Miller, Andrew Kei (2012) Jamaica to the world: a study of Jamaican (and West Indian) epistolary practices. PhD thesis http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3597/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Jamaica to the World: A Study of Jamaican (and West Indian) Epistolary Practices Andrew Kei Miller MA Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy English Literature School of Critical Studies College of Arts University of Glasgow 1 ABSTRACT The Caribbean islands have been distinguished by mass migratory patterns and diasporic communities that have moved into and out of the region; as a consequence, the genre of the letter has been an important one to the culture and has provided a template for many creative works. This dissertation is the first major study on West Indian epistolary practices: personal letters, emails, verse epistles, epistolary novels, letters to editors, etc. It focuses on a contemporary period – from the 1930s to the present, and on examples that have come out of Jamaica. The dissertation offers both close-readings on a range of epistolary texts and theoretical frameworks in which to consider them and some of the ways in which Caribbean people have been addressing themselves to each other, and to the wider world. My first chapter looks at the non-fictional letters of Sir Alexander Bustamante and Sir Vidia Naipaul. It reflects on the ways in which the public personas of these two men had been created and manipulated through their public and private letters. My second chapter tries to expand a critical project which has been satisfied to simply place contemporary epistolary fiction within an eighteenth century genealogy. I propose another conversation which understands recent examples of West Indian epistolary fiction within their contemporary cultures. My third chapter looks at examples of Jamaican verse epistles and considers how three poets – Lorna Goodison, James Berry and Louise Bennett – have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to create an epistolary voice that is both literary and oral. My fourth chapter looks at the popular Jamaican newspaper advice column, Dear Pastor. It considers the ways in which evangelical Christianity has impacted on the construction of a West Indian epistolary voice and consequently the shape of a West Indian public sphere. My final chapter considers how technology has changed epistolography; specifically how the email, Facebook messages, and tweets have both transformed and preserved the letter. I end with a presentation of a personal corpus of emails titled The Cold Onion Chronicles with some reflections on remediation of epistolary forms. 2 Once Joseph, Seamus and I decided we would make an emblem of styles to summarise our own work. I remember Seamus saying ‘bogs, bogs, bogs’. I think I described Joseph as having a skeleton of a soul at night, in winter—a kind of lonely ether. Mine, I decided, was just ‘Wish You Were Here’. There’s a lot to be said for postcards and why there are postcards. – Derek Walcott 3 Contents Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................ 5 ‘So I arrived in London. It was a cold day...’: An Introduction .............................. 6 ‘It’s what I’m introducing myself as’: Self-fashioning & Self-fictioning in Sir Busta’s and Sir Vidia’s non-fictional letters ............................................................ 27 ‘My sister, being the good Jamaican, went to Western Union and sent me £100’: Cultures of Remittance as represented in West Indian Epistolary Fictions ........ 56 ‘I became the 'Manchester Slam Poetry Champion' which doesn't thrill me ’: Scribal/Oral tensions in Jamaican Verse Epistles................................................... 83 ‘PrayformeasIprayformyselfinJesusNameAmen’: Church Testimony as discourse in a Jamaican diasporic Public Sphere ................................................. 112 ‘The genre I’ve apparently settled into writing is the ignoble Email Forward’: The letter remediated and re-addressed in the Post-Postal Present ................... 144 Bibliography ................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. 4 Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge two people above all others: I cannot imagine a better supervisor for my particular temperament than Professor Nigel Leask – someone who gave me space to do what I was doing (even when I was doing it badly) but who stepped in with specific and firm advice when I needed it. For his patience and his prodding as I learnt to write in a very different way, I thank him. And Ronald Cummings who, small built as he is, was the full extent of my postgraduate community and support group, and was in fact all the community that I needed; for the challenging questions he posed, and even more, for the ready references he was able to direct me to, right up to the end, I (and my bibliography) thank him. I hope I was half as helpful to his own Ph.D. as he has been for mine. 5 ‘So I arrived in London. It was a cold day...’: An Introduction ‘So I arrived in London. It was a cold day, as if there is no other way to arrive in this city.’ This is how I began the present project six years ago. Rather than a Ph.D., I was conscious then of beginning a series of correspondences with my friends. It was 2004 and I had just left Jamaica for England. In terms of academic degrees, I was beginning a Masters in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. A part of that degree involved the writing of what would become my first novel, The Same Earth, but by the end of the year I had, almost unwittingly, completed another book-length project – a collection of letters from which that first sentence comes. The letters were emails sent to a group of friends, mostly back in Jamaica, and were called ‘The Cold Onion Chronicles’. At the time of this coinage the name did not have much meaning beyond being a spoof on another very similar set of emails, ‘The Colonial Chronicles’, which my friends, Nadia Ellis and Stephen Russell, had written while they were Rhodes scholars at Oxford. It is only now in hindsight that the onion seems an obvious metaphor for the multiple layers that exist in epistolary narratives – layers which the present project will attempt to explore. When I wrote ‘The Cold Onion Chronicles’ I was conscious of being part of a tradition of epistolary writing, but one that had only begun with the aforementioned friends – Nadia and Stephen. This was short-sighted of me. In truth, I had joined a much wider and a much older tradition. A vibrant culture of West Indian Epistolary practice has arguably been inevitable given that the Caribbean has been a profoundly fractured society characterized by mass migratory patterns and diasporic communities that have moved out of and into the region. Caribbean citizens have traditionally relied on the exchange of letters to maintain familial and cultural bonds. Creative writers from the region have also been aware of this culture and have often trafficked epistolary modes into their writing. So although this thesis has its genesis in my own practice (and in the end I will indeed return to a selection of ‘The Cold Onion Chronicles’), it is this wider tradition of West Indian epistolography that is my focus here and which this dissertation will discuss. Letters have been important cornerstones 6 to Caribbean communities and I want to consider their places in both popular and literary culture. The phrase I have chosen as a title for this project, ‘Jamaica to the world!’ (Or in its more creole form, ‘Jamaica to di werl’) has recently become a popular expression of nationalism on the island. In the recently concluded World Games in Daegu, South Korea for instance, after Usain Bolt had convincingly won the 200 meter event, Twitter users from the Caribbean began to tweet (and indeed trend1) this simple expression. I am intrigued by its epistolary conceit – how it conjures up the act of Jamaicans posting their updates, their achievements’ and sometimes their concerns, to loved ones and to the wider world. We can find many trenchant commentaries on acts of epistolography in Caribbean popular culture. Consider the 1994 British sketch comedy series, The Real McCoy. In one memorable episode the scene opens to a Jamaican woman shuffling towards her door to answer a knocking. Upon opening the door she is visibly surprised at the other woman she finds there, come so early in the morning to visit. The woman of the house suspects an ulterior motive, but still invites her visitor in. It takes a while, but the visitor at last comes around to the point of her visit: she remarks that she has heard a rumour that the woman of the house is planning a trip back to Jamaica. She wonders then if this woman would be so kind to take “a little something” to the island on her behalf. The response however is less than accommodating. It is in fact a hostile “No!” The owner of the house asks, “You ever see plane take off to Jamaica? It lean so!” and demonstrates a plane taking off at an askew angle. “And you know what cause it to lean so? Is all them little little things that cause it!” The visitor frowns and feels compelled to clarify that all she was going to ask her friend to take back were a few letters.