 |
 Adjustable Skipping Jump Rope with Counter Number Fitness Exercise Workout Gym $3.49 Time Remaining: 11d 1h 26m Buy It Now for only: $3.49 |
 Nike + Plus FuelBand Fuel Band Medium M Wristband Bracelet Fitness Step Counter $122.50 (5 Bids) Time Remaining: 2d 9h 3m |
 Heart Rate Watch Calorie Counter Pulse Monitor Fitness FREE SHIPPING $36.99 (1 Bid) Time Remaining: 6h 15m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $9.95 Time Remaining: 15d 23h 7m Buy It Now for only: $9.95 |
 Heart Rate Sport Watch Calorie Counter Pulse Monitor Fitness FREE SHIPPING $34.99 Time Remaining: 6h 15m |
 Adjustable Skipping Jump Rope with Counter Number Fitness Exercise Workout Gym $3.39 Time Remaining: 1d 17h 36m Buy It Now for only: $3.39 |
 Heart Rate Watch Calorie Counter Pulse Monitor Fitness FREE SHIPPING $36.99 (1 Bid) Time Remaining: 6h 15m |
 NEW HEART RATE MONITOR DIGITAL SPORTS WATCH FITNESS HEALTH PULSE COUNTER CALORIE $7.43 (8 Bids) Time Remaining: 14h 47m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch Brand New US $11.00 Time Remaining: 28d 19h 8m Buy It Now for only: $11.00 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.01 Time Remaining: 1h 4m |
 Adjustable Skipping Jump Rope with Counter Number Fitness Exercise Workout Gym $3.98 Time Remaining: 28d 15h 50m Buy It Now for only: $3.98 |
 MINI PEDAL EXERCISER BIKE FITNESS EXERCISE CYCLE FOR LEGS ARMS W COUNTER $36.93 Time Remaining: 18h 30m |
 Nike Plus + Fuelband Fuel Band S Small Wristband Bracelet Fitness Step Counter $219.99 Time Remaining: 1d 11h 31m |
 NEW MINI PEDAL EXERCISER BIKE FITNESS EXERCISE CYCLE FOR LEGS ARMS w COUNTER $49.95 Time Remaining: 10d 16h 35m Buy It Now for only: $49.95 |
 Nike Plus + Fuelband Fuel Band M Medium Wristband Bracelet Fitness Step Counter $224.99 Time Remaining: 1d 11h 31m |
 Adjustable Skipping Jump Rope with Counter Number Fitness Exercise Workout Gym $3.49 Time Remaining: 19d 23h 2m Buy It Now for only: $3.49 |
 Nike + Plus FuelBand Fuel Band Small S Wristband Bracelet Fitness Step Counter $219.99 Time Remaining: 1d 21h 58m |
 Nike + Plus FuelBand Fuel Band Medium M Wristband Bracelet Fitness Step Counter $224.99 Time Remaining: 1d 21h 58m |
 NEW Adjustable Skipping Jump Rope Counter DIGITAL Fitness Exercise Workout Gym $3.98 Time Remaining: 13h 24m Buy It Now for only: $3.98 |
 New Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness US $5.00 (5 Bids) Time Remaining: 1d 17h 45m |
 Waterproof Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Stop Watch Calorie Counter Fitness Exercise $5.45 Time Remaining: 6d 2h 24m Buy It Now for only: $5.45 |
 Heart Rate Sport Watche Pulse Monitor Fitness Wrist Watch Calorie Counter $34.99 Time Remaining: 1d 7h 23m |
 Mini Sunny Health and Fitness Pedals with time and calories counter $39.99 Time Remaining: 1d 13h 13m |
 New Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness USA $11.00 Time Remaining: 12d 20h 38m Buy It Now for only: $11.00 |
 NEW HEART RATE MONITOR DIGITAL SPORTS WATCH FITNESS HEALTH PULSE COUNTER CALORIE $1.56 Time Remaining: 5d 15h 22m Buy It Now for only: $10.64 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch Black Silver $8.99 Time Remaining: 29d 8h 10m Buy It Now for only: $8.99 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 4h 10m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.95 Time Remaining: 3h 50m |
 Sports Fitness Watch Calories Counter Heart Rate Pulse Monitor $1.00 Time Remaining: 28d 19h 23m Buy It Now for only: $1.00 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.85 Time Remaining: 4h 30m |
 Waterproof Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Stop Watch Calorie Counter Fitness Exercise $5.89 Time Remaining: 23d 23h 59m Buy It Now for only: $5.89 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 5h 10m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.95 Time Remaining: 4h 51m |
 Digital LCD Jumping Skipping Rope Calorie Count Counter Fit for Adults Children $14.99 Time Remaining: 17h 21m Buy It Now for only: $14.99 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.85 Time Remaining: 5h 30m |
 Pluse Heart Rate Monitor Calorie Counter Sports Watch Fitness Exercise Running $5.89 Time Remaining: 22d 22m Buy It Now for only: $5.89 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 6h 11m |
 Body Media Go Wear Fit Bodymedia Armband Heart Rate and Calorie Counter System $50.00 Time Remaining: 2d 14h 46m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness Sporting Goods Newest $6.99 Time Remaining: 5d 9h 59m Buy It Now for only: $6.99 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.85 Time Remaining: 6h 31m |
 Waterproof Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Stop Watch Calorie Counter Fitness Exercise $5.89 Time Remaining: 22d 23m Buy It Now for only: $5.89 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 7h 11m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.95 Time Remaining: 5h 51m |
 COUNTER JUMP ROPE COUNT EXERCISE SKIP SPEED GYM FITNESS $4.99 Time Remaining: 6d 5h 1m Buy It Now for only: $4.99 |
 Fitness Exercise Foam Handle Auto Counter Jumping Skipping Rope $6.74 Time Remaining: 1d 5h 37m |
 Waterproof Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Stop Watch Calorie Counter Fitness Exercise $5.89 Time Remaining: 18d 18h 49m Buy It Now for only: $5.89 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 8h 12m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.85 Time Remaining: 7h 30m |
 Nike + Plus FuelBand Fuel Band Large L Wristband Bracelet Fitness Step Counter $249.99 Time Remaining: 25d 59m Buy It Now for only: $249.99 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.95 Time Remaining: 6h 51m |
 Waterproof Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Stop Watch Calorie Counter Fitness Exercise $5.89 Time Remaining: 18d 18h 46m Buy It Now for only: $5.89 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.85 Time Remaining: 8h 33m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 9h 11m |
 NEW Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch orange 15 $15.99 Time Remaining: 13d 14h 1m Buy It Now for only: $15.99 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.95 Time Remaining: 7h 51m |
 New 5 Colors Sport Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Wrist Watch $6.99 Time Remaining: 8d 16h 52m Buy It Now for only: $6.99 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 10h 11m |
 SPORTLINE 360 TOTAL FITNESS PEDOMETER step counter $5.99 Time Remaining: 2d 20h 35m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Stop Watch Calorie Counter Fitness Exercise Orange 009 $6.59 Time Remaining: 3d 15m Buy It Now for only: $6.59 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 11h 11m |
 NEW MINI PEDAL EXERCISER FITNESS BIKE EXERCISE CYCLE FOR LEGS ARMS W COUNTER $49.93 Time Remaining: 15d 13h 27m Buy It Now for only: $49.93 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.85 Time Remaining: 9h 30m |
 New Orange Sport Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Wrist Watch $0.01 Time Remaining: 11h 45m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $9.95 Time Remaining: 22d 11h 10m Buy It Now for only: $9.95 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.85 Time Remaining: 10h 38m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $11.00 Time Remaining: 29d 12h 35m Buy It Now for only: $11.00 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.95 Time Remaining: 8h 50m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 12h 11m |
 2 x New Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $15.59 Time Remaining: 23d 19h 1m Buy It Now for only: $15.59 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.85 Time Remaining: 11h 31m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch jogging running $11.49 Time Remaining: 28d 17h 41m Buy It Now for only: $11.49 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 13h 12m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.95 Time Remaining: 10h 51m |
