English 240 (Caribbean Literature) Daily Updates

Look here for routine announcements, afterthoughts, reminders, important information I forgot to mention in class, schedule changes, and/or "homework" that I'd like you to do before we next see each other. I'll always try my best to update this page by 9:00 p.m. on days that class meets, but please make a habit of checking this page regularly.

We meet at 3:00 for last words, Poetry Project unveilings, and...food! (If you can bring something, great; if not, come and eat. I'll bring one dish, some mauby or sorrel, and plates/cups/flatware.)

I'll check the Poetry Project Group pages daily for finished revisions, but last call will be Monday morning, 10:00 a.m.

Don't forget that I'd also like each of you to hand in a brief written assessment on the Poetry Project next Monday. Mhis is mainly meant to be a self-assessment--an accounting of what you did, both visibly and behind the scenes, in helping to build your group's page. It can also be an occasion for assessing your group's working dynamics, if you need for it to be that.

If you have any other research notes or raw materials that you think it'd be beneficial for me to see in evaluating your work, get those to me Monday, as well.

Finally: So that you don't have to finish two projects at once, I've pushed back the due date for final papers till Wednesday at 4:30. I'll probably hold some office hours next Monday and Wednesday, but you can also put 'em in my mailbox in the English Dept. Office, Founders 201.

Draft website pages due: please upload files (in .rtf, .doc, or--preferably--.htm format) to your group page's file folder and clearly identify each file. I'll assemble them and let you know when your site is online.

Here's the deal that, in view of the crunch, we agreed to in class today: you faithfully read the first four chapters of The Dragon Can't Dance for Wednesday, and I'll accept posts through Saturday evening without counting them as late. Forum open soon; Lovelace "links" page in the online Course Reader is updated right now.

It's been a while since I've updated this page, I know. A reminder, first of all, to come see me with any concerns you might have about how the Poetry Project is going (rough draft is due Wednesday the 25th), any ideas you want to bounce off of me for a final paper, and/or any questions you might have about where you stand vis-a-vis reading responses. And speaking of reading responses: under our revised calendar, posts on The Dragon Can't Dance are due Tuesday, April 24th. If you need a make-up opportunity, you may e-mail me about the possibility of writing on the calypso anthology--which would be a good thing to read & listen to in preparation for Dragon, in any event.

Very sophisticated stuff I was hearing today. Wednesday, we'll start in on a half-dozen dub poems in particular. Review the posts on the Moodle forum, as well as these poems: "Siddung Pon de Wall" (by executive order) and "Riddym Ravings," "Politician," "Big Time Gangsters," "Me Green Poem," and "Dis Poem" (by popular acclaim).

I've posted some afterthoughts (Columbus, from his after-deck--who, me?) on The Arrivants here; have a look. And prepare to discuss your favorite dub poems.

One more day on The Arrivants. We'll finish up, come hell or high water! Dub Poetry postponed till next Monday, with reading responses due Sunday. (I'll open a forum by the end of the week.)

I like what I was hearing in class today (when I let anyone else get a word in edgeways, that is). We'll keep going on Monday, starting with Renee & Daisy leading us through "The Emigrants." 'And we'll see if we manage to get through everything left on the agenda.

In the meantime, keep preparing "Word Sound Have Power" as if we'll start in on it on Wednesday. I've spoken with Academic Computing about the problem in the labs with RealPlayer not being able to handle my ancient files: so far, they've fixed the computers at stations 3A, 3B, & 3C in the Gist Hall 218 lab; I'll let you know if they manage to update any others.

Get started reading/listening to the Dub Poetry anthology, Word Sound Have Power. On Wednesday, various folks will be walking us through a discussion of some representative poems from Rights of Passage and Masks, trying their best both to highlight what's interesting about the poems in and of themselves and to situate them in the context of the sections and the "books" they come from. If you missed class today and want to give these poems some special attention, here's the lineup (you may even be able to join in a pre-class conversation on the discussion forum):

And then we'll tackle "Tano" (p. 151), "Caliban" (p. 191), and "Negus" (222) together.

We begin The Arrivants. See the updated Brathwaite page of the online Course Reader, and (if you missed class on Wednesday), download these detailed reading guidelines.

