Historical Thought and Literary Representation in West Indian Literature (review)

Historical Thought and Literary Representation in West Indian Literature, by Nana Wilson-Tagoe. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1998. 328 pp. ISBN 0-8130-1582-0.

If there is one defining feature of Caribbean societies, it is the fact that they are inescapably historical. They were created as a consequence of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World in 1492. History further intervenes in their evolution with the extermination of the indigenous population and the repopulation of the region by diverse ethnic groups brought in as cheap labor to work the sugar cane plantations. Nana Wilson-Tagoe is acutely aware of this reality in her insightful work Historical Thought and Literary Representation in West Indian Literature, which tackles one of the major themes in Caribbean literature. She is not the first to do so, but the nature of her focus makes her study far more useful today than earlier attempts to tackle similar issues in West Indian literature such as Kenneth Ramchand's The West Indian Novel and Its Background. It is closer in approach to more recent critical studies such as Simon Gikandi's Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature and Barbara Webb's History and Myth in Caribbean Fiction, both of which appeared in 1992. Her study also shares some of the weaknesses and strengths of Gikandi's and Webb's work in that they both point the way to a full-blown treatment of comparative Caribbean literature but remain hobbled by geographical or technical constraints.

Despite the intrusion of history in the Caribbean, there has been an understandable disquiet among both creative writers and historians as to the nature of this history. Wilson-Tagoe laments the fact that the "literal-minded historian" condemns the region to an historical limbo because of the lack of a past grandeur or because of what Derek Walcott terms "an absence of ruins." This is where the creative imagination comes in and in this regard her heart belongs to Wilson Harris whose 1970 declaration that a philosophy of history for the region must lie in "the arts of the imagination" echoes throughout this work. This book can, therefore, be seen as a clash between the literal, linear historians and the creative writers who transcend the unrelieved gloom of the region's traditional historiography.

In order to demonstrate the power of the literary imagination, Wilson-Tagoe often usefully resorts to modern literary theory, which allows her to argue that the literary text is not simply an adjunct to historical or social reality but is capable of altering our perception of reality. The creative imagination's ability to move beyond a "cloying material time" is the main subject of the chapter "The Critical Context," which is at the heart of the book's hypothesis. However, the argumentation here falls short of a similar introduction in Gikandi's Writing in Limbo in which he very lucidly discusses the issue of "historical anxiety and ambivalence." Indeed, there is too little reference in Wilson-Tagoe's study to the most interesting recent theoretical work on Caribbean literature such as Edouard Glissant's Caribbean Discourse or Antonio Benítez-Rojo's The Repeating Island. Both these works could have taken the aesthetic and ideological relations between Caribbean literature and modernism much further in terms of describing the profoundly subversive and counterdiscursive strategies that Caribbean writing can deploy in order to wrest the region free from the "cloyingly materialist" perspective that Wilson-Tagoe quite rightly criticizes. Indeed after raising some fascinating issues in the first seven pages of her introduction, she devotes the next half of this chapter to summarizing the rest of the book. This smacks of the original thesis that should have been even further revised before publication.

The fact that the thesis was done in the anglophone Caribbean does also have a restrictive effect on the book's intellectual reach. Not only is the corpus of texts selected...