Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing (review)

Very much in the spirit of her study of African Caribbean writing, Catherine A. John ends her introduction with a section of Bob Marley’s “Rastaman Chant.” Her invocation of Marley as she effectively commences her scholarly work—as does her “Jah bless!” at the conclusion of the acknowledgements—tells us much about where we are. Where we are is, in part, in a critique of the “linearity” of traditional western thought supplanted by Africanist linguistic, historical and critical discourse, but largely in a critical examination of certain African Caribbean writers with respect to one of the major terms in the subtitle: folk groundings. These “groundings” in the “folk” are expressed through culture, through the language, rhythms, dances, shouts and music of the historic Black experience and are the means to the reclamation and reassertion of Black consciousness in the diaspora. For Black consciousness is, as developed here, ontological, immanent in the dances, shouts and language. If this is a risky position, she defends it well.

Where we are, then, is with a vigorous, almost always lucid voice and the kind of impeccable scholarship that yields a ten page bibliography for the 209 pages of text. Organized from the theoretical to the textual, the introduction explores the “alternate consciousness” from several theoretical frames, building her case for the ontological in, at times, almost prosecutorial mode by dismantling the critiques of negritude by, for instance, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy and countering with Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor. Consequently, her introduction is a natural passage indeed to her first chapter and its subject, Paris, 1956, and the groundbreaking First International Conference of Negro Artists and Writers. Her command of the issues that dominated that conference and the debates that would have far reaching ideological effects is, at times, breathtaking. She works handily in French and easily in the literary and theoretical backgrounds, both Caribbean and African, although at moments seemed hasty in her judgments and stingy with contextualizing: Jacques Alexis is dismissed at one point as “employing Western definitions” (36), and she makes no effort here to, however briefly, examine how a Haitian at mid-century might have special concerns. Historians of the Caribbean warn us—wisely—to particularize. To what degree the debates at the 1956 conference were driven by national and, yes, cultural and historical differences, is eclipsed by an undeniably well crafted account of the ideological differences only.

Chapter two, as its title “Colonial Legacies, Gender Identity and Black Female Writing in the Diaspora” suggests, connects to certain of the issues of the cultural debates of the 1956 conference. Her examination of the texts of such Black female writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Merle Hodge and Erna Brodber focuses on their often parallel arguments and representations that gender identity must be formed by African rather than European stereotypes, that language, sexual behavior and even dress are markers determining this identity especially in the colonial situation. It is at the end of this chapter that Professor John defines the role of the “diaspora scholar and critic” which is “. . . to build on these implicit conversations across space and time, with an eye to creating an alternate canon of literacy as root and foundation for new and evolving Pan-African diaspora identities” (73). What is admirable here and invigorating is the articulation of a sense of purpose that is essential to her idea of scholarship and criticism. This is also very much a piece of the earlier theoretical chapters, especially her account of the work of Diop and Ba, and their projects of linguistic and cultural restoration. The daunting phrase, however, is “across space and time” and how to theorize this without blurring it.

Chapter three, “Negritude and Negativity: Alienation and ‘Voice’ in Eastern Caribbean Literature,” begins with an epigraph from an interview with the Trinidadian novelist Earl Lovelace. Choosing wisely the definition of negritude as a “concrete coming to consciousness,” Professor John focuses on...