Oppressed Caribbean Culture Essay

Caribbean culture, in so far as it is conceded to exist, is at once the cause, occasion, and result of evolved and evolving paradoxes. The psychic inheritance of dynamic response to disparate elements interacting to find ideal, form, and purpose within set geographical boundaries over time could not have produced otherwise. The 1990s have witnessed no less of this, precisely because the decade serves to encapsulate contradictions in human development over the past half a millennium. The entire Caribbean, and indeed all of the modern Americas of which the Caribbean, like the United States, is only one part, are the creatures of the awesome process of cross-fertilization following on the encounters between the old civilizations of Europe, Africa, and Asia on foreign soil and they, in turn, with the old Amerindian civilizations developed on American soil long before Christopher Columbus set foot on it. It is a development that has helped to shape the history and modern condition of the world for some half a millennium and one that has resulted in distinctive culture-spheres in the Western hemisphere, each claiming its own inner logic and consistency. The Caribbean, at the core of which are a number of island nations, themselves in sub-regional groupings, is conscious of the dynamics of its development. For it rests firmly on the agonizing and challenging process actualized in simultaneous acts of negating and affirming, demolishing and constructing, rejecting and reshaping. Nowhere is this more evident that in the creative arts, themselves a strong index of a people’s cultural distinctiveness and identity. Admittedly, other indices of culture such as linguistic communication, which underpins the oral and indigenous scribal literatures of the region, religion, and kinship patterns, reveal the texture and internal diversity that are the result of cross-fertilization of differing elements. The result is an emerging lifestyle, worldview, and a nascent ontology and epistemology that all speak to Caribbean historical experience and existential reality, in some cases struggling to gain currency and legitimacy worldwide (and even among some of its own people) for being native-born and nativebred. For this is the original meaning of â€Å"Creole. † Whites born in the American colonies were regarded as â€Å"creoles† by their metropolitan cousins. And the Jamaican-born slaves were similarly differentiated from their â€Å"salt-water Negro† colleagues freshly brought in from West Africa. The term was soon to be hijacked by or attributed to the mulatto (half-caste) who defiantly claimed certified rootedness in the colonies–a status not as easily claimed by the person of African or European descent whose ancestry lay elsewhere, it was felt, other than in the Caribbean or the Americas. An understanding of the shared human thirst for freedom in terms of its cultural significance is critical. For the impulses that drive the Caribbean people (like people anywhere) to freedom within nation states, to the right to choose their own friends and political systems, and to independent paths to development are the same impulses that drive them to the creation of their own music, their own languages and literature, their own gods and religious belief-systems, their own kinship patterns, modes of socialization, and self-perceptions. All plans made for them from outside must take this fact into account, whatever may be the dictates of military and strategic interests or the statistical logic of tabulated growth rates and gross national products. The Caribbean people, faced as they are with the post-colonial imperative of shaping civil society and building nations, expect to be taken seriously in terms of their proven capacities to act creatively in coordinated social interaction over centuries in the Americas. They feel passionately that their history and experience are worthy of theory and explanation and expect others to understand and appreciate this fact. They are unique, paradoxically because they are like everybody else. The Caribbean has been engaged in freedom struggles and its inhabitants have been at the job of creating their own languages, and designing their own appropriate lifestyles for as long as and, in some cases, longer than most parts of what became the United States. Recognition of this and the according of the status due such achievement is a prized wish of all Caribbean people–Black, White, Mestizo, Indian (indigenous and transplanted), Chinese, and Lebanese. By general critical consent, the principal women writers in English to emerge, so far, from the Caribbean are the properly varied trio of Jamaica Kincaid (Elaine Potter Richardson) and Jean Rhys. I say â€Å"properly varied† because the immensely mixed political and social history of the Caribbean is reflected by and in its writers. Kincaid, the most experimental of the three, is seen by her admirers as a deliberate subverted of Dead White European Male modes of narrative. Yet any reader deeply immersed in Western literature will recognize that prose poetry, Kincaid’s medium, always has been one of the staples of literary fantasy or mythological romance, including much of what we call â€Å"children’s literature. † Centering almost always upon the mother-daughter relationship, Kincaid