ISLAND ECOLOGIES AND CARIBBEAN LITERATURES1
ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY
Department of English, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Received: August 2003
ABSTRACT This paper examines the ways in which European colonialism positioned tropical island landscapes outside the trajectories of modernity and history by segregating nature from culture, and it explores how contemporary Caribbean authors have complicated this opposition. By tracing the ways in which island colonisation transplanted and hybridised both peoples and plants, I demonstrate how mainstream scholarship in disciplines as diverse as biogeography, anthropology, history, and literature have neglected to engage with the deep history of island landscapes. I draw upon the literary works of Caribbean writers such as Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Jamaica Kincaid and Olive Senior to explore the relationship between landscape and power.
Key words: Islands, literature, Caribbean, ecology, colonialism, environment
THE LANGUAGE OF LANDSCAPE the relationship between colonisation and ecology is rendered most visible in island spaces. Perhaps there is no other region in the world This has much to do with the ways in which that has been more radically altered in terms European colonialism travelled from one island of flora and fauna than the Caribbean islands. group to the next. Tracing this movement across Although Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles the Atlantic from the Canaries and Azores to Darwin had been the first to suggest that islands the Caribbean, we see that these archipelagoes are particularly susceptible to biotic arrivants, became the first spaces of colonial experimen- and David Quammen’s more recent The Song tation in terms of sugar production, deforestation, of the Dodo has popularised island ecology, other the importation of indentured and enslaved scholars have made more significant connec- labour, and the establishment of the plantoc- tions between European colonisation and racy system. Foregrounding the ways in which environmental history. While the growing field European, African, and Amerindian histories of ecocritical studies is concerned with the re- became rapidly entangled in the transatlantic lationship between literary production and the colonial process allows us to destabilise the pop- environment, few have taken into consideration ular notion that islands are isolated geographic the importance of island ecologies and histories, spaces from the larger forces of globalisation particularly in the wake of the colonial process. and modernity. Thus I argue, against the popular grain of Euro- A growing body of scholarship has gestured American ecocriticism, that the complex histories to this complex creolisation process to suggest of colonisation, the imposition of the mystifying that the Caribbean became the first site of terra nullius (empty land) upon indigenous spaces, modernity; a concept that has been applied to and the relationship between landscape and human diaspora rather than the diasporan seeds power are central to any discussion about of plants. What Crosby terms ‘portmanteau biota’, literary inscriptions of island environments. In defined as the organisms that travelled with recent years, Crosby and Grove have shown that Europeans to their colonies, including animals,
Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie – 2004, Vol. 95, No. 3, pp. 298–310. © 2004 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA
ISLAND ECOLOGIES AND CARIBBEAN LITERATURES 299 plants, and disease, radically altered island land- relate even a mythological chronology of this scapes (Crosby 1986, p. 89). land to their knowledge of this country, and so Portmanteau biota introduced to the Carib- nature and culture have not formed a dialecti- bean region included transplanted crops such as cal whole that informs a people’s consciousness’ sugar cane, nutmeg, and coffee which, coupled (Glissant 1992, p. 63). Since the Caribbean with the slavery system and monocrop agri- has been so deeply informed by the history culture, significantly contributed to the near of diaspora, including the destabilisation eradication of many indigenous peoples, flora, and restructuring of diverse cultural practices, and fauna. Damaging ecological practices by island narratives have struggled to articulate Europeans in the Atlantic islands and the local ‘space (as) a practiced place’ (de Certeau Caribbean were visible rather early in colonial 1984, p. 117). The hegemonic plantation system history. For example, the deforestation of that banned African languages, cultural practices, the Canary Islands was widely reported by 1300 and religions heavily determined the social (Grove 1995, p. 5), while British sugar produc- contours of nearly every ‘sugar island’ in the tion had exhausted Barbadian soil to the extent Caribbean. Glissant reminds us that in the absence that attempts were made to import richer soil of African cultural recognition, the Caribbean from Dutch Guiana in 1769. Yet most scholars ‘landscape is its own monument: its meaning have either examined the ecology of the Carib- can only be traced on the underside. It is all bean or the literature, without bringing these history’ (Glissant 1992, p. 11). Consequently he two disciplines together as I hope to do, lest we encourages Caribbean writers to reestablish forget that the term ‘culture’ is derived from dialectic between landscape and history, and the Latin for ‘cultivation’.2 Literary produc- between culture and the natural world. tions from the Caribbean, I contend, are deeply What Glissant refers to as ‘the language of engaged with the process of human and plant landscape’ is apparent in the literary works of diasporas, rendering a complex cultural ecology a number of Anglophone Caribbean writers of island spaces. The history of island coloni- including Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua) and Olive sation, which is a narrative about the relationship Senior (Jamaica). Here I examine the ways in between landscape and power, is thus vital to which the historical process of biotic transplan- any discussion about literary inscriptions of tation is rendered in cultural narratives, tracing Caribbean ecologies. a trajectory between agriculture in the Carib- In his introduction to Landscape and Power, bean to the cultivation of particular flora as out- W.J.T. Mitchell defines landscape, ‘not as an lined in Kincaid’s My Garden (Book). Kincaid object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a offers a political ‘language of landscape’ which process by which social and subjective identities is inseparable from colonisation. In a similar are formed’ (Mitchell 1994, p. 1). In other words, vein, Olive Senior’s poetry collection, Gardening the landscape is not reducible to anthropocentric in the Tropics, particularly the section entitled representation; the ‘natural’ environment is ‘Nature Studies’, queries the process of cultural constituted and constitutive of human history. and biological rootedness by declaring, ‘plants As a process rather than a passive template, this are deceptive. You see them there/looking as if indicates a particular dialectic between the land once rooted they know/their places; not like and its residents. In the Caribbean, this dialectic animals, like us/always running around, leaving is specifically rooted in the region’s violent traces’ (Senior 1994, p. 61). Senior and Kincaid history; an unprecedented upheaval and relo- address the creolisation and hybridity of biotic cation of European, Asian, and African peoples transplants, depicting a culturally complex island and cultures, rapidly condensed within the bound- community and inscribe ‘the language of land- aries of island topoi. Edouard Glissant (Marti- scape’ in a number of natural metaphors. This nique), contends that due to the history of the suggests that the natural world is not simply a plantation system, Caribbean cultural narratives backdrop for human subjectivity and history. In have been unable to articulate a relationship to both authors, flora and fauna are inscribed as the landscape that is disentangled from forced diasporan settlers, highlighting the ways in which agricultural labour. Because of the material the landscape mitigates the complex process of compression of land/labour, ‘people did not human transplantation and sedimentation.
