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15. The Facetiness Factor: Theorizing Caribbean Space in Narrative
- The University of Alabama Press
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15 The facetiness factor Theorizing Caribbean space in narrative Barbara Lalla If poetics refers to patterns defining a literature and its regulating laws, how should we theorize poetics for a literature that defines itself (at least in part) in terms of its contempt for regulation? This question probes a crucial discursive dimension of our literature: namely, how our writers position themselves in relation to their topics, and how they seem to negotiate their stance toward established conventions and rules. In this chapter, I propose to examine what many of us term facetiness as an essential attitudinal position in Caribbean literary discourse. The Jamaican term,facetiness, expresses a deep-in-the-bone sense of self that vividly resists any outside inducements to conform because conformity is felt to require a denial of the self. refusing conformity (especially metropolitan sanctities) needs forcefulness, and sometimes force. so to assert this strategic approach is to claim that Caribbean discourse operates from a position of bold impudence, of barefaced, brazen, and (if it comes to that) rude self-assertion.1 Perhaps because Caribbean literary discourse carries so close to the surface its lived,living,oral-aural energy and memory,and also because its voices could not be heard unless they insisted, and, most of all, because this discourse assimilates and assaults the other metropolitan discourse in order to free itself, facetiness becomes a fundamental necessity—in a sense, a genetic marker. Whether the voice is that of louise bennett insisting on a Creole poetics freed from all regulation, or of stylists such as Walcott who challenge metropolitan norms both from within and from without, mocking their medium while making it into a multiplicity of voices, the pressure of nonconformity thrusts at the surfaces of seeming conformity, as in Walcott’s sonnets: “Poopa, da’ was a fete! I mean it had / free rum free whisky and some fellars beating / Pan . . . while he drunk quoting shelley with “‘each / Generation has its angst.’”2 facetiness defies, and it subverts with mockery—most of all, through constant challenge to rules. of mixed etymological origin, Jamaican Creole The facetiness factor / 233 facety may derive partly from archaic english face, meaning “effrontery, cheekiness , or boldness,”but it also is related to a surinam Creole term: fiesti sounds exactly like the Jamaican term but means “dirty, nasty.”3 Indeed, facetiness includes an element of optional mud-slinging in its refusal to stay within prescribed limits of language or worldview. It asserts the right of the speaker to her own vision and aggressively defies any who would convert, avert, or subvert that vision.And,as we have seen,the unique vision arises in its own words: change them,and the new world dies.It is this sense in which resistance means life, and accommodation means suffocation unto death, that drives so many Caribbean voices. facetiness may be expressed through all sorts of behavior (in actions such as suck-teet, backanswer, and butt in), but facetiness may also infuse particular types of discourse like robber Talk (discussed later).This dynamic has implications for our understanding of Caribbean space because facetiness entails a refusal to be contained. for sheer facetiness, consider nalo hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, which takes over Toronto and locates its villain, rudy (what else could he be named?)4 who “a run tings”from the Cn Tower. hopkinson follows that with Midnight Robber, which, in the words of elizabeth boyle, “projects the black Atlantic into cyberspace.”5 one is prompted to ask:What next? or rather,where next? nalo hopkinson’s speculative fiction reconceives Caribbean space in projecting the futuristic setting of her novels on an alternative world that ironically mirrors our present and our past. she appropriates and transforms space in conceiving a technology woven from our folklore and displaying a matrix of oppressive forces only too similar to those of our own world. In both novels, for the survival of her self,the female protagonist must destroy an overwhelmingly powerful paternal exploiter who both intrudes and confines. The attitudinal orientation of characters, narrators, and author begs investigation. now any discourse is defined by its speakers’ position in relation to what is said, whether this orientation depends on a physical or a mental viewing position ,and the latter (conceptual perspective) includes attitudinal positioning.6 It is,therefore,within a theoretical framework for considering attitudinal perspective in narrative that I propose to examine attitudes that govern some conceptions of Caribbean space, particularly by reference to nalo hopkinson’s Midnight...