional poetic diction that had dominated earlier West Indian poetry. Some writers, for example identified the West Indian Little Tradition with a submerged African heritage, a fixed quantity preserved among and therefore identified with the folk, while others maintained that it was the ongoing creole strategies of accommodation, assimilation, adaptation”(12). See also Louis James, especially chapters eight, nine and ten.

14. For variations on the disruptive fluidity of Caribbean identity see also Stuart Hall, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, and Wilson Harris.

11

CHAPTER ONE

A Borrowed Renaissance: The Gendered Aesthetics of Una Marson.

Alison Donell rightly recognizes the need to place early Caribbean women writers, including Una Marson, in the Caribbean poetic canon. Donnell writes: Scholarship during the last decade has successfully highlighted the wealth of creative talent and literary innovation from contemporary Caribbean women writers, yet there remains a dearth of research and criticism on early women’s writing in the region . . . One of these early writers, Una Marson, is now well recognized as an important literary role model for Caribbean women and there is no shortage of tributes to her. . . [Yet] there has been no detailed or substantive reading of her work. Even those critics who have pioneered a literary recognition of Una Marson’s work have adhered to criteria which make an uncompromised acknowldegement problematic. The elements of mimicry and pastiche within her poetry, along with her use of orthodox poetic forms and archaic language continue to elicit embarrassed critical silences or excuses. (“Gender Consciousness” 187) Honor Ford Smith also identifies and acknowledges the need for a reinvestigation of Marson’s work. Smith states: Marson’s work began a tradition which has been carried forward since in the work of Louise Bennett, the Sistren Collective and others. Her work suggested that women consider the small specific ‘private’ problems as a starting point for their struggles, that they express these culturally and from this position weave their concerns into political artifacts often expressing a perception of experiences which have not yet been expressed as ‘legitimate’ areas of political concern. For this kind of work to bear fruit, it must be accompanied by the mobilization of cultural artists and women requiring a new relationship of artists to the process of artistic products. (36) It is in this critical gap that this chapter intervenes. My work becomes part of Smith’s process of “mobilization” that proposes new ways to access and evaluate women’s writing by connecting the Renaissance intertextualities and gender consciousness in Marson’s poetry. So then, my purpose for this chapter is similar to Donnell’s project in its recuperative and reclamative efforts and is also a response to Smith’s call. I propose that Marson’s work is not mere “pastiche” or blatant “mimicry” but rather a subversive assimilation of the English Renaissance lyric and

12 Renaissance conceits such as Petrarchism which allow for the interrogation of categories of gender and colonialism. Furthermore, Heather Dubrow has suggested that “Petrarchism [. . . ] repeatedly challenges the boundaries between characteristics that might be gendered masculine and feminine . . .” (Echoes 11) and that it “also stages the breakdown of distinctions. . .” (Echoes 12). Therefore, by using these Petrarchan conceits Marson challenges the constructed distinctions of class and gender in early twentieth-century Jamaica. Marson grew up in a middle-class family in Jamaica. She received an “an English public- school education” at Hampton school for girls (Delia Jarrett Macauley 19). The school “offered everything an English young lady needed: elocution, deportment, refined conversation, gardening, concerts and musical appreciation. Even the school ghost, Boxer, was a noble Englishman” (Macauley 19). Furthermore, “. . . Hampton boasted a well stocked library of textbooks on English literature, English history, English geography and even English flowers” (Macauley 19). It is clear that Marson was schooled in the classics because, “The curriculum demanded regular study of modern and classical literature. Every term each Hampton’s girl studied at least two literary texts; like English pupils of her generation she was reared on Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, . . .” (Macauley 19). Marson’s favorite subject was English Literature. Yet, however idyllic the school’s education and setting, “Una was deeply unhappy because as a dark-skinned scholarship girl she was made to feel inadequate and unacceptable by the posh majority who knew and enjoyed the privilege of ‘whiteness’: ‘Let it be said also that the 20 or so really dark girls were snubbed by some white and near white girls” (Macauley 19). Moreover, Smith maintains, Marson, “. . . was unquestionably one of the few black pupils in a school which was acknowledged to have discriminated against black girls by contemporaries. It was administered by English school mistresses teaching English Literature, English History and Geography as well as Latin and Mathematics (26). Clearly at this time Jamaica was still affected by racism and colonialism. Perhaps this ostracization inspired Marson’s later activism. When Marson was at school in “. . . 1913 there were only sixty Hamptonians, five classrooms and a staff of ten women teachers. Half the teachers were English women, the others were Jamaicans. All of them had received their university education in England with the exception of Miss Lucas, the music teacher, who trained at the Paris Conservatoire” (Macauley 17). Considering her very English education, it is not surprising that Marson chose to work within the literary forms that were best known to her. Therefore, any criticism that examines her poetry must take her educational background into account. Later when her parents died she “was unable to continue. As a young woman, she came to Kingston to work at the Gleaner in the 1920s. Her own cultural awakening probably took place at this time as Garvey’s activity at Edelweiss Park was at its height and she participated in poetry presentations there” (Smith 26). Marson eventually became an activist who rallied for the rights of women and especially children. And she used her writing, including her essays, articles, plays and poetry, to help advance equality and fair treatment for women.1 Smith comments on Marson’s activism: Out of her life then emerges a picture of a woman who in the context of the 1930s pioneered the organization of cultural workers in the country and who consciously saw this as part of her political commitment. Second, she pioneered the organization of women through the use of cultural form— seeing this as most

13 important to the success of work with women. It was as if the political edge of her awareness of her double exploitation as a black woman could only find full expression here, the depth of her ‘burden,’ as she refers to it in one of her poems, not being adequately explored in any existing organization or movement. (28) Accordingly, I explore some examples of her poetry that speak to women’s issues of love, marriage and oppression. In the space allowed for this exploration, I have chosen to examine five of her poems, “Renunciation,” “In Vain,” “To Wed or Not To Wed,” “Repose” and finally “To the I. A. W. S. E. C.” All of these poems demonstrate Marson’s complicated vision of female love and desire, while simultaneously interrogating the attendant issues of feminism, patriarchy, power and colonialism. Denise deCaires Narain also recognizes that: In these poems, then, Marson’s indebtedness to her ‘European poetic masters’ is displayed in such various forms that dismissing them as ‘fakery’ or ‘not authentically West Indian is to refuse the ambivalent and contradictory nature of Marson’s poetic oeuvre and some of the more nuanced strands of colonial cultural exchanges between England and the West Indies. The uncertainty about voice which characterizes Marson’s work is an indicator of the degree of her sense of cultural unbelonging and of a desire to both belong to, and challenge the poetic status quo. (17) In, “Renunciation,” nature performs on her behalf but she has no power to command the beloved. In fact, the speaker “craves” the beloved to the extent that she seemingly longs to be his slave. And in the sonnet “In Vain,” the theme of enslavement continues. The speaker works tirelessly in hopes of the beloved’s arrival; however, the beloved never comes. Finally the speaker resigns herself to his absence and then in a turnabout longs for the beloved to never come to her. “In Vain” and “Renunciation” both disrupt the sonnet form in terms of rhyme scheme although they maintain the three quatrain, couplet ending model. The poems’ simple rhyming scheme is framed by the more complex positioning of the persona as a slave. This positioning makes the poems disturbing. In, “Renunciation,” and “In Vain” Marson both troubles our understanding of slavery and redefines the Petrarchan trope of the lover’s enslavement, a trope that occurs frequently in seventeenth century literature. Dubrow states, “Engaged in demonstrating parallels between courtship and courtiership, a number of new historicists have identified the Petrarchan lover with the subservient and often unsuccessful candidate for patronage. Thus, this tradition becomes a narrative of failure and the loss of agency” (Echoes 10). What I am suggesting then is that if we take the traditional position of the enslaved Petrarchan lover, then Marson’s poems disrupts this paradigm. Her poems are able to enact this disruption because, as Dubrow states, “[. . .] Petrarchism typically enacts a dynamic, unending slippage between power and powerlessness and between one of their principal sources, success and failure” (Echoes 10). In these poems the speaker claims that she is a slave but in fact she is the instrument of power in the poems. Donnell agrees that Marson makes the slave the agent (“Sentimental Subversion” 119). Thus Marson redefines the parameters of the term “slave” in relation to seventeenth-century poetry. Donnell states, “The ‘slave’ in the sonnet thus serves to question the preordained cultural significance of the slave as both the sign of possession of another’s self within the context of a society built upon slavery, and as the surrender of the self within the context of European love sonnets” (“Sentimental Subversion” 119). Thus the woman, although suffering the pangs of

14 unrequited love, does not lose her subjectivity. In fact she is the subject of the poems. In “Renunciation” the persona starts off with a direct address to herself and her situation. She states, “For me the sunbeams dance and dart / And song birds sing with merry heart / For me the winds are whispering low / And laughing flowers in hedges grow” (1-4). The anaphora “For me,” begins each part of the quatrain. In every quatrain Nature labors on behalf of the speaker. However, Nature’s labor is contrasted by the ending couplet where the speaker “craves” enslavement. Ironically, the speaker “craves” enslavement to the beloved but it is nature who is enslaved to the speaker. Thus, the focus is on the persona, not the beloved or the object of affection. In some ways, this is a slight departure from Renaissance aesthetics in terms of sonnet sequences. Carol Thomas Neely indicates that when English sonneteers begin their sequence, “Concern with the proper decorum continues throughout the sequences as the poet-lovers claim originality over predecessors (Sidney, 3, 28), denounce critics (Drayton, 31), confront rivals (Shakespeare, 86), and lament their aesthetic as well as their moral inadequacy” (364-5). However, these concerns are absent in the beginning of Marson’s sonnet sequence. But as with other Renaissance sonneteers, such an absence could indicate a focus on the speaker’s feelings rather than those of the beloved. Therefore, by focusing the quatrain on the speaker in “Renunciation,” and waiting until the last line of the sestet to address the beloved, she takes the beloved down from the pedestal of Petrarchism and puts the beloved on her level. This rhetorical move is in line with Renaissance sonnets. However, what is significant is that this type of move is usually done when a male speaker petitions a female addressee. So by placing the speaker in the preeminent position of the male speaker, Marson makes the woman’s desire of exclusive importance. This construction of female desire becomes even more complicated when we examine the next poem in the sequence, “In Vain.” In this poem the persona does not merely reflect on nature as a signifier of her lost or unattainable love. That is, she is not engaged merely in reflection as she was in “Renunciation.” Rather she is engaged in activity. But what makes this activity seem more troubling is the reference to enslavement. In, “Renunciation” the reference to the speaker as a slave did not resonate so disturbingly because the speaker merely pondered on nature as an illustration of her frustrated desires; besides, nature was working or performing if you will for the speaker. Moreover, Nature worked on her behalf. But, in “In Vain” the speaker appears to be slaving away for the beloved. The anaphora “In vain” is accompanied by activity: “In vain I build me stately mansions fair / . . . In vain I deck the halls with roses sweet / . . . In vain I watch the dawn break in the sky / . . . In vain one boon from life’s great store I crave” (1,5,9,13). Each activity that follows “In vain” might seem one of abject submission. The persona builds a throne in order to “place a lowly stool beside” the beloved (2-4). She “strews the paths with petals rich and rare” and she “list[s] with throbbing heart sounds of [his] feet” in hope for his arrival (6-7). She also returns to nature but only briefly as “In vain [she] watch[es] the dawn break in the sky” (9). The poem is one of active, frustrated expectancy as she builds and waits and builds and waits. Nevertheless, in the poem the speaker has chosen to work. The poem does possess a certain stillness, perhaps a carry-over from the first poem, but the stillness is overlaid with movement. When the speaker ceases her labors and becomes still, she gains her autonomy. In the last two lines of the first quatrain, the speaker states, “And place a lowly stool beside thee there, / Thus, as thy slave to come into my own” (1-2). And in the couplet, the speaker states, “In

