Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century

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Afro-Greeks Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century

EMILY GREENWOOD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Emily Greenwood 2009 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2009934145 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, UK ISBN 978–0–19–957524–4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This book is dedicated to my mother Margaret Sarah Nabalira Greenwood (neé Seng’endo) 1946–2007 in loving memory


Acknowledgements As with some of the connections explored in this book, its own genesis has been curious and hard to predict. It is a pleasure to trace its genealogy and to record the individuals and institutions whose generosity made it possible. At various stages of the way I was given bearings by friends, colleagues, and people who didn’t know me but graciously took the time to meet me and offer their perspective on Classics in the Caribbean. At secondary school, and before I was capable of comprehending what it might mean, Andrew Waldron told me—in the imperative—that I must read Omeros and took time out of a sixthform class on Ovid’s Metamorphoses to explain how important this poem was. Subsequently I embarked on a Classics degree at Cambridge, but the Caribbean kept returning. As an undergraduate in supervisions on ancient Greek slavery with Paul Millett I was encouraged to read The Black Jacobins, and as both an undergraduate and a postgraduate I learned from Paul Cartledge’s comparative approach to Greek history in which reception, including Caribbean and modern Greek receptions, is an inalienable part of the study of ancient Greece. Research for this book began, in the background, while I was a research fellow in Classics at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge (2000–2). I would like to record my thanks to the Master and Fellows of the college for providing such a conducive environment for research. During this period Mary Beard gave me the opportunity to offer supervisions on Classics and Colonialism as part of an undergraduate course on Classics in the Twentieth Century, and this enabled me to start shaping my ideas about the reception of Classics in the modern Caribbean. It was also during this period that I received a British Academy Research Grant to fund an essential research trip to the Caribbean in 2002. For several years the project lay dormant, but it was revived thanks to a semester of research leave from St Andrews University in 2006, and an award from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of their

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research leave scheme. Without this year of research leave this book would have taken much longer to write and I owe a debt of gratitude to both. The following institutions provided much appreciated invitations to try out some of the material that has gone into this book: Cambridge University, the University of Glasgow, the University of Reading, St Andrews University, and Yale University. I also had the opportunity to present some of the material in Chapter 1 at the 2007 British Classical Association Annual Conference in Birmingham. I am grateful to the audiences on each occasion for their improving comments and suggestions. A number of libraries have facilitated my research for this book: Cambridge University library— particularly the archives of the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board, held in the Cambridge University Archives—the Castries Public Library in St Lucia, the library at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies, the Trinidad National Archives, and St Andrews University library. I would like to thank John Campbell who gave me an education in C. L. R. James when we were fellow doctoral students at Cambridge. In the Caribbean I was fortunate to have conversations about Caribbean Classics with Hunter Francois, Dame Pearlette Louisy, Derek Walcott, and Geoffrey Wiltshire. All were extremely generous in taking the time to meet me and to answer my (often inept) questions. In St Lucia Michael Nelson put me in touch with former Classics teachers and students, and in Jamaica John Campbell gave me hospitality and helped me to find my way around the Mona campus of UWI. Selwyn Cudjoe and Gregson Davis kindly wrote in support of grant applications that I made in connection with this project; I have learned a great deal from their respective research on Caribbean literature and, in the case of Gregson Davis, from his pioneering research on the reception of Classics in Caribbean literature. John Gilmore gave me much-needed pointers about what to read at an early stage in this project. At St Andrews Mette Berg and Lorna Milne encouraged me in my research on Caribbean literature. I also benefited from the St Andrews LACNET (Latin American and Caribbean Research Network) group and from discussions with colleagues in the departments of social anthropology and modern languages. Tony Seddon patiently explained some of the points of cricket to me and

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shared memories of some of the epic Test matches about which C. L. R. James writes in Beyond a Boundary. I would like to record my thanks to Lorna Hardwick and Jim Porter, the series editors. I was extremely grateful for their initial invitation to contribute a book to the Classical Presences series and I have benefited from their support, advice, and patience throughout the project. In the latter stages of research for this book, two other books in the Classical Presences series have informed my ideas about dialogues between Classics and anglophone Caribbean literature: Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie’s edited volume on Classics in Postcolonial Worlds (2007), and Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson’s Crossroads in the Black Aegean (2007). Reading both books has made me all the more excited about contributing to the series. Over the past decade Lorna Hardwick has inscribed Classical Reception as a vital part of the discipline of Classics, initiating transcultural and postcolonial dialogues about classical reception. Lorna has given me and others opportunities to publish in this area and it is difficult to imagine this project without the example of her work in this field. At Oxford University Press Hilary O’Shea has been enormously encouraging and patient and her enthusiasm for this project has kept me going. I am not only grateful for all the work that she has put into my own book, but also for her pivotal role in bringing the Classical Presences series into being in the first place. Kathleen Fearn and Tessa Eaton have been kind and efficient Production Editors, overseeing the transition into print and making the process painless for the author. At the copy-editing stage, Jackie Pritchard ironed out a myriad inconsistencies and infelicities. Lastly, I am grateful to Joy Mellor for all her work on the proofs. However, as much as I am anxious to acknowledge the advice and support of others that has fed into this book, I would also like to acknowledge that any mistakes or oversights that remain are due solely to my own foolery. I consider myself fortunate to have Barbara Graziosi and Liz Irwin as friends. Over the duration of this project they have kept my spirits up with their sage advice, encouragement, and humour and have inspired me with their own research on ancient Greece. My husband David Milne has always believed in this project. His support and interest have buoyed me up in the depths of reading and

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research, and it is no exaggeration to say that I could not have completed this project without him. Some of the happiest moments of this project were those spent marvelling over Caribbean literature with him. I remember watching my father Robert Greenwood read and write textbooks on Caribbean history when I was a young girl, and my curiosity about what he was doing must surely have a part to play in the story of how I came to write this book. My biggest debt of all is to my parents for their love and for their championing of my education. This book is dedicated to my mother, in loving memory. In the words of Lorna Goodison’s lovely poem, which articulates the sacrifices that mothers make for our education: ‘may I inherit half her strength’ (‘For my Mother (May I Inherit Half her Strength)’, 1986: 46–8).

Contents List of Abbreviations

Introduction Goodbye to Hellas Overview of Chapters 1 An Accidental Homer: Accidents of Homeric Reception in the Modern Caribbean Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree Towards a New World Odyssey Foreign Lines of Verse: Walcott’s Dialogue with Modern Greece 2 Classics as School of Empire Classics and the Educational Elite Contesting the Curriculum Afro-Romans and Imperial Redistribution C. L. R. James: Finding one’s Own Way in Classics Conclusion

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1 1 14 20 22 39 58 69 70 79 85 96 108

3 Translatio studii et imperii: The Manipulation of Latin in Modern Caribbean Literature Translating Latin Badly Latin and Sweet Talk in Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe (2002) The Postcolonial Virgil in V. S. Naipaul Derek Walcott: Translating Empire Conclusion

118 133 165 183

4 The Athens of the Caribbean: Trinidadian Models of Athenian Democracy Athens in Trinidad I: C. L. R. James

186 188

112 114

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Contents Athens in Trinidad II: Eric Williams Conclusion

206 224

5 Caribbean Classics and the Postcolonial Canon The Unstable Canon: A Tale of Two Helens Classics of National Literature? Postcolonial Classics: Writing from Rome in Brathwaite’s X/Self Conclusion

226 226 236

Bibliography Index

253 282

243 251

List of Abbreviations AHRC

Arts and Humanities Research Council

BAB

Cyril L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1994)

CP

Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948–1984 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992)

DLP

Democratic Labour Party, Trinidad and Tobago

ISA

Industrial Stabilization Act, Trinidad and Tobago

OCEX

Cambridge University Archives, Records of the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board (1873–1995)

OCSEB

Oxford and Cambridge Schools’ Examinations Board

PEM

People’s Education Movement, Trinidad and Tobago

PNM

People’s National Movement, Trinidad and Tobago

QRC

Queen’s Royal College, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago

T&T

Trinidad and Tobago

UCWI

University College of the West Indies

UWI

University of the West Indies

WFP

Workers’ and Farmers’ Party, Trinidad and Tobago


Introduction GOODBYE TO HELLAS This book charts a series of frail connections between the literatures of the modern anglophone Caribbean and the literatures and cultures of ancient Greece. The phrase ‘frail connections’ may strike the reader as an underwhelming beginning, but it is important to tread carefully and modestly when writing about a region that has had countless foreign cultures and literatures projected onto it as a consequence of empire. What is more, it is of the nature of much of the material that I examine in this book (works of fiction) that the connections involved will sometimes be tenuous.1 The Martinican novelist and intellectual E´douard Glissant has described Caribbean culture as a ‘series of relationships’, and Michael Dash has echoed this description in defining Caribbean literature as ‘a multiple series of literary relationships’.2 In uncovering dialogues between anglophone Caribbean literature and the literatures of ancient Greece and, to a lesser extent, Rome, I hope to elucidate a single element in this series. I certainly do not mean to imply that this element is a sufficient key to the interpretation of Caribbean literature; on the contrary, this 1 I am thinking in particular of a comment made by the Guyanese author Wilson Harris in an interview with Fred D’Aguiar in 1986. In answer to a question about his reliance on the mythical imagination in reconstructing the Guyanese past, Wilson Harris replied that in response to imperialism he feels a moral imperative to establish connections between cultures: ‘There must be this profound dialogue and to trace that dialogue in creative terms requires us to see frail connections, there are no massive connections…’ (ellipsis in the published text of the interview), Harris and D’aguiar 2004: 38–9. 2 Glissant 1989: 139; Dash 1998b: 20.

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book shows that where the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome are demonstrably present, they can be made sense of only with reference to the presence of other cultural codes. Conversely, to emphasize dialogues between Caribbean literature and African, European, and Amerindian cultures, but to overlook dialogues with ancient Greece and Rome, is to perpetuate an odd occlusion in the Caribbean’s cultural space, which Antonio Benı´tez-Rojo has identified as ‘a supersyncretic referential space’, in which no one paradigm of knowledge predominates.3 At first sight the word ‘dialogue’ in my title may seem counterintuitive. However, a fundamental tenet of my argument is that the reception of ancient Greece and Rome in anglophone Caribbean literature works both ways. This is a study of how Caribbean authors have ‘received’ Greece and Rome, as well as how they have returned original conceptions of Graeco-Roman texts.4 We learn not just what Greece and Rome signify in the Caribbean, but also how Caribbean authors signify Graeco-Roman texts.5 I differentiate between European cultures and the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. From the standpoint of the twenty-first century, Caribbean literature has successfully thrown off many of the extraneous cultural plots and narratives that were put upon the region during its colonial past, but the literatures of Greece and Rome still await decolonization.6 Paradoxically, it is in the fields of colonial discourse theory and postcolonialism that this decolonization is most urgently needed. Through false genealogies and cultural traditions masked as historical continuities, ancient Greece is often carelessly and erroneously linked with modern Europe, as though they shared a single, continuous history.7 Although Greece may have given us the word ‘Europe’, as well as the idea of Europe as a 3

Benı´tez-Rojo [1989] 1996: 314. Unlike ‘reception’, which suggests an active process, the verb ‘receive’ can denote a passive, one-way cultural flow, which I am anxious to avoid (for discussion of the terminology and its potential pitfalls see Hardwick 2003: 2–4; Goff 2005: 12–14; and Martindale 2006: 11). However, I retain it here because it conveniently signals the imposition of Classics in colonial educational syllabi. 5 I use the term ‘signify’ after Gates 1988. 6 With the proviso that not all territories in the Caribbean have been decolonized; colonization by a different name persists in the French Antillean de´partements d’outre-mer Guadeloupe and Martinique. 7 See Ahmad 1992: 166 and 183, criticizing Edward Said’s conflation of Europe and ancient Greece in Orientalism; Harrison 2000: 41–2; and Stam and Shohat 2005: 297. 4

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geographical massif, and the cultural construct of Europe as distinct from Asia, ancient Greek conceptions of Europe do not correspond to present-day conceptions of Europe. And yet, insofar as ‘Greece’ makes it into contemporary postcolonial theory at all, it tends to be carelessly subsumed in loose, totalizing descriptors such as: ‘the west’, ‘European cultural heritage’, ‘European history’, ‘European imperium’, ‘western history’, ‘western culture’, ‘western imperium’, ‘western episteme’, ‘occidental knowledge’, or, even more loosely, phrases such as ‘the imperial tradition’ or ‘the colonial archive’.8 There are, of course, explanations for the identification of ‘ancient Greece’ with ‘Europe’ in postcolonial literature and theory. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries European colonizers appropriated the civilizational authority of Greece and Rome, and aligned these civilizations with modern European colonialism.9 The discipline of Classics may have been complicit with imperialism, but this is properly a phenomenon of reception—how Greece and Rome have been assimilated to narratives of empire.10 The ways in which Greece and Rome are featured in Caribbean literature demonstrate the aftereffects of colonial classicism, while at the same time revealing that its assimilations of Greece and Rome are reversible. In previous decades my study might have looked suspiciously like a misplaced exercise in Eurocentric cultural legitimization, justifying Caribbean literature through its relationship with classical literature. Under colonialism this kind of intellectual enterprise was widespread as educated colonials sought to justify Caribbean culture through putative relationships with classical literature and associated ‘culture’ with the attainment of Greek and or Latin.11 Having spent my early school years in Malawi in the 1980s in the shadow of Hastings Banda’s Kamuzu Academy (a secondary school modelled on the 8 See Young 1995: 165 on the homogenization of categories such as ‘the West’ and the ‘Third World’ in postcolonial studies. 9 See p. 113 below. 10 See Porter 2008: 469 for the reminder that ‘classical studies…are themselves a form of reception studies’. 11 See Rohlehr 1981: 9 ‘[F]or generations, some of the best minds among the colonised, feeling acutely their lack of “history” and “tradition”, tired themselves out in trying to possess “the whole literature of Europe from Homer”, while at the same time scorning their selves, skins, accents, music, women and milieu.’ See also p. 69 below.

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institution of the British public school in which all students were required to study Latin and Greek), I have a keen sense of the role that Classics has played historically in symbolizing education and culture as elite, remote possessions that come from the outside.12 However, I am interested in dialogues between Greece and the Caribbean on the grounds that they may help us to understand better the distinctiveness of anglophone Caribbean literature and may also contribute fresh insights to the study of ancient Greece—an object of knowledge with which European Hellenism has perhaps made us over-familiar.13 The ruptures that emerge in the course of these dialogues interest me as much as the possibilities, hence I start with the assumption contained in the phrase ‘Goodbye to Hellas’, that Greece is extraneous to the modern Caribbean. The phrase ‘Goodbye to Hellas’ occurs in the introduction to Antonio Benı´tez-Rojo’s seminal study The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective.14 Benı´tez-Rojo conceives of the Caribbean as a meta-archipelago that consists in an island culture that is repeated throughout the region’s historically and culturally diverse islands. Echoing Alejo Carpentier’s image of the Caribbean as the ‘New World Mediterranean’,15 Benı´tez-Rojo observes that the status of meta-archipelago is a quality that the Caribbean shares with Hellas (the ancient Greek term for Greece).16 However, having raised this passing analogy with ancient Greece, Benı´tez-Rojo is keen to dismiss the relationship, with the injunction 12 Kamuzu Academy was founded in 1981 by Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, then ‘Life’ President of Malawi. See Ngugi Wa Thiong’o 1986: 19; and the memoir of the former Kamuzu Academy student Samson Kambalu for a satirical account of the Headmaster’s justification of the classical curriculum at the school (Kambalu 2008: 199–200). 13 See Reiss 2004: 128: ‘For metropolitan critics, the Greek case offers a special sort of unfamiliar familiarity’; see also ibid. 125–8 (discussing Jusdanis 1991). See p. 252 below with n. 103. 14 Benı´tez-Rojo [1989] 1996. 15 Dash 1998b: 11. Compare Figueroa 1971: 4, ‘almost a Western-hemisphere Mediterranean’, and (less bashfully) Swanzy: ‘as was seen by the late Harold Slannard, the racial stock of a potential writer [in the Caribbean] is one of the richest in the world, providing wonderful chances of cross-fertilization: European, African and Asiatic strains mingle, as with the Greeks of old; as amongst Aegeans and Dorians of Greece, the Teutonic and Latin are contrasted’ (Swanzy 1949: 21). 16 Benı´tez-Rojo [1989] 1996: 4; see also Glissant [1990] 1997: 33.

Introduction

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‘Let’s say goodbye to Hellas’ (ibid. 11). This throwaway comment seems to represent a widespread attitude towards ancient Greece in the modern Caribbean: Greece belongs to the past, and to the colonial past, at that. And yet what Benı´tez-Rojo does not observe, but which others have, is that the idea(l) of Greece—as both cultural ideal and antitype—has played and continues to play an important role in the construction of Caribbeanness.17 It is premature to say ‘goodbye’ to Hellas.18 Take for example, the essay ‘Our America’ (‘Nuestra Ame´rica’, 1891) by the revolutionary Cuban intellectual Jose´ Martı´ (1853–95).19 In the course of expounding his vision of a hybrid American society and educational system that would reflect the diversity of the Americas (i.e. not just North America), Martı´ has recourse to the emotive power of Greece as a symbol of Old World civilization and as the possession of a social elite: The European university must bow to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught in clear detail and to the letter, even if the archons of Greece are overlooked. Our Greece must take priority over the Greece which is not ours. We need it more.20 La universidad europea ha de ceder a la universidad americana. La historia de Ame´rica, de los Incas aca´, ha de ensenãrse al dedillo, aunque no se ensen˜e la de los arcontes de Grecia. Nuestra Grecia es preferible a la Grecia que no es nuestra. Nos es ma´s necessaria.21

The dry topic ‘the archons of Greece’ is used synecdochally to stand for the imposition of foreign syllabuses on students in the Americas. What strikes me in Martı´’s rhetoric is the contradictory rejection of and simultaneous dependence on ‘Greece’. In the same way that Martı´ reconfigures America in his own image (‘Our America’), Greece is also assimilated into this new ideology (‘Our Greece’), showing the extent to which it was and is viewed as a cultural site 17

See Dash 1998b: ch. 4 (‘A New World Mediterranean: The Novel and Knowledge’). In fairness, I note that Benı´tez-Rojo does not say ‘goodbye’ to Hellas definitively. On the contrary, the explanatory power of Greek myths (Prometheus, Theseus, Odysseus, Sisyphus) and authors (Herodotus, Homer) recurs throughout his work. 19 ‘Nuestra Ame´rica’ was first published in La revista illustrada de Nueva York, 10 January 1891. 20 Martı´ 1977a: 88, trans. Elinor Randall. For discussion, see Retamar 1989: 17–21. 21 Martı´ 1977b: 29. 18

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worth retaining (‘we need it more’). This concurs with Simon Goldhill’s study of the ways in which Greek and the study of ancient Greece have been seen as both a useful paradigm of knowledge in the construction of different cultural identities, as well as a threat to the expression of these same identities.22 Martı´’s formula ‘Our Greece must take priority over the Greece which is not ours’ also contains the realization that there is no unmediated Greece: the Greece that has been transmitted in scholarship and popular culture is subject to ideologies of race, class, sex, and nationality. A similar rhetorical manoeuvre is at work in Derek Walcott’s poem ‘Roots’, which refers to ‘our Homer’.23 I have tried to hint at this tension in my title ‘Afro-Greeks’—a hybrid hyphenation that goes against the grain of Caribbean culture in two senses. First, it refers to an unreal pairing, since these cultures do not meet to any significant extent in the Caribbean. Secondly, the apparent ‘black–white’ clash of ‘Afro-Greek’ plays on erroneous cultural preconceptions that have aligned ancient Greece with racist discourses that are alien to it. This clash has been endlessly explored in Martin Bernal’s Black Athena and the critical literature that this work has occasioned.24 The same frisson is also present in Derek Walcott’s nicknaming of his friend, the St Lucian painter Dunstan St Omer, ‘Gregorias’. In Walcott’s poem Another Life, the narrator comments on the ‘explosive’ sound of the name in that it implies a ‘black Greek’.25 We can compare other disjunctive hybrid formulations such as ‘Afro-Saxons’, ‘AfroVictorians’, and ‘Afro-Latins’, which all play on the yoking of supposedly

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Goldhill 2002. ‘Then till our Homer with truer perception erect it’; ‘Roots’ was first published in the collection In a Green Night (Walcott 1962: 60–1). Burnett 2000: 319 reads this line as Walcott envisaging ‘a future of West Indian art…which would supersede the external cultural referents of the colonial era’; however, this is to misconstrue the tension in the phrase ‘our Homer’ and in the poem as a whole, which affirms an independent cultural identity, while at the same time retaining Homer’s authority as a vital cultural icon. Torres-Saillant 1997: 70 connects Martı´ and Walcott, but for purposes of contrast rather than comparison. 24 Bernal 1987, 1991, and 2001. 25 ‘But, ah Gregorias, | I christened you with that Greek name because | it echoes the blest thunders of the surf, | because you painted our first, primitive frescoes, | because it sounds explosive, | a black Greek’s!’ Another Life, 23 ll. 3614–19 (Walcott 2004: 151–2; CP 293–4). 23

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irreconcilable cultures.’ Simon Gikandi has used the term ‘AfroVictorian’ to refer to African intellectuals such as Francis Nkrumah and Johnstone Kenyatta, as well as pro-African intellectuals such as the Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James, who challenged colonial rule while under colonialism and were themselves the products of a Victorian culture.26 Brent Hayes Edwards discusses the use of the term ‘Afro-Latin’ in the essay ‘L’Internationalisme noir’ by the Martinican intellectual Jane Nardal, which was published in the first issue of the Parisian periodical La De´peˆche africaine (February 1928).27 Nardal uses the term ‘Afro-Latin’ (a neologism) alongside ‘Afro-American’ to denote an amalgamated cultural heritage that enables people of African descent to enjoy the ‘benefits of white civilization’ while remaining true to their race. In the context of the anglophone Caribbean, the phrase ‘Afro-Saxons’ was used contemptuously in the 1950s and 1960s to denote individuals with Anglophile manners and seemingly pro-imperialist sympathies.28 Although Afro-Greeks is not a contemptuous coinage, it is a coinage that gently ridicules the pretensions of educated colonials who make ostentatious display of their knowledge of Classics.29 This seems to be the sense in which it is used in Walcott’s poem ‘Homecoming: Anse La Raye’ (1969), in which he likened himself and his schoolboy peers to ‘solemn Afro-Greeks, eager for grades’.30 I propose to take seriously what started as a figure of fun, in order to explore the cross-cultural and transhistorical articulations that are involved in the dialogue between the literatures and cultures of the Caribbean and the literatures and cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. I am particularly interested in the two-way flow of ideas: how writers have read the Caribbean through Greece and Rome and, conversely, how these readings can be reversed to read Greece and Rome through the Caribbean. For me the hyphenation or articulation in ‘Afro-Greeks’ is not an occasion for mockery or a site of mimicry, but an opportunity for invention. Discussing the newness of migrant and minority discourses and the new spaces that they

26 27 28 29 30

Gikandi 2000a: 3; 2000b: 157–67 (on James’s Victorianism). Edwards 2003: 19–20 (see also ibid. 16). Birbalsingh 1996: xv. Compare Fanon’s ‘Graeco-Latin Negroes’ (Fanon [1961] 1990: 7). Walcott 1969: 50–1 (CP 127–9).

