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7 The Testimonial Impulse Miguel Barnet and the Sistren Theatre Collective By the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new configuration of the Caribbean public sphere was beginning to be consolidated, and the literary field found itself being redefined. Chapters 7 and 8 explore two responses by Caribbean writers—the testimonial impulse and the turn to popular culture—that show how new relationships between writer and public structure this postcolonial space. Alison Donnell begins her discussion of “critical moments in anglophone literary history” with what Laurence Breiner has referred to as the “Savacou debate,” the heated exchange that began in reviews of the anthology of new writing presented in the journal Savacou in 1971 and continued in essays throughout the 1970s by some of the major critics of Anglophone Caribbean literature.1 Social and political changes taking place by the 1970s make possible in Donnell’s account “the emergence of a shared agenda in terms of content , style and form [that] enabled a community of critics to articulate collectively the shape of decolonised narratives, and thereby to set the principles for a regional literary history in motion” (31). Contemporary Caribbean literary history—what I am calling its postcolonial phase— is, for Donnell, initiated in the 1971 Savacou issue and the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) conference in Jamaica with which its publication coincided. The Savacou issue became a site of contestation as reviewers criticized or lauded the anthology’s attempts to redefine the relationship between intellectual and public. The main innovations of the anthology were the inclusion of apparently unlettered voices, which is the topic of this chapter, and the overt inspiration from music, which I examine in chapter 8. These efforts to redefine intellectual work come as responses to the shifting place of literature in the postcolonial public sphere, though, as these chapters show, each project retains elements of anticolonial desires. 176 Postcoloniality and the Crisis of the Literary While the anticolonial writers I examined in previous chapters imagined themselves speaking for and articulating the ideals of a group they figured as the folk or pueblo, the Savacou anthology features a different logic based on an immediacy of voice: that the role of the lettered poet (the anthology was edited by academics and professional writers Kamau Brathwaite, Kenneth Ramchand, and Andrew Salkey) is to provide a space for the unlettered to enter the public sphere himself or herself and speak in his or her own voice. Giving Bongo Jerry a place of prominence in the anthology is part of the same impulse that led Mervyn Morris to edit and publish Louise Bennett’s performances in 1966 along with an essay “On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously” in 1967. The most vehement attacks on the new anthology, from reviewers like Eric Roach, who explicitly positions himself as representing a previous generation , argue for literature requiring a kind of distillation process: “for the poet . . . language, mined from the ore of tribal speech, is purified in his head, becomes molten in his heart and is poured out into the form of the poem to harden for all time” (Roach 6). By contrast, Brathwaite’s introduction to the volume ends by celebrating how this collection “has brought the writer out of the tower, out of his castle, out of his ego” (“Foreward” 9). The new writing lacks the anticolonial aura—the reference to Lamming’s castle here is overt—but, for Brathwaite, this democratization of literature is precisely its value in a postcolonial setting: “until recently, the writer was hero, was one of the elite; his distance overseas added to the glamour of this ideograph. The reader was his pupil; told what to think; must follow if he could. . . . All that has changed” (9). The substance of the Savacou debate shows the testimonial impulse at work as the Caribbean made its transition from modern colonialism to postcoloniality. The same questions raised in the Savacou debate—of uncovering a cultural history apart from what Europe might recognize, of literature’s ability to represent the different language registers typical of a colonial setting, of the possibility or even desirability of the subaltern speaking— are crucial questions for postcolonial studies. Subaltern studies is frequently associated with South Asia, with Robert Young even arguing that the centrality of testimonio in Latin American studies comes from the influence of the subaltern studies movement in India of the 1980s on Latin Americanists like John Beverley (352). I suggest that while the terms may be different in the...

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