15 vain one boon from life’s great store I crave, / No more the king comes to his waiting slave” (13- 14). In these four lines the binaries of slave / master and slave / king are collapsed. By rejecting the king, not work, the speaker comes into her own. So it is not her enslavement that circumscribes her agency, but rather her own decisions. Donnell asserts, “By reclaiming subjectivity at the moment of sacrifice and devotion, Marson’s poem allows the slave to be an agent and thus reveals how collusion can be an act of self-definition and of choice” (“Sentimental Subversion” 119). If we recall it is the speaker who sets the king on the throne. An indication of her subjectivity is her ability to put the king on a throne. What is also interesting is that it is the presence of Diana, goddess of war and wisdom, who spurs the speaker to action, or rather inaction. It is after “Diana calmly sails on high” that she has her epiphany. So by the end of the couplet there has been a reversal in what the speaker “craved” most. Instead of craving enslavement, she craves solitude. Paradoxically then, the presence of work in the poem serves only to highlight the speaker’s autonomy. Moreover, by making the couplet ambiguous, that is by requesting that the king come “no more” again, the persona gains her subjectivity. If we move directly from the opening quatrain to the closing couplet, the poem could be interpreted thus: the speaker comes into her own when the king comes no more to her. That is, she gains autonomy without the presence of the king or the beloved. This disruption of the slave / master paradigm is reflective of the disruption of traditional ideas about love within both poems. Ironically, the poems become a commentary on female subjectivity and the persona’s own desire rather than an homage to the male lover. Again, there is another irony in her disruption of the slave / master paradigm, her poetry becomes remarkably Petrarchan. There is the appearance of the obsession or desire for the beloved, but the poems betray an obsession with the persona instead. Tellingly then, the sonnets do not end in marriage or suggest marriage as the answer to female desire; rather, they articulate the problems of marriage in complicated ways. In “To Wed or Not to Wed” Marson interrogates the conventional notion of marriage as the natural choice for women in 1930's Jamaica. In fact, she rejects marriage as the imposed bourgeois ideal for women. There are many reasons for this. One reason was that many Jamaican men turned down their darker-skinned counterparts in order to gain status in a very racialised and colonized Jamaican society. Rhonda Cobham explains: Social studies of Jamaican middle-class society between the wars and after draw attention to the disproportionate number of unmarried black women within the Jamaican middle class. They attribute this to the tendency of Jamaican men to marry upward on the colour scale, rejecting well-educated women of their own shade or darker in preference to fairer-complexioned women or foreign white women through whom they could increase their social prestige in Jamaican circles. (205) Therefore, darker-skinned women had fewer choices than their lighter-skinned counterparts. Furthermore, the economic realities of the time hindered the traditional bourgeois Victorian ideal of marriage with the family headed by one male accompanied by the Angel in the House. Cobham also asserts: By the turn of the [twentieth] century, . . . a well-established female lifestyle had emerged among the second generation of free black women. Since the majority

16 of lower-class women were self-employed or worked as domestics, the shortage of wage labour locally did not affect them in the same ways that it did men. It was not uncommon for women to be the sole visible financial mainstay of the family as their men often worked far away, returning home only between contracts to idle away the time until another job opportunity arose. This arrangement preserved for the women a degree of sexual and economic independence, and men who did not maintain contact with their families while they were employed abroad were likely to find on their return that they had been displaced by someone else in their women’s affections. (196-97) Cobham maintains that these attributes of hard work and sexual freedom “presented a contradiction in terms” for the “dominant culture” (197). In fact, these women were considered “sinful” (Cobham 197). Therefore, “nearly all Jamaican creative writing before 1920 is taken up with trying to resolve this contradiction in a way that would rationalise the position of women in Jamaican society in terms acceptable to the dominant culture” (Cobham 197). Perhaps Marson’s poem is not an effort to “rationalise the position of women in Jamaican society” but an attempt to redefine the place of marriage in the society and its viability for all Jamaican women. And, according to Macauley, marriage was proposed as the solution to the problem of fatherless children: “In McFarlane’s Case for Polygamy (1932), for instance, he proposed that in a Christian society like Jamaica where women outnumber men, the men should take two wives, thus permitting the women to stay at home and have babies” (35). But Macauley tells us that, Una did not feel that marriage and family life were for everyone, and she rejected his anti-feminist moralist stance. She found herself at odds with her main literary allies because she was relating the specific oppression of women as a sex to marriage, family and religion, and argued that ‘a living wage’ not marriage was woman’s prime need. But she found herself in a difficult position, both shocking to her elders and vulnerable to traditional reprisals. (35) So, considering the colonial contexts in which she lived, and by questioning a woman’s decision to marry while framing the question in the context of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, Marson invests the poem with far-reaching implications. The poem becomes not only a question of marriage but a question of the choices given to women in colonial Jamaica. Her “(With apologies to Shakespeare)” at the end of the poem, could be taken at face value and read as a playful if not semi-facetious apology to Shakespeare. Thus, the apology recognizes Shakespeare’s indelible status in Anglo-Caribbean literature. Nevertheless, it also suggests a playful disregard for Renaissance icons while displaying the understanding that, “the choice of a literary form functions less as the willing admission of indebtedness [. . .] than as a proud assertion of originality” (Dubrow Genre 12-13). Moreover, the ironic stance of the poem and the subject matter recovers it from mere imitation. In “To Wed or Not to Wed” the speaker subversively compares marriage to death: To wed, or not to wed: that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The fret and loneliness of spinsterhood Or to take arms against the single state And by marrying, end it? To wed; to match,

17 No more; yet by this match to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to; ‘tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. (1-9) In the poem “spinsterhood” is seemingly an unnatural “state” that can only be overcome by marriage. But the poem subverts or counters what it purports to support so that “Spinsterhood” ultimately becomes a “state” that is preferable to death. For it is in marriage that “The heartache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to” (7,8) become consumed, or die. So then marriage becomes not a gateway to another stage in life, but rather an eerie, ominous unsure afterlife, much the same as Hamlet imagined death to be. To make marriage even less palatable, marriage becomes imbued with the imagery of battering or forceful violence since it can only win or conquer by taking “arms” against the “single state”(4). The poem goes on to ponder the potential catastrophic consequences of choosing marriage. First the speaker offers the slightest possibility of a happy “match” then quickly removes it, “To wed, to match; / To match, perchance mismatch: aye there’s the rub; / For in that match what dread mishaps may come / When we have shuffled off this single state / For wedded bliss” (9-13). The “dread mishaps” leaves open a realm of horrendous possibilities. So the speaker simultaneously presents “spinsterhood” as a questionable “state,” while positioning marriage as one of potential “dread.” So then “the joys of wife and mother, / The pleasures of devotion, of sacrifice and love / The blessings of a home and all home means, / . . . The loved ones circling round at eventide” (15-17,19), become not an idyllic picture of hearth and home, but rather another possibility or incarnation of, or invitation to “dread.” After painting this seemingly heavenly or idealized portrait of marriage and motherhood, the speaker disrupts this image by reframing it in the context of dread and terror, by asking: Who would fardels bear To pine and sigh under a single life But that the dread of something after marriage, That undiscovered nature, from whose ways One can scarce sever, puzzles the will, (21-25) The word “fardels” is an old English word meaning sin and / or burden. So again, spinsterhood is seemingly negative, it is a burden, but the burden of spinsterhood pales in comparison to the “dread of something after marriage,” and “That undiscovered nature.” Therefore the speaker’s seeming vacillation, “Thus dreadful doubt makes cowards of us all” (28), becomes a rhetorical device where the speaker can map out the possible dangers of marriage. Ultimately, for women living in colonial Jamaica, marriage becomes an unknown, uncharted, undiscovered and possible hostile territory. Moreover, to choose marriage is to choose inaction, which is depicted as death. By using Hamlet’s soliloquy to frame the question of whether or not to marry, Marson invests the question with matters as weighty and far-reaching as those Hamlet considered. Hamlet considers not only suicide, which Marson’s poem echoes, but whether to act or not to act, whether there is an afterlife, to exist or not to exist. So by asking “to wed or not to wed” Marson is asking all the questions that Hamlet asked. Therefore, the question of marrying is the question of action versus inaction and existence versus non-existence. Marson then makes the question of marriage as important or as significant as those questions that concern life and death.

18 Hamlet’s soliloquy is about doubt and in the end he resolves not to kill himself but to take action against Claudius. In the poem Marson also reworks the soliloquy to resolve the doubt and take action. Thus the speaker chooses not to marry. Ironically, by choosing spinsterhood, she chooses action. Consequently she chooses life: Thus dreadful doubt makes cowards of us all And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And matrimonial rites, and wedded life With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. (28-33) Again the speaker uses “dread” to end her discourse on marriage. Marriage is rejected in the end, just as the speaker rejects doubt. The speaker cleverly rejects doubt in order to reject marriage and act, and subsequently choose a single life. Marriage according to the poem is the loss of action. Thus the forceful images of phallic violence that begun the poem lose their effectiveness and become impotent. So by appropriating Shakespeare, Marson forces Shakespeare’s text into a feminist way of looking at things. By framing the poem in the context of Hamlet’s soliloquy the poem becomes a critique of marriage as the raison d’etre of women. Considering the colonial contexts of “To Wed or Not to Wed,” it is not surprising that the speaker returns again to reality in “Repose” and expresses her heartbreak in pragmatic terms.2 “Repose” functions as a classic Petrarchan poem with its conceit of the heart fighting “storms,” crossing “oceans” and navigating “winds” and “tempests” (8,10,11). However, Marson subverts the Petrarchan ideas and conceits in the poem in order to make a statement about the sadness and disappointment of real heartbreak. The last couplet rejects the purported sentimentality and philosophy of the poem and disrupts our expectations of the Petrarchan lover languishing forever for love. Instead, the speaker is forced to admit that her heart is not really breaking on the “rocks” but rather that her heart is suffering “deep hurt and ache on ache” (13-14). “Repose” begins with the focus on the speaker. The first line is a self address to the speaker to “Return, my heart, from wandering afar / Where tempests toss thy unpretentious bark, / Rest thee content to muse upon a star, / At dawn to hear the music of the lark” (1-4). Recall Neely’s comments that many times the English sonneteers begin their sonnet sequence with a “lament [of ] their aesthetic as well as their moral inadequacy” (364-5). Moreover, Neely also asserts that the “. . . addresses are characterized by a mixture of pride and embarrassment” (364). However, in Marson’s sonnets, including “Repose,” we don’t see either “a mixture of pride and embarrassment” or a “lament” about her “moral inadequacy.” Rather what we encounter is a direct assertion about her right to love. When she calls her heart an “unpretentious bark,” she positions herself as having a right to speak or as a subject equal to the addressee. The poem does not include one direct address to the beloved. Instead the poem becomes a refrain of caution, comfort and warning to the self or to the heart. The caution and comfort is typified by the lines that state, “Stay home and half forget the prisoned pain / That will not have thee rest in settled peace, / The simple joys of life thou canst retain, / From storms of ocean thou wilt find release;” (5-8). In the third quatrain the call to rest is again made: “Rest, then, my heart, thou knowest but too well / How strong and fierce relentless winds can blow; / How frail thy bark when tempests round thee swell, / How thou dost need the peace thou woudst forgo” (9-12). However, the

