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Writers of the Caribbean Diaspora: Shifting Homelands, Travelling Identities TWO recent news items appear to be quite relevant here—the first concerned the men who perished in a ship cargo-container and the second was about the abstention of British/American representatives from the UN-sponsored conference on racism wherein the Iranian president pointed out that the American and British governments, in order to safeguard their own imperial interests, cunningly "accuse" the non-imperial states of violence against the Jewish race.
Curiously, the dazzling variety of multicultural Caribbean society and its literature is the consequence of the massive dislocation of slaves from Africa and later on that of the indentured labour from India, particularly needed for the sugar plantations of the colonial masters in these islands. Thus, unwittingly, far from the colonial intentions, the Caribbean islands have emerged as a testing ground for the evaluation of the multi-cultural society and its literature. This collection of 20 essays by the critics primarily hailing from different colleges and universities in India cover a wide variety of authors with the focus on the theme of displacement and dislocation caused by colonial expansion. A few essays are by critics like Cyril Dabydeen and David Dabydeen who work abroad. Cyril Dabydeen’s memoir Shaping the Environment: Sugar Plantation or Life After describes the dilemma present in the mind of the earliest migrants, "Would there be another time or another place for us?" David Dabydeen’s article Teaching West Indian Literature in Britain explores the pedagogical approaches to textual interpretation. The job is challenging and clear cut: "The West Indian teacher will then have to offer for analysis a set of propositions about the history and culture of the region—a particular region, derived from the body of creative writing itself". This is to evade the Western theory, "which will exoticise, capture and Calibanise the black subject". In this interesting assemblage of critical discourses on authors like, Shanti Mattoo, Austin Clarke, Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, Arnold Harrichand Itwaru, George Lamming, Eric Braithwaite and Ramabai Espinet, we find a new Caribbean landscape emerging. Focus on woman’s silence finds expression in Lakshmi Persaud’s work and Seepersad Naipaul portrays situations from the feministic as well as patriarchal points of view. While V. S. Naipaul’s negation of Caribbean history, in effect, points to its ‘presence’, Caryl Phillips seeks recourse to the collective memory of oppression and Jean Rhys demonstrates that the deep fissures created by colonialism are not easy to reconcile. Nevertheless, there are possibilities of attaining a new identity, as Charu Mathur suggests in her essay on Sam Selvon, "The Indo-Trinidadian realises he is neither a rootless being devoid of identity nor a lost son of India but a man made and shaped by the island now. The island is his world and this is the new reality he accepts and relates to." However, Purabi Panwar points out that this ‘new reality’ does not severe itself from its native roots even in the process of empowering itself with the coloniser’s tongue.
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Ironically,
it was the British imperialism that thrived blatantly for centuries
together on the slave trade violently aimed at those African and Indian
races that the colonisers took to be yolk-animals. The recent tragic
deaths in the human cargo shipments are a direct legacy bestowed on the
modern civilisation by the British/American imperialistic slave trade.