returns us inevitably to perspectives familiar from our experience of the fantasy narratives of childhood. Kincaid genuinely expresses her regard to Caribbean as those that have been â€Å"creolized† into indigenous form and purpose distinctively different from the original elements from which those expressions first sprang. With some of those original elements, especially those from a European source, themselves reinforcing their claims on the region, whether through politics, economic control, or cultural penetration, the Caribbean is becoming even more conscious not only of its own unique expressions but also of the dynamism and nature of the process underlying these expressions. These in turn constitute the basis for the claims made for a Caribbean identity. Jean Rhys, of Creole Dominican descent, is a formidable contrast to Marshall and seems to me the major figure to emerge thus far among Caribbean women writers. Though she lived mostly in Paris and England, the imagination of Rhys came fully alive in her novel of 1966, Wide Sargasso Sea, a remarkable retelling of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre from the perspective of Bertha Mason, Rochester’s mad first wife. The terrifying predicament of the 19th-century Creole women of the West Indies, regarded as â€Å"white niggers† by colonialists and as European oppressors by blacks, is presented by Rhys with unforgettable poignancy and force. Shrewdly exploiting the modernist formal originalities of her mentor, Ford Maddox Ford, Rhys achieved a near masterpiece in Wide Sargasso Sea. Allusive, parodistic, and intensely wrought, the novel remains the most successful prose fiction in English to emerge from the Caribbean matrix. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the starting point is this placelessness. Although Rhys’s novel starts with Antoinette’s childhood in Coulibri, its boundaries lie outside the novel in another woman’s text. In Jane Eyre we have the madwoman Bertha locked up in the attic of Thornfield Hall. The significant title â€Å"Wide Sargasso Sea† refers to the dangers of the sea voyage. Rochester first crosses the Atlantic alone to a place which threatens to destroy him, then once more, bringing his new wife to England. Both Rochester and Antoinette are transformed through this passage. Rochester gives Antoinette a new name, Bertha, and in England she finally is locked up as mad. Rhys finds her own place in Jane Eyre, â€Å"a prisoner of another’s desire. † She sets out to describe that place and, in doing that, she redefines it as her own. In her challenge to Jane Eyre, Rhys draws on the collective experience of black people as sought out, uprooted, and transported across the Middle Passage and finally locked up and brutally exploited for economic gain. She uses this experience and the black forms of resistance as modes through which the madwoman in Jane Eyre is recreated. In the film version Wide Sargasso Sea develops stereotypes of Black West Indians that strongly mirror Bogle’s discussion of classic film depictions of African Americans. The inner stereotype in the film is that of the â€Å"tragic mulatto† which, the film hints, describes Angelique, the evidently White child who has been raised by Blacks. Although Angelique insists on her â€Å"Whiteness,† a menacing dark skinned stranger claims at diverse points in the film to be her brother through her father’s relationship with a slave. The viewer is left to consider whether the widowed plantation owner seen at the beginning of the film is actually Angelique’s mother. While it does not answer this question directly, it obviously shows through Angelique’s actions that her culture is far more African than European. These suspicions, actions, and Angelique’s reliance on the ex-slave Christophine ultimately destroy her marriage and drive her insane. Christophine, herself, fulfills the â€Å"mammy† role since the film portrays her as a constant presence who fiercely guards Angelique from all dangers. In the West Indian context, though, she is given a twist, as she is not only guardian angel but also a practitioner of the magical art of â€Å"obeah. † This portrayal — a staple of films dealing with the West Indies — is never completely developed. Nevertheless, the film permits us to witness its potency, as Angelique, despairing of keeping her husband’s love, calls on Christophine to develop a magical potion to bind his affections to hers. One opponent for those affections is Emily, a young Black servant who might well be characterized as a female â€Å"Black buck† — a sexual predator who seduces a married White man into interracial unfaithfulness. Finally, there is Nelson, the long-suffering head of the household who intimately approximates Bogle’s â€Å"Tom. In the film, insults of various sorts that are directed towards him result only in silence and a determination to remain a faithful servant. Though, in Dominican novelist Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the island’s riotous vegetation and dramatic landscape are depicted with an ominous intensity that prompts the protagonist’s English husband to equate it with evil. Lally, the narrator of another Dominican classic, Phyllis Shand Allfrey The Orchid House ( 1953), faced with the menacing power the island’s nature exerts over Stella and