Let me augment Monday's introductory lecture with a couple more ideas:

So as I've been saying, Walcott's best-known as a poet—an extremely versatile one—and it's a shame we're mainly ignoring that. But let me present you with a couple of poems that display his range and illustrate some of the themes I talked about in my introductory lecture on Monday. Walcott speaks in "What the Twilight Says" about the prestige, the allure, the sexiness, of English; about the desire (which those revelers down in the street wouldn't fully understand, he thinks) to master that tongue, to learn its poetic models and traditions, to adapt its iambic rhythms to his voice (or vice versa), to adjust its preferred images to suit his eyes. That's also the explicit subject of some of his earliest poetry. Here's an excerpt from "Prelude," published in 1948:

And here's another excerpt—in accurate iambics—from "A Far Cry from Africa" (1962):

So: you can note there the declamatory tone, the showy and learned technique, the complicated syntax, the refined diction. And both of these poems (you'll have to take my word for this if you don’t know it from firsthand experience) show the influence of 17th-century metaphysical poets (like Donne and Marvell) and of 20th-century modernists (like Eliot, Auden, and Dylan Thomas). (And I’ll just mention parenthetically that from the earliest stage of his career, Walcott has been interested in "rewriting" the history of the Caribbean as a kind of humble, vernacular echo of classical epic—in imbuing both the colonial past and current West Indian everyday life with the dignity and awe of antiquity. This all culminates, of course, in Walcott's transformation of Homer's Odyssey into his own epic poem Omeros.)

But at same time, Walcott has also written in Creole (or "patois," spelt [and pronounced] "patwah" in Creole!) for most of his career, and even moreso lately. Here, for instance, is a fragment from “The Schooner Flight” (1979), part of which Walcott read on the video clip I played in class:

In idle August, while the sea soft,

You can see and hear how he effortlessly switches registers from "standard" English to Creole to something in between. Not surprisingly, when Walcott founded his first theatrical company, the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, in 1959, he aimed, as I mentioned, to create "a theatre where someone can do Shakespeare or sing Calypso with equal conviction."

So let's see, as we continue to talk about Dream on Monkey Mountain (produced the same year that The Mimic Men was published, by the way), if Walcott lives up to his own aesthetic ambitions and to his view of history. That is, let's see how he deals with the historical "amnesia" he mentions in "The Muse of History" (356) and how he bears up to the weight of the present. Finally, let's see in what way his vision of people in the new world is "Adamic" (357): how he views the survival of the middle passage as leaving you not in the ruins of history, but at the beginning of history, with a blank slate to write on ("What the Twilight Says" 4), in a language that goes "beyond mimicry" (17).

First, have a relaxing and productive break. Second: get ready for a heavy second half of the semester. We'll start in on Dream on Monkey Mountain (remember, I'm only holding you responsible for the play of that title contained in the collection of the same name, along with the introductory essay "What the Twilight Says" and a couple of short pieces in the online reader (I'll update that page soon). Reading responses are due Sunday, March 18th (I'll also open up a discussion forum soon).

In case you didn't get my e-mail: I've set up Poetry Project group pages in Moodle, where you can keep up an ongoing discussion, e-mail each other, and upload files. Check in frequently.

If you missed class today, carefully--and thoroughly--read the project description for the Poetry Project. We'll meet in Library 208 on Wednesday to get a jump on things before Spring Break; I'll create group pages on Moodle soon.

You'll have 5 minutes or so to regroup, review/compare notes, and decide on a game plan; then we'll hear reports from the groups who were working in class on Wednesday, using passages from Naipaul's 1962 travel narrative The Middle Passage to illuminate various aspects of The Mimic Men (and vice versa). (If you weren't in class today, you can view all five Middle Passage excerpts here--and even if you were in class, you'll want to have a look at all of them, to get a sense of how your discussion may have overlapped with other folks. Sophia: have a look at #4; Sarah, #2, and Christina--if you're not in the hospital!--#1.)

I gather that some groups' work was slightly handicapped by the fact that a few people weren't yet finished with the book. That'll make it even more important that you continue individually, over the weekend, the work that you began collectively today.

You'll notice that there's a little breathing room built into the calendar over the next couple of weeks. This would be an opportune time to get started on Walcott and Brathwaite--whose Arrivants trilogy is especially challenging (which means you'll want to set aside extra time to read it slowly and repeatedly, and to make use of secondary materials to guide you along).

I've opened a Moodle forum which, in principle, is dedicated to V. S. Naipal's The Mimic Men. But for Monday's class, we're also reading several non-fiction pieces (some "creative," some academic) by Michelle Cliff and Stuart Hall which I'm offering as a kind of prelude to Sir Vidia. A lot of reading, I know, especially for the beginning of the midterm crunch. But please do prepare all these pieces conscientiously. You may post your thoughts about Cliff and Hall to the forum as well as your thoughts about Naipal--particularly if you need another opportunity to make your quota for the course. I've already posted some reading questions on all three writers.