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Through their examination of the relation importance of islands to world history has been between transplanted and indigenous biota, generally ignored. The sun never did set upon these authors respond to Wilson Harris’s the British empire in a large part due to its exten- (Guyana) call for writers to ‘to deepen out per- sive island colonies from the Caribbean to the ception of the fauna and flora of a landscape Pacific in one hemisphere, and from the Indian of time which indicate the kind of room or Ocean to the Mediterranean in the other. Con- space . . . in which whole societies conscripted sequently it is not a surprise that colonial island themselves’ (Harris 1995, p. 48). Following the adventure narratives were one of the most pop- lead of ecocritic Lawrence Buell, I read these ular genres produced in the British metropole. Caribbean texts as ‘environmentally oriented British colonial activity in island spaces became work(s)’ in that they demonstrate that ‘the non- mystified through the literary construction of human environment is present not merely as a isolated islands, which presumably were await- framing device but as a presence that begins to ing European material and narrative ‘develop- suggest that human history is implicated in ment.’ Texts from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to natural history’ (Buell 1995, pp. 7–8.) Like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (and the thousands of most ecocritics, Buell bases his study on US ‘Robinsonades’ that adopted this narrative of landscapes and has not considered the more island colonisation) were important precursors tumultuous aspects of (island) colonisation. for reductive representation of tropical islands Therefore if we reposition Buell’s definition of over the centuries. the environmental imagination with the Carib- Broadly speaking, these narratives produced bean context, we might very well ask if the trans- a contradictory binary that is also visible in the plantation of dozens of varieties of sugar cane language of island biogeography. This aporia, and the millions of slaves across the Atlantic to an insoluble contradiction evident in both dis- cultivate this crop could be called ‘natural’, ciplines, suggests that islands are simultaneously even if cane, breadfruit, coffee, nutmeg, ackee, isolated yet deeply susceptible to migration and mango, coconut and countless other staple settlement. This is why for instance, much of crops of the region have become deeply natu- Robinson Crusoe circulates around the tension ralised. Unlike the white settler production of between the protagonist’s decades of isolation nature writing, particularly the genre produced and his persistent paranoia that he will be visited in the US, these island writers refuse to depict by ocean-voyaging cannibals. Crusoe’s fear of the natural world in terms that erase the rela- indigenous migrant consumption belies the ways tionship between landscape and power. In fact, in which the European migrant consumption the complex diasporas of plants and peoples in of island landscapes and labour was exacted the Caribbean, and these writers in particular, through the movement of those wooden float- problematise the notion of ‘natural history’ and ing islands: the British maritime empire. Here its segregation from human agency. we might reflect on the notion of island remote- ness; nearly every scientist, botanist, geologist, ISLANDS OF HISTORY3 anthropologist, and travel writer has come to the conclusion that islands are remote by travelling Before I turn to these contemporary Anglophone there. The material and ideological accessibility texts, I would like to sketch out the ways in which of tropical islands to Euro-American colonial- tropical islands have been depicted across a ism suggests that perhaps they are not so remote broad spectrum of British narratives so that we after all. We have to question who benefits from can more fully understand the colonial context the persistent myth of island isolation, particu- from which Caribbean writers have diverged; larly in the wake of over a century of techno- as a whole, recent poetry from the Caribbean logical developments in communications and challenges exotic narratives that mystify the re- transportation. Island tourism has taken this lationship between island landscapes and imperial isolation axiom to hyperbolic levels – in this power. Yet this does not mean that the colonial paradigm, the tourist departs from his or her legacy has dissipated in any meaningful way. modern, temperate continent (or British archi- In an era where size becomes synonymous with pelago), travels to the tropics in comfort and might, the cultural, historical, and material ease, arrives at a ‘remote’ island conveniently
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ISLAND ECOLOGIES AND CARIBBEAN LITERATURES 301 inhabited by ‘natives’ who are somehow isolated cess of colonisation. The imposed concepts from the same forces of modernity and global- of remoteness and isolation are closely aligned isation that mark the tourist. Or, in the case of to the colonial imperative to erase islanders’ one modern media Robinsonade, the US tele- migratory histories, particularly their maritime vision programme Survivor, actual natives need capacities. Islands and their inhabitants are not apply. The contestants travel by helicopter paradoxically positioned as ‘contained’ and ‘iso- or motorboat in order to access supposedly lated’ yet this belies the consistent visitation by remote and ahistorical islands. When indige- colonials, shipwreck, anthropology, and tour- nous history does appear, it is rendered evolu- ism. As I have argued, the narrative of island tionarily ‘primitive’, in strikingly