Rhys's Pieces: Unhomeliness as Arbiter of Caribbean Creolization

I

Any attempt to trace the many resonances that historically have been attached to the creole figure in Caribbean literature and culture will be inflected by the long and pervading presence of colonialism in the region and its attendant corollary of hierarchical social separation and difference based on perceptions of race. Indeed, the ambivalent desire and subjective misrecognition that lay at the heart of historical writing about colonialism and racism have tended to frame the issues of monstrosity and exclusion that produced the creole as part and parcel of wider colonial discourses. Thus, the shifting and increasingly unstable inscription of the creole figure echoes, in a certain sense, certain critical ambiguities of politics and temporality that color the colonial encounter and its aftermath. Specifically, in the contemporary English- and French-speaking Caribbean, the multiplicity, displacement, and creative instability that undergird creole-driven theories of postcolonial performance have supplanted this category's suspect beginnings as colonialism's model for the fearfully unnameable and unplaceable hybrid monstrosity, and now increasingly shape the substance of much of the artistic and creative work emerging from the region.

The French Caribbean has been the birthplace of the two dominant cultural theories promulgated in this field in recent years: antillanité, or Caribbeannness, first broached by the Martinican author and theorist Edouard Glissant in Le discours antillais in 1981, takes a geopolitical as well as a discursive approach to contesting the ongoing pattern of island dependence and metropolitan domination engendered in the French Caribbean by the now half-century-long practice of overseas departmentalism. By taking cognizance of the "multi-relation" that undergirds the region, Glissant writes, a new creative and cultural framework for Caribbean identity can be effectively constructed. In coming to terms with "the constantly shifting and variable process of creolization" in the Caribbean (15), he writes, its intrinsic doubleness will reveal "not only distress and loss but also the opportunity to assert a considerable set of possibilities. . . no longer in absolute terms but as active agents of synthesis" (16). The principles of créolité, on the other hand, were first elaborated in the Eloge de la créolité by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant in 1989; although roundly critiqued for valorizing position over process, and for sometimes broaching the slippery terrain of essentialism, it has quickly become a "literary movement [that] has been for the past ten years the only noteworthy one in the entire Caribbean," as Michael Dash recently wrote (238). Speaking in the name of the people to whom they simultaneously addressed themselves, its authors deliberately adopted the strident tones of a manifesto, or a political declaration: "We cannot reach Caribbeanness without interior vision. And interior vision is nothing without the unconditional acceptance of our creoleness. We declare ourselves Creoles. We declare that creoleness is the cement of our culture and that it ought to rule the foundations of our Caribbeanness" (87). At bottom an artistic framework that draws on linguistic, cultural, and historical patterns of pluralism within the region to express the interconnected totality of the Caribbean experience, "Créolité," as Dash continues, "is essentially a strategic defence of the ideal of diversity in a world threatened by the disappearance of cultural difference" (239). More similar than they are different, these theoretical perspectives are firmly grounded in the materiality of Caribbean historical experience.

In a certain sense, however, the importance of patterns of creole interaction as a sort of structural foundation for Caribbean societies was in fact established prior to this through the work of the Barbadian poet and historian Edward Brathwaite. In The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820, Brathwaite proposed that the principle of cultural distinctness upon which much of the historical definition of the region was drawn be abandoned in favor of an increasing recognition of the intrinsic sociocultural pluralism of the islands. This pluralism was itself predicated on the complex patterns of population displacement that were the corollary of the sugar-driven...