Pastoral Diaspora

Page 5 July–August 2008 Pastoral Diaspora Danielle D. smith The pastoral, a form of writing traditionally concerned with cultivated rural landscapes and the farmers and shepherds who inhabit them, is often considered infertile terrain for scholars of postcolonialism , diaspora studies, and ecocriticism. Seen as harboring politically and aesthetically conservative projects, the pastoral has received little critical attention as a vehicle for the dynamic expression of tensions between displacement and emplacement in the diasporic experiences of people across the New World. Sarah Phillips Casteel’s reassessment of the pastoral for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (this literary mode dates back to the bucolic poetry of third-century BCE Greece) challenges dominant assumptions in the academy concerning the role of place in the diasporic imagination. While contemporary theoretical approaches to the study of diaspora eschew fixed spaces in favor of transitory ones and rural spaces for urban ones, Casteel maintains that rural and wilderness spaces serve a broad crosssection of ideological and cultural programs and are themselves sites in which myths of origins are challenged and identities are reimagined. The “second arrival” of the book’s title—a term Casteel borrows from V. S. Naipaul’s novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987)—refers to the diasporic subject’s move to the countryside following an earlier arrival in the metropolis. The second arrival also involves another more elusive shift: it is the “second look” at the past and the present, which leads to “a new way of seeing as a result.” In light of the work of cultural geographers such as Denis Cosgrove, Casteel stresses the complexity of the process of seeing and representing landscape as a socially and historically mediated act, as a series of inherited “landscape ideas.” The pastoral mode comprises both written and visual media, both traditionally and in Casteel’s corpus. In chapter 1, “V. S. Naipaul’s and Derek Walcott ’s Postcolonial Pastorals,” for instance, Casteel examines the influence of real and painted European landscapes on Anglophone Caribbean writers. The works she discusses, Naipaul’s The Enigma ofArrival and Walcott’s book-length poem Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), are both set in Europe, in Wiltshire, England, and Pontoise, France, respectively. On the outside, both works appear to follow the time-honored tradition of the pastoral, but from within the quaint, rural European settings, Casteel demonstrates, there emerges an incisive critique of the legacy of colonialism through the reverse migration experience of the postcolonial subject. Both works confront iconic images and received ideas about Europe and the Caribbean with a distinct reality that ultimately becomes a “second look.” The final chapter of Second Arrivals, “Landscape and Indigeneity in the Installation Art of Isaac Julien and Jin-me Yoon,” as its title indicates, focuses exclusively on the visual realm of landscape, building upon the written manifestations of belonging in the New World analyzed by Casteel in previous chapters. In the case of these Gyssels continued from previous page is an Indies which finishes when reality brushes its arduous hair; a land of dream. / It accepts what comes, suffering or joy, which is multiplicitous on the clay….” What reading Glissant in English will help bring to light is his perfect “understanding” of and “convergence” with another major voice in the Anglophone Caribbean, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. In his Nobel lecture as well as in several interviews, the Saint Lucian poet recognizes his debt to other writers, notably the French Caribbean poets who preceded him in rendering Caribbeanness, in translating into literary form what it means to belong to the particular time and place that is the Caribbean archipelago. What these two poets also share is a sincere fascination with another poet raised in the French Antilles and whom they both deeply admire: Saint-John Perse (himself awarded the Nobel in Literature in 1960), a Creole born of French planters in Guadeloupe. Indeed, as strange echoes of Walcott ring out in Glissant’s work, the reader comes to realize to what extent language frontiers can impact reception, and obscure intimate connections and close relationships between Caribbean writers. Omeros (1990)—a work that corresponds to Glissant’s own endeavors to write “an epic of the dispossessed” (to use Robert Hammer ’s...