 Adjustable Skipping Jump Rope with Counter Number Fitness Exercise Workout Gym $3.99 Time Remaining: 9d 1h 28m Buy It Now for only: $3.99 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.85 Time Remaining: 12h 31m |
 Adjustable Skipping Jump Rope with Counter Number Fitness Exercise Workout Gym $4.79 Time Remaining: 18d 18h 21m Buy It Now for only: $4.79 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.95 Time Remaining: 10h 4m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.85 Time Remaining: 13h 31m |
 New Black Sport Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calorie Counter Fitness Wrist Watch $8.69 Time Remaining: 8d 19h 12m Buy It Now for only: $8.69 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 14h 11m |
 Nike Plus + Fuelband Fuel Band S Small Wristband Bracelet Fitness Step Counter $219.99 Time Remaining: 28d 16h 59m Buy It Now for only: $219.99 |
 Heart Rate Pulse Monitor Calorie Counter Fitness Watch $9.50 Time Remaining: 9h 2m Buy It Now for only: $11.50 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 15h 11m |
 NEW Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness US $11.00 Time Remaining: 12d 18h 3m Buy It Now for only: $11.00 |
 Red Sport Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Unisex Wrist Watch $0.01 Time Remaining: 12h 34m |
 Pulse Heart Rate HR Monitor Calories Health Counter Sports Fitness Wrist Watch $9.99 Time Remaining: 19d 2h 47m Buy It Now for only: $9.99 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 17h 11m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 16h 10m |
 Wireless Heart Rate Monitor Calorie Fitness Counter Sport Wrist Watch+Black Belt $38.99 Time Remaining: 20d 22h 32m Buy It Now for only: $38.99 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.95 Time Remaining: 11h 53m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $11.00 Time Remaining: 6d 23h 53m Buy It Now for only: $11.00 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.85 Time Remaining: 14h 33m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 18h 11m |
 Skipping Jump Rope with Counter Fitness Exercise $4.99 Time Remaining: 13d 22h 32m Buy It Now for only: $4.99 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.85 Time Remaining: 15h 31m |
 Heart Rate Watch Calorie Counter Pulse Monitor Fitness FREE SHIPPING $36.99 Time Remaining: 6d 15h 54m Buy It Now for only: $36.99 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.95 Time Remaining: 12h 53m |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Fitness Watch $0.85 Time Remaining: 19h 11m |
 Omron Digital Pocket Pedometer walking fitness Exercise counter Workout Supply $30.99 Time Remaining: 2d 10h 36m Buy It Now for only: $30.99 |
 Pulse Heart Rate Monitor Calories Counter Watch Fitness $0.85 Time Remaining: 16h 33m |
Fitness Counter
The Pleasures of Exile as a Counter-Discourse: Lamming's Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Caribbean Identity
Introduction
Since the time of the Great Discoveries and the globalization of our planet, identities are more than ever flying, shifting, changing places and forms, moving around numerous locations. The colonial circumstances complicated the racial, socio-political and cultural relations and constitute an indisputable turning point in the development of the countries involved. As Edouard Glissant reminds us in Caribbean Discourse, the answer to the question of "What is the Caribbean?"--is "a multiple series of relationships". My hypothesis concerning the Caribbean scenario is that--The Pleasures of Exile is a postcolonialist, postrealist and postnationalist counter-discourse because it gives us George Lamming's glimpse of the complex issues of identity contained within the Caribbean island-states that were largely shaped by European colonial discourse and practice from the late fifteenth century until the late twentieth century. Geographically, ‘the Caribbean' refers to all island nations of the Caribbean Sea and territories on the surrounding South and Central American mainland, while ‘West Indies' refers only to the formerly British colonies. Whatever, the complexities are entailed in the process of trying to represent its diverse people with a diverse history with a homogenous, autonomous ‘identity'. According to Michel Foucault, our identity is constructed by how we are seen. From this perspective, ‘the Caribbean identity' refers to how people in the world see and evaluate the Caribbean, either individually or globally, and the ways that it is politically, culturally and discursively constructed along with the possibility of reconstruction. So my research questions are—"How are the nations of the Caribbean and/or the West Indies originated? How are they represented by canonical discourses and how is their identity constructed? What about its impact throughout different times and spaces of the world? Is it possible to deconstruct and reconstruct their identity through counter-discourse?" In The Pleasures of Exile (1960),George Lamming explores their answers to assert a dignified identity of the Caribbean people.
First, we have to keep in mind that since 1960s there has been a great emphasis on decolonization and emergent nationalism throughout the Caribbean region. Concerning their background, of all the post-colonial peoples only the Caribbean can be said to be largely dispossessed of their history and identity due to rootlessness, dispossession, diaspora and hybridity. The Caribs and the Arawaks, the original dwellers of the islands still remain as a ghostly trace on its modern creolized inhabitants. So, the objective of my research is to explore, with textual signifiers, Lamming's dealing with the themes of colonial history of displacement and dispossession, slavery and racial subjugation, decolonization and the Caribbean emigrant experiences as a quest for deconstruction and reconstruction of his national identity. I would like to establish that as the canonical discourses like The Tempest, the B.B.C. etc.construct the Caribbean's mythologized identities negatively with biased perspectives for their own benefits, Lamming has tried to deconstruct or decentralize their canonical position counter-discursively. But according to Derrida, every experience has more than one interpretations that must be subjective, perspectival and biased; and subjectivity denies authenticity. In that sense, no work can claim a universal meaning to ‘the Caribbean identity'. However, Lamming's quest can be called his intellectual commitment to his land and people "who are still regarded [by Europe and America] as the unfortunate descendants of languageless and deformed slaves" (119).
The essays of The Pleasures of Exile (1960)are written on the basis of imagination and experience. It represents the critical issues like the Caribbean pre-colonial and colonial situations leading to the nation's struggle for decolonization and Lamming's post-colonialist vision; history of diasporas and slavery; racism, hybridity and identity crisis; politics of language, religion, canonical discourses, media, Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses etc.--in the construction, representation and manipulation of the Caribbean's stereotype identities and their worldwide impacts. And in that sense, the book emerges as Lamming's revisioning and rewriting the Caribbean colonial history from a post-colonial perspective. Lamming once said—
From about the beginning of sixties, I entered into the [Trinidad] region not just as witness and observer, but in a certain kind of activist and … as the New World Group … [who] talked about the Caribbean as it reacted to colonial power and so on. We saw the independence of Guyana not as a Guyanese affair. This was a matter that concerned the whole region.