similar ways isolation is constituted by these visitors. Not to the nineteenth-century colonial European surprisingly, there are few if any historical testi- landscape paintings that Stepan examines in monies from Pacific or Caribbean islanders her excellent study, Picturing Tropical Nature. As bemoaning their isolation from Europe. she points out, colonial landscape paintings The term ‘island’ does not simply signify a incorporated ancient flora such as fern palms, small tract of land surrounded by water but suggesting ‘a vegetative existence belonging to ‘something resembling an island especially in an older, more primitive world than the tem- its isolated or surrounded position’ and ‘an isolated perate world of the present’ (Stepan 2001, p. 11). group or area; especially: an isolated ethnological As with the colonial British constructions of group’ (my emphasis, Webster’s Dictionary). The islands, the timeless and atemporal isle can only latter definition is dependent upon Western signify as such when it is constructed in binary evolutionary and anthropological axioms opposition to the modern history and urbanised suggesting that the construction of the remote geography of its continental visitors. Since this island is contingent upon the metropolitan cen- binary is based upon unequal relations, it derives tre that employs it. For instance, Kirch explains from metropolitan colonialism and thus has that (Pacific) island societies have been ‘fertile contributed to the erasure of what islanders intellectual terrain for anthropology . . . [and] might inscribe about their own landscapes and have long provided inspirational material for histories. the advance of anthropological method and In the Western imagination, ‘island’ and theory’ (Kirch 1986, p. 1). Kirch cites a number ‘islandness’ have metaphorical nuances that are of important anthropological theories, includ- highly contingent upon the repercussions of ing functionalism, which arose from the con- European colonialism and continental migra- flation of island cultures with their bounded tion towards island spaces. Although this paper topographies. As in other discursive fields, the examines cultural forms, this colonial desire islands are inscribed as isolated and contained for islands also has a concrete material basis. ‘laboratories’. In The Song of the Dodo, Quammen In his analysis of European colonial documents explains that for nineteenth-century Western of the Medieval and Renaissance era, Crosby scientists, ‘islands in general were repositories concludes that experiments in the Canaries and for the rare and the peculiar’ (my emphasis, Madeira taught the Europeans that they must Quammen 1996, p. 82). His encyclopedic study seek lands that were: of island biogeography barely problematises island isolation, even when in most cases the 1. remote enough to discourage European studies he examines are based on archipelagoes. epidemiological susceptibility, As such, Quammen’s work reflects the ways 2. isolated from large mammals such as horses in which island biogeography is founded upon to ensure European military advantage, the unexamined assumption that islands are 3. distant enough to prevent native defence defined simply by ‘inherent isolation’ (Quam- against introduced disease, men 1996, p. 19), which leads to an additional 4. lands that were not inhabited by ocean- presumption that islands ‘are natural laboratories voyaging peoples (Crosby 1986, p. 102). of extravagant evolutionary experimentation’ The repetition of the words remote and isolated, (Quamman 1996, p. 18). The associative terms presumed synonyms for island space, suggests ‘repository’, ‘museum’ and ‘laboratory’ suggest that they are central to the ideological pro- the mobilisation of the colonial gaze upon a
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302 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY passive and static object – an artifact often ment’. In this sense, natives and islanders become rendered without contextual history.4 ‘creatures of the anthropological imagination’ Although British island narratives are notori- (Appadurai 1988, p. 39). In the case of many ous for emptying island spaces of history, some island anthropologies, the bounded landscape critics have pointed out the ways in which other has served as a metaphor for bounded and limited disciplines, such the archeology and anthro- culture. Other scholars have demonstrated that pology of island spaces and peoples, have tended Enlightenment ideology and anthropological to ‘focus exclusively on a “systemic” approach praxis position indigenous peoples in a homo- which disregards history’ (Kirch & Green 1992, genous, prepositional time prior to the narrative p. 162). Significantly, Kirch contends that of European, linear-based progress.7 It is in this scholars have been so entrenched in the dis- way that island societies are dehistoricised and course of island boundedness, isolation and represented as undeveloped and premature, atemporality (‘shallow time depth’) that arche- in stark opposition to the trajectory of Western ological inquiries were hardly made in the biological and cultural evolution. Although it Pacific until recently. Interpretations of heavily seems counter-intuitive, the deep geological and scrutinised islands such as Tikopia were so con- biological history that both Darwin and Wallace cerned with ‘internal processes of change . . . were able to pinpoint in island spaces seems to [that] regional (archipelagic) exchange networks’ have become frozen in time and then ideologi- were completely overlooked (Kirch 1986, p. 4). cally grafted onto modern island peoples and This is a glaring omission if one considers landscapes. As a result, geological primitivism the geographically extensive Pacific