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Island Ecologies and Caribbean Literatures1 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. © 2004 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG 300 ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY 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
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