Preface: The Paradox of Beginnings

I begin here again, begin until this ocean’s a shut book, and, like a bulb the white moon’s filaments wane

—Derek Walcott, Another Life

The miracle of Small Axe, if I may be permitted to call it that, has very much to do with its willing proximity—its candid openness—to the problem of beginnings.¹ Perhaps time—more time—will alter this relationship. I don’t know. But such as we have been up until now as a Caribbean platform for criticism, we have been obliged, and indeed have obliged ourselves, to think self-consciously and reiteratively about beginnings, about the curious, puzzling ways in which, as idea and as activity, beginnings always constitute a sort of paradox: a point of departure that—simultaneously—affirms and disavows, acknowledges and displaces, creates and repeats. Such I suppose is the fertility and ambiguity of beginnings. And when in the itinerant years of the mid- to late 1990s (returning to think about the Caribbean from a decade’s work on Sri Lanka, and returning to the University of the West Indies from teaching at the University of Chicago), I initiated the Small Axe Project in collaboration with a number of colleagues, the question of beginnings was very much on my mind. What did an undertaking such as inaugurating a journal of criticism consist of? What did it entail as an intellectual as well as a practical matter? What did it imply regarding our attitude toward the received state of knowledges from and about the Caribbean? If beginnings always presuppose prior beginnings, how were we to mark our departures from, as well as our continuities with, these former—formative—beginnings? How were we to establish a freeing independence from these pasts, our inheritances, which could nevertheless constitute an agonistic, quarrelsome recognition of our continuous debt to them?

To be sure, I don’t mean to suggest here that there is any novelty in this attitude toward beginnings. Readers of the late Edward Said will no doubt remember the seminal book in which he takes up precisely this theme of the relationship of criticism (or of writing, more generally) to the idea of beginnings.² For Said, the problem of beginnings was of central—indeed of animating—concern to the proper practice of criticism. This is because beginnings (“a general term covering a large variety of scattered occasions”³) condense a number of intersecting issues, values, and concepts—among them language, creativity, intention, authority, style, authenticity, mimesis, time, conjuncture, and so on. Beginnings imply undertaking, entering a field, intervention, and therefore the self-conscious, reflective marking of a difference. Beginnings are enabling: they are creative and critical; they open up cognitive space. So that for Said, famously, there was an important distinction to be drawn between the concern with “beginnings” and the concern with “origins,” the former, in contrast with the latter, being an always situated, and therefore historicizable, activity. But beginnings are also recursive, conserving, connected to the pasts from which they take their leave and measure their distance. Capturing the essential paradox, Said offered the view that beginning “ultimately implies return and repetition rather than simple linear accomplishment”; a beginning “not only creates but is its own method because it has intention. In short, beginning is making or producing difference; but—and here is the great fascination in the subject—difference which is the result of combining the already-familiar with the fertile novelty of human work in language.”⁴

I have always thought of Small Axe as a beginning that stands in relation to two prior beginnings, earlier moments of intellectual work in and on the Anglo-Creole Caribbean, moments that I count as founding for my own intellectual formation: the moment of New World Quarterly in the 1960s; and the moment of Savacou in the 1970s. To my mind, these are the two great independent journals of the post-independence Anglo-Creole Caribbean, and thinking about their emergence—and their passing—is indispensable for understanding the distinctiveness of the moment of departure of Small Axe.

The historical-ideological moment of New World Quarterly was that of the final...