Narratives of Obeah in Twentieth-Century Anglophone West Indian Literature
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Narratives of Obeah in Twentieth-century Anglophone West Indian Literature Janelle Alicia Rodriques Submitted for degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics Newcastle University February 2016 Abstract This thesis examines representations of Obeah, the name given to a range of African- inspired, syncretic Caribbean religious practices, in novels and short stories written by authors born in the former British West Indies. Ranging from the late 1920s to the late1980s, these texts’ plots all systematically engage with these practices in their narrations of West Indian nation and national identity. My study focuses on how each of these texts narrates Obeah vis-à-vis the wider concerns of modernity, cultural identity, nationhood and colonial alienation, and realigns the discussion of Obeah aesthetics with debates around what has been designated ‘the folk’ in Caribbean literary criticism. Through detailed, comparative readings of the works of several authors, this study not only recovers the neglected trope of Obeah in West Indian fiction, but also argues Obeah’s integrity to the elaboration of a uniquely regional literary and cultural aesthetic. Chapter One examines the use of Obeah in barrack-yard fiction, and its implications for the myth of a unified, homogenous nation. Chapter Two explores the representation of Obeah in short stories of the late 1930s into the 1950s, and their concerns with Obeah’s place in the new nations they imagine. Chapter Three reads Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom (1934) as critiques of the primitive/modern aesthetic and cultural binary; I argue that Obeah is narrated, in these novels, from the threshold of these extremes. Chapter Four examines three novels written around Independence, featuring single male protagonists whose negotiations of Obeah are analogous for national negotiations of selfhood. Chapter Five focuses on Erna Brodber’s Myal (1988), which manipulates ‘African’ spirituality in its ‘quarrel with history.’ These novels all, in addressing Obeah, reimagine these practices as integral to, while also challenging, the idea of West Indian nationhood and identity. i Dedication To my parents, for their unwavering support, defence and belief. ‘I do come from this tradition of possessing and claiming yourself, because if you don’t possess and claim yourself, someone else will.’1 1 Moira Ferguson and Jamaica Kincaid, ‘A Lot of Memory: An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid,’ The Kenyon Review, 16 (1994), 163-188 (p.184). ii Table of Contents Introduction. Obeah as cultural signifier.……………………………………………………………………………..4 Chapter 1. ‘Too much row an contention is in this yard:’ Contemplating cacophony in Minty Alley and Black Fauns………………………………………………………………………………………………………….37 Chapter 2. ‘It is the reader who constructs a story:’ Obeah and cultural identity in the mid- century West Indian short story……………………………………………………………………………………….…81 Chapter 3. ‘Part of the narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be considered constitutive:’ ‘Primitive Modern’ in Banana Bottom and Wide Sargasso Sea …………………..127 Chapter 4. ‘In a zone of direct contact with developing reality:’ Obeahmen as heroes, in novels of Independence…………………………………………………………………………..……………………….166 Chapter 5. ‘The peace of those she must touch and who must touch her:’ Obeah as healing in Erna Brodber’s Myal.…….………………………………………………………………………………………………215 Conclusion. Shifting Obeah……….……………………………………..……………………………………………….237 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………241 iii Introduction: Obeah as cultural signifier In this thesis, I argue that the incorporation of Obeah, a group of associated syncretic, African-inspired religious and cultural beliefs and practices still popular throughout the Anglophone Caribbean, into the region’s literature, has played an important role in the articulation of West Indian literary and cultural identity. Given its provenance, Obeah has naturally resonated with the West Indies’ majority black populations and, given its association with rebellion, was ideally suited to a culture that would define itself against colonial rule. Obeah functions, in the texts here analysed, as a symbol of resistance to colonial ideology, and as a marker of the black ‘folk’ aesthetics that are now constitutive of West Indian literary and cultural production. These texts, written and published at key moments of West Indian cultural literacy, foreground Obeah as not only ‘local colour’ but as social and cultural logic, integral to the creation of such a thing as ‘West Indian literature’ and, by extension, West Indian culture. While the term ‘Anglophone