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open up, Homi Bhabha observes that hybrid hyphenations ‘emphasize the incommensurable elements—the stubborn chunks—as the basis of cultural identifications’.31 It is in this spirit that I use the term ‘Afro-Greeks’: to signal a conjuncture between spheres of culture that are seemingly incommensurable and to hint at the simultaneous tension and mutuality at the heart of this relationship. I also have in mind Brent Hayes Edwards’s use of the concept-metaphors ‘articulation’ and ‘dećalage’ (‘gap’, ‘discrepancy’, ‘time lag’) in his study of Black Internationalism, to express the ambivalent quality of transnational relations that exhibit both unity and separation.32 This book explores Caribbean investigations of the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome in a New World context, using the term ‘New World’ in spite of its erroneous logic. In modern anglophone Caribbean literature the term has been redeemed somewhat, with poets punning on the fact that ‘new world’ is just one letter away from ‘new word’. In the poem ‘For Pablo Neruda’, published in the collection Sea Grapes, Derek Walcott has the line ‘in the New World, in a new word | brotherhood’.33 The same pun occurs in Kamau Brathwaite’s The History of the Voice in a discussion of the innovativeness of Caribbean sound-poetry: ‘the word becomes a pebble stone or bomb and dub makes sense (or nonsenseness) of politics demanding of it life not death, community not aardvark, new world to make new words and we to overstand how modern ancient is.’34 The echo of the phrase ‘new word’ in ‘new world’ neatly encapsulates the aim of this study: to look at ancient Graeco-Roman literature and culture afresh via Caribbean readings, and to examine the new words and paradigms for the study of both Graeco-Roman Classics and the Caribbean that emerge from this dialogue. This book also bears witness to a vanished era in the intellectual culture of the Caribbean. That it is possible to write this book at all is due to the fact that several of the writers who dominated Caribbean literature in the twentieth century were schooled in Latin and ancient

31 This quotation is taken from ch. 11 of The Location of Culture (‘How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation’) (Bhabha [1994] 2004: 313). 32 Edwards 2003: 11–15. 33 34 Walcott 1976: 60–1. Brathwaite 1984: 50 (my italics).

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history, and sometimes Greek, under a colonial school curriculum in the period roughly 1910–60. None of these writers swallowed the classics uncritically, but the fact that they received this classical education had a bearing on many of the classics of modern Caribbean literature. It is already the case that Classics has all but vanished from Caribbean schools, making it hard for new generations of students and scholars to appreciate an important dimension of the intellectual context of Caribbean literature—a dimension that will soon be forgotten. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, I do not intend to assert dialogues with classical, Graeco-Roman literature over the other more obvious cultural traditions that are present in the literatures of the modern Caribbean, but I do want to explore and record these dialogues to prevent them from passing into oblivion. Since I first conceived of the idea for this book the disciplinary landscape has changed in exciting ways. In the last few years there has been a steady flow of excellent publications in the field loosely referred to as ‘classical reception’, which have studied and analysed the reception of Classics in postcolonial cultures, primarily in Africa, India, and the Caribbean.35 At the same time, research on the African-American reception of Classics, referred to as Black Classicism or classica Africana, is thriving.36 The weight of this research has smashed the proprietary fiction of Classics as the property of the ‘West’, or as the natural and exclusive inheritance of peoples of European descent. What is more, not only has this recent research studied the reception of Classics in non-traditional and postcolonial contexts, but it has also received and taken on board the implications of these new connections for how the discipline of Classics is practised and conceptualized. In Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson’s Crossroads in the Black Aegean, adaptations of Greek tragedy staged in Africa and the African diaspora write back to Classics and question assumptions about the cultural identity of the cultures that

35 A sample of this research: Goff 2005; Goff and Simpson 2007; Hardwick and Gillespie 2007; Trivedi 2007; and Hall and Vasunia forthcoming. Although the following do not focus exclusively on postcolonial receptions, see also Hardwick 2000, 2003; Martindale and Thomas 2006; Graziosi and Greenwood 2007; Hall 2008a; Hardwick and Stray 2008; and Stephens and Vasunia forthcoming. 36 Wetmore 2003; Ronnick 2005; Rankine 2006; Walters 2007; O’Meally 2007.

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Introduction

it studies.37 Goff and Simpson summarize the force of these adaptations as follows: Not only do they arise at a variety of locations across the diaspora, displaced from any metropolis, but they also dramatize, in doing so, the fact that the classical touchstones of colonial culture were almost as remote from the modern imperial metropolis as they themselves are. The British Museum, as Lord Elgin discovered, is not in Athens. In proportion as Africa and ancient Greece are both distant from that modern metropolis, they are close to one another.38

In the course of researching this book I have been struck by the fact that, unlike Africa and Greece in the passage quoted, research on the same texts in different disciplines still remains far apart, so this book is also put forward as a tentative opening gambit in a dialogue between Classicists and Caribbeanists, not to mention scholars working in comparative literature and postcolonial studies. I am acutely aware that for a work that studies dialogues, there are some big silences at the margins of this text. Given that I argue that receptions of Classics in the anglophone Caribbean share common tropes, the corollary of this argument is that these receptions demand to be seen in the larger context of the Caribbean and the Americas, bringing the Dutch, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean into the conversation, as well as the cultures of North and South America.39 I hope that other scholars with more expertise in these fields will help me to continue the conversation. Another silence concerns the absence of women’s voices in this book. Although the colonial educational system in the anglophone Caribbean was undoubtedly biased towards men, some Caribbean women writers also studied Classics at the elite schools and allude to this classical education in the margins of their work. The archives of the Oxford and Cambridge exams board (OCSEB), and the London University exams board show women passing exams in Latin in the Caribbean from the late 1920s, albeit in much smaller numbers than 37

38 Goff and Simpson 2007. Ibid. 31–2. See Torres-Saillant 1997: ch. 1 for a programmatic statement of the ‘unity of Caribbean literature’, with the criticism of Do¨ring 2002: 5–7, 11–13. Do¨ring (Ibid. 6) pits a model of ‘open-ended cultural interaction’ against Torres-Saillant’s model of cultural unity. 39

Introduction

11

their male counterparts. But those Caribbean women who had a classical education have chosen overwhelmingly not to discourse on it. I choose to view this not as the marginalization of Caribbean women with respect to Classics, but rather as the marginalization of Classics in Caribbean women’s writing. In turn, this marginalization is part of the process of the restoration of the black female subject, whose selfhood was erased by the colonial curriculum. Consequently, when Classics is mentioned by Caribbean women writers, it is often in recrimination for its part in the suppression of Creole culture. In the well-known poem ‘Colonial Girls’ School’, the Jamaican poet Olive Senior aligns Latin with subjugation to a foreign, Anglocentric education, which ‘Told us nothing about ourselves | There was nothing about us at all’.40 The negating of Classics thus becomes part of the process of writing back and correcting the negation of indigenous cultures. Merle Hodge, the only Caribbean woman writer discussed in this book at any length, is a case in point. In my discussion of the double named Helen which Tee invents for herself in Crick Crack, Monkey (1970), I conclude that Helen of Troy is relevant to Hodge’s story only insofar as Hodge asserts the irrelevance of these foreign doubles to the cultures of modern Trinidad.41 The question as to why Classics proved a useful resource to many prominent male writers, but not to women writers, is one that demands further investigation. As we will see in the following chapters, male writers such as the Barbadian authors Kamau Brathwaite and Austin Clarke also testify richly and eloquently to the denial of Creole culture in their classical colonial education, but they use Classics to signify in the same breath. It might be tempting to appeal to the idea of an ‘old boy network’ of Caribbean literature—to use a phrase applied to Western male appraisals of African literature by Lloyd Brown.42 Indeed, when C. L. R. James attended Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad (1911–18), followed soon after by Eric Williams, 40 Senior 1985: 26; the poem contains the lines ‘yoked our minds to declensions in Latin’, and ‘a childhood | memorizing Latin declensions’. It is striking that the latter reference to Latin declensions is rhymed with the ‘detentions’ that the students would receive for speaking their own language, which the colonial school downgraded as ‘bad talking’. See p. 93 below with n. 84. 41 See pp. 227–31 below. 42 Brown 1981: 5, quoted in Katrak 1998: 231.

12

Introduction

their educational experience was modelled on the English public school as a training house for the Victorian gentleman.43 However, although the male writers who feature in this book went to the region’s elite colonial boys’ schools, their struggle to achieve success as writers, and to claim the intellectual recognition for which their schooling had trained them, makes the clubbable, elite, British patriarchal associations of the ‘old boy network’ wholly inappropriate. Not to mention the fact that they were themselves ostracized by this network. Part of the explanation must be not just the colonial context of the classical education that was offered in Caribbean schools in the late colonial period, but also the fact that the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome were produced overwhelmingly by men and for men, offering women writers few figures of empowerment.44 Where anglophone Caribbean women writers have entered into dialogue with Classics, and specifically Graeco-Roman mythology, to fixate on these classical allusions and to press them into service in my argument would be to misrepresent what their poetry is about.45 So although Caribbean women writers are largely silent partners in this dialogue with Classics, theirs is a silence that speaks and reminds us, if a reminder is needed, that there are important swathes of postcolonial Caribbean literature in which Classics is extremely marginal, if not altogether absent. Two further methodological caveats are in order. Throughout this book I use the capitalized noun ‘Classics’ to denote the study of the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. This is not to suggest that these cultures have a monopoly on the terms ‘Classics’ and ‘classical’, even 43 Although they mastered this education, in retrospect both James and Williams were highly critical of the way in which the colonial curriculum failed to engage with the cultural and historical contexts of Trinidad and the West Indies (see pp. 99 and 122–3 below). 44 This is not to say that such figures do not exist, but they require the excavation of feminist scholarship (Zajko and Leonard 2006: passim). See, e.g., Margaret Atwood’s revisionist history of Penelope in The Penelopiad (2005), or the use of women from classical mythology in the mythopoiesis of African-American women writers, discussed by Walters 2007. 45 See, for instance, Lorna Goodison’s poem ‘The Mulatta as Penelope’ (Goodison 1986: 25), and the discussion of classical mythology in anglophone Caribbean women’s poetry in Jenkins 2004: 141–58.

Introduction

13

if modern European scholarship has sometimes taken this relationship for granted. As Harish Trivedi has argued recently in respect of Sanskrit Classics, there are other cultures and civilizations, which challenge the automatic association between ‘Classics’ and GraecoRoman civilization.46 However, the proprietary process whereby these cultures where designated as ‘classical’, and claimed for Europe, is an inalienable part of the history of their reception in the modern world, not least in the Caribbean, where the hierarchical metaphor at the heart of the term Classics suggested not just hierarchies of class, but the ranking of races as well.47 It therefore makes good sense to retain this use of Classics in the present study, the better to expose it through dialogues with Caribbean literature. Lastly, I am conscious that the adjective ‘anglophone’ in anglophone Caribbean literature is potentially problematic, since as a descriptive term it is not equal to the plurality of languages that coexist in what is notionally ‘anglophone’ Caribbean literature.48 Nor is this to suggest that Caribbean English is ‘not quite’ English, but rather that it is English and a whole lot more. Here I would like to evoke Peter Hitchcock’s discussion of the connotations of ‘anglophone’ in contemporary England, where he remarks that ‘Anglophone is always somebody else’s English just as Anglophone literature is somehow not American or English’, and observes that the epithet anglophone can serve to destabilize the stable identity of (the) English.49 It is in this spirit that I use the term anglophone: not to tie modern Caribbean cultures to an English colonial past, but to suggest that Englishes are an important part of dialogues with Classics in anglophone Caribbean literature.

46

Trivedi 2007, discussed on p. 240 below. See the discussion of Howard Fergus’s poem ‘At Grammar School’ on pp. 83–5 below. For an excellent discussion of the history of the terms ‘Classics’, ‘Classical’, and ‘the Classic’, see Lianeri and Zajko 2008: passim, who place the accent on ‘how classicism constructed its history by appropriating the Latin term [classicus] and the concept linked to it’ (p. 3). They also point out that, as a modern discipline, Classics has rightly sought to distance itself from a normative definition of the classical, in favour of a relative definition, in which the classics and the classical are not the prerogative of any one culture. 48 49 See pp. 123–4 below. Hitchcock 2001: 758–9. 47

14

Introduction OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS

Following on from the analogies between the Caribbean and the Mediterranean/Aegean discussed above, the first chapter, ‘An Accidental Homer: Accidents of Homeric Reception in the Modern Caribbean’, has recourse to Benı´tez-Rojo’s concept of the ‘path of words’ to articulate the idea that several classical motifs had already been mapped out in the Caribbean in travel writing. The chapter studies the constant return to Greece in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands (1950), contrasting Froude’s notorious Homeric analogy in The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses (1887), with the all-pervasive Hellenic coordinates that Fermor uses to orient his travel account. Whereas Froude’s Hellenic analogies had appealed to ancient Greece, Fermor evokes the totality of Greek civilization, from prehistory to the present day. This preoccupation with Greece can be traced to Fermor’s lifelong fascination with Greece dating from his first travels in Greece as a 20-year-old; but a by-product of this fascination is the fact that Greece threatens to eclipse the Caribbean in his travel account. In fact, in places, the Caribbean comes close to being an accident of Greece, a curious ‘other’ Mediterranean which, to quote Bhabha, ‘is almost the same but not quite’.50 Since both Froude and Fermor’s accounts had appealed to Homer’s Odyssey as a legitimizing text for their travel accounts, the second section explores Walcott’s fashioning of a New World Odyssey that writes back to Froude and Fermor, and shares tropes with other responses to The Odyssey in the Caribbean. Finally, as a measure of the contingency involved in the ways in which texts travel, I explore how Walcott’s Caribbean reception of Greece relates to the conflicted Hellenism in the work of the Greek poet George Seferis, with the rich irony of Walcott writing back to (modern) Greece as one ‘New World’ poet to another. The second chapter, ‘Classics as School of Empire’, emphasizes the influence of the colonial educational curriculum in the British West

50

Bhabha [1994] 2004: 122.

Introduction

15

Indies on the invention of a distinctive mode of Caribbean Classics in the works of anglophone Caribbean writers. Accounts of this curriculum, ranging from Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin (1953) to Austin Clarke’s Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack (1980), reveal the paradox of the intimacy of the student’s classical knowledge acquired in preparation for the Cambridge Certificate exams, and the simultaneous sense that Classics was not theirs; they both possessed and did not possess it.51 However, this same curriculum in which Classics was relayed through a prism of empire and whole civilizations were collapsed into an imperial tradition in which Pericles’ Funeral Oration was one with the culture of Victorian Britain also fertilized rich anti-imperial and anti-colonial rereadings of Classics that are the subject of Chapters 1, 3, and 5. To explain this tension between repressive education on the one hand, and a fertile source of artistic creation on the other hand, I invoke the concept of antagonistic cooperation, which has been grafted from the study of jazz and blues to explain some of the apparent contradictions of Black Classicism in North America.52 In the first part of the chapter I examine the culture of elite education in the British West Indies, centred on the Cambridge Certificate examinations and the competitive grail of the island scholarships. This section draws on Eric Williams’s Education in the British West Indies (1950), and the archives of the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board held at the University of Cambridge. I suggest that accounts of Classics in the colonial curriculum correspond broadly to three tropes: ‘Contesting the Curriculum’, ‘Afro-Romans and Imperial Redistribution’, and ‘Finding one’s Own Way in Classics’. Taking each trope in turn, I examine a range of works including V. S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street (1959), C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963), Eric Williams’s autobiography Inward Hunger (1969), Austin Clarke’s Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack (1980), and selected poems by Howard Fergus and E. A. Markham. As evidence of the way in which Caribbean Classics has been successfully liberated from the colonial curriculum, my third chapter 51

See Gordon Rohlehr’s depressing description of this condition, cited in n. 11 above. 52 See Rankine 2006: 49–50; and O’Meally 2007: 14 (with n. 16, p. 26), and 80.

16

Introduction

‘Translatio studii et imperii: The Manipulation of Latin in Modern Caribbean Literature’, examines the critique of the fiction of a continuity of empire from Rome to the British Empire offered by three anglophone Caribbean writers. Starting with Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe (2002), I trace variations on this theme in Clarke, V. S. Naipaul (The Mimic Men (1967), and A Bend in the River (1979)), and the poetry of Derek Walcott. I suggest that these writers each play with the idea of misappropriation and error, strategically deploying the misquotation and mistranslation of Latin in modern Caribbean literature to expose gaps and elisions in British colonial appropriations of Classics. I suggest that this misquotation and mistranslation is canny because it involves the complex manipulation of readers’ expectations. For those who recognize and can translate the quotations in question, misquotation may suggest simple error. However, these misquotations simultaneously conceal an additional layer of significance, and recognition of the Latin source and its context is not sufficient for interpretation. To fully comprehend the meaning of the (mis)quotations, the reader needs to know the Caribbean context in order to appreciate the intelligence of an error that actually conceals an important truth. It transpires that the misquotation of Latin in these texts is not a simple matter. Particularly in Clarke and Naipaul, misquotation shows up a miscarriage in the process of translation and, correspondingly, a miscarriage in the succession of empire. If the classical texts quoted in colonial contexts mean something else, or are misquoted, then the narrative of imperial continuity (the translatio studii et imperii) loses cogency. In contrast, the subsequent chapter ‘The Athens of the Caribbean: Trinidadian Models of Athenian Democracy’, shows a version of this translatio being put to work by C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, in an attempt to harness Athens as an empowering model for Trinidadian national identity. This complicates the idea of any easy balance sheet of appropriation in which misappropriation always falls on the side of empire and colonialism and appropriation on the side of the anti- and postcolonial. James and Williams approached Athens in different ways, but they shared the determination to take back Classics from the colonial archive through which it had been transmitted. In the case of James, I examine his representation of Athens in ‘Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece’

Introduction

17

(orig. 1956),53 and his extension of this analogy to Trinidad in the essay ‘The Artist in the Caribbean’ (orig. 1959),54 and Beyond a Boundary (1963). In the case of Williams, drawing on his lectures for the PEM and PNM and his political speeches, I examine his ability to make political capital out of his classical education in his early political career, and the way in which he represents his knowledge of the Classics in his autobiography Inward Hunger (1969). The fact that James had been Williams’s mentor shows up the divergence in the ways in which the two men appealed to Athens and the divergent conclusions that they drew from their study of the past. In turn, I argue that this divergence illustrates the complex cultural politics of appropriating the past. In ‘The Artist in the Caribbean’ James justified the writing of self-serving history (i.e. to serve the national self) in the Caribbean by pointing to the kind of colonial fictions that Naipaul exposes in A Bend in the River (see p. 138 below): ‘look at the illusions most of those European nations have had of themselves.’55 And yet, for James’s and Williams’s purposes in the political arena, they could not afford to expose the illusions and half-fictions in their own appropriations of the ancient Greek past, thereby undermining their commitment to the openness of Athenian democratic culture, which was one of the features that they championed when positing analogies between Athens and popular political participation in Trinidad. I suggest that there is a fundamental difference between the uses of Classics in the works of fiction studied in Chapters 1, 3, and 5 where the nature of the material used (primarily myths and literary texts which have migrated far and wide) is underwritten by the imagination, and the works of James and Williams which assign a more positivist, factual value to the ways in which they use Greece. As a result of their appeal to history James and Williams are more deeply implicated in the polemics of appropriation. Finally, Chapter 5 ‘Caribbean Classics and the Postcolonial Canon’, which also serves as the conclusion to the work, suggests that uses of Classics in the anglophone Caribbean represent an important 53 54 55

James 1977: 160–74. Ibid. 183–90. Ibid. 189.