seafaring became synonymous with primitive islanders, capacities which, before Europeans had ventured who became icons of cultural stasis even while from their shores, led to the settlement of nearly the spaces they inhabited were generally recog- every island in this vast ocean.5 This example has nised as dynamic. ample precedence in anthropological studies. This construction of isolated island space is The reductive division of the Pacific islands into an implicit consequence of European coloni- Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia highlights alism and has a tremendously complex history. the ways in which migration and exchange The island has functioned ideologically in between the islands were either inconceivable various historical eras as a ‘new Eden’, a socio- or simply threatening to the continental arriv- political utopia, a ‘refreshment’ stop for long ants, who had a vested interest in maintaining maritime journeys, and the contained space where a stable tax-paying, church-going, and labour- shipwrecked men (or boys) may reconstruct ing population. Arbitrary cultural divisions were their metropolitan homes. The rise of the also made between the ‘peaceful Arawaks’ of British novel in the nineteenth century was the Caribbean and the supposedly fierce Caribs. sustained by exceedingly popular texts such as Recent scholars have traced the linguistic simi- JM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island and Robert Lewis larities between the Carib and Arawak/Taíno Stevenson’s Treasure Island, just two of the hun- and demonstrate that, like Oceania, the region dreds of island adventure narratives that were had been interconnected by indigenous trade published in Britain alone.8 Island narratives routes for centuries before European arrival.6 have travelled extensively even if islanders When island peoples are inscribed histori- themselves were positioned in bounded terms. cally, too often this is rendered in evolutionary The island archipelagoes of the Canary and terms that deny modern continuities and com- Madeira islands were the first ‘laboratories’ for plexities. Like the presumably primitive native European maritime colonialism and the first visited by the western anthropologist, islanders sugar plantations of the Atlantic.9 This conti- are often perceived as symbols of the evolutionary nental experiment in island colonisation, defor- past. Appadurai asserts that the ‘native’ association estation, sugar plantocracy and slavery was then with place has resulted in an image of native relocated throughout the Caribbean. The use ‘confinement’ and ‘incarceration’ (Appadurai of one archipelago (represented as an isolated 1988, p. 37). These constructions derive from island) as an ideological template for the next, the ‘quintessentially mobile’ anthropologist who reveals the ways in which this continental dis- visits the native in his or her ‘natural environ- course travelled along a westward trajectory. For
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ISLAND ECOLOGIES AND CARIBBEAN LITERATURES 303 example, the Canaries were not only ideological that the influential botanist Carolus Linnaeus and colonial laboratories of Europe, but also contended that Mount Ararat was the terrestrial an important cartographic point that caused world’s originary island: ‘if we therefore Christopher Columbus to situate his ‘discovery’ enquire into the original appearance of the of the Caribbean as ‘off the Canary Islands’. The earth, we shall find reason to conclude . . . one ideological mapping is rendered materially small island was in the beginning raised above visible when we remember that Columbus picked the surface of the waters’. Linnaeus concluded up sugar cane in the Canaries and transported that this primordial island was ‘a kind of living it to the Caribbean. museum’ and the site of Eden (quoted in Islands have not only functioned as colonial Quammen 1996, p. 35). Although I have barely or socio-political spaces of experiment, but have skimmed the surface, it is clear that island facilitated tremendous ecological, biological, topographies have not only materially benefited and social theory. As Grove explains, European Europe, but have also provided the botanical, deforestation of the Canary and Caribbean anthropological, biological, environmental, and islands created the first environmental conser- ideological space for European laboratories, vation laws of Spain, Britain and France. It was experimentation, and development. As Sahlins primarily due to the island environments of explains, ‘the heretofore obscure histories Mauritius and the Galápagos that Darwin was of remote islands deserve a place alongside able to theorise The Origin of Species; Wallace the self-contemplation of the European past – made similar evolutionary observations in the or the history of “civilizations” for their own Malaysian archipelago; the Caribbean (and remarkable contributions to an historical later the Pacific) islands were some of the first understanding’ (Sahlins 1985, p. 72). sites of European ethnography; and Atlantic, I am interested in comparing the ways in Indian Ocean and Pacific islands were the which island studies, particularly the natural templates upon which Jean-Jacques Rousseau sciences, articulate the fraught relationship based his vision of the homme naturale. Nunn con- between migrant colonists and the endemic. In tends that oceanic islands were vital to Alfred this case scientists use these terms to designate Wegener’s theory of continental drift as well as the process of species evolution, but certainly it later discoveries about sea-floor spreading and is no coincidence that Darwin, Wallace, and plate tectonics (Nunn 1994, pp. 22–25). More others began using these terms during the