I think we did a pretty nice job of opening up Lamming's novel today. (And thanks to Daisy for transcribing the notes on the board!) You spend the weekend re-reading the book--or finishing it, as the case may be; I'll try to take what we did today and plan something slightly more structured for Monday. You might focus, provisionally, at least, on three major areas of discussion:

Look for an update of the Lamming page before the end of the weekend, and don't forget to post those discussion questions.

More on Lonely Londoners: I'll spend some time reading the Discussion Forum over the weekend; you should, too. Here's a direct link to the slideshow that I wanted to show you today, from the Picture Post article from 1956 with the hair-raising title "30,000 Colour Problems" (you'll need a recent version of Adobe Reader to view it). It'll help you form a better mental picture of the characters of who populate Selvon's novel.

Finally: get a jump on the next novel, George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin. It's a narratively complex novel, not an easy read, and perhaps not as obviously pleasurable. But I hope it's worth your time. Devise a system for taking good notes, and I'll try to post some reading questions reasonably soon.

Now, more background on Selvon's novel. Here's that lecture I promised (threatened?):

So: with Selvon’s novel we begin to study the products of what’s known as the West Indian Literary Renaissance or “Boom”: within a period of about ten years, beginning around 1950, most of the major writers emerged who would put West Indian lit on the world map. In a short but intense burst of activity, these guys—and it was pretty much a boys’ club—effectively invented the forms and themes of the modern West Indian novel. The curious thing about this West Indian literary boom, though, was that for the most part, it didn’t take place in the West Indies. Almost all the writers associated with it won their fame and success not in the Caribbean, but in London—and in fact many of their first works were (like The Lonely Londoners) about the experience of their self-imposed exile there. Obviously, this requires some explanation.

For starters, you could do worse than read Maisie and Haynes’s situation as a kind of explanatory allegory. You could argue, that is, that all sorts of stifling material circumstances conspire to trap Maisie & Haynes in a kind of paralyzing inertia. Life is so claustrophobic and impoverished in Minty Alley that anyone with real ambitions (especially any young woman with independent aspirations) has gotta get the hell out of there. Even if you’d like to stay and work things out (as Haynes sometimes seems to want to), the place can be so constricting and alienating and intense that it frustrates your ability to get any perspective on it. So read Minty Alley as a microcosm of Trinidad (or of any Caribbean island): if you live in a small, provincial colony and you’ve gotartistic or intellectual ambitions—especially if those ambitions involve giving voice to some kind of oppositional black consciousness—you eventually find that you run up against the same sorts of obstacles. This had happened before, actually: Claude McKay decamped to America in 1912, and both CLR James and Una Marson lit out for England in 1932. And now, in the late 40s and early 50s, a whole bunch of other young writers full of piss & vinegar were driven to escape what they saw as the failure of their homeland in order to nurture their imaginations. (Lamming talks about this at some length in “The Occasion for Speaking,” which I’ve put in next week’s readings.)

Now to see things this way—i.e., to see the streets of 1950s London as being choked with young, gifted & black West Indian intellectuals—would be to distort and exaggerate the situation. Sure, there were students & writers & artists & entertainers there; but obviously the men who populate Sam Selvon’s Lonely London are not romantic artist-types who’ve gone into self-imposed exile because they felt stifled or underappreciated back home. Moses, Galahad and Co. are peripherally aware of the presence of all those students and eggheads, but they themselves are regular Joes, working stiffs. So how did England become (by the late 1980s), the “third-largest West Indian island”? How did it come to be that in 1960, an English book reviewer could complain that the London which Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey depicted in his latest novel seemed like a city “as foreign to an English person as Babylon or Buenos Aires”?

Well, briefly: it came to be through one of the great ironies of colonial history. In its waning years, the Empire, quite to everyone’s surprise, began to implode upon itself—a delicious paradox whose poetic justice Louise Bennettt gleefully plays up in “Colonisation in Reverse.”

