Caribbean Literary Discourse: Voice and Cultural Identity in the Anglophone Caribbean

1. Songs in the Silence: Literary Craft as Survival in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

1 songs in the silence literary Craft as survival in eighteenth-Century Jamaica Jean D’Costa exiles created Jamaica’s literature.1 Transcending loss of home and culture,they endured wars, forced migrations, captivity, transshipment, enslavement, and desperate loneliness, and yet they kept memory and instinctive genius alive despite all odds. such were the ancestors whose amnesiac memories together brought forth Jamaica’s visions and founded our literary heritage. Their story is not unique in its sorrow and triumph. It is unique in that our literature is characteristically Jamaican and Caribbean; that it is at once singular and universal ; and it was shaped in the severest conditions during the last three and a half centuries. In eighteenth-century Jamaica, the plantation economy built on slavery and sugar forced a new culture into existence. literature had no place there; language served the meanest purposes.yet, strangely, out of its inhumanity came these most deeply human attributes: a literature fashioned in its own language. because these origins are so veiled in fragmented memory,so shaped by the discontinuities of history and mortality, critics such as m. Keith booker and Dubravka Juraga place the beginnings of Caribbean literature only at the start of the twentieth century.2 This view relegates to silence many voices of significance in the development of both oral and written discourse. It also denies the influence of patterns of resistance and survival devised by the generations who created this culture, and it fails to acknowledge the nature of the genres and discourse embedded in this language culture.Édouard Glissant notes the ambiguity with which discourse on the plantation was fraught,reaching as it did toward naming the forbidden,the proscribed aspects of domination and control. Alienation in these conditions becomes not only an outcome of deracination and domination, but it could be adopted as disguise, as a mask behind which forgetting and remembering could happen in relative safety,a place where language itself might be constantly remade in response to an ever-changing, al- 18 / D’Costa ways dangerous world.3 Concealment and masked disclosure served the purposes of survival and left their stamp on the literature they formed. In the fused yet divided world of the Caribbean plantation,a world as alienated from its own products as from its cultural origins, literature of any kind once seemed strangely out of place. Indeed, the experience of many Caribbean thinkers suggests that a profound antipathy to the life of the mind lay at the center of eighteenth-century Caribbean culture, to be handed down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an alienated view of art and letters and a deeper alienation from its own lived experience, the “amnesia” of Derek Walcott’s Another Life.In this spiritual and artistic autobiography,Walcott presents the “divided child” of the Caribbean striving for coherence, for a rooted life of the mind.The “divided child,”cut off from its past,“hears nothing.”yet, engulfed by that past, the child also “hears everything / that the historian cannot hear, the howls / of all the races that crossed the water.”4 by hearing “nothing,” the child cannot speak to its experience. Comparing itself to the european or American, the child sees itself with nothing to match the imported books, machines, and goods of the “real” world up north. since the dawn of its exile culture in the late seventeenth century, the child has been told, again and again, that its language, rituals, and ideas have no value. Among exiles, the child artist is an exile twice over, for what value has art against money? so deep was the alienation even in my lifetime that Jamaicans with literary aspirations expected to live in exile in order to pursue literary careers. In his early twenties,Claude mcKay (1889–1948) moved to the United states; the novelist John hearne (1926–1994) began his career in england; in 1963,mervyn morris (1937–) told a group of high school students that he might have to leave Jamaica in order to develop as a poet. yet the “divided child” does hear everything while hearing nothing. The proof of that “everything” lies in the shapes and forms, the styles and registers of Caribbean literature today. In this present time,partly because of the privilege of distance and partly because the process of fusion has taken fuller effect,we can recognize the genres forged during the years in which forgetting and invention resembled each other, and, worst of all, art seemed nothing more than...