ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: EL DORADO: THE NEW QUEST FOR CARIBBEAN UNITY Tanya Liesel Shields, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Directed By: Professor Merle Collins, Comparative Literature Program El Dorado the gilded man or golden city has always signified the deferred and colonial quest for a New World paradise. It has led explorers, conquistadors, and those they enslaved on fabulous journeys of misinterpretation and trickery. Global reconfigurations in politics, culture and economics generated by globalization on the physical and psychological infrastructures of poor places, has the Caribbean searching for a redefined El Dorado. Through the medium of literature, this new El Dorado has the potential to fulfill the promise of Caribbean unity, inherent in its geography and history, by subsuming national interests to regional ones. This dissertation fuses the concerns of globalization, postmodernism and citizenship into the Amerindian Postmodern, a term coined by me, and a framing, largely influenced by the philosophical work of Wilson Harris. I argue that using an Amerindian postmodernist approach in regional literature allows a crossing of linguistic, geographic, nationalistic, and economic barriers not addressed by political attempts at integration. Art, as a mediator, has the power to shift consciousness and its political power is demonstrated in various liberation struggles and by governmental attempts to repress and restrict how art is created and used. Art culls fact from fiction and desire from apathy, whether the authors’ are deliberately part of the process or not. The Introduction and Chapter One articulate and illustrate Amerindian postmodernism at its most theoretical. These chapters outline the basic tenets of this idea for ex ploring questions of identity and resource sharing. Chapter Two investigates the role and status of women using a lens, I call the Sycorax Model, which emerges from postcolonial discourse via relationships expressed in Shakespeare’s The Tempest . Examining how women use, abuse and transform their muted and stated powers for the benefits of their communities is imperative. Chapter Three examines the Haitian Revolution, as represented in various texts, as one moment during which black people asserted their humanity and the contradictions such a claim engendered. Chapter Four explores how various theatrical forms and festivals concretize the positive ideas of regional nation building and Amerindian postmodernism. In effect, this project argues that a regional Caribbean nation is a good and necessary thing for Caribbean survival and a process through which the cultural arts will help us navigate. It is the region’s new quest for paradise, with the understanding that paradise is a process rather than a final destination. EL DORADO: THE NEW QUEST FOR CARIBBEAN UNITY By Tanya Liesel Shields Thesis or Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2005 Advisory Committee: Professor Merle Collins, Chair Professor A. Lynn Bolles Dr. Dorith Grant-Wisdom Dr. Carlos Schröder Professor Barry Pearson © Copyright by Tanya Liesel Shields 2005 Dedication For M.E. ii Acknowledgements June, Aubrey, Shirley, Keith, Hazel, Phillip, Anthony, Shereen, Agatha, Norbert, Taiwo, Tracy, Twanna, Twain, Tiffany, Renee, Sheena, Tanya, Jamal, Nasir, Alaysia, Jesse, Bernice, Elvis, Stephan, Rondell, DeTannyia, Carolyn, Courtland, Logan, Will, Sasha, Joe, Charlene, Richelle, Ming, Gia, Audrey, Nikolas, Alphonso, Steve, David, Belinda, April, Stan, Carlos, Bob, Shelly, Steve, Yasmine, Kayla, James, Jason, Sandy, Linden, Sandra, Kimberley, Kenyatta, Seth, Randi, Merle, Lynn, Dorith, PatriciaCameron, Tanya, Virginia, Louise, the Shields family, and you. Thanks to all of you—I am. iii Table of Contents Dedication........................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledge ments ............................................................................................................iii el dorado: the new quest for caribbean unity ..................................................................... 1 at the edge of hope ............................................................................................................ 73 soulsister sycorax............................................................................................................ 126 infinite rehearsal............................................................................................................. 180 masquerade: total ritual theatre ..................................................................................... 239 conclusion: c’est fini! ...................................................................................................... 