Vol. 25 / No. 1 / April 2017 Volume 25 Number 1 April 2017 Lisa Outar, Editor in Charge Published by the Departments of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies CREDITS Original image: Full Moon, acrylic on canvas, 2004 by Shastri Maharaj Anu Lakhan (copy editor) Nadia Huggins (graphic designer) JWIL is published with the financial support of the Departments of Literatures in English of The University of the West Indies Enquiries should be sent to THE EDITORS Journal of West Indian Literature Department of Literatures in English, UWI Mona Kingston 7, JAMAICA, W.I. Tel. (876) 927-2217; Fax (876) 970-4232 e-mail: [email protected] OR Ms. Angela Trotman Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature Faculty of Humanities, UWI Cave Hill Campus P.O. Box 64, Bridgetown, BARBADOS, W.I. e-mail: [email protected] SUBSCRIPTION RATE US$20 per annum (two issues) or US$10 per issue Copyright © 2017 Journal of West Indian Literature ISSN (online): 2414-3030 EDITORIAL COMMITTEE Evelyn O’Callaghan (Editor in Chief) Michael A. Bucknor (Senior Editor) Glyne Griffith Rachel L. Mordecai Lisa Outar Keithley Woolward BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Antonia MacDonald EDITORIAL BOARD Edward Baugh Victor Chang Alison Donnell Mark McWatt Maureen Warner-Lewis EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Laurence A. Breiner Rhonda Cobham-Sander Daniel Coleman Anne Collett Raphael Dalleo Denise deCaires Narain Curdella Forbes Aaron Kamugisha Geraldine Skeete Faith Smith Emily Taylor THE JOURNAL OF WEST INDIAN LITERATURE has been published twice-yearly by the Departments of Literatures in English of the University of the West Indies since October 1986. Edited by full time academics and with minimal funding or institutional support, the Journal originated at the same time as the first annual conference on West Indian Literature, the brainchild of Edward Baugh, Mervyn Morris and Mark McWatt. It reflects the continued commitment of those who followed their lead to provide a forum in the region for the dissemination and discussion of our literary culture. Initially featuring contributions from scholars in the West Indies, it has become an internationally recognized peer-reviewed academic journal. The Editors invite the submission of articles in English that are the result of scholarly research in literary textuality (fiction, prose, drama, film, theory and criticism) of the English-speaking Caribbean. We also welcome comparative assessments of non- Anglophone Caribbean texts provided translations into English of the relevant parts of such texts are incorporated into the submission. JWIL will also publish book reviews. Submission guidelines are available at www.jwilonline.org. Table of Contents Editorial Preface 7 Lisa Outar The Revelation of Hurricanes in the Camouflaged Caribbean 10 Russell McDougall Reading the Plantation Landscape of Barbados: Kamau Brathwaite’s The Namsetoura Papers and Annalee Davis’s This 23 Ground Beneath My Feet: A Chorus of Bush in Rab Lands Melanie Otto Monuments and Shadows: Uncovering Haunted Histories in Myriam J. A. Chancy’s Spirit of Haiti 45 Robert Sapp Talking Back to the Bildungsroman: Caribbean Literature and the Dis/location of the Genre 60 Kaisa Ilmonen Clairvoyant Memories of an “Aproned Leader”: Bearing Witness to the Transgression of Gender Boundaries in A 77 Silent Life Jean Y. Lee Indo-Caribbean Working-Class Masculinities at Home and Abroad: David Chariandy’s Soucouyant and Ian Harnarine’s 94 Doubles with Slight Pepper Anita Baksh Book reviews Daryl Cumber Dance, In Search of Annie Drew: Jamaica 113 Kincaid’s Mother and Muse Simone A. James Alexander Tanya Shirley, The Merchant of Feathers 118 Carol Bailey 124 Notes on contributors 7 Editorial Preface Lisa Outar I am pleased to introduce this issue of JWIL which illustrates well the rich and diverse terrain that constitutes the field of Caribbean literature and literary criticism; it features essays that examine the work of writers and artists from Guyana, Trinidad, Canada, Haiti, Barbados, Jamaica and New Orleans, written by scholars from the region but also from Europe, North America and Australia. The essays deal with themes as far ranging as hurricanes, ghosts, bildungsromans, Indo-Caribbean masculinities, trauma, feminism, saturated landscapes, the aftermath of the plantation, mental illness, intergenerational gender formations and constructions of history, all of which contribute to our understanding of the complexities of the past and the present of the region and its diasporas. The first section of the issue continues the important work started by the November 2016 JWIL issue with its special focus on Caribbean ecocriticism. This is an urgent and growing field which points out, among other things, the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to Caribbean Studies and we are happy to be able to feature here the work of Russell McDougall and that of Melanie Otto who use multiple lenses to focus on the ways in which the forces that affect the region—natural and anthropogenic—shape and reshape our literary