Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation

2. Caribbean Space: Lamming, Naipaul, and Federation

c h a p t e r t w o Caribbean Space Lamming, Naipaul, and Federation Space, Nation, Exile Any account of West Indian literature seems to have at its core the question of exile. This is in part because discussions of Caribbean literature have centered to a very large degree on the major writers of the ‘‘boom’’ period of the 1950s and 1960s, the majority of whom spent these decades in England in a condition of self-imposed exile. During this time influential writers such as George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Braithwaite, among others, first emerged, and around these figures both the English Caribbean literary canon and critical approaches to Caribbean literature have been constructed ever since. The identification of the themes and characteristic concerns of the writers of the 1950s and 1960s with Caribbean literature as such understandably has its limitations. Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh are right to point out that a sense of what constitutes Caribbean literature that is based solely on the work of these writers is ‘‘limited both in its narrow historical range and in its male and African-Caribbean bias.’’∞ In this chapter I will be concerned almost entirely with an examination of 66 Zones of Instability specific works by two of these boom writers—Lamming’s ‘‘The Occasion for Speaking’’ and The Emigrants and Naipaul’s The Middle Passage—as well as a brief discussion of C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary, written during the boom by a writer who first came to prominence in the 1930s. It is important to make clear at the outset that my analysis of these works is not intended to produce some general theory of Caribbean literature. It is not my intention or my desire here to make a claim about the thematic or formal characteristics of these particular texts that make them representative of West Indian literature as a whole. On the contrary, my interest in these writers and these particular works grows out the fact that I find them to be atypical of the literature of the 1950s and 1960s. As might be expected given my choice of these texts, they are atypical in a way that will allow me to flesh out some of the theoretical issues concerning national literature introduced in Chapter One. Taken together, these works—a critical essay, a novel, a travelogue, and a cultural history-memoir—exhibit a number of different strategies for explicitly ‘‘textualizing’’ space, that is, for representing or otherwise dealing with space within the text as an issue for the text. They do so with an explicit political end in mind. Writing at a moment of incredible social transformation—the end of colonialism, the rapid encroachment of modernity and modernization in the West Indies, the growing promise of national sovereignty—these texts constitute attempts to map the present and the future for the West Indies. In the literature of this period a concern with space is inevitably linked to the nation and to the creation of a national space. In The Emigrants, Lamming undertakes an experiment in the creation of the spatial conditions necessary for the nation, while Naipaul’s The Middle Passage is one long howl about the nation’s impossibility in the West Indies. By suggesting that these works are atypical, I do not mean to give the impression that there are no other novels of the period that are not in some way concerned with the nation. It is in fact common to characterize this boom period of Caribbean writing with a general pronationalist stance that continues the political work initiated by the writers of the 1930s (such as Albert Gomes, C. L. R. James, and Alfred Mendes) and following World War II by the ‘‘little magazines’’ Bim, Focus, and Kyk-over-al.≤ In the aftermath of the failed West Indies Federation and the achievement of political independence by the major islands in the 1960s, writers working after the 1960s are seen either as no longer motivated by nationalism or as ambivalent about the results of these earlier national literary projects. It is possible, of course, to locate in any work of literature some indication of the national situation by pointing as much to what is Lamming, Naipaul, and Federation 67 said as to what is left unsaid, as Stefano Harney does in his examination of Trinidadian literature in...