Indeed, George Lamming wants literature of the region to be part of the consciousness of the Caribbean. Therefore, besides focusing on the personal experiences, he also (re)tells the ethnic and social history of his nation. In fact, to have more reliable version of a nation's history, we need some historiographer from inside the very territory. From this perspective, Lamming emerges as a Caribbean voice to deconstruct the colonial negative versions of the Caribbean history and identity, and to explore, restore and rewrite the positive ones. I would try to prove my viewpoint that as a part of his counter-discursive quest, Lamming attempts a postcolonial allegorical reading of Shakespeare's The Tempest to dismantle or expose the British colonial ideology before the world.
The methodology adopted in my research consists of a close intertextual and comparative analysis, which will draw from interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks, taking a critical exploration mainly towards the Caribbean postcolonial identity. I would focus on how Lamming reworks the European ‘classics' to invest them with more local relevance and to divest them of their assumed authority/authenticity. Helen Tiffin terms such a project as ‘canonical counter-discourse', a process whereby a post-colonial writer unveils and dismantles the basic assumptions of a specific canonical text by developing a ‘counter' text that preserves many of the identifying signifiers of the original while altering, often allegorically, its structure of power. Many of the approaches used here have been borrowed from the concepts of several postcolonial and cultural critics, such as Stuart Hall, Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Louise Althusser, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Boise, N'gugi, Walcott and others--that will throw light on important debates which have featured in post-colonial and cultural theories in recent times; some textual references involved directly or indirectly with the Caribbean identity. In order to prove my hypothesis, I would also use some extracts from historical sources; because the extracts serve to remind us that the determining condition of postcolonial cultures is the historical phenomena of colonialism, with its range of material practices and effects mentioned above. And these material conditions and their relationship to questions of ideology and representation are at the heart of the most vigorous debates.
Therefore, I would try to locate from this text the necessary postcolonial and cultural issues relevant to my hypothesis. To elaborate and support my argument, the five chapters of this dissertation are organized around this paradigm. Chapter I is about the Caribbean background. Chapter II consists of a theoretical framework on the issues related to post-colonial and cultural identity. In chapter III, I have focused on the politics of representing the Caribbean in colonial-discourses as well as the ideological resistance to those mythical stereotyping. Then chapter IV concentrates on Lamming's Deconstruction of canonical-discourse The Tempest & reconstruction of the Caribbean identity through allegory. In the final chapter, Lamming's quest for his contemporary Caribbean identity in real life situations throughout the world is presented with textual references. And the terms or terminologies associated with ‘identity' are incorporated in every relevant section. As regards the mode of argument, I have tried to relate Shakespeare's discourse The Tempest and Lamming's counter-discourse The Pleasures of Exile to the Caribbean historical circumstances which produced them and in which they have been read. So I have placed them in postcolonial critical context, concentrating on Lamming's reinterpretation of a colonial canon by breaking fresh ground of Western outlook/argument. That is, I have made cultural and political reading of them. The primary sources like historical documents, Lamming's works and interview etc. and the secondary sources like books and articles on postcolonial and cultural issues are cited at the end of my research. I think that since very little research has so far been done on The Pleasures of Exile, my critical-analytical approach may have some importance; at the same time, some limitations. After all, my conviction is that--my research would engage the readers with a vast scope of existing knowledge and debates on the Caribbean postcolonial identity.
Chapter I
The Caribbean Background:
The Historical and Cultural Scenario
In an interview at the East Coast of Barbados in 1989, George Lamming said, "We had grown up without that dimension [making the Caribbean history a reality] and then not only as a writer of something about capitalism and slavery, but actual articulator in person, bringing together of young people to look at documents". Indeed, the colonial historical perspectives have inextricably determined the identity of the Caribbean nation. In other words, identity is the product of history; on the personal level, of memory. In a lecture delivered at Columbia University in April 1971, Walcott said that for the Caribbean writers—
History is fiction, subject to a fitful muse, memory'; and servitude to this muse ‘has produced a literature … of revenge written by the descendants of slaves … this literature serves historical truth … The truly tough aesthetic of the New World neither explains nor forgives history … The shipwrecks … of the crew in The Tempest are the end of an Old World …
Again, according to Christopher O'Reilly, the Caribbean is a unique nation in that its original inhabitants, the Amerindian Arawaks and the Caribs no longer inhabit the area. Diseases and direct military oppression wiped them out when the European began to occupy the islands in the sixteenth century. Especially, the nations of the Caribbean have been associated with the British for over three hundred years, first as slave societies, then as colonies, and now as members of the Commonwealth. Though traces of Carib culture and language still exist, the Caribbean today is a mixture of the various races and cultures. This includes diasporic people and traditions from Europe, Africa, India, China etc.
SugarIslands and the creation of slave colonies:
The practice of enslaving peoples of other political, racial or ethnic backgrounds, as repulsive as it is to us today, is of great antiquity and was common to most, if not all, of the high civilizations of the Old World. The present Caribbean population is for the most part the consequences of the deliberate or forced migration of people from different parts of the world for different purposes. To be specific, the most important factor in the creation of Caribbean societies was the establishment of sugar plantations worked first by exploited African slaves and subsequently by Asian indentured labourers, once the indigenous labour force had been wiped out. Their numbers are still disputed. For instance, a conservative estimate puts the number of slaves transported across the Atlantic between 1450 and 1900 at 11,698,000. It has been estimated that fewer than half of the slaves captured actually survived the journey across the notorious middle passage of six thousand miles due to extreme overcrowding, trauma, starvation, contaminated food and water, appalling sanitation and diseases etc. Indeed, this largest forced migration in the world history can be called a process of systematic dehumanization. In the Caribbean islands, they were catalogued, treated and tortured as working animals, even to the extent that the strongest were used to warn them about any impending revolt.
According to Encyclopedia of Post-colonial Literatures in English, when Christopher Columbus first arrived in the Caribbean island, in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the region was inhabited by Taino peoples—Arawaks and Caribs—to whom the European applied the misnomer Indian, or Amerindian. It did not take long for the Spaniards, in the name of the Bible, of the king of Spain, and of elusive gold, to all but eliminate these original islanders, whether through forced labour or by the sword and gun. Other European nations—English, French and Dutch—followed the Spaniards into the Caribbean and in many places supplanted them. For instance, Jamaica came under British sovereignty in 1655 and became the hub of the slave trade in the area. Further, some smaller migrations, in some cases occasioned by religious persecution—from Portugal, Spain, and the Middle East—have also been appreciable, however small the numbers, in the making of the Caribbean nation. Therefore, the socio-cultural West Indian countries vary today partly as a function of the mixture of European colonizing influences to which each was subjected. With the extinction of the indigenous people went the extinction of indigenous languages and their replacement by imported cultural varieties. It led to their identity crisis.
The foundations of modern West Indian society were laid by this enforced and purely expedient encounter of Africa, Asia and Europe in the Caribbean islands. In evidence, the process of slavery had profound effects upon the psychology and cultures of them. Manipulation of religion is an important example of it. Clawson states that the purposes of the Spaniards, Portuguese and the English in coming to the New World centred on the so-called "three G's: Gold, God and Glory". Since the slaves were branded and baptized at the port cities after their arrival, it was alleged that slavery delivered them into the cherishing hands of Christian masters. Thus, their original religion was also lost and it led to a significant aspect of the Caribbean identity crisis.
Again, slaves had few rights and little control over their lives. They often wore padlocked collars, and were frequently mistreated. They were not allowed to learn how to read or write. Owners could treat them cruelly—starving, beating, or even killing them. Murder of a slave by a white was not a capital felony in Barbados, e.g., until 1805. Barbados Law prescribed ‘a moderate whipping' for absence from a plantation without leave, runaways were to be taken ‘alive or dead'. Those absent for more than 30 days were liable to the death penalty. Colonial slave codes were all broadly similar. After being captured and torn forever from their loved ones, slaves lost their individuality and identity.
