Our discussion of "The Sea is History" this past Thursday, especially that last section with its implied critique of the post-independence period, reminded me of Walcott's 1992 Nobel lecture, "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory." It's such an amazing speech, stunningly blending the poetic with the polemic and suggesting a strikin example of sly civility at work (e.g., when he refers to being "on the raft of this dais," he's very ingeniously figuring himself as a stand-in for an exotic Caribbean island, implicitly but very subtly critiquing, I think, the mostly white male Nobel audience surrounding him with its (patronizing?) "applauding surf"). The speech at times reminds us of the bind faced by these island nations: to sell themselves & the tourist industry, they must almost necessarily promote and encourage the delights of mindlessness (i.e., the privileged tourists must see the islands as a place to flee the colder, more serious climes of the West). Here's one of Walcott's most memorable (and visually striking) sections:
"But in our tourist brochures the Caribbean is a blue pool into which the republic dangles the extended foot of Florida as inflated rubber islands bob and drinks with umbrellas float towards her on a raft. This is how the islands from the shame of necessity must sell themselves; this is the seasonal erosion of their identity, that high-pitched repetition of the same images of service that cannot distinguish one island from the other, with a future of polluted marinas, land deals negotiated by ministers, and all of this conducted to the music of Happy Hour and the rictus of a smile. What is the earthly paradise for our visitors? Two weeks without rain and a mahogany tan, and, at sunset, local troubadours in straw hats and floral shirts beating 'Yellow Bird' and 'Banana Boat Song' to death. There is a territory wider than this -- wider than the limits made by the map of an island -- which is the illimitable sea and what it remembers."
The agenda of so many postcolonial writers and artists is precisely to articulate and explore that "wider territory." Postcolonial studies, as you might imagine, implies studying and promoting writing by "postcolonial" writers (like Walcott, Rushdie, Kay, Achebe, et al.), but also bringing our critical attention to the discourse and literature of imperialism (as Said does in his nuanced reading of Conrad's Heart of Darkness).
Speaking of Said, and mindful of Rushdie's multi-colored sea of stories and implied indictment of essentialism, here is his call for contrapuntal reading in the stirring last paragraph of Culture and Imperialism:
No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems to be no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot's phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the 'other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.' It is more rewarding--and more difficult-- to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about 'us.' But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how 'our' culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter). For the intellectual there is quite enough of value to do without that."
No comments:
Post a Comment