19 demands to rest only serve to highlight all the “work” that the heart is doing, or rather the love that the heart is expending. As with Petrarchan imagery the heart has to fight many storms. So the image of work is merely reinforced by the desire not to love or toil anymore. Such a subversion recalls the former poems “In Vain,” and “Renunciation,” by making the speaker the focus of the work including the “labor” of love. Such a focus then affords the speaker autonomy and subjectivity. And again with “In Vain,” and “Renunciation,” the couplet further complicates our understanding of the sonnet. By stating, “For hearts do not upon the wild rocks break; / They only know deep hurt and ache on ache” (13-14), the speaker appears to reject the Petrarchan imagery she once employed so usefully. However, what appears to be rejection is merely reconstruction. The seeming frustration, surrender and despair only serve to highlight the work the heart has done before. Therefore, the couplet is not a resignation or capitulation to hopelessness, but rather a reiteration of reality and action. Neely states, ““In all of the sequences, as in Shakespeare’s, parthenogenesis prevails; the poet-lover creates his desire, his beloved, his poetry, all out his own head and comes to lament the barrenness of the enterprise” (367). For Marson the “parthenogenesis” that occurs does create her “desire, [her] beloved, [her] poetry.” And like Shakespeare, Marson might ponder or lament the usefulness of such an “enterprise.” Narain also pinpoints the frustration which sometimes imbue Marson’s work. She states, “There are several striking aspects about Una Marson’s poetic output: the anxiety about the process of writing; the diverse range of poetic voices she makes use of; the uneveness of the ambition and quality of her work; the frequent moving between locations out of which she wrote; and the sense of restlessness and lack of fulfilment which pervade most of her work” (Narain 8-9). However, unlike her Renaissance predecessors, Marson’s poetics, cannot end with mere “lament.” The speaker must go on to validate her poetic enterprise. In the self-circumscribed world of her poems, this is the best way to gain autonomy. Like “In Vain,” and “Renunciation,” “Repose” simultaneously subverts and disrupts the images that it paints thereby emphasizing the complicated nature of love, or female love for a male subject. It is not surprising that “Repose” and “To the I. A. W. S. E. C” is found in a later collection of her works, Towards the Stars. Towards the Stars demonstrates an emerging maturity in terms of her poetic process, but more importantly it illustrates Marson’s complicated if not amicable marriage between Renaissance aesthetics and Jamaican Nationalism. In terms of Jamaican Nationalism and racial pride, Marson has been accused of being less than sympathetic to the problems of race and the colonial enterprise in Jamaica. However, even a cursory reading of her poems belies any such notion. A feminist and womanist poem, “To the I. A. W. S. E. C,” is a keen demonstration of Marson’s concern not only for female equality, justice and improvement in Jamaica but also worldwide. For Marson, politics can be allied with love, consequently, love results in praxis. Marson used this poem as part of her address to the International Alliance of Women for a conference in Turkey on women’s rights in 1938 (Smith 27). She was the only black woman in attendance (Smith 27). The fact that Marson used the sonnet form suggests her acknowledgment to Renaissance forms and the usefulness of such a form. And, by using a form flexible enough to address religion, love and politics to talk about women’s rights, Marson makes an implicit commentary on the love that she bears for women everywhere.

20 She begins the poem with a call to “Women of England who in freedom’s name / Work with courageous women of all lands / For women’s rights, . . .” (1-3). Throughout the sonnet, Marson is careful to address women only. Not once does she place the “burden” of female equality and progress on men. Thus, by speaking directly to women, and using the sonnet as her vehicle, Marson simultaneously elevates the stature of women and incorporates her Renaissance aesthetics. Donnell suggests, “by locating her poetry within what appears to be a ‘natural’ genre for a woman, Marson is able to exploit dominant expectations of love literature without endorsing them, and to carve out a space from which to explore the workings of love and the politics of romance” (“Sentimental Subversion” 115). Therefore, by using Renaissance aesthetics to talk about love, equality and freedom, Marson has clearly shown that her poetry is not “mere pastiche or blatant mimicry” but rather a conscious reworking of Renaissance ideas that speak to the complicated nature of women’s desires and love. Neely has pointed out that “for the English sonneteers the failure of love ultimately means the failure of poetry as well” (365). For Marson, the failure of love becomes the possibility for poetry. Moreover, the failure of love in her poetry becomes the possibility for female agency.

21 Endnotes

1. Marson wrote in a variety of genres. Her first foray into writing consisted of poetry, then she moved to drama, and later returned to poetry. However, she also utilized essays and newspaper articles to discuss equal rights for women in Jamaica and around the world. Her first collection of sonnets from Tropic Reveries,1930, focuses on women’s desire, love and sexuality. In it she has a sonnet sequence that speaks about a beloved who has abandoned her. The sequence consists of 10 poems.

2. Both “Repose and “To the I. A. W. S. E. C,” (which I discuss later in the chapter) are from another collection of poetry, Towards The Stars, 1945.

22 CHAPTER TWO

To “Range a Blind Field for a Bough of Laurel”: Renaissance Ambivalences in the Poetry of Eric Roach

According to Laurence Breiner, “In 1971, the conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) provided the occasion for a galvanic West Indian event. The main theme of the conference was West Indian literature, ‘the enactment of national identity in poetry, fiction, and criticism’” (Introduction 1). One panel was held to discuss “the function of the writer in society” (Introduction 1). Breiner states that the ACLALS was significant because: It was ACLALS, in effect, that formally introduced West Indian writers to their audience. The interplay of speakers and listeners at the conference was the first substantial manifestation of West Indian society attending to its own thoughts about literature. For writers resident in the region, the ACLALS audience constituted the revelation of a tangible public, the promise that West Indian society could and would support a self-sufficient literature. (Introduction 4) Breiner’s summation of the ACLALS conference of Caribbean Literature was “that it conveniently marks the moment when certain distinctive features — defining a ‘West Indian aesthetic’ in some minds — were recognized and proclaimed” (Introduction 9). Because it took place during this time, Trinidadian poet Eric Roach’s body of work marks this transformation. Nevertheless, for Roach the idea of a “distinctive” “West Indian aesthetic” was still not a reality. For Roach, the standards of judgment for Caribbean poetry were still too divergent and divided along the lines of culture and race. And, according to Breiner, there were still questions that lingered and had troubled the other poets in attendance “at least since before independence” (Introduction 6). These were some of the questions, “Was there an audience? Was there a literature? Was that literature distinctively ‘West Indian’?” (6). These questions demonstrate that Roach’s reservations regarding an already formed unique Caribbean literature were valid to some degree. In fact, Roach constantly wrestled with these questions in his poetry. He was endlessly trying to find a balance between protest poetry and high art. Therefore, his poetry ranges over matters of an emerging but not yet formed West Indian identity, the problem of audience and reception and the purpose of a poet. In this chapter, I explore these issues of authorship, identity and aesthetic judgment in Roach’s poetry.

23 In the foreword to the first and only printed collection of Roach’s poetry: The Flowering Rock: Collected Poems 1938-1974, Caribbean scholar, Ian McDonald declares, “This is an extremely important book. Before its appearance no literary historian or critic, let alone lover of poetry, will have been able to measure the full richness of West Indian poetic creation in the era since the Second World War” (9). McDonald goes on to state that this collection of Roach’s work “consolidates” Roach among a “pantheon” of poets “which include at least Claude McKay, Derek Walcott, Louise Bennett, Martin Carter and Edward Kamau Brathwaite” (9). McDonald’s statements about Roach’s emerging importance as a Caribbean poet is reflective of a changing and emerging Caribbean canon. Roach was born and grew up in the countryside of Tobago. At fourteen he had to commute daily to the bleak world of the city for a British colonial education (Rohlehr, “Strangled City” 108). It is this experience of loss that helped to shape Roach’s poetic identity. Writing about this experience, Roach declares: Just on thirteen, my father thrust me out of the warm organic cocoon of the village, not to fend for myself, but to take the six-mile daily journey to the recently started highschool in town. It was a journey from the past into the future, from simple tribal ignorance into the society of the world. Later I came to regard my journey as symbolic of the whole tribal movement of the Caribbean from its nineteenth-century morass of illiteracy, servitude, poverty and folk-customs into the glittering, heartless, murderous menage of twentieth-century western civilization. (Rohlehr, “Strangled City” 108) Here Roach’s comments illustrates the disillusionment brought by his English education and a movement from the frying pan into the fire in terms of his movement into adulthood and writing. However, scholars have seen in Roach’s words a disdain for Afro-Caribbean culture. Moreover, statements such as the above, particularly his description of the Caribbean as a “nineteenth- century morass of illiteracy, servitude, poverty and folk-customs” (Rohlehr, “Strangled City” 108) have led to mixed reviews in the reception of Roach’s poetry. Roach’s negative sentiments regarding the history and cultural identity of Africa and the Caribbean have led many scholars to marginalize Roach in terms of his importance in Caribbean poetry. In response to Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s “suggestion that Black consciousness constituted the thrust of West Indian writing” Roach stated, “To thresh about wildly like [Audvil] King and [Bongo] Jerry in the murky waters of race, oppression and dispossession is to bury one’s head in the stinking dunghills of slavery” (Breiner, Introduction 188). But Breiner reminds us to be cognizant of the environment in which Roach wrote and the context that prompted his words. Breiner states: The political climate is an important factor here. The rhetoric of Black Power in overwhelmingly black Jamaica served constructively in achieving national self- consciousness and self-respect, but in racially mixed Trinidad at the time of the February revolution it could appear irresponsibly inflammatory. The canonization of Africa was still new, and Roach was only one of many fervent nationalists, long aware of the African heritage, who objected to the Black Power (and particularly to its rhetoric) on the firmly nationalistic grounds that it was a piece of the old mimicry, a slavish importation of the North American version of ideas which had actually originated in the Caribbean of Cesaire, Fanon and James. (Introduction

24 188) Scholars were even more incensed when in a review of poets from the West Indian journal Savacou, Roach asks “Are we going to tie the drum of Africa to our nails and bay like mad dogs at the Nordic world to which our geography and history ties us?” (Rohlehr, “Problems of Assessment” 318). Rohlehr concludes: “For Mr. Roach . . . the drum of the Afro-West Indian is associated with an animalistic blood-lust, while ‘European culture’ is most generously defined, and proffered as a means of Caribbean salvation” (Rohlehr, “Problems of Assessment” 319). However, Kenneth Ramchand is kinder in his appraisal of Roach’s oeuvre and cultural and poetic sensibility: He was disappointed in his hopes for society, the world and himself but he would not follow spurious gods. Not surprisingly, he got into wars in the 1970s with armchair radicals, aestheticians of the grassroots, neo-Africanists and people who either had not read his work or who could not afford to expose themselves to contradiction and uncertainty. Absurdly, he was accused of being against Africa, against the folk and against dialect. He was an Afro-Saxon, he was obsolete. But the sinking poet was still moving on, beyond the narrow limits of the so-called radicals with their manly rhetoric. (19-20) Clearly Roach was dismayed at what he saw as bad protest poetry tied to an African sensibility (Rohlehr, “Problems of Assessment” 317). And, despite his Renaissance affinities or English literary traditions, as McDonald rightfully states, Roach “was one of the first to express in remarkable poetry and clear individual voices the vision of a precise and distinctive West Indian identity” (9). But, as a poet, Roach has not been free from detraction. And as we have already seen, many critics have accused him of not being close enough to his Africanness or African identity. Nevertheless, as stated earlier, even in his initial poetry, he was still struggling with his African and Caribbean identities. Even a cursory reading of his poems demonstrates this struggle. And as Ramchand explains, Roach admired Homer and Milton, “But Roach was no blind weaver. He was very alive to the social, political and cultural issues in his time and place, and these were just as real to him as, and not separate from, his more philosophical concerns”(15). Moreover, “he never had a problem with Africa: he was proud of his Africanity but did not think of himself as an African or as someone removed from his natural habitat” (15). His denial of being African highlights even more his complex vision of his identity. In one of his poems, “She,” he states that the Caribbean is also “African.” Nevertheless, his concern for his people and his sense of political and cultural issues is reflected in his poetry in very complex ways. But what is even more complex is Roach’s relationship to his own poetry and his poetic legacy. By legacy I mean the English Romantic and Renaissance tradition that he was taught. But, for the purpose of this thesis, I will focus on the Renaissance tradition. Nevertheless, for me, what connects almost all of Roach’s poetry is his struggle with the meaning and purpose of his work and his anxieties about writing good poetry. Moreover, what makes his poetic dilemma even more complex is his affinity to Renaissance poetics. Many times in his poetry the land becomes a metaphor for the struggle between Eurocentric hegemony and Caribbean independence. This struggle is worked out in several of his poems and it is these poems that I have chosen to examine for this chapter. Although I will make references to other poems, the primary focus of my examination will be the