To justify all brutalities, the usual arguments in the name of ‘civilizing mission' were advanced through colonial canonical discourses of travellers, churchmen, historians, writers and philosophers (e.g., Hume) to establish the inherent inferiority of the Caribbean black race that appeared to be the white men's burden. Unfortunately this meant that whatever the whites would do, would be regarded in any way as ‘civilized'; and whatever the blacks would do, would be represented as ‘savagery'. In this regard, Aime Cessaire writes in Discourse on Colonialism—"Between colonizer and colonized, there is room only for forced labour, intimidation, pressure, the police … compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance … brainless elites, degraded masses" (177). In The Pleasures of Exile, George Lamming reveals that the common objective of the empires in the Caribbean was exploitation in the interest of the metropolitan core.
Meanwhile, it is universal that when power corrupts, resistance erupts. Lamming revisits that "the great ambition of the slaves was to be free. They had fought and died to achieve it. The spirit which demanded it had transformed men who lived like brutes into soldiers of considerable intelligence and daring" (138).
After the British abolished slavery in 1833 a large number of the Asian and the African were imported to form the labour force and consequently to add to the ethnic and cultural hybridity of the Caribbean. Then the colonial policy of ‘divide and rule' comes to the surface, as Lamming scrutinizes: "The old imperialism of Europe, appropriating the destiny of the region through a strategy of fragmentation by language (French West Indies, British West Indies, Dutch, Spanish West Indies, and so on) has given way to a new and more fearsome thrust of imperial encirclement" (8).
However, local agitations compelled the British colonizers to grant the Caribbean some internal self-government in the 1940s and then, inevitably, to independence, except for one or two of the smallest islands. And, we have to keep in mind Lamming's reference to the context: "There were no independent countries in the English-speaking Caribbean when I started to write The Pleasures of Exile in 1959" (Introduction to 1984 edition). So, his mission was decolonization and vision was freedom.
To conclude this part, the European imperial enterprise ensured that the worst features of colonialism throughout the globe would all be combined in the Caribbean area. In brief, the history of the Caribbean is about 30 million people scattered across an arc of islands—Jamaica, Haiti, Barbados, Antigua, Martinique, Trinidad; among others—separated by the languages and cultures of their colonizers, but joined together, nevertheless, by a common subaltern heritage. For whether French, English, Spanish, or latterly American, the nationality of their masters has made only a notional difference to the peoples of the Caribbean. So we can say that the Caribbean identity is a problematic and hotchpotch identity. And the Caribbean history is not about root, but about route. However, The Pleasures of Exile comes as a result of Lamming's protest against the brutality of the Europeans by picturing the illegal practice they were doing over the Caribbean.
Chapter II
Theoretical Framework on Post-colonial Identity:
The aim of this chapter is to explore some (political and cultural) implications of nationalist projects in post-colonial societies and examine the extent of national identity. In colonial time and space, identities are based on partial traits (skin colour, socio-economic status, nationality or ethnicity, region, profession, generation and so on). And the relative weight of identities changes across time and space. Besides, the terms by which identities are ascribed are determined by power relations, depending on who is using it and in what context. For instance, media industries accelerate identity formation by quickly targeting particular identities as specific. Consequently, contemporary cultural and postcolonial theories seek to challenge or deconstruct the essentialist and universalizing identities.
For instance, in "Cultural Identity and Diaspora", the Caribbean writer Stuart Hall states that identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. We should think of identity as a ‘production' that is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. This view problematises the very authority and authenticity to which the term ‘cultural identity' lays claim. Our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes that provide us, as ‘one people', with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history. This ‘oneness', underlying all the other, more superficial differences, is the truth, the essence, of ‘Caribbeanness', of the black experience. It is this identity which a Caribbean or black diaspora must discover, unearth, bring to light and express through discursive representation. Now I would like to proceed with a key concept on ‘diaspora'.
‘Diaspora' is a Greek word meaning ‘to disperse'. In the post-colonial context, diaspora refers to forcible or voluntary migration of people from their homelands to new regions. Thus, it is a central historical fact of displacement during colonization. A question that I assume may come to the reader's mind is: ‘Why and how have the diasporas occurred in the Caribbean context?'
To make the concepts of diaspora and displacement more clearly, I would like to define four terminologies related to the identity of the diasporic people. First is ‘Settler', one who settles in a new country, i.e., the colonists who settled in the Caribbean as resident. Second is ‘migrant', a person who moves or who is made to move from one place to another, especially in order to find work. For example, the African people who were transported as slaves, or the Indian and the Chinese people as indentured labour--to the Caribbean sugar plantations are migrants. Third is ‘immigrant', a person who comes to live permanently in a place or country from other country in legal and technical processes. Fourth is ‘exile', a person who is living in a foreign country, usually for political reasons. But in Lamming's work, the Caribbean writers' exile in England was an exploration for identity.
‘Hybridity' is integrated with the Caribbean diasporic context. People from different countries appeared here and out of their inter-racial marriages came up a nation called ‘the Caribbean'. Thus, ‘the Caribbean' is a hybridized form of different geographical identities including the European, the African, the American, the Spanish, the East Indian, the Chinese, the Portuguese and the Dutch. By identity we here refer to national or political identity, which is based on the Caribbean's cultural heritage and political habitation. In the last chapter, I would illustrate Lamming's observation on the Caribbean ‘hybrid identity' as a "newly composed, mixed or contradictory" identity; a new form out of different or unlike trend. Hybridity takes many forms in the scenario: cultural, political, racial etc. Now, its meanings has been extended to refer to the hyphenated identities of persons or ethnic communities; e.g., the Afro-Caribbean. The ethnic mixture suggests a homogeneity that results not merely from amalgamation, but also an assimilation that destroys the Caribbean identity.
Again, when a black marries a white, their children share both black and white blood; and the identity of these mulattos is hybrid as well. In each case, hybridity leads to existential (identity) crisis as a malaise. However, the Caribbean postcolonial writers attempt to show hybridity as an anti-colonial tool regarding their identity and culture, because in hybridity the sense of mixing breaks down the strict polarization of imperialism. That is why, in The Pleasures of Exile, there is a critical awareness of the Caribbean origin and a willingness to acknowledge the African, Asian and Chinese legacy as part and parcel of their national identity.
Now, in post-colonial societies, the rediscovery of identity is often the object of what Frantz Fanon once called a "passionate research … directed by the secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others". He also says, "Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it". Therefore, Lamming quests for reviving the Caribbean history as a commitment by understanding--how the rift of separation, the ‘loss of identity', which has been integral to the Caribbean experience, only begins to be healed when these forgotten connections are once more set in place. He attempts to reconstruct in discursive terms the underlying unified identity of the black Caribbean people. In this regard, The Pleasures of Exile is a resource of resistance and identity, with which to confront and reform the Western representations of the Caribbean.