18

Introduction

contribution to the study of variant cosmopolitanisms in the contemporary global academy. Focusing on the poetry of the Jamaican poet John Figueroa, who many critics have identified as an important precursor for the New World classicism in Walcott’s poetry, I explore the contradiction that his cosmopolitan vision of a Caribbean literature that networks all the region’s cultures and languages has been completely neglected by the same postcolonial canon that has celebrated Walcott. Better known, but still not as well known outside the Caribbean and Caribbean studies as he should be, is Kamau Brathwaite. I argue that Kamau Brathwaite’s revision of universal history (the translatio of Chapter 3) in X/Self (1987)56 offers an important framework for Caribbean Classics by suggesting that the Caribbean’s history of catastrophe presents a logical vantage point from which to survey the global succession of empires leading back to Rome and beyond. And yet, X/Self is seldom brought into dialogue with Walcott’s engagement with the Graeco-Roman past. This is less a point about the respective merits of Walcott’s and Brathwaite’s poetry and their colossal contributions to the intellectual culture of the Caribbean, than about what Aijaz Ahmad has referred to as the ‘canonizing agency’ of the west.57 One of the central contentions of this book is that the study of the reception of Classics in the anglophone Caribbean needs to focus not just on the dialogue with the literatures of Greece and Rome, but also on the dialogue between Caribbean authors themselves—a conversation in which Williams learns from James, Walcott learns from Figueroa and vice versa, Brathwaite learns from Ce´saire, Naipaul learns from Walcott, Clarke learns from Lamming and Chamoiseau, and on and on. To wrench one author out of this circulation of knowledge in the way that the canon has plucked Walcott from the Caribbean is to obscure a dense web of intellectual relationships.58 However, this is arguably to give too much authority to the idea of a monolithic western canon. Although Ahmad’s ‘canonizing agency’ undoubtedly affects publication, sales, and print circulation, its 56 Roughly half of the poems in this collection were revised for inclusion in Ancestors (2001); see p. 243 below with n. 70. 57 Ahmad 1992: 123. 58 On Walcott’s inclusion in the canon, see Melas 2007: 116.

Introduction

19

authority is threatened by its inability to respond adequately to the emergence of regional canons and, consequently, to cover the ambitious topic of ‘World’ Literature. In the context of Figueroa’s affinity for Horace the provincial poet and Brathwaite’s view from the Roman provinces in X/Self, I point out the irony that anglophone Caribbean writers have recalibrated the canon so that they are the natural successors of Horace, or Ovid (who are doubly off-centre, given the end of Rome’s empire), writing from the provinces and holding the cultural centre. In conclusion I propose that dialogues between anglophone Caribbean literature and Classics reveal a disarming minority position in which Greece and Rome survive because of their distance from a European classical ideal. Precisely because these writers fashioned their own relationship with Classics against the macro-cosmopolitan model of empire, in anglophone Caribbean Classics the appeal of the Graeco-Roman past is micro-cosmopolitan. The comparison between the Caribbean and Greece assumes the smallness of the Greek city-states, Greece’s submission to Rome, and its paradoxical position as cultural giant on the periphery of Europe. Similarly, the Rome dwelt on in modern anglophone Caribbean literature is a compromised, deceased empire whose legacy is paradoxically that of the limits of empire.

1 An Accidental Homer Accidents of Homeric Reception in the Modern Caribbean

As we saw in the Introduction, in both actual and literary cartography, the archipelago of Greece has often been mapped onto the Caribbean, leading to the figure of the ‘new’ or ‘Caribbean’ Aegean.1 This chapter examines key commonplaces in both colonial and postcolonial literatures in which Greece features in the Caribbean as an ideal or ironic heterotopia. Greece was famously and gratuitously projected onto the Caribbean in A. J. Froude’s The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses (1887), but more striking still is the pervasive Hellenism in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands (1950). These leisured tourists inadvertently tied the modern Caribbean to Greece, ensuring that when Caribbean writers of the twentieth century came to write the Caribbean for themselves they had to contend with the Hellenic filters put in place by writers describing the region from the outside.2 Whereas Froude’s Hellenic analogies had appealed to ancient Greece, Fermor evokes the totality of Greek civilization, from prehistory to the present day. Paradoxically, this accident of travel writing has proved to offer fruitful ground for comparison between the situation of the New World vis-a`-vis the classicism of the Old 1 An example of actual cartography is the naming of Andros in the Bahamas after Andros in the Aegean; see Walcott 1997e: 62: ‘In maps the Caribbean dreams j of the Aegean, and the Aegean of reversible seas.’ 2 See Lamming [1960] 1992a: 37–8; and Walcott 1998: 77.

An Accidental Homer

21

World, on the one hand, and the situation of the modern Greek nation constructing the terms of its relationship with ‘Old’ Greece, on the other hand. Starting with Fermor, I explore the role that travel writing played in the construction of the Caribbean as the New Aegean. Since both Froude’s and Fermor’s accounts had appealed to Homer’s Odyssey as a legitimizing text for their travel accounts, the second section explores Walcott’s fashioning of a New World Odyssey and relates it to Caribbean tropes for the reception of this text. Finally, as a measure of the contingency involved in the ways in which texts travel, I explore how Walcott’s Caribbean reception of Greece relates to the conflicted Hellenism in the work of the Greek poet George Seferis, with the rich irony of Walcott writing back to Greece. By invoking the concepts of ‘accident’ and ‘contingency’, I have in mind less the chaos theory that underpins Benı´tez-Rojo’s model of global Caribbean culture, and more Brathwaite’s idea that the literature of the Caribbean should be a ‘literature of catastrophe’ in response to the ‘history of catastrophe’ or the catastrophes of history that have shaped the modern Caribbean.3 At the risk of comparing small things with great, I propose that the travel writings studied here be included in this larger ‘history of catastrophe’, understood as everything that the Caribbean has suffered. In a famous article, ‘Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture’, James Snead proposed that black culture(s) have traditionally accommodated ‘accidents’ and ‘ruptures’ more readily than European cultures.4 Based on African music and performance culture, and its variations in the African diaspora, Snead suggested that black culture(s) have evolved the capacity to integrate sudden changes into a system based on cyclical repetition, assimilating and containing contingency within broader patterns of recurrence. Snead’s theorization of repetition as a figure 3

See Brathwaite [1985] 1995: 235: ‘for me, the history of catastrophe, the coming to grips with a person bitten by those ratchets; that archetypal labourer; ruined by that greed; requires a literature of catastrophe to hold a broken mirror up to broken nature.’ For a definition of chaos theory as it pertains to his conception of history and culture in the Caribbean, see Benı´tez-Rojo [1989] 1996: 3. This privileging of chaos theory in Caribbean poetics is also found in Glissant’s Poetics of Relation ([1990] 1997): 133–40). 4 Snead [1984] 1990, especially p. 67.

22

An Accidental Homer

of black culture is a useful frame for this chapter, which seeks to explain how contingent readings of the Caribbean via the Odyssey, or ‘accidents of Homeric reception’, have been assimilated to broader patterns in Caribbean culture.

PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR’S THE TRAVELLER’S TREE 5 Fermor’s account of his Caribbean journey draws upon a series of pre-texts, ranging from Homer’s Odyssey as the ‘original’ traveller’s tale, to the travel writings of authors ranging from Pe`re Labat to Lafcadio Hearn.6 Nor does Fermor disguise this: in the section on Martinique Fermor records the time that he spent at the Schoelcher library in the capital Fort de France: ‘I often used to visit it to read Memoirs of Martinique, by the travellers and settlers of former centuries, and the works of Lafcadio Hearn.’7 In its turn, Fermor’s account becomes yet another pre-text for subsequent writers of the Caribbean, adding another accretion of language and imagery to the written landscape, or to what Antonio Benı´tez-Rojo has described as ‘the Path of Words between Europe and America’.8 In the preface Fermor encourages his readers to make connections with Homer’s Odyssey: ‘this was the only trace of method or guiding principle that prompted my two companions and myself on our Odyssey through the islands: a journey almost as uncoordinated and involved as the island itinerary three thousand years ago to Ithaca from Troy’ ([1950] 2005: x).9 Fermor’s account offers us an 5

All quotations from this work in the following discussion are taken from the 2005 paperback edition published by John Murray (Fermor [1950] 2005). 6 Labat 1722 and Hearn [1890] 2001. 7 Fermor [1950] 2005: 62. 8 Benı´tez-Rojo [1989] 1996: 183–6. See Hulme 2000a: 245, ‘The Traveller’s Tree has become the conduit through which the old colonial verities have passed into contemporary accounts.’ 9 See the comment on his stay at Pointe Baptiste on the island of Dominica: ‘looking back on the whole of our Odyssey through the islands it remains, without question, the happiest part of it’ ([1950] 2005: 103). Fermor travelled with his future wife Joan Rayner and Kostas, a Greek friend.

An Accidental Homer

23

insight into the accidental way in which Greece gets repeated in the Caribbean. By the time at which Fermor set out on his Caribbean journey, he had spent several years in Greece both as an independent traveller and as a British officer in occupied Greece during the Second World War, but had yet to publish any travel writing on Greece.10 In his travels around the Caribbean archipelago he takes his bearings from the Greek archipelago with which he was familiar. In view of Benı´tez-Rojo’s conception of the Caribbean as a ‘meta-archipelago’ without limits, and his attribution of the same property to Hellas,11 it is interesting to observe the operation of the Hellenic meta-archipelago in Fermor’s travel account, where it operates as a spatio-temporal construct that reaches from Homer to the modern Greek nation of the mid-twentieth century. Although Fermor presents his work to the reader as a ‘random account’ based on wandering (p. xi), Greece is omnipresent as a significant elsewhere and provides coordinates that ensure that the traveller is never lost, and never loses the Odyssean plot line. After the Anglocentric nineteenth-century travel accounts of Caribbean travels by Trollope, Kingsley, and Froude, it is striking that the Anglo-Irish Fermor rarely sees resemblances to Britain in the Caribbean. Granted, we are told that a landscape in Grenada ‘resembled a beautiful eighteenth-century Devonshire town in mid-winter’ (183), and that the meadowland surrounding the town of Marigot in St Martin ‘might have been anywhere in Sussex, with cows grazing under tame European trees’ (235).12 However, apart from these occasional evocations of British landscapes, it is the Mediterranean that prevails and, indeed, dominates the landscape of the Caribbean in Fermor’s account. Throughout the narrative Mediterranean comparanda are used to orient the reader. Hence we are told that the skin of a Martinican girl ‘was about the same colour as a dark Greek girl’s or a southern Italian’s’ (14). There is an ever-present assumption about the originality of the Mediterranean, with the Caribbean 10

Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966). Benı´tez-Rojo [1989] 1996: 3–4; see p. 4 above. 12 This Anglicizing pastoral trope reaches its climax in Fermor’s description of the landscape of the Blue Mountains in Jamaica ([1950] 2005: 357). Contrast Froude’s travel account, which, in the words of Do¨ring, is obsessed with the idea of ‘Englishness displaced’ in the tropics (Do¨ring 2002: 26). 11

24

An Accidental Homer

copying or repeating its landscape and cultures.13 In Syparia in Trinidad, emerging from the parish where he and his companions had viewed the image of the Black Virgin—an image which calls to his mind Roman Catholic figurines and Greek Orthodox icons—Fermor is disconcerted to emerge into an East Indian crowd: ‘it seemed anomalous and wrong that, turning from such a figure from the Old World, we should be surrounded not by Tuscans or Calabrians or Macedonians, but by Hindis in saris, and even, here and there, in turbans’ (165). In Fermor’s account the cultural traditions of the Caribbean remain unassimilated, always traceable to their Old World roots. The relationship between the Caribbean and the Mediterranean is never analysed explicitly; the closest Fermor ever comes to reflection on this trope (the constant turn and return to the Mediterranean) is the momentary opportunity for doubt opened up by the conditional clause in the following reflection on the relative geographies of the Caribbean and the Mediterranean: If the island sea is to be compared with the Mediterranean, these occidental Pillars of Hercules are multiplied into a colonnade through the many pillars of which the Atlantic everlastingly propels its trillions of water. (242; my italics)

The circumspect reader might question the validity of this hypothetical parallel (‘if . . .’), which echoes the rhetoric of ethnographic comparison in Herodotus. François Hartog and Rosaria Vignolo Munson have both discussed the construction ‘as if’ (‰ N) in Herodotus’ ethnography. Hartog notes that Herodotus uses such devices to ‘contain’ and ‘control’ difference, as he moves between the world familiar to Hellenic audiences and distant, different worlds;14 while for Munson it is one formula in an ‘extensive metanarrative vocabulary of similarity’, which facilitates Herodotus’ ‘active pursuit of the similar’.15 A good example of a hypothetical comparative analogy is found in Book 4 of Herodotus’ Histories in the course of a discussion about the geography of Scythia. Herodotus attempts to illustrate the

13 See Retamar 1989: 5 on the prejudice according to which ‘some Latin Americans are taken at times for apprentices or rough drafts or dull copies of Europeans’. 14 Hartog [1980] 1988: 228 (see further ibid. 225–30). 15 Munson 2001: 82. Compare Benı´tez-Rojo’s remarks on cultural assimilation in Herodotus and subsequent travel writers ([1989] 1996: 180).

An Accidental Homer

25

landscape of Scythia by evoking Mediterranean landscapes for the benefit of his Greek audiences: For Scythia is bounded on two sides by two different seas, one to the south, the other to the east, much as Attica is; and the position of the Tauri in Scythia is—if I may compare small things with great—as if the promontory of Sunium from Thoricus to Anaphlystus in Attica projected rather further into the sea and were inhabited by some race other than the Athenians. Or, to give a different illustration for the benefit of those who have not sailed along this bit of the Attic coast, it is as if some race other than the present inhabitants were to draw a line between the port of Brundisium and Tarentum in Iapygia, and occupy the promontory seaward of it.16 Ø ªaæ B ŒıŁØŒB a æÆ H hæø K ŁºÆÆ ç æ

Æ, æe ÆæÅ ŒÆd c æe c MH, ŒÆ æ B ` ØŒB åæÅ· ŒÆd ÆæÆºØÆ Æ fiÅ ŒÆd ƒ ÆFæ Ø

ÆØ B ŒıŁØŒB, ‰ N B `ØŒB ¼ºº Ł ŒÆd c ` ŁÅ ÆE Ø Æ e ª ı e e ı ØÆŒ , ºº

K e

[c ¼ŒæÅ ] I å

Æ, e Ie ¨ æØŒ F åæØ ` Æçº ı ı. º ªø b ‰ r ÆØ ÆFÆ ØŒæa ªº ØØ ıÆºE . Ø F

ÆıæØŒ KØ. n b B ` ØŒB ÆFÆ c ÆæÆ ºøŒ, Kªg b ¼ººø Åºø· ‰ N B ÅıªÅ ¼ºº Ł ŒÆd c ıª Iæ Ø KŒ ´æ ı ºØ I Æ Æ åæØ æÆ ŒÆd Æ c ¼ŒæÅ .

As Hartog notes, Herodotus’ comparisons are often far-fetched, comparing unlike with unlike; in such cases, Hartog argues that what is at work is not so much translation or transition, but rather transposition.17 What the audience sees by way of this analogy is not the landscape of Scythia, but instead the landscape of Attica.18 Herodotus’ rhetoric of the familiar concedes that his work addresses audiences with different geographical points of references (‘for the benefit of those who have not sailed along this bit of the Attic coast’).19 Hartog interprets this statement as Herodotus showing off his knowledge, using a formula familiar from the 16

Herodotus, Histories 4.99.4–5, trans. de Se´lincourt (1996). Hartog [1980] 1988: 226–7. 18 Ibid. 227–8: ‘To set the thing before the eyes, maybe, but precisely by setting something else there: therein lies the originality of the traveller’s tale. As a figure of rhetoric in this type of narrative, the parallel is thus a fiction which enables the reader to see how it was, as if he were there, but it does so by presenting to his view something else.’ 19 Herodotus, Histories 4.99.5. 17

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geographical genre of the periplous (the description of lands based on coastal circumnavigation), rather than as Herodotus genuinely responding to geo-cultural diversity (Hartog [1980] 1988: 228–9). However, I would argue that Herodotus engages in a subtle provocation of Greek audiences in this passage: his flirtation with the idea of Attica being inhabited by some people other than the famously autochthonous Athenians hints at the geo-historical limits of culture and empire. Rather than simply affirming the position of Greece at the centre of the known world, Herodotus’ relational geography arguably leaves things open to doubt: Athens may not always be inhabited by the Athenians. Fermor’s use of the ‘if . . .’ trope makes no such concession: the Hellenocentrism goes unquestioned and, indeed unremarked. In Fermor’s Hellenic analogies, Greece is superimposed onto the Caribbean, making the latter superficially recognizable and intelligible. Whereas we expect Greek geographical analogies in Herodotus’ work, in Fermor’s case, in a work written in English, it is striking that references to contemporary (1940s) Greece are intended to bring the Caribbean closer to his readers. Fermor’s Hellenocentrism is of a particular sort, born out of his philhellenism.20 He projects the Greece onto the Caribbean not because he lacks insight into the specificity of the Caribbean’s cultures; on the contrary, The Traveller’s Tree was refreshingly unbigoted for its time (1950). Instead, Fermor projects Greece onto the Caribbean because it occupies a central place in his life and in his cultural imagination. In Fermor’s eyes, the central streets of Point-a`-Pitre, the capital of Guadeloupe, ‘have the raggedness of the more squalid thoroughfares of Salonica’ (Thessaloniki) (5); and the island of La De´sirade, to the windward of Guadeloupe, reminds Fermor of Spinalonga—‘that other leper-island that I used to gaze at from the mouth of a cave in Crete’ (17).21 In Grenada the neoclassical architecture of the Seventh Day Adventist chapel (‘a pediment 20 Philhellenism was the term given to the championing of modern Greece and the cause of modern Greek nationhood in the early decades of the nineteenth century leading up to the Greek War of Independence (1821); see Woodhouse 1969: passim. It is now used more generally of pro-Greek sympathies on the part of non-Greeks (see Leontis 1995: 8 with n. 13), and it is in this sense that I use it with reference to Fermor. 21 ‘That other leper island . . .’ (my italics); the idea that Caribbean landscapes have ‘doubles’ also intimates that they are doubles or copies of Old World originals.

An Accidental Homer

27

sustained by fine Doric columns’) prompts another return to Greece: ‘as cool and serene among the moonlit trees as though it had been built out of Parian marble on a headland in Attica’ (195). Similarly, the village of Hell’s Gate, perched on the volcano Saba in the Leeward Isles, is likened to a ‘Thessalian monastery’ (231), and the mountains beyond Port au Prince in Haiti ‘recall[ed] the mountain satellites of Athens’ (250). These Hellenic analogies cut across the boundaries of nature and culture, as even the flora and people of the Caribbean are imaginatively reconstructed to resemble the architecture of Greece. The porters who carry the baggage on the expedition to visit the Caribs in Dominica are ‘as slender and graceful as caryatids under their globular loads’ (105), and in Barbados an avenue of cabbage palms is likened to a Greek temple: ‘Their succession of smooth, grey trunks rose as straight and symmetrically as the peristyle of a Greek temple, bursting high in the air into a series of exaggerated Corinthian capitals’ (137). There is a massive gap at the centre of Fermor’s analogy between the avenue of cabbage palms on the one hand, and the peristyle of a Greek temple on the other hand. This is an excellent example of the geographical and ethnographic trope analysed by Hartog (see n. 18 above), where a fictional parallel replaces an object in culture a with a completely different object from culture b. Through a cumulative process, in which Greece (b) is repeatedly substituted for the Caribbean (a), culture b—the ‘other’ culture—displaces culture a, so that the reader keeps on reading the Caribbean through Greece, and seeing Greece in Fermor’s illustrations of the Caribbean.22 Several of Fermor’s descriptions echo the descriptions of J. A. Froude, whose adaptation of the Odyssey into a parable on British colonial government in the West Indies I will examine later in this chapter. Froude had commented on an avenue of palm trees in Barbados, noting their ability to survive a hurricane as ‘one of the West Indian marvels’.23 Again, Fermor’s Grecizing image of the Carib

22 The only reverse example occurs in Fermor’s novel The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953), where a story set on the fictional Antillean island of Saint-Jacques is told to the narrator on the Aegean island of Mytilene, ‘It was in another island, thousands of miles from the Antilles . . .’ (Fermor [1953] 2004: 10). 23 Froude [1887] 1888: 105.

