The Challenge to Center: Caribbean Literature

The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context. By J. Michael Dash. University Press of Virginia, 1998

Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation. Edited by Belinda J. Edmondson. University Press of Virginia, 1999

The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories. Edited by Stewart Brown and John Wickham. Oxford University Press, 1999

Bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women's Poetry. Edited by Karen McCarthy. The Women's Press, 1998

In a small place, people cultivate small events. The small event is isolated, blown up, turned over and over, and then absorbed into the every day, so that at any moment it can and will roll off the inhabitants of the small place's tongues. For the people in a small place, every event is a domestic event; the people in a small place cannot see themselves in a larger picture, they cannot see that they might be a part of a chain of something, anything. The people in a small place see the event in the distance heading directly towards them and they say, "I see the thing and it is heading towards me." The people in a small place then experience the event as if it were sitting on top of their heads, their shoulders, and it weighs them down, this enormous burden that is the event, so that they cannot breathe properly and they cannot think properly and they say, "This thing that was only coming towards me is now on top of me," and they live like that, until eventually they absorb the event and it becomes a part of them, a part of who and what they really are, and they are complete in that way until another event comes along and the process begins again.

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

The invocation of a lost people, of a people lost in time, of a people who "cannot give an exact account, a complete account of themselves" (53), as described in Jamaica Kincaid's polemical essay of 1988, could well describe how Caribbean people(s) have come to be situated in an academic and theoretical discourse which purports to center Caribbean culture by plumbing the literature produced by writers writing from the islands or abroad. Kincaid's essay frames this discussion of new texts that have emerged in Caribbean studies and of their role in solidifying a space for Caribbean literature with respect to the supposed linear progression of European literary studies. Indeed, there is no national literature of the Caribbean; there are national literatures. Yet the region has produced bodies of literature commensurate with each other across national and cultural lines, indeed, beyond linguistic ones as well. For this reason, Caribbean literatures can claim a unique identity: they are one yet made of many, escaping easy categorization. But, to return to Kincaid, there is a way in which the Caribbean, in academic discourse, has become part of a larger picture which Caribbean inhabitants may not claim or recognize. At issue here is the extent to which academic discourse answers to the people of the region or ignores them. If the "native" of whom Kincaid speaks is lost in time, weighed down by an event (imperialism, enslavement, colonization) "as if it were sitting on top of their heads," one is compelled to ask: to what degree does literary discourse alleviate such weights or does it add to them? I do not mean to ignore the sarcasm implicit in Kincaid's text, but beneath the humor, the sarcasm, the irony, lies the condition of people remaining colonized through institutionalized mechanisms (such as educational systems); for such people linear time does not exist simply because it repeats a past that has yet to be escaped. For all its convolutions of language and representation, Kincaid's A Small Place denounces tourism as the new enslavement of Antigua and Antiguans. Lost, then, to time, the "native" has but two choices, to acquiesce or to rebel. To what extent, then, does...