Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity (review)

Creole. Kreyol. The term is as likely to send people into postures of counter-hegemonic defiance, or paroxysms of pleasure and nostalgia (the married woman’s scarf tied just so in the “good old days,” food prepared with all the “authentic ingredients” “back home” or in a space which has been culturally compromised: “comida criolla” rather than “yanqui,” as a friend who has just returned from Puerto Rico puts it). Or even disgust. Recently I heard a university lecturer from the Caribbean scoffing at the term’s popularity, with a not-so-veiled dig at North American and European academic investment in the term: “If mixture is a condition of the human experience globally,” she asked, “why is it exoticized with reference to the Caribbean?” It is certainly true that North America and Mauritius, for example, have claims on the experiences designated by the term. Perhaps there is also an impatience here with the ways in which the region’s tourist brochures have solidified stereotypes about servitude and sexuality by appealing to cultural and racial combinations which are supposedly nowhere else to be found.

Geographical location is helpful here. It is surely no accident that the derisive comments above came from a Jamaican, since there, as in other anglophone countries, the term seems to be used in the late 20th century merely to refer to the name of a language (as in “Jamaican Creole”) and even then finds itself competing with the more common designation, “patwa/patois.” In other countries in the region (including those such as Trinidad, St. Lucia and Dominica which are “anglophone” but have significant historical and cultural francophone affinities), the term continues to have currency as a marker of authenticity—origin, experience, physiognomy, linguistic or culinary abilities—legislating insider versus outsider.

Yet the fact that this particular term is not used in this or that territory says nothing of the experience being accounted for: creolization has as many names as we need to give it. The editors of Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity have given us a useful range of geographical and cultural resources to draw on. It is wonderful to see the too-often neglected Curaçao and Suriname represented here, in the contributions by Frank Martinus and Astrid Roemer, respectively, as well as Panama, and the Garifuna of Honduras, in Carlos Guillermo Wilson’s contribution. In addition, Sherezada (Chiqui) Vicioso’s piece reminds us that Spanglish, travel and memory facilitate the continual re-positioning of Caribbean borders in New York and elsewhere, continuing to give vitality to the concept of creolization.

Those with an interest in the region generally, then, will find this volume useful, and specialists on the Caribbean and teachers in the undergraduate and postgraduate classroom particularly so. A word about availability: I assigned it this past spring, and I was embarrassed to have my students pay the fifty dollars (US) being asked for the hard cover edition. The soft cover edition is only available in the Caribbean (for the equivalent of US $25) and may be purchased only by someone residing there. While the collaboration between Caribbean and US presses is of course welcome, and has the effect of making books available more cheaply to readers living in the Caribbean, these prices still seem exorbitant.

In their “Preface” the editors state their intention of countering the tendency to concentrate on the “critical or theoretical work of a few writers from the same linguistic and cultural Caribbean affiliations,” by bringing together prominent writers from all over the Caribbean “whose literary corpus has represented their insights into the process of creolization,” but who are presenting here not “fiction, poetry, or plays but a series of reflections on the cultural dynamics of language and literature” and their “interrelation” in the Caribbean context (vii). The contributors, then, were born, and in some...