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porters as caryatids recalls Froude’s comparison of statuesque Bajan women to the ‘old Greek and Etruscan women’, and his comment that they ‘might serve for sculptors’ models’.24 The geographical and topographical parallels that align the Caribbean with modern Greece are interwoven with references to ancient Greece. As a framing device, the Odyssey haunts Fermor’s imagination, colouring his encounters in the Caribbean. Many of the Homeric allusions are at the level of mock epic or ‘pseudo-epic’, to use Derek Walcott’s phrase.25 Pseudo-epic tones are inescapable when Fermor envisages the nightly onslaught of mosquitoes in Guadeloupe in terms of the Trojan War. Describing the mosquito nets in their hotel room in Point-a`-Pitre (Guadeloupe), with bathetic humour Fermor observes that ‘These edifices of muslin give to all sleepers the appearance of tented heroes on the Dardan Plain’ (23). More obscurely, describing the flora in the countryside outside Point-a`-Pitre, Fermor has recourse to the recherche´ iconography of ancient Greek cultic sculpture to illustrate the symmetry of the fruit on the pawpaw tree: ‘Under fleshy cartwheels of leaves the fruit of the paw-paw clustered round the perpendicular trunks as thickly and symmetrically as the breasts of Diana of the Ephesians’ (7). The choice of comparandum reveals much about the horizons of expectation that Fermor envisages for his audience, who are presumed to be more familiar with the representation of Diana (the Roman counterpart of the Greek goddess Artemis) in Ephesian cult than with the paw-paw tree. Similar examples of culture supplanting nature occur in Derek Walcott’s poetry, but here it is important to note that it is travel writing that first inscribes Greece onto the landscape of the Caribbean. In addition, Fermor’s journey is punctuated by Odyssean staging posts, such as the hedonistic sojourn with Monsieur de Jaham in the foothills of Mount Vauclin (Martinique), where the single adjective ‘nepenthean’ keys the reader into an Odyssean allusion: ‘Miraculously, none of us felt next day a trace of the potations and fatigues of the night before. The morning passed in a nepenthean coma under the poison-trees reading and talking, or gliding off into sleep’ (54). 24

Froude [1887] 1888: 38. ‘Provincialism loves the pseudo-epic’, Another Life, l. 952 (Walcott 2004: 41), quoted on p. 64 below. 25

An Accidental Homer

29

The allusion is to Helen slipping a nepenthean (pain-negating) drug into the wine when she and Menelaus entertain Telemachus in Sparta on his mini-odyssey in Book 4 of Homer’s Odyssey (4. 220–1).26 Fermor also encounters Greeks on his travels in the Caribbean: in his account of Fort de France Fermor dwells on a meeting with a Greek woman from Aleppo in Syria (a member of the Greek diaspora), who tells Fermor and Costa that the Martinicans are ‘wild, wild people! Agrioi anthropoi!’ (56). More significantly, the book ends with a conversation between Fermor and a Greek man who is returning to his business in Nicaragua after a trip home to Sparta (396). Fermor’s decision to end the account of his Caribbean odyssey with this conversation reveals the omnipresence of Greece in his account, as though the entire narrative has been a conversation with an (implied) philhellenic audience, for whom Fermor’s journey extends the contours of the Greek diaspora. At times the Greek sub-plot comes to the foreground, arresting the narrative of the Caribbean journey. The most pronounced example of Hellenic interference, if I can call it that, is the gratuitous digression on Ferdinando Palaeologus—the descendant of Constantine XI Palaeologus, the last emperor of Byzantium—which occupies five pages in the midst of Fermor’s account of Barbados (146–50).27 The digression begins with a return to the theme of Barbados as ‘Little England’ (first introduced on p. 134). Fermor comments that ‘In nothing is the illusion of England so compelling as in the Parish churches of Barbados’ (145), and singles out the Church of St John. However, it soon transpires that what interests Fermor is in fact a distant connection with ancient Byzantium: ‘apart from the beauty of its position it has a claim upon the attention of the traveller that makes it, in the recent world of the Antilles, strangely venerable’ (145–6). The claim turns out to be the inscription on one of the headstones in the church graveyard that marks it out as the grave of Ferdinando Palaeologus (146). This inscription prompts the digression that seeks to explain the apparent incongruity of the

26 ‘Straightaway she threw a drug into the wine from which they were drinking j a quencher of pain (neˆpenthes ) and anger and an agent to forget all woes’ (ÆPŒ K r

º çæÆŒ

, Ł Ø

, Å Ł ¼å º , ŒÆŒH KºÅŁ

± ø ). 27 There is a cross-reference to this digression in Fermor’s account of his travels in Mani in the southern Peloponnese (Fermor 1958: 26).

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An Accidental Homer

remains of a descendant of the imperial house of Byzantium in a graveyard in Barbados. The Hellenic filter in Fermor’s account becomes even more apparent if we compare his account of the Church of St John with that of Froude. What interests me here is Fermor’s repetition of Froude with difference. Froude recounts his visit to the same church in The English in the West Indies.28 Whereas, for Froude, the church was venerable for its Englishness, for Fermor the church is venerable because it has a connection with Greece. Froude had focused on a Latin inscription that prompts a reflection on the British Empire, while Fermor’s inscription prompts a meditation on the end of the Byzantine Empire. The repetition is signalled not just by the idea of a common place that travellers visit in succession and the construction of a commonplace around it, but in the repetition of the term ‘venerable’ used to describe both Froude’s and Fermor’s response to the church. A brief digression on Froude will reveal the differing projections that the two travel writers put upon the landscape and the differing significance of the Odyssean motif in their narratives. In his Caribbean travel account Froude chose the metaphor of ‘The Bow of Ulysses’ to define the state of Britain’s relationship with its Caribbean colonies in the late 1880s.29 In fact, the metaphor of the bow does duty for a series of relationships. In the first instance, ‘Ulysses’ is England, out at sea due to the parliamentary movement, fronted by William Gladstone, to give Home Rule to Ireland. Although Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill (moved on 8 April 1886) had been defeated by the time Froude travelled in the Caribbean, the spectre of Irish Home Rule clearly haunts Froude in this work. To Froude’s way of thinking, England as Ulysses had absented itself from its duty, leaving its colonies—like Ithaca and Penelope—to be ravaged by suitors.30 Although Froude’s chief targets were the supporters of Home Rule for the colonies, his choice of metaphor also hints at the ideal manhood 28

[1887] 1888: 101–2. For discussion see Do¨ring 2002: 26–7. Froude undertook the voyage on which this account is based in 1887, setting sail from England in December 1886. For a discussion of Froude’s account in the context of ‘Englishness’ in nineteenth-century travel writing, see Gikandi 1996: 84–118. 30 Froude [1887] 1888: 14; see also ibid. 315. For discussion, see Greenwood 2007: 193; and Goff and Simpson 2007: 261. 29

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31

of the English statesman as a man of action who is fit to govern and to string Ulysses’ bow, unlike the colonial subjects in the Caribbean whom Froude regarded as unfit for self-government.31 Lastly, there is also a sense in which Froude, whose account of the West Indies is the outcome of a ‘voyage of discovery’ in the region, is himself a Ulysses figure, appalled at the state that his house is in and determined to restore England’s empire to its rightful order. In the Caribbean criticism of this work, the idea of Froude trying ‘to pass himself off as the Ulysses of the Empire’ first occurs in Nicholas Darnell Davis’s work ‘Mr. Froude’s Negrophobia, or Don Quixote as a Cook’s Tourist’, published in Demerara in 1888.32 J. J. Thomas, the Caribbean schoolmaster and scholar, who published a rebuttal of Froude’s work in 1889, also points out the motif of Froude as Ulysses.33 Froude’s self-fashioning as Ulysses is reminiscent of what Louise Pratt refers to as the ‘heroics of discovery’ in Victorian travel narratives (1992: 201–4), and foreshadows Fanon’s complaint that ‘the settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey’.34 This latter aspect of Froude’s Ulysses/Odysseus can also be traced back to the post-Homeric tradition of Ulysses as a ‘frontier-man’ who voyages to the ends of the earth to establish the limits of knowledge and to reclaim his identity;35 in Froude’s case the voyage is a quest to reclaim English masculinity and imperial authority. Aside from the conspicuous metaphor of the bow of Ulysses in the title, Froude’s engagement with the Odyssey is minimal. More significant than Froude’s pretensions to being a latter-day Odysseus is the fact that he sees the Caribbean territory through the visor of

31

See Richmond 1982: 129 on the jingoism of Froude’s sub-title and, for a more general discussion, Gikandi 1996: 110–14, and Edmondson 1999: 19–37: ‘Race-ing the Nation: Englishness, Blackness and the Discourse of Victorian Manhood’. 32 I have not seen Davis’s work and have relied on the references in Smith 2002, especially p. 155. 33 Thomas [1889] 1969: 63; see Greenwood 2005a: 79 for comment. 34 Fanon [1961] 1990: 39. 35 See Hartog [1996] 2001, especially 3–39, with the comments of Dougherty 2001: 5–7. In his anthropological travel account of his travels amongst remote Brazilian tribes, Claude Le´vi-Strauss also adopts an Odyssean authorial persona. Echoing the description of the Homeric Odysseus as the man who ‘saw the cities of many men and came to know their minds’ (Odyssey 1. 3), Le´vi-Strauss comes out with phrases such as ‘I had seen something of the world’ (33) and ‘being sufficiently experienced to know’ (Le´vi-Strauss [1955] 1976: 33 and 35, respectively).

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Greek literature. At one point we find Froude dispensing advice on colonial government, based on a prescription that a committee of Parian advisers allegedly made for good government in Miletus— a prescription recounted by Herodotus (Histories 5.28–9).36 Commenting on his reading during the return voyage (Plato), Froude writes: ‘on long voyages I take Greeks as my best companions.’37 Froude’s statement about his choice of reading calls to mind Gikandi’s phrase the ‘pre-texts of empire’38—texts on which the mythology of empire was based—since Froude’s reading of ‘the classics’ prefigures his experience of the people and landscape of the Caribbean. However, although quotations from ancient Greek authors (Euripides, Plato, Sophocles, Herodotus, Homer) predominate over Roman authors in Froude’s account, the ‘bow of Ulysses’ is more properly a symbol for the civilizational authority of the amalgamated legacies of Greece and Rome. There are strange twists in Froude’s classical analogies, which suggest that we are dealing with an eclectic late Victorian classicism, rather than a thoughtful engagement with specific Greek and Roman authors. Froude’s analogies do not always add up. On page 18 the British in the West Indies are aligned with the Britons on the outposts of the Roman Empire, ‘civilized’ (¼colonized) by Rome and harassed by barbarian hordes. The reflective reader should puzzle at this analogy, which implies that the British in the West Indies are to the British at home what the distant Britons were to the Romans in Italy. Froude employs this analogy to shame metropolitan readers into acting in the interests of the British in colonial territories,39 but the analogy has the inadvertent effect of exposing gaps in Britishness between those at the centre and the peripheries. Later in the work (182–3) Froude uses a more conventional analogy, proclaiming the British Empire as the natural successor to the Roman Empire, carrying on the ‘duty’ of empire bequeathed by the latter. But back to the graveyard in St John’s Church. 36

Froude [1887] 1888: 79. See Do¨ring 2002: 175. Froude [1887] 1888: 321; Froude also quotes Euripides and Aeschylus on the same page. 38 Gikandi 1996: 102. 39 Also the subject of Froude’s earlier work Oceana or England and her Colonies (1886), the success of which inspired Froude to undertake The English in the West Indies. See Markus 2005: ch. 6. 37

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For Froude the discernible imprint of English culture makes Barbados a privileged location (33, 94), as does the relative antiquity of some of its monuments. Whereas Fermor’s interests drew his attention to an inscription that testifies to a frail and meandering connection with Greece, Froude had been drawn to a Latin inscription in the porch of the church which reads ‘Sic nos, sic nostra tuemur’ (‘Thus we look after ourselves and what is ours’), dedicated to an Irish emigrant called Michael Mahon (101). This motto conveniently echoes Froude’s thesis about England’s duty—as mother country— to its colonial possessions. Ironically, Froude reflects on how Michael Mahon came to be buried in this parish and speculates that he may have been a victim of ‘the tragi-comedy’ of English rule in Ireland (ibid.). Presumably Froude intends this excursus as a cautionary tale not to bring a halt to English government in the Caribbean, far from it, but to halt its descent into what was in his view a tragi-comic farce.40 Froude stops short of the association that colonial rule per se is a tragi-comedy (with emphasis on the tragedy) for Britain’s colonial subjects in the Caribbean. As Froude frames it, the motto serves as a warning for the ephemerality of empire; the Church of St John’s is treated as a museum piece—a fragment of England frozen in time—which will be overtaken by the exotic tropical landscape in which it stands: ‘[T]hese Barbadian churches, old as they might seem, had belonged always to the Anglican communion. No mass had ever been said at that altar. It was a milestone on the high road of time, and was venerable to me at once for its antiquity and for the era at which it had begun to exist’ (101). Commenting on the flora in the graveyard, Froude notes the absence of the flowers that are traditionally planted in British graveyards and their replacement by more exotic plants, leading to the reflection that ‘we too are, perhaps, exotics of another kind in these islands, and may not, after all, have a long abiding place in them’ (102).41

40

On Froude’s attitude to the Irish, see Young 2008: 217–18. An affirmative answer to Froude’s conjecture ‘may not, after all . . .’ is provided by Walcott’s poem ‘Ruins of a Great House’, which takes the thought process even further: looking into the future not only do the cultures of the plantation and empire end in ruins, but also, looking into the past, the English were once themselves the colonized (‘Albion too was once j A colony like ours . . .’) ¼ Walcott 1962: 19–20 (CP 20). 41

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For all of Froude’s colonial high-handedness and patronizing racism, he is able (albeit momentarily) to contemplate the idea that it is the English who are exotic and out of place in the West Indies, rather than his usual practice of measuring everything with a colonial yardstick and finding it anomalous and exotic in relation to England.42 Although Fermor is far more subtle and respectful of cultural difference than Froude, the Hellenic interference in his account means that the Caribbean lies in the shadow of Greece and frequently finds significance in relation to the borrowed culture of Greece. Hence the digression on Ferdinando Palaeologus ends with a plaintive contrast between Barbados and remote landscapes associated with the Byzantine Empire (Blachernae, the Golden Horn, and Mystra in the Peloponnese):43 [A] strange and inappropriate story. And rather sad. For nothing, after all, could be more remote in distance, or in feeling more alien to this little coral island, than the waters of the Golden Horn: waters that once reflected the vanished palace of the Blachernae, the home of the purple-born; or the cypresses of Mystra, whose Byzantine parapets look down from the Taygetus towards the plain of Sparta and the wide valley where the Eurotas meanders through the olive groves of Lacedaemon to the mountains of the Peloponnese. (149–50)

It is nowhere expressed explicitly, but the reader is left with an impression of the failure of Barbados (‘this little coral island’) to be Constantinople or Mystra.44 A digression that began with wonder 42 See Do¨ring 2002: 27, ‘In the decisive turn from natural to national history, the passage anticipates a dreaded turn also in the destiny of the English, who may no longer believe in their natural superiority.’ On p. 30 Do¨ring notes ‘the constant faltering’ of Froude’s imperial rhetoric. 43 Blachernae and the Golden Horn are toponyms from the city of Constantinople: Blachernae was a suburb in the north of the city and, from the eleventh century, was the location of a palace that was the main residence for the emperors of Constantinople. The Golden Horn was the name given to the estuary that divides the city of Constantinople in two, north from south, and flows into the Bosporus. Under the Byzantine Empire, from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, Mystra was the capital of the despotate of Morea (Morea was the Frankish name given to the Peloponnese region of Greece) and was an important seat of Byzantine government. 44 Fermor’s nostalgia ensures that he refers to Istanbul by names frozen in the past (Byzantium and Constantinople). On Fermor’s obsession with Byzantium and the Byzantine Empire as ‘Yeatsian nostalgia’, see Downing 2001: 15–16.

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(‘strangely venerable’) over an ancient inscription in a Barbadian graveyard culminates in the suggestion that these ruins belong to a much more ancient past and are out of place here. There is a hint here of the ‘oceanic nostalgia for the older culture and a melancholy at the new’ that Walcott criticizes in the essay ‘The Muse of History’.45 Reading this passage in Fermor, in which the Caribbean is represented aspiring in vain after the Aegean, one appreciates the full force of Derek Walcott’s persistent quarrel with the latent inequalities in the figure of the ‘Caribbean Aegean’ or the ‘New Aegean’, expressed pointedly in the talk ‘Reflections on Omeros’: Now what Romare [Bearden] did was not, for me, the kind of thing that many reviewers and critics saw in Omeros: a reinvention of the Odyssey, but this time in the Caribbean. I mean, what would be the point of doing that? What this implies is that geologically, geographically, the Caribbean is secondary to the Aegean. What this does immediately is to humiliate the landscape and say to the Caribbean Sea, ‘You must think of yourself as a second-rate Aegean, or, on a good day, you can look like the Mediterranean.’46

The series of relationships that Fermor establishes between the Mediterranean, the Aegean, and the Caribbean all tend in one way, relating the Caribbean back to Greece which functions as a locus of history and culture. If Fermor’s Caribbean journey is a symbolic odyssey, then the home to and from which all bearings are taken is Greece. However, it is important to note here that distance or remoteness from Greece, or even the charge of being a ‘second-rate Aegean’, was also paradoxically brought against modern Greece by European travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.47 As a meta-archipelago, which functions as a chronotope, across both space and time, geographical ‘Helladic’ Greece often finds itself alienated from the construct of an ideal ‘Hellenic’ Greece.48

45 Walcott 1998: 42. This essay was originally delivered as a lecture as part of a conference at Columbia University on 13 April 1971 and was initially published in 1974 (see King 2000: 269–70). 46 Walcott 1997e: 232. Goff and Simpson (2007: 40) identify the tenet that ‘the Caribbean is not a second-rate Aegean’ as a central theme in Walcott’s poetics. 47 See generally Herzfeld 1982: ch. 1. 48 On the Helladic/Hellenic distinction see Leontis 1995: 11, 137–8.

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In The Traveller’s Tree Fermor looks back to Byzantium from the Caribbean archipelago, but in his account of his travels in Mani Fermor indulges in a similarly nostalgic flight of fancy which imagines the reinstatement of Evstratios Mourtzinos, a fisherman whom he meets in the Peloponnesian town of Kardamyli, to the throne of Byzantium.49 With self-deprecating humour, Fermor splices his counterfactual fantasy with the real-life conversation of the fisherman, which gets drowned out by the narrator’s intoxicated stream of consciousness. Notwithstanding the humour, Fermor’s fixation with Byzantium is an example, albeit benign, of the use of an ideal Greece to eclipse the ‘real’ Greece, not to mention the ‘real’ Caribbean. A malign example is found in Froude, in a passage about the ‘heroes of the New World’, where he takes a characteristically racist side-swipe at modern Greeks in the course of insulting the Spanish: Columbus and Las Casas, Cortez and Pizarro, are the demigods and heroes of the New World. Their names will be familiar to the end of time as the founders of a new era, and although the modern Spaniards sink to the level of the modern Greeks, their illustrious men will hold their place for ever in imagination and memory.

In the same way that the ‘New World’ has furnished a restrictive legacy for the cultures of the Caribbean and ‘Latin’ America (an equally problematic term), the appellation ‘modern Greece’ (in Greek ‘the New Hellas’) has haunted the Greek nation, ensuring comparison with another Greece which the chronological framework implies is the ‘original’ Greece.50 At the end of this chapter I will suggest ways in which the New World reception of Classics in the Caribbean offers suggestive and enabling analogies for Greece’s relationship with its ancient past. I have already referred to E´douard Glissant’s description of the Caribbean as ‘a series of relationships’, and Michael Dash’s application of this phrase to Caribbean literature (p. 1 above). One of the 49

Fermor 1958: 32–8. See the clear discussion in Ricks [1989] 2004: 8–9, especially the following comment on p. 9: ‘On the one hand the word “modern” tends to mark off the modern Greek as not being quite Greek, on the other the word “Greek” inevitably ties him to a distant past with which unflatteringly comparisons are all too easily made.’ 50

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biggest challenges faced by Caribbean writers in the twentieth century, whether writing in the Caribbean, Ghana, Toronto, New York, Boston, Paris, or London, was to demonstrate the dialogism of these relationships, so that Caribbean culture is not seen as an accumulation of borrowings, but as a culture that both takes from and contributes to diverse cultures.51 In the case of Fermor’s use of the motif of the Caribbean Aegean, the relationship is one-way: the Caribbean is named after Greece and known through a series of resemblances to Greece.52 My argument here is that Caribbean receptions do not merely receive Greece, but transform it as well. The problem of mutuality explains apparent contradictions in the way in which the themes of relation and referentiality are handled in Derek Walcott’s work. If the Caribbean and its literatures consist of a series of relationships, then referentiality is unavoidable. On some occasions Walcott seems to endorse this view; take, for example, his description of Omeros as ‘about associations, or references, because that is what we are in the Americas: we are a culture of references, not of certainties’.53 He subsequently glosses this American aesthetic as ‘this free-form choice . . . which owes to everything and is referential in that sense’ (242).54 And yet, speaking about Omeros in a 1990 interview, Walcott was quick to dismiss the notion that ancient Greece might supply a frame of reference for his poem: ‘How could I wish to join a classical tradition when where I was had nothing to do with the vegetation, people, or anything remotely referential to Greece

51 See C. L. R. James’s review of Walcott’s In a Green Night in the Trinidad Guardian (James 1962): ‘The appearance of such a volume at this time when we are piling up evidence of what we are not, is a powerful indication of our competence in fields where the only reward is usually the expression of a vocation. We have produced a poet, an authentic poetry-centred poet. Whatever else we do or do not do, that is something.’ 52 There is one reverse Caribbean–Greek analogy in Fermor’s account of his travels in Mani (Fermor 1958), where Fermor’s guide advises him not to fall asleep under a fig tree on the grounds that its ‘shadow is heavy’ (15). Fermor draws a parallel with a Caribbean superstition about sleeping under the bells of a datura tree in flower (16). 53 Walcott 1997e: 239. 54 This idea is repeated on the following page: ‘What culture is not a me´lange? In that sense, then, the first impulse of the referential—what I have called the free-form choice—is not to verify the sources, but to accept the references, however “wrong” they may be’ (243).

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or Rome?’ (my emphasis).55 Perhaps the vehement rejection is a response to the way in which the question was phrased, given that the interviewers asked Walcott whether he located himself in ‘the classical tradition or the Caribbean tradition’ (ibid., my italics). The disjunctive conjunction forces an exclusive choice that is the opposite of the ‘free-form’ choice model of referentiality that Walcott was to articulate in ‘Reflections on Omeros’. Likewise, the idea of an exclusive choice—that to work in the ‘classical tradition’ is not to work in the ‘Caribbean tradition’—runs counter to Dash’s model of Caribbean literature(s) as a ‘series of relationships’, a model that allows for the presence of the so-called ‘classical tradition’ within the ‘Caribbean tradition’.56 While Fermor did not set out to mock the Caribbean, the comparisons that he sets up between the Caribbean and Greece continually serve to remind the reader of Caribbean absences or debts: there is no (neo)classical architecture, or what there is is ‘borrowed’ from Europe. Fermor’s travel account, with its incidental allusions to ancient and modern Greece, makes the Caribbean an accident of Greece. This accidental connection, which is a legacy of cartography and travel literature, has had profound consequences for the literature of the anglophone Caribbean in the twentieth century, provoking Caribbean writers in the tradition of J. J. Thomas’s Froudacity (1889) to produce their own responses to Greek myths and texts and to establish relationships with Greece that are independent of the colonial framework through which Greece and Rome were transmitted.57

55

Brown and Johnson [1990] 1996: 181. Another way of envisaging the relational model of Caribbean literatures is the ‘additional’ model offered by Benı´tez-Rojo [1989] 1996: 189, ‘The ordinary thing, the almost arithmetical constant in the Caribbean is never a matter of subtracting, but always of adding . . . The literature of the Caribbean seeks to differentiate itself from the European not by excluding cultural components that influenced its formation, but rather, on the contrary, by moving toward the creation of an ethnologically promiscuous text that might allow a reading of the varied and dense polyphony of Caribbean society’s characteristic codes.’ 57 See Ch. 3, pp. 128–33 below. 56

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TOWARDS A NEW WORLD ODYSSEY Froude’s prepossessing projection of the Odyssey onto the Caribbean had the unwitting effect of making the reinterpretation, or counterinterpretation, of this myth a vital part of the creative imagination of anglophone Caribbean literature and art in the twentieth century. The reception of the Odyssey in anglophone literature in the modern Caribbean is an example of a text that was expropriated by colonial writers to underwrite empire, and has subsequently been revisited and rewritten to undermine empire and its legacies and to revise (perceptions of) the region’s history. As such, it runs parallel to other texts that have shaped both colonial and anti-colonial images of the Caribbean—most obviously Shakespeare’s Tempest.58 In the colonial period, writers such as Froude were influenced by and contributed to what Pratt has referred to as ‘the overdetermined history of imperial meaning-making’ (Pratt 1992: 4). Overdetermination is also a feature of the inventive mythologies of the postimperial Caribbean, with artists and writers able to choose from the history and myths of diverse traditions (African, European, Indian, Amerindian). When Odysseus appears in Walcott, his appearance is affected by the circuitous route that he has travelled through a literary map, through Virgil, Dante, modernist authors such as T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce, and the black vernacular tradition that Robert O’Meally has illuminated so well in his study of Romare Bearden’s ‘Ulysses Suite’.59 In the case of Joyce, another of the accidents in the Caribbean reception of the Classics is Walcott’s engagement with Ulysses as one of the ways into Homer’s Odyssey in the twentieth century, which in turn owes something (but certainly not everything) to the accident of the Irish missionary diaspora.60 58

See Lamming’s analysis of the significance of The Tempest for the modern Caribbean [1960] 1992a: especially 95–117; for comment see Nixon 1987, and Hulme 2000b. 59 On Walcott and Dante, see Fumagalli 2001; on Walcott and Eliot, see Pollard 2004. On Bearden, see O’Meally 2007, and on Walcott and Bearden, see Hardwick 2007: 67–9; and Davis 2008. 60 Commenting on the dissemination and translation of Irish modernist literature, Cronin 2006: 23–4 stresses the importance of taking into account the ‘multiple

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Colonial discourse—specifically the sub-branch of travel writing—is riven with what anthropologists have termed ‘temporal inequality’: to travel into the unknown world is to travel backwards in time and to regress in terms of civilization.61 Consequently, encounters with the New World, which is ‘new’ because unfamiliar to the Old World traveller, often had recourse to the very old world, using coordinates from classical or biblical texts to map out the new territory in the imagination (Hulme [1986] 1992: 3). In response, Caribbean engagements with Greek and Roman classics are characterized by knowing tricks with time that play on the gulf between their newness and the antiquity of Greece and Rome. The most common way in which this gulf has been bridged is by denying the temporal, historical distance and asserting simultaneity in its place. The classic articulation of this position is Walcott’s essay ‘The Muse of History’ (Walcott 1998: 36–64), which substitutes ‘history as myth’ in place of ‘history as time’ (ibid. 37). As critics have observed, the transcendence or rejection of history is itself a historical move, insofar as it originates in specific, historically located intellectual movements.62 In this case, myth is used as a stratagem to counter the historical inequality between Old World and New World, where the very terms ‘old’ and ‘new’ signal a denial of history in the case of the latter. It is common practice to identify this mythical approach to history with T. S. Eliot’s ‘mythical method’ and the broader distaste for history in high modernism. Although Eliot and other American and European modernist writers have been influential in Caribbean letters, to explain the Caribbean negotiation of history via the imagination in terms of modernism is to confuse medium with cause; modernism is just one of the many strategies

translation activities of a country’s diaspora’ (using ‘translation’ in the broadest sense). In this context he points out the important role in this translation process played by the Irish as missionaries, pedagogues, and linguists (24). Although Cronin specifically refers to Irish missionaries in West Africa, I am reminded of Walcott’s account of the Irish Brothers at St Mary’s College and how their passion for Joyce and other Irish writers encouraged his own (Walcott 1997f: 31). 61 Fabian 1983: 31; McClintock 1994: 254; Youngs 1997: 4; and Melas 2007: 15, 29. 62 On the rejection of history as itself an historical phenomenon, see Cooper 2005: 402 and passim. For the influence of modernism on the rejection of history in Caribbean fiction, see Gikandi 1992: 8–9.

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and resources that were available to Caribbean writers in the twentieth century.63 Against this backdrop, the Guyanese author Wilson Harris offers an engagement with the classical past that poses an original and dynamic model of the reception of Greece in the New World. In place of passive receiving, or returns to the past, Harris promotes a radical artistic imagination in which the past is unfinished, and still to be completed in the future. In an essay entitled ‘Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror: Reflections on Originality and Tradition’, Harris counters the perception of epic ‘as something that belongs to the past and is now a museum-text to be imitated in the theatre or in performances of virtuosity’, with the idea of ‘arrival in an architecture of space that is original to our age’.64 The obscure notion of ‘arrival in an architecture of space’ is glossed in another essay, ‘History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas’,65 where Harris writes that ‘the journey across the Atlantic for the forebears of West Indian man involved a new kind of space’ and connects this space with the architecture of limbo, which he visualizes as a multidimensional gateway where cross-cultural traditions meet. He elaborates: To arrive in a tradition that appears to have died is complex renewal and revisionary momentum sprung from originality and the activation of primordial resources within a living language. We arrive backwards even as we voyage forwards. This is the phenomenon of simultaneity in the imagination of times past and future . . . (1999: 187 ‘Quetzalcoatl and . . .’)

This counter-intuitive idea of ‘arriving in a tradition’, or ‘arriving backwards’ entails a subtle reordering of the ethnographic movement where journeys to different lands are regressive journeys back in time. Instead, past traditions—including but not limited to classical mythology—are seen as unfinished and carry over into the future. 63

See Pollard 2004: 19 on Brathwaite and Walcott exploiting the resources of modernism for their purposes; Pollard’s general emphasis on the reconception of modernism as a ‘discrepant cosmopolitan movement’ does justice to the cultural specificity of Caribbean modernism. 64 Harris 1999: 187. This theory (rejecting the formal appropriation of the past as a passive object, in favour of a ‘numinous arrival’ in tradition) is repeated in similar terms in the essay ‘Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization’; ibid. 243. 65 Ibid. 152–66, quoting from p. 159.

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Harris indicates that this does not mean that the future is the same as the past, but rather that the two are continuous (1999: 257–8). This idea is explained in the essay ‘The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination’, where Harris, discussing Sophocles’ Antigone, proposes that an ‘invisible text’ runs parallel to the ‘visible text’ of the play and ‘secretes a corridor into the future’ (1999: 249) when elements of the play will be treated with different insights. Harris’s method of reordering literature and cultural traditions spatially rather than temporally means that there is no tension between tradition and originality, since the two exist in the same space. It is not a case of ‘returning’ to the Odyssey, which would be an impossibility, but of arriving in a new space, via an original route, where one recognizes or encounters elements of the Odyssey and other myths. In its New World context this ancient Greek text serves as a ‘contact zone’ where different cultures of interpretation can meet. Pratt coined the phrase ‘contact zone’ in the context of colonial discourse theory, to denote ‘the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures’.66 Frequently the term applies to textual spaces and can be extended to cover readings and counter-readings on either side of colonialism, from Froude reading the Odyssey in 1887, to Harris, Walcott, and others reading the Odyssey—as well as the odysseys of Froude and Fermor—in the twentieth-century Caribbean. For Harris the arts of the imagination represent serious possibilities for the creation of history in the Caribbean, leading to his invocation of the ‘epic strategems available to Caribbean man in the dilemmas of history which surround him’.67 In what follows, I explore Derek Walcott’s fresh use of Homer in terms of Wilson Harris’s conception of the ‘epic stratagems’,68 as a New World counter-reading that challenges the Odyssean presumptions of Froude and Fermor. Already in Homeric epic, Odysseus is an accommodating figure with a wide range of signification. We see this in the very first line of the 66

Pratt 1992: 6–7. From the essay ‘History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas’ (1999: 156). 68 For Walcott’s double-edged, ‘fresh’ use of Homer, see Omeros p. 283 (7. LVI.iii). See also Goff and Simpson 2007: 255, who cite the lines in Omeros in which the narrator expresses an instrumental approach to classical knowledge (p. 272 (6.LIV.iii)): ‘it was mine to make what I wanted of it, or j what I thought was wanted.’ 67

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Odyssey, where Odysseus is not named in person, but is instead referred to as the ‘man of many turns’ (aneˆr polutropos). The adjective polutropos is ambiguous and can signify both his versatility (‘of many turns’, ‘ingenious’) and his wandering (‘much roaming/travelling’).69 In the Oxford Commentary on the Odyssey, Heubeck et al. emphasize the sense of versatility in polutropos, arguing that Odysseus’ travels were a result of accident and that, in the opening line of the poem, it would be appropriate to refer to a trait that is characteristic of the hero, rather than a trait which is an accident of circumstance (Heubeck et al. 1988: 69). This explanation seems unduly schematic and the decision to rule out the suggestion of wandering in polutropos is questionable, given that wandering—whether voluntary or not—defines Odysseus’ situation in the first half of the poem. Stanford rightly preserves the ambiguity in this adjective with his neat translation ‘the man of many moves’ (Stanford 1974: 206). Recent critical discussions have insisted on the ambiguity of this adjective, linking the placement of this adjective right up-front, in the first line of the epic, with Odysseus’ polymorphous guises in the poem.70 Walcott exploits this ambiguity in his refiguring of both the character of Odysseus and the Odyssey, which return a very different Odysseus. In Walcott, Odysseus’ ‘many moves’ evoke the forced migrations and uprooting that led to the modern settlement of the Caribbean, and the legacies of exile and alienation that resulted. However, the ‘many moves’ are also reminiscent of the resourcefulness celebrated in Caribbean folklore, derived from figures such as Anansi in African folklore, or Br’er Rabbit and Tar Baby.71 In fact, this Odyssean epithet is already on its way to becoming a key trope in Black Classicism in the Americas, with Robert O’Meally singling it out as one of the characteristics of Odysseus that provides a link with the jazz tradition (Odysseus the improviser), enabling the African-American artist Romare Bearden to perform his own twists and turns on Homer.72 69

Hall 2008a: 19–20 discusses different English translations of polutropos. See Peradotto 1990: 115–16; Goldhill 1991: 3–4; and Pucci [1987] 1995: 13–30, 53, on ‘metaphorical polytropy’ in the Odyssey. 71 On the former, see Burnett 2000: 303–4, who discusses the character of Anansi as one of the influences for Walcott’s characterization of Odysseus in The Odyssey: A Stage Version. For Br’er Rabbit and Tar Baby, see Walcott 1997c: 49. 72 O’Meally 2007: 16. 70

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Walcott has often commented on the paradox of the ‘amnesiac memory’ of the New World and has spoken of the act of erasure as the beginning of art in the Caribbean. However, this erasure and amnesia prove fully compatible with remembering the past through epic mythologies from other worlds. In this context Hena Maes-Jelinek has used the perceptive phrase ‘Ulyssean palimpsest’ to describe Wilson Harris’s metamorphosis of Homeric characters in The Carnival Trilogy.73 In Walcott’s poetry, the constant (re)turn to erasure also proves to be a refreshing take on one of the Odyssey’s most famous tropes. Or, to put it more precisely, a new spin on one of the smartest tropoi of polutropos Odysseus: his punning self-naming on the island of Polyphemus the Cyclops, where he declares his identity as ‘no one’: ‘No one is my name; my father and mother call me no one and so do all of the others who are my friends.’74 One of the most explicit reflections on naming in Omeros is the sequence where Achille, guided by a god in the form of a swift, travels back through time, re-crossing the Middle Passage, to encounter his father in Africa.75 Hardwick has examined how this sequence of the poem evokes the katabasis of ‘classical’ epic,76 and has subsequently suggested that the failure of recognition may also serve as ‘a metaphor for the deracination of texts’.77 When asked the meaning of his name, Achille replies: Well, I too have forgotten. Everything was forgotten. You also. I do not know. The deaf sea has changed around every name that you gave us; trees, men, we yearn for a sound that is missing.78

73 Maes-Jelinek 1995: 47. Guy Rotella makes a similar point about the way in which Walcott regulates the traces of past empires in the Caribbean. Walcott’s general strategy is one of erasure or controlled amnesia but, as Rotella notes, ‘erasures leave palimpsestic traces’ (2004: 142). 74 Homer Odyssey 9.366-67. 75 Walcott 1990: 133–52 (3.XXV–XXVIII). 76 Hardwick 2000: 105–8, and 2002: 242–4. See also Ciocia 2000. 77 Hardwick 2007: 66. Hardwick’s suggestion of deracination poses an interesting supplement to Breslin’s analysis of this passage as a meditation on the collapse of signification as a consequence of diasporic migration during the course of which names come adrift from their meanings (Breslin 2001: 266). 78 Walcott 1990: 137 (3.XXV.III).

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We can compare Achille’s statement to that of the ‘nameless’ narrator in the early poem ‘Origins’, who claims ‘I remember nothing’.79 Afolabe is distressed at the notion of a name without meaning (‘a name means something’). He explains that if a name has no meaning (means nothing) then its referent must be nothing, too: Unless the sound means nothing. Then you would be nothing. Did they think you were nothing in that other kingdom?

For Paul Breslin this linguistic impasse poses ‘an untenable choice’: either the narrator has to resort to Homeric epic in order to assign meaning to the name Achille, which would be to overwrite Achille’s African ancestry, or else ‘accept a severance of language from meaning as a consequence of diasporic estrangement’, which would tell against the epic allusions and Homeric etymologies.80 However, in this particular sequence, the fact that Achille’s name means ‘nothing’ resonates Homer even while the significance of the Homeric Achilles is forgotten. The perplexing idea of a name that means nothing takes the reader back to Book 9 of the Odyssey and the ruse with which Odysseus outwits Polyphemus. In the context of the latter poem, the countercultural absurdity of a name that means ‘nobody’, and the Cyclops’ lack of culture and civilization in not recognizing this, is cued by a remark by the Phaeacian king Alkinoo¨s as he requests Odysseus to declare his name and his origins: ‘Tell me the name [onoma] by which your mother and father called you in that place . . . No one among the peoples, neither base man nor noble, is altogether nameless [anoˆnumos], once he has born, but always his parents as soon as they bring him forth put upon him a name.’81 We might object that, in Homer, the incident where Odysseus strategically assumes the name of ‘Nobody’ is one of the crafty stratagems [doloi] for which he has told us he is famous (i.e. the opposite of nameless) at Odyssey 9.19–20; this is voluntary anonymity in the service of self-promoting fame. However, the Odyssey with which Walcott engages is a fragmentary Odyssey that has arrived

79 80 81

Walcott CP 11–16, at 11; ‘Origins’ was first published in Selected Poems (1964). Breslin 2001: 267. Homer, Odyssey 8.550–4; translated by Lattimore [1965] 1991: 135.

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in the New World in bits and pieces. Appropriation of a single detail does not necessarily activate the broader narrative context; consequently there are many different, sometimes contradictory, Odysseuses in Walcott’s oeuvre, and Odysseus can appear both as cultural hero and as estranged wanderer. This metamorphic approach to Homer/Odysseus is shared by Wilson Harris, who has argued that ‘it is no longer possible for him [Odysseus] to arrive in New World El Dorados . . . as a single man. He has become plural.’82 Namelessness and nothingness have very specific connotations in the context of Caribbean history; the Caribbean is named in many different ways, many of which hint at erasure and suppression of true identity. The region is variously referred to as the ‘Caribbean’, named after an almost vanished tribe (the Caribs), the ‘New World’ (an Adamic blank canvas), the ‘West Indies’ (named after something the region is not, perpetuating Columbus’ error), or ‘Latin America’. As Arturo Uslar Pietri commented in ‘The Other America’ (1974), ‘What many people call “Latin America” is, in a very meaningful way, the world from which the name has been taken away. There has always been a metaphor, a misnomer, or an understandable dissatisfaction about its name.’83 So Walcott’s echoing of Odysseus’ namelessness in Omeros is germane to the Caribbean; at the same time it consciously engages with a Homeric legacy, which it uses with considerable irony as an epic strategy to secure the fame of St Lucia and imagined St Lucians like Achille and Hector.84 The trope of the Caribbean as a blank space containing nothing but the landscape has been a constant theme in Walcott’s poetry and prose, as has the valorization of this ‘nothing’. However, the farreaching significance of this theme emerges fully, only in the long poem Another Life (1973).85 Towards the end of the poem a child, Walcott’s son Peter, hears the Caribbean’s history in the howl of a shell (l. 3386), and ‘hears nothing, hears everything j that the historian 82

Harris 1992: 91. For discussion, see Maes-Jelinek 1995: 55 and passim. Pietri [1974] 1997: 207. 84 For the idea of the narrator’s stratagems in Omeros, see p. 271 (6.LIV.ii), referring to the differing approaches adopted by Major Plunkett and the narrator in writing Helen’s history: ‘Except we had used two opposing stratagems j in praise of her and the island.’ 85 All references to Another Life refer to the annotated edition, edited by Baugh and Nepaulsingh (Walcott 2004). 83

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cannot hear’ (ll. 3387–8).86 Faced with the accumulated histories of conquest and enslavement, Walcott proposes beginning again, ‘from what we have always known, nothing’ (l. 3430), repeated again in lines 3339–40, ‘nothing, then nothing, j and then nothing’. In this counterhistorical scenario ‘nothing’ is, paradoxically, a positive object of knowledge that frees the Caribbean subject from the master narrative of colonial history. In fact, Afolabe’s question ‘Did they think you were nothing in that other kingdom?’ (see p. 45 above) pointedly alludes to the colonial nullification of cultural identity in the Caribbean. The repetitive focus on ‘nothing’ answers a colonial refrain, present in Froude and taken up by V. S. Naipaul, that ‘nothing has ever been created in the Caribbean’.87 In fact, both Walcott’s echoing of the charge of ‘nothing’ in Another Life and Achille’s amnesia in Omeros (p. 44 above), can be compared to the lament of the character Tom in the sequence ‘Work Song and Blues’ in Kamau Brathwaite’s Rights of Passage (orig. 1967):88 for we who have achieved nothing work who have not built dream who have forgotten all dance and dare to remember the paths we shall never remember again: Atumpan talking and the harvest branch–,