Again, Stuart Hall states that identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past. It is only from this position that we can properly understand the traumatic character of the ‘colonial experience'. The Caribbean have been positioned, subjected and constructed as different and other, in Said's sense of Orientalism, within the categories of knowledge of the West by the dominant regimes of representation. In this aspect, discourse designates a form of representation. And, the canonical discourses had the power to make the Caribbean see ‘other' with dire consequences. Equally important, every regime of representation is a regime of power formed, as Foucault reminds us, by the fatal couplet ‘power/ knowledge'. But this kind of knowledge is internal, not external. It is one thing to position a subject or set of peoples as the ‘other' of a dominant discourse that is reinforced by education, law and media. To Foucault, discursive practices establish what is accepted as ‘reality' in a given society.
In Helen Tiffin's view, post-colonial cultures are inevitably hybridized, involving a dialectical relationship between European ontology and epistemology and the impulse to create or recreate independent local identity. Decolonization is a process that invokes an ongoing dialectic between hegemonic centrist system and peripheral subversion of them, between European or British discourses and their post-colonial dis/mantling. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said situates Lamming as one of the key figures in the transition from colonization to decolonization, and his work as belonging to a body of ‘resistance culture'. But as it is not possible to create or recreate national or regional formations wholly independent of his colonial enterprise, it has been his project to interrogate European discourses and discursive strategies from a privileged position within (and between) two worlds; to investigate the means by which Europe imposed and maintained its codes in the colonial domination of so much of the rest of the world; specifically the Caribbean. Now to clarify ‘discourse' in Foucault's term, it is the system of knowledge by which the world can be known. Discourse has played an important role in constituting identity.
In contrast, Post-colonial counter-discursive strategies involve a mapping of the dominant discourse, a rereading of its underlying assumptions, and the (dis)mantling of these assumptions from the cross-cultural standpoint of the imperially subjectified ‘local'. Thus the rereading and rewriting of the European historical and fictional records are vital and inescapable tasks for the Caribbean intellectuals, who seem to be identical with the demonstration of Stephen Slemon that the potential of allegory is a privileged site of anti-colonial or post-colonial discourse. For instance, Shakespeare's The Tempest is often considered to be a colonial discourse, a part of the process of ‘fixing' relations between Europe and its ‘others', of establishing patterns of reading alterity at the same time as it inscribed the ‘fixity' of that alterity, naturalizing difference within its own cognitive codes. But the function of such a canonical text at the colonial periphery also becomes an important part of material imperial practice, in that, through educational and critical institutions, it continually displays and repeats for the colonized subject, the original capture of his/her alterity and the processes of its annihilation, marginalization, or naturalization as if this were axiomatic, culturally ungrounded, ‘universal', natural. Hence, the politics of discourse is that it constructs identity through fantasy, narrative and myth.
It is to note that long before the theoretical elevation of counter-discursivity as a paradigm of postcolonial writing, Lamming's essays insist on the counter-discursivity as a necessary legacy of the colonial encounter. This legacy, rooted as it is in language and discourse, can be appropriated, revised and transformed only within the context of a systematic questioning and dismantling of imperial codes of governance, culture, and self-fashioning that permeate European writing. We can locate some counter-discursive features from The Pleasures of Exile. For example,with the reversal of master-slave hierarchyin "The African Presence" Lamming has a decentralizing or subversive portrayal of--the Nigerian Minister's under-secretary as a servile Englishman, his black wife as the mistress of the English wife whose children studying in England have no warning that their "Daddy has lost his crown" (177). Besides, he degrades the colonizers and upgrade the colonized ancestors' (‘Nigeria was mine' p.175) new role in this visionary context: "African are not anti-English or anti-European. They ask simply that Prospero must be transformed, rejuvenated, and ultimately restored to his original condition of a man among men" (178). It establishes the Caribbean as liberal.
Survey or Review on the Caribbean Identity:
For Foucault and Lacan, identity is a signifier at play in cultural fields of individuals. And in Kobena Mercer's view, identity becomes an issue when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable--is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty. From their perspectives, the project to establish an autonomous and homogenous identity in the pluralistic immigrant Caribbean society where there is no single notion of ‘Caribbeanness' but a growing acceptance of syncretic model that is inclusive and accepts the diversity and hybridity as the foundation of identities--is probably more problematic, uncertain and fraught than in the other post-colonial societies. The dispossession and displacement that the uprooted, marginalized, Diasporic Caribbean people are subjected to, bring them into a state of agony and identity crisis. As a highly political author, Lamming is credited, along with Vic Reid, Wilson Harris, V.S. Naipaul, Everton Weekes, Derek Walcott, Garfield Sobers, Mighty Sparrow, and others, with making the emergence of a Caribbean identity possible. Lamming sees the lack of cultural identity in this region as a direct result of the history of colonial rule.
In a wondrous introduction to Party Politics in the West Indies, C. L. R. James, one of the most distinguished thinkers of the modern Caribbean, made the following statement about the people of the Anglophone Caribbean:
People of the West Indies, you do not know your own power. No one dares to tell you. You are a strange, a unique combination of the greatest driving force in the world today, the underdeveloped formerly colonial coloured peoples; and more than any of them, by education, way of life and language, you are completely part of Western civilization … All those who would say or imply that you are in any way backward and therefore cannot in a few years become a modern advanced people are your enemies, satisfied with the positions that they hold and ready to keep you where you are forever.
It is noticeable that James made this statement in 1961, just one year after the publication of The Pleasures of Exile. Because while one can and may speak of a Caribbean experience or a Caribbean identity, it is necessary to be aware of the nuances of each specific experience and how it played out in the region. Indeed, because of its supposed humanistic functions, ‘English Literature' occupied a privileged position in the colonial classroom, where its study was designed to ‘civilise' native students by inculcating in them British tastes and values, regardless of the exigencies of the local context. ²
According to Stuart Hall, we might think of the black Caribbean identities as ‘framed' by two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture. Caribbean identities always have to be thought of in terms of the dialogic relationship between these two axes. The one gives us some grounding in, some continuity with, the past. The second reminds us that what we share is precisely the experience of a profound discontinuity: the peoples dragged from African and Asian subcontinents; and it ‘unified' these people across their differences, in the same moment as it cut them off from direct access to their past.
In addition, since the Western discourses normalize and appropriate Africa by freezing it into some timeless zone of the primitive, unchanging past--Hall inspires that Africa must be reckoned with by the Caribbean people. It seems that in his urge and search for root, Lamming emerges as such a Caribbean spokesman in "Ishmael at Home" of The pleasures of Exile:
We need an Institute of African and Oriental Studies right in the heart of Port-of-Spain. In this institute we will ask for some light on what has been discovered of the African civilizations before the European arrival. For West Indians, on the whole, still have to learn that Africa existed—not simply as desert, river and malaria—but as a home where men were alive and engaged in a human struggle with nature. The presence of some Africans in the Caribbean will help to dislodge that image of Africa as bush and artless nature, an image which prospero planted most successfully in the West Indian consciousness. (155)
It belongs irrevocably, for them, to what Edward Said once called an "imaginative geography and history". Their belongingness of it constitutes what Benedict Anderson too calls ‘an imagined community'. Again, none of the people who now occupy the islands--black, brown, and white; African, European, American, Spanish, French, East Indian, Chinese, Portuguese, Jew, and Dutch etc.—originally ‘belonged' there. So Lamming adopts memory and imagination to revive their identity.
