Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zone

2. Reimagining the Caribbean: Seeing, Reading, Thinking

2 Reimagining the Caribbean Seeing, Reading, Thinking On another of those journeys loaded with personal and epic meaning for me, from Grenada to Carriacou, deliberately recapturing lost personal history, I retrace the journey that Avey makes in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983). On the way, I learn from a feisty Jamaican writer that the turbulence one experiences, and to which Marshall gives epic meaning, is actually the result of volcanic action that is producing another island (affectionately called “Kick ’em Jenny”). In the middle of the Caribbean Sea, I peer into the distance, trying to imagine where this island would come up. But it is a rainy and cloudy day, and in the misty, foamy gray-white distance there are a number of smaller island shapes, and even my “resident seer” for the moment is not sure but had located somewhere in the distance the general area of this new activity. A few baby island forms appear, and I am not sure what I am supposed to see anymore except that the whole seascape is awe inspiring. Around me, formidable, self-possessed, otherwise glamorous colleagues, fellow travelers, are falling into the throes of that seasickness that Marshall describes. In my own preseasickness moments, the entire experience appears as a moment out of some powerful creation myth. The myth collapses into the reality. The Caribbean, in my vision, is a place of constant new birth, consistent destruction and regeneration, tearing down and making over, an ongoing site of transformation. A related memory surfaces: As a little girl growing up in Trinidad, my sense of island security shifted radically when it was announced that another island had come up off the east coast of Trinidad. In my otherwise secure dual-island 34 . chapter 2 national identity of Trinidad and Tobago, this new presence had many meanings . In the late 1950s, we had witnessed a time of epic transformation, the beginning of the end of colonialism, a failed West Indian federation in 1958, ending the decade with the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Talk of a would-be three-island link with Grenada seemed to accompany a ridiculous “send them back home” deportation of illegal “small(er) islanders” narrative. Newspaper photographs presented what seemed to be a baby ghost island, actually the result of volcanic activity, a muddy, squelchy, furrowed landmass, like other newborns covered with the residues of water and grime, giving off a sense of not being sure where it belonged. Creation in my understanding, then, is never a once-and-over seven-day mythic event, but is an ongoing, active creative process. So, certainly, a few intrepid souls would attempt to claim this new island, plant their own flags, but as easily as it came up, the would-be island submerged to where it was before, as if not quite ready to be. This memory has always remained with me fundamentally. It has taught me that island space, indeed human land space, is always unstable, fragile, always in the process of creation, subject to the motion of elements, violent storms, and natural movements of the earth. But always what remains constant is the possibility of new creation, transformation. In this meditation, I want to contemplate three frames of engagement in an exercise of seeing, reading, imagining, outside of the parameters we have been given, outside of the boundaries we assume, outside of the definitions we take as normative. Here theory and creativity will be allowed to collapse and collide. From naming to the specifics of physical reality, the contemporary Caribbean has been produced through numerous historical processes, ranging from genocide, enslavement and traffic in human bodies, ecological degradation , and exploitation of natural resources to colonialism, imperialism, and economic globalization. We already know that the term West Indian is a misnomer produced by Columbian error and reproduced continuously even by those misnamed themselves, a concept that needs to be consistently troubled. The gap between tourist constructions or outside media presentations and lived reality also remains. Caribbean culture, then, has been produced in spite of and often in response to these, as a way of writing oneself out of these various enslavements, through pathways for the reclaiming of the imagination. The path through popular education to the creation of a specific Caribbean subjectivity and seeing, reading, thinking · 35 a concomitant literary tradition has been well documented by Caribbean scholars. But what of all the other creative pathways? In...