THE ARTS JOURNAL Vol 2 No 2
Editorial Note
Over Seas: a transnational Caribbean
Gemma Robinson
The ‘national’ in the Caribbean has always been
transformatory. From the Haitian revolution, to the terminated West
Indian Federation, to Carifesta, the national, the regional and the
global have come together in the Caribbean in divisive, unifying and
celebratory ways. This issue of The Arts Journal explores Caribbean
cultural identity through creative writing, memoir, and criticism. The
contributors address publishing, film, fine art, fiction, photography,
poetry and radio. Only one contributor explicitly names
‘transnationalism’ (Leon Wainwright), yet all the pieces
gathered here consider, in the words of Nicholas Laughlin, ‘What
“Caribbean” Can Mean’. This issue shares
Laughlin’s wish to explore ‘the charge of
possibility’ held in the word ‘Caribbean’, as well as
George Simon’s concern to reveal what there is
‘besides’ the Caribbean in the Caribbean: ‘Besides,
like most Amerindians, I had not ever considered myself as a
“Caribbean” person’.
As an English academic based at a Scottish university, my editorial
interests betray the biases of my location – many of the
contributors (with the exception of George Simon, Jane Bryce and
Nicholas Laughlin) are based outside the
Caribbean region; some were born or grew up in the Caribbean (Wilson
Harris, Vahni Capildeo, Fred D’Aguiar, David Dabydeen); and some
have long-standing interests in the arts of the Caribbean (Anne
Walmsley, Leon Wainwright, Sandra Courtman and myself).
In this issue the contributors return to the essential topic of how
journeys contribute to Caribbean identity. This need not be physical
travelling. Wilson Harris (returning to a Guyanese publication after a
twenty-year absence) wants us ‘to approach a broken-ness in
humanity of which we are perhaps dimly aware’. In the extract
given here from his new novel, The Ghost of Memory (to be published by
Faber in November 2006), the ‘Wanderer’ provokes the
narrator to see that ‘Art speaks through us – through our
appearances as painted flesh or fleshly paint – of the immense
journey of life’. Mungo, in David Dabydeen’s short story,
‘The Painterboy of Demerara’, also dreams of seeing
‘with eyes of painted light’ (Harris). Dabydeen locates us
in the studio of the ‘Official Artist of the Colony of Demerara
and Contiguous Territories’ where Mungo paints the ‘animals
and whitefolk foot as well as what Massa call still-life, that is table
and chair and fruit- bowl and hurricane lamp’. Like Harris,
Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar see imagination and creativity as
precariously redemptive: Mungo paints to ‘make England
shine’ and become ‘Painterman’; Corinne, in
D’Aguiar’s novel, Naming the Dead, has survived Jonestown,
but dreams to return to her role as gardener: ‘Touched a seed,
tucked it in shallow, muddy ground and it sprouted’. All three
writers search for ‘a profound practice that might really alter
the frame of human behaviour’ (D’Aguiar). In a small way I
hope this issue will be part of that practice; its aim to publish, in
an accessible Guyanese publication, three of Guyana’s most
prominent creative writers, alongside memoirs and critical articles
about the Caribbean, is an example of the productive transnationalism
that writers, artists, publishers, academics and readers can achieve
today.
Vahni Capildeo’s and George Simon’s ‘memoirs’
explicitly tackle their border crossings ‘over seas’.
Capildeo suggests in an introduction to the extract from her
non-fiction book, One Scattered Skeleton, ‘that a straightforward
story of growing up, or exile and re-evaluation, might not really
correspond to the complexity of identity, remembering, and
migration’. Migration dominates this extract: as the
fictionalised ‘I’ fills in time before the birth of
Ratna’s baby – the first border crossing – Leila
argues, ‘This is not a hurricane. It is not that we are waiting,
and that we will hear “it passed to the north of
us”’. The narrator disagrees, wanting instead to batten
down the hatches in Jamaica, and encourage us to pass through Trinidad
and England, childhood, adulthood and motherhood in ‘the white
house of waiting’. George Simon’s memoir takes as its
central motif a story told to him by his mother about the Milky Way.
Here we read that Simon could not be the artist he is today without, in
the words of D’Aguiar, gaining from ‘Guyana’s
necessarily porous borders and the interdependence of
territories’. Moving from Pakuri, to McKenzie, Georgetown,
London, Wickford, Portsmouth, back to Georgetown, to N’Djamena,
Lyon, Canada, Kaliko and back again to Guyana, Simon (like the young
man who would be a Shaman), has proved himself during the
‘sub-journeys of the master journey’. He narrates a life of
departures and return that help him to understand ‘the
synchronicities in spiritual practices and imagery’ that
stimulate his work.
Anne Walmsley, Nicholas Laughlin and Jane Bryce reflect on their roles
in the cultural practices of book publishing, magazine publishing and
cinema in, about and for the Caribbean. Walmsley’s notes on a
career in publishing form an essential part of a history of the
Caribbean book, a border-crossing history that is only beginning to be
written in Caribbean Studies. Laughlin encourages us to join him in his
daily confrontation of ‘Caribbeanness’, as he edits
Caribbean Beat. With ‘distribution via BWIA seatpockets’,
print runs of seventy thousand copies per issue, a diverse readership
of transmarine travellers, and an ambitious cultural remit, Laughlin
convinces us that Caribbean Beat is a dynamic part of
‘Caribbeing’. Bryce’s article argues for
‘projecting the Caribbean’ within world cinema. As
co-director of the Barbados Festival of African and Caribbean Film, she
values the challenge of representation posed by film, provocatively
claiming ‘a space for African cinema in the Caribbean, where so
many people are still so ignorant about Africa, so resistant to the
idea of its modernity, desiring only the unchanging ahistorical Africa
of a dream of origin’.
Articles by Leon Wainwright, Sandra Courtman and me provide
complementary cross-cultural studies of Caribbean art, photography,
literature and radio. Wainwright’s detailed analysis of the late
Guyanese artist, Aubrey Williams, interrogates the reception of his
work in Britain and Guyana. Taking Revolt (a painting gifted to the
Guyanese people) as a key work, Wainwright reveals the
‘entwined’ art history necessary to understand
Williams’s work: ‘Made in Britain, [Revolt] travelled to
Guyana, as Williams himself often did, to share a field of
effects’. ‘Field of effects’ neutrally describes the
often fraught consequences of the transnational crossing of seas that
influences Caribbean identity. Division is just one of these
consequences and can be construed positively and negatively. Bryce
argues for a ‘split screen’ Caribbean – ‘which
perpetually holds more than one thing in view’ – and
Courtman explores how the ‘split self’ of emigration is
revealed in Birmingham’s photographic collections. Concentrating
on studio work in Birmingham, Courtman narrates a story of the hard-won
democratisation of the portraiture of Caribbean people, and of
Birmingham’s 1970s ‘self-aware generation of black
Britons’. My article returns us to less certain times for
Caribbean writers and to the 1950s poetry and radio broadcasts of
Wilson Harris and his contemporaries. I argue that radio (in the words
of George Lamming) provoked a ‘carnival of disputatious
argument’, and sketch out how Guyanese writers and radio
programmes helped to voice a ‘new world of the Caribbean’
within an emerging transatlantic public of listeners, readers and
spectators.
Finally, I would like to thank Ameena Gafoor and the Editorial Board of
The Arts Journal for their invaluable advice and generous help in
bringing this issue to Press.