25 two versions of “Immortelles,” “She,” “Caribbean Coronation Verse” and finally “The Blind Weavers.” In the first “Immortelles” the sonnet is a praise of the land’s beauty, but also a testament to the indomitable will of the Caribbean people. “Immortelles” thus becomes a blazon of the earth’s beauty. So by using the Renaissance sonnet form and the blazon to describe the beauty of the Caribbean “Immortelle” flowers, Roach magnifies the Caribbean landscape. “The forest [that] flames!” Causes the response of “. . . joy in January!”(5). So unlike the colder climes of England, there is abundant joy in the season of winter. Because of the Immortelles, the landscape comes alive. In fact, the beauty of the forest is so vivid that it seems to burn. But if it burns, the imagery resonates not with death but with life. In fact the “floral fire” has served to loose the forest from its “mute captivity” (11-12). And it is after this fiery freedom that the forest can “burst forth” into “song” (13,14) and allow its rightful “queen to ascend her throne” (14). Superficially, the poem can be read as praise for Roach’s Caribbean landscape but an alternative yet valid reading suggests that “Immortelles” is a metaphor for the triumph of the Caribbean people over oppression. This reading is more credible if we examine Roach’s second “Immortelles” where he places the Immortelle flower as “imperial” royalty decked in “scarlet plume” which “Hold courtly state, when all the forest round / Seemed palled with poverty” (8, 9- 10). The colour scarlet has often been associated with royalty. And his use of the word “plume” acts as a pathetic fallacy which invests the flower with human attributes. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “immortelles” states that they are flowers which “retain their colour after being dried.” Therefore, the immortelles are flowers which signify beauty, resilience and tenacity; states which Roach came to associate with his native Caribbean people. Moreover, the drying process refers to the hardship endured under colonial rule and the costly survival of the Caribbean people. In the second “Immortelles” Roach states that the “. . . forest trees are blazon’d o’er with bloom” (26). Therefore, in their act of creating a blazon the immortelles become a poem and by extension the poet. So, another reading suggests that as a poet Roach is the “immortelle” figure for his people, beautiful, resilient, but most importantly, immortal. Considering Roach’s desire for poetic recognition and immortality, such an interpretation is convincing. Furthermore, Roach’s deliberate use of “blazon” denote his Renaissance familiarities. Roach also employs the rhetoric of comparison and acknowledgment in order to hierachize the beauty of his native Caribbean flowers and thus landscape. At the beginning of the sonnet he admits that “Earth decks herself with beauty everywhere; / A mountain top with cap of silver snow / I have not seen, but heard it lovely” (1-3). In the middle of the third line he almost seems to employ a turn or a volta, when he ends by stating “here.” Then the enjambment forces the reader to the fourth line where he begins his praise of his native Trinidad. In the Italian and English sonnet tradition the turn is usually reserved for the later lines or the last couplet. So by placing the turn at the beginning of the sonnet, Roach inverts the sonnet form, but invests his poem with deeper meaning by priortizing his native landscape with magnificent beauty. In other words, his rhetoric of admission ironically serves to reinforce the unstated sentiment that no other landscape can compete in terms of beauty and splendor. The image of the immortelles is captured again in the next sonnet that I would like to examine. In the sonnet “She” a woman becomes the metaphor for the Caribbean. In this sonnet Roach acknowledges the complex and complicated history of the Caribbean. Here Roach

26 denounces both the slave trade and the battles between the indigenous populations. Roach acknowledges that the Caribbean is “Europe, Africa and Asia” and sadly too “the native Carib disappearing” (7-8). This acknowledgment of the multiplicity or complex identity of Caribbean people, is not only a post-colonial effort to embrace difference but more importantly an acknowledgment of his poetic identity. In this poem, Roach locates the Caribbean as “the meaning” (1). The open-ended nature of such a word suggests then that the Caribbean is the repository for the location of identity and the place for displaced Caribbeans to find meaning. But “the meaning” also suggests that the Caribbean is the place to discover history. The poem illustrates that the history that can be found is not a simplistic rendition of imperialist narratives but one “Of ruthless traffic, of dark uneasy peace / Among ourselves, of reckless greedy gleaning / Of old continents, and the commingling / Of our blood with wanton, lustful ease” (3-6). Roach does not romanticize Caribbean history or attempt to locate a single truth in regards to Caribbean identity. Instead he acknowledges the historical complexity of the Caribbean subject and condemns the brutality of European imperialism. However, after the imagery of war and desecration, he moves again to the vision of the “Flame-flowered immortelle and flamboyant / Crimson hibiscus and bright golden poui” (10,11). In fact, the lines that describe the beauty of the Caribbean are all declarative. No question is asked; in other words the poet leaves no room to doubt that “She’s beauty set in a rare frame of beauty” (9). In fact, by personifying the Caribbean as feminine or as a woman, Roach acknowledges the strength and endurance of the Afro-Caribbean woman. To make such a connection is not a paternalistic, patriarchal or essentialist view of womanhood, but rather an acknowledgment of the historical debt and the immense contribution that Afro-Caribbean women have made to the culture and history of the region. Roach ends the sonnet with an ironic twist. How can a woman who has endured such shame, brutality and rape have “pride and passion kindling in her eye” (14)? The answer lies again in the resilience of the people, signified by the ever present immortelle flower. Therefore, the “Green foliage and sheer blue of sea and sky” cannot help but “Surround her with their loves” (12-13). In fact, “they flaunt / The pride and passion kindling in her eye” (14). So then, if the sea and sky flaunt / The pride and passion kindling in her eye” they are also reflecting her “pride” and “passion.” The image then is of a beautiful, saucy woman who has seen hard times but knows better than to give up. In this sonnet Roach resists the impulse to invert the usual place of the turn. The turn fittingly occurs in the last couplet. So although the sonnet begins with images of destruction it ends with images of “passion” life, birth and continuous renewal. An apt representation of the Caribbean people. So far, we have seen Roach’s intricate description of Caribbean identity. However, in “The Blind Weavers” Roach’s Renaissance ambivalences and admiration toward Renaissance writers reaches its high point. Interestingly, “In The Blind Weavers” Roach’s ambivalence turns to desire for the respect, admiration and fame given to writers such as Homer and Milton. Here we clearly see his love for his people, but also his struggle with his role as a poet and his English literary traditions. In verse one Roach attempts to insert himself in the poetic tradition of the Renaissance writers and Homer when he calls “greeting” in order “to startle” their “blind weaving” (3- 4). I suggest that verse one be read as the frame for the Renaissance tradition partly because of Roach’s use of “weaving.” Weaving becomes a metaphor for all creative literary endeavors. So by writing poetry, Roach becomes part of the Blind Weavers and by extension a

27 creator. So then the preeminent Renaissance writers would be weavers, poets, thus creators. Therefore, when the poet asserts “you,” the “you” is a reference to Homer and to the Renaissance Poets. Verse one, two and three state: I run to your roof from the rain You hear dampening December; I call you greeting to startle Your blind weaving, To flutter the light at the heart of your dark. I should be Jesus of miracles Thinking you pity; but how May the blasphemous passionate man Give eyes of his dark. The light of his world of his rage and his lust? Blind Homer, blind John Milton Are my masters. Could I, As from their dark, they told Faith, beauty, deeds I should grow taller than the timber (1-5, 6-10, 16-20). So when Roach states, to “startle you” it is a definitive bid for attention and an attempt at immortality. Milton and Homer’s canonical status in literary studies ensure their immortality; so in effect they are still weaving. Therefore, if Roach can gain the attention of the Renaissance writers then he too could live forever. However, there is also a political bent in the poem when it alludes to the Renaissance Canon and its impact on Caribbean people. By calling “greeting” to the Renaissance writers, and inserting himself in their poetic tradition, Roach is also offering a new model for poetic writing. So his “greeting” is at once a gesture of salute and at the same time an expression of defiance. In verse two of “The Blind Weavers” we see more of his complex relationship with his Renaissance predecessors. Verse two reminds us of Roach’s concern with immortality. Additionally, this section highlights his unresolved tension between admiration and dependence in Roach’s relations with Renaissance ideas. Roach’s main concern in the poem is how the Renaissance poets were able to disseminate their ideas to a blind public. He also questions how he could do the same. But, he sees himself in a lower position than his Renaissance predecessors. In fact, his ambivalence regarding his role as a poet and his aspiration for poetic stature is revealed in the lines that question, “but how / May the blasphemous passionate man / Give eyes of his dark. / The light of his world of his rage and his lust?” (7-10). In other words how can such a divided subject give “light” to the world when he is also consumed by “rage” and “lust”? Moreover, would it be possible that his “light” also consists of “rage and lust”? The poet is in such despair that he thinks that the only way that the Renaissance muses might “pity” him is if he were “Jesus of miracles,” that is a miracle worker (6-7). Stanza three continues the theme of Roach’s desire to be accepted as a poet, prophet, and creator. Speaking to Milton and Homer, he declares, “I know the world of your loss. / I range a blind field / For a bough of laurel / To wear in my hair, / To wear on my grave in the rock of the land” (11-15). The “blind field” is a metaphor for the blindness of his people and the perceived

28 futility of his poetic endeavors and aspirations. Here we see Roach’s acute distress over his poetic value. Is he just blindly writing or weaving? Or is there a purpose to his art? Do the people accept and understand his work? Will he be recognized for his efforts? Will his work live on? Seemingly, Roach felt the answers to these questions were in the negative. Moreover, the distress over his poetic value is couched in the language of competition. His use of “laurel” recalls not only the Greek prize of the laurel crown for excellence in poetry, but Laura, Petrarch’s elusive muse. So this reference to “laurel” highlights his desire but simultaneously underscores the futility of his poetic ambitions. That is, the Caribbean equivalent of the Greek “laurel” does not seem to be forthcoming, and if we remember, real or not, Petrarch never attains Laura. Moreover, if Roach does succeed in gaining any prize or recognition, he will only be able to wear it on his grave. So then the best he can hope for is elevation through death. An image of despair if there was ever one. The tone of longing and despair also imbues the rest of the poem. In stanza four and five he declares that if he could do what Milton and Homer does he would be “taller than timber,” “taller than time” (20-21). In other words, canonical. Like Milton and Homer, Roach knows darkness. I am deliberately conflating blindness and darkness because I believe this is what Roach does. But, unlike Milton and Homer, Roach believes that he cannot turn his blindness or darkness into something good.1 That is, while their blindness or darkness helped to liberate them and to create beautiful poetry, he believes that his does not. Perhaps Roach’s perceived failure is that his personal darkness is his inability to reach the people that he most wanted to reach. In a later poem we see his ambivalences develop even more. In “Caribbean Coronation Verse” we see Roach’s move to outright protest and rage at British Imperialism. “Caribbean Coronation Verse” begins with the notion of notorious identity. Shakespeare and Marlowe are the stand-ins for the English Literary Tradition. “The Island Kingdom” is positioned against Shakespeare, but neither the Island Kingdom or Shakespeare is completely faultless. Shakespeare is positioned as a craftsman or sculptor that “cut[s] and chisel[s]” at his verse (2). Marlowe is positioned as a saint who is “martyred in a brawling tavern,” but who is therefore “made immortal by the kiss of death”(3- 4). At one point Marlowe almost approaches a Christ- like status as “his bright Blood [is] streaming in the firmament”(5). But in the next line he is humanized by his royalty and arrogance. The seventh line is ambiguous. We are not sure if the reference or accolade of “personal as love, desirable as gold” is a reference to Marlowe or the Queen. The first stanza sharply contrasts with the following five stanzas. Here Roach lays bare the brutal history of the English empire. Roach starts with the first imperial gaze and sarcastically dubs the pirates and privateers “Intrepid tourists on a tropic cruise” (14). Roach names infamous English privateers in stanza two. But in the third stanza he specifically names John Hawkins, the first English slave trader and his dastardly deeds. These acts include helping to implement the slave trade, and buying and selling slaves to the Spanish for profit. Roach also delineates the actions of other English privateers. In stanza five, Roach makes reference to the Queen again. However, this is in stark contrast to the position of the Queen in verse one. For Roach the Queen becomes a figure of malevolence. And in stanza five Roach comments on the “whitewashing” of history. In fact, for

