Between virtuosity and despair: formal experimentation in diaspora tales

Abstract

Formal experimentation is a recurring feature in the literary output of works dedicated to the African diaspora, both in prose and in verse, and is easily understood as the artistic response to the need to recount a story that is abnormal – a story, that is, that could not be told using conventional literary models. But virtuosity is more than a merely formal device in these works: it affects both how and what it delivers, and can thus be read in light of the testimonial function the work of art performs towards the millions of people who died in the years of the slave trade, and as a celebration of the public role of art. Using trauma theory as a framework to approach two works of poetry, Zong! by Tobago-born Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and “Ruttier for the Marooned in the Diaspora” by the Trinidadian writer Dionne Brand – writers who belong to the Afro-Caribbean diaspora – this article addresses the importance of both formal inventiveness in rendering the traumatic experience and the relevance of testimony in order to explore the ethics of reading.

Keywords:

• diaspora
• trauma studies
• experimental writing
• ethics of reading
• Marlene NourbeSe Philip
• Dionne Brand

Notes

1. I do not have space in this article to explore in detail the notion of “the literary”, especially in relation to postcolonial literatures. However, a brief clarification is in order here to make sense of my analysis of Brand’s and Philip’s texts and of my concluding remarks on the ethics of reading. Literary texts perform two operations at the same time: they mean something for somebody, and they show what it is to mean by way of their form. We cannot paraphrase a literary work and expect to have produced a literary work ourselves. We may have a good summary of its plot, but the meaning, or meanings, of the text cannot be grasped without scrupulous analysis of the way in which the story is told. In other words, the uniqueness of literature as a category of our knowledge has to do with the way in which language is used as intimately tied to the possibilities for new meaning that are opened by that specific use of language. The poems analysed in this article are, I believe, brilliant examples of this.