| Popis: |
St Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott has famously described in Joycean terms the weight of history on the Caribbean imagination as a nightmare from which its peoples are trying to awake, a nightmare which finds its source in the forced transportation of millions of African slaves to the New World colonies. The burden imposed by this violent history of displacement and enslavement is still felt in the contemporary Caribbean as local writers, critics and poets try to develop an aesthetic capable of exploring the scars of colonialism. Moreover, these scars are shared both by descendants of slaves and descendants of masters. Yet the obsession with the region’s history can lead to what Walcott has called ‘a literature of recrimination and despair, ... or a literature of remorse’. Contemporary Caribbean authors acknowledge the dual burden of a past as torturer or victim, a burden they seek to understand in the rewriting of some of the most painful episodes of their region. This paper proposes to look at the reconstruction of the Middle Passage in a number of Caribbean novels. In particular I will concentrate on George Lamming’s (Barbados) portrayal of the psychological imprisonment of both master and slaves in his novel Natives of My Person, set on a slave ship. I will also examine the rediscovery of the Middle Passage as a formative step in identity building in Michelle Cliff ’s (Jamaica) novels Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven. |
