Supriya Nair

Diasporic Roots: Imagining a Nation in Earl Lovelace's Salt

It was the Atlantic this side of the island, a wildeyed, marauding sea the color of slate, deep, full of dangerous currents, linedwith rowupon row of barrier reefs, and with a sound like that of the combined voices of the drowned raised in a loud unceasing lament—all those, the nine million and more it is said, who in their enforced exile, their Diaspora, had gone down between this point and the homeland lying out of sight to the east. This sea mourned them.

Response to Smith and Pirbhai

in the field. Nair suggests ‘comedy, laughter, and humour are all ambivalent, unstable forms’ (150), which nonetheless evoke a shared laughter working through specifically Caribbean expressions of the carnivalesque and the uncanny, ‘double entendre’ and forms of Creole word play, and ‘racial realities and deceptions’ (155). Nair takes a wider (rhizomatic) detour in her consideration of the modes of ‘black humour’ that resonate in pan-African texts, from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to Andrea Levy’s A Small Island, and in the Caribbean region by way of Jamaican poetess Louise Bennett’s ‘nation language’ or Derek Walcott’s dramatic satire in such works as Pantomime. (Here, Levy’s The Long Song might have been an interesting choice as a recent work of fiction that is pushing the envelope on the neo-slave narrative genre in its provocative deployment of trickster strategies and grotesque parody.) Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours offers a refreshingly original critical mapping of what Nair astutely identifies as some of the dominant concerns and aesthetic features of contemporary Anglophone Caribbean writing. For the most part, the ‘trickster strategy’ (4) of the detour makes good on its promise, as the book description tells us, to assess ‘the rich complexity of this body of writing from pluralistic perspectives’, though a few authors (Junot Diaz and Michelle Cliff, for instance) make only minor appearances despite their emphasis in the back cover’s synopsis. However, this is a very minor gap in a study that is otherwise populated by an illuminating range of works in new critical configurations that will be uncharted territory for many a specialist and casual reader alike. Of particular note are the sections on Jonestown (chapter 3), magical realism (chapter 4) and Caribbean humour (chapter 5), which turn ‘detour’ into fecund ground for some of this work’s most intriguing textual encounters, where journalistic tract sits comfortably alongside literary archive, or where aesthetic considerations remain firmly rooted within informed sociohistorical discussion. Indeed, ‘Caribbean detours’ might present less agile scholars with the slippery prospect of precipitating the very reductionism the study aims to contest; however, Nair’s vigorous prose, theoretical muscle and syncretic approach sustain, in spirit and execution, the ‘supple literary cartographies’ explored by this important and thoroughly engaging new addition to Caribbean literary studies.

Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics

The cover of Monique Allewaert’s Ariel’s Ecology presents a striking photograph of one underwater sculpture from Jason deCaires Taylor’s provocative exhibit “Vicissitudes”. Although the book does not refer to the remarkable living sculptures of the artificial reefs, the image is tailor-made (if you can pardon the pun) for Allewaert’s ecological reading of “personhood”, through which she reiterates the complex themes of her book. Just like the haunting visagemoulded by human artifice, inanimate material, marine life and oceanic currents, personhood in the American tropics is not the definitive, static, enclosed human subjectivity of Enlightenment or colonial ideology, but the evolving, entangled “collation of organic and inorganic forms” (161). Thus the encroaching and unstable domain of swamps that straddle water and land; the vitalist materialism of some early modern natural historians; the synchronic coexistence of animal and human life forms in what Allewaert calls the “parahumanity”of enslavedbeings; the porous, combinatory cosmologies of fetishes; and, finally, the volatile, fragmented status of white women in “anabiography” and colonial iconography all constitute “Ariel’s ecology”, which is poetically rendered in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: