Views and Visions: layered landscapes in West Indian migrant narratives

Abstract

This panel focuses on the crucial importance of migration and remigration to/from the Caribbean and its diaspora centres. My paper is an exploration of how visual and written narratives can be read within this context. Specifically, I want to survey a sample of nineteenth and early twentieth century constructions of the colonial West Indies by women (travelogues, journals, fictions) and if possible, compare these accounts with contemporary visual representations, particularly of landscape, in order to demonstrate how enduring is the strategy of overlaying features of the familiar, memories of (European) home, onto the topography of the (tropical) new. Often, the tropical ‘home’ resists this ‘translation’ and points to the postcolonial space as one which is best read via a peculiar kind of double vision which yokes together disparate cultures; a vision still apparent in West Indian writing today from Naipaul to Kincaid.

Notes

I use the term migrant loosely here, to include Europeans who traveled to the West Indies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a view to settling, at least for a time. It is worth noting that just as the aim of early settlers was generally to make money in the Caribbean and return home to a better life in Europe or America, so most twentieth century Caribbean migrants initially travel to Britain or North America to make money and return to a better life at home. My interest in both groups is in the strategies they adopt to render the new place habitable.

J Bautista de Avalle-Arce, Cultural and Literary Exchange between Europe and the Americas, Occasional Papers in Latin American Studies, Hartford, CO & Providence: University of Connecticut & Brown University, 1991, p 4.

M Nugent, Lady Nugent's Journal of her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1966, p 26. First published in 1907.

M Newton, Glimpses of Life in Bermuda and the Tropics, London: Digby, Long & Co, 1897, pp 201 – 203.

Translated by A Wilmere, London: Hakluyt Society, 1959.

C Kingsley, At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies, London: Macmillan, 1874.

E Bohls, ‘The aesthetics of colonialism: Janet Schaw in the West Indies, 1774 – 1775’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 27 (3), 1994, pp 363 – 390.

Ibid, p 368.

For example, William Hodges who accompanied Captain Cook as official draughtsman on his second Pacific voyage (1772), had been apprenticed to and painted in the style of Richard Wilson, the British pastoral painter; and Wilson's style was itself based on the classical landscapes of seventeenth century painting established by Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin.

W James, The Mulberry Tree, London: Chapman & Hall, 1913, p 7.

Ibid, p 99.

W Ralegh, ‘Discoveries of the large, rich, and beautiful empire of Guiana’, in The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation 1598 – 1600, Volume 10, Glasgow: R. Hakluyt, 1903 – 1905, p 428.

Bohls, 1994, p 366.

Kingsley, 1874, p 18.

Ibid, p 15.

Ibid, p 15.

Nugent, 1897, p 237.

See KD Kriz, ‘Curiosities, commodities and transplanted bodies in Hans Sloane's Voyage to…Jamaica’, in G Quilley & KD Kriz (eds), An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660 – 1830, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, pp 85 – 105.

A Collection of Exotics from the Island of Antigua [by a Lady], London: np, 1797.

A Vision of Eden: The Life and Work of Marianne North, New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1980. Abridged by G Bateman from Mrs JA Symonds (ed), Recollections of a Happy Life: Being the Autobiography of Marianne North, London: Macmillan, 1892.

J Schaw, Journey of a Lady of Quality: Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina and Portugal, in the years 1774 to 1776, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1934, p 102.

W Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, 2 Volumes, London: T & J Egerton, 1790, p 8.

Bohls, 1994, p 376.

Newton, 1897, pp 12 – 13.

Bohls, 1994, p 390.

Engraved T Vivares, in G Robertson, A View in the Island of Jamaica, ‘Drawn on the spot, & painted by George Robertson’, London: John Boydell, 1778.

On Robertson's Jamaica prints, see G Quilley, ‘Pastoral plantations: the slave trade and the representation of British colonial landscape in the late eighteenth century’, in G Quilley & KD Kriz (eds), An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660 – 1830, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, pp 106 – 128. Quilley asserts that ‘in none of Robertson's six Jamaican images are the figures shown labouring: the creolisation of the landscape requires its slave population to be somehow released from servitude in order to be present in the pastoral environment’ (p 116).

K Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p 23.

G Quilley, 2003, p 119.

VS Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, Harmondsworth: Penguin Viking, 1987, p 38.

Also see J Kincaid's Lucy (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990). The trauma at Queen Victoria Girls' School in Antigua, of having to learn by heart Wordsworth's poem about flowers she has never seen, poisons her first view of daffodils in the US (p 29). Like Naipaul's migrant, Lucy comes to the US having spent years dreaming of the landscape learned from books, only to find the actuality ordinary and disappointing; what she ‘knew’ turns out to have been ‘fixtures of fantasy’ for her hungry colonial imagination (p 4).

Naipaul, 1987, p 12.

Ibid, p 170.

J Gardner, White Skin, Black Kin: ‘Speaking the Unspeakable’, Exhibition catalogue, Bridgetown: Barbados Museum & Historical Society, 2004.