Introduction

Literary critic Roberto González Echevarría asserts that Latin American literature originated in the Caribbean. “It is in fifteenth century explorer Christopher Columbus’s diary,” he writes, “that we [readers] first encounter what will become the most persistent theme of Latin American literature.” That theme, Echevarría argues, is “how to write in a European language about realities never seen in Europe before.”

Caribbean writers find before them the tools of four European languages, imported by the imperial aspirations of the Dutch, English, French, and Spanish. Writers from Dutch Caribbean regions, such as Frank Martinus Arion and Astrid H. Roemer, have been translated into other languages, making their work available to non-Dutch-speaking readers, but the Dutch Caribbean tradition stands largely unexplored.

Caribbean literature unites literary works that have been studied not only in terms of national traditions (Haitian, Cuban, and so on) but also under a wide range of classifications, such as West Indian (meaning from the English-speaking Caribbean), francophone (French outside of France), and Latin American literatures, as well as African diaspora and postcolonial literature. Caribbean literature designates literature not only from the island nations but also from Central and South American continental territories such as Belize, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana, which share a common experience of slavery and sugar-plantation economies with the island territories. Because the indigenous populations of Arawaks, Tainos, and Caribs of the Caribbean basin were almost wholly exterminated through violence and disease, Caribbean peoples primarily descend from settlers exogenous to the region, most notably the large number of African slaves brought to toil on the plantations and the indentured Asian laborers brought to replace African labor after emancipation. Consequently, Caribbean writers must negotiate a relationship with both a colonial metropolitan culture and the memory of the other African and Asian cultures from elsewhere.

Early flourishings

If Caribbean literature began with Columbus’s diary, the Caribbean novel, by contrast, was largely a product of the twentieth century. Nineteenth century Cuban antislavery novels, such as Anselmo Suárez y Romero’s Francisco (1880), Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (first part 1839, completed 1882; Cecilia Valdés: A Novel of Cuban Customs, 1962), and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841; English translation, 1993), offered early intimations that nationalist, anticolonial thought in the Caribbean was inextricably bound to the legacies of slavery. For the most part, however, novelistic interrogations of Caribbean identities waited until the first decade of the twentieth century, when Haitian writers began their realist experiments and thus provided the seeds for the later, great genre of Haitian literature, the peasant novel.

In this early period, the novels of a writer claimed by the Harlem Renaissance proved paradigmatic. The Jamaican Claude McKay (1889-1948) was the first black anglophone Caribbean novelist. His first novel, Home to Harlem (1928), depicts Jake, an African American returned from World War I to the streets and nightlife of Harlem, and Ray, an exiled Haitian intellectual and aspiring writer, who instructs Jake in pan-Africanism and awareness of a global proletariat. Notably, Ray finds himself in the United States working alongside Jake as a Pullman Car porter because he has fled the U.S. occupation of his island. McKay’s second novel, Banjo (1929), revisits Ray, this time as he pronounces on culture, world politics, and racial roots with an international assembly of drifters living on the Marseilles waterfront. Through Ray’s debates with Banjo, McKay comments on colonialism and its racial manifestations while honing his portrait of the alienated intellectual. His final novel, Banana Bottom (1933), signals precisely the kind of nativist sentiment that his Haitian contemporary Jean Price-Mars advocated in his seminal study of Haitian folk culture, Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928; So Spoke the Uncle, 1983). McKay’s novel depicts the return of Bita Plant to the Jamaican rural community of Banana Bottom after her education in England (arranged by her white missionary guardians) and charts her rejection of both the stilted middle-class pruderies that her guardians expect from her and the mate they would choose for her. In returning to the “folk,” Bita negotiates a more natural, integrated identity that takes what it can from the European intellectual tradition but is still most comfortable happily ensconced in the lush setting and rituals of rural black culture.

McKay’s figure of the alienated, Western-educated intellectual returns countless times in Caribbean novels of the twentieth century, as does his appreciation of the folk culture. The effects of a colonial education—African Guadeloupians taught about “their ancestors the Gauls,” Jamaican children taught to recite poems about daffodils and snow they have never seen—are a common touchstone in the Caribbean novel’s depiction of childhood, particularly the popular bildungsroman genre, as epitomized by Michael Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando (1965), Merle Hodge’s Crick, Crack, Monkey (1970), Zee Edgell’s Beka Lamb (1982), Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1985), Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1984), and Myriam Warner Vieyra’s As the Sorcerer Said (1982). The perils of colonial education are treated with particular emphasis in Austin Clarke’s pointedly titled Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack: A Memoir (1980). McKay’s pan-Africanism predated the negritude movement spearheaded by the Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire, and his privileging of rural folk culture resonated with the emphases of the peasant novel in Haiti, most notably Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée (1944; Masters of the Dew, 1946).

By contrast, the Trinidadians Alfred Mendes and C. L. R. James added an early urban spin to the Caribbean novel. James is primarily known for his studies of Caribbean history and culture—for instance, his study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), and his meditation on cricket, Beyond a Boundary (1963)—but he also authored one novel, Minty Alley (1936). Minty Alley joined Mendes’s Pitch Lake (1934) and Black Fauns (1935) in inaugurating a tradition of social realism and protest that focused on the oppression of “yard,” or slum, life. Later, Roger Mais’s The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) and Orlando Patterson’s The Children of Sisyphus (1964) revisited this theme.

Alejo Carpentier

The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) shares the baroque style of the Cuban novel with José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Carpentier began his novelistic career under the influence of the Afro-Cubanismo of the 1920’s and 1930’s. His first novel, ¡Ecué-Yamba-O! Historia Afro-Cubana (1933; Lord praised be thou), reflected the anthropological bent of the period by drawing on Carpentier’s observations of the syncretic African Cuban Santería ritual. Influenced by the avant-garde, particularly the Surrealists, Carpentier’s idea of the “marvelous real” of Caribbean life was transformed into the literary style of Magical Realism synonymous with the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. A 1943 trip to Haiti, during which Carpentier came face-to-face with the magical presence of vodun (or Voodoo) in everyday life, led him to theorize that this commonplace “marvelous” quality was far superior to the contrived attempts by the European Surrealists to achieve similar effects.

In his prologue to El reino de este mundo (1949; The Kingdom of This World, 1957), Carpentier introduced his idea of lo real maravilloso produced by the hybrid nature of New World culture. Set in Haiti, the novel traces an arc from a slave insurrection to the establishment of a postcolonial state, from 1751 to 1831, depicting real historical figures and drawing on the mythical traditions associated with the revolt. Haitian Voodoo figures prominently as a factor in the quest for independence, and religion and music appear as two mediums for New World cultural mixture. The Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis would later elaborate his own theories on Haiti’s marvelous realism, reflected in his novels Compère Général Soleil (1955; General Sun, My Brother (1999) and Les arbres musiciens (The Musician Trees, 1957). The late eighteenth century setting of The Kingdom of This World proved fertile ground for Carpentier’s exploration of emerging New World identities; he returned to it in his novels El siglo de las luces (1962; Explosion in a Cathedral, 1963) and Concierto barroco (1974; Concert Baroque, 1976).

Carpentier is notable for his recognition of the centrality of African culture to New World cultural forms, as well as for an emphasis not on pure origins but on examples of cultural mixture, such as syncretic religious practice and Caribbean music forms. He also stands at the forefront of thought that began to envision a pan-Caribbean or inter-Antillian commonality, which began to take stronger hold at the end of the twentieth century.

Finally, Carpentier’s preoccupation with elaborating a Caribbean history not fully accounted for by European intellectual traditions, an emphasis that offers a window on contemporary Caribbean life, is a common strategy of the Caribbean novel. For example, V. S. Reid’s New Day (1949) links the granting of the 1944 Jamaican constitution to the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion; Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) offers a perspective on 1830’s postemancipation life in the British territories of Jamaica and Dominica; Pedro Mir’s Cuando amaban las tierras communeras (1978) spans the years 1916 to 1965 and chronicles the dismantling of communal land ownership in the aftermath of the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic; and Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1991) and Crossing the River (1993) return to Caribbean life of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and Maryse Condé’s La vie scélérate (1987; The Tree of Life, 1992) also demonstrate a historiographic impulse by linking a young protagonist’s investigations of her familial history to obscured features of Caribbean history.

Wilson Harris

In its emphasis on history and mythology, the work of Guyanese writer Wilson Harris (born 1921) has much in common with that of Carpentier. Harris’s novels, however, leave all trappings of realism behind. His nonlinear, hallucinatory style is by far the most challenging of contemporary Caribbean novelists, although his experimental approach is shared by the fragmented and polyphonic novels Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980), Myal (1988), and Louisiana (1994), by the Jamaican Edna Brodber. While Carpentier, too, plays with time, particularly in his best-known novel, Los pasos perdidos (1953; The Lost Steps, 1956), in Wilson’s hands, it becomes even more fluid, looping in and out of itself in ways that defy any straightforward chronology. In an excellent metaphor for what it means to live with the history of the Caribbean, Harris’s explorers in Palace of the Peacock (1960) encounter their dead selves and then die again. Palace of the Peacock is the first of the four novels known as The Guyana Quartet (1985), Harris’s best-known work; the other three are The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963).