86

Walcott 2004: 143. Naipaul [1962] 2001b: 20. Naipaul chose Froude´’s notorious statement as the epigraph to his Caribbean travel account The Middle Passage (Naipaul [1962] 2001b). Picking up on this well-worn trope, Walcott used this passage for the epigraph to the poem ‘Air’, which was first published in 1969 in the collection The Gulf and Other Poems (Walcott 1969: 36–7; CP 113–14). The last line of this poem is ‘there is too much nothing here’. Poem I of Midsummer also echoes this theme: ‘there’s that island known j to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froude, j for making nothing. Not even a people’ (Walcott 1984: 11). The trope of the nothingness of the Caribbean has been analysed extensively in scholarship, provoking a weary comment from Edward Baugh (‘to which critics never tire of referring’; 2006a: 170). See Figueroa 1974; Terada 1992: 161–3; Breslin 2001: 1–2, 112–13; and Baugh 2006a: 8–9. 88 Brathwaite [1973] 2000: 13. 87

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Tom’s strategic forgetting serves a dual purpose: to dull the pain of remembered history and to serve as a mask behind which the slaves in the New World can conceal their double lives (both here and there) from Massa.89 That the ‘Nothing’ in these lines is not nothing is apparent from Tom’s recollections of West African culture and religion (one has to remember in order to be aware of forgetting), as well as the rhythms of Brathwaite’s verse, which echo African beats.90 In the phrase ‘we who have achieved nothing’, there is an echo of the famous passage in Aime´ Ce´saire’s Cahier in which the Caribbean’s lack of the hallmarks of hegemonic civilization—exploration and conquest, or exploration with a view to conquest—are invested with triumph: ‘Eia . . . pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien invente´ j pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien explore´ j pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien dompte´.’91

See Brathwaite [1973] 2000: 15: ‘So I . . . who have forgotten all j mouth “Massa, yes j Massa, yes j Boss, yes j Baas.” ’ 90 Cf. Callahan’s brilliant analysis of the African rhythms in Book 3 of Omeros where Achille is transported to Africa (Callahan 2003: 23–31). 91 ‘Eia for those who have never invented anything j for those who have never explored anything j for those who have never conquered anything’; Ce´saire 1983: 68–9; translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. For Brathwaite’s engagement with Ce´saire’s Cahier, see Pollard 2004: 112; and on Walcott and Ce´saire, see Baugh 2006a: 8. 89

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Gordon Rohlehr has also suggested a connection between Brathwaite’s Uncle Tom and Ellison’s nameless narrator in Invisible Man (1952), ‘whose invisibility is a metaphor both of the white world’s failure to recognize who he is, and of his own denial of image, roots and past’.92 In the essay ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’ published in 1974, shortly after the publication of Another Life, Walcott theorized that: ‘Nothing will always be created in the West Indies, for quite a long time, because what will come out of there is like nothing one has ever seen before.’93 Hardwick has argued convincingly that there is a sophisticated postcolonial poetics and politics of Homeric recognition in the work of Walcott, Harris, and Bearden.94 In his estranging engagement with Homer, Walcott repeats an Odyssean theme. Like Odysseus, who goes unrecognized on his return and whom Athena at first prevents from recognizing his home (Odyssey 13.187–216), the figure of Odysseus returned in Walcott’s work has undergone radical changes. While Omeros and the more overtly Homeric The Odyssey: A Stage Version are not quite ‘like nothing one has ever seen before’,95 any traces of recognition are fraught with difficulty and ambiguity. Also like Odysseus, Walcott challenges his readers and audiences to a play of recognition. The very pronouncement of erasure and of beginning again from nothing turns out to be rooted in one of Odysseus’ most notorious strategies, hence asserting the presence and absence of Homer at the same time. This evocation of Odysseus the nobody suggests a New World reading of the epic, in which the protagonist—transported away from home against his will—resorts to obscurity in order to reach home and, in many senses, begins again.96 In fact, Walcott’s reinvention of the Homeric ‘nobody’ trope resonates with a broader

92 Rohlehr 1981: 26. For Ellison’s Invisible Man as a seminal text for Black Classicism, see Rankine 2006: 121–51. Rankine’s discussion of Ellison’s use of classical myth has rich implications for the Caribbean. 93 Walcott 1997b: 54. See Terada’s comment on Walcott’s inversion of Naipaul: ‘Walcott makes “nothing” positive, a persistence rather than an absence’ (1992: 79). 94 Hardwick 2007. 95 Walcott 1997b: 54. 96 See Breslin 2001: 2 on the ‘indeterminate identity of an Odyssean “nobody” ’ as a source of strength in Walcott. I analyse the ‘nobody’ trope more fully in Greenwood 2007: 203–4.

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anti-colonial strategy in Caribbean literature, according to which the Caribbean’s relative lack of monumental civilization—usually assumed to be a weakness—is mobilized as a positive strategy for resisting imperial powers. This absence of monumentality is tackled head-on in ‘Names’ (1976), where Walcott reviews the false naming that colonizers inscribed in the Caribbean. Walcott seems to pick up on Fermor’s elaborate comparison of the avenue of cabbage palms in Barbados to the ‘peristyle of a Greek temple, bursting high in the air into a series of exaggerated Corinthian capitals’.97 Reflecting on the colonial naming that invested the Caribbean with European toponyms, Walcott muses on the lack of any real correspondences, giving the lie to this preposterous naming.98 There can be no Caribbean ‘Versailles’ or ‘Castille’; but instead the ‘uncultivated’ flora of the Caribbean is forced into unequal comparisons, with terms that belittle or humiliate the Caribbean landscape: Where were the courts of Castille? Versailles’ colonnades supplanted by cabbage palms with Corinthian crests,99

In the case of the comparison between the cabbage palms and the courts of Castille and the colonnades of Versailles, the cabbage palms ‘supplant’ Castille and Versailles because, unlike the palaces of both places, which symbolize defunct monarchical regimes, the cabbage palms are part of nature’s kingdom—a kingdom that cannot be conquered in the conventional sense: These palms are greater than Versailles, for no man made them,

97

Fermor [1950] 2005: 137; see p. 27 above. See Bhabha [1994] 2004: 331–7, who describes Walcott’s poem as an expression of the colonized world’s ‘right to signify’. See also Do¨ring 2002: 31 for a discussion of naming in the context of the New World. 99 Walcott 1976: 41 (CP 307). These lines touch on New World commonplaces: for example, the relocation of Castille in the Americas is cited by Arturo Uslar Pietri in the essay ‘The Other America’, which analyses the crisis of naming in the New World: ‘They were going to make a new Spain, a New Castille, or a New Toledo; they were going to found the Order of the Knights of the Golden Spur, or, purely and simply, the Utopia of Sir Thomas More’; Pietri [1974] 1997: 209. 98

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their fallen columns greater than Castille, no man unmade them except the worm, who has no helmet, but was always the emperor,100

The worm outlasts all the empires that are used to measure the Caribbean’s perceived lack of history. One thinks of the passage from Ce´saire’s Cahier, quoted on p. 48 above. ‘Names’ offers a version of Ce´saire’s trope of strategic aporia, in which the lack of history and cultural achievement that has been put upon the Caribbean by various colonial discourses is assumed pre-emptively as a positive possession. Hence in the poem ‘Names’, the statement that ‘No man made them’ yields the positive boast that ‘no man unmade them’: the natural landscape cannot be captured and colonized in the way in which the built landscape can. Thus the cabbage palm, as emblem of an uncultivated and ‘uncivilized’ landscape, is able to trump monuments of civilization.101 The clash between civilization, on the one hand, and the trope of strategic aporia, or strategic nothingness, is also at issue in the work of the Greek historian Herodotus. In Book 4 of Herodotus’ Histories, Herodotus marvels at the nomadic culture of the Scythians, which enables them to resist invasions of their territory. The context of this resistance is interesting because the Scythians, as they are portrayed in Herodotus’ account, could also be said to be subject to the ‘unequal forces of cultural representation’ (this phrase is taken from Bhabha [1994] 2004: 245). François Hartog has described how the Scythian way of life is ‘defined through an accumulation of negatives’ (most of which constitute the inverse of Greek cultural practice), and how this is turned around through the institution of nomadism, which makes a strategic advantage out of an apparent lack of civilization or even an

100

Walcott CP 308. Rotella offers an important qualification to Walcott’s strategy here. Walcott’s ‘nature’ is actually acculturated nature: the cabbage palms in ‘Names’ have ‘Corinthian crests’. Rotella has analysed this strategy in a discussion of the poem ‘The Sea is History’ (Walcott [1979] 1980: 25–8), in which he explains Walcott’s substitution of nature for culture in terms of the trope of the ‘natural sublime’, with the proviso that Walcott’s turn to nature does not dispense with built culture altogether, but instead reproduces its features in the natural environment (Rotella 2004: 128–30). 101

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anti-civilization.102 Pascal Payen—a former doctoral student of Hartog—has analysed Herodotus’ interest in nomadic insularity as a strategy for resistance at even greater length. Payen argues that, in the case of the nomadic Scythians, aporia—a Greek noun which is predominantly passive in meaning (‘lack of means’, ‘lack of access’, ‘failure of resources’), and its corresponding verb aporein (‘to lack resources’, ‘to be at a loss’)—emerges as a positive quality. Because the Scythians lack the culture of their enemy (in this instance the enemy is the Persian empire of Darius), the enemy lacks the means to deal with them; hence their aporia is a source of strength.103 We can compare Walcott’s extensive and versatile play on nothingness to the ‘positive aporia’ of the Scythians as theorized by Hartog and Payen. The idea of aporia as an evasive, passive-aggressive strategy for resisting conquest calls to mind the culture of sabotage as a mode of slave resistance on the plantation: the feigning of inability and inanity in order to frustrate Massa’s business. Although the Odyssean trope is undeniably present in Walcott’s oeuvre, the Homeric allusion is not sufficient to explain the significance of ‘nothingness’ in the context of the Caribbean. In connection with Hartog’s focus on the nomadism of the Scythians, Mary Baine Campbell has pointed out that French poststructuralist theory has used the symbol of the nomad to reinterpret the Odyssey and other canonical texts, seeing in them the seeds of ‘homeless wandering’ instead of cultural permanence.104 It is an irony of the Caribbean reception of the Odyssey that Odysseus, whose travels reflect early Greek colonization, comes to resemble the homeless, un-Greek, uncivilized Scythians of Herodotus’ Histories. But perhaps this is not so ironic when we reflect that Odysseus’ fame is won through alienation and at some distance from the certainties of a familiar culture and home. Caribbean receptions are able to make sense of this aspect of the Homeric Odysseus in relation to Caribbean cultures. For example, the emphasis on Odysseus’ mastery of dissembling and camouflage complements the centrality of these traits in Creole language and culture, which in turn act as supplement to the figure of Odysseus.105 For Walcott, the Odyssey is 102 103 104 105

Hartog [1980] 1988: 204–5. Payen 1997: 297–300. Campbell 2002: 267–8. On disguise as inherent in Caribbean Creoleness see Glissant 1989: 21.

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just one strand in a complex, relational matrix; this is a good example of what Guy Rotella has called ‘multiple origins’ in Walcott’s work, where apparent ‘origins’ are never original.106 The strategy of containing Homeric analogies through mediating contexts that serve to distance the author from Homer occurs elsewhere in modern Caribbean literature. In the novel Los pasos perdidos (1953) by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, a sustained Odyssean motif ultimately proves mistaken, setting up expectations in the narrator that are disappointed by the outcome of events.107 The novel traces the journey of a musicologist—the narrator—to a primitive settlement on the banks of the Upper Orinoco and his encounters with, among others, a native woman called Rosario and a Greek miner called Yannes. Yannes travels with a bilingual (Greek– Spanish) edition of the Odyssey and comments on events of the novel with quotations from the Odyssey.108 Under the influence of Yannes’s edition, the narrator begins to adapt a section of the Odyssey (the nekuia in Book 11) into an opera109 and begins to explain his experiences in the jungle in terms of the plot of the Odyssey. Rosario is the ‘Penelope’ figure in the novel, but this Penelope does not wait for her man. In fact, the Odyssean motif is snuffed out at the end of the novel with a rejection of the correspondence between Rosario and Penelope: ‘The Greek looked at me in surprise that turned to pity. “She no Penelope. Young, strong, handsome woman needs husband. She no Penelope. Nature of woman here needs man . . .”’ (ibid. 273). Although the plot of the Odyssey is not borne out or repeated in The Lost Steps, the fact remains that the novel narrates a journey which is, allegorically at least, a quest to return home to the narrator’s primitive origins, characterized by nostalgia. Benı´tez-Rojo, who has compared The Lost Steps to Wilson Harris’s novel The Palace of the Peacock (1960), describes the journey as a ‘psychic’ journey, and points out that the journey in the novel loosely repeats journeys 106

Rotella 2004: 148–9. All page references for the novel in the following notes are taken from the 1956 English translation The Lost Steps, translated by Harriet de Onı´s. 108 Yannes’s first quotation occurs on p. 132 and is taken from Athena’s speech to Odysseus (Athena appears in disguise), advising him to supplicate Arete, Queen of the Phaeacians (Odyssey 7. 48–77). 109 The composition of the opera is described on pp. 216–18. 107

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made by Carpentier himself.110 At the same time, the jungle through which the narrator travels supplies a perfect backdrop for an Odyssean drama of (mis)recognitions: ‘The jungle is the world of deceit, subterfuge, duplicity; everything there is disguise, stratagem, artifice, metamorphosis.’111 Benı´tez-Rojo emphasizes the influence of the Schomburgk brothers’ travel accounts of British Guiana on Carpentier’s fictional representation of the jungle, but as we have seen in the case of Walcott, it is important to appreciate how the Odyssey, as classical pre-text, is used in concert with travel texts to establish expectations that frame the innovations of New World fiction.112 In the novels of Wilson Harris, recognition poses a transcultural and transhistorical challenge. The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990)—later included as the final novel in Harris’s Carnival Trilogy (1993)—bears four epigraphs: a quotation from Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of the Odyssey (Odyssey 13.194–202),113 a quotation from Tennyson’s Ulysses, a quotation from a work called Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics by Nick Herbert, and lastly a quotation from William James’s Association of Ideas. These quotations put the themes of (mis)recognition, parallels in space and time, and unconscious associations at the foreground of the novel. In addition, by citing both Fitzgerald’s translation and Tennyson’s Ulysses, Harris hints at the different routes via which versions of the Odyssey reach present-day audiences—a theme that becomes more prominent in the later novel The Mask of the Beggar (2003). Towards the end of The Four Banks of the River of Space the narrator Anselm is overwhelmed by the patterning of events in world history and arrives at the following realization: ‘Quantum parallels imply self-recognitions

110

See Benı´tez-Rojo [1989] 1996: 190 (psychic journey), and p. 178 (Carpentier’s journeys). The journeys in question are a journey that Carpentier made over the Mount Raraima plateau (between Guyana, Venezuela, and Brazil) by air in 1947, and a journey along the Orinoco in 1948. 111 Carpentier 1956: 165. 112 Benı´tez-Rojo [1989] 1996: 184–6, referring to Richard Schomburgk’s Travels in British Guiana, 1840–1844 (1847), and Robert Schomburgk’s A Description of British Guiana (1840). 113 This is the scene where Odysseus wakes on his native island of Ithaca and fails to recognize it because the goddess has surrounded him with a cloud of mist—see p. 49 above.

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across hard-and-fast barriers as well as subtle alternatives within a range or pattern of fate.’114 Harris’s repeated use of language such as ‘cross-cultural realities’, ‘quantum cross-cultural art’, ‘shared imaginations’, ‘the universal imagination’, ‘fiction spirit’, ‘fiction-blood’ across his essays and fictional works runs counter to the call for historical narratives and ‘more rigorous historical practice’ in postcolonial theory.115 And yet, Harris’s phrases accurately represent a New World Caribbean imagination that is true to the experience of the region’s conflicting histories and the cultural inequalities fostered by colonial history. Precisely because Odysseus is a figure of disguise and (mis)recognition, he proves so apt for Caribbean adaptation. Caribbean versions of the Odyssey challenge readers who cherish the original odyssey to look again and to recognize different aspects of the epic.116 In The Mask of the Beggar, the narrator is a nameless author/artist who is obsessed with Odysseus’ disguise as a beggar in the Odyssey. In keeping with Odysseus’ disguise in Homer, Odysseus appears ‘in disguise’ in New World fiction in the sense that so much time has elapsed and so much has changed that it is hard to recognize him. I felt myself drifting along with Homer’s Beggar as he travelled blindly, brilliantly around the world until he came to pre-Columbian South America and arrived in the gravity of art—much denuded, much later, in a twentiethcentury extension of himself, in West Street. He was so different, so disguised, except that he was still a Beggar, that my son did not know him.117

In Homer, Odysseus’ struggle to return and to regain his home is inextricably linked to questions of identity and recognition: who people say they are and who they really are. The double theme of return and recognition at the heart of the poem helps to explain how this work, applied to the Caribbean by colonial travellers, has been successfully assimilated to Caribbean experience. It is easy to find fault with the ideal of returning the middle passage and attempting to 114

Harris 1993b: 358–9. Quoting Cooper 2005: 401. See Cooper 2005: passim for a critique of ahistorical modes in postcolonial theory. 116 See Dougherty 1997: 355–6 on learning to read Homer again after Walcott; and Friedman 2007: passim. 117 Harris 2003: 40. 115

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‘go back’. As critics point out, such a return is an impossible fiction. As the narrator asks in The Mask of the Beggar: What is homecoming when we scarcely know those who are lost, our alien brothers, sisters, husbands, wives? What is home, after long years, when we arrive like solid ghosts?118

Homer’s Odyssey offers a complex myth of return in which nostalgia for a distant home is preserved, but the inevitability of change and irresolvable distance is also admitted. As Pietro Pucci comments, writing about the relationship between the themes of recognition and return in the Odyssey: This [the metaphysical myth of a ‘return to the same’] is a myth that the text may entertain but cannot achieve. Because it assumes the existence of a simple, identifiable origin and the possibility of repetition without difference, it contradicts the movement of the sign itself and of writing . . . Odysseus cannot return to the same, for the nature of return, no less than that of recognition, excludes the possibility of sameness.119

Nor is this solely a philosophical or aesthetic phenomenon; Pucci’s remarks also apply to the ‘history of catastrophe’ in the Caribbean.120 The catastrophe of the genocide of the Amerindian peoples in the Caribbean, the catastrophe of the middle passage, and subsequently the brutal upheaval of the indentured labourers brought/bought from East India turned worlds upside down; but although the dream of return was a prominent motif in Caribbean literature in the twentieth century, it is a dream that exists in tension with the historical and cultural changes that people have suffered in the region. As Aijaz Ahmad has commented on the presence of English in India, ‘History is not really open to correction through a return passage to an imaginary point centuries ago, before the colonial deformation set in . . .’121 In the context of the Caribbean, 118 Harris 2003: 3. The (im)possibility of return is an enduring question in diaspora studies: see, e.g., Safran 2004: 16: ‘Can one ever go home again?’ Compare Phillips 2002: 131: ‘Caribbean people are forever moving between different versions of “home”.’ 119 Pucci [1987] 1995: 128. See Henriksen 2006: 39. 120 See the quotation from Brathwaite quoted on p. 21 above (with n. 3). 121 Ahmad 1992: 77.

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Brathwaite’s Rights of Passage, originally published in 1967, ends with the statement ‘There is no j turning back.’122 The Odyssey may have been put upon the Caribbean by European travellers, but Wilson Harris and Derek Walcott have drawn upon a New World context to construct a Caribbean Odyssey. Following Pucci’s stress on the impossibility of a return to the same, we might say that the Caribbean receptions of the Odyssey studied here represent a response to the poem that goes to the heart of contemporary interpretation. However, this raises the question of the extent to which interpretations of the Odyssey are prepared to recognize these Caribbean receptions. At issue here are the debates about the appropriation of the classical past that exercise classical reception studies. I conclude this discussion of the Caribbean Homer by developing the theme of (mis)recognition, which I mentioned in the context of naming (pp. 44–9 above). (Mis)recognition is a fundamental theme, both in Homer’s Odyssey and modern criticism of this work, as well as in modern Caribbean literature. Kenneth Warren has identified ‘necessary misrecognitions’ as an essential characteristic of black diasporic subjectivity in the poetry of Langston Hughes.123 According to Warren, ‘recognition can never preclude misrecognition because one can always be identified as other than what one claims to be’.124 Conversely, selfmisrecognitions are necessary in order to fashion identities that can assimilate and make sense of both past histories and present circumstances in diaspora communities. When seen solely from a proprietary colonial perspective, Caribbean readings of Old World myths are sometimes charged with misrecognition or—more baldly—error. The clearest statement is found in George Lamming’s introduction to his volume of essays The Pleasures of Exile, which present a sustained counterreading of Shakespeare’s Tempest: It will not help to say that I am wrong in the parallels which I have set out to interpret, for I shall reply that my mistake, lived and deeply felt by millions of men like me—proves the positive value of error. It is a value which you must learn.125 122 123 124 125

Brathwaite [1973] 2000: 85. See Torres-Saillant 1997: 103 for discussion. Warren 1993: 404–5, and passim. Ibid. 400. Lamming [1960] 1992a: 13; see Hulme 2000b: 224 for comment.

