Last (W)rites

I hope the seminar papers proceed productively apace; I will certainly look forward to reading them. Given how many of our texts were fragmented, multi-perspectival, and creolized, I wonder nearly if there could have been some way of following suit in your final papers for the class. We danced around this possibility on one or two occasions, but maybe it's something we should have discussed more seriously! I remember chancing upon (and finding appealing) this description by Robert Root in his book The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction: "The segmented essay is like an oratorio or a concerto. The spaces are like intervals of silence between the separate elements. Sometimes the segments of prose in an essay can be recitative, aria, duet or trio, chorus; they can be allegro non troppo, allegro appasionato, andante, allegretto grazioso. This is what the spaces say: In this interval of silence hold onto what you have just heard; prepare yourself to hear something different; ponder the ways these separatenesses are part of a whole. Like musical compositions, nonfiction need not be one uninterrupted melody, one movement, but can also be the arrangement of distinct and discrete miniatures, changes of tempo, sonority, melody, separated by silences. This is what the spaces say" (86). I don't know how that could be made to fit the final seminar paper for a course like this, but it's beguiling nonetheless. Could you imagine a multigenre essay, too, that would involve each of us contributing 2-3 pages, with multiple segments, that we assembled into one piece that we then tried to get published as a multi-authored article in a literary journal? Had I achieved fuller buy-in with this blog maybe we would have found a good bit of the potential material right here. Maybe it's an idea for a future iteration of the class.

Well, the whale-oil has nearly been exhausted, and thus it may be time for me to conclude this bloggy yarn and depart The Quarterdeck! The foregoing, to quote Captain Josias Lockwood of the Star of the Sea, has been signed and written in my own hand, "and I attest it on my solemn honour a compleat and true account of the voyage," undertaken with my seafaring companions during the Fall 2015 semester. I am grateful to those nine for everything they contributed these many months, and for no small amount of patience and good cheer, and I wish them a restorative winter break on land and happy trails extending into their futures!

Redemption Songs

Putting the final PowerPoint show together for our last night (and listening to Marley's song in the process) made me realize that nearly every text we read this semester ultimately became a kind of redemption song. Given how dark and grim the historical contexts and the narratives themselves so often were, it's quite astonishing to find our writers time and again managing to find the hope, the redemption, even the elation; we intuit, as a result, the particular importance of literature and art in allowing for a passage through the tallies of grief into a kind of solace and joy. We had Robert Hayden's "voyage through death to life upon these shores"; history starting anew "in the salt chuckle of rocks" in Walcott's "The Sea is History"; Antoinette's reawakening and self-assertion in the very last sentences of Wide Sargasso Sea; Moses's "church" sessions with his mates and his discovery of the vocation of being a writer in The Lonely Londoners; Jose taking the memory of Ma Tine and his cultural roots with him, also as a writer in the making, in Black Shack Alley; the inclusivity of Maud's quilt of birds and the sea "still going on" at the close of Omeros; Clare's fusion with the landscape and the breaking of day at the end of No Telephone to Heaven; the swelling "many-tongued chorus" supplying collective solace in Crossing the River; Solibo's passage to the "countryless land" to experience "all joy all music all dance."

It's all really quite affirming and, well, quite beautiful, you know?! In our last novel, of course, we dance the "Carriacou Tramp" with Avey, a "shuffle designed to stay the course of history" (250) and to symbolize continuity bodily through the circle dance. Remembering Kincaid's anger in A Small Place and our own discomfort in reading about the degradations of tourism, wasn't it so wonderful, too, to see Avey escape from that banal, meaningless cruise on the Bianca Pride and finish our semester with a kind of conversion narrative that would probably make even Kincaid proud. When Avey ascends in the plane on her way back to New York, we learn that "to fix their image in mind she kept her eyes closed for a long minute after the plane was airborne" (253). How fitting, here, that Avey uses her mind's eye -- rather than the tourist's camera -- to ensure the durability of her place in her newfound "cultural confraternity." The island from which she departs is finally perhaps "more a mirage than an actual place. Something conjured up perhaps to satisfy a longing and a need," something that transcends its natural geographic reality and allows her to sanctify a collective and personal past and thus imagine a new future. As Avatarra and not merely Avey, and "rightfully restored to her proper axis" (254), she may now inherit the wisdom of her grandmother and the ability to unify space and time: "'Her body she always usta say might be in Tatem but her mind, her mind was long gong with the Ibos ...'" (254-5).

Redemption songs, indeed.

Booking Future Passages

Those repeated moments in Praisesong for the Widow when Avey feels the presence of the past (and of her ancestors) physically -- e.g., "And it seemed so real, the fight, that when I woke up the next morning I was actually hurting, physically hurting. And my wrist was sore from her holding it" (170) -- reminded me that I nearly included on our semester's reading list Octavia Butler's time-traveling, nearly sci-fi slavery novel, Kindred. Butler's protagonist is a contemporary African-American woman who, during her nightly dreams, finds herself, frightfully, suddenly immersed in the horrors of a nineteenth-century southern plantation; when she wakes up, her body is physically marked and bruised by the experience, thus physicalizing the notion of historical trauma.

I bring this up because this may be a good time to consolidate some additional texts that we might have read (and that we might still read on our own!). There's the relevance of a text like Melville's novella, Benito Cereno (which makes me think we could also have included the narratives of Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, and surely other texts from the American tradition). In addition to Kindred, I would recommend Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones, which is a truly shattering novel (set in Haiti and the Dominican Republic) by a gifted writer; if you want to get a more modest sense of Danticat's work, check out the memorable short story "Children of the Sea," which you can find in the volume Krik? Krak?, and which I nearly put on our secondary reading schedule. Chamoiseau's novel Texaco, of course, comes to us with great acclaim. Charles Johnson's Middle Passage would have been a solid choice for the course (and it, too, was in the queue until the last moments of preparation), and would have allowed us to pull in some of the New Orleans/Mississippi Delta components of the world of Atlantic passages. A possible alternative to Star of the Sea (in terms of the Ireland/America transit) would be Colum McCann's TransAtlantic, one of 2013's great, great novels. I also considered More's Utopia for the early weeks of the class. And then how could we forget Toni Morrison?! Any others??

One more stray recommendation for you, as I scan my memory: in the April 18, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen has an interesting personal essay ("Farther Away") in which he combines an accounting of his period of solitude and isolation on an island in the South Pacific, a consideration of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (which also could have been a candidate for the course had we had world enough and time), and a reflection on the life and death of his good friend, David Foster Wallace.

Filling Stations

During the "nation dances" late in Praisesong for the Widow, Avey observes that "it was the essence of something rather than the thing itself she was witnessing ... All that was left were a few names of what they called nations which they could no longer even pronounce properly, the fragments of a dozen or so song, the shadowy forms of long-ago dances and rum kegs for drums. The bare bones. The burnt-out ends. And they clung to them with a tenacity she suddenly loved in them and longed for in herself. Thoughts -- new thoughts -- vague and half-formed slowly beginning to fill the emptiness" (240). This notion of "filling the emptiness" harkens back to at least a couple of earlier scenes -- e.g., when she's slumped forward and emptied out on the hotel room floor, "prostrate before the darkness" (143) and when she's on the wharf a second time and realizes that "there now seemed to be a small clear space in her mind" (187). Sensing this was an echo of Clare and a passage I had read in No Telephone to Heaven, though, I found this message from one of Kitty's last letters to Clare: "A reminder, daughter -- never forget who your people are. Your responsibilities lie beyond me, beyond yourself. There is a space between who you are and who you will become. Fill it" (103). The idea of being emptied out and refilled thus resonates on a number of levels in each novel, and maybe even adds still more mysterious beauty to the blank spaces between words in those last moments of Cliff's novel. Not only are we as readers asked to fill in the blank spaces of a fractured and fragmented narrative, but these empty spaces also symbolize the dissolution that is needed before something new can emerge (whether it's a new language, a new self, a new society).

How appropriate, too, that Marshall's novel ends so movingly with scenes of song and dance. These scenes both honor the novel's title (the "praisesong" is a celebratory poem/song that originated in African cultures) -- which prepared us for the fact we'd be experiencing a musical composition as much as we'd be reading a story -- and bring so many of our earlier texts into the same orbit (which we already talked about a little bit). It makes me think that a study of the body and the kinesthetic imagination in some of our texts could have been a great paper topic as well. In the quote I shared Wednesday night, from his poem "Tom" (from Rights of Passage, 1967), Edward Brathwaite writes "dance / and dare to remember." And then there's this from Sterling Stuckey, which perhaps I'll include on a handout in support of our brief time on Gilroy and music next week during our last class meeting: "Dance was the most difficult of all art forms to erase from the slave's memory in part because it could be practiced in the silence of aloneness where motor habits could be initiated with enough speed to be autonomous. In that lightning fast process, the body very nearly was memory and helped the mind recall the form of dance to come. For in dance, such is the speed with which the mind can work, and the body respond to it, that the time between thought and action all but disappears. In a sense, then, the body is mind, and is capable of inscribing in space the language of the human spirit. When the tempo slows, of course, the body configures what the mind more easily recalls."

The Carriacou Shuffle

Despite the harried nature of these final weeks of the semester, I hope you found some pleasures and some interpretive riches in Praisesong for the Widow, a novel that seems to be powerfully capable of re-staging the issues (and, really, all of the texts) we've traversed this semester. Some of what I'll assemble here will likely be a kind of recap of last night's class, but it helps me, I guess, to try to articulate it in this way.

Marshall's novel certainly reinforces the importance of storytelling that was so prominent in Solibo Magnificent and the importance of mythic memory that was so prominent in No Telephone to Heaven; it uses both to contest and disrupt traditional historiographic understanding (which we've seen in every text this semester, seemingly), and finally fulfills Walcott's desire that historical memory seek out elation rather than recrimination and despair. After the death of Jay (who is "Jerome" at that point) and up through her crisis on the Bianca Pride, Avey falls into an almost amnesiac silence (though there's that "colossal cry" (133) that forms in her throat that nearly summons Christopher's howl in Cliff's novel), recalling the zombified state of Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, before gradually (through a series of minor awakenings and epiphanies) overcoming her North White Plains materialistic self by connecting with her Sea Islands self and the matrilineal inheritance that originated in her grandmother and then in her Aunt Cuney. It's a Clare Savage-like voyage of discovery -- at first unconscious but then finally self-aware (aided by that rum and coconut water in Lebert Joseph's church of a rum shop!); as it did for Clare, the voyage includes a reverse Middle Passage, an epic sickness, and the ministrations of the healing hands of maternal figures. Avey's increasingly dazed flight from the strip of the hotels as she wanders down the beach reminds us of Achille's sun-stroke induced passage into another time and place in Book 3 of Omeros; Avey's savior and guide, Lebert, joins Seven Seas, Medouze, and Solibo as carriers of a seemingly ancient wisdom (and how memorably Lebert is described, "the lines etched over his face like the scarification marks of a thousand tribes" (161)). Lebert's job, ultimately, is to make Avey aware of her connections to "the vast unknown lineage" (137), connections which are so strikingly metaphorized by "that myriad of shiny, silken, brightly colored threads [...] which were thin to the point of invisibility yet as strong as the ropes of Coney Island" (249); this sense of a global community, which finally unites the disparate geographical spaces of the novel (the northern United States, the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, the eastern Caribbean island of Carriacou, and Africa), makes us hear again the "many-tongued chorus" of Phillips's Crossing the River.

Early on, of course, we're reminded of Kincaid and A Small Place, especially as the Bianca Pride is described -- "huge, sleek, imperial, a glacial presence in the warm waters of the Caribbean" (16-7). When Avey becomes ill after eating that parfait, we realize, I think, that what she's sickened by is the gaudy excess of the tourism and Western materialism represented by that ship. It's interesting, too, to think about that skeletal tourist -- "the only thing to be seen on the deck chair was a skeleton in a pair of skimpy red-and-white striped trunks and a blue visored cap"; it's not until later, when Avey's transformation occurs via dance and movement, that we realize the symbolic import of that man's appeal to Avey to "have a seat. Take the load off your feet" (59) -- that advice represents the very opposite of what she needs. Somehow, as I noted last night, I can't help but juxtapose this tourist with that fleshy, impossibly irritating and condescending German tourist we saw in that film clip from Cannibal Tours; the latter, we suspect, is destined to become the former. Avey ultimately is physically reduced as well -- "she was as slow and clumsy as a two-year-old just learning how to undress herself" (151), but for her it's all a prelude to being re-filled and re-animated (remember Clare's "rebaptism" in NTTH); she awakens "like a slate that had been wiped clean, a tabula rasa upon which a whole new history could be written" (151). She becomes the opposite of that skeletal tourist, and thus makes even a Biblical reference freshly relevant: "Thus saith the Lord god unto these bones, Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live" (Ezekiel 37:5).

More to follow, I suspect, and, as always, I hope this post might induce a few of you to leave some of your own remainders, especially those of you who didn't get to weigh in much last night. In the meantime, continued good luck with your writing and with all of the pressures of the crazy endgame; I'll look forward to our last class meeting next week.

Under the Shade of the Tamarind

I recently chanced upon this line from Hugh Thomas's book, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870: "In some respects, the treatment of slaves was, Park thought, far from being harsh or cruel. They were led out in their fetters every morning to the shade of the tamarind tree, where they were encouraged to play games of chance, and asked to sing, to keep up their spirits" (384). This reference to the tamarind tree resonates so much more fully now after having read Solibo Magnificent. I wonder if we can think of the tree as providing another of those alternative spaces we've talked about from time to time this semester, spaces that allow for more enabling performances/realizations of identity (e.g., St. Pancras/Saltfish Hall in The Lonely Londoners, Medouze's hut in Black Shack Alley, the Halsey Street apartment for Avey and Jay in Praisesong for the Widow (which you are about to encounter), etc.). In Chamoiseau's novel, the tree stands as the center of community life, the center of communal solidarity and collective identity, the center of resistance. It suggests borders between the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown, the physical and the spiritual, etc. It suggests ancestral knowledge (making it the perfect place for the wisdom and storytelling of Solibo). It exemplifies and symbolizes both rootedness and mobility ("roots and routes"). And with Thomas's quote, we gain the added significance of the tamarind tree as a place of refuge and protection for slaves; these trees supplied them with shade, medicine, food, and later must have played a role in helping slaves/maroons to escape.

In reading this novel again, too, I was reminded of how there are so many wonderfully evocative and poignant moments of writing in this novel, moments that are worth contemplating in isolation. An example: "That scene lasted forever -- and could have gone on and on: a tafia-soused audience, sitting in a circle at the crack of dawn, does not inscribe itself in the ephemeral. But then, after eons (exactly three hours, thirty-eight minutes, and twenty-two seconds, says the coroner), a basaltic old man left the assembly and made toward Solibo. His name was Congo and he seemed to owe Death four centuries" (16). Or this one, on memory and grieving, and on storytelling's solace: "Sidonise, who had seemed for a few moments to be drowning in another world, starts to murmur an inaudible story. A strange smile transfigures her pain, her eyes follow the flight of internal visions. There is a prowling memory there, of those that death, in its tide, drains from our heads, our hearts, our dreams. Oh life plays hide-and-seek, never giving all of herself at once, but leaving to death's seasons the essence of her stems, her flowers' subtle perfume. There, through the small sherbet vendor, Solibo confronts our distress, dissipates it, as certain churches do the sadness of the devoted. Charlo' forgets his cheek and raises his inundated eyes" (78-9).

Perhaps you have other passages, other reflections to share?

On the Move

The aftermath of the Paris attacks and the coarsening of the political dialogue in our own country have me thinking about refugees again (Syrian and otherwise), which brings Clifford's essay back into my field of vision. We're reminded yet again, as Caren Kaplan writes, that "the ever-expanding numbers of displaced persons remains uneasy and unresolved," and of how marginal and imperiled refugees are (rhetorically and literally) relative to such other categories as exiles, migrants, transnationals, etc. The added spectre of terrorism (i.e., of terrorists using to their advantage the flow of refugees to western Europe) raises the stakes of Clifford's sense that diasporic cultural forms "encode practices of accommodation with, as well as resistance to, host countries and norms" (307).

For our purposes, we must remain mindful of the material histories and, often, the psychic trauma of bodies on the move (which may end up being the focus of final papers for some of you, in one way or another). Clifford proposes that "a shared, ongoing history of displacement, suffering, adaptation, or resistance may be as important as the projection of a specific origin" (306), or of any possibility of a return to that origin, and we think again, perhaps, of the various bodies on the move in our course texts this semester, seeking a better life, seeking communal affiliation, etc.: the spectral existence of Martha in Crossing the River and Mary Duane in Star of the Sea, the existential loneliness of Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, Travis's (CTR) and Bobby's (No Telephone to Heaven) wounded and symbolic odysseys, the difficult travails of Moses and his fellow immigrants in Selvon's London, even, at some level, Plunkett's displacement in Omeros ... among many others.

Gosh, did you notice that even the seagulls in The Lonely Londoners (the ones that end up on the window ledge of Cap's apartment) are exilic/diasporic? We learn that they "come up from the old Thames when things too hard for them by the sea," and that "sometimes they join the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, and it have some of them does hang out by the Odeon in Marble Arch" (134). Creatures of the sea (just like the Caribbean immigrants) who have moved to urban areas for congress and survival -- how appropriate is that?! Lately, too, I tend to think of the poignant symbolism of Greer in Crossing the River (Joyce's and Travis's bi-racial son). Not only does he both challenge naive/purified notions of British national identity (as white, for example), but he also inflects that national identity with the history of slavery and racism (Bhabha's ideas of disjunctive temporalities would be useful here. And then, wow, we remember Joyce, on the novel's last page, thinking, with great irony and sadness, "I almost said make yourself at home." We're stunned, realizing that there can be no homecoming for Greer, realizing that his experience of dislocation and dispossession will be ongoing, and that he'll have to seek affirmation and solidarity in other (hybrid, intercultural) affiliations.

(Hi)stories

It was important to raise the issue of history and historiography in last week's class, as this reminds us yet again of questions that have been consistently present for us this semester, and that suggest very promising possibilities for papers and further inquiry. I think of Declan Kiberd's avowal (which was on the board) that “there can be no single History, only a plurality of self-interested histories, each composed at the mercy of its own moment of creation and at the mercy also of the literary form in which it is encased.” When, near the very end of Star of the Sea, we learn that Seamus Meadowes has reinvented himself many times over after reaching America, and even written an autobiography in which he casts himself as a justice-seeking advocate for the working man, we realize quite palpably how this novel shows us how stories, testimonies, and myths proliferate and then are dispersed; meanwhile, the truth gets harder to locate, and the dead become ever more lost and anonymous in the mists of time (remember Walcott, in "The Muse of History," proposing that "in time every event becomes an exertion of memory and is thus subject to invention. The further the facts, the more history petrifies into myth"). As the narrating Dixon finally explains, "As for the rest -- the details, the emphases, certain devices of narration and structure, whole events which may never have occurred, or may have happened quite differently to how they are described -- those belong to the imagination" (394). It all sounds very poststructural, right: the actual past has gone, and it's only manifested in the historicized traces now, traces that signify an absent presence.

Our most direct encounter with historiography has been Walcott's essay, of course, but if you want to pursue this line of inquiry you'd do well to seek out Hayden White's work -- in particular the essay to which I referred in class some weeks ago, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" (1980). In the three decades since White's work appeared, we've come to realize that the relations between literature and history must be rethought and that, indeed, there are two meanings of the word "history": (1) the events of the past, and (2) telling a story about the events of the past. White is interested in the constructedness of historical narrative, in the principles of selection, and in the desires that inhere in our need to have real events presented in such a way that they "display the formal coherency of a story," for "the notion that sequences of real events possess the formal attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary events could only have its origins in wishes, daydreams, reveries." In what ways do our texts this semester (Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage," for example, or Crossing the River, Omeros, Star of the Sea, etc.) formalize and thematize an opposition to "old historicism," which, according to White, has always wanted us to find in historical narratives "a structure that was in the events all along," and which, consequently, suggests "why the plot of a historical narrative is always an embarrassment and has to be presented as 'found' in the events rather than put there by narrative techniques"? When you realize how history was traditionally a matter of coherence, of structures, of order, of knowability, it begins to bring a whole new resonance to the fractured, gapped, multigenred, stitched-together texts we've encountered this semester ...

Sea Worthiness

We're at the point in the semester, of course, when connections and threads should be richly accumulating across our disparate texts (as I tried to indicate via our little exercise involving "names" on the whiteboard last night); I look forward to the final papers in this regard, as I'm sure some of you will be doing this kind of associational and comparative tracking. As another kind of exercise, and wondering about the connective tissue made available to us through the Irish Famine and emigration experience (after last night's productive discussion), I thought I'd try to identify at least one link between O'Connor's Star of the Sea and our various course texts this semester: (1) w/ Hayden's "Middle Passage": the two texts mostly clearly and directly involved with the onboard ship experience; the comparisons between the role of the captains in the two texts; the fragmented nature of the narratives and the multiple sources in play in each; (2) The Tempest: we might think about the connections between Caliban, Cliff's Christopher, and Pius Mulvey around the idea of "othering" and notions of the monster and the abject; there's also the possible comparison between Prospero and David Merridith in that each was in a sense exiled in their own land before experiencing the sea crossing and more overt exile; (3) Wide Sargasso Sea: there's a kind of echo between the post-emancipation changes to the social order in Rhys's Jamaica and the Famine-related upheavals that changed the fates and hierarchies (to some extent) of the landlords and tenant farmers in Ireland; the idealized expectations of Antoinette regarding England and of the emigrating Irish regarding the America that awaits them; (4) Crossing the River: there are probably too many to mention here, but there's the ship's log/diary comparisons between the two texts (and the two captains), "that terrifying ledger of human suffering" (O'Connor 186); there's the spectral, dispossessed western migrations of Phillips's Martha and O'Connor's Mary Duane (who is finally just "a shade moving slowly through a forest of black umbrellas" (389)); there are the similarities in the multi-voiced, fragmented form of the novels; (5) No Telephone to Heaven: the discourse of racism that appears in both texts; the sense of comparative traumas and experiences of racism that are opened up in both texts (e.g., Clare's experience juxtaposed with Bobby's African American experience in the former novel, and the Irish dispossession and sea passage juxtaposed with the Middle Passage in the latter); (6) Black Shack Alley: Merridith's alienated position relative to his father reminds us, perhaps, of that the treatment of fathers, sons, and inheritances -- and the way such relationships are affected by colonial dynamics -- are featured in each text; (7) Omeros: Maud's Irishness and the Poet-figure's journey to Ireland in Book 5 open up interesting points of convergence with O'Connor's novel: as Michael Malouf proposes, "Structurally, Ireland and Joyce move the poem away from its previous concerns with the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle Passage and lead to the more universalist, cosmopolitan themes of the later chapters in Book 5"; maybe we could even think of the Adamic sensibility and poetics being a relevant comparison (the emigrant Irish expect a kind of Adamic renewal in America, perhaps, and also experience the kind of ineffable void in their sense of history (because of the trauma of the Famine) that Walcott describes in "The Muse of History"); (8) The Lonely Londoners: the good, resourceful, creative side of Pius may remind us a little of "Selvon's boys" in London, but, more than that, the novels also focus searingly on material dispossession -- this fear of Pius Mulvey may remind us of the milk bottles passage in Selvon's novel: "More than poverty and hunger it began to claw at him: the picture of himself and his heartbreakingly courageous brother growing old and then dying in that mountainside cabin. Nobody to mourn them or even to notice they were gone" (87); there's also the juxtaposition between the great hopes of the emigrants upon leaving their native lands in each text and the harsh realities of what they encounter -- as we learn late in Star of the Sea, "anti-immigrant feeling was strong" (376) in New York when the Star's passengers are finally allowed to disembark.

Well, it's an interesting exercise, in any event! Before we move on, a couple more observations about Star of the Sea. First, there's the sheer poignance of the Captain's observations of the leavetaking (which, in a way, take us back to those memorable scenes in Book 3 of Omeros when the slaves are taken from their homes, their families, their occupations, or that moment in Crossing the River when, the ship heading to sea, Captain Hamilton observes that "they huddle together, and sing their melancholy lamentations" (124)): "What anguish, then, must be endured by those on board who will never again in this life see their loved ones who must remain behind? The man who will never more go walking in the evening in his home town with his brother, quietly reflecting together on the matters of the day. Or the girl who must bid farewell to respected parents whom she knows to be too poorly to countenance such an arduous voyage. The happy young couple who must part from one another and the father parted from his wife and children, to travel into America by himself where the means only exist to pay for one passage. To wander alone among strangers, they risk all" (275).

Consider this, too, as an overflow vestibule to last night's discussion. I know there are a good many observations still to be made about O'Connor's novel, the two poems, the Clifford essay, etc.

Of Shining Salted Faces

Well, I'm thinking we can & should still be in the business of isolating some stray striking passages in this space, and the grim encounter between the whale and the Star of the Sea in O'Connor's novel reminded me of that wonderful moment, late in Omeros, when Philoctete and Achille encounter (with a mixture of awe and terror) the sudden emergence of a whale right next to their fishing boat:



Exultant with terror, Philo kept ravelling


the line around his fist, and then both gasped as one whale --


"Baleine," said Achille -- lifted its tapering wedge



as a bouquet of spume hissed from its splitting pod,


as it slowly heightened the island of itself,


then sounded, the tail sliding, till it disappeared



into a white hole whose trough, as it came, lifted


In God We Troust with its two men high off the shelf


of the open sea, then set it back down under



a swell that swamped them, while the indifferent shoal


foamed northward. He has seen the shut face of thunder,


he has known the frightening trough dividing the soul

from this life and the other, he has seen the pod


burst into spray. The bilge was bailed out, the sail


turned home, their wet, salted faces shining with God.



This passage, with the radiant appearance of that whale at the end of a day's fishing, reveals that, among other things, Walcott is a great nature writer, too. One remembers Shakespeare's sense of the "solemn sympathy" of nature, perhaps, or, as I do, thinks of David Abram's discussion of animism in his great book, The Spell of the Sensuous. Abram hopes that the interpenetration of the human and animal/natural worlds is such that "the other forms of experience that we encounter -- whether ants, or willow trees, or clouds -- are never absolutely alien to ourselves" (16). This is increasingly rare, though, and Abram later laments, "How is it that these phenomena no longer address us, no longer compel our involvement or reciprocate our attention? .... To freeze the ongoing animation, to block the wild exchange between the senses and the things that engage them, would be tantamount to freezing the body itself, stopping it short in its tracks .... If we no longer experience the enveloping earth as expressive and alive, this can only mean that the animating interplay of the senses has been transferred to another medium, another locus of participation" (130-1). We should admire Philo and Achille here, their "salted faces shining with God," and this natural manifestation of their rediscovered wholeness. Someone (Briana, maybe?) had wondered about the significance of the ants in Omeros (and I think ants end up having an ambiguously important role in Solibo Magnificent, too, which is next up for us), so maybe this incident, along with the Abram quotes, help us a bit in that regard?

Cliff Notes

I guess the subject line could also read "Tempis Fugit," right? Egads, it's tough to do justice to everything within our allotted boundaries. Thank you to James and Sean for giving us some leads for getting started on the No Telephone to Heaven discussion, but, of course, much remains. I take some solace in Walcott's understanding of time: "The strength of the sea gives you an idea of time that makes history absurd.... History is a very, very minor statement; it's not even an intrusion, it's an insignificant speck on the rim of that horizon. And by history I mean a direction that is progressive and linear. With the sea, you can travel the horizon in any direction, you can go from left to right, or from right to left. It doesn't proceed from A to B to C to D and so on. It's not a rational line. It's a circle, and that's what you feel." With your permission, I'd like to inhabit that understanding of time (and not the linear one) as we approach our readings henceforth -- let's be islanders in that regard.

Now, as for Cliff's novel, maybe I can consolidate a few things and invite you all to toss around a passage or two in these parts so we can advance the conversation even as we look ahead to this week's film and then, more distantly (i.e., in the following week), to our next novel, The Star of the Sea. I know we started to address this, but I've been intrigued by some of the meaningful overlap with Wide Sargasso Sea (between the authors, between the protagonists, between the richly ambivalent endings (with the seeming awakening of each protagonist), between the healing figures of Harry/Harriet and Christophine, between the abject orphaned figures of Christopher and Daniel Cosway, etc.). When Rhys's novel opens with "They say when trouble comes close ranks" we are right away alerted to the fact that the social dynamic, in the post-emancipation period, is changing in a major way, and that race is going to be pressured by other categories (like class and gender). No Telephone to Heaven starts in much the same way, with that clear dialectic being established between sameness and difference. Thus, you have the guerrillas trying to forge an alliance based on their similarities -- "this alikeness was something they needed" (4), but the difficulty of smoothing over their differences is symbolically indicated by those "khaki pants and shirts" (5) they all wear. The first description of Clare, too, indicates the wide range of racial categories in play in the Caribbean (familiar to us from the problems Antoinette's family encounters in Rhys's novel): "A light-skinned woman, daughter of landowners, native-born, slaves, emigres, Carib, Ashanti, English, has taken her place on this truck, alongside people who easily could have hated her" (5). Imagine Tia having to forge an alliance with Antoinette to fight oppression: it's completely logical in one sense, and deeply problematic in another. When we were discussing the irony of the freedom fighters wearing U.S. army jackets, by the way, which seems to symbolize the difficulty the postcolonial subject faces in undertaking resistance (not being able to escape the hegemonic Western circumscriptions), I had meant to try to connect that early moment to Kitty trying to resist very those subversive little notes of Mrs. Black, and then both to the attack on the film production at the end of the novel. The end result of those laundry notes was to have her two African-American co-workers fired, and thus to further the interest of her boss's/society's racist predilections. What does that say about the efficacy of resistance? Does it lend credence to Fanon's belief that anti-colonial violence is somehow necessary as a "cleansing force"? Does this inform the horrific violence committed by Christopher?

One other interesting detail that we noted in the opening pages of each text is the metaphor of the garden that has been overrun and turned into "ruinate." In Rhys's novel, the garden that used to be "large and beautiful" has now "gone wild," with "a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell." The suggestions are perhaps ambivalent here, as in one sense they point to the loss of innocence and the downfall of the Cosway family (with which we sympathize), but in another sense to the demise of the colonial ideal (and certainly the lushness of the island environs and vegetation in Part II becomes an antagonist to the controlling desires (both literal and narrative) of Rochester). The implications are similarly ambivalent in No Telephone to Heaven, perhaps? That is, there's something restorative about an undisturbed nature returning to an original state of wildness, but it also seems to represent a loss of connection (to the matrilineal heritage, among other things).

It may be worth calling attention to the similarities between Section V of Cliff's novel and Book Five of Omeros (Edward Said's "voyage in," in which the figure from the colony must travel to the heart of empire as part of his/her educational process, and hope to find a balm for a psychic wound), and it seems necessary as well to note the wounds of various sorts in this novel (in this sense, again, there's very rich overlap between NTTH and Omeros, which would contain possibilities for another fine paper topic): there are the very prominent physical wounds (Paul and his family and especially Mavis, Bobby, Clare's womb, etc.), but also a variety of psychic and figurative wounds (Christopher, Clare, Harry/Harriet, etc.).

There are obviously a myriad of other scenes and moments in Cliff's novel that we'd still do well to address. I think, for example, of (1) Clare's & Boy's experience at the New York high school ("no place for in-betweens" (99), (2) the system of racial classification (see that paragraph on New World racial categories on p.56) that dates back to the late 16th century and continues to have damaging effects on the characters of this novel, (3) the paragraphs involving Clare's identification with Bertha ("Caliban. Carib. Cannibal. Cimarron. All Bertha. All Clare" (116)) in Jane Eyre, (4) the insights Clare gleans from encountering the bronze state of Pocahontas (another woman who was renamed) (pp.136-7), (5) the scene with Clare and Harry/Harriet in the nightclub designed "to suggest a galleon on the Spanish Main" (121), and a good many others ... We eventually realize that this text is something of a bildungsroman, with Clare slowly coming into a more enlightened awareness of history and of her own identity (it's a very expanded version of what happens to Antoinette in those final paragraphs of Wide Sargasso Sea, when she resolves to put the torch to Thornfield Hall and everything it represents). Cliff's novel is circular in this regard: everything that happens helps us to understand how she ends up being in the rebels' van at the beginning of the novel.

Anyway, it would be great to gather together some more comments on No Telephone to Heaven. Have at it, if you're so inclined!

Compassing Omeros

I'm late in helping you outfit your pirogues with these navigational aids, but you might find this guide to Omeros (more extensive and analytical than the student-created ones I've been distributing) quite useful, as well as this running index/glossary. You might also find worthwhile Hilton Als's 2004 profile of Walcott for the New Yorker, as well as this more recent piece by Adam Kirsch, also for the New Yorker. This interview (audio) of Walcott also has some good material, and if you advance to around the 27th minute you'll hear him discussing Omeros for a little bit.

I still find myself mulling over some of the questions that arose regarding Kincaid and A Small Place: e.g., the vague discomfort regarding Kincaid's positionality, the question about what it means to live in a "small place," etc. Regarding the former, maybe this issue would largely go away if it weren't for those couple of moments when her critique of everyday Antiguans becomes especially unvarnished. Still, Franz Fanon and others assert that the first step in the reclamation process for the abject and the colonized is anger, so maybe her call to arms, even in its more strident guises, has a kind of necessary and honest forcefulness to it. And what would we find, I wonder, if we rooted around the website for the Antigua and Barbuda Department of Tourism? I'm suddenly curious to read A Small Place again now, too, to see if there's more self-reflexivity than is immediately apparent, to see where Kincaid might subtly be negotiating her dual position as insider and outsider (I'm also inclined to wonder if there might somehow be some overlap between Kincaid's text and Ortiz's Cuban Counterpoint around the issue of invoking and then reversing polarizing binarisms).

Maybe, too, we can redirect some of these issues to Omeros, especially in those moments when the poet/narrator is in the position (nearly) of tourist (e.g., in the opening of Book Six when he rides in a taxi back to his St. Lucian Hotel after his sojourn in Europe and North America in the previous book). Walcott said once in an interview, in fact, that "I come down here so often that perhaps literally I'm a tourist myself coming from America." Anyway, there are plenty of other moments in Omeros when the discourses and lenses of tourism are present. There's probably a paper idea in there somewhere ...

Kneel to Your Load

Greetings, everyone, from the anchorage of a sunny Thursday. I hope Omeros will start to yield more and more delights as you get more accustomed to the demands of reading a "poem" like this, and as the layered stories/strands start to come into clearer focus. I'm never quite sure how to approach this work properly, at least in the early going: do we work forward in a sequential and linear fashion, or do we jump around based on thematic pursuits? I guess it must be a bit of both, but hopefully we can strike the right balance next week.

Anyway, you've got those three major levels to track: (1) the self-reflective and questing nature of the poet figure (who we can rather safely see as Walcott himself in this case (in Book IV you'll encounter many sections where he seems to struggle with his life in Boston; in Book V he feels uneasiness as a U.S. university professor ("Service. Under my new empire" (206)); and there's that interesting section (pp. 173-4: significantly, it's the only one written in couplets) in which he seems to describe the breakdown of his marriage). Try to track the questions and uncertainties he struggles with as you get deeper into the text; (2) the Achille/Hector/Helen plotline, which finds Walcott locating his epic material in the quarrels of two subsistence fishermen; and (3) the historiographic pursuits of Plunkett, who "decided that what the place needed / was its true place in history" (64) and who finally finds the "Homeric coincidence" (i.e., a ship named the Ville de Paris surrendering in a war "fought for an island called Helen" (100) (so named because of the way the French and British fought so fiercely over it). Some moments I think we should be sure to touch down on as we get going next Wednesday, and before we move on to the later books with Sarah's assistance, would be Book I, Chapter 5 (pp.24-32); Book 1, Chap. 12 & 13 (pp.67-76), Book 2, Chap. 14 (esp. pp.81-83), Book 3, Chap. 25 (pp.133-139), and Book 3, Chap. 32 (pp.165-68) (although, really, pretty much all of Book 3 is crucial).

St. Lucia, by the way, was first settled by Arawak Indians around 200 A.D., although by 800 their culture had been superseded by that of the Caribs; these early Amerindian cultures called the island “Iouanalao” (Island of the Iguanas). It was long believed Columbus discovered the island in 1502, but recent evidence suggests he merely sailed close by; in any event, there was no European presence until its settlement in the 1550s. Sometime around 1600 the Dutch arrived, which was followed by the first attempt at colonization in 1605. By mid-century the French arrived, which began that period of the island changing hands fourteen times. The British persevered, and by 1814, after that prolonged series of enormously destructive battles, the island was finally theirs (to this day, though, the French legacy is still evident in the Creole dialect). St. Lucia became independent within the British Commonwealth in 1979.

Personally, and do take issue if you think I'm overstating things, when I read Omeros I find myself feeling I'm immersed in the greatest poetic achievement that I've ever encountered. His extraordinary attention to the felicities and complexities of language, his deft managing of the technical demands of what he's attempting here, not to mention the intellect and wisdom that stand behind the content, seem to me to be above anything I've ever read before. I wonder if some of you wouldn't mind simply sharing here a passage or line or two that has stood out for you in terms of such accomplishments. I love (and could repeat over and over again) the assonance and consonance (and general euphony) of that "to please implacable Caesars" phrase (37), but there are no shortage of others: e.g., there's that gorgeous scene-painting that concludes Chapter VII (p. 42), when the speaker describes waking up "from that shallow sleep"; or when he refers to lightning as the Cyclone's "stilt-walking messenger" (52); or when he describes the "sucked-out sun, like a lozenge / on a blue Delft plate" (79); or when he describes the slaves watching "the Redcoats running between the trees, / dispersing like blossoms when the poinciana rattles its hanging bandoliers in the breeze" (81); or that extraordinary (and extraordinarily sad) scene in Book V when he describes the Sioux being ambushed at Wounded Knee, when the U.S. soldiers are figured as pines on the hill: "The pines have lifted their spears. / Except that the thick, serrated line on the slope was rapidly growing more pine-trees" (214).

Well, kneel to your load, indeed. But I hope it's proving to be a stimulating load. See you next Wednesday.

Unhomed

Homi Bhabha proposes that the state of being "unhomed" is the paradigmatic post-colonial experience, an idea that we can certainly start to see being played out in our texts so far this semester. I guess it all started with that Grace Nichols poem on the first night (I don't really know where I belaang / Yes, divided to de ocean / Divided to de bone / Wherever I hang me knickers -- that's my home), which cautioned us to be ready to spot a poetics of home that features irreconcilable fragments of memory and desire. Antoinette is denied a home in Jamaica by unyielding racial categories, and then, after crossing the Atlantic, she ruefully notes that "this cardboard house where I walk at night is not England" -- the cardboard might be the walls that can't protect her (and that will soon burn), but this is also a touching moment in that she's still trying to believe in some "real" England that she was always taught to believe existed. And then, wow, I can't get that devastating story of Martha out of my mind from the second section of Crossing the River. In a way, because she is finally so utterly dispossessed and seems only able to find some measure of solace in a dream, Martha reminds me of Antoinette and her obeah-induced sleep in Wide Sargasso Sea.

When contemplating the state of being unhomed, I think of all those Syrian refugees on the move for western Europe, and of that striking image (above) of untold numbers amassing in a battered Damascus and seeking food from the United Nations; once a mass of people are uprooted and moved, they all too often become spectral figures, and are removed from the field of vision of literature, culture, and public consciousness (in some distant way, Antoinette's situation in that attic becomes a kind of metaphor for this spectrality). Whether we get to talk about it this week or next, this condition brings the importance of James Clifford's essay into our purview. The questions Clifford raises are vitally important (especially for our pursuits in this class), and they're immediate and direct: "What is at stake, politically and intellectually, in contemporary invocations of diaspora" (302)? This is especially pertinent given that diasporic consciousness and positions so often get articulated (in largely salutary ways, as a kind of homogenized cosmopolitanism, for example) by academics, theorists, writers, artists, etc. What happens when we nearly start to celebrate the condition of exile? What responsibility do we have as participants in literary studies, in a class like this one, etc., to keep this discourse rooted in historical and cultural specificity? "What is the range of experiences," asks Clifford, "covered by the term [diaspora]? Where does it begin to lose definition?" (306).

Our readings this semester are already making it clear that not all experiences of displacement and estrangement are experienced evenly. Caren Kaplan, in her book Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, cautions us against seeing exile as "a condition of the soul," something that ends up being unrelated to the facts of material life: the exile subsequently gets constructed as a "romantic figure" while the refugee (of which there may be some 25 million in the world today) becomes a "faceless political construct outside the sphere of literature and aesthetics." Anyway, our novels (and poems) are already helping us think about "the distinctions between exile, expatriation, diaspora, and immigration," and how they can be teased out and "made meaningful in historically and culturally specific ways" (Kaplan).

The Latest Lowdown and Ballad

The passages/issues we might still think about in The Lonely Londoners are probably legion! There's surely still more to say about homes and housing (and the idea of home) -- with cramped rooms, dormitories, hostels, and temporary meeting places seeming to loom so large, reminding us, perhaps, of that Grace Nichols poem with which we began the semester and inviting some possibly rich paper topics (I know there is a Selvon short story entitled "Basement Lullaby" -- I wonder what that might offer); Waterloo Station, with its many scenes of arrival, is one of the many central spaces of the novel (a locus of return, of rendezvous, of remembrance) that needs to be addressed (is Piedra's "Game of Critical Arrival" relevant here?); renamings and nicknames are crucial to Selvon's novel, and are another continuation of a prominent concern in our course; the whole idea of reimagining (and reverse colonizing) the metropolis (in a sense, inventing a black London) probably deserves more consideration (we did well to note Tanty's tropicalizing of the local food store, as well as the symbolic appropriation of some of London's central landmarks (which may provide intriguing overlap as we look ahead to Book 5 of Omeros and Chapter 5 of No Telephone to Heaven)); the spatial creolization that transforms St. Pancras Hall into "Saltfish Hall" in Trinidad suggests (even if just for a few moments) a new kind of socially inclusive space (don't even the gender relations seem a little different during Harris's fete?) and foreground the performative cultural resources of London's new citizens (how cool to think of them dancing calypso style to "God Save the Queen"!); the difference between Moses's and Galahad's approaches to living in London seem to go to the heart of the confused spirit of the rehomed (but still largely unhomed) West Indian migrant. Lots still to talk about, as you can see, and I'm sure you all would add to this list (also, perhaps, lots still to write about -- if you have a stray moment during these busy days, this blog space still seeks your musings!).

The Lonely Londoners is certainly a novel about itineraries, about routes, about an alternative pedestrian rhetoric (which is why I think de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life could be relevant here), about a sustained (and largely optimistic) engagement with the immigrant's built environment. Fittingly, the novel, which begins on a "grim winter evening" (23), ends on a summer night when "laughter fell softly" (142), and seems ultimately to offer a figurative rendering of the migrant's creative spirit, which was still able to be suffused with hopefulness in the mid- to late-1950s. And how wonderful, too, that the proliferating narratives never reach closure but remain open, and thus suggest that "Selvon's boys" are not fated to be merely passive and acted upon by the world; their stories are never finished, and it will apparently become Moses's quest to become the narrator of both his own life and the lives of his people.

I hope that you were able to avoid excessive "botheration" this past weekend, that you were able to "coast a lime" or two, and, indeed, that the glorious weather meant the weekend did really be hearts for all of you!

Reading Between the Lines with Homi

Hi All,

Just a quick recommendation of a podcast I listened to last summer that seems to prove Bhabha's thesis in "DissemiNation."  It's a RadioLab podcast on the Mau Mau movement in Kenya that began in the 1950s.  The Mau Mau were a group of colonized Africans who engaged in some, shall we say, violent tactics in an attempt to assert themselves to their British colonizers.

The official British narrative of the Mau Mau Uprising/Revolt was basically all the outside world had, then some researchers began talking to former Mau Mau people decades later and finding a new narrative.  And finally, when former Mau Mau fighters sued the British government several years ago, it was revealed that the British government had documents disputing the "official" narrative.

The podcast is kind of long, but it's a good listen and I think enlightens some of Bhabha's points.  The podcast came out July 2, so it's easy to find, and it's free.

Happy listening!

Monster of the Isle

Thanks to Brandon for giving us/you a separate container/thread for any residual Tempest conversation, to which I guess I'm adding another -- there's still so much to comment on, I suspect. In a play that is, we might say, about the making of identity and about contingent, constructed realities (and about ontological undoing as a result of storms and being "sea-swallowed"), it's interesting to contemplate, as we did briefly in class last week, the "deformity" and visual representation of Caliban. Without any kind of detailed knowledge of the history of these representations on the stage and in film, I'd propose that it probably doesn't matter "how" he's deformed; Peter Hulme writes that "the difficulty in visualizing Caliban cannot be put down to a failure of clarity in the text. Caliban, as a compromise formation, can exist only within discourse: he is fundamentally and essentially beyond the bounds of representation." George Lamming, in another great book, The Pleasures of Exile, sees Caliban as standing in for the Other, as "the excluded, that which is eternally below possibility"; this aspect of Caliban does authorize us to situate this text quite directly within the poetics and discourses of the New World.

Some of you, by the way, might want to take note of (and maybe track down) Hulme's useful and penetrating book, Colonial Encounters: in addition to a chapter on Prospero and Caliban, the book includes a survey of other adventure/discovery stories involving the likes of Columbus, Robinson Crusoe, John Smith and Pocahontas, etc.

Much of the postcolonial/ideological debate surrounding this play revolves around choosing between Ariel and Caliban as a way of understanding one's past and imagining one's future (whether individually or collectively as a nation). Both are subject to Prospero, of course, but Ariel is a willing subject while Caliban is more forcefully enslaved. Ariel accepts Prospero's directives and, at play's end, seems ready to regain his freedom in a kind of untroubled way (i.e., as Edward Said notes, he projects as a kind of "bourgeois native untroubled by his collaboration with Prospero"). Choosing to align oneself with Caliban, though, implies either accepting his mongrel past while looking ahead with some optimism to emancipated development, or escaping the state of abjection and seeking out his originary essence -- i.e., the identity and history that predate the contamination that resulted from the colonial encounter. As Said proposes, we can say that "both Calibans nourish and require each other," even as each suggests different central investments and political purposes. As we move forward in this class and with our subsequent readings, Caliban will perhaps more evidently come to be seen as a kind of representative for all who were similarly subjugated. Anyway, feel free to weigh in and to keep building up the relevance of Shakespeare's play to our inquiry. There seem to be all sorts of relevant keywords we might use as jumping off points: exile, displacement, shipwreck, the sea, Robinson Crusoe, usurpation, bondage, coercion, the decentering of power and legitimacy, language and representation, historiography, etc.

See you in a couple days.

Caliban

Hello, everybody.  I'm not sure if this is the type of thing that this blog is intended for; but now that we're in the second week of the course, it seemed like a good idea to me that we have a post put up on here anyhow.

During the class tonight, there was a comment made that it would be really nice to have a "New World" reading of The Tempest.  Unfortunately, though, most of the conversation seemed to point the other way!  I guess, if a person really wants a really loose parallel between the text and the new world, though, one hit me on the way home tonight.

When my first family members immigrated to Canada in the early 1600s, they wrote down a brief memoir--not their whole story, but just a quick recap of everything.  And one of the things that they mentioned was that the Indians became friends with the French primarily as a way to get rid of the English.  They chose a less demanding master, I guess, and promised to help kill the English settlers if the French would take over.

To me, it just sounded a lot like Caliban's situation, I guess.  I don't know of anything similar to that happening in Europe, though it very well could've happened!  If it's useful to that person who was looking for an excuse to make The Tempest about the New World, maybe you could use it!

Have a good tail-end of the week.

Depth Charge

Greetings, everyone. I think we'll be more fully provisioned for the semester if we have this blog at our disposal; perhaps it will help us adjust the intellectual rigging from time to time, to collect the stray drops from our briny casks that would otherwise fall unrecorded, to ensure that valuable insights don't end up forever buried in the orlop deck (and, don't worry, I'll eventually ease up on the nautical metaphors, once the novelty passes!). No, seriously, as I said in class, the blog may prove to be a very rewarding supplement and archive, but you're to feel no obligation: use it as you will and we'll see what shape it takes.

I hope the first class meeting went passably well in terms of identifying some of the operative contexts for the course. Given that the course will be transhistorical and transnational in its framing and in its featured texts, I'm hoping/expecting that there will be all manner of possibilities for you to move the material (and, eventually, your research and written work) in directions that intersect with your own interests. A short list of contexts, of course, as I tried to convey last night, includes the Middle Passage, historical trauma more broadly, postcolonial perspectives, Caribbean literature and poetics, New World poetics (with the implicit distinction between "Old" and "New" worlds, the notion of an Adamic imagination, etc.), the discourse of islands, travel and tourism, power and representation, diaspora studies, the poetics of home, etc. etc. Another prominent area of inquiry, I realize, especially after considering that trio of poems last night, is the passage of genres, aesthetic conventions, and languages across the Atlantic: we will undoubtedly encounter reconfigurations, hybridizations, reappropriations, creolizations, etc., of many types, so if you're interested in more formal matters and in matters of literary craft, or in linguistics, then there should be some promising opportunities for you. Hayden's strategy of reversing the Middle Passage and asserting control for an African-American sense of history -- by questioning the truth value of historical documents and redeploying "white" documents and voices -- provides an immediate opening; there was also Walcott's ironic and searing exegesis of the Biblical narratives in "The Sea of History"; and we had just those waning moments to get to the stylistic/linguistic blendings of Grace Nichols in "Wherever I Hang," a poem that reminds us of James Clifford's sense that once traveling is foregrounded as a cultural practice, then dwelling (or "home"), too, needs to be reconceived.

After foregrounding the oxhide boat of St. Brendan, I might have more fully introduced, too, the suggestive richness of the notion of the ship. Paul Gilroy, in The Black Atlantic, proposes that "the ship provides a chance to explore the articulations between the discontinuous histories of England's ports, its interfaces with the wider world ... As it were, getting on board promises a means to reconceptualize the orthodox relationship between modernity and what passes for its prehistory." Recalling a quote from Marcus Rediker that I shared last night, we are invited to consider the slave ship as a "world-changing machine," one that was "central to a profound, interrelated set of economic changes essential to the rise of capitalism: the seizure of new lands, the expropriation of millions of people and their redeployment in growing market-oriented sectors of the economy; the mining of gold and silver, the cultivating of tobacco and sugar; the concomitant rise of long-distance commerce; and finally a planned accumulation of wealth beyond anything the world had ever witnessed" (The Slave Ship 43) ... Some of you, too, may ultimately want to think about the sea itself as an important chronotope, as a metaphor that, among other things, suggests the fluidity and unmappability of identity and meaning. Anyway, onward we go ...

First up, of course, is Shakespeare and The Tempest. I don't think you'll have trouble putting it to work for our purposes: it should allow us to talk about the point of first contact (where, according to Piedra, "the game of critical arrival" is conducted), about Old and New World encounters and the one understanding itself through the other, about discovery, about sovereignty, about power, language and representation, about islands, about the paradigm for the colonial relationship. We could have started, I suppose, with More's Utopia, which would have taken us back to 1516 -- that text, which features one of the first (of many) ideal societies to be located in newly discovered realms, becomes an exercise in European social criticism more than a depiction of New World realities. We may wonder if there's a similar process at work in The Tempest. Feel free, of course, in advance of any class meeting, to weigh in at this location -- the quarterdeck! -- and get some of the ideas and questions circulating. See you next Wednesday!