Abstract
Modern-day scholars of Caribbean literature tend to view with suspicion literature written in or about the Caribbean before the late nineteenth century, texts mostly published by Europeans and creoles in Europe and for European audiences. The body of literature appears counterproductive—and irrelevant—to modern-day efforts to celebrate the literary contributions of historically marginalized populations in the Caribbean. My proposed essay for a volume on the literary history of early Caribbean literature emphasizes the important relationship between pre-colonial/colonial and postcolonial Caribbean literature. Early Caribbean texts are often not the sole production of European writers but collaborative efforts that register multiple discourses, multiple voices, and multiple cultures within the texts. So, in constructing a literary history of the early Caribbean, I emphasize ways of reading the literature that do not merely confirm European dominance but that also recognize the complex human contacts that formed the literature. I do this through a close-reading of Richard Ligon’s History of Barbados, focusing specifically on that moment when he relates the tragic story of Yarico, an Indian maid sold into slavery by her English lover. I compare his version to Beryl Gilroy’s 1996 novel Inkle and Yarico. As the relationship between Gilroy and Ligon’s interpretations of Inkle and Yarico illustrates, early-modern and modern Caribbean literature are intimately linked, fueled in both cases by cultural encounters among black Africans, Indians, and Europeans that have defined the region in the past and today. Approaching early Caribbean literature in this way, as product of multicultural encounters, complements current postcolonial efforts to recuperate the literary contributions of historically marginalized populations in the Caribbean. More important, this perspective puts in dialogue the literary history of early Caribbean and modern Caribbean literatures.
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Notes
- 1.
Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, ed. Karen Kupperman (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2011), 107. All subsequent references to Ligon’s narrative appear in text and are taken from Kupperman’s annotated edition, which is based on a 1673 reprint. The narrative was first published in 1657.
- 2.
For example, see Richard Eden’s translation of Sebastian Münster, A treatyse of the Newe India with other new founde landes and islandes (London, 1553). Eden describes black African women: “The women are very fruitful, and refuse no labor all the while they are with child. They travail in manner without pain, so that the next day they are cheerful and able to walk. Neither have they their bellies wrimpled, or loose, & hanging pappes, by reason of bearing many children” (91). See also Leo Africanus, A Geographical Historie of Africa , trans. John Pory (London: Eliot’s Court Press, 1600): Early English Books Online , Web, April 3, 2013, in which he describes a group of Amazon-like African women who cut off a breast to improve their skills with bows and arrows.
- 3.
See Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
- 4.
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 11.
- 5.
Steele, Richard. “The Spectator, No. 11.” English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. Ed. Frank Felsenstein. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999): 81–88, 88.
- 6.
Jehlen, “History Beside the Fact,” 189.
- 7.
Steele, “Spectator,” 88.
- 8.
See Felsenstein, English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), in which he has compiled and annotated a comprehensive collection of the many versions of the “Inkle and Yarico” story published in England and the Americas, mostly in the eighteenth century.
- 9.
Ibid., 112.
- 10.
For another perspective on why Yarico’s story was popular among the English, see Peter Hulme, “Inkle and Yarico,” in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 225–264. Hulme argues that the story of Inkle and Yarico, in its many eighteenth-century mutations, was part of a larger language of sentimentality and colonial discourse, easily adaptable to the popular genre of sentimental literature.
- 11.
Felsenstein, English Trade, Indian Maid, 17. Felsenstein examines the story’s cultural work in English society. To understand something of the tale’s ubiquity in other parts of eighteenth-century Europe, see Madeleine Dobie, Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010), which examines the tale’s applicability for French culture. Also, perhaps not incidentally, a French story that bears telling resemblance to “Inkle and Yarico” predates Ligon’s, appearing in Jean Mocquet’s Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia, and America, the East and West-Indies, Syria, Jerusalem, and the Holy-land in 1617.
- 12.
Beryl Gilroy, Inkle and Yarico (Leeds: Pepal Press, 1996), 28. Note, all subsequent references to the novel appear in text.
- 13.
Like Yarico, Pocahontas’s mythology is based largely on a paragraph that appears in the third version of Smith’s The General Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles.
- 14.
Shireen Lewis, Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Négritude to Créolite (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 90.
- 15.
Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (1960) (Ann Arbor, Mich: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 38.
- 16.
Ibid., 38.
- 17.
Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry From Africa” in In a Green Night (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1969), 18.
- 18.
Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (London: Routledge, 2006), 35.
- 19.
Evelyn O’Callaghan, Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: ‘A Hot Place, Belonging to us.’ (London: Routledge, 2004), 9. For other recent studies that stretch or challenge orthodoxy, see Leah Reade Rosenberg, Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Nicole N. Aljoe, Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709–1838, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- 20.
O’Callaghan, Women Writing, 177.
- 21.
Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature, 13.
- 22.
Ibid., 38.
- 23.
Also in 1999, Louis James produced an overview of Anglophone Caribbean literature, the first section of which he devotes to a discussion of those early European texts written in and about the region. Like Krise, he recognizes that early literature as essential to the historical and cultural origins of Caribbean literature, though he does not classify those texts as Caribbean literature. Rather they are part of the cultural landscape or framework out of which Caribbean literature arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. See James, Caribbean Literature in English (London: Longman, 1999).
- 24.
Derek Walcott, “A Frowsty Fragrance” (Review of Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies 1657–1777) The New York Review of Books (June 15, 2000), section 1, accessed April 12, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/jun/15/a-frowsty-fragrance/?page=1.
- 25.
Walcott, “A Frowsty Fragrance,” sec. 2.
- 26.
Ibid., sec. 1.
- 27.
Ibid., sec. 1.
- 28.
Walcott, “A Frowsty Frangrance,” sec. 3.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ramchand, “West Indian Literary History: Literariness, Orality and Periodization” in Callaloo 34 (1988): 109.
- 31.
Ibid., 95.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Tom Krise, “Constructing Caribbean Literary History” in Literature Compass 2 (2005): 8, accessed April 12, 2014, doi:10.1111/j.1741-4113.2005.00139.x.
- 34.
Tom Krise, Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657–1777 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 16.
- 35.
Krise, “Constructing Caribbean Literary History,” 9.
- 36.
Krise, “Constructing Caribbean Literary History,” 6.
- 37.
J. Michael Dash, “The World and the Word: French Caribbean Writing in the Twentieth Century” in Callaloo 34 (1988), 115.
- 38.
Leah Reade Rosenberg, Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 5.
- 39.
See Barthes “The Death of the Author” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).
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Smith, C.L. (2018). Finding the Modern in Early Caribbean Literature. In: Aljoe, N.N., Carey, B., Krise, T.W. (eds) Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone Caribbean. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71592-6_10
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