the very way in which it persistently unwrites and rewrites that problematic adjective, 'Canadian.'
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Caribbean Fiction
Many contemporary writers and critics subscribe to the idea of the Caribbean as a distinct cultural as well as geographical entity with a coherent regional ethos beyond divisive national and linguistic premises. This view recontextualizes the literary history of the English-speaking Caribbean, which was defined historically as West Indian in recognition of the formative nature of its colonial relationship to Great Britain. An all- inclusive Pan-Caribbean approach to the literary history of the region reconceives the literature and culture of the English-speaking Caribbean as a New World phenomenon with a cultural validity that is distinct from the ideological values of Pan-Africanism and Commonwealth literature, which privilege Africa and Britain as ancestral landscapes. This historical inversion is a significant rerooting of literary and cultural history in the English-speaking Caribbean. An all-inclusive PanCaribbean approach privileges geographical locality and the affiliative relationships that derive from locality as formative factors in the postcolonial Caribbean.
The use of both West Indian and Caribbean to identify native space, and the interchangeability of these designations by so many writers and critics, attests to the fluidity of historical and cultural perspectives in the now independent nations of the English-speaking Caribbean. The perception of overlap suggests that identity in the region is tied to the historical process of change and development as a process of emergence, and calls attention to the conflation of the -586- political and the literary in the regional novel. This chapter deals with the development of the novel of the English-speaking Caribbean and the shifting hierarchies of identity construction that coexist within the integrative vision of an all-inclusive Caribbean community. Under this rubric, the ideological values of Commonwealth literature and the literatures of the African and Indian diasporas are contextualized as facets of the region's cultural diversity.
The identification of the Caribbean as an all-inclusive native space overarches but does not erase linguistic and national boundaries in the region. One may speak legitimately of the Dutch-, French-, Spanish-, and English- speaking Caribbean, and there are further subdivisions dictated by peculiarities of politics and government, race and ethnicity. Yet, many writers and scholars of the English-speaking Caribbean view the literature of the entire region collectively. Writers as various as Wilson Harris, Sam Selvon, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and V. S. Naipaul speak and write of the Caribbean as a coherent cultural entity. This rubric provides a context for self-definition validated by the writers themselves.
In describing the cultural context out of which he writes, the poet Derek Walcott describes West Indian and Caribbean as interchangeable: 'I think you can also trace through the entire archipelago a sort of circle of experience which can be called the ' Caribbean Experience.'…the whole historical and, to a degree, racial experience is a totality in the Caribbean. I wouldn't confine West Indian literature to literature written in English.' Caribbean interconnectedness is also a recurring theme in the public lectures and novels of George Lamming. In his address to the St. Lucia Labor Party's 37th annual convention in 1987, Lamming urged his audience 'to forget all this nonsense about the English-speaking and French-speaking Caribbean….we in the Caribbean have no idea what an enormous capacity we have for the creation of a unique civilisation, when we come to know our region freely, from territory to territory.' Barbadian poet and historian Edward Kamau Brathwaite has made the material and spiritual basis for Caribbean interconnectedness a core theme in his work. In
The unity is submarine breathing air, the societies were successively amerindian, european, creole. the amerindian several; the european various; the creole plural subsistent plantation maroon multilingual multi-ethnic many ancestored fragments the unity is submarine breathing air, our problem is how to study the fragments/whole.
However the inner structure of the Caribbean is defined, however it is resolved in time and space, these writers all envision the entire Caribbean as the cultural community in which their works are embedded.
This affiliation across language and national barriers, as opposed to an older, historically imposed filiation to the cultural centers of Europe, and, more recently, to the cultural centers of North America, attests to the development of significant cultural relationships within the 'postcolonial' Caribbean. The idea of a culturally distinct Caribbean rests on a perception of organic connectedness in the region that is based on a common historical and racial experience and a common passion to define this experience in terms that distinguish it culturally and ideologically from the metropolitan centers of Europe and North America. The novel in the English-speaking Caribbean is characterized by a distinctive sense of the Caribbean as a cultural entity original to itself, whether the writer's relationship to the developing Caribbean ethos is celebratory, elegiac, or even hostile, as is sometimes the case with V. S. Naipaul. It is preoccupied characteristically with self-discovery and self-definition, with redefining ancestry, community, and kinship through the restoration of an evolving indigenous culture devalued by a Eurocentric view of the world.
Despite the paradox of continuing dependence on the patronage and support of publishing houses and reading audiences in Europe and North America, the novel serves a self-authenticating, selfvalidating function in a region battered by a Kurtz-like extermination of the islands' original inhabitants, hundreds of years of authoritarian/colonial rule, and the menace of North American hegemony. It confirms the existence of a cultural community in a region of the world where political and economic stability is, more often -588- than not, a vision of the future. Novelists as different as George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Sam Selvon, and V. S. Naipaul write about the Caribbean experience in terms that are geographically and culturally distinct; terms that foster the idea of a regional consciousness and a regional identity. In one of the best-known novels of the region,
The cultural ideology posited by creative writers and intellectuals in the region advances the notion of a cultural community unified by the common experience of slavery, colonialism, and ensuing cultural diversity. Present reality suggests that art may achieve a unity and coherence that is unlikely, perhaps impossible, on a political level. The creativity of the region seems energized to an extraordinary degree by the rapid and profound political changes occurring throughout the region. The disparity that exists between artistic vision and historical climate in many parts of the Caribbean suggests a dramatic struggle to consolidate a sense of regional identity that runs counter to divisive linguistic and national boundaries.
The emergence of the novel in the English-speaking Caribbean is a twentieth-century phenomenon. It begins tentatively and develops independently in Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad until the 1940s when unprecedented interterritorial cultural exchange promoted a new awareness of the West Indies as a collective community. The idea of a collective West Indian identity as a national framework for development became entrenched in the press toward democratization and independence following World War II. It gained legitimacy with plans for a British West Indian Federation in 1947 and the establishment of the University College of the West Indies in 1949. The West Indian Federation was established in 1958 and collapsed in 1962, but the sense of collective identity as West Indian endures in the popular imagination and in institutions like the University of the West Indies and West Indian cricket, even as the more inclusive mul-589- tinational collective Caribbean identity in regional and extraregional discourse gains currency.
Despite the fluidity implicit in the changing values attached to collective identity, the development of the novel in the region is intimately bound up with the rise of national consciousness. The depiction of native space and an indigenous reality, its unavoidable specificity and concreteness, generated expanding levels of selfawareness — geographic, economic, sociopolitical, and quotidian. Over time, the novel generated a sense of native land with its own organizing center for seeing and depicting that was quite distinct from the colonizing values that shaped the