and cultural theorizations and representations of it. Meteorology in McDougall’s essay becomes a means of challenging our spatial containment of the region, of linking Louisiana to Jamaica, of producing a literary counter-discourse to Caribbean exceptionalism and of revealing “hidden geographies of environmental crisis with clear transnational implications.” In examining the aesthetics of hurricanes in the work of Lafcadio Hearn and Erna Brodber, McDougall leads us to a broader, fertile, conceptual terrain for assessing Caribbean literature and sovereignty. In Melanie Otto’s essay, which looks at the way the landscape of Barbados is read by Kamau Brathwaite and visual artist, Annalee Davis, rab lands—the terrain rendered useless in the aftermath of the plantation— figures anew and is recuperated in a language of landscape that addresses the trauma of the past. Otto tracks the ways that the land itself becomes an archive for both Brathwaite and Davis, inspiring multimedia creations imbued with deep personal meaning and with radical implications for how to engage ethically with history. The past haunts all of the essays that appear in this issue. The second section of the issue features work by Robert Sapp and Kaisa Ilmonen. Sapp examines the representation of ghosts in Myriam Chancy’s Spirit of Haiti in order to theorize what he calls a poetics of haunting, one that links Haiti and its diasporas and that brings to light silenced stories and a unique Haitian historical consciousness. Kaisa Ilmonen’s essay on the literary traditions that have informed the shapes that Caribbean writing has taken illuminates some of the ways in which Caribbean women writers especially have wrestled with their painful inheritances and have refashioned them to their own purposes. Ilmonen traces, in particular, the use of the form of the bildungsroman and the limitations and the possibilities embedded within this genre for Caribbean women to represent the complex raced, classed and gendered realities of their lives. Ilmonen calls the ambivalent forms that emerge “talking back” but Jean Y. Lee’s essay in the next section 8 of the issue on Ryhaan Shah’s version of the bildungsroman also leads us to consider the unheard primal scream issued by Caribbean women at home and in the diaspora at the impossible choices they often face when negotiating the shards of historical and personal trauma. The final two essays in the issue constitute a special focus on gender constructions in Indo- Caribbean literature and film. Lee’s essay adds to the work of theorizing Indo-Caribbean feminist interventions that Gabrielle Hosein and I featured in our recent anthology, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), work that has been underway for over thirty years now with the publications of Patricia Mohammed, Rhoda Reddock, Rosanne Kanhai, Joy Mahabir, Mariam Pirbhai, Brinda Mehta and many others. The two essays in the special section of this issue of JWIL focus in complementary ways on constructions of Indo-Caribbean masculinities and femininities. In her analysis of Ryhaan Shah’s A Silent Life, Lee identifies what she calls a postmemory of indenture that influences the gender relations of multiple generations of Indo-Caribbean women. Shah’s novel and Lee’s analysis of its taking up of the trope of activism on the part of Indo-Caribbean women pushes back in particular against continuing stereotypes of Indo-Caribbean femininity as passive, tracing instead matrilinear genealogies of resistance but also transmissions of historical trauma. Anita Baksh’s essay on the fiction and film work of David Chariandy and Ian Harnarine respectively contributes to the vibrant field of Caribbean masculinities (one shaped in part by JWIL’s special issue on Caribbean Masculinities edited by Michael Bucknor in 2012) and it brings attention to the still underexplored area of Indo-Caribbean masculinities. The essay shifts direction from work that has been done by Michael Niblett and Rhoda Reddock recently that focuses on the waste that is laid to the Indo-Caribbean male body by the plantation and by the destructive effects of the long trajectory of indentureship to thinking about affect and the tender relations men pursue within the constraints of class and the hardships of immigration. Set against the backdrop of hegemonic constructions of Caribbean masculinity, the turn that Baksh takes to looking at the more recent cultural productions of Indo- Caribbean men provides important contrasts to what was offered a generation or more ago by writers such as Seepersad Naipaul, Samuel Selvon and V.S. Naipaul. The insights that Baksh offers on the complexities of negotiating masculinity, Indianness and working-class status are as relevant to the region as to the multiple second sites of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. In the wedding of visual and written narratives in Baksh’s essay and in Otto’s, this issue of JWIL also contributes to a capacious conception of the literary to better understand the terrain that Caribbean cultural producers negotiate and translate in their work.