{"id":489,"date":"2020-04-10T11:15:47","date_gmt":"2020-04-10T15:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/?p=489"},"modified":"2020-04-10T11:17:29","modified_gmt":"2020-04-10T15:17:29","slug":"the-complexity-of-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/2020\/04\/10\/the-complexity-of-identity\/","title":{"rendered":"The Complexity of Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s characterization of this hybridity is conventional and mundane, despite the beauty of the language he communicates it in.\u00a0 His view of Walcott\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cFrom the beginning he has never simplified or sold short. Africa and England are in him.\u201d (Heaney, 6).\u00a0 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\u2019s identity. How does he truly know that Walcott\u2019s activations of both the Caribbean and Egypt are \u201crisky\u201d or \u201clarge appropriations\u201d and even if they are, with what experience does he legitimize them?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m curious to know how we would have read Heaney\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Heaney\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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 <\/span>A Tempest<\/span><\/i> too.\u00a0 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\u2019t dehumanize someone else without losing some of your humanity in the process – and Prospero\u2019s cruelty is a marker of that.\u00a0 In the same way that <\/span>The Tempest<\/span><\/i> couldn\u2019t be translated to French without Cesaire imbibing himself, and the subsequent English translation for our version of <\/span>A Tempest<\/span><\/i> would have lost some of Cesaire. Once again, that was rambling, but I\u2019m essentially trying to assert that identities can\u2019t be distilled into stock categories.\u00a0 There is change in the creation of hybridic identities that can\u2019t fully be quantified, but should be appreciated. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s characterization of this hybridity is … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Complexity of Identity”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3672,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[437770],"tags":[422554,213791,8878,264369],"class_list":["post-489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-walcott","tag-homeland","tag-hybridity","tag-identity","tag-legitimacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3672"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":491,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions\/491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}