Harris’s novels are distinctive in their emphasis on the American Indian presence in the New World and for their evocation and symbolic use of the rivers and jungles of the Guyanese territory. His The Eye of the Scarecrow (1965), The Waiting Room (1967), Tumatumari (1968), and Ascent to Omai (1970) deploy a symbolic Guyanese landscape, and they “remember” perspectives of endangered communities, stretching back to before Columbus. Harris identifies a flute made by Carib Indians from the bone of an enemy as a symbol for what occurs in his work.

In Harris’s fiction, natives and European, African, East Indian, and Chinese settlers do commune, but with an unblushing acknowledgment of the violence of their mutual history. In this way, Harris’s work both consumes what he terms “dilemmas of history” and becomes an “organ of self-knowledge,” the bone flute that harmonizes the multihued peoples of Guyana with their historical struggles and conflicts.

George Lamming and V. S. Naipaul

Unlike Harris, Barbadian George Lamming (born 1927) and Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul (born 1932) embrace realism. These authors stood at the forefront of the anglophone literary boom in the 1950’s. This decade was marked by an exodus of British West Indians to England to seek work and the burgeoning of independence movements that would come to fruition in the 1960’s and 1970’s, when British Caribbean territories began to gain their independence. Whereas Carpentier praises the “marvelous,” in the sense of magical realities of Caribbean hybridity, Lamming and Naipaul focus rather unflinchingly on grim Caribbean realities. Both take a critical view of colonial status and its legacies in the West Indies and explore themes of alienation and exile in their depiction of West Indian life. Beyond this, however, their intentions and conclusions wholly differ.

In his collection of essays The Pleasures of Exile (1960), Lamming represents the voyage to London as initiating a mutual recognition between people of the various West Indian islands, related to but distinct from the homogenizing imperial gaze of the mother country. At home, these voyagers are Trinidadian, Jamaican, and Barbadian, but in England (on the way there, even), they become West Indian. Migration enables pan-Caribbean identification and community, a possibility also proposed in Samuel Selvon’s trilogy The Lonely Londoners (1956), Moses Ascending (1975), and Moses Migrating (1983). In refusing to read “exile” as tantamount to a flight from identity, but rather as constitutive of it, in refusing to see migration as deracination, Lamming predates later studies of African diaspora culture, such as Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) and Carol Boyce Davies’s Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), which see international flows as producing, rather than diluting, culture. As Gilroy suggests, “routes” are as important as “roots.”

For Lamming, the voyage to England is also a voyage of enlightenment, a journey into the heart of colonialism that permits one to emerge from its darkness. London is one symbolic stop along the journey to independence. Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954) brings black workers to London, and Of Age and Innocence (1958) returns them to the Caribbean and its growing independence movements. Approaching the themes of voyage and colonialism from another angle, his Natives of My Person (1972) charts the travels of a white crew of would-be settlers as they sail from the Guinea coast to the island of San Cristobal during the sixteenth century. The crew’s shipboard interactions, particularly the male-female relationships, reveal ingrained patterns of conquest and domination and serve as an allegory for the society they will find in the New World. Lamming’s voyagers were succeeded by other novelistic travelers: Condé’s Veronica in Hérémakhonon: On doit attendre le bonheur (1976; Hérémakhonon, 1982) and Cliff’s Clare Savage in No Telephone to Heaven (1987) also undergo migrations that help them reflect on their personal identities and Caribbean heritage.

Lamming’s later novel Water with Berries (1972) takes its title from a speech in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) and presents guilt-ridden West Indian artists, the sons of Caliban, in London. This journey to London also involves an appropriation of the national bard. Both Water with Berries and The Pleasures of Exile develop the idea of Caliban as the colonial writer who has been taught the master Prospero’s language and has learned to curse in it, a recurrent figure in the literature of the Caribbean, most notably in Aimé Césaire’s play Une Tempête, d’après “La Tempête” de Shakespeare: Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre (1969; The Tempest, 1974). This figure also epitomizes Caribbean writers’ ongoing dialogue with Western literary tradition, as demonstrated by Jean Rhys’s appropriation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) in her Wide Sargasso Sea and Derek Walcott’s Odyssean transformations in his Caribbean epic Omeros (1990).