I already mentioned some of the patterns of migration out of the Caribbean in the late 19th & early 20th centuries; now, from the late 40s through the early 60s, there was a second wave that swamped those earlier ones. Here’s the simple version of what happened: to begin with, during WWII, Britain recruited fairly good numbers—a few thousand, say—of West Indians to come work in Britain as servicemen and civilian laborers associated with the war effort. At the end of the war they were all offered big financial incentives to return home, but many stayed. More important, after the war, when the British economy was in shambles and industry needed rebuilding, colonial subjects were tempted to come to the “mother country” to fill serious labor shortages in certain industries. Now, the government wasn’t exactly encouraging this; in fact it tried for several years to fill the shortages with Eastern European workers. But with the institution of the British Commonwealth in 1948 (a complicated political arrangement between the UK and its current and former colonies), all subjects of the Empire were officially regarded as British citizens and technically entitled free entry into the UK. West Indians simply saw an opportunity and jumped.

So in June 1948 what happens is this: the SS “Empire Windrush” (wonderful name, no?) arrives in England from Jamaica with 492 (black) passengers intending to settle and find work, even though they’ve got no arranged jobs, no family waiting for them, no place to live. (I encourage you in the strongest terms to go explore some of links on the Selvon web page.) The episode makes headlines for a few days, embarasses the government slightly and alarms a few racists, but jobs and housing are found for everyone and the whole thing blows over. The thing is, though: the Windrush episode turns out to be the start of a trickle of spontaneous migration; over the next few years, in fits and starts, more and more West Indians arrive under more or less the same circumstanes. Now at this point, the government is still a little skittish about large numbers of indigent single black men entering the country, and it takes a few half-hearted steps to discourage further immigration. But the immigrants keep coming anyway—many of them by this point having been actively recruited by prospective employers in the UK. There are no reliable figures for the years 1949-52, but in 1953 about 2000 West Indians entered Britain; in 1954, about 11,000; from 1955 thru 59 between fifteen and thirty thousand per year; in 1960 and 1961, 50,000 & 66,000 respectively—and by halfway through 1962 (with 32,000 already having entered the country), the Brits suddenly put immigration restrictions in place. (The numbers I’m citing represent only West Indians, who up till that point were single biggest immigrant group, but there were also significant numbers of Indians, Pakistanis, Africans and Hong Kong Chinese. The overwhelming majority settled in the major British cities, particularly London.)

Now you can imagine some of the problems that ensued: Moses & Co. mention most of them, at least obliquely. On the material level, there were problems with job placement and unemployment, inadequate social services, housing shortages, etc., etc. Very little was done officially to assist or accommodate the settlement and social integration of the migrants. They tended to be segregated into low-income jobs and deteriorating neighborhoods, and they increasingly grew to be looked upon by their neighbors with suspicion and alarm. A couple of noisy conservative politicians tried to mount an anti-immigration campaign throughout the 50s and tried to get restrictions imposed, but the Labor government, for various political reasons, did little except to repeatedly “study” the matter. As for the British public: there was certainly plenty of petty, everyday racism, and even a few scattered racial disturbances (as well as sporadic, isolated incidents of small-scale racist violence), but there was actually no widespread popular concern about immigration (and no widespread, overt antagonism towards immigrants of color) until August and September 1958, when all the simmering hostility came to a boil in four days of race riots in Nottingham (a city in the midlands) and Notting Hill (the London neighborhood just west of Bayswater), which were provoked almost entirely by white racist thugs who savagely beat up and otherwise terrorized black residents. The issue briefly flared up in Parliament and the national newspapers with lots of tongue-clucking and soul-searching—but then after a month or so it fizzled, and nothing really came of it. Nevertheless, in the ensuing couple of years there were mounting pressures for immigration control (which paradoxically had the effect of spurring immigration, as colonials rushed to get into Britain before the inevitable happened). Legislation passed in late 1961, as I mentioned above, but even this was fairly mild: it established a three-tiered system of restrictions based on job skills, and those restrictions were administered fairly liberally. So even with restrictions in place, over 50,000 immigrants per year arrived from the Commonwealth from 1963 on through the 1970s, and “race problems” kept on growing. More on that at a later date.