29 Roach, history been rewritten so much that his “nigger voice from the slave islands / Proclaims her majesty in Shakespeare’s tongue” (41- 42). Here we see Roach’s commentary on the invasive nature of the oppressive language that he has learned. Roach’s commentary is also that language can be an oppressive tool with which to shape empire and thus culture. Therefore the slogan, “Advance Brittania” (44) in Roach’s poem is a social commentary and a condemnation of English Imperialism and colonialism. But the poem’s irony is also self-referential and recognized; Roach has learnt to speak the language of Shakespeare, but he uses it to denounce English imperialism. Here Caliban’s curse echoes. In a critical scene from The Tempest, Caliban furiously defends his honor to both Prospero and Miranda. When he states to Miranda, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” (1. 2. 365-367). Caliban’s fury and frustration is not that he has been taught the language of his oppressor; he already had his own form of communication, no matter how “brutish” and “gabbled” (1. 2. 360). His fury is that he has learnt a language of futility. He may be able to curse, but that is his only “profit.” Moreover, through the use of Miranda and Prospero’s language, Caliban is able to understand his oppression more acutely. Caliban knows he is powerless and admits this to himself, “I must obey. His art is of such power / It would control my dam’s god, Setebos, / And make a vassal of him” (1.2. 375-377). So Roach’s line, “Till now my nigger voice from the slave islands / Proclaims her majesty in Shakespeare’s tongue / To queen a commonwealth of flowering freedoms. / Advance Brittania” (41- 44), echoes Caliban’s frustration and enslavement. Thus, Roach’s use of “nigger” is his acknowledgment of oppression, interpellation and helplessness. Yet, although Roach believes that his language is not used for self-empowerment, but to proclaim English majesty, the irony inherent in “flowering freedoms” also imply a sort of rebellion, a usurpation and subversion. “Caribbean Coronation Verse” was written in Roach’s political period. But, despite the use of sarcasm, there is a hint of admiration for the language as illustrated by the first stanza. This is part of Roach’s poetic identity that he seems to be working out, or rather the conundrum that he is trying to solve. That is, how can such a lovely language be indigenous to a group of people who have practiced such brutality? Ironically and indirectly then, Roach’s tongue is used to “queen a commonwealth” and “advance Brittania” (43-44). In this poem the complaint is that his tongue is not used for the advancement of his cause or his people, but for the cause of English Empire. This irony is very troubling to Roach. Therefore, the Queen ultimately becomes a large, looming sun figure that obliterates everything and all other histories (33-36). But there is another way to view Roach’s plight and that is Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry. Bill Aschcroft explains that mimicry is the “ambivalent relationship between colonizer and colonized” (139). Moreover, “The threat inherent in mimicry, then, comes not from an overt resistance but from the way in which it continually suggests an identity not quite like the colonizer” (Aschcroft 141). Bhabha states, “The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing” (86). In fact, according to Ashcroft, “The consequences of this for post-colonial studies are quite profound, for what emerges through this flaw in colonial power is writing, that is, post-colonial writing, the ambivalence of which is ‘menacing’ to colonial authority” (140). Unlike Caliban, Roach does have some power. Subsequently, the poem questions the totalizing power of colonial discourse and reveals the subversive potential of language.

30 Roach’s poems, like any good poetry, reveal his complex understanding of human nature, his love for the English language, and his love for this people. McDonald has explained that in Roach’s poems we see his keen affinity to nature, the land and the people. This affinity can clearly be seen in his earlier sonnets or those to his native land. But even in these sonnets paying tribute to the beauty of his native land, we see his protest and his denunciation of imperialism. Roach’s desire for poetic immortality is not merely a desire for fame or fortune. Rather his desire is for an immortality obtained only through legendary verse. If he does question whether any poet makes an impression on his or her people, the attempt to answer that question seems to be found in his last poem before his death “Verse In August.” Here Roach, questions what his purpose is and if his life had any meaning. At the end of the poem he asks, what’s all my witness for? why do i wear the poor folk and the years? eh brother what’s the score? is the game won or lost? will I know now at the breaking bitter last do old men know? (51-57) He committed suicide one year later in 1974. Ironically, his suicide was accomplished by drinking insecticide and then swimming out to sea at Quinam’s Bay in Trinidad where he presumed Christopher Columbus had landed (Ramchand 11). By deliberately staging his death at Columbus’ supposed landing point, Roach inscribes his body as his final text. Consequently, we can read his suicide either as a text of resistance or one of surrender. Considering his struggle with his poetic identity, I read his suicide as a conflation of both. It appears then that he was unable to work out the purpose and meaning of his life. In fact his conundrum with how the poet is “idealized,” or immortalized is exacerbated by his ambivalent relations with the tradition of Renaissance literature. He wants to insert himself in the Renaissance tradition of legendary writers and he wants the immortality that they have gained. He too wants to be “taller than time.” He wants his words to remain after his death and he wants them to have just as much impact on his people as did Homer and Milton. He wants this legendary status not merely for fame but so that societal change can be enacted. That is, by reading his poetry, his people will change the way they view themselves and their history. Though his personal struggle was never solved, we have an amazing witness to that struggle and are better for it.

31 Endnotes

1. Intriguingly, the despair in the poem echoes to some extent the despair in Milton’s sonnet XVII, “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent.” In this sonnet Milton suggests that his “talent for writing a great poem, seems to be burying itself in darkness against his will” (Hollander and Kermode 720). But although Milton’s invocation of God and the parable of the talents lends the poem some hope, Roach finds no such hope is in his poem.

32 CHAPTER THREE

The Sweet Enemy: Petrarchan Discourse in the Poetry of Claude McKay

In his autobiography, A Long Way From Home, Claude McKay reveals to his first editor, Frank Harris, that he had a “peasant childhood in a mountain country of a few hundred villages widely scattered over the hills” (11). This mountain country was Clarendon, Jamaica. McKay goes on to talk about “The missionary who built the first mission— a Mr. Hathaway who claimed kinship to the Shakespeare Hathaways, and who started my school-teacher brother (the eldest) on the road to college and gave him his first complete set of Shakespeare” (11). His brother, a school teacher and a freethinking radical, was one of his earliest influences. McKay also relates to Harris how he was given access to the books of Mr. Jekyll, “an English gentleman who became [his] intellectual and literary mentor and encouraged [him] to continue writing verses in the Negro dialect” (13). McKay states, “I told Harris how, with this man’s excellent library at my disposal, I read poetry: Childe Harold, The Dunciad, Essay on Man, Paradise Lost, the Elizabethan lyrics, Leaves of Grass, the lyrics of Shelley and Keats and of the late Victorian poets, and how he translated and we read together pieces out of Dante, Leopardi. . . (13). But McKay admits that ironically, it was not poetry that had first “attracted” him (13). In fact, “It was the story in the plays that had carried [him] through Shakespeare (13). In 1912 McKay eventually left for America in order to gain a wider audience for his poetry. McKay reports, “I admitted that back in my mind there had really been the dominant desire to find a bigger audience. Jamaica was too small for high achievement. There, one was isolated, cut off from the great currents of life” (20). While in America, he performed manual labor in order to support his goal of becoming a poet. He had patrons but toward the end of his life he found himself impoverished and forgotten. In his later years he suffered ill health and then died in obscurity. In order to demonstrate how his struggle with racism and injustice in America influenced his poetic output, I will briefly cite an incident that he recounts in his autobiography. In it, McKay speaks of his passion for New York: “Often I was possessed with the desire to see New York as when I first saw it from the boat— one solid massive mammoth mass of spiring steel and stone”(133-34). His friends Eugen Boissevain and Max Eastman also desired to see “New York in that way”(134).1 They “drove up to a summit commanding the grand view of the city”(134). And according to McKay they “stood there for a long time drinking in the glory of the pyramids” (134). Afterward they drove around the countryside for a while (134). Eventually

33 they became hungry and returned to the city in order to get something to eat (134). However, no restaurant or hotel would serve them (134). Finally, after a long search one restaurant consented to serve them, but only in the kitchen (134). McKay states: It was one of the most miserable meals I ever ate. I felt not only my own humiliation, but more keenly the humiliation that my presence had forced upon my friends. The discomfort of the hot bustling kitchen, the uncongenial surroundings — their splendid gesture, but God! it was too much. I did not want friends to make such sacrifices for me. If I had to suffer in hell, I did not want to make others suffer there too. The physical and sensual pleasures of life are precious, rare, elusive. I have never desired to restrict the enjoyment of others. I am a pagan; I am not a Christian. I am not white steel and stone. (134) Out of the humiliation of that experience, he reached the following conclusion: I think the persons who invented discrimination in public places to ostracize people of a different race or nation or color or religion are the direct descendants of medieval torturers. It is the most powerful instrument in the world that may be employed to prevent rapprochement and understanding between groups of people. It is a cancer in the universal human soul. It saps the sentiment upon which friendliness and love are built. Ultimately it can destroy even the most devoted friendship. Only super-souls among the whites can maintain intimate association with colored people against the insults and insinuations of the general white public and even the colored public. Yet no white person, however sympathetic, can feel fully the corroding bitterness of color discrimination. Only the black victim can. (135) Inspired by this experience of pain and humiliation, he wrote one of his best sonnet sequences. He acknowledges, “It was at this time that I wrote a series of sonnets expressing my bitterness, hate and love. Some of them were quoted out of their context to prove that I hate America” (135). But in fact a cursory reading of the poems reveal that his feelings toward America were more complex and ambivalent. At any rate, the restaurant incident and the poetry it inspired indicate that McKay turned to the sonnet when he wished to express his most powerful feelings. It is the form he turns to in order to convey his innermost feelings of anger and frustration. In light of McKay’s use of the sonnet and its usefulness to mediate between the private and the public, Phyllis Levin states, “Once again, the sonnet leaves us with the mystery of public and private utterance, the struggle of the self to transcend the self in relation to an ideal within one’s sight and beyond one’s grasp, the image of a voice born in the space between disintegration of one world and the emergence of another” (lxxii). For McKay, this ideal was justice and equality. The restaurant fiasco also marks his love / hate relationship with America. In this chapter, I discuss three of the sonnets that stemmed from McKay’s painful experience that day, “America,” “The White City,” and “Baptism.” Additionally, I also examine “Poetry,” “One Year After,” “Futility,” and finally, “Through Agony.” These sonnets are equally demonstrative of McKay’s ambivalence toward America. But more than just mere ambivalence is the intensity of the emotions displayed in the sonnets. The sonnets are clearly Petrarchan in their imagery and their oscillation between extreme emotions of love and hate. Heather Dubrow states, “The tempestuous tossing back and forth between representations of success and failure, agency and