disturbingly, many Pacific and Caribbean islands peak of European colonisation of tropical have become nuclear and live ordinance test islands all over the globe. The online Oxford sites and the ‘repositories’ of toxic waste due English Dictionary suggests that the word ‘colo- to US and French imperialism. As such, some nist’, adopted by the British from its Roman Pacific islands have the dubious distinction origins, initially signified a human process dur- of being the first unapproachable ‘museums’ ing the height of European colonisation in the of millennial toxicity. The variant poles of eighteenth century. With the rise of natural island utopia (the ‘noble savage’) and dystopia science as a nineteenth-century discipline, the (nuclear eschatology) suggest that islands have term seems to have ‘travelled’ into island bio- long served as the philosophical and material geography, employed to suggest the migratory foci of the fears and desires of continental process of flora and fauna to island spaces.10 arrivants. The language of island biogeography is thus The geographic categorisation of islands strikingly symbolic of the process of European into oceanic (an emergence from the sea floor) colonisation of island spaces. For instance, if and continental (a fragment of the mainland) we take the observations of the nineteenth- privileges scientific and philosophical concerns century evolutionist, Moritz Wagner, on the with island origins. As Grove explains, the idea consequences of the geographic isolation of of island isolation ‘directly stimulated the emer- fauna, we might easily assume he is speaking of gence of a detached self-consciousness and a humans: ‘the formation of a new race will never critical view of European origins and behaviour’ succeed in my opinion without a long con- (Grove 1995, p. 8). Due to this association tinued separation of the colonists from the other between islands and origins, it is not surprising members of their species’ (quoted in Quammen
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304 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY
1996, p. 131). Given the very palpable debates traded as commodities, the writers I examine at this time about the evolution of a specifically hinge their work on the simultaneous ‘uproot- creole culture in the Caribbean and other col- ing’ of plants and peoples and their transplan- onies, and the construction of non-European tation to colonial botanical gardens and sugar peoples in terms of racial difference, Wagner’s plantations across the Atlantic. In the Caribbean, choice of language can hardly be coincidental. the island landscape into which these labourers Due to these historical and discursive entangle- were acculturated was as ‘routed’ in trade net- ments, crude adaptations of Social Darwinism works as the human arrivants. Here I quote at were employed in Western literary production length from writer Jamaica Kincaid: as biological justifications for the colonisation What did the botanical life of Antigua consist of non-European peoples, a point that did not of at the time [the] famous adventurer escape Darwin’s contemporaries, including Karl (Christopher Columbus) first saw it? To see Marx.11 a garden in Antigua now will not supply a clue. The bougainvillea . . . is native to tropi- ROOTS: GARDENING IN THE TROPICS cal South America: the plumbago is from southern Africa; the croton is from Malaysia; Just as Darwin ‘refused to set man over and the hibiscus from Asia and East Africa; the against the rest of the natural world’ (Beer allamanda is from Brazil; the poinsettia . . . is 1986, p. 215) and was deeply concerned with from Mexico; the bird of paradise is from the fraught relationship between migrants southern Africa; the Bermuda lily is from and the endemic, Caribbean writers have also Japan; the flamboyant tree is from Madagas- explored biotic colonisation in island spaces. car; the casuarina comes from Australia; the Olive Senior’s poem ‘Plants’ observes, ‘the world Norfolk pine comes from Norfolk Island . . . is full of shoots bent on conquest,/invasive the tamarind tree is from Africa and Asia. seedlings seeking wide open spaces’ (Senior The mango is from Asia. The breadfruit is 1994, p. 61). This brings us back to the ways in from [Tahiti] (Kincaid 1999, p. 135). which the ‘natural’ world, too often ideo- logically segregated from the social practices of The imaginative excavation of precolonial human beings, has been of profound concern history, symbolised by the landscape, poses a to many Caribbean writers. Thus far I have men- particular problem for the Caribbean writer tioned that both cultural and biogeographic attuned to the temporal and spatial relations of studies of islands are caught between discourses power. Kincaid asks, before Columbus, ‘What of migration and island isolation, and I have herb of any beauty grew in this place? What tree? tried to destabilise some of the narratives that And did the people who lived there grow them for emphasise bounded cultures and material their own sake? I do not know, I can find no practices by gesturing to the complex histories record of it. I can only make a guess in this way: of island colonisation. To sum up the previous the frangipani, the mahogany tree, the cedar section, I contend that both cultural and scien- tree are all native to the West Indies, and Anti- tific island discourses have their roots in the gua is in the West Indies’ (my emphasis, Kincaid upheavals of the European colonial era – the 1999, p. 137). In this passage Kincaid has establishment of island biogeography, botanic marked a significant slippage from what she gardens, the plant trade, and nature studies, initially calls ‘this place’ – the space of the con- like the tropical landscape paintings and island