Belonging-In-Difference: Negotiating Identity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY BELONGING-IN-DIFFERENCE: NEGOTIATING IDENTITY IN ANGLOPHONE CARIBBEAN LITERATURE MARIE-FRANCE FAULKNER A dissertation in fulfilment of the requirements of Anglia Ruskin University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Submitted: January 2013 I declare that this work is my own and that the material contained herein has not been substantially used in any other submission for an academic award. This work may (i) be made available for consultation within the University Library or (ii) be lent to other libraries for the purpose of consultation or (iii) may be photocopied for such purposes. Signed Dated: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank all the members of my family, Valérie, Anne and particularly David for all the moral support and encouragement they have given me throughout my course of studies. I want also to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to all my students of the last 25 years who have introduced me to a variety of cultural perspectives through which I have gained a deeper understanding of the complexity of notions of nationality, belonging and identity. My heartfelt thanks as well to Prof. Guido Rings, Prof. Sarah Annes Brown and Dr Bettina Beinhoff for their guidance and support. i TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements (i) Table of contents (ii) Abstract (iv) 1. Introduction 1.1 The novel as polyrhythmic performance 2 1.2 Similarity and continuity, difference and rupture 9 1.3 Belonging-in-difference 12 1.4 Language as operation of discourse 15 1.5 Caribbean discourse and postcolonial theory 24 1.6 Trajectory 26 2. ‘Language, an unstated history of consequences’ 2.1 The book as ‘signifier of colonial desire and discipline’ 29 2.2 ‘The morning of the chalk and the blackboard’ 38 2.3 ‘Self’s shadow’ 44 3. ‘Language, an unknown history of future intentions’ 3.1 A new way of seeing 51 3.2 Detention and departure 62 ii 3.3 ‘Claiming an identity they taught me to despise’ 71 4. Caryl Phillips Crossing the River ‘A chorus of common memory’ 4.1 ‘Writing as hopeful space’ 84 4.2 ‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’ 90 4.3 ‘Survivors all’ 100 4.4 Crisscrossing the river 108 5. David Dabydeen’s Disappearance 5.1 ‘On not being Milton’ 121 5.2 Living ‘ruler’s edge’ 130 5.3 ‘I am an allusion to an allusion to an allusion’ 138 6. Andrea Levy’s Small Island 6.1 ‘Negotiating the ship’ 150 6.2 Dreams of Empire 157 6.3 ‘I thought I’d been to Africa’ 166 6.4 Entangled horizons 178 7. Epilogue 196 8. Bibliography 205 9. Appendix 234 iii ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY ABSTRACT FACULTY OF ARTS, LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BELONGING-IN-DIFFERENCE: NEGOTIATION OF IDENTITY IN ANGLOPHONE CARIBBEAN LITERATURE MARIE-FRANCE FAULKNER January 2013 Through the critical discourse analysis of Anglophone Caribbean literature as a polyrhythmic performance, this research sets out to examine the claim that, in a world in a state of constant flux, emerging Caribbean voices are offering a challenging perspective on how to negotiate identity away from the binary constructs of centre and margin. It argues that the Caribbean writer, as a self-conscious producer of alternative discourses, offers an innovative and transcultural vision of the self. This research consists of three stages which integrate critical discourse and literary analysis with colonial/postcolonial and socio-cultural theories. Firstly, it investigates the power of language as an operation of discourse through which to apprehend reality within a binary system of representation. It then examines how the concept of discourse, as a site of contestation and meaning, enables the elaboration of a Caribbean counter-discourse. Finally, it explores the role, within the Caribbean text, of literary techniques such as narrative fragmentation, irony, dialogism, intertextuality, ambivalence and the carnivalesque to challenge, disrupt the established order and offer new perspectives of being. My study of Anglophone Caribbean texts highlights the power of language and the authority of the ‘book’ as subtle, insidious tools of domination and colonisation. It also demonstrates how, by allowing hitherto marginalised voices to write themselves into being, Caribbean writers enable linear narratives and monolithic visions of reality to be contested and other perspectives of understanding and of meaning to be uncovered. It exposes the plurality and the interweaving of discourses in the Caribbean text as a liberating, dynamic force which enables new subject positions and realities to emerge along the lines of similarity and difference. At a time when the issue of identity is one of the central problems in the world today, the research argues that this celebration of the plural, the fluid and the ambivalent offers new ways of being away from the stultifying perspective of essentialist forms. Key words: Caribbean Literature, Language as discourse, negotiating