34 impotence, and control and helplessness is, then at the core of Petrarch’s poetry and that of many of his followers as well. And it should be at the core of our interpretations” ( Echoes 23). At times, McKay’s sonnets reveal this vacillation between power and helplessness. But more often than not, the Petrarchan elements in McKay’s sonnets personify America as the typical cruel Petrarchan mistress, desired but forever denying him the reciprocal treatment of equality and dignity. Subsequently, his Petrarchan sonnets reveal his struggle with racism, his struggle to transcend the limitations of race as a poet, and finally his attempt to come to terms with the realization that America will never yield; that is, America will never become the place of justice and equality that the poet desires. Gary Smith agrees, “Indeed, the most prevalent theme in the black protest sonnet is not unrequited love but rather the unrequited desire for socio-economic justice” (3). Therefore, McKay’s ideal America will always be the elusive lover, Laura, chased but never captured. For McKay, Petrarchism becomes the perfect poetic mode to express a desire that would forever go unfulfilled. The first poem that I will examine is “America.” In “America” the Petrarchan paradoxes of love and hate are vividly captured. Dubrow has remarked that Petrarchan tropes allow us to say the unsayable ( Echoes 67). In “America” McKay uses Petrarchan tropes to admit to a love / hate relationship with America. Jean Wagner clarifies that “The other half of the picture, the hatred that America has for blacks, does not obliterate the poet’s love for it. McKay’s hatred does not mean a rejection of America; it is a reproach directed against the country’s inability to reconcile discriminatory practices with egalitarian democratic doctrines” (231). America is likened to a ferocious tiger “stealing” the poet’s “breath of life” (3) and sinking its “tooth” into the poet’s throat (2).2 Thus, America is the predator and the poet is the prey. Leonard Forster reminds us that in Petrarchan poetry “The lady is often shown as enjoying the lover’s pain; she is crueller than a tiger. If there is something of the masochist about the petrarchistic lover, there is something of the sadist in his picture of the beloved ” (15). But despite the slow and painful climb or march towards death in the sonnet, the poet declares that he loves “this cultural hell that tests” his youth (4). Again, the Petrarchan oxymora of life and death, love and hate, is captured in those lines. Forster reminds us that, “‘life-in-death’ and ‘lovely agony’ is the paradox of Petrarchan love” (6). Even more oxymoronic and contradictory are the following lines, “Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, / Giving me strength against her hate” (5- 6). According to Wagner, “What is predominant here, and basic also, is his love for America, whose strength acts on the poet like a stimulant”(231). In fact, it is doubly ironic that the vigor or life-line, lifeblood if you will of America flows into his blood, the essence of his being, in order to give him “strength” against her hate. Forster explains that “The interpenetration of pleasure and pain, and the satisfaction which could be derived from holding these two opposites in an uneasy balance, is basic in Petrarch’s work and becomes the fundamental theme of the Petrarchistic convention”(13). So America’s “vigor” sustains the poet only to give him strength to withstand her hate. We can assume that “vigor” represents whatever the poet sees as positive about America. And America’s bigness overwhelms the poet, in fact, it “sweeps his being like a flood” (7). The poet has to be careful that America’s bigness does not wash away his identity or his “being” (7). But the poet still rebels against America. And the poet’s nomenclature of “king” suggests America’s despotic treatment of certain classes and groups. But unlike some Petrarchan lovers, the poet declares he is not given to “terror,” “malice,” “or not [even] a word of

35 jeer” (10). Wagner ventures a reason for this courage: “McKay has a prophetic vision of atonement through the collapse of American power, its miracles of granite one day to be swallowed up by the sand” (234). James Keller also reads the end of American power in the poem. Keller states, “The final four lines of the poem predict the eventual destruction of America [ ]” (452). In “America” as in many of McKay’s other poems, we see the bittersweet nature of love. Forster explains that there is a “dualism” in Petrarch’s work which holds pleasure and pain in an “uneasy balance” (13). According to Petrarch, in conformation with this “dualism” the “lady” is seen as the “sweet enemy” or “dolce nemica” (Forster 13). Forster asserts, “Petrarch uses the phrase ‘dolce nemica’ more than once, that love should be compared to war and be described in a wealth of military imagery” (13). McKay utilizes this military imagery in order to challenge America. The poet is being fed bread, the staff of life, but it is bitter nonetheless (1). The speaker is much like a prisoner who is fed basic, material food, but not food that sustains his heart and mind. If the tiger has sunk his tooth into his throat then he is a prisoner (2). One false, uncalculated move could end in death for the poet. This entrapment is much like the precarious position of blacks, especially black men, during early twentieth-century America. But this type of treatment will eventually lead to America’s downfall. Keller agrees, “The poem suggests that any country that feeds upon its own unoffending children must eventually destroy itself. This thesis places the marginalized individual in the role of cultural savior, warning the nation against its pride and folly” (453). It is a warning that the poet fears will go unheeded. Nevertheless, like a true Petrarchan lover, the poet still cries out to his cruel mistress. The next poem “The White City,” also continues the motif of rejection and corrupt feeding. We may confidently assume that this White City is New York and by extension America. “The White City,” like “America” feeds the poet, but at a price. Like “America” it is also hell. And just like “America” were it not for the “ the white world’s hell” feeding the poet “vital blood” the poet would be a “skeleton,” “a shell” (5, 7- 8). But how are we to reconcile these sentiments, and what are we to make of such statements? Is the poet suggesting that he needs racism in order to have poetic material? Will he in fact die without racism? Is it racial strife that is sustaining him? No, it is not racism that sustains him but rather hatred. If we reexamine the poem, we will realize that the “ dark Passion that fills” his “every mood” (6) is in fact hatred of racism, injustice, America and finally the “White City.” In fact a by-product of this problematic sustenance is his poetic material and inspiration. Wagner agrees that hatred “is the actual prerequisite for his survival, since it transmutes into a paradise the base inferno of the white world. It is a sort of antidote secreted throughout his being and which prevents the White City from emptying him of his substance” (225-26). And as in “America,” the image of blood is ironically equated with life (8). There is also the image of feeding. His hatred, or his “Passion,” feeds him vital blood (8). Although the feeding provides or comprises vital blood, it is a corrupt and contaminated feeding. In fact, as in “America,” in “The White City” the act of feeding is vampiric because the poet is feeding from his hatred, and he states that, were it not for his hatred, his “being would be a skeleton, a shell” (5). Therefore his life support is unnatural. Moreover, he has to go inward almost to his own blood in order to survive America. Sensing the futility of American equality, the poet has to nourish his hatred in order to protect himself and his poetic material. Nevertheless, his hatred becomes his solace and allows him to bear the agonies of

36 racism. In fact as Wagner affirms, “Hatred has acquired quite a power of transfiguration. It becomes the favored theme of the poet’s song, for it alone can make his surroundings bearable” (225). But more importantly, Wagner sees this hatred as a sign of the mental health needed to endure the arbitrary agonies of racism: “Thus a hypertrophic hostility (especially when, as in McKay’s case, it is kept under close surveillance by the will) is an unchallengeable symptom of psychic health” (226). Moreover, Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey maintains, “Without [this hatred], ‘the individual is overwhelmed by the hostile world in which he is forced to live’” (qtd. in Wagner 226). The rest of the sonnet reveals that his hatred is not so straightforward. Because of the love he bears for the city, the speaker is actually ambivalent towards it. He confesses, “The tides, the wharves, the dens I contemplate, / Are sweet like wanton loves because I hate” (13-14). His oxymoronic use of opposites, love and hate, reveals his inner struggle with both racism and his poetic material. The “tides, the wharves, the dens” are movements towards the poet’s innermost sense of self. Even his use of “muse” exposes his inner struggles and ambivalence. In line three, “muse” functions as a verb. “I muse my life-long hate,” reflects the poet’s calmness in spite of passionate torrents of hatred. Muse also plays on the meaning of “muse” as inspirational force for his poems. However, this quiet reflection is contrasted by the later lines of the poem where the images are of bustling movement: “The strident trains that speed the goaded mass, / The poles and spires and towers vapor-kissed, / The fortressed port through which the great ships pass” (10-12). These are also things that the poet loves in spite of himself. Therefore, “muse” both bares and conceals the poet’s inner self. And because of the speaker’s marginalization primarily due to his race, he believes his love for the city is illicit, perhaps even traitorous. The speaker yearns to be a part of the city and uses the language of longing and lovers to describe it. But love becomes hatred or a “dark Passion” because he is not granted entry and he realizes that he will never become fully integrated with it, or an equal partner or lover. Therefore, he might contemplate his hate, or think about it in anger, but he is still helpless and his hate remains a constant companion, nourished by the oppressive actions of the city. But let us not forget that the speaker needs his “dark Passion” in order to make America livable or tolerable. Moreover, he needs his outrage and hatred to temper his guilty or illicit love for the city. So, the relationship between the poet and the White City of America is a dysfunctional one of reciprocity and rejection.3 In some ways, the poet’s attitude toward America suggests the Petrarchan paradox that “it is death to be parted and death not to be joined” (Forster 17). The speaker also states, “I see the mighty city through a mist— ” (9), as if a veil has been drawn over his eyes. In a sense, one could read this element in the poem as an instance of W.E. B. DuBois’ notion of double consciousness.4 And perhaps because of this double consciousness, the poet himself declares that he cannot see properly. However, I think a more instructive reading would be to consider Heather Hathaway’s insistence that we read McKay as a migrant estranged to a great degree from his fellow American blacks and very painfully conscious of this estrangement. Hathaway maintains: While his poetry has been read most commonly against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance, reconsideration of it within the context of his Jamaican birth and eventual expatriation gives rise to alternative interpretations that valuably reconcile some of this poetry’s most troubling ambiguities. Indeed, several works

