Caribbean Shore

              I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,

              I had a sound colonial education,

              I have Dutch, Nigger, and English in me,

              Either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.

Caribbean literature emerged within a context of many languages and cultures. The languages of the Caribbean—French, English, Spanish, and Dutch—are remnants of the colonizing powers and their historical encounters with the region. “It’s good that everything‘s gone, except their language, / which is everything”. The well-built history of Greek and Latin generates a suggestion that the languages of imperialism tend to outlast the empires. The British never made the mistake of understanding the importance of language though Creoles and local patois (hybrid languages) developed from the mixture of European languages with Native American languages, especially Carib and Arawak, and the languages of Africans brought to the Caribbean as slaves. Asians, primarily from India and China, and Middle Easterners also contribute to the region’s cultural diversity.

Slowly, ever so slowly . . . I was coming to an awareness . . . of cultural wholeness, of the place of the individual within the tribe.  Slowly, ever so slowly, I came to a sense of identification with these people, my living diviners.  I came to connect my history with theirs, the bridge of my mind was linking Atlantic and ancestor, homeland and heartland- (Kamau Brathwaite)

Kamau Brathwaite reacts with great anger towards the oppressive colonial culture that has controlled the islands for so long. Brathwaite looks to Africa as the progenitor of his consciousness and ultimately rejects the European colonial power as an influence.  He throws off any connection to a European past with a certain amount of anger and violence. In his major works Brathwaite considers the issues that have troubled many of the contemporaries: the nature of Caribbean identity, the future of the Caribbean and its people, and the role of the artist in Caribbean society. In response, Brathwaite has consistently argued that the contemporary Caribbean is the product of along process of Creolization that continues to affect the islands. Accepting that Caribbean identity is made up of a variety of traditions and cultures, Brathwaite traces his roots back to Africa. He asks that the African contribution to Caribbean life not be forgotten. He is a champion of the survival of submerged languages and their forms in the language of contemporary life, and as an individual and communal poet he seeks to remake in his poetry a new language for a Caribbean future. Derek Walcott is much less aggressive in that approach, but no less vehement in the drive to assert the Self as a voice the world must reckon with.  Walcott embraces his African heritage and his European heritage:  the issue of history concerns him more than the question of which was more important. But, at times, Walcott seems very ambivalent about the issue of history and who he looks to as his progenitor (or even whether he looks to anyone, or simply rejects both sides as unsatisfactory): Another Caribbean poet, James Berry, reacted to the need for a Caribbean voice by looking back to Africa (as Brathwaite, did, but without the same extremely violent tendencies).  Once he affirmed the strength of Africa, he managed to pass that strength on to his own Caribbean heritage and voice. Kwame Dawes looks to Reggae for asserting a Caribbean voice. Each author has a different poetic sensibility and means of getting at the very thing that makes him/her a whole person.  For many, this involves throwing off the constraints of colonial powers and education in favor of something real and local.  Others push farther back and embrace Africa as the origin of the true, emerging Self.

Brathwaite, during his speech on the development of nation language in Anglophone Caribbean poetry, says: 

We in the Caribbean have a [. . .] kind of plurality:  we have English, which is the imposed language on much of the archipelago.  It is an imperial language, as are French, Dutch and Spanish.  We also have what we call Creole English, which is a mixture of English and an adaptation that English took in the new environment of the Caribbean when it became mixed with the other imported languages.  We have also what is called nation language, which is the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in.

The principal feature of Caribbean societies is their extreme heterogeneity or diversity, which is the product of several centuries of slavery and indentured labor organized into plantation colonies in order to generate profits for Europeans. The contemporary Caribbean is also notable for a restless energy that domesticates language to local rhythms and intonations, while propelling many of its writers into diasporic movement from the homes to which their ancestors were transplanted. Caribbean plurality partakes equally of the exuberant and troubled. Its logic of self discovery is driven by a powerful sense of collective displacement. Their identity has been influenced by colonial, European powers, by native Amerindian culture, by the imported culture of the African slaves.  But their own culture and identity is separate from all of these influences; it is something unique to the Caribbean.  Just as the islands threw off the shackles of slavery and colonialism, now they throw off the shackles of history to assert their true identity.

The artist’s imagination, especially Caribbean, has always been motivated by the idea of the collective past because he or she wants to relate the past to the present. It is really important to reach and understand the collective past. The identity and the individual lives are somewhat shaped by collective past or by a fixed historical reality. Walcott’s poem “A Far Cry from Africa” reconstructs what it means to be Creole caught in the grim historical reality that shaped him problematic identity; being a Caribbean he has deep love for his language, English, but he is also a descendant of African selves brought to America:

            I who am poisoned with the blood of both

               Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?

                      I who have cursed

          The drunken officer of British rule, how choose

          Between this Africa and the British tongue I love?

History is expected to be true and objective, though the limitations of our very human experience often makes this quality of being true and objective impossible. Colonization has left a distorted history, one filled with several gaps. Walcott, in “The Muse of History” criticizes those postcolonial intellectuals who angrily lament over the destruction of the historical past; he rather focuses on the possibility of a history less world which provides the Caribbean an academic opportunity to rewrite their history again. Caribbean tendency is to find out the history not the root. Sense of dispossession and sense of loss insist them to re-establish the collective past The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy explores various African migrations, both within Africa and to West Indies and America, through the period of the slave trade and modern times. As such the settings vary from a Trinidadian slum around independence to the Ashanti Kingdom in West Africa before the arrival of white traders. Arrivants can be seen as an epic of black migration in its various forms, which links black experiences across continents and different periods of history as Masks, represents African culture and history. Both Walcott and Brathwaite use the imagination as a way of making sense of the Caribbean experience and creative something positive. Their work emphasizes the vastness in the terms of history, culture and geography, of that experience.

In The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy Brathwaite tells about Caribbean experience, goes to Africa and comes back to Caribbean. Both the place makes him gloomy. Africa does not allow him to stay and the Caribbean was not the own home actually. In an unsatisfactory mood he accepts that only the journey is much better than the home. It is not the Brathwaite but the people who are searching the root and at the last stage they find a route to stay. Now they need a history and they are supposed to keep it. Actually a nation demands a history. But subjective history is always distorted. Walcott examines the standard view of Caribbean history and sees that colonization has left a distorted history, one filled with numerous gaps. In Caribbean history as Walcott finds it, the absence of facts renders the history as hollow as a coconut shell. Walcott wants the history of creative imagination but not the history which is distorted. For example, in Another Life he argues the primacy of the creative imagination, and its capacity both to possess and to transcend the events of history. Walcott’s intention is to provide autobiography, which he decorates with art, as an alternative to history or to the accumulation of dead facts. The poets of English speaking Caribbean have much to say to all those who care about the future, and who are prepared to look critically but constructively at the past. They view creative imagination as a productive means of attending difficult questions of identity, history and survival.

The experiences of Caribbean literature encompass the historical issues of enslavement and forced migration, the related themes of home and exile, and colonialism and decolonization, the gritty celebration of survival and festive celebration of an inheritance of place, tongue and tradition, the lament for the lost and the quest for identity, the championing of faith and the teeth of betrayal and disillusion. Caribbean literature also embraces the social and cultural themes of tradition, landscape, culture, and community, and addresses such universal questions as history, identity, sexuality, family life, pain, joy (Pokocean).