The Caribbean is the space where the creolizations and assimilations and syncretism were negotiated. It also has to be understood as the place of many continuous displacements. It stands for the endless ways in which Caribbean people have been destined to ‘migrate'--continually between centre and periphery as the exile of Lamming. Thus, the Caribbean identity is a legacy of diaspora, of diversity, of hybridity and difference. The diaspora experience as Hall intends it here—is defined by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity' which lives with and through, not despite difference, by ‘hybridity'.‘Diasporic identities' are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference. One can only think here of what is uniquely—‘essentially'—Caribbean: manifestly the mixes of race, ethnicity, language etc. To conclude this section with Lamming's view on the Caribbean identity, he wants to retain an autonomous identity: "I refrain from saying that I am from the West Indies, for it implies a British colonial limitation. I say rather, I am from the Caribbean" (215).
Role of History in Constructing Nationalism:
The concept of identity is entangled with the concept of nationalism that involves a sense of belonging and collectivity. And national history provides people with a sense of shared origins, a sense of common past, spirit and an identity in the present. Relevant to this issue is Michel Foucault's contention that every social discourse, which involves a politically generated truth-claim, encounters a counter-discourse that challenges the original discourse's legitimacy. In this case, power produces or creates notions of ‘truth'. So, truth for Foucault often seems nothing more than the outcome of a struggle between competing discourses.
History is a form of discourse. Many scholars agree that the history of a (formerly) colonized territory is generally erased or distorted by the colonizer, replaced with the colonizer's history; and in the case of the Caribbean—"any attempt to uncover the past meant dealing not only with the noise of conflicting memories, but with silence" (Boehmer 197). Uncertainty of identity reflects their uncertainty of past. So the need to make history foreshadows Fanon's scheme of inevitable epistemic violence. Now, I would focus on how history can be constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed in the Caribbean context, as implicit in Lamming.
Colonial Construction of the Caribbean History:
History is a significant form of canonical discourse. It is defined as a record of what has happened in the past. It is also expected to be true and objective, though the limitations of our very human experience often make the quality of being true and objective impossible. In most cases, it is the dominant culture or group that writes history; as such, history is made to serve the interest of the ruling party. Following this tradition, when the European colonizers approached any country, one thing they would do in the beginning was to write the history of the colonized indigenous people.
According to the Western views, the Caribbean is a destitute nation without history and achievement. Written from Eurocentric point of view, this history is often far from reality, full of misinterpreted or distorted images of the indigenous heroes and people, in order to legitimize colonial mission and subordinating the natives. For example, the European historiographic discourses would describe the natives in the Caribbean islands as ‘cannibals' only after a very vague account written by Columbus long time ago. But actually those writers never met any people who can truly be called eater of human flesh. Such myth or history in colonial countries is, therefore, nothing but a means of colonial hegemony. The colonial accounts chronicled by the colonizers are radically opposed to any impartial, adequate and accurate phenomenon of the Caribbean. And they have manipulated the Caribbean identity before the world to a great extent.
Postcolonial Reconstruction of the Caribbean History:
One of the chief tasks of the postcolonial thinkers and writers has been to rewrite history of the indigenous people and thus to restore dignity to its own identity. Derek Walcott in his influential essay "The Muse of History" criticizes those postcolonial intellectuals who angrily lament over the destruction of the historical past; he rather focuses on the possibility of a 'historyless' world which provides the Caribbean an 'Adamic' opportunity to rewrite their history afresh. Lamming's quest for identity in The Pleasures of Exile incorporates such a vision and mission.He has made us change our way of seeing and made us see history as the collective experience of people. For instance, he has revived the unyielding patriotic spirit of the Caribbean martyrs throughout the colonial history, whose unyielding resistance against the colonizer ‘masters' is a testimony of the nation's dignified identity. In this way, history becomes active, dynamic and inspirational for their prospective decolonization, rather than a mere account of the past cause and effect.
In reference to the textual context, the Haitian "Ceremony of the souls" is Lamming's symbolic way of regenerating the Caribbean history. Here, through the ritual of calling upon spirits of the dead to speak through the living, the past is reactivated in the present. He asserts—"the symbolic function of the ceremony for me, as an artist within the Caribbean situation, is the necessity of recounting the past with each moment of conscious living". According to Supriya Nair, ‘Vodum rite' here signifies a practice restricted by the colonials as a taboo; and in reanimating the dead, who speak to and through the living descendants, it revives the trial of colonial history and presents new and unusual evidence. Again, speculating about what the absent Sycorax and Miranda's unnamed mother might have told us in The Tempest that counter Prospero's version, Lamming says provocatively—"our knowledge must be postponed until some arrangement comparable to the Haitian Ceremony of the souls returns them to tell us what we should and ought to know [as the Caribbean]" (116). It demonstrates Lamming's counter-discursive strategy to relive the Caribbean historical identity.
Besides, Lamming's stance on the question of history is that literature itself contributes to the ambitious enterprise of the making of history. He does not always read history conventionally as significant events exclusive of everyday life; rather he considers literature to be a kind of imaginative record that paradoxically substantiates challenges and destabilizes the claims of ‘rationalist' accounts in colonial historical metanarratives. He claims that the ‘emergence' of the West Indian novel is the third significant historical event in the modern Caribbean, because it is most suited for representing the inner experiences of the West Indian communities and thus plays the role of "an imaginative interpretation of West Indian society by West Indians" (41). To me, as he is a part of the Caribbean literary canon, this is also a kind of self-glorification that upholds the Caribbean identity.
To Lamming, the first significant event in the Caribbean history is Columbus' entry and the second is the abolition of slavery. However, the primacy he gives Columbus does not necessarily indicate that anything before the so-called discovery of the Indies was insignificant. Rather, it emphasizes his perception of the Caribbean as repopulated and manufactured, more than any other site of imperial dominance, as first and foremost a colony, a subaltern existence that precedes all essences associated with their postcolonial identity. In this way, though he initiates with Columbus, by referring to the Caribbean literary achievement as the third important historical event, he displaces the complacency of the first. He argues that novel gives voice to the anti-colonial struggles of the Caribbean peasants, as we find in the project of Indian ‘Subaltern Studies Group'; and it oversets the predicted trajectory of the dominant, i.e., Western history.
Lamming subverts the trends of the Western grand narratives by acknowledging the fundamental importance of peasant or folk life as the subject matter in any story about the Caribbean islands. Thus, he celebrates the Caribbean tradition and peasant sensibility, as a part of establishing their identity. His conviction is that agricultural past is the common background-umbrella under which a national Caribbean identity can be re-constructed. And taking raw materials from this proletarian class for his writing, a Caribbean writer can truly write back and disempower to the metropolitan centre. Otherwise, his identity would be annihilated from himself and the world. Hereby, Lamming tries to outline what Gordon Rohlehr sees as a nascent theory about the relation of West Indian writers to their roots. So the past is crucial to his present identity.
"Caliban Orders History" can be called a classic example of Lamming's counter-discursive essays. Here he extends a literary character to fit the "unforgotten and unforgettable" (150) historical figure Toussaint L'Ouverture, one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 and the primary figure in James's Black Jacobins. The theme of it is the transformation of slaves trembling before a white man into people being able to organize themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day. Lamming regards it as a great epic of revolutionary struggle and achievement too. To adjoin my focal point in this regard, the novel can be called a historiographic metafiction on the Caribbean identity.
