The Caribbean Is More Than Colonialism

When Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in October, it was hailed as a victory for the Caribbean.

The recognition of his work is also a recognition of an older version of the Caribbean--but it is not the only one. There is a need, in the American literary conception of this geographical region, to make a substantial widening of the definition of Caribbean writers to reflect the expansion of the emotional terrain they explore.

Walcott is perhaps the most celebrated of Caribbean writers currently reaping international acclaim. This group includes other luminaries such as V.S. Naipaul and Jamaica Kincaid. They all are, in part, products of a colonial experience.

For the past 30 years, most Caribbean nations have been independent and, having thrown off the yoke of colonialism, have moved into attempts at economic self-sufficiency.

Colonialism (along with its inevitable handmaidens--economic and cultural subordination) is the central concern which informs much of their work. Their leitmotif is exile (its corollaries, dispossession and displacement) and the attempt to resolve the enigma of arrival and assimilation in a culture not their own. Their focus is still on empire and the oscillation of loyalties.

An enterprising writer like Jamaica Kincaid, who is lecturing here this semester, has been able to spin gold from the flax of her colonial experience. Almost her entire body of work is an unrelenting howl of agony about the inequities of power.

While this is a universal theme, the approach is in danger of becoming outdated and reductive, a quaint artifact requiring occasional excavation, interesting for its historical worth but ultimately failing to translate into a contemporary relevance.

The work of many Caribbean writers like Walcott and Kincaid, born well before the wave of independence which transformed the Caribbean in the '60s, does not represent the entire Caribbean experience.

Their work, often written in self-imposed exile, constitutes just one of the strands of a variegated expression. The Caribbean experience as refracted through their eyes, while authentic, is not complete.

They present the familiar ironies of being caught between two worlds, unwitting Proserpinas who, having eaten of the pomegranate are unable to inhabit either world fully.

Fortunately, there exists another view of the post-colonial Caribbean, one beyond Naipaul's mordant wit and grim aspect, beyond Kincaid's condescension and Walcott's romanticization.

Any intellectual reconstruction of Caribbean literature must account for the fact that the conditions which spawned a Kincaid or a Walcott no longer exist. Geographical and intellectual isolation are impossible.

In a fluid world of instantaneous global communications and economic interdependence, cultural boundaries are permeable.

In Ted turner's global village, foreignness is an irrelevant, archaic concept. Almost everyone and everything is accessible. Our familiarity with the mortuary that is Somalia and with the spread of hate in Germany is largely the courtesy of sophisticated telecommunications.

This increased access has helped to create a new and different strain of literature which reflects the new geopolitical concerns. It is no longer limited by imperial shackles. It reflects the realization that the axis of power has shifted irretrievably and will no doubt shift again. It reflects the realization that no empire is immortal. It takes note of the acceleration and emergence of democracy and the triumph of a new economic sensibility.

The newer focus addresses environmental concerns and the need for sustainable development, a direct contrast with the heedless rush to unbridled modernization.

And it is relatively unknown in the United States. The people who write this literature are overshadowed by the more well-known and acclaimed authors.

In his Nobel lecture, Walcott insists that the "Caribbean is looked at [as being] illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized.... No people. Fragments and echoes of real people, unoriginal and broken."

This conveniently ignores the new Caribbean sensibilities reflected in the literature of a people and a region determined in their refusal to be consigned to irrelevance and anonymity.

It celebrates indigenous constructs but is not solipsistic. It is neither resigned nor bitter. It welcomes the influence of other cultures in fermenting a potent new brew.

It is essential to acknowledge the new post-colonial literature of self-assertion, of an implicit recognition and confident understanding of the Caribbean's emerging place on the world stage.

The move to embrace and implement new economic policies will allow the "warrior-archers, the god actors and their handlers" who inhabit Walcott's Trinidad to thrive.

The Caribbean Basin Initiative (though largely toothless), for example, was an attempt to show that the Caribbean did merit international attention in the political world as independent nations. The move to hemispheric unity as presaged by the North American Free Trade Agreement will be further evidence of this.

It is inevitably right that Walcott has assumed his rightful place in the literary pantheon. The people of the region cannot, as he suggests, wait for "a broader more benign consideration of the Caribbean." It is they who are responsible for its imaginative redefinition.

History is the accretion of time and events. Colonialism was one of the shaping forces in the Caribbean. It was not the final event.

Lorraine A. Lezama is a contributing writer for the editorial board.