Tag: hybridity

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Walcott and the Sea

Walcott physically embodies the Caribbean’s hybridity and translates it into his work. This hybridity can be seen very clearly in his use of the sea in his works, which is responsible for the hybrid identity of the Caribbean people in the first place. The characters’ connections to the sea explore the ideas of hybridity, its connection to the sea, and how identities are connected to and are constantly being altered by the water. 

In The Sea at Dauphin, both the livelihood and identity of the people of St. Lucia are dependent upon the sea. On a basic level, Dauphin is a fishing village that is full of fishermen who work to catch food that helps to feed their families and the town. The sea, however, also was the source that helped to shape the mixed language and culture that make up their identity. The characters in the play speak a mixture of Creole and English, a language reflecting those of the real Caribbean inhabitants. This language is the result of the native islanders’ interactions with the French and English colonizers, who came to the island via the sea and forever changed their identity and that of the island. While older characters such as Hounakin are not as directly connected to the physical sea, the younger characters are all directly connected to the sea in some way. This suggests that the future of the islanders and their identities are even more inherently connected to the sea and the hybridized identity that it brings than the older generation had been. 

 In “The Schooner Flight,” Walcott explores what effects traveling the sea has on Shabine’s hybridized identity. Shabine leaves behind his home and ventures out to the unfamiliar sea. This is different from The Sea at Dauphin, where people venture to sea to fish but further travel is not mentioned. As a result of this, Walcott gives the reader a closer look into what happens to the already hybridized identity of a Caribbean person when they venture off of their island. Shabine’s experience depicts how one carries their identity with them, even when they leave, and how it comes to be affected and even further hybridized through travels. While Shabine is leaving behind the island physically, he carries the memories of it—most notably in his constant reminders of his lover, Maria. No matter what Shabine does or how far he travels, he is unable to shake the memory of her and his longing to return. His identity, as well as his remembrance of her shifts, however, as he gains a greater sense of the colonizer’s religion. Maria and this religion become intertwined and his travels on the sea work to alter and form a greater sense of hybridity within his identity. 

 As Heaney mentions, Walcott gives space in his works to explore the different facets of identity. In these works, we see examples of the Caribbean’s hybridized identities in both those who stay and those who choose to venture away from the islands. In both cases, the sea not only was the initial source of mixing in the Caribbean that brought about hybridized identities, but the place that continues to bring about further mixing. Walcott’s use of the sea and his clear connections to how it comes to mix the identity of the people has helped me not only to understand the hybridized identity of the Caribbean, but also to better realize the functions of sea on all identities—especially in relation to groups that we have looked at this semester.

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The Complexity of Identity

I was most struck by our reflections on hybridity this week and the various ways it manifested in the different works we looked at and the ways it complicates identity. Walcott, unnecessarily pointed out by Heaney, clearly interacts with the intersections of history and identity within his work and Heaney’s characterization of this hybridity is conventional and mundane, despite the beauty of the language he communicates it in.  His view of Walcott’s work plays into tropes about the Caribbean and the Atlantic experience, that I think some of us were skirting around activating in our descriptions of Walcott’s poetry and its flow – tropes of lyricism encoded in the language and people, that, while maybe not entirely inaccurate, fail to grasp the true dynamics of hybridic identity. Heaney says of Walcott “From the beginning he has never simplified or sold short. Africa and England are in him.” (Heaney, 6).  This statement is its own unintentionally ironic and blunt simplification of what we know to be the complex histories at work here and as I believe Alexis pointed out, who is Heaney, as an Irishman, to be the judge of how Walcott expresses his hybridic identity. The Irish too have their realm of hybridity within their sphere, which I think we can see Heaney attempting to reconcile in his own work about the Troubles, but that does not privilege him to assign value judgements for the expressions of another’s identity. How does he truly know that Walcott’s activations of both the Caribbean and Egypt are “risky” or “large appropriations” and even if they are, with what experience does he legitimize them?       

I’m curious to know how we would have read Heaney’s assessments of Walcott had we not had the collective aha moment last week about the nature of comparisons between the Black and the Green and the fundamental distinctions between them and if we would have come to the came conclusions. 

Heaney’s comment about Africa and England is interesting too based on what we have discussed about the ideas of a homeland and how the memory of a homeland becomes unique to those that hold it.  There is a change of time and distance and I think that plays into hybridic identity too – history and identity aren’t static or easily separable. We can see this, the idea of hybridity as exchange and ultimately change within A Tempest too.  As we, and the text, attempted to point out, the process of colonization changes the colonizer as much as it changes the colonized – you can’t dehumanize someone else without losing some of your humanity in the process – and Prospero’s cruelty is a marker of that.  In the same way that The Tempest couldn’t be translated to French without Cesaire imbibing himself, and the subsequent English translation for our version of A Tempest would have lost some of Cesaire. Once again, that was rambling, but I’m essentially trying to assert that identities can’t be distilled into stock categories.  There is change in the creation of hybridic identities that can’t fully be quantified, but should be appreciated.

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Essentialism and the Black Diaspora

Paul Gilroy’s “The Black Atlantic” calls into question the legitimacy of some of the terms we use to divide and identify our world. He rejects the notion of an antagonistic relationship between his personal identifiers of black and English, noting that, while popular culture may perceive the English identity to be a white person, in fact, there is nothing essential about being English (p. 1). Gilroy attacks ethnic absolutism as impossible in light of the Atlantic slave trade, where European, American, and African cultures influenced each other in ways that made each of these places more “hybrid.” Gilroy’s examination, then, requires drawing out the connections between these cultures. Fortunately, people of African descent have drawn out these connections for generations. Gilroy notes that some African-Americans waived off their feelings of exceptionalism “in favor of a global, coalitional politics in which anti-imperialism and anti-racism might be seen to interact if not to fuse (p. 4).” Similarly oppressed black people have transcended national barriers to work for a common cause. While Gilroy’s point about the breakdown of rigid nationalities through pan-Africanism is correct, this point must also call into question the black diaspora. As Gilroy asserts and science affirms, there are no phenotypical differences between different races and race is only real through society’s affirmation of it. Thus, the idea of the black diaspora buys into the social construct of race just as nations buy into ethnic absolutism. Though the black diaspora rejects the idea of national division, it does connote that there is something essential about being part of the black diaspora. Yet that essential mark cannot be blackness since race does not exist. For members of the Black Atlantic Diaspora, the defining characteristic could be a history of oppression, though that may not be a specific enough division. Though I do not currently know the solution to the issue of legitimizing the black diaspora, I think this is an important lens to work with throughout the semester. When we read black authors, we must continuously ponder whether there is anything essential about being black.