Amerindian ante-coloniality in contemporary Caribbean writing: Crossing borders with Jan Carew, Cyril Dabydeen and Pauline Melville

Abstract

When speaking of the Caribbean, one often finds it difficult to reconcile the singular term used to refer to it and its linguistic, social, historical and aesthetic plurality. Even if the archipelago has shared similar experiences of traumatic transportation and indentureship, the specificities of each island have hindered the emergence of a shared Caribbean identity. Emphasis has been put on the extinction of the indigenous Amerindian peoples, but Amerindian resilience has not been granted sufficient scope. Only a few writers have chosen to imaginatively return to that Amerindian past that precedes the trauma of forced transportation – a past that has almost receded out of collective memory, dominated as it has been by the African dimension. In the wake of Wilson Harris, Pauline Melville is one of the writers who have been trying to gain access to a collective identity that might be termed ante-colonial. With reference to the work of Melville, Jan Carew and Cyril Dabydeen, this article reads the presence of Amerindian culture in Caribbean literature as a renewed symbol of resistance to domination and a symbol of a shared identity, providing a stronger bond between the land and the people. It argues that this détour through Amerindian culture finds its meaning in the desire to override colonial dispossession, thus providing a possible focal point of connection for the Caribbean at large.

Keywords:

• Amerindian
• myth
• Caribbean
• Jan Carew
• Cyril Dabydeen
• Pauline Melville

Acknowledgements

A different, shorter version of this paper was delivered at the “Going Caribbean!” conference in Lisbon, November 2009. The author wishes to express her gratitude to Ronnie Scharfman, Bella Brodzki and Simone Alexander for the fruitful conversations she had with them while she was preparing this article, and to thank the peer reviewers and editors of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing for helping her clarify its argument.

Notes

1. Considering that Dominica has an Amerindian population of about 4000, all residents of the 3700 acre Carib Territory set aside for them in 1903 in the north-eastern corner of the Island, and that St Vincent has an Amerindian population of about 1500, the numbers are inconsequential and the physical presence is scant. Even in Guyana nowadays, which is one of the few countries on the mainland which have not experienced a complete wiping out of the Amerindian population, the Amerindians comprise a little under 7% of a population of about 718,000, i.e. about 49,000 people (⟨http://www.guyana.org/NDS/chap22.htm⟩, 28 July 2010).

2. For the history of the Amerindian people’s erasure and survival, in order to understand how the Tainos and the Kalinagos living in the Caribbean between ad 1000 and the late 15th century are the descendants of the Saladoid people who had come to the Caribbean from the South American mainland in waves of migration between 500 and 250 bc, overlapping one with the other, see Forte and Wilson. See also ⟨http://indigenousreview.blogspot.com/⟩, the precursor of which was the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink, its aim being to constitute a network and provide information about the “indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, past and present, and the wider indigenous world” (28 July 2010).

3. Other younger writers, who do not necessarily have Amerindian ancestry, have also integrated the Amerindian element in their fiction writing. One can mention Kevin Baldeosingh in The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar, or Marie-Elena John in Unburnable.

4. For a detailed comparison of the Brazilian writer Mario de Andrade’s Macunaima (1928) and Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale, see Braz. See also Shemak and Bragard. These are the only articles that engage in depth with the problematics of cultural translation and ultimate untranslatability as regards indigeneity.

5. For enlightening in-depth studies of the intertextual intricacies of Melville’s text with Evelyn Waugh’s writing about Guyana (mostly in A Handful of Dust and Ninety-Two Days), see Ness, and also Lawson Welsh, “Imposing Narratives”.

6. See Lévi-Strauss 28, as well as Gullick 27–28.

7. As well as the articles by Braz, Shemak, and Bragard mentioned above, see also Shields, whose article is one of the only ones to focus on the issues of trans-nationalism, from the angle of indigenous global citizenship. Other articles by Condé, François, Morris, Pyne-Timothy, Renk, Rippl, Savory, Thieme and Wallart have also been included in the Works cited list for the sake of reference.

8. Carew’s Fulcrums of Change, Part Two, devotes a whole chapter to “The Fusion of African and Amerindian Folk Myth” (69–87).