Anyway, this is the context in which the West Indian literary “boom” was happening. Between 1949 and 1960, as I said, over a dozen West Indian writers (not just Selvon, Lamming, Walcott, and Naipal, whom we’ll be reading, but other big names like Vic Reid, Roger Mais, Edgar Mittelholzer, Ralph deBoissiere, Andrew Salkey, and Wilson Harris) established international reputations in England, with over 50 books to their credit between them; many of those books are now recognized as “classics” of West Indian lit. Selvon and Lamming were the first to break through to a wide audience and critical acclaim (Selvon’s A Brighter Sun came out in 1952, followed by Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin in ‘53)—in fact these two men were good friends, and had arrived on the same boat in 1950. Their initial success, together with the flood of West Indians into Britain, provoked both a kind of “exoticist” curiosity and genuine interest on the part of a British reading public. “Caribbean Voices”—a weekly radio program on the BBC devoted to West Indian creative writing (which actually grew out of a show Una Marson had begun in the late 1930s), consolidated all these guys’ fame both in Britain and back home. And that’s how London became the “literary capital” of the West Indies. Certainly there was something weirdly colonialist about this, but nevertheless, London was a place where lots of cross-fertilization and collaboration could take place. Freed from what they saw as the constraints of their small islands back home, Jamaicans, Barbadians, Trinidadians and others could come together and forge a sense of Pan-Caribbean cultural consciousness and unity.

Again: we’ll read more about this dynamic in Lamming’s essay next week, but I think you can see it at work even in The Lonely Londoners, where Africans, South Asians, and West Indians of all types are coming together in a new community, inventing a social style, a street culture and a common language—(which as Ken Ramchand points out is neither standard English nor standard West Indian Creole, but something in between)—all their own.

We begin The Lonely Londoners. Forum posts are due Tuesday; I've put up some reading/discussion questions there for your reference. (I'll answer Minty Alley posts later this week.) Please check out the required & recommended readings/resources on the Selvon page of the online Course Reader.

We'll try to recover the momentum we built up last Wednesday and talk about how Minty Alley's sexual politics complicate its exploration of class and color in the early 20th-century Caribbean. You can lay the groundwork for that discussion by making some noise on the Moodle forum, which has been fairly quiet since Wednesday. (I'll probably close that forum to further posts on Tuesday afternoon, so don't wait too long to speak your piece.)

Get a jump on The Lonely Londoners, too; I'll try to open up a new forum and post some discussion questions soon.

If you're choosing to write on Minty Alley, post your response to the forum by 8:00 p.m. Tuesday. If you're not, then take special care in reading what comes in and try to formulate a discussion question by classtime on Wednesday.

One of the things I wanted to show you--and exhort you to check out--in class today was my page of General Reference Resources on the Caribbean. Please have a look (among other things, there are resources related to the topics I was lecturing on in class today)--and also check out the James resources in the online Course Reader.

Speaking of today's class: I'll probably have another 10 or 15 minutes' worth of remarks before we begin talking together on Wednesday, but here's what I wanted to say today, by way of conclusion:

We left off with Tropica, whose poem "Nana" was full of regretful nostalgia for the old days when black women patiently & uncomplainingly brought up white babies in the plantation house. And I was suggesting that Tropica seems to want it both ways--ie.e, tto acknowledge the importance and the centrality of black culture, but to "contain" it in an unthreatening form, the form it took before black people began moving to the cities in great numbers, where they acted in ways that genteel white folks found to be loud and unruly and threatening.

On the whole, then, the first notable effort to create a uniquely, self-consciously “Caribbean Literature” was a bit flawed:

So when black writers, artists, and intellectuals finally began to come into the limelight, as they did in the 1920s and 30s (with the rise of a black middle-class and black political movements, which I'll talk a little about next week), then Caribbean literary history became increasingly linked to movements by the Caribbean’s black & mixed-race majority for self-determination, decolonization, and cultural pride. And then it was no longer clear what place white creoles played in scheme of things, and the work of Tropica & Tom Redcam’s generation came to be dismissed (or only grudgingly acknowledged) not just because it was naïve and derivative and so on, but also because of the skin color and class privilege of its creators. They were essentially hoist by their own petard: if, as they had implicitly posited, "authentic" West Indian culture was black, then why did it need to be filtered through white people, who by their own logic were not authentic? That logic came to haunt not only Tropica and Tom Redcam et al. , but also people like Jean Rhys, who was a writer of infinitely more talent, but who is not universally recognized as a "Caribbean" writer.

Still, their constitutes a prelude: when figures like C.L.R. James came along (who were also trying to build a pan-Caribbean cultural consciousness, and whose sympathies really were with common folk), the ground had already been broken. That is, whatever their flaws, those white creole writers opened up several of the themes and motifs that would later come to characterize the grand sweep of Caribbean literary history in the 20th century. You’ll see in James, for instance, an interest in vernacular language and in the culture of the masses; and it's worth comparing his treatment of that subject matter to that of his literary predecessors.

Get a jump on James's Minty Alley. I'll be lecturing on Monday, but we'll begin discussing the book on Wednesday, and particularly if you choose to write on it, you'll need to have the book finished by Tuesday night.