37 produced during this period clearly highlight McKay’s sense of distance and difference from those around him, including other blacks. (44) Furthermore, “his profound and distressing alienation from his adopted culture is reflected in many of the poems that he wrote during this period” (Hathaway 49). Therefore, I want to suggest that the veiling imagery in the poem is a register of his liminality as a Jamaican within a very American culture. Nevertheless, in terms of McKay’s neo-Renaissance poetics, the veiling imagery is at the same time reminiscent of Petrarch’s dream visions of Laura. Petrarch dreamt of Laura when she died, and wrote a lot of the poems about her after her death (Forster 12). Clearly then, the veiling is a reflection of the poet’s inner turmoil and the racism and injustice that separates him from the city. In “America” and “The White City” McKay uses ambivalence in order to conceal his true feelings. According to Forster, Petrarch was interested in the elaboration of the antitheses (Forster 4). In “Baptism” McKay explores the antithesis of “life-in-death and lovely agony” (Forster 6), while expanding on his ambivalent feelings toward America. The poet’s ambivalence is masked, however, by the image of fiery sacrifice. For numerous poets, including Petrarch, fire represents love (Forster 16 -17). Forster states that Petrarch “compares himself to a salamander living in the flames of love” (17). Notwithstanding, I want to suggest that McKay’s expansion on the Petrarchan theme of love as a fire suggests that it is his action of going into the fire that represents love, and that the fire is a refiner’s fire that personifies racial persecution and his poetic struggles. In this poem the poet presents himself as a Christ figure or sacrificial lamb. In “Baptism” the poet is facing up to the demands of being a black poet, and the racism of America. Hathaway concurs, “Dominated by the personal pronouns ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘my,’ ‘Baptism’ metaphorically suggests McKay’s own confrontation with the racism of the United States” (44). The poem begins, “Into the furnace let me go alone; / Stay you without in terror of the heat. / I will go naked in— for thus ‘tis sweet— / Into the weird depths of the hottest zone” (1-4). However, the poet’s insistence to go into the fire alone has been noted by some critics as an indication of the individualistic aspect of McKay’s work. Hathaway rightly observes that, “despite this victorious conclusion for the individual subject of the poem, nowhere in ‘Baptism’ does the speaker invoke the strength of his black peers for assistance; nowhere does he suggest that the peril of the fire can be better faced as a group” (45). But this sense of individualism has more to do with his refusal to follow the aesthetic mainstream. In any event, this perceived individuality in no way obviates his struggle with racism or his care for his fellow blacks. Again, if the poem is individualistic, it is an indication of his liminality within American culture. Nevertheless, his entrance into the fire is also an act of arrogance and perhaps bravery. But there is real pain and fear beneath his bravado. Like a Petrarchan lover, his continued insistence that he is unafraid negates his words. His choice of verbs such as “quiver,” “flicker” and “tremble” betrays his fear while intensifying the tone of terror (5-7). Moreover, he goes into the fire “naked” (3). His nakedness is a sign of his vulnerability and it also correlates with the traditional image of a biblical sacrifice.5 Another sign of his fear is his insistence that his “heart shall tremble not its fate to meet” (7). His fate could range anywhere from poetic failure or racial rejection to figurative or literal death. Yet, in spite of his fear the poet does go into the furnace and it clearly transfigures him: he has been “transform[ed] into a shape of flame” (12). George Hutchinson rightly states, “The

38 poem amounts to a form of religious expression, . . . while it demonstrates the speaker’s heroic self-control within the chains of the sonnet” (413). But this transformation comes at a price. The poet has to endure hell or “The yawning oven” that “spits forth fiery spears” (11). And ironically, while being refined by this fire of racial persecution and poetic struggle, the poet speaks of desire: “Desire destroys, consumes my mortal fears” (11). His introduction of desire occurs just before the turn of the sonnet. We would not expect to see desire in a sonnet about fiery transfiguration. Therefore, the introduction of desire gives us in effect a double turn. This movement or double turn serves to authenticate his sacrifice. That is the poet seems to be writing about his experience; not rewriting an experience. But what is this desire that the poet feels? And how can the flames of fire give birth to desire?6 The desire that the poet experiences is the longing to overcome the sting of racial and poetic rejection; and the yearning for poetic excellence and immortality. This is the reason the poet goes into the furnace alone. He goes in order to achieve these objectives. Hutchinson remarks that the furnace “makes possible his transcendence” (413). Therefore, desire becomes not only an act but an outcome. The flames give birth to desire because they clarify what it is that he must do. More importantly, the flames immortalize him and according to Hutchinson, McKay “becomes the fire that consumes him— archetype of immortality— ecstatically earning his identity as ‘red aspish tongues’ ‘wordlessly’ shout his name (133)” (413). Therefore, he will no longer be subject to a “. . . world of tears” (14). But if the poet is no longer subject to our world of tears, he is certainly subject to the demands of the next world, and that is the world of “Poetry.” In “Baptism” we see the poet as a willing sacrifice transformed by fire. However, in “Poetry,” the poet is an unwilling sacrifice fleeing from the fire or the “blazing light” of Poetry (5). In this sonnet, the speaker conflates the power of “Poetry” with the powers of God and even personifies poetry as his mistress. In fact, “Poetry” recall’s John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV (“Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God”), in terms of the self-effacing effects the process has on the poet. “Poetry” also invokes George Herbert’s “The Altar” and its image of sacrifice and the struggle with the “temptations of poetry” itself (Hollander and Kermode 665). The sonnet’s intertextuality with Donne and Herbert’s poems allow us even more insight into McKay’s poetic struggles and ambivalence. The poet is like a flower, appropriately “storm-swept”(1). He fears that he will surrender his whole being to poetry because he is incapable of saying no to its demands. The poet can only do what poetry demands, but questions whether it will be at the cost of his soul, his humanity. “Poetry” has power, is omnipresent, and can create and destroy much like the traditional notions of a Judaic / Christian God. Poetry is without mercy, because the poet is “hiding [his] tortured soul” (2). The ending couplet, “I fear, I fear my truly human heart / Will perish on the altar-stone of art!” (13-14), presents a contrasting image to Herbert’s altar-stone. For Herbert the heart is the altar and he offers it up to God as a humble sacrifice. But for McKay he flees in fear that he will lose his heart. Michael Schoenfeldt has observed that in the passion poetry of John Donne, George Herbert and John Milton, “. . . sacrifice obligates mortals to respond to God in a way that is by definition unavailable to them” (564). Perhaps this lack is part of the poet’s fear. Furthermore, Schoenfeldt notes that “Reformed” writers of the seventeenth century “stressed the necessary decomposition of self that would internalize the energies of that sacrifice” (566). This “decomposition of self” is evident in Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV. In order to gain access to the

39 speaker’s heart, the speaker requests that God “Knocke, breathe, shine, force, breake, blowe, burn and make [him] new” (2,4). The fact that the violence inherent in this siege borders on rape is supported by the last three lines of the sonnet: “Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I / Except you ‘enthrall mee, never shall be free, / Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee” (12-14). McKay’s speaker flees from such a total loss of self-hood and subjectivity. Schoenfeldt has also remarked that “Although both Foucault and feminist film theory have taught us to conceptualize the gaze as an inherently intrusive, even oppressive phenomenon, Donne was fascinated by a contrary notion: the immense comfort that can emerge from a sense of complete visibility before God, and the corollary fear that God will not deign to bestow such a gaze upon him” (568). Likewise, “As the fabrics of privacy are rendered transparent fiction before the penetrating gaze of the omniscient God, Donne finds consolation rather than paranoia in visibility . . .” (Schoenfeldt 568). The speaker in McKay’s sonnet finds no such consolation but rather fears that the essence of his self-hood “loves” and “passion” will be lost forever if he surrenders to this omniscient power. The altar stone imagery also corresponds to the image of the Petrarchan mistress as a hard stone (Forster 15). This type of image is also present in McKay’s poetry and in Herbert’s. Speaking of Herbert’s poetry, George Watson asserts, “The Temple is rich in God-mistress analogies” (355). Constance Jordan and Clare Carroll have suggested that for Herbert, “each of his poems is kind of a spiritual event, enacting in its form, both visual and aural, the very theological experiences and beliefs—or conflict of beliefs—expressed” (1686). Therefore, both “Baptism” and “Poetry” suggest a way to make meaning of the racism the poet experiences, and a way to understand his place in the world of poetry. Clearly, both “Baptism” and “Poetry,” like Herbert’s poems from “The Temple,” perform a spiritual event that constitutes the poet’s inner spiritual and poetic conflicts. Next, I would like to discuss some of McKay’s more conventional love sonnets and demonstrate that their Petrarchan elements also function as a metaphor for his racial struggles. In the sonnets “One Year After,” “Futility,” and finally “Through Agony,” the speaker addresses America represented by a woman. The theme that runs through these sonnets is infidelity. Because of the language he uses, one may assume that his beloved is a white woman. Thus in many respects unattainable like Petrarch’s Laura. Therefore, he becomes an outcast from two worlds, the world of whites and of blacks. In fact, in “One Year After” the poet admits: “I was an outcast from thy world and mine” (14). Remember, as a Jamaican immigrant, McKay himself occupied a doubly liminal space in America. Nevertheless, the poet’s relationship with America or a woman who seems to be of another race causes him great distress and despair while simultaneously giving him an illicit thrill at being able to defy or break the law that would separate them. Ironically, in “One Year After” his attempts to deny the constraints of race on their relationship becomes like a mistress that he has to constantly reassure or placate. The poet states that the wine of their love is illicit (10), but the truth for the poet is still an awful truth: he is faithless to his race (10,11). Moreover the fact that his beloved possesses an “iron hand” suggests that she has power (12). More disturbingly is the fact that the poet is “bleeding beneath” her “iron hand” (12). Therefore, she sadistically enjoys his pain. This sonnet confirms Forster’s contention that in Petrarchism,“The masochism of the lover is complemented by the

40 imputed sadism of the lady” (Forster 19). I am not suggesting here that McKay enjoys racism but rather I am emphasizing the fact that McKay had to find a way to endure his suffering. He is in pain because of the cruelty of the woman, his beloved, and the law that separates them. Clearly, in this sonnet, the poet is not just another Petrarchan lover posturing for sympathy. Although his mistress or beloved is without mercy or pity, she does not hold all the power. This point is very important because in my reading of the imaginary relationship between McKay’s speaker and his mistress ( or America ) there is a shift of power. America never totally rejects the poet but alternately beckons and spurns him. The poet rebels in part two of the sonnet and uses the typical Petrarchan image of the storm to amplify his rebellion and courage: “Adventure-seasoned and storm-buffeted, / I shun all signs of anchorage, . . . / New gales of tropic fury round my head / Break lashing me through hours of soulful dread;” (1-2,4-5). Like a Petrarchan lover, in spite of the storm’s fury, he does not cease his quest because the quest or the chase is the key to his survival. On one level, the quest is sex with his beloved or other women, but my primary reading casts the quest as the constant pursuit of justice and equality. Therefore, in these final sonnets I am reading sex not in the strictest sense of the word, but more as a symbolic consummation of the poet’s desire for justice, equality and poetic recognition. He continues to court danger despite the consequences. But perhaps this reckless courting of danger is understandable. He, unlike Petrarch, had “sex” with the object of his desire. In part two of the sonnet, passion rises in the speaker’s breast, like “rivers of the Spring” (14). But in line seven he appears to abandon his desire or his passion. He states that “when the terror thins, and spent, withdraws, / Leaving me wondering awhile, I pause— ” (7). His deliberate pause in line seven works two ways. It causes the reader to pause; that is, it makes us reflect on his pause, and it gives the poet time to pause. Moreover, his pause is a type of renunciation of his desire, albeit temporary. Dubrow sums up such a move: “ Give me chastity, O Lord, but not yet” (Echoes 66). So his pause also reflects his ambivalence. Forster reminds us that in Petrarch, “love” transcends nature” (21). In this poem, “nature” is the man made laws. The poet refuses to traverse “rigid roads” (9) or a life that has been mapped out. Therefore, he rejects such a destiny. But he has no peace, no rest, and he moves from one beloved to another (9). As we have seen, this movement is dangerous. Both danger and risk, supersede his “monstrous union” (Part 1, 13). So, despite his perceived treachery and his outcast state, he cannot help but seek out these women and “sex.” The poets’s quest is a powerful commentary on the strength of desire to make us traverse “ risky ways” (8). It is also a commentary on his desire for freedom from oppression. The next poem, “Futility,” is perhaps the Petrarchan poem that adheres most closely to the Petrarchan model. The poet has tried to escape the grips of his pain, his love, his disease. In fact, he has tried to use “new flames” to distract him or teach him some new ecstasy (2). But his old love, the “old fever,” “seizes” him (3,4). He uses the active verb “seize” and “grips” demonstrating the power of this old love. He has even tried to lose himself in every type of sexual activity imaginable (5-6). But that too is unsuccessful. In fact, it seems that he has come close to “death” (5-6). “Precious powers spent” (6) also recalls the traditional Renaissance notion of the male orgasm as a little “death.” He has even “bared” his “body” to the strangest “scourge” (5-7). The use of “scourge” suggests that he is punishing his body and enduring pain. The image of the scourge reiterates the poet’s position in “Baptism” and “Poetry” as a Christ

41 figure or sacrifice. Again, in order to highlight his suffering, McKay conflates the sacred and the profane. In this sonnet the beloved has taken his reason for being. But the physical harm that she has done is so significant that no “physician can replace” or heal him (10), and there is no “substance” to “hold” or “form” to “pursue” (12-13). In line 13, “substance” suggests something ephemeral or concrete. This paradoxical meaning of “substance” is important because it illustrates that the beloved encompasses his emotional and physical life. The poet confesses that his “thoughts burn[ ] through everything” to her (14). In this poem, we see the Petrarchan imagery of theft functioning as a theft of his heart and soul (Forster 13). And we also see love as a disease. The mistress is cruel; his sense of direction is also confused. Therefore he has no “happiness” and “no aim” (11). In “Futility” the poet tries to do something else, or pursue something else, but finds that he cannot because he is enslaved by his ambivalent feelings toward America. The last poem that I would like to consider is “Through Agony.” “Through Agony” is where you see the Petrarchan motif of the lost senses. Again, as in “Futility” and “One Year After,” he has sex with the beloved. The use of “Temple” shows that the beloved is divine in some way, thus powerful (12). In Part 1 of the sonnet, the poet gives himself to her in hopes of being free. He uses the language of war, that is “triumph” twice (9,14). Then, the poet states, “I gave you sum and substance to be free” (13). But, this power is merely temporary and self- comforting. He ends with the declarative that she will never “triumph” over him any more (14). And, although the poet ends with the declarative in Part 1, he does an about-face in Part 2. He admits that without her the hours are “dark and dull” (2) and his “heart sinks heavier than stone” (3). The speaker is distraught because he loves the woman more than he believes he is supposed to. And although he denies it, he is ashamed of his love for her. He tries to obscure his shame by placing it as a negative: “I do not shame to turn myself away / From beckoning flowers beautifully blown, / To mourn your vivid memory alone” (6-8). This ploy is unsuccessful because of our a priori intertextual knowledge from “One Year After.” Nonetheless, her memory is so “vivid” (7) that she burns brightly in his mind and he cannot get her out of his head. She is ever present. The water imagery in lines 10 and 11 will give him rest and serve as an antidote to the fire in his brain. Ironically, some of the water that he uses in attempt to assuage his memories of her are his own tears. “The salty, brimming waters of my breast” (10) can only mean that he is spent by tears and moreover so many tears that it reaches his breast. In order to gain strength to continue with his quest, the poet aligns or clothes himself with nature: “The mists will shroud [him] on the utter height” (9), so that the “. . . fresh dews of the night,” will “bathe” his “spirit hankering to rest” (13). Nature will comfort him and give him strength to carry on. So then, Nature becomes a way to mark his quest with moral significance. If Nature will help him and give him strength, then he must be ethically right. Consequently, despite his knowledge that America will never give in, the poet will never end his pursuit. And it is this sense of pursuit that permeates his Petrarchan poetry. Clearly, the work of Claude McKay demonstrates that literary critique is partly a function of current economic, racial and class status. Nevertheless, in order to enact social change, McKay chose to write against social constraints. By employing Petrarchan discourse and personifying America as a woman, McKay’s poetry challenges the racist assumptions of early twentieth-century America. Additionally, McKay’s Petrarchan poetry demonstrates Belinda Edmonson’s contention that

42 “Blackness itself is not a fixed and absolute entity. Caribbean blackness– as contrasted to the black experience in Africa and, more relevantly, the United States— moves in and among so many other cultures and is [ ] dependent on context . . . (112). Therefore, by appropriating a form traditionally associated with whiteness and privilege, McKay’s poetry performs a subversion that resists established notions of race, gender, authenticity and literary merit. Accordingly, by deciphering McKay’s Petrarchan poetic codes, we remember to value artistic and personal freedom. Moreover, as the Petrarchan elements demonstrate, we also remember that the pursuit of artistic and personal freedom is just as important as the attainment of the goal itself. For McKay, writing becomes the way to own his self and his identity.

43 Endnotes

1. Although the date is not specifically mentioned in his autobiography, from the details McKay reveals, the incident happened sometime in May 1922.

2. In the sonnet “Tiger,” from Selected Poems of Claude McKay, McKay again represents America as a tiger waiting to devour him. He begins the poem: “The white man is a tiger at my throat, / Drinking my blood as my life ebbs away, / And muttering that his terrible striped coat / Is Freedom’s and portends the Light of Day” (1-4).

3. This interpretation of rejection and seduction is supported by a reading of McKay’s “The City’s Love.” (See Harlem Shadows 1922). In this poem, McKay clearly embodies the city as a woman: “For one brief golden moment rare like wine, / The gracious city swept across the line; / Oblivious of the color of my skin, / Forgetting that I was an alien guest, / She bent to me, my hostile heart to win, / Caught me in passion to her pillowy breast; / The great, proud city, seized with a strange love, / Bowed down for one flame hour my pride to prove” (1-8).

4. For more on this concept see DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk. In his chapter titled “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” DuBois states, “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,— a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,— an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (45).

5. The poem also invokes the image of Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace.

6. It is interesting that the poet’s unusual placement of desire within the sonnet causes confusion for Nathan Huggins: “the trial is uncertain since we are never told what it is. Line eleven serves to confuse the vagueness, because it appears that desire is the fire which consumes and destroys. His own desire— such a vague word, desire for God, for sex, for purity, for virtue?— has given the poet a stronger soul and a finer frame” (218). Nevertheless, Huggins’ struggle to understand McKay’s imagery indicates the need for more detailed analysis of McKay’s sonnets.

44 CONCLUSION

. . . A green lawn, broken by low walls of stone, Dipped to the rivulet, and pacing, I thought next Of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake, Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed In memory now by every ulcerous crime. The world’s green age then was a rotting lime Whose stench became the charnel galleon’s text. The rot remains with us, the men are gone. But, as dead ash is lifted in a wind, That fans the blackening ember of the mind, My eyes burned from the ashen prose of Donne. (30-40)

In order to crystallize the formidable dilemma of a post-colonial subject attempting to find the right form of literary expression I began this thesis project with a quote from Derek Walcott’s, “A Far Cry From Africa.” It seems fitting then to conclude the project with another of Walcott’s poems, “Ruins of a Great House.”1 Walcott’s “Ruins of a Great House” indicates the impossibility of returning to a unified, pure, pre-colonial African or Caribbean self. In the poem the speaker states the “ancestral murderers” are also “poets” (33). This statement recognizes that language was used as a tool of imperialist oppression. Nonetheless, the “[murderous] men are gone” (33, 37) but the “stench” and “rot” of colonialism “remains” (36, 37). And although the speakers “eyes” have been “burned from the ashen prose of Donne” (40) he cannot make an Oedipal attempt to pluck his eyes out. Consequently it is too late to recover sight that has not been tainted or mixed by colonialism. As horrible as the history has been, it has already become a part of him. The poem closes with this somber recognition: “All in compassion ends / So differently from what the heart arranged: / ‘as well as if a manor of the friend’s. . .’” (49-50). As each chapter of the project demonstrates, it is difficult to come up with a formula for Caribbean poetry that does not in some way lapse into a model of literary circumscription or prescription. Because of this difficulty, the poets have been misread by scholars and misplaced by the politics of canonicity. They have also been misread against the notion of dialect; the ongoing debate about authenticity and language and Manichean structures of identity. The colonization and the education that came with English imperialism and colonialism was so oppressive that any perceived "sympathetic" link to the system has been read as traitorous. Afro-

45 Caribbean dialect was perceived as the only genuine alternative to British literary models. Therefore, those who did not use dialect were regarded as inauthentic or not truly Caribbean. So, the debate about identity and authenticity is inextricably linked to language. Nevertheless, the poets were not rendered conservative by the Renaissance forms, rather they have all employed the form in some original way. Heather Dubrow maintains, “. . . writing in a genre can be a highly polemical gesture, a way of attempting to initiate a new chapter of literary history through the act of creating a single work of art” (Genre 30). Hence, by using Renaissance forms, their voice resonates in a multivocal, polysemic linguistic way demanding from their audience an uncompromised response. Clearly, attempts to redefine what is authentic and indigenous often lead to uncontrolled rigidity. And, these arguments regarding Afro-Caribbean authenticity and indigeneity are not new. In fact, the arguments are intergenerational and diasporic. These arguments are also current in African-American and African literature. When the Caribbean nations were gaining independence, African nations were also becoming independent. And it was around this time that the civil rights movement in America gained momentum. In a way, civil rights symbolized independence for American Blacks. And political independence was matched by literary independence. Consequently, the political and aesthetic movements of Blacks became parallel. Naturally, questions of language and what language to write in arose from this merger. But there is not one way to be Caribbean, African-American or African. Consequently, any attempt to dismiss difference presupposes a unitary Blackness. Stuart Hall remind us: The original ‘Africa’ is no longer there. It too has been transformed. History, is in that sense, irreversible. We must not collude with the West which, precisely, normalises and appropriates Africa by freezing it into some timeless zone of the primitive, unchanging past. Africa, must at last be reckoned with by Caribbean people, but it cannot in any simple sense be merely recovered. (231) However, it is the notion of a pure identity that many Caribbean scholars and writers fix their gazes upon. This approach does not allow for heterogeneity or diversity of voices. Rather, it creates another margin within the margins. And as each chapter illustrates, such a definition of Caribbean identity, while understandable given the brutality of slavery and colonialism, ends up reinscribing the writers it is supposed to liberate. In chapter one, we saw that because of arbitrary notions of authenticity, misunderstanding and fear, womanist and feminist poet Una Marson has been left out of the Caribbean canon. Marson’s work clearly challenged received notions of gender and womanhood, but it has been neglected because it does not fit within the accepted ideas of authentic Caribbean poetry. In chapter two we analyzed Eric Roach’s poetry. Roach too was initially marginalized because of his choice of form. He was forced to choose and to fit in with the models of authentic Caribbean poetry. His suicide and his last poem, “Verse in August” suggests that he was never able to fully reconcile what appeared to be two diametrically opposed poetic perspectives. Chapter three highlighted McKay’s appropriation of the sonnet. McKay used the sonnet in order to challenge American racism and injustice. By positioning America as an unattainable Petrarchan mistress, McKay dared America to harmonize her theories of freedom with her practices of injustice. Therefore, what each author illustrates through the appropriation of Renaissance form and conceits is the subversive potential of language.

46 I have attempted to map out the issues of authenticity, identity, genre and form that undergird the thesis. However, I am also aware that the limited scope of my project prevents a comprehensive treatment of all these issues. This thesis project gestures to the recuperative effort that needs to be undertaken for other marginalized Caribbean poets. While recognizing the place that language has in identity construction we cannot allow our writers to solely carry the burden of “racial uplift.” Ironically, it is Edward Kamau Brathwaite who reminds us that people are the arbiters of revolution not just discourse (21). The work of these poets illustrates not only the complexity and diversity of Caribbean subjects, but of human beings in general. Thus, the poets make meaning not only for themselves but for their audience as well.

47 Endnotes

1. “Ruins of a Great House” is also from Walcott’s In A Green Night.

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53 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Lisa Gay Jennings was born June 30, 1972 in Kingston, Jamaica to Carol and Dalrick Jennings. She holds the distinction of being the middle child. Kerry-Ann Jennings is the eldest and Paul Jennings is the youngest. In 1986 she and her family emigrated to the United States. She graduated from Florida International University in the spring of 1998 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. During the fall of 2000 she entered Florida State University as a graduate student in the department of English. In the fall of 2002 she received a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship. Her area of interest is Caribbean and Renaissance Literature.

54