Nobel Prize winner Naipaul became particularly invested in this Western tradition. Naipaul, who was awarded the Nobel in 2001, is largely regarded as the leading novelist in the anglophone tradition and among the region’s most widely acclaimed writers. Ironically, however, he repeatedly demonstrates disgust with his Caribbean homeland, as evidenced in his nonfiction work The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies—British, French, and Dutch—in the West Indies and South America (1962). Drawing on an education in nineteenth century realism, Naipaul gives his readers modern, alienated, West Indian protagonists who are trapped in claustrophobic, inauthentic, and ineffectual lives. In his deft hands, apparently trivial elements—a yellowed, filthy pillowcase; cooking odors; the ugly sound of an in-law’s chewing—convey the hopelessness and degradation of his characters. Unlike Lamming, who critiques colonial Caribbean social organizations as a spur toward envisioning true political and ideological independence, Naipaul regards the faults of incompetent and corrupt government, poverty, poor educational opportunities, and general cultural provincialism as impediments to the full expression of individual Caribbean selves. Particularly adept at conveying the cultural conflicts within the East Indian communities of Trinidad, as well as their place within the mosaic of Trinidadian society, Naipaul’s art is one of supreme vividness, humor, and despair.

Naipaul’s first three novels are both comic tributes to and ironic commentaries on the place of his childhood. Miguel Street (1959) depicts the residents of the eponymous Port of Spain street, a slum to outsiders, through the wide eyes of a young artist who departs for England at the book’s conclusion, never to return. The other two novels—The Mystic Masseur (1957) and The Suffrage of Elvira (1958)—establish Naipaul’s distinctive critique of island politics. The first details the career of a lowly masseur who exploits his status as a mystic in order to rise in island politics, sacrificing his personal integrity along the way; the second depicts islanders who are ill prepared for universal suffrage and whose petty feuds and superstitions are exploited by self-interested politicians. Naipaul’s two best-known Caribbean novels are A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) and The Mimic Men (1967). The former book richly but pessimistically depicts the struggles for autonomy of its sensitive, ineffectual title character. The Mimic Men represents Naipaul’s most pointed exposure of the fraudulence of Caribbean political rhetoric, the pomposity and mimicry of the Caribbean’s would-be leaders. Naipaul’s ousted Caribbean politician, the self-loathing cynic Ralph Singh, flees his native Isabella and embraces the possibilities of exile, later recalling his participation in island politics as a “period in parenthesis.” Ultimately, for Naipaul, exile is a strategy of survival, a preservation from the derivative mediocrity of Caribbean culture, a cultural “mimicry” that is the enduring legacy of colonialism.

Édouard Glissant

One response to this sense of Caribbean derivativeness has been a search for roots—not European ones, as in Naipaul’s case, but African ones. The appreciation of “blackness” and the connection to Africa were epitomized by the highly influential negritude movement associated with Aimé Césaire and his seminal Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939, 1947, 1956; Memorandum on My Martinique, 1947; better known as Return to My Native Land, 1968), but the movement’s positing of a historical black identity that serves as a prelapsarian preserve against the “fall” of the Middle Passage and enslavement came under fire for its essentialism and romanticized view of Africa. The Martiniquan poet, essayist, and novelist Édouard Glissant (born 1928) critiques this craving for pure, stable origins.

Glissant’s theoretical work Discours antillais (1981; Caribbean Discourse, 1989) poses models of métissage (mixture and miscegenation) and créolité (creoleness) that destabilize notions of a fixed or permanent identity. These concepts are modeled on Creole, the mixed language that was born in the Americas. For Glissant, Creole is not a degraded cultural form, but the epitome of Caribbean cultural formations. From this perspective, other sites of hybridity, such as Caribbean music and the carnival ritual, prove valuable forms of Caribbean expression.

Glissant’s theories inspired novelists, among them Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau, who choose to write in Creole. Chamoiseau’s writing is increasingly available in English translation, particularly his Prix Goncourt-winning novel Texaco (1992; English translation, 1997). Puerto Rican writers Ana Lydia Vega and Luis Rafael Sánchez similarly embrace investigations of inter-Antillian traffic and commonalities, such as those posed in Glissant’s Poétique de la relation (1990; Poetics of Relation, 1997). Sánchez’s La guaracha del Macho Camacho (1976; Macho Camacho’s Beat, 1980) and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres (1967, 1990; Three Trapped Tigers, 1971) employ a regional Spanish strongly evocative of the French Creoles of Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. These writers also exhibit a preoccupation with popular culture and an ironic postmodern style that link them to other postmodern Caribbean novelists such as Marie Chauvet, Dany LaFerrière, and Willie Scott.

Glissant’s novel La Lézarde (1958; The Ripening, 1985) recounts a series of voyages down the Lézarde River, using the Martinique landscape to meditate on the island’s history. The titles of his later novels, including Tout-Monde (1993), particularly reflect his theoretical interests.

Maryse Condé

Like Glissant, the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé (born 1937) also strains against the return to African origins embraced by negritude thinkers, and her work displays a healthy postmodern irreverence. She leaves no sacred cows standing. Her first novel, Hérémakhonon (“welcome house” in Mandingo), records the internal monologue of the cynical, Sorbonne-educated Veronica, who travels to Africa to teach at a university. Confronted with a postcolonial Africa torn by internecine violence, an Africa that has moved on since her ancestors’ removal from it to Guadeloupe, Veronica concludes her visit by reflecting, “My ancestors led me on. What more can I say? I looked for myself in the wrong place.” The role of intellectuals and women’s sexuality likewise emerge as legitimate means for exploring larger social and political issues. Her own critical study of French Caribbean women novelists, La parole des femmes (1979), reflects her insistence on the importance of women’s perspectives in understanding Caribbean art and societies.

Condé stands among the most prolific and well-established writers of the Caribbean, with many of her novels available in English translation. She played a major role in debating the theoretical merits of creolization as a construct for understanding Caribbean culture. Her novels after Hérémakhonon, such as Une Saison à Rihata (1981; A Season in Rihata, 1988), deal with contemporary life in modern Africa as well as the epic sweep of its history, as in Ségou: Les murailles de terre (1984; Segu, 1987) and Ségou II: La Terre en miettes (1985; The Children of Segu, 1989). Her novella Pays mêlé (1985), translated as Land of Many Colors (1999), marks a return to Guadeloupe. Her subsequent novels, Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem (1985; I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, 1992), La Vie scélérate (1987, Tree of Life, 1992), Traversée de la mangrove (1989; Crossing the Mangrove, 1995), Les Derniers Rois Mages (1992; The Last of the African Kings, 1997), and La migration des coeurs (1995; Windward Heights, 1998), all deal with Caribbean and, more broadly, American settings.

Along with Merle Hodge, Marie Chauvet, Paule Marshall, and Simone Schwarz-Bart, Condé began her novelistic career before the explosion of writing by Caribbean women that began in the 1980’s. The Antiguan Jamaica Kincaid is perhaps the best-known anglophone writer to emerge during this boom. Condé’s later work nonetheless reflects the trends and attitudes in both the literature and scholarship of the Caribbean at the end of the twentieth century.

Throughout their century-long meditations on Caribbean identity, history, and culture, Caribbean novels have often explored connections to Europe, Africa, and Asia. Beginning in the 1980’s, increasing attention was paid to both regional Caribbean and inter-American relationships, in particular with the United States. This focus was especially evident in the work of women novelists, presaged by Marshall’s The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969). In the 1990’s, Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise (1993), Edna Brodber’s Louisiana, and Evangeline Blanco’s Caribe: A Novel of Puerto Rico (1998) paralleled Condé’s The Last of the African Kings, The Tree of Life, and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem in representing intersections between U.S. and Caribbean history and culture. These works joined novels of Caribbean nationals’ migrations to the United States, such as Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), Judith Ortiz Cofer’s The Line of the Sun (1989), and Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) in reorienting the transcontinental perspectives of Caribbean writing (Europe, Africa) to treat inter-American routes as well.

A similar type of hemispheric intercalation appears in the Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré’s choice to compose her novels of Puerto Rico, The House on the Lagoon (1995) and Eccentric Neighborhoods (1998), in English. Caribbean writing at the end of the twentieth century reflects not only new patterns of migration and the Caribbean diaspora but also the century-long presence of the United States in the Caribbean region. Later Caribbean writers include Cuban-born Cristina García (Dreaming in Cuban, 1992) and Cuban American Oscar Hijuelos, whose The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1990. Dominican American writer Junot Díaz’s first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), was awarded the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008.

Caribbean transit

The idea of migration features prominently in the literature of the Caribbean region. Interestingly, other novelists not from the Caribbean region have also seen fit to “migrate” there for fictive purposes: Ernest Hemingway’s much-acclaimed novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952) pits humanity against nature in the ocean off Cuban shores; war correspondent Martha Gellhorn’s novelistic skills matured in Liana (1944), her tale of a powerless mulatto, or person of mixed race, living on a Caribbean island. Graham Greene chose Cuba on the eve of revolution as the backdrop for his satirical reflection on Cold War paranoia in his Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment (1958), and Toni Morrison created a fictional Caribbean island as the primary setting for Tar Baby (1981), a meditation on racial identity and race relations. As in the work of its more “native” authors, these novels mark the Caribbean as a vital hub in the traffic of global literature, a place of import and export and migration and exile, and the origin, endpoint, and transit zone of many cultural passages.

Bibliography