temporary Caribbean subject – to the objectified castaway novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth query about ‘the people who lived there’. This centuries, are all ‘modes of representation suggests a profoundly discontinuous temporal which were developed in the process of colonial landscape, which cannot be categorised in the expansion’ (Stepan 2001, p. 35). At this point same spatial terms due to the tremendous alter- I would like to turn to the process of migration, ation and rupture of the island’s flora, fauna, to reinvigorate the etymological roots of the term and human populations. In other words, the ‘diaspora’, defined as the dispersal of (human) precolonial Caribbean and the contemporary ‘seeds’. Although most scholars tend to segre- island of Antigua are radically divided between gate the ways in which peoples and plants were ‘here’ and ‘there’; Kincaid has semantically
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ISLAND ECOLOGIES AND CARIBBEAN LITERATURES 305 separated each space, refusing to establish a [her] own immediate past (the Caribbean) and conceptually unified narrative of time. As such, the past as it is indirectly related to [her] (the Kincaid reiterates Glissant’s contention that conquest of Mexico and its surroundings)’ Caribbean history is characterised by ‘ruptures’ (Kincaid 1999, p. 8). For Kincaid, island history, and ‘brutal dislocation’, where ‘historical embedded in the landscape itself, is a medita- consciousness could not be deposited gradually tion about relations of power. In The Garden and continuously like sediment’ (Glissant 1992, (Book), long passages are devoted to plants pp. 61–62). The narrative result is not only a such as the casuarina, hibiscus, and the wisteria. ‘tormented chronology of time’ and space, but Cotton and sugar cane, on the other hand, sig- suggests that the (subjugated) past, suppressed nify the ways in which both plants and peoples in dominant historiography, becomes ‘obsessively became commodities under the slavery system. present’ (Glissant 1992, p. 63). As Kincaid explains, ‘the people on Antigua By examining the colonial process, we see have a relationship to agriculture that cannot that two key tropes were ‘central to the task of please them at all. Their very presence on this giving a meaning and an epistemology to the island hundreds of years ago has to do with this natural world and to western interactions with thing, agriculture’. Reiterating Glissant’s theory it. These were the physical or textual garden that nature and culture have formed a dialectical and the island’ (Grove 1995, p. 13). There has split, Kincaid concludes, ‘it seems so clear to been an established tradition linking work such me, then, that a group of people who have had as gardening with the writing process, and such a horrible historical association with grow- scholars have increasingly turned to the colo- ing things would try to make any relationship nial narratives of garden utopias (Eden) and to (agriculture) dignified and useful’ (Kincaid positioned them alongside postcolonial rendi- 1999, p. 140). But this is not simply a division tions of island dystopia. Grove explains that by between horticulture and agriculture, or aes- the fifteenth century, ‘the task of locating Eden thetics versus commodity capitalism. Kincaid and re-evaluating nature had already begun to has written extensively about the ways in which be served by the appropriation of the newly the flowers of empire, like the daffodils in Wil- discovered and colonized tropical islands as liam Wordsworth’s poem ‘I wandered lonely as a paradises’ (Grove 1995, p. 5). The pervasive Cloud’, were utilised in the British colonial edu- image of the island paradise is probably one of cation system in ways that alienated Caribbean the most obvious mystifications of centuries of students from their own tropical surroundings. slavery and colonisation. Grove suggests that the Her protagonist in the novel Lucy, forced to rise of the island Eden in European narratives memorise and publicly recite this poem as a has a material origin in that it was a product schoolgirl, has no idea what a daffodil looks itself of ‘the realisation that the economic like until she moves to New York in her adult demands of colonial rule . . . threatened [the years. Based on her own experience of colonial islands’] imminent and comprehensive degra- education, Kincaid has highlighted the ways in dation’ (Grove 1995, p. 5). In other words, at which the ‘roots’ of (horti)culture are trans- the height of the process of altering and dam- planted in ideological and material terms. Now aging island landscapes, tropical islands were residing in Vermont, Kincaid’s own complex interpellated in Edenic terms, removed in space patterns of migration allow her to cultivate both and time from the urbanisation of Western imported and endemic flora with a heightened Europe, which of course had been constituted cognisance that ‘perhaps every good thing that by the labour of the colonies. stands before us comes at a great cost to some- If there is a point of similarity between the one else’ (Kincaid 1999, p. 152). The Garden notion of island utopias and the writing process, (Book) outlines the entanglement between it would be that both conceptualise the process diasporan ‘routes’ and the ‘roots’ of sedimen- of creation with the materials at hand, creating tation in new landscapes. Growing plants for historical meaning out of particular spaces. the sheer beauty of it, rather than for material Kincaid, a novelist and avid gardener, explains consumption, is as much a part of this process that this is why both her writing and gardening of acculturation as this growing body of land- are ‘exercises in memory, a way of remembering scape literature itself.