Caribbean’ is now more frequently used in academic discourse, ‘West Indian’ continues to be used by English-speaking Caribbean people, and their descendants and relatives across the diaspora, as a term of recognition and shared identity. As a Jamaican myself, the term ‘West Indian’ is more familiar to me, and although I am aware of its colonial origins I attach no stigma to it. I use both ‘West Indian’ and ‘Caribbean’ throughout this thesis as, though the two may seem interchangeable they are not necessarily commensurate. In this thesis I use the term ‘Caribbean’ as designating a region that encompasses all territories whose coastlines border the Caribbean Sea, including South, Central and North American states, whose official languages include French, Spanish, English and Dutch. I use the term ‘West Indian’ to refer to people, places, cultures, languages and texts originating from the former British West Indian islands (and Guyana), which were incorporated into the West Indies Federation, a political union of these then- colonies that lasted from 1958 to 1962.1 While this political union is no more, the cultural identity which sponsored it and which it sponsored remains – put simply, while all West 1 The original member territories of the West Indies Federation were Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago. Anguilla, Montserrat, the Cayman Islands, and the Turks and Caicos Islands became British overseas territories. British Guiana, which became Guyana after its independence, and British Honduras, which became Belize, were official observers. 4 Indian states are Caribbean, not all Caribbean states are West Indian. I also refer to the literature under review here as ‘ours,’ chiefly to delineate this literature’s position vis-à-vis the dominant tradition of ‘English Literature’ more broadly. West Indian Literature, while it may be written in English, is not English Literature; my use of the pronoun ‘our’ makes this more immediately apparent. I begin my investigation in 1929, with the establishment of Trinidad magazine, which launched the career of C. L. R. James, along with other pioneering writers who became known as the Beacon generation, given their association with The Beacon magazine, into which Trinidad was subsumed.2 The inter- and postwar years remain significant for West Indian literature and culture, not least because of the literary ‘boom’ of the 1950s. This period saw the granting of universal suffrage to Jamaica and Trinidad (in 1944 and 1945 respectively), which was followed by political Independence (in 1962).3 Before that, though, one of the most sobering events for the region was World War I and its aftermath. While the onset of war may have ‘helped to stir up latent Empire loyalties,’ as Hyacinth Simpson has argued, by its end these loyalties were exhausted.4 Wounded veterans (overwhelmingly from the working classes) began to return in 1916 bearing not only physical scars, but with wavering allegiance to the ‘Mother Country,’ having experienced Britain’s bitter racial prejudice and discrimination first-hand. Moreover, they found themselves ill-provided for by local governments. Alfred Mendes, who served in the British West India Regiment and whose work is featured in Chapter One of this thesis, recalled in his autobiography that those of us who fought in the War were so changed in outlook and attitude that our memories of our past selves were dead and buried […]. Church, Royalty, Nobility, 2 Norval Edwards argues that these Beacon writers ‘articulated certain critical claims and intentions [that] shaped the basic template of Caribbean criticism for nearly half a century,’ in ‘The Foundational Generation: From The Beacon to Savacou,’ in The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, ed. by Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell (London: Routledge, 2011), pp.111-123 (pp.112-113). 3 Other British Caribbean territories gained independence between 1966 and 1981. Anguilla, Montserrat, the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands remain British Overseas Territories. 4 Hyacinth M. Simpson, 'Patterns and Periods: Oral Aesthetics and a Century of Jamaican Short Story Writing', Journal of West Indian Literature, 12 (2004), 1-30 (p.9). Despite opposition (many took the outbreak of war to agitate for self-government), several thousands pounds in gifts, and approximately £2 million in cash was raised for the war effort in the West Indies, despite the effects of an increasing cost of living, indicating overwhelming support and loyalty to the Crown. Recruiting officers used moral persuasion and promises of reward for duty to the Mother Country to entice volunteers, but their job was made easy by depressed wages and chronic unemployment. See Glenford Howe, Race, War and Nationalism: