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.