Andrew, ruefully concludes that the island offered nothing but beauty and disease. Rhys’s protagonists, most evidently Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, share a view of England as deadening, grey and emotionally destructive. England is a place of hypocrites, and the English have a ‘bloody, bloody sense of humour’. With a West Indian accent, she goes on, ‘and stupid, lord, lord’ (Wide Sargasso Sea: 134). But it remains Rhys’s place, the source of those English books which provided an early contribution to her construction of herself as writer. The idea of definitive national origin and affiliation is a source of anxiety for Rhys’s protagonists. For Rhys herself nationality was complicated by her exile and her race: also England did not value her Caribbean origins. For Rhys’s women, as perhaps for herself, England is also a place where human emotions, especially those associated with sexuality, are outlawed or repressed; she described sex in a letter of 1949 as a ‘strange Anglo-Saxon word’ (Abalos, David T. 1998, 66). Hemond Brown comments that Rhys’s attitude to England remained remarkably consistent over her whole writing career: ‘For those fifty-odd years, England meant to her everything she despised’ (Bandon, Alexandra. 1995). But despite this, she surely demonstrated in her characterisation of working-class English chorus girls and call girls and Rochester (perhaps informed by her important attachments to Lancelot Grey, Hugh Smith, Leslie Tilden Smith and Max Hamer, all upper- or middle-class Englishmen), that the poor Englishwoman and even the colonizing, socially secure Englishman have their own areas of serious emotional damage. She may have blown off steam sometimes, but in her fiction she took pains to be fair to the country which had both given her sustained literary identity and denied her dignity. In the Caribbean, complex racial narratives are the most powerful signifiers, although class increasingly reverberates now. In England, in Rhys’s lifetime, it was the class narrative which primarily constructed identity, though Rhys clearly writes the importance of race as a formative self-construction from her Dominican childhood. She sometimes sees race and class as equally important even in England, as in the case of Selina, who carries Rhys’s own outlaw status during an important period of her life. In the two explicitly Caribbean novels, Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea, race is evidently a major source of identity. Jean Rhys had long described the cultural dialectic of his region’s historical experience and contemporary reality in the following way: â€Å"But the tribe in bondage learned to fortify itself by cunning assimilation of the religion of the Old World. What seemed to be surrender was redemption. What seemed the loss of tradition was its renewal. What seemed the death of faith was its rebirth†. Caribbean existential reality is here portrayed as a creature of paradox. Surface appearances may well be masks for their opposites. What one sees is not likely to be what one gets. Other similar manuscript was in â€Å"Goodbye Mother† by Reinaldo Arenas, the grief inundated daughters Ofelia, Otilia, Odilia and Onelia kill themselves in front of their dead mum just for their cadavers to occasion a series of triumphant choruses from the legion of rats and maggots who feast on the putrefactory banquet. Neither of these authors, nor the evenly talented Rene Depestre and the former Dominican President Juan Bosch, is Anglophonic. It’s usually believed that the most excellent Caribbean literature in English consists of chronological polemics On the other hand Cristina Garcia novel â€Å"Dreaming In Cuban† tells the stories of the women of a Cuban family, scattered by revolution but still connected through a shared past. The narrative is polyphony of several voices who, in turn, describe their world from their viewpoint. Characters include Lourdes, an anti-Castro exile who runs a chain of â€Å"Yankee Doodle Bakeries,† and Felicia, whose perceptions connect and blur the lines between insanity and santeria. Pillar, Lourdes’s daughter and an aspiring punk artist, is determined to return to Cuba to reconnect with her grandmother and make her present life meaningful. She laments that history does not tell the important stories and longs to recover Cuba for herself: â€Å"[T]here’s only imagination where our history should be† (138). In the title of Dreaming in Cuban, â€Å"Dreaming† includes all the diverse dreams of Garcia’s female protagonists about the nature of being Cuban, what it is to be Cuban, to dream, not in American, but in Cuban. This necessitates Garcia’s taking into account all the conflicting elements of contemporary Cuban-ness for Cuban and Cuban American women. Amazingly, she never invalidates or disputes the diverse and conflicting perspectives of these different dreamers. She succeeds by giving readers a complexity of experience beyond binaries, where many diverse and conflicting perspectives circle around one another endlessly. These differences are constructed by differences in the various ideologies that the characters embrace communism, capitalism, traditional gender relations, voodoo, and feminism–and also by differences in their experiences due to varying historical locations in time and place.