Discrepant Affinities in Caribbean Poetry: Tradition and Demotic Modernism

To properly situate the contributions of Lee Jenkins's The Language of Caribbean Poetry: Boundaries of Expression, one must first turn an eye onto three earlier books in the field of Caribbean studies. These books recognize a commonality in poetry across the region but give different accounts as to what it is based upon, and how it might be specified. J. Edward Chamberlin's Come Back to Me My Language (1993) places Caribbean verbal art within the history of black slavery and its colonial aftermath; his is a comprehensive effort to demonstrate the achievement of the poetry, as it shapes and participates in a social movement out of "four hundred years of colonial conditioning" toward the "spirit of liberation and independence."¹ This movement fundamentally involves a struggle with language to win possession of it from colonial dictates—a decolonization of English that links Caribbean poetry to that of other parts of the Anglophone world such as, conspicuously, Ireland and Australia. Following up on Chamberlin's thunderclap, Laurence Breiner submitted a more systematic study of the ideas that shaped literary culture in the West Indies through the early 1990s: An Introduction to West Indian Poetry (1998) provides a history of aesthetic and other questions that poets addressed, literary developments elsewhere in the Caribbean, the European, African, and American factors in West Indian poetry.² A new sophistication arrives with Charles Pollard's New World Modernisms (2004). More narrowly focused than the others—it is about Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott—this book is also more lateral in its fraternity, delving theoretically into modernism and postcolonialism to rediscover T. S. Eliot for Caribbean aesthetics. Pollard takes bearings from Edouard Glissant's understanding of créolité and the poetics of relation, and from James Clifford's influential idea of "discrepant cosmopolitanisms."³ He replaces the Eliot currently under censure in the U.S. academy with one that, surprisingly, offered paradigms—in his poetry and criticism—that Brathwaite and Walcott could build from in writing Caribbean experience: these poets "create modernisms that augment, rival, and complement [Eliot's] European modernism" (9).

Set beside these studies, each with a clarifying point of view and methodology, one peruses The Language of Caribbean Poetry with a measure of disappointment. Published in 2004, the year of Pollard's study, this book likewise takes the modernism of Caribbean poetry as its central thesis. Additionally, it is Eliot who represents modernism here. Both in regard to his innovative poetry and his invention of Tradition, Eliot is the ineluctable referent for the case being made, that Caribbean poetry should be set within a wider horizon than the precincts of the postcolonial. Much of what Jenkins proposes resembles Pollard's argument, but without the theoretical inquiry and the sense of distinctions and specificity that he brings to the subject. Jenkins builds upon Chamberlin's critical grasp of the problematic legacy of colonial English that Caribbean poets in time break free from to win possession of their own tongue. Taking guidance from sociolinguistics and Brathwaite's History of the Voice, The Language of Caribbean Poetry explores poetry's recourse to the demotic—or vernacular, or Creole—register in speech. The demotic is more than a means. It is the cultural source of Caribbean poetry's vigor and the medium of its creative difference from metropolitan arts. But noting that the putative orality of the demotic is represented and received through writing, Jenkins is above all focused upon textual dynamics. In Chamberlin's survey, Caribbean poetry after World War II enacts the slow fashioning of an idiom from local speech, to pose and respond to questions intrinsic to the historical legacy. The lived circumstances of the writer, woven together with language, cannot be separated from the reflected past. Neither history nor theory provides Jenkins with her critical framework. Rather, she takes hold of Caribbean poetry in relation to tradition and locates its distinction in an intertextual practice that Creolizes, or revises, literary givens...