291 bibliography.................................................................................................................... 297 iv el dorado: the new quest for caribbean unity “We were scatt ered like grains of sand, and the bosses walked on that sand. But when we realized that we were all alike, …we got together for the huegla (strike)…” -- Jacques Roumain 1 Haitian writer Jacques Roumain reinforces the idea of coumbite , or collective action, in his 1944 masterpiece Masters of the Dew . A coumbite is an agricultural effort in which neighbors collectively work together. 2 The idea of belonging to land and to a community that works the land is integral in the construction of coumbite . Besides belonging, the idea of communion—coming together as a connected whole, a community —is an urgent call in Roumain’s text as peasants realize their salvation will emerge from working together. Though Masters of the Dew romanticizes the peasant, it is Roumain ’s articulation of citizenship, awareness and action that are most meaningful for my project, which advocates integration.3 In the early weeks of September 2004, coumbite manifested as neighbors all across the Caribbean and Caribbean transnationals around the world, rushed to help islands decimated by a series of deadly and devastating hurricanes. Earlier in the year, during Haiti’s thirty -third coup, Jamaica provided sanctuary for Haitian refugees and, for a time, exiled president Jean Bertrand Aristide. These expressions of coumbite demonstrate the continued sense of belonging and attempts at building community across linguistic and physical boundaries. Ultimately, the case can be made that these ideas of community and becoming a regional citizen will undergird the Caribbean quest for El Dorado in the twenty -first century. 1 El Dorado, the fabled golden destination, has been a myth associated with the Americas, particularly the Guianas and northwestern regions of South America (Venezuela and Columbia). 4 Exploration stories, with El Dorado as beacon, abound in the quest to tame the Americas. Jane M. Loy suggests that El Dorado was a confluence of American legends and reality. First thought to be a man, the gilded one, then a land in which Indians posse ssed “hordes of gold,” to a “land of marvelous riches,” to the current quest for timber and petroleum profits, this myth has been part of the “leit motif of the history” of the region.5 For Wilson Harris, El Dorado is a moving space, just always out of re ach,6 while V.S. Naipaul characterizes this moving space as another symbol of loss – often of history and people —that he examines in his book, The Loss of El Dorado. Nonetheless, the most consistent and coherent myth has been that of the city, Manoa, paved with gold, whose wealthy inhabitants are coated in that mineral. Sir Walter Raleigh’s account, perhaps the most famous one in the English - speaking Caribbean, locates El Dorado in Parima Lake in Guiana: Many years since I had knowledge, by relation, of that mighty, rich, and beautiful empire of Guiana, and of that great and golden city, which the Spaniards call El Dorado, and the naturals Manoa, which city was conquered, re -edified, and enlarged.7 In the Spanish -speaking Americas, Eduardo Galeano recounts the stories of many explorers from Raleigh and Gonzalo Pizarro to Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada: They crossed swamps and lands that steamed in the sun. When they reached the banks of the river, not one of the thousands of naked Indians who were brought along to carry the guns and bread and salt remained alive…The hunger was worse than the crocodiles, snakes, and mosquitoes…they quarreled over the flesh of any man who fell, before the priest had even finished giving him passage to 2 Paradise…El Dorado must be on the other side of the mountains, …not the river’s source. So they walked across the mountains. 8 The stories of Raleigh, Pizarro, and de Quesada are tales told by plunderers and prospective plunderers whose pioneering efforts laid the psychological and p hysical foundations for continuous incursions into the region not only for profit at all costs but also for paradise. Yet, this idea was also used as a repellant, or certainly a detour, by indigenous peoples. El Dorado, emerging from stories of the Music a peoples of Columbia and their gold dust ceremonies has also been a story of native resistance through deferral. Indigenous people would repeatedly tell Europeans that El Dorado was just ahead, over the horizon, the ridge, river, or mountain, “Always the Indians told of a rich and civilized people just a few days’ march away.”9 These El Dorado stories illustrate