Lamming states that James "shows us Caliban as Prospero had never known him; a slave who was a great soldier in battle, an incomparable administrator in public affairs; full of paradox but never without compassion, a humane leader of men" (119). He is, of course, thinking of the invertion of power-play between the slaves and the masters, and in his own context the image applies to the peasants as well. The historical persona of Toussaint reinvents the stereotypical savage Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest, rendering a familiar interpretation of the play suspect by transferring the possibilities of the Haitian Revolution into the realm of fictional drama. But by making so intimate an incorporation of history into literature, Lamming also disrupts the scientific or factual claims of history, a disruption that is shared by James's polemical confrontation with the imperial version of the Haitian Revolution that dismissed the troublesome, former slave, Toussaint. His ‘revisionist' tendency in respect of the Caribbean historical identity matches with N'gugi's opinion in Petals of Blood: ‘To understand the present … you must understand the past'. Indeed, the past humanizes Lamming's African legacy.
To conclude this section, how history might be ‘rewritten'--is a crucial question for the self-representation of colonized people. And postcolonial approach has changed the ways people would approach the problems of history, identity, race, place and displacement. Colonizer's version of history about the Caribbean is subverted symbolically and Lamming as a native is writing his own history. He re-visits and rewrites the Caribbean history to revive the truth and make his nation aware as a necessity for attaining the freedom from the body and mind forged manacles of the Empire. Through history he wants to unify the Caribbean: " … what could hold Indians and Negroes together in Trinidad … is their common background of social history which can be called West Indian … whose basic feature is the peasant sensibility" (224-25). Nationalism becomes his way of transcending colonial history in his quest for self-definition or identity. Throughout his extended dialogue with James's The Black Jacobins, Lamming's persona identifies him with a tradition of resistance and lays claim to the Haitian heroic revolution as a facet of his New-World-Caribbean identity on behalf of the whole Caribbean. Thus, the Caribbean history is a history of foreign aggressions and native resistance. And, it seems to be his exposition of the responsibility of intellectual engagement with the colonial situation. In my chapter on postcolonial interpretation of The Tempest, I would illustrate Lamming's revisioning the Caribbean history more.
Chapter III
Representation of the Caribbean in Colonial-Discourses:
The Caribbean is a neglected and often misrepresented area of the world. According to Homi K. Bhabha, "colonialism and postcolonialism are very much about identities and the ways these are constructed and deconstructed by discourses … The address to nation as narration stresses the insistence of political power and cultural authority". And practically, colonial-discourses are established by and for the colonizers as the instruments of power and subject-formation. It implies a process of judgment and discrimination, and has an unspoken authority. In Bhabha's words, the objective of colonial-discourse is to interpret the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction. At the same time, he observes that postcolonial migrant people can destabilize traditional identities and violate supposedly mutually exclusive categories because they are simultaneously of both the East and the West.
Discourse produces a subject dependent upon the rules of the system of knowledge that produces it. And discourses are always, to Foucault, a function of the power of those who control the discourse to determine knowledge. Politics of representation is much integrated with discourse and postcolonial identity. In Ashcroft's words, European texts—anthropology, history, drama, fiction etc. captured the non-European subject within European frameworks that read his or her alterity as ‘terror'or ‘lack'. Such texts—the representations of Europe to itself, and the representation of others to Europe—were not accounts of different peoples and societies, but a projection of European fears and desires masquerading as scientific/‘objective' knowledge.
To conclude, in the Caribbean context the colonized subject has been characterized through colonial discourses as ‘other', ‘primitive' and ‘cannibal'--as a means of establishing the ‘binary' separation of the colonizer and colonized, and asserting the naturalness and primacy of the colonizing culture and world view. It is through, in Althusser's term of the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses', education system and in terms of modes of production and consumption like the services of BBC, popular television shows, cartoons etc. through which colonialist representations persist and currently circulate, and thus construct the Caribbean identity. Thus, a discursive practice, according to Foucault, ‘controls the dissemination of certain knowledge, thereby ensuring the domination of certain social interests by producing a certain kind of subject'.
Politics of Modern Western Media:
Western Media have played a vital role in constructing the black Afro-Caribbean's identity as ‘savage' other and sustaining the imperialist purposes. For instance, when an African appears on media screen, the focus is concentrated on his craziness to prove the African's mythologized identity. Besides, his curly hair is presented as a symbol of savagery. Meanwhile, Lammingbecame a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial service ‘Caribbean Voices' in 1951, actually to figure out the root of the problems of colonization like—why do these white people think themselves to be so superior that they can dominate and colonize any other? (Italics Mine). However, the programme (1945-58) was the first serious acknowledgement in a metropolitan country, of the existence and importance of a corpus of Anglophone writing in the Caribbean and of a group of writers, many unknown to each other, seriously working in that area. Moreover, in an interview taken at the East Coast of Barbados in 1989, Lamming said:
I worked for a number of years with the BBC ... Caribbean Voices ... I came to realise that over the years, that there was a Caribbean reality which was there, which touched different territories in different ways, but which had not yet come fully into the consciousness of each territory ... So the evolution of each territory depends very much on the forging and the incorporating of that Caribbean reality into the consciousness of each.
However, though the media nurtured the Caribbean's sense of identity, the politics of representation and negative identity-construction worked behind it.
In "Introduction" to The Pleasures of Exile, Lamming has dismantled that the main purpose of the BBC was not only to broadcast the Caribbean news, but also to show the world a tribal ritual of the natives named ‘Vodum rites'. As he clarifies this cultural identity—
This ceremony of the souls is regarded by the Haitian peasant as a solemn communion; for he hears, at first hand, the secrets of the Dead. The celebrants are mainly relatives of the deceased who, ever since their death, have been locked in Water. It is duty of the Dead to return and offer, on this momentous night, a full and honest report on their past relations with the living … The living demand to hear whether there is any need for forgiveness, for redemption; whether, in fact, there may be any guide which may help them towards reforming their present condition. (9-10)
Actually, the purpose of the BBC was to address the world that—Look at these Caribbean people! They have such customs and rituals. Look at the difference. We are so enlightened and civilized; while they are still down to earth and superstitious people. That is why we feel that it has been our humanitarian duty to civilize them by colonial mission for centuries (Italics Mine). Again, it seems to me that Lamming has ‘depoliticized' the politics inherent in the broadcasting of such an indigenous culture. That is, he might have warned the contemporary nation that as the Caribbean, they could not be free unless they had come to terms with a past like the Haitian ‘Vodum rite' or the Ceremony of the Souls.
However, out of self-justifying conviction, Western media and languages have been used as tools for colonization. Just as the dead are coming back by the ‘magic box' radio, Prospero, the colonizer, becomes resurrected. I would explain Prospero/Caliban metaphor in the formation of the Caribbean identity in my discussion on The Tempest. My point here is that Lamming challenges the criteria of identity that the British colonizers have imposed on the colonized natives, and their worldwide propaganda through the media to justify that the colonizers are a form of ‘Saviour' for these ‘uncivilized' Caribbean. Indeed, it is their hegemonic attitude.
