The Politics of Myth: A Contemporary Perspective on Orpheus in Hell

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids

This essay explores the complex ways in which narrative may signify in the contemporary Caribbean cultural context. Specifically, it is concerned with a trilogy written by award-winning Surinamese author Astrid Roemer, set in the years of independence of the Caribbean country after 300 years of Dutch occupation. The analysis focuses not on the usual postcolonial themes but on structures of signification: allegory, materiality and media of language, affect, and the function of objects. Roemer’s texts demonstrate the relation between discourse and physical violence, her language being tied to material media, bodies, and earth. Not just postmodern, but posthuman too, the Surinamese narrative is characterized by the attempt to connect objects to language, objects to emotions, or nature to memories. Language brings us in touch with Caribbean reality and memory, all the while questioning its capacity to do so through allegory and metaphor.

small axe, 2023

Amerindian presences play a continuous and significant role in Brathwaite’s poetic oeuvre, marking a tension between his literary recovery of the past and his desire to create a new alter-native image in the place of these figures. Far from a tension to be resolved (Brathwaite does not articulate fixed ‘either-or’ expressions), the poet uses a range of textual devices to ensure that Afro-Caribbean Amerindian entanglements constitute his alter-native project, manifesting in the possession of Amerindian presences in poetic forms, whether the pre-colonial Arawaks, his wife Doris, or the native Caliban of Shakespeare’s imagination. While not specifically expressed in these terms, these entanglements inform what Edwards describes as the “anxieties of sovereignty” that haunt Brathwaite’s work (17), and the need to create “a legitimizing Genesis,” to quote the late Michael J. Dash (197). In the most explicit reading of this dynamic, Shona Jackson calls this nexus an “epistemic condition” of “becoming native” that is “predicated on its own and on New World aboriginal displacement, and on the nation-state and the creation of an identity within it that will ultimately govern this new native status” (82). Jodi Byrd gives a similar finding when she traces representations of Amerindian absence in the work of Wilson Harris, who frames “Amerindian presences […] as ‘alien,’ ‘lost,’ and ‘vanished,’” in order to establish a “center from which these experiences have been ‘lost’ or ‘vanished’” (Byrd 157). By reading for the recurrence of Amerindian-Creole entanglements across Brathwaite’s work, I complicate the ‘rupture’ separating the poet’s early and late work, a split precipitated by a series of crises he describes as ‘the time of Salt’. On this basis, I take a non-chronological reading of Brathwaite’s work that traces an unresolved tension between his sense of native genesis and his recovery of Amerindian paradigms. After doing so, I take a wider view of Brathwaite’s engagements with Indigenous communities beyond the Caribbean based on the poet’s comments in ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey that each of the world’s continents “has a culture paradigm which can be ‘read’ from the totems of their landscape: Americas (cenote), Europe (missile), Af (circle), Asia (pagoda), Australasia (wave/boomerang)” (115), as well as Brathwaite’s engagement with writers and scholar working across Indigenous studies.

The Caribbean Writer as Warrior of the Imaginary / L’Ecrivain caribéen, guerrier de l’imaginaire, 2008

2023

This paper explores the integration of African cultural elements, particularly voodoo and drum rituals, in Kamau Brathwaite's poetry. Through a detailed examination of Brathwaite's work, we trace the transformation and enduring influence of these elements from pre-colonial Africa through the colonial era to the post-colonial Caribbean. The analysis reveals how Brathwaite's poetry serves as a medium for cultural preservation and resistance against colonial hegemony, while also providing a pathway for individuals in the post-colonial era to rediscover and reconnect with their African roots. The examination culminates in an appreciation of Brathwaite's poetry as a bridge that not only spans temporal and spatial boundaries but also offers a lens through which the complexities of diasporic identity and cultural synthesis are vividly portrayed and explored.

2017

Saona. The final movement personalises this exercise and focuses on the poet's interactions with the sea and memory. 'Africa' is no longer there' (1993: 231). The Africa we must search for instead is the 15 As noted by Aribidesi A Usman (2008) among many others, 'Africans enslaved in the New World were brought from different societies with varied cultural, linguistic, political, and religious traditions' (130).

Ansu Journal of Language and Literary Studies, 2017

The postcolonial theory is built from the colonial experiences of the people who engaged in liberation struggles around the world and particularly in the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. It bears constant witness to constant cultural hybridization so that the new hybrid personalities are invested with the power to dominate and reclaim their lives in the new world. According to Brathwaite, the Caribbean becomes a free man when he totally embraces his African roots; he is therefore a colonial migrant who interprets the Caribbean culture and language. He interprets his concepts through a hybrid of personae that consequently unsettle the authority of the Whiteman. This study looks at Brathwaite works as inter-textual references and counter readings of historical records to challenge historicist accounts of African-Caribbeans which werewritten by the White colonizers. His poetry does not only reflect the multiplicity of realities and the plurality of the subjects but the form and the shape of his writings embody the experiences of postcolonial subjects.

It is hard to peg postcolonialism by a particular definition. As a matter of fact, there are differing views as to the classification of certain works as postcolonial or not. One of the generally acceptable thoughts about postcolonialism is that the works of Frantz Fanon laid a good foundation and eventual structure for postcolonial studies. Clearly, however, the postcolonial ideals have been further developed by scholars like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and even Homi Bhabha through their various contributions. This paper does not intend to spotlight the works of these great scholars but to apply some of their thoughts to the postcoloniality in contemporary reggae music that springs from the Caribbean. Although with a solid foundation in roots reggae, contemporary reggae has advancing beyond the temporal restrictions of roots reggae, its antecedent, to heighten emphasis on social issue, spiritual longings and the personal in arresting postcolonial realities. The state of contemporary reggae as a socially conscious au/oral art thus begs sustained scholarship in examining how it rests on an established heritage to engage and reflect on topical 21st century postcolonial conditions in the Caribbean. With its theoretical approach grounded in postcolonialism and its selection of Jah Cure's and Natty King's reggae songs-two contemporary reggae artists-the paper examines conception of unity, love, and equality as envisioned by the selected contemporary reggae artists. It engages representations of class consciousness, binary divides, spirituality, and coloniality within the song-texts. Exploring the thematisation of social tumult within the lyrics affords the study avenues to comment on the reactive approaches in contemporary reggae to postcolonial ordeals that signify a continuance of and foregrounding of politically reactive metaphors and motifs of social awareness typical of roots reggae, despite generational and temporal gap.