identity, transculturality, postcoloniality, Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen, Andrea Levy iv BELONGING-IN-DIFFERENCE: Negotiating Identity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature 1. INTRODUCTION I must be given words to shape my name to the syllables of trees I must be given words to refashion futures like a healer’s hand… It is not it is not it is not enough to be pause, to be hole to be void, to be silent to be semicolon, to be semicolony Edward Brathwaite (1967: 224-225) Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, I become centred. What I’ve thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes, paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience! This is coming home with a vengeance!... I have been puzzled by the fact that young black people in London today are marginalized, fragmented, unenfranchized, disadvantaged and dispersed. And yet, they look as if they own the territory. Somehow, they too, in spite of everything, are centred, in place, without much material support, it’s true, but nevertheless, they occupy a new kind of space at the centre. Stuart Hall, 1987: 44 I have crossed an ocean I have lost my tongue from the root of the old one A new one has sprung Grace Nichols (1992:87) 1 1.1 The Caribbean novel as polyrhythmic performance The Caribbean, Lamming states, is unique in the sense that it is essentially a ‘historical phenomenon’, in which peoples from a variety of linguistic, geographical and cultural backgrounds were forced into contact and made to find new ways of relating, of working out interconnections among themselves (2011). This is a view also taken up years earlier by C.L.R James who emphasises that, more than any other group in the world, the peoples of the Caribbean are ‘constructed by history’ (1969: 46). It is a history haunted by the ghostly figure of Columbus, whose ‘scraping, rusted anchor’ has left in its wake a Caribbean self with ‘locked teeth’ and a ‘sore on his shin still unhealed’ (Walcott, 1990: 9-10). The explorer’s mistaken ‘discovery’ of the West Indies unleashed the ruthless annihilation of an entire indigenous population, the trauma of the Middle Passage, the atrocities of slavery on the Plantation, the tragedy of the severance from ancestral lands and traditions and the imposition of an alien language and culture. Since that brutal encounter, the story of the Caribbean and of its peoples has been one of flux, of movement, of plurality of discourses. This has also placed matters of language, belonging and identity at the centre of the preoccupations of the writers of the Caribbean diaspora who, as Gikandi argues, are ‘forced to redefine themselves in relation to this moment’ (1992: 3). In his study of Caribbean literature, Writing in Limbo, Gikandi sets out to examine the anxiety and ambivalence such an event has engendered in Caribbean writers and to chart their attempts at representing and resisting a European narrative of history ‘inaugurated by Columbus and the modern moment’ (2). Whilst matters of Caribbean dislocation and displacement have thus received much attention in the field of literary post-colonial studies, little consideration has as yet been given to Hall’s contention that Caribbean people have an ‘important message for the world about how to negotiate identity’ (Hall, 1995: 4). This is of particular relevance since, with the resurgence of questions of ethnicity and of nationalism, the issue of identity is one of the central problems that the world faces today. This study sets out to interrogate such a gap and explore, as its main research question, how, within the context of Britain today, the Anglophone Caribbean literary text can offer a liberating and transformative paradigm of identity away from what are, for Harris, the ‘monolithic callouses and complacencies’ of the Western 2 articulation (1981: 44). In order to address such a question, I set out to investigate, within the context of the Anglophone Caribbean novel, a number of what I consider to be closely related issues: 1. How, through the power of the imagination, a Caribbean narrative of a hitherto silenced past challenges the Western articulation and what role it plays, if any, in the recovery of a Caribbean voice and sense of self. 2. The power of language, seen from the perspective of an operation of discourse, as a tool of enslavement, of liberation and of transformation. 3. How the use of cross-rhythms, of interweaving of narratives and discourses, of crossing of borders at the heart of the Anglophone Caribbean novel challenges an essentialist, traditional vision of reality and identity. How this enables a transcultural perspective on identity to be envisioned. Benitez-Rojo uses Chaos theory to explain the apparent paradox that, he believes, characterizes the ‘Caribbean cultural machine’ (1996:18). On the one hand, we are offered the image of a meta-archipelago in a state of total disorder, ‘saturated in messages’, with no obvious boundaries or centre (4).

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