Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (review)

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature, by Chris Bongie. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. 543 pp. ISBN 0-8047-3280-9 cloth.

This splendid book studies exhaustively the implications of the phenomenon known as "creolization" (transculturation, mestizaje, hybridity) and examines intelligently the positions that critics and writers have historically taken in the debate about cultural identity in the Caribbean and the postcolonial world. If it is true--as Chris Bongie himself professes--that his theoretical approach owes much to the critical work of Edouard Glissant, the reader will find in Islands and Exiles readings that are illuminating in their originality and a new word or two, such as "post/colonial," coined by Bongie to designate the links that at the same time unify and differentiate postcolonial and colonial literatures.

As is often the case with books that study literature of or about the West Indies, Islands and Exiles deals principally with a single linguistic area: the francophone islands (Haiti, Martinique, Guadaloupe). Nevertheless, Bongie also offers close readings of Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and J. M. Coetzee's Foe. Following the recent tendency of associating the Antilles with other archipelagoes, Bongie also studies Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie and Keri Hulme's The Bone People.

What I value the most about this book is something that only Bongie and a half dozen Caribbeanists can really appreciate deeply, and that is its ability to include an astonishing number of opinions without the discussion ever sacrificing its warmth and sense of direction. I should make it clear that if Bongie illustrates his work profusely with quotations from well-known writers and scholars--such as Césaire, Maximin, Carpentier, Brathwaite, Harris, Walcott, Condé, Confiant, Appiah, Bhabha, and many others--it is not from a desire to seek authoritative sources, but simply because from his uncomfortable position in the middle he cannot entirely discount, nor can he entirely assume, a good number of the judgments that have been issued about what kind of literature best represents the postcolonial identity. Bongie himself clarifies his "third" position as he mediates the Confiant/Lebrun debate over creolization vis-à-vis the nationalism/globalization conflict: "That is perhaps time to claim the interregnum as our home rather than (only) as a place of exile and to begin to learn how to live with a condition that we cannot cure . . ." (347).

Beautifully written and skilfully planned, Bongie's Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature is a book that must be read by those interested in the cultural problematic of the Caribbean. Because of its comprehensiveness and maturity, it is, if not the most innovative, then the most useful and instructive of any book of its kind that I know of.

Antonio Benítez-Rojo

Antonio Benítez-Rojo is the Thomas B. Walton Jr. Memorial Professor at Amherst College (Massachusetts).

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