Recrossing the Sargasso Sea: Trauma, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and His Critics

In an oft-cited passage in his 1974 monograph Contradictory Omens, Edward Kamau Brathwaite declares that white creoles have forfeited their claim to the spiritual life of the Caribbean. Whether intended or not, his pronouncement raised doubts about the standing of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) in the Caribbean canon. Brathwaite brought discomfiting attention to his own “black West Indian” identity (38) as well as the identities of Rhys and several prominent scholars who had written about the novel. The dialogues of misrecognition that have characterized several of the more notable exchanges between Brathwaite and his principal critic, Peter Hulme, illustrate the need for a reading practice for Caribbean trauma texts that recognizes, as Cathy Caruth has argued, that authors and critics are implicated in one another’s histories. The need for such recognition is particularly urgent in the case of critics who see themselves connected to the historical traumas staged in the texts they investigate. Rather than following the model of canonical European trauma texts, especially Holocaust accounts, in which perpetrators and victims are opposed in both individual and collective binaries, Caribbean texts offer more complex sites for the study of trauma literature. Victims may be identified with groups that have perpetrated pervasive cultural trauma and perpetrators of psychological trauma may belong to groups of the dispossessed. These crosscurrents provide highly productive grounds for deepening our understanding of readers’ and critics’ responses to trauma texts and to one another.