Representation of the Caribbean's ancestors through popular culture is another tool for identity formation. In "The African Presence", Lamming discovers that the Africans' appearance in the Western films functions as an Ideological State Apparatus too:
They are arranged like nature in scenes which are to suggest the authenticity of a native crowd in the background. In moments of tension, they may be asked to stand still: statues of mourning [no expression] … Sometimes these Africans are asked to shout at a retreating white pirate who argues that he didn't mean to shoot the elephant. (165)
In such representation, the curiosity of the spectators would be to know what words the Africans actually shout in that dark forest. But the media is unable to decipher the meaning. So the media have no right to propagate that the European colonizers enlightened the Africans with their language. Again, in some films "the African appears as Butlers. Like a privileged slave who shows signs of learning…" He "speaks only with hands. He hears his name take the form of salt, butter, or bread; and he answers with some receptacle containing food" (165). To cite Althusser here, it seems to me that metaphorically he is interpellated into something that can fulfill the European's colonial appetite. He only knows how to obey the white masters perfectly—before having a sense of self-existence and identity as a human being. The film conditions the psyche of young Africans in such a way that later "they discuss and dramatize the contents of their memory" (165). Since the plot represents the African as barbarous and the Western stranger as ‘the great saviour', unconsciously they believe, internalize and accept their subjectivity constructed by audio-visual discourse. Here lies the politics of pleasure. Again, idea of mimicry is apparent in Lamming's indication of "the false laugh which the West Indian summons as he watches the film brutalization of the African's personality in the role of a moon-cow" (181).
The impact of the Western narrative cinema in the lives of the young Africans is that they cannot distinguish between phantasy world and the real world. For instance, unemployment problem compels them to lead a life as represented in the cinematic world from where they want to get everything they like. The result of such identification is often disillusionment, despair or distress. Sometimes it demands their imprisonment and they cannot explain the reasons of their subversion before the court. Their dumbness is taken as stupidity; and they have to depend on justice of Heaven or power of magic because law is blind. But none understands that this speechlessness is the whole predicament of black slaves. In a word, the aggression of media-politics worked and is still working subtly and steadily to represent the black Africans as ‘savages' and devil-like, to justify the colonial ‘civilizing mission'.
In response, post-colonial resistance to such representations has taken many forms; e.g., the widespread contemporary practice of counter-canonical literary discourse, as discussed by Helen Tiffin. Processes of artistic and literary decolonization have involved a radical dis/mantling of European codes and a post-colonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses. This has frequently been accompanied by the demand for an entirely new or wholly recovered ‘reality', free of all colonial taint. Given the nature of the relationship between colonizers and colonized in the Caribbean context, with its pandemic brutalities and its cultural denigration, such a demand is desirable and inevitable.
Early Images of the Caribbean in Canonical Discourses
The Caribbean identity rooted with Africa is based on myths found in dominant discourses. The Caribbean has held a significant place in European literature and voyage-narratives from the sixteenth century onwards. Images on those writing have exerted a powerful influence on thinking about the Caribbean and the nature of colonization there. As Lamming has found that such writing has constituted a trend of canon, he feels committed to reinterpret, reject or rewrite some of those myths from a Caribbean perspective. In "Introduction" of The Pleasures of Exile, Lamming scrutinizes the Caribbean mythologized identity as ‘cannibals' in the first voyage-narrative of an English knight Sir John Haukins in October 1562, which documents—"The Canybals of that Island … are the most desperate warriers that are in the Indies, by the Spaniardes report, who are never able to conquer them … they were driven ashore, and so taken by them [the Carib Indian], and eaten" (13). Thus a seed of colonization is subtly and richly infused with mythologized identity of the Caribbean as ‘savages'. And the myth of England's supremacy in taste and judgment begins in a West Indian from the earliest stages of his education. To Lamming, such a "myth is most difficult to dislodge" (26).
In "The Occasion for Speaking" too, Lamming has quoted the great German philosopher Hegel's last word on Africa in his Introduction to The Philosophy of History:
Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained—for all purposes of connection with the rest of the world—shut up; it is the Gold-land [which might have allured colonizers] compressed within itself--the land of childhood, which lying beyond the days of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night … it is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit … still involved in the conditions of mere nature… (32)
Then Lamming evaluates this canonical discourse by stating—"what disqualifies African man from Hegel's world of History is his apparent incapacity to evolve with the logic of language which is the only aid man has in capturing the Idea. African man, for Hegel, has no part in the common pursuit of the Universal" (32). Lamming also indicates that it is the colonizing pressure of the European claim which creates an element of embarrassment in the American Negro Baldwin's glance towards Africa:
‘… a vision of the bush, primitive, night-black in its inaccessibility' [as Conrad's The Heart of Darkness] … We know what is meant by bush. It is the tom-tom and the axe: the tom-tom always loud with noise, and the axe for ever suggestive of blood. It is here, perhaps, that the old white myth and fear of superb sexual potency in the black male may have started. (33)
Thus, the African are thought and taken into consideration through rumour and myth, by the foreign tutelage growing a sense of fear about Africa as a world beyond human intervention. In postcolonial criticism, ‘myth' can be said to imply a romanticized, distorted or false set of attitudes; and is therefore close to the sense of ‘stereotype'. And the Western discourses have constructed negative myths on the origin of the black Caribbean—which Lamming tries to deconstruct counter-discursively for reconstructing the reality of the Caribbean identity.
Interesting but significant for the Caribbean identity, in "A Way of seeing", Lamming discusses about an American novelist whose some books have been "set in the West Indies … But she had never seen the Caribbean. She recreated the atmosphere from general reading". Lamming wonders whether it is "the indirect colonial influence of The Tempest" (71). This is a remarkable instance of the formation and dissemination of stereotype Caribbean identity by armchair discourses. In Sylvia Wynter's view, it is the myth of Europe which rejects all other experiences, African, Indian, Chinese etc. which contribute to the being of the West Indian.
Again, the impact of colonial discourse on a West Indian Negro is expressed in "The African Presence". Lamming says that such a person's relation to Africa is "problematic" because--
He knows it through rumour and myth which is made sinister by a foreign tutelage, and he becomes, through the gradual conditioning of his education, identified with fear: fear of that continent as a world beyond human intervention. Part product of that world, and living still under the shadow of its past disfigurement, he appears reluctant to acknowledge his share of the legacy which is part of his heritage. (160-161)
Ideological Resistance to Mythologized Representations:
There is a proverb: ‘Tit for tat'. So, where there is colonial representation and ideological conditioning, there must be some sort of resistance—of which Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile is a classic example. Its counter-discursive essays challenge both the values and beliefs that colonizers have imposed on the native populations, and the assumption that European colonization is superior and bring civilization to indigenous cultures. From Said's perspective, it can be called an "ideological resistance"; because the declining state of the Western hegemony during 1950s opened up space for the writers' effort to restore back the lost sense of a unity to the contemporary disintegrated Caribbean communities which were still under the British colonial system. To cite Lemert's view in this point: the destabilizing of the modern world is associated with a curious, but undeniable energizing of identity as the topic of widespread political interest.
Put simply, canonical counter-discourse destabilizes the power/knowledge axis of imperialism. There are many counter-discursive possibilities even within one culture's encounter with the master narratives which have impacted upon its history. In the next chapter, I would like to establish that Lamming's route of subverting Shakespearean canon The Tempest is an ideological attempt
About the Author
M.A in English Literature
Lecturer in English, Green University of Bangladesh
Former Lecturer, Dept. of English, Darul Ihsan University, Bangladesh
E-mail: ruman31@yahoo.com
Phone: +8801722198344
What's the best fitness video for an inactive 65 year old?
I work 24 hrs a week standing behind a counter. I walk the dog for half an hour a day. That's it! I need a gentle but effective fitness video to start me off. Any ideas?
I like all the Rosemary Conley Diet & Fitness videos, especially the Salsacise ones.
Try www.rosemaryconley.tv - there are some very short ones on there to start with.
King 5 Interview Caloric Counter Accuracy on Fitness Equipment