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Lamming’s declaration of a right to error can be interpreted as a version of ‘the empire writing back’—a response to the wilful projections of foreign and alien forms onto the landscape and people of the Caribbean in colonial discourses. Seen in this way, misrecognitions are cunning strategies that enable Caribbean authors to possess and manipulate the names and corresponding myths that were transposed onto the Caribbean along with colonization. I explore this theme more fully in Chapter 3 below where I argue that the misquotation of Classics is an important trope in the reception of Classics in modern Caribbean literature, forcing a debate about what constitutes misappropriation and error—a debate that turns critical attention back onto the appropriation of Classics by colonial powers.

FOREIGN LINES OF VERSE: WALCOT T ’S DIALOGUE WITH MODERN GREECE We come full circle: this chapter began with Patrick Leigh Fermor projecting Greece onto the Caribbean, it ends with Walcott writing back to Greece, addressing the poet George Seferis and relating to the latter poet’s struggle to recuperate the difficult legacy of the ancient Greek past.126 I want to suggest that George Seferis’s Hellenist conception of Hellenism complements, and is mutually enriched by, Walcott’s reinvention of Greece in the Caribbean. In Walcott, Seferis’s struggle to articulate a viable relationship between the ‘new’ Greece and the ‘old’ Greece has analogies with the situation of the poet in the ‘New World’, forced to mediate between a hybrid inheritance in which the cultures of Europe occupy an overbearing position. When read through Walcott’s poetry, aspects of neo-Hellenism resonate with the anti-colonial struggle to create national cultures in 126 At a press conference in Athens held on 17 October 2006 to mark the occasion and honour of the award on an honorary degree from Athens University (18 October 2006), Walcott remarked, ‘It must be tough to be a Greek poet, having to deal with the weight of all that stuff . . . Any young Greek poet who lifts a pen is lifting a column’ (quoted in Nilan 2006).

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the face of invasive cultural imperialism. Walcott is not the only anglophone Caribbean poet to have opened up dialogue with modern Greece: the Jamaican poet A. L. (Arthur Lemiere) Hendriks wrote a version, or what he calls ‘a transference of the idea’, of Cavafy’s famous poem ‘Ithaki’ (‘Ithaca’) in Jamaican English.127 I cannot claim that there is any obvious connection between George Seferis and Derek Walcott. Arguably the only ‘connection’ between the two men is the fact that they both won the Nobel Prize for poetry (Seferis in 1963, Walcott in 1992). Walcott was born in 1930, Seferis died in 1971. Walcott self-published his first collection of poems in 1948, and subsequently six volumes of Walcott’s poetry were published to critical acclaim within Seferis’s lifetime,128 but I have not been able to ascertain if Seferis read any of Walcott’s poetry. That Seferis had some knowledge of Caribbean poetry is indicated by his diary entry for Monday, 24 June 1946, where he records something that he has noticed ‘by chance rereading Saint-John Perse’s Anabase in Eliot’s English translation (London, 1930)’.129 Saint-John Perse—the nom de plume of Alexis Saint-Le´ger Le´ger (1877–1975)— was born in Guadeloupe in the French Antilles and was the first Caribbean writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1960. In his own Nobel Lecture ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’, Walcott claimed Perse’s Anabase as a modern Caribbean epic.130 While it is debatable to what extent Seferis read Perse as an Antillean poet rather than a French poet, they were certainly acquainted; in his biography of Seferis Roderick Beaton notes occasions on which Seferis and Saint-John Perse, both poet-diplomats, met.131 In the case of Walcott, knowledge of Seferis is easier to demonstrate. In addition to the references to Seferis in the poem ‘From This Far’ (see p. 64–5 below), Walcott told me that he has read some of Seferis’s poems in translation and that George Kalogeris, a

127 Hendriks 1988: 69–70. In Hendriks’s version, the elusive ‘Ithaca’ of Cavafy’s poem comes to stand for the pursuit of nationhood and national identity in the West Indies. 128 25 Poems (1948), Epitaph for the Young (1949), In a Green Night (1962), Selected Poems (1964), The Castaway (1965), and The Gulf (1969). 129 Seferis 1974: 2. 130 131 Walcott 1998: 78–9; see also 281–9. Beaton 2003: 337, 383.

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Greek poet whom Walcott taught at Boston, had described for him the effect of reading Seferis’s poetry in Greek.132 Seferis’s poem ‘On a Foreign Line of Verse’ (‘— ø ’ Æ

å ’) was written in December 1931.133 The title alludes to the opening line of sonnet 31 of Les Regrets (1558) by the Renaissance French poet Joachim Du Bellay (1522–60): ‘Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage’, which supplies the first line of Seferis’s poem in Greek translation: ¯PıåØ f ŒÆ e ÆØ F ˇı Æ. David Ricks has offered a compelling analysis of this poem in chapter 11 of The Shade of Homer.134 Ricks identifies a tension, at the heart of Seferis’s poem, between ‘the Ulysses of the Western Classical Tradition’ on the one hand, and the ‘Modern Greek Odisseás’ on the other hand (126). He goes on to explain that, when seen in the context of this tension, the ‘foreign verse’ in the poem is doubly foreign: ‘the verse referred to is “foreign” both because it derives from Du Bellay’s French . . . and, emotionally, because the speaking voice is outside the Greek world and trying to establish access to it through what is to hand: a Western Ulysses’ (127). In Seferis’s conception, Du Bellay’s verse is a Western European appropriation of the myth of Odysseus’ return, which intervenes between the poet-narrator and the ‘Greek’ Homer. In this sense, Joachim Du Bellay is a prime example of the foreignization of Hellenism, if I can call it that, which Seferis famously defined in the essay ‘Dialogue on Poetry: What is Meant by Hellenism?’—the phenomenon whereby works and ideas exported from Greece in Graeco-Roman antiquity were spread outside Greece and, indeed, kept alive outside Greece under the period of Turkish occupation, only to be brought back to Greece as foreign imports in the desire to ‘reclaim’ Hellenism. Since the time of Alexander the Great we have scattered our Hellenism far and wide. We have sown it throughout the world: ‘As far as Bactria we took it, as far as the Indians,’ as Cavafy says. And this vast diaspora was to have a significant result. Hellenism was worked upon, reformed and revivified, right down to the time of the Renaissance, by personalities who were some-

132 133

Interview with Derek Walcott (St Lucia, 25 March 2002). 134 Seferis 1994: 87–9. Ricks [1989] 2004.

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times Greek and sometimes not. And after that time, which marks the enslavement of the Greek race, it was shaped by personalities who were not Greek at all and who worked outside the Greek area. And we should remember that it was in this period that were created those great works which crystallized the form of the civilization which we know today as European.135

Seferis gives examples of these foreign appropriations, which include Dante’s Ulysses and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, but Joachim Du Bellay’s adaptation of motifs from the Odyssey in his sonnets would be yet another example.136 However, insofar as there is a tension between a classical Greek Odysseus and a modern Greek, folk Odisseás, as Ricks has argued, then there is a sense in which the Odyssey is also, potentially, ‘foreign verse’.137 The narrator describes epiphanies of Odysseus, which come to him at moments when he sits ‘surrounded on all sides by exile’ (æØªıæØ Ie c ØØ).138 However, although Odysseus embodies exile and offers consolation through the example of his desire for nostos (‘his ripe longing to see once more the smoke ascending j from his warm hearth and the dog grown old waiting j by the door’),139 he is not himself ‘home’. The Odysseus of this poem symbolizes a continuous Greek tradition in that he is described whispering ‘words j in our language spoken as it was three thousand years ago’ (ºªØÆ B ªºÆ Æ, ‹ø c Øº FÆ / æd æE åØºØ åæ ØÆ).140 Over the course of the poem Odysseus is assimilated into a more familiar tradition—the Cretan epic Erotokritos: Because he speaks humbly and calmly, without effort, as though he were my father

135

Seferis [1966] 1992: 92, translated by Rex Warner and T. D. Frangopoulos. Aside from the Odyssean theme of sonnet 31 (playfully mocked in sonnet 130), Les Regrets is pertinent to Seferis for its engagement with the theme of exile since it was written from the perspective of a period of exile in Rome (1553–7) and explores tensions between Du Bellay’s native homeland, France, and Rome as imaginary homeland of Renaissance humanism. 137 In his biography of Seferis, Roderick Beaton notes that Seferis had re-read the Odyssey in the summer of 1931 and had read Joyce’s Ulysses for the first time; a few months later he would compose ‘On a Line of Foreign Verse’ (Beaton 2003: 92). 138 Seferis 1994: 87. 139 140 Seferis 1995: 42. Seferis 1994: 88; 1995: 42. 136

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The fact that Odysseus speaks ‘humbly and calmly, without effort’ suggests a humbling and debasement of the elevated ideal of Homeric epic of classical literature, a bringing down to earth in line with the Greek folk tradition. Roderick Beaton notes that one of the boatbuilders and fishermen whom Seferis had got to know during his holiday in Skiathos in 1931, and who reminded him of the community in Skala, was a man called Sotiris Stamelos, who was in Seferis’s eyes a living embodiment of Homer and of Makriyannis, a folk hero of the Greek War of Independence (1821). ‘On a Line of Foreign Verse’ was written in London. When the poet-narrator describes the epiphany of Odysseus at moments when he sits ‘surrounded on all sides by exile’ (æØªıæØ Ie c ØØ), the exile involved is double: it is both physical separation from a geographical ‘Helladic’ Greece, and alienation from an ideological construct of a Hellenic Greece which Seferis is struggling to negotiate in his mind. If we take just one of these poles, Helladic Greece, then there is not a single, coherent home or Greek homeland in the poem. Instead, the ‘home’ to which the narrator’s imagination travels is the seaside home in Skala tou Vourlou, a coastal town c.30 miles from Smyrna where Seferis, who was a Greek from Asia Minor, used to spend summer holidays as a boy. Since the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 when the Greek population of Asia Minor was expelled by the Turkish army under the leadership of the Turkish nationalist Mustafa Kemal, this town was in Turkey and no longer part of the Greek homeland. The instinct to bring Seferis and Walcott into dialogue over Homer’s ‘foreign verse’ finds confirmation in the fact that the programme for Walcott’s play The Odyssey, which ran in The Pit at the Barbican in 1993 (opening on 22 June), included an excerpt from Seferis’s ‘On a Foreign Line of Verse’ (in English translation) to 141 Seferis 1995: 43, translated by Keeley and Sherrard. Erotokritos is a romance by the Cretan poet Vitsentzos Kornaros (1553–1617), the most important poet of the Cretan Renaissance. For Seferis’s affinity for Erotokritos acquired in childhood, see Beaton 2003: 19.

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illustrate the way in which Odysseus’ nostos has captured the cultural imagination of poets who have found in it a powerful representation of exile.142 Like Seferis, Walcott had also approached Homer through Du Bellay’s poem in Another Life (1973), in a bawdy section that sends up Odysseus as the stock character of the cuckold. The quotation occurs in chapter 6, section 4, of Another Life,143 a work which was written over a seven-year period spanning the years 1965–72. Whereas Seferis had translated the line into Greek, Walcott retains the French, but only quotes half of the line, substituting an alternative. Heureux qui comme Ulysse, ou Capitaine Foquarde, while his pomegranate-skinned Martiniquan Penelope rocks in her bentwood chair, laughing, stitching ripped knickers . . . 144

The addition of the name ‘Capitaine Foquarde’ to the end of the halfline from Du Bellay is bathetic, and effects a much more literal debasement of both Du Bellay and Homer than the debasement that I suggested in the case of Seferis’s recasting Odysseus as a humbler, demotic figure than the Odysseus of the European classical tradition. In Walcott’s poem the name Foquarde is a phonetic interlingual pun, which plays on the sound of this French name in English ‘Fock ’ard’. A few lines later Walcott has the line ‘Foquarde. Coquarde’ (l. 943); in their commentary Baugh and Nepaulsingh note that the French noun coquarde refers to ‘an old man who is overconfident in his sexual abilities’.145 Penelope is recast as a loose, Martinican woman who, instead of weaving a funeral shroud for Laertes, is stitching her ripped knickers. The vignette featuring Capitaine Foquarde and his wife Penelope is part of a larger sequence, beginning in chapter 3, which

142

The play—an RSC production directed by Walcott and Greg Doran—was first staged in The Other Place at Stratford-upon-Avon, where it ran from July 1992 to January 1993. For the performance and re-performance of the play, see Hardwick 2007: 62. The programme for the performance at the Barbican also included a translation of Du Bellay’s ‘Heureux qui . . .’, on which see Baugh 2006a: 227. 143 Walcott 2004: 39–40. 144 Lines 928–33 of Another Life (Walcott 2004: 39). 145 Baugh and Nepaulsingh in Walcott 2004: 256.

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parodies the classical education of the poet’s childhood and features allusions to characters from Greek mythology. Characters such as Ajax and Helen are given local counterparts. Hence Helen becomes ‘Janie, the town’s one clear-complexioned whore’ (l. 413). At the start of chapter 7, following on from the description of Capitaine Foquarde, the narrator reflects on his own mythical method, explaining that, Provincialism loves the pseudo-epic, so if these heroes have been given a stature disproportionate to their cramped lives, remember I beheld them at knee-height . . .146

On the periphery of empire in St Lucia, instead of ‘epic’ we have pseudo-epic, populated by local characters. The method of appropriating Homer in Another Life (1973) is transformed in subsequent poems, leading to Achille and Hector the St Lucian protagonists of Omeros (1990), whose names have their own, local roots, and ultimately to what Robert Hamner has termed ‘the creolization of Homer’ in The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1993).147 Walcott opens up dialogue with Seferis in the poem ‘From This Far’,148 where a Greek tanker on the ocean serves as a metaphor for the submarine (or supramarine) unity of poetry and enables Walcott to converse with Seferis about the complex relationship with the ancient Greek past in the latter’s poetry. This conversation also includes the Greek poet Cavafy.149 In Walcott’s imagination the ship becomes a cultural vehicle, with ‘a cargo of marble heads; j from Orpheus to 146

2004: 41, ll. 952–5. Hamner 2001. Baugh 2006a: 200 suggests ‘it is not so much a matter of Caribbeanizing Homer as of affirming the Black presence in a modern globalized world’. Hardwick 2007: 66 offers a reading of the play in which Walcott exploits the disruption of linear, historical time to stage a meeting between ‘“past” text and its readings and the present perception’; her emphasis on Walcott’s commitment to the principle that ancient and modern can speak is pertinent to the kind of conversation that I am constructing between Walcott, Seferis, and Homer. 148 The Fortunate Traveller (1981: 29–32), CP 414–17. See Thieme 1999: 167; Burnett 2000: 103; and Melas 2007: 129. My discussion of the poem in this paragraph repeats material published in Greenwood 2005a: 84–5. 149 The reference to Cavafy is contained in the lines ‘I see the other who invited the barbarians j into the whitewashed streets’ (1981: 32), referring to Cavafy’s poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (‘æØ

Æ f Æææ ı’), written in 1888 and first published in 1904. 147

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Onassis’. In Seferis’s poetry buried marble statues and ruins symbolize the underlying layers of Greek culture in all its historical guises, protruding through the surface and interfering with the present.150 The reference to Seferis’s poetry becomes more specific as the poem proceeds: in section 3, Walcott writes, ‘I remember you holding a heavy marble head.’151 This line alludes to the third poem in Seferis’s Mythistoreˆma (published in 1935; written between December 1933 and December 1934), which begins: ‘I woke with this marble head in my hands.’152 In Seferis’s poem the marble head is a cultural deadweight and symbolizes the struggle with the Greek past and its literature, which is one of the major preoccupations in Mythistoreˆma. For Walcott, Seferis’s poetry has become shorthand for the struggle to construct a viable tradition between past and present cultures. More specifically, Seferis’s poetry epitomizes the struggle with the legacy of Hellenism, which is also felt in the ‘Mediterranean of the new world’, or the ‘Caribbean Aegean’. However, the ‘marble head’ is also an allusion to Walcott’s own game with the past, as becomes evident in the poem ‘Greece’, which follows just one poem after ‘From This Far’.153 In this poem Walcott is shouldering an ancient Greek deadweight of his own (‘I climbed, carrying a body round my shoulders’), but as the poem progresses the body (corpus in Latin, both human body and literary corpus) is revealed to be a book, or even the book in the European canon— Homer’s Iliad.154 The poet-narrator’s successful unburdening of this body is the action that is needed to enable forwards movement; not a break with the past because, as Walcott reminds us, ‘revolutionary

150

See Padel 1985: 92. Melas (2007: 128–9) discusses the relationship between Seferis and Walcott, stressing the nightmare of the (Greek) past in Greek modernism and suggesting (129) that the nightmare vision in this poem from Mythistoreˆma ‘stands as a contrast and corrective to the “yearning for ruins” and the envy of elegy Walcott sees as symptoms of postcolonial desire for historical filiation’. 152 Seferis 1995: 5, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Seferis 1994: 45: ‘˛ ÅÆ b e ÆææØ F ŒçºØ a å æØÆ’). 153 Walcott 1981: 35–6. Thieme 1999: 167–9 offers an excellent discussion of the classical allusions in this poem. 154 ‘The body that I had thrown down at my foot j was not really a body but a great book’ (1981: 35). On ‘corpus’, see Farrell 1999 on the poem as bookish body in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 151

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literature is a filial impulse’,155 but forwards movement within the tradition. John Thieme interprets this action as the necessary condition for Walcott’s engagement with Greek epic on his own terms, anticipating Omeros.156 Although Walcott disclaims the cultural inheritance of Greece in the poem ‘From This Far’ (‘I stayed with my own’), the fact that the poem entails a complex web of allusion to Greek literature from Homer to Seferis immediately undermines this claim. As Paula Burnett notes in her discussion of this poem, ‘the task of Antillean art was to be, as Walcott defines it, the assimilation of the features of every ancestor: pluralism was its imperative, with each of the region’s cultures represented.’157 I suggest that Walcott’s use of Seferis in this poem represents an ironic inversion of ‘On a Foreign Line of Verse’, where Seferis’s poem has become the ‘foreign verse’, but one whose subject is germane to the New World situation of the Caribbean. For Walcott, I think that the chief appeal of Seferis’s modernism is the fact that it complicates the facile construct of a classically based Western European culture that was variously challenged, and explored, but more often upheld by European modernism. In the essay ‘Dialogue on Poetry: What is Meant By Hellenism?’ (cited on p. 60 above), Seferis traced the scattering of Hellenism through a Hellenic diaspora, and the subsequent foreign intervention in Hellenism, leading to the reimportation of foreign values. In the latter half of the twentieth century Seferis’s own version of Hellenism has been exported to the Caribbean and elsewhere. A consequence of this dissemination is the journey back,158 such as the award of an honorary degree to Walcott by the University of Athens in October 2006 (see p. 58 n. 126 above), and the publication in 2007 by the publishing house Kastaniotis of Selected Poems by Walcott translated into Greek by Katerina Anghelaki155

Walcott 1998: 36. Thieme 1999: 169 ‘Paradoxically, this act of wiping the cultural slate clean also ushers in the possibility of a local Iliad : the quarrel between a St. Lucian Achilles and Hector provides the starting-point for Omeros’ (‘Hector’s and Achilles’ rages’ are mentioned at Walcott 1981: 36). See also Baugh 2006a: 159. 157 Burnett 2000: 103; see p. 181 below, with n. 218. 158 For the journey back, or ‘voyage in’, to use Edward Said’s phrase (Said [1993] 1994: 288–316), see p. 203 below. 156

An Accidental Homer

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Rooke and Stephanos Papadopoulos, the latter a Greek-American poet who has been supported by Walcott in his own career as poet.159 It is possible to argue that Walcott’s poetry has informed the poetry of Stephanos Papadopoulos, whose first volume of poetry, Lost Days, written in English, mediates between modern Greek literature and a broader, cosmopolitan culture, and includes several poems set in St Lucia.160 ‘Mavraki’, the first poem in the collection, treats contemporary Athens from the perspective of Mavraki, an elderly Cretan street-seller and veteran, offering a wry perspective on the commodification and absurdification of Greece in the tourist thoroughfares of Athens.161 The poet-narrator meditates on the future of Hellenism: ‘Where do we go from here?’ (1). There are shades here of the pessimism of Seferis and perhaps even echoes of the poem ‘In the Manner of G.S.’, but in the choice of the persona Mavraki there is also a sense that Greece is being seen through a broader cultural lens.162 Mavraki is a genuine Cretan surname, and the poem glosses it as such (‘Mavro means black, Aki, from Crete’) (1); but mavraki (a diminutive whose literal meaning is ‘little black’) and the noun mavro from which it derives, can also be used to describe a black person, both neutrally and pejoratively.163 It is tempting to see a black presence here and to interpret the name Mavraki doing double duty as a metaphor for the alienation and dispossession of the eponymous character whose sense of alienation has led him to feel like a black man in his own nation. It has been said that the Caribbean diaspora has created its identity through the narratives of others.164 I hope to have shown that, although the Caribbean version of the Odyssey for the New World follows the paths of words laid by travel-writers (Froude’s Bow 159

Walcott invited Stephanos Papadopoulos to take part in the first workshop organized by his Rat Island Foundation on St Lucia in 1998. 160 Papadopoulos 2001; for poems set in St Lucia, see pp. 42–5. 161 Papadopoulos 2001: 2, ‘Salmon-tired tourists move up Hadrianou, j they have made the ocean crossing to come to this: j a street of jewellery shops and plaster, j authentic Greeks in authentic shops.’ 162 ‘In the manner of G.S.’/ ‘b e æ ı ˆ..’: Seferis 1994: 99–101; 1995: 52–3. 163 Mavro and mavraki (the (little) black stuff) are also terms for cannabis, although this sense has no bearing on the poem. 164 Birat 2004: 10.

