these are recreations of Caribbean life: The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street (1959), A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), The Mimic Men, Guerrillas (1975), and The Enigma of Arrival. Naipaul's fiction suggests that the discourse of Naipaul the travel writer and essayist is distinct from that of Naipaul the novelist. There is a great deal of fun and laughter in The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira, Miguel Street, and A House for Mr. Biswas. The comic element in these early novels is not a rejection of native space so much as a celebration of its otherness. The quality of Naipaul's humor is not that different from Selvon's in the Moses trilogy; it turns on a self-conscious ritualized delight in -601- observed details and incongruities. Naipaul's humor, when it depends most viciously on satire and vulgarity, is not dissimilar to the folk humor of the calypso and ritual forms of insult-trading popular in Trinidad.
The adventures of Pundit Ganesh in The Mystic Masseur, Mr. Harbans in The Suffrage of Elvira, and Mr. Biswas all describe the identity-altering process of Indian immigrants settling into a new cultural landscape. Of these, A House for Mr. Biswas is by far the most accomplished. It is more than an adventure novel of everyday life, it is a novel of Caribbean emergence frozen in epic time by a skillfully engineered prologue and epilogue of endurance and continuance. Mr. Biswas emerges as everyman and as a man of the people; an East Indian becomes a representative West Indian and occupies a 'native' space of his own. Second only to Biswas, Naipaul's The Mimic Men is a brilliantly irreverent study of 'the complete colonial,' a recurring figure in Caribbean literature. The portrait is rendered with energy and humor as the autobiography of a neurotic, untrustworthy, failed colonial politician. The Mimic Men critiques autobiography as a genre and mocks the proliferation of fictive autobiographies in contemporary Caribbean literature. Guerrillas and The Enigma of Arrival are very different in tone. In Guerrillas the journalist in Naipaul takes the upper hand in a fictive account of sensational murders in Trinidad. The Enigma of Arrival is a novel of rejection and withdrawal to an ideal English landscape. A Bend in the River (1979) reiterates Naipaul's disaffection with the social and political vagaries of postcoloniality and multiculturalism in an African setting.
Other Trinidadians of Indian descent have written authoritatively and well about Indian immigrants settling into the colonial Caribbean. Naipaul's brother, Shiva Naipaul, published two novels, The Fireflies (1970) and The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973). In The Jumbie Bird (1961) by Ismith Khan, the theme of generations is characterized by a general striving ahead and engagement with multiracial, multiethnic Trinidad. Khan's second novel, The Obeah Man (1964), reflects the author's wide-ranging engagement with national consciousness. Like Selvon, Khan embraces all aspects of Trinidad's culture as facets of his creative vision.
The novels of Trinidad's Michael Anthony and Earl Lovelace have a different relationship to Trinidad as native space. The sense of -602- native country in these writers of African descent is well established. Though Michael Anthony has published several histories of Trinidad and Tobago, he shuns national-historical discourse in his best fiction. He has published six novels, among them The Games Were Coming (1963), The Year in San Fernando, and Green Days by the River (1967). The most outstanding of these is The Year in San Fernando, which is about one year in the life of a twelve-year-old boy living away from home. Anthony uses the innocence and naiveté of his protagonist to great advantage in this classic Caribbean novel of adventure and everyday life in the limited environment of a small town in Trinidad. Growth and development are limited by a cycle of return marked by the passage of the school year, by seasonal changes, and by the agricultural cycle of planting and harvest.
Earl Lovelace writes about the rural and urban poor in Trinidad, their coping mechanisms, their strategies for survival, their struggle to maintain a sense of identity and community in a rapidly changing environment. National identity is delineated in the competing claims of Trinidad's 'multi-ethnic many ancestored' community. His most accomplished novels are The Dragon Can't Dance (1979) and The Wine of Astonishment (1984). In The Wine of Astonishment, enduring conflicts of race, class, and ethnicity are concrete and are localized in the historic struggle of Trinidad's Spiritual Baptists for legitimacy. In The Dragon Can't Dance, Carnival and Calypso are stripped of their exoticism as facets of urban poverty and underdevelopment.
The publication of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) called attention to the fact that there were few novels written by women from the English-speaking Caribbean. Phyllis Shand Allfrey's The Orchid House (1953) anticipated some of the issues raised by Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea about what it means to be a white West Indian woman in the regional press toward democratization and independence. Sylvia Wynter's The Hills of Hebron (1962) was conceived in the nationalist mold; her emphasis was on the transformation of Jamaican society as a whole, not on the liberation of women as a distinct social category. Clara Rosa De Lima and Rosa Guy, both born in Trinidad, also published first novels in the mid-1960s though neither is set in the Caribbean. De Lima's Tomorrow Will Always Come (1965) is set in Brazil and Guy's Bird at My Window (1966) - 603- is set in New York. Rhys's Voyage in the Dark appeared in 1934 but the significance of her West Indian heroine's ethnicity — 'I'm a real West Indian, I'm in the fifth generation on my mother's side' — was not appreciated at the time. Through the novel's female characters, Wide Sargasso Sea made a dramatic statement about the victimization and silencing of women in the Caribbean. Antoinette's fortune is stolen, her affections are scorned, and she is imprisoned in an attic in a strange land. Amelie is seduced by her master and paid off for her trouble; she leaves to start a new life in Guiana. Politically aware and resistant Christophene challenges Edward with her insight into his cultural chauvinism, sexism, and greed, and he silences her with threats of imprisonment and the confiscation of her property.
Since the publication of Rhys's novel women have been writing and publishing at an unprecedented pace. The Caribbean novel in English is no longer a male enterprise. Issues of female difference and discrimination have altered the terms of national, racial, and cultural identities in the novel and in critical theory. Certain overarching issues, however, remain the same, among them the postulation of an all-inclusive Caribbean identity, the migration of the writer, the restoration of indigenous culture, the need to break with a Eurocentric bias, a preoccupation with the poor and the disadvantaged, education and alienation, expatriation and return, childhood and adolescence as paradigms of the national experience, and concrete geographical localization. With few exceptions feminist consciousness in the new Caribbean writing does not occupy a discursive space beyond the ethnicity and nationalism typical of the literature as a whole. The female subject is embedded in the dynamics of nationally and regionally drawn economic and cultural processes. Two critical anthologies published recently underscore this: Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (1990), edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, and Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference (1990), edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe.
The women other than Rhys who have received most critical attention in recent years are Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid. Though both write out of the specific cultural constraints of a Caribbean identity, feminist consciousness has a different value in the novels of each writer. In both of Brodber's novels, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home and Myal (1988), the liberation of women -604- from attitudes of containment is embedded in issues of national reconstruction. National identity does not have the same value in Kincaid's work. In her Annie John (1985), an island nation is a mother from whom one must escape in order to have a life of one's own. The gendered space of Kincaid's Annie John redefines the parameters of the Caribbean novel of childhood and adolescence. In Kincaid's Lucy (1990), expatriation is a necessary prelude to emergence. Kincaid's novels make a feminist argument beyond ethnicity and nationalism on behalf of the psyche of the New World black woman who would write her own script.
Issues affecting women specifically and Caribbean societies generally are being refashioned by novelists as different as Michelle Cliff, Marion Patrick Jones, Janice Shinebourne, Clara Rosa De Lima, Rosa Guy, Valerie Belgrave, Merle Hodge, Sybil Seaforth, Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell, and Zee Edgell. Rosa Guy and Clara Rosa De Lima are well-established writers now. Guy has published six novels to date and De Lima has published five. In the 1970s Merle Hodge published Crick Crack Monkey (1970), and Marion Patrick Jones published Pan Beat (1973) and Jouvert Morning (1976). To Merle Hodge
