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The Oxford Book of Caribbean Literature: Contemporary Voices

This document discusses the contemporary voices represented in the anthology "The Oxford Book of Caribbean Literature". It notes that while many of the writers have roots in the Caribbean, only a few still live there, as many now reside in places like Florida, Toronto, or Europe. Their perspectives are now complicated by these other communities they are a part of. The works included cover a wide range of topics beyond the politics of exile, including love stories. Writers like Edwidge Danticat straddle many traditions through their work.

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61 views

The Oxford Book of Caribbean Literature: Contemporary Voices

This document discusses the contemporary voices represented in the anthology "The Oxford Book of Caribbean Literature". It notes that while many of the writers have roots in the Caribbean, only a few still live there, as many now reside in places like Florida, Toronto, or Europe. Their perspectives are now complicated by these other communities they are a part of. The works included cover a wide range of topics beyond the politics of exile, including love stories. Writers like Edwidge Danticat straddle many traditions through their work.

Uploaded by

Lecks90
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The Oxford Book of Caribbean

Literature

Contemporary Voices

1
Contemporary Voices
• This generation inevitably sees the
Caribbean and the concerns that have
dominated the work of Caribbean writers in
more complex terms.
• Only three—at most—of these dozen
writers actually live and work in the
Caribbean now, though all maintain strong
ties.
2
Contemporary Voices
• Living in Florida or Toronto, or Europe as
„home‟—not now as isolated migrants but
as part of established Caribbean
communities, their „take‟ on Caribbean
issues is inevitably complicated by those
other perspectives.

3
Contemporary Voices
• That difference in attitude to „home‟ is evident
here as a kind of stylistic liberation in writers such
as Kincaid, Robert Antoni, and Edwidge
Danticat—and the young Cuban writer Edgardo
Sanabria Santaliz, but it is also the apparent
subject matter of some stories here—Zoila Ellis‟s
“The Waiting Room” or Makeda Silvera‟s
“Caribbean Chameleon” dealing with different
ends, as it were, of that journey between the
Caribbean and „elsewhere.‟

4
Contemporary Voices
• But a concern with the politics of exile, or
identity is not a dominant motif in the work
of contemporary writers in the way that it
was for that earlier generation of writers
involved in the first wave of mass migration
and immigration in the 1950s.

5
Contemporary Voices
• At least as many of the stories in this
section of the anthology might be termed
love stories, though they are very different
in tone and all, interestingly enough, are
written by men.

6
Contemporary Voices
• Edgardo Sanabria Santaliz‟z fantastical
story of the capture of a mermaid has the
quality of fairytale while Patrick
Chamoiseau‟s “Red Hot Peppars” is a more
down-to-earth story of seduction, callous
betrayal, and revenge.

7
Contemporary Voices
• Robert Antoni‟s “A World of Canes”
combines elements of both romance and
cruelty, but is particularly interesting as a
“told tale,” Antoni giving the narrative over
to the poorly educated girl who speaks her
story as if to a friend.

8
Contemporary Voices
• The fluent, confident unapologetic way he
uses that creole voice is a measure of the
journey West Indian writers have made
from the tentativeness of Eric Walrond‟s
experimentation with language in the early
years of the century.

9
Contemporary Voices
• Sasenarine Persaud‟s story, written in a
creolized Canadian/Indo-Guyanese voice,
full of local references—local to both
Toronto and to Georgetown—adds another
dimension to that continuum of voices
contemporary writers have drawn on.

10
Contemporary Voices
• The kinds of questions about identity, allegiance,
and notions of audience that such diversity implies
come to the fore when we consider the work of
Edwidge Danticat. Born in Haiti, she has lived
most of her life in the USA and she writes in
English, though much of her work is a reflection
on Haiti and, indeed, into Haitian history.

11
Contemporary Voices
For whom is Danticat writing? Is her work
part of Haitian/Caribbean literature or more
properly part of the multiplicity of voices
that must make up modern American
literature?

12
Contemporary Voices
• Of course it belongs to both—is part of the
multiplicity of voices that must make up
modern Caribbean literature—in so far as
those lines of demarcation were ever clear
or useful, they have been now irredeemably
blurred.

13
Contemporary Voices
• Perhaps the most we can say is that
Danticat‟s background provides her with the
emotional connection to characters in
Haiti‟s story that speak through her
imagination in ways not accessible to
writers without those connections.

14
Contemporary Voices: “Nineteen
Thirty Seven”
• Danticat‟s story “Nineteen Thirty Seven”
touches on that notion of finding a way to
escape the cruelties of one life for another,
elsewhere, and also offer another angle on
that process by which the Caribbean
„herstory‟ is brought to life.

15
Contemporary Voices: “Nineteen
Thirty Seven”
• It is a story about witchcraft, in a sense,
about women‟s „secret‟ powers, powers to
defy all sorts of laws—the least significant
being those made and administered by men.

16
Contemporary Voices: “Nineteen
Thirty Seven”
• It is a story about the oppression of women
and male fear of those powers they believe
certain women have. But it is also a story
about metaphor and the power of stories . . .
Whether of the tears of the Madonna or the
capacity of some women to fly.

17
Contemporary Voices
• Danticat straddles many traditions—the folk
and religious oral traditions of Haiti, the
literature of the wider Caribbean, and the
modern American short story.

18
Contemporary Voices
• By her drawing of them into a style that is
both personal and yet accessible to her
readers, whether in Haiti or Handsworth,
Harlem or Halfway Tree in Jamaica, she
points the way forward for Caribbean
writing into the twenty-first century.

19

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