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of Ulysses, and Fermor’s Hellenizing gaze which carries Greece before it), Caribbean authors have been able to turn the metaphor of the Caribbean as new Aegean or the new Mediterranean into an enabling trope. In Walcott’s case it is striking that he has often used the example of modern Greece as an ally in his postcolonial engagement with the legacy of Greece. The quest for a Hellenic Hellenism, as distinct from a European Hellenism, in the work of Seferis finds a counterpart in Walcott’s conception of ‘our Homer’ and Martı´’s conception of ‘our Greece’.165 In ‘Caliban’, an essay that engages profoundly with Martı´’s ‘Nuestra Ame´rica’, Roberto Fernańdez Retamar observed in a sardonic aside that the Caribbean Sea is ‘referred to genially by some as the American Mediterranean, just as if we were to call the Mediterranean the Caribbean of Europe’.166 In the work of Walcott, Retamar’s ‘just as if’ becomes a serious proposition. 165 My italics; see pp. 5–6 (‘our Greece’) and 6 (‘our Homer’) above. On Hellenic Hellenism, see Leontis 1995: 115. 166 Retamar 1989: 6 (trans. Edward Baker), translating Retamar 1971: 13: ‘el mar Caribe (al que algunos llaman simpa´ticamente el Mediterrańeo americano; algo ası´ como si nosotros llama´ramos al Mediterrańeo el Caribe europeo.’

2 Classics as School of Empire We among the blacks who received a good education learnt what we knew from the classical writings of Western civilization. We knew that the principles which were enshrined in those classical works did not apply in the Caribbean. But when we went abroad we found to our astonishment that they did not apply there also.1

The question of the extent to which Greece and Rome were theirs looms large in anglophone Caribbean writers’ accounts of encounters with Classics in the colonial classroom. C. L. R. James’s reflection on his education in Trinidad identifies the analogical mode at the heart of the colonial educational curriculum in the Caribbean colonies. This analogical mode meant that everything studied was relayed through a prism of empire in which whole civilizations were collapsed into an imperial tradition in which Pericles’ Funeral Oration was one with the culture of Victorian Britain. Writing about the educational context in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, Gordon Rohlehr remarked that: [F]or generations, some of the best minds among the colonized, feeling acutely their lack of ‘history’ and ‘tradition’, tired themselves out in trying to possess ‘the whole literature of Europe from Homer’ . . . 2

C. L. R. James’s realization that the ideals contained in the classical texts which he had studied as part of the colonial curriculum were absent in

1

C. L. R. James personal communication with Reinhard Sander, 26 January 1979; quoted in Sander 1988: 112 with n. 24 (114). 2 Rohlehr 1981: 9, quoted on p. 3 above (n. 11).

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British society is replicated in the works of other anglophone Caribbean writers in the twentieth century. In fact, disillusionment about the integrity of European culture and corresponding awakening are at the heart of modern Caribbean fiction, and the reassessment of GraecoRoman civilization assumes an important role in this process. In the previous chapter I put forward an argument about tropes in Walcott’s New World reception of Homer; subsequent chapters will examine how anglophone Caribbean writers have laid claim to other aspects of the classical tradition. The present chapter considers the representation of classical pedagogy in the depiction of the colonial curriculum in modern anglophone Caribbean literature. I suggest that these scenes correspond to clear tropes which, in turn, are influential in the broader reception of Classics in Caribbean literature.

CLASSICS AND THE EDUCATIONAL ELITE C. L. R. James was born in Trinidad in 1901. From 1911 to 1918 he attended Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad, to which he won a prestigious government scholarship. James sat his School Certificate examination—an exam set and marked overseas by the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board (OCSEB)—in 1917, receiving passes in English, history, Latin, French, and elementary maths.3 In that year, James was one of twenty-five pupils in the Caribbean who sat School Certificate examinations in Latin (e) or Greek (f).4 Of these, twenty-four students took Latin, ten students took Latin and Greek, and one student took Greek on its own.5 These students all came from three schools: Queen’s Royal College (Trinidad), St Mary’s Trinidad, and Harrison 3 In the publication of results for overseas candidates, James’s results are listed as follows: C. L. R. James b, c, e, g+, i (b = English; c = history; e = Latin; g+ = French, i = elementary maths. Source: OCEX 50/21). 4 Note that this figure only applies to students at schools that used the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board. Schools could also use the London University Examination board. On the history of the Oxford and Cambridge examination boards, and the joint board (after 1873), see Watts 2008 and Stockwell 1990 for the role that the board played in Britain’s colonies. 5 Source: OCEX 50/21.


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College (Barbados).6 In the same year, fourteen students at these three schools took a combination of Latin (a) and Greek (b) in Higher Certificate Examinations, with twelve students gaining passes in both Latin and Greek.7 H. A. M. Beckles, one of the students at Harrison College (Barbados), gained a distinction in Higher Latin. To put this in context, in the year 1918, the total number of passes in Latin and Greek at Higher Certificate level was 310, with only fourteen distinctions in Latin, and six in Greek.8 At the same time that C. L. R. James was sitting his School Certificate examination in Trinidad, in Barbados Grantley Adams was sitting Higher Certificate examinations in Latin and Greek (a, b).9 The case of Grantley Adams is instructive: he first appears in the publication containing results for overseas schools in 1913, where he is listed as passing the Lower School Certificate with passes in Latin, Greek, French, elementary mathematics, scripture knowledge, English, and history.10 He then attains the Higher Certificate examination in 1915, with passes in Latin, Greek, elementary mathematics, scripture knowledge, English, and history.11 In total, eleven candidates passed the Higher Certificate examination in Barbados in this year. Of these eleven, the names of nine candidates are prefixed by asterisks, indicating that they had already attained the certificate at a former examination. In other words, these candidates are repeating the examination with a view to winning the one island scholarship

6 Harrison College was founded in 1773; Queen’s Royal College (initially the Queen’s Collegiate School) in 1859, and St Mary’s College in 1863. On the background of the latter two schools, see Campbell 1992: 25–6. 7 Note that the alphabetic notation for subjects in the Higher Certificate examination differs from that used for the School Certificate examination. 8 Source: OCEX: 50.27 ‘Decennial Report of the Board for the years 1914–23’. 9 Sir Grantley Adams (1898–1971; knighted in 1957) was a barrister and member of the Queen’s Counsel. From 1954–8 he was Premier of Barbados, which was still a dependency of Britain, and from 1958 to 1962 he was the Prime Minister of the West Indian Federation. 10 G. H. Adams a b c F I j k (source: OCEX 50/18). The capital letters denote distinctions in elementary mathematics and scripture knowledge, respectively. Prior to 1917, the school examinations on offer from the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board were the Lower School Certificate and the Higher Certificate. In 1917 the Lower Certificate was removed and the ‘School Certificate’ was introduced in its place. 11 G. H Adams a b f i+ j k (source: OCEX: 50/19). The sign + after i denotes that the candidate showed a satisfactory acquaintance with the passages from the Greek New Testament on the scripture paper.

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allocated to Barbados each year to fund Higher Education at a university in the British Empire (typically in Britain or Canada).12 Grantley Adams was no exception: he repeated the Higher Certificate examination in 1916 and again in 1917. Finally he was awarded the Barbados Island Scholarship in 1918, which enabled him to study law at Oxford. In Barbados a single island scholarship was introduced in 1850; Trinidad introduced two island scholarships in 1870, increased to four in the period 1870–1903. In 1904, this was reduced to three scholarships, and then reduced to two in 1919, one of which was earmarked as an agricultural scholarship. In 1925 this was altered to one general scholarship and one science scholarship.13 British Guiana introduced island scholarships in 1882, and St Lucia in 1918.14 In the case of the Leeward Islands, the scholarship, introduced in 1917, was divided across seven islands.15 The tremendous prestige attached to these scholarships should not obscure the paucity of opportunity for successive generations of intelligent, ambitious, educated West Indian students. For those who deserved scholarships but did not win them, there were very few other opportunities for higher education. Writing in 1968, Gordon Lewis wrote that ‘the scars left behind by the old island scholarship system can still be seen in West Indian life’ and offered the following indictment of the scholarship system: It was a grinding, merciless system that each year, or sometimes biennially, let one favoured candidate through the escape-hatch from the colonial prison; and it would be difficult to estimate who was damaged most, the

12 The University College of the West Indies (now the University of the West Indies) was not established until 1946 and admitted its first students in October 1948 to study medicine; students for science degrees were admitted in 1949, and students for arts degrees in 1950. When Grantley Adams left school, the only university in the British West Indies was Codrington College in Barbados, which awarded external degrees in Classics and Divinity from Durham University. On institutions ‘of university rank’ in the Caribbean region (i.e. not just the British West Indies) already in existence prior to the foundation of the UCWI, see Williams 1968: 109. Further discussion on pp. 74–5 below. 13 See Williams 1969: 22, 30. 14 See Campbell 1992: 19 on the island scholarships in Trinidad; on island scholarships in other islands, see Bacchus 1994: 248–9. 15 See Fergus 2003b: 135 who notes that a Leeward Islands scholarship was first proposed in December 1893. The seven islands in the Leeward group are Anguilla, Antigua, British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Montserrat, Nevis, and St Christopher.


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winners who themselves frequently collapsed from tension and exhaustion of new studies, or the losers who gave up hope as marked ‘failures’ . . . 16

Of the writers discussed in this book, Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados), V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad), and Eric Williams (Trinidad) all won island scholarships.17 For those few students who were fortunate enough to win government exhibitions or scholarships to the elite schools in the different islands, one of the ways in which their educational experience was distinguished from that of their contemporaries on the island was by the fact that they learned advanced Latin and, in a few cases, Greek. It was widely recognized that this elite education was a means of socioeconomic advancement, opening up better-paid jobs with better status and enabling the student in question to better him- or herself.18 This phenomenon is satirized in chapter 4 of V. S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street (1959), where Elias, one of the boys on the street, harbours the ambition to become a doctor, while the other boys on the street aspire to become cart-drivers. In pursuit of this ambition Elias prepares for the Cambridge Senior School Certificate examination, under the dubious tutelage of Titus Hoyt. As preparation for this exam, Elias has to learn Spanish, French, and Latin. The narrator describes how Elias fails the Certificate examination on the first sitting. Some on the street put the failure down to metropolitan prejudice: ‘Boyee said, “What else you expect? Who correct the papers? English man, not so? You expect them to give Elias a pass?”’19 The theme of colonial exclusion is also hinted at in Titus Hoyt’s qualification, displayed on a sign outside his house, which doubles as a schoolroom. The sign advertises Titus Hoyt’s credentials as ‘Titus Hoyt, I.A. (London, External)’ and holds out the

16

Lewis 1968: 87–8. Compare Fergus 2003b: 136 on the institution of the scholarship in the Leeward Islands: ‘the granting of the scholarship was compatible with the secondary education and social ethos of the era in which a tiny elite benefited at the expense of the entire society.’ See also Williams 1969: 23, 30 and James [1963] 1994a: 22. 17 Brathwaite’s scholarship took him to Cambridge (Pembroke College), Naipaul’s took him to Oxford (University College), and Williams’s scholarship took him to Oxford (St Catherine’s College). Slightly later (1962), Merle Hodge won the Trinidad and Tobago Girls’ Island Scholarship to pursue a BA in French at University College London. 18 Williams 1969: 24–5; Johnson 2006: 319–21. 19 Naipaul [1959] 2000a: 27.

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promise of guaranteed passes in the Cambridge School Certificate.20 The detail ‘External’ is imbued with comic resonance and undercuts the authenticity of his Inter Arts degree.21 The practice of requiring pupils at secondary schools in the British West Indies to take examinations set and marked in England by English examiners, and the practice of offering students in the colonies external degrees from British universities, are both heavily criticized in Eric Williams’s report on education in the British West Indies, first published in 1950.22 Of the former, Williams remarks that it ignores the environment of the West Indian student (16) and that ‘it is one of the prime reasons for that British West Indian tradition whereby the local product is depreciated and the foreign make coveted’ (55). According to The Report of the West Indies Committee of the Commission on Higher Education in the Colonies, in the decade 1934–43 approximately 600 students in the British West Indies took the external degree examinations of London University.23 After the affiliation of Codrington College in Barbados to Durham University in 1875, it was also possible for students at Codrington College in Barbados to take external degrees in Classics or Divinity from the University of Durham.24 Codrington College was founded by the legacy of Christopher Codrington (1668–1710), a plantation owner in Barbados, who was for a time Captain General of the Leeward Islands (1697–1703) and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. From 1745 to 1830 it existed as a grammar school, becoming a college of further education in 1830. The affiliation with Durham University lasted from 1875 to 1955, during which period 283 20

Naipaul [1959] 2000a: 26, 79. A point also made by Strongman 2007: 89. This report was based on a memorandum that Eric Williams prepared for the West Indian sub-committee of the British Commission on Higher Education in the Colonies (appointed in 1943), which published its own report in 1945. I cite from the American edition of Williams’s work, published in 1968 (Williams [1950] 1968). 23 Williams [1950] 1968: 83. 24 See Whiting 1932: 239: ‘The students pursued the whole course for the Durham degree in Arts of Theology at their own college, the University examination papers were sent out to them, the degree was conferred there by the Principal or the Bishop. The University had no control over the teachers or the teaching.’ On the affiliation between Codrington College and Durham University see Whiting 1932: ch. 13 and Simmons 1973. 21 22


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Codrington students gained degrees from Durham University.25 Commenting on the institution of external degrees, Eric Williams notes, ‘an external degree of Durham University, obtained by residence at Codrington College in Barbados, or an external degree of London University, obtained by private study, rates lower than a degree from Manchester University or Trinity College, Dublin’.26 This assertion is borne out in Naipaul’s story: when Elias fails, the suspicion about metropolitan bias against scripts from the colonies is compounded by the dubious status of Titus Hoyt’s ‘external’ degree, with the implicit suggestion that ‘external’ denotes exclusion from the centre of knowledge. On sitting the exam a second time, Elias passes with a third grade, but resits the following year in the hope of securing a second grade, only to fail again. Having settled for the more accessible career of Sanitary Inspector, Elias fails the exams for this too, ultimately ending up as cart-driver. In an article comparing Naipaul’s Miguel Street with Une enfance creóle II: chemin-d’ećole by the Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, Roberto Strongman has suggested that the satirical depiction of Elias’s failure to achieve academic success via the colonial system of education is part of a counter-discursive critique of this educational system on Naipaul’s part. According to this argument, ‘[Elias’s] repeated failure is a laughable occurrence which is used to condemn the internalization of developmental narratives which drive colonized subjects to approximate the telos of metropolitan standards.’27 Strongman is right insofar as the social and economic impoverishment of the community in Miguel Street is a product of colonial government and its failure to provide an adequate infrastructure for the society which its policies have created; however, the target of Naipaul’s satire is first and foremost the narrowness of opportunity in Trinidadian society and the consequent struggle to improve one’s position in society through education, leading to an instrumental view of education, rather than the colonial injustices that created this condition. Similarly, much of the satire is directed at the person of

25 26 27

Simmons 1973: 55. Williams [1950] 1968: 107. Strongman 2007: 93.

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Titus Hoyt, who exploits Elias in the hope of gaining vicarious glory and status through the latter’s exam results. This picture is confirmed in Austin Clarke’s memoirs of his schooldays in Barbados in the 1940s, Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack (1980).28 Looking back on his admission to Combermere School in 1944, Clarke describes the horizon of social expectation of pupils at this school for ‘middle- and lower middle-class boys’ ([1980] 2003: 6): ‘It was a second grade school. It would turn me into a civil servant, if I did well. If I didn’t do well, it would turn me into a sanitary inspector’ (ibid.).29 Clarke’s mother dreams of her son becoming a doctor: To be a doctor in those days, you had to know Latin backwards and forwards. You had to be a ‘Latin fool.’ Amas, amat and amamus would be the only things to save me from the hot sun of the bookkeeper; for the larvees of the sanitary inspector, dressed like a soldier of health; and from the low salary of the civil servant.30

In a very practical sense, then, Latin was the gateway to the higher professional careers and to a better livelihood, as it was in Britain. But to compound the inequities of class, in the Caribbean context social advancement through education was also riven with the inequities of race. This racial prejudice manifested itself in two different ways: first in terms of local attitudes to education, and secondly in terms of the lack of opportunities for well-educated black West Indians to take their place in the culture in which their studies had immersed them. In the generations in which the authors discussed in this book did their schooling (from C. L. R. James in the 1910s to Naipaul and Walcott in the 1940s), attitudes to education were shaped by the legacy of the plantation system, in which education 28

Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack is best described as autobiographical fiction. The book ends with the entry of Boy (Clarke) to secondary school (Harrison College); the sequel, Proud Empires, was published in 1986 and continues the story of Boy’s education, culminating in his graduation from secondary school and the award of an island scholarship to study in Canada. Clarke himself studied at the University of Toronto 1955–7, funded by his teacher’s salary from Barbados and supplementary earnings (see Algoo-Baksh 1994: 30–8). 29 In October 1945, 2,505 students were enrolled in secondary schools in Barbados (Williams [1950] 1968: 39), out of a population of 193,680 (the population size in the 1946 census). 30 Clarke [1980] 2003: 7. See Johnson 2006: 321.


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was deliberately withheld from slaves and, subsequently, from free plantation workers. In the worst case scenario, this led to the perception that education was fundamentally at odds with the place that black people had been dealt in the social hierarchy of the islands. This attitude is expressed by one of the characters in the novel The Children of Sisyphus (1964) by the Jamaican novelist and academic Orlando Patterson, who scoffs at the idea that her friend’s daughter might try to gain a government scholarship to secondary school: ‘Higher dem studies? Den is wha’ yu an’ yu pickney business wid dat for? That is backra business. Wha’ de rass yu goin’ sen’ yu pickney fe higher her studies fo’? Is bust yu wan fe bus’ de pickney brain? Education no mek fo’ neager people, yu know.’31

The Rastafari community at the centre of the novel is based around a slum in Kingston (‘the Dungle’). The classical allusion in Patterson’s title says it all: that there is a down-pressed socio-economic class in Jamaican society whose dreams of a better life are ‘mocked to death by time’ to use Zora Neale Hurston’s lyrical phrase.32 Based on the data from the 1943 census of Jamaica, in his Education in the British West Indies, Eric Williams noted that only 2 per cent of the population had a secondary education, and that, amongst the island’s black population, secondary enrolment fell to 1 per cent.33 In the 1960s, when Patterson’s novel was published, this class was still largely excluded from conventional secondary education. Such complete exclusion represents the worst case scenario; often the best case scenario was that education was appreciated and tolerated as long as it was tied to a utilitarian employment outcome.34 In the middleclass families where education was valued for its own sake, their children still faced an uphill battle to realize their intellectual potential in cultural climates that made very little provision for the life of the mind, and no certainty that they would flourish as writers, academics, or artists overseas. The alienation of the Caribbean writer from his or her surroundings is a commonplace of twentieth-century

31

Patterson [1964] 1982: 72. Hurston [1937] 1986: 9. See C. L. R. James’s review of Patterson’s novel (James 1984: 163–5; first published in the New Left Review in 1964). 33 34 Williams [1950] 1968: 38. Williams [1962] 1964: 247. 32

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criticism. Eric Roach, whom many saw as a victim of the dearth of opportunities for art in the region, commented: Although Cambridge school-certificated, we left school knowing absolutely nothing of ourselves, our country, its history and circumstance. We were adolescents lost between two worlds, one to which we belonged by birth but were educated to reject, the other we discovered in the books. We were, to coin a phrase, ‘exoticized natives’.35

This view is echoed by Jan Carew, writing in 1978, ‘The Caribbean writer today is a creature balanced between limbo and nothingness, exile abroad and homelessness at home, between the people on the one hand and the colonizer on the other.’36 The concept of the native exoticized through education speaks to the same sense of estrangement as Walcott’s ‘Afro-Greeks’ coinage (see p. 7 above). For Walcott and his schoolboy peers in St Lucia, following a curriculum with a heavy classical bias, their education made them insider-outsiders in both worlds.37 In an interview with Charles Rowell in 1987, reflecting on his own elite education, Walcott conceded that ‘when you look back, the gap between the college boy and the other boy in the street, who was not at college, is a social crime in a sense’.38 But he also insisted that, at the time, he and his peers at college did not feel any antagonism towards the elite educational schools from which they benefited, and that the standard of the schooling that they received was ‘in a way a debt to empire’.39 The retrospective consciousness of the divisions inherent in his colonial education, and in colonial society more broadly, resonates throughout Walcott’s work as he sketches a landscape in which learned poetry echoes in illiterate landscapes. In Walcott’s oeuvre this ambivalence