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ROUTES AND BIOTIC MIGRANTS ‘gold on (his) mind’ (Senior 1994, p. 13). The narrator explains that Columbus brought ‘plenty This complex exchange between routes (the of bananas/oranges/sugar cane’ and in turn, process of migration) and roots (the process of the native subject provided ‘maize/pineapples/ settlement) is also evident in Olive Senior’s guavas’. The speaker concludes, ‘in that respect/ book Gardening in the Tropics. Author of an ear- there was fair exchange’ (Senior 1994, p. 12). lier collection entitled Talking of Trees, Senior’s This first poem, titled ‘Meditation on Yellow’, corpus is concerned with the ways in which peo- functions as a critique of two gold commodities ple and plants are naturalised in island spaces. of the Caribbean islands – first, Columbus’s If, as biogeographers explain, islands are sus- search for this precious metal, and second, trop- ceptible to immigration, then Senior examines ical island sunshine, vital to the modern tourist these in both human and botanic terms. The industry. It was the first commodity that contrib- connection between migration and ‘natural’ uted to the decimation of indigenous Caribbean (read: endemic) forms of life is immediately peoples, forced to work in the sixteenth-century apparent in her book’s structure. The first sec- gold mines established by early European tion is entitled ‘Traveller’s Tales’ and examines colonists. After the exchange between Colum- historical migrants to the region, beginning with bus and the indigenous speaker, Senior jumps Columbus. The second section, ‘Nature Studies’, ahead in time to the modern tourist industry, includes fourteen poems predominantly named highlighting the ways in which a similar form of after endemic Caribbean plants such as guava, migrant is threatening cultural, economic, and pineapple, and pawpaw. Her concern with environmental stability. As such, she anticipates diaspora and movement is evident in the titles Kamala Kempadoo’s later study, Sun, Sex, and such as ‘Illegal Immigrant’ and ‘Stowaway’, which Gold, an important collection that examines the explore the complex (and subaltern) trajec- ways in which the Caribbean tourist industry tories of island arrival and departure. Responding has exploited local peoples and landscapes for to biogeographical studies that depict the trajec- metropolitan interests in ways that date back to tories of island landfall in terms of air- or sea- Columbus’ arrival. I quote at length from this borne migration, Senior inscribes these biotic section of Senior’s poem: travellers as metaphors of empire. She warns At some hotel of the ‘colonizing ambitions of hitchhiking burrs’, overlooking the sea the ‘surf-riding nuts/bobbing on ocean’, and you can take tea the ‘parachuting seeds and other/airborne traf- at three in the afternoon fic dropping in’, including ‘those special agents served by me called flowers’ (Senior 1994, p. 61). Given the skin burnt black as toast ways in which ‘special agents’ of the CIA have (for which management apologizes) armed political parties in Jamaica for decades, Senior is particularly concerned with how but I’ve been travelling long ‘gardening in the tropics’ leads to the excavation cross the sea in the sun-hot of ‘skeletons’, where Jamaican ‘cemeteries are I’ve been slaving in the cane rows thriving’ (Senior 1994, p. 83). The ‘colonizing for your sugar ambitions’ of flora and fauna suggest the dis- I’ve been ripening coffee beans cursive entanglement between island biogeo- for your morning break graphy and empire, as well as the disturbing I’ve been dallying on the docks continuities between fifteenth and twenty-first- loading your bananas century colonisation of island spaces. I’ve been toiling in orange groves Just as the trade of peoples and plants for your marmalade characterised the colonial settlement of the I’ve been peeling ginger Caribbean, Senior highlights the ways in which for your relish endemic crops of the region become entangled I’ve been chopping cocoa pods in this early mercantile economy. In the first for your chocolate bars section, her indigenous (Arawak) narrator I’ve been mining aluminium addresses Columbus, critiquing the obsession of for your foil
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And just when I thought contemporary tourist industry. Like her poetic I could rest colleagues such as Kamau Brathwaite (Barba- pour my own dos) and Derek Walcott (St. Lucia), Senior – something soothing positions these unequal exchanges in historical like fever-grass and lemon context, rendering this presumably premodern cut my ten and isolated isle in terms that condense in the kitchen five-hundred years of colonialism, tourism, and take five transnational capitalism – all rendered appar- a new set of people ent by the heightened visibility of the con- arrive tinental migrants. The repetition of the speaking to lie bare-assed in the sun subject’s assertion ‘I’ve been’, coupled with a wanting gold on their bodies dizzying litany of introduced crops such as sugar, cane-rows in their hair ginger, orange, banana, coffee, and cocoa, sug- with beads – even bells gest a tautological experience of history; a cycle of entrapment where local peoples labour over So I serving them imported plants for imported tourists. The sec- coffee tion written in Jamaican creole, which does not tea employ the past tense, (‘I give you the land/I cock-soup give you the breeze’) complicates linear notions Red Stripe beer of time that, as many scholars have explained, sensimilla were constructed through transatlantic capital- I cane-rowing their hair ism. But if capitalism depends upon a utopian with my beads teleology, in Senior’s poem there is no temporal But still they want more narrative of progress; she suggests very little has want it strong changed in economic terms for the island citi- want it long zen. In this case, the Caribbean subject perpet- want it black ually ‘gives’ the land, breeze, and gold without want it green reciprocity. The present tense articulation suggests want it dread a tautological history of furnishing material and environmental commodities to the metropolitan Though I not quarrelsome centre. If I can return to Buell’s assertion that I have to say: look an ‘environmentally oriented work’ demonstrates I tired now that ‘human history is implicated in natural I give you the gold history’, we can see from Senior’s example that I give you the land human and natural history in the Caribbean are I give you the breeze inextricably entangled, caught between narra- I give you the beaches tives of the cultural consumption of both nature I give you the yellow sand and labour. I give you the golden crystals Senior’s emphasis on the tourist industry is all the more revealing when we consider that And I reach to the stage where most Caribbean states, economically crippled (though I not impolite) by World Bank and IMF lending practices, are I have to say: lump it forced to maintain tourist and service sectors or leave it that are remarkably like exploitative plantation I can’t give anymore (Senior 1994, pp. 14– economies. In Sun, Sex, and Gold, Kempadoo 16). points out that by 1996 ‘formal tourism employ- ment’ (exempting the vast informal tourist If island ecologies are largely determined by network) represented over 25 per cent of the patterns of migration and settlement, Senior is Caribbean region and was one of fastest grow- making an obvious parallel between the ways ing sectors (Kempadoo 1999, p. 20). Alarm- in which late fifteenth-century teleologies of ingly, between 70 and 90 per cent of foreign conquest have become reformulated in the capital earned in tourist industry is not invested
