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Transcultural Perspectives in Caribbean Poetry

SABRINA BRANCATO

N THE CURRENT REVISION of canonical notions of , Carib- bean finds itself in a pioneering position. It is increasingly I being recognized that all are transnational, in that they are no longer seen as strictly bounded to a particular location: they participate in a continuous exchange and therefore constantly renegotiate their own identity and challenge simplistic definitions. Culture – if we can avoid throwing the word into the dustbin – has to be understood as ‘transculture’: i.e. an on-going hybridization, a process of embracing and releasing; no longer an island but, rather, an ocean of waves. Within Caribbean studies, plurality and syncretism have long been con- sidered the foundation of a Caribbean aesthetic, and research on Caribbean has often drawn on theories highlighting the openness and flexibility characterizing the region, one major example being the use of chaos theory by Antonio Benítez–Rojo.1 The notion of ‘’ has informed more than one description of the development of Caribbean litera- ture. Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh highlight the transcultural dimension at the very root of Caribbean experience and literature: “The litera- ture of this region, like its history, has by necessity developed from acts of

1 Antonio Benítez–Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Per- spective, tr. James Marannis (La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva postmoderna, 1989; Durham NC: Duke UP, 1992). 234 SABRINA BRANCATO ½™¾ negotiation and crossing between different cultures.”2 For this reason Carib- bean literature is consonant with the theoretical tropes of current cultural developments:

We are now familiar with of movement, with mobile cultural identities, and with flexible notions of aesthetic and cultural . As readers of Caribbean literature we need to be aware that these seemingly postmodern tropes do not arrive as abstract theory but rather emerge from the lived reality of mobility, plurality and relativity over the centuries. The cultural specificity of Caribbean literature is not at risk in this almost postmodern configuration as these features are distinctly Carib- bean ones.3

In the Caribbean cultural , literary praxis thus anticipates theory. Caribbean poetry is transcultural both at the stylistic level and at the level of subject-matter. It could be defined as a transcultural literary genre, since it springs from the combination of different cultural traditions, both local (slave songs, calypso, folk music, reggae, ) and foreign (Western classics, West African griots, the Harlem Renaissance, the American modern- ist tradition). The transcultural nature of the genre has in fact been thoroughly and systematically explored by Laurence Breiner, who traces the different relations which link the poetics of the region to Europe, Africa, and America.4 The creole continuum, so widely employed by Caribbean poets, is itself a transcultural product. As Edward Kamau Brathwaite highlights in his defini- tion of nation language,

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.5

2 Alison Donnell & Sarah Lawson Welsh, “General Introduction” to The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, ed. Donnell & Welsh (London: Routledge, 1996): 25 (my emphasis). 3 Donnell & Lawson Welsh, “General Introduction,” 25. 4 Laurence A. Breiner, Introduction to West Indian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). 5 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Lan- guage in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London & Port of Spain: New Beacon, 1984): 13.