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308 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY in the Caribbean itself but rather is extracted remarkably like the colonial and biogeograph- through foreign goods and services (Kempadoo ical studies that were explored in the beginning 1999, p. 21). Like the plantation system, the of this paper.12 Yet Easterly and Kraay convinc- tourist industry does little to sustain the local ingly argue, ‘small states have on average higher economy while fattening the wallets of indus- income and productivity levels than large states, trialised Northern states and multinational and grow no more slowly than large states’ corporations. In Mimi Sheller’s words, the (Easterly & Kraay 2000, p. 2014). Far from being ‘Caribbean island has become a global icon isolated, ahistorical, and static, small states such which encapsulates a deep history of relations as islands have higher ‘quality of life indicators’ of consumption, luxury, and privilege’ (Sheller (Easterly & Kraay 2000, p. 2017), which is 2001). Echoing the connections made in ‘largely due to their greater trade openness’ Senior’s poem, Sheller explains, ‘following in (Easterly & Kraay 2000, p. 2024). This suggests the footsteps of the explorers, the planters, and a positive future for island peoples and land- the armed forces, the tropical “holiday in the scapes only if it is coupled with a serious reevalu- sun” became a safe new means of consuming ation of World Bank and IMF policies. It is no the Caribbean environment’ (Sheller 2001). secret that ‘for many developing countries, IMF We must question to what extent the con- assistance has failed to make a significant con- ceptualisations of islands as isolated and remote tribution to a sustained recovery of the financial are appropriate, when, as Senior’s poem so sector and economic growth’ due to ‘misguided cogently explains, black diasporan subjects, policy’, which has all too often made a devastat- ‘natives’ of the Caribbean for over 500 years, ing impact upon social, environmental, and continue labouring with introduced commodi- ‘political stability’ (Kirkpatrick & Tennant 2002, ties for the benefit of metropolitan interests. p. 1947). As Sidney Mintz and C.L.R. James have pointed Since the title of this paper evokes the term out, the Caribbean, due to its complex history ‘ecology’, I would like to conclude this paper by of forced migration and plantocracy, was one of turning to the online Oxford English Dictionary the first sites of the world’s modernity. As such, definition: ‘the science of the economy of ani- we could conclude that time/space compres- mals and plants; that branch of biology which sion, perceived as intrinsic to the globalised, deals with the relations of living organisms to postmodern era, was long familiar to the Car- their surroundings, their habits and modes of ibbean due to centuries of fragmentation and life, etc.’ These poets, and the Caribbean island reassembly in the landscape, economy, and histories they explore, outline clear relation- culture. To pursue this logic, tropical islands, ships between those who introduce, cultivate, or far from representing the remote and archaic benefit from the horticulture and agriculture of past, embody the earliest structures of capitalist the island environment. As such, these authors modernity as well as its contemporary global follow Glissant’s theory that the island ‘land- inequities. As the first spaces of forced ‘hybridi- scape is its own monument . . . It is all history’. sation’, these islands provide a palimpsest or The complex diasporas of plants and peoples in layering of cultural and economic histories. Caribbean history render the term ‘natural his- ‘Gardening in the tropics’, Senior tells us, ‘you’ll tory’ into an oxymoron if we define it as a space find things that don’t/belong together often hermetically sealed from human alteration. intertwine/all mixed up in this amazing fecun- Reading imperialism into the environmental dity’ (Senior 1994, p. 86). imagination of the Caribbean shows the ways Although economists have tended to assume in which natural history is implicated in and that globalisation (generally associated with in fact cannot be disentangled from the multiple Western metropoles) puts undue pressures on settlements of human history. Thus it demysti- small states, Easterly & Kraay (2000) suggest fies the conflation of islands with timeless iso- that the conflation of ‘fragile’ economies and lation by foregrounding the convergence of political systems with the small (island) environ- global forces onto island spaces, rendering ment has been inaccurate. Interestingly, the both human and natural narratives as part of dismissive economic categorisation of ‘fragile’, rather than outside of the modern historical ‘isolated’, and small (island) states sounds process.
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Notes p. xxvii). Importantly, Beer points out that the reductive interpretations of Darwin’s work, 1. An initial version of this paper was presented at including Marx’s response, neglected the fact the Islands of the World Conference ( June 2002) that Darwin ‘emphasized also that survival sponsored by the International Small Islands depends upon variability, and that diversity is Studies Association (ISISA) and the University of essential to the island of the world’ (Darwin 1996, Prince Edward Island, Canada. I would like to p. xxviii). Darwin was not necessarily the isola- acknowledge the helpful comments made on this tionist that later scholars have suggested. In manuscript by Godfrey Baldacchino. Origin he writes, ‘although I do not doubt that 2. See DeLoughrey, Handley and Gosson Caribbean isolation is of considerable importance in the Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and production of new species, on the whole I am Culture (forthcoming), which explores the inter- inclined to believe that largeness of area is of section between Caribbean literature and eco- more importance, more especially in the pro- criticism. A bibliography for the project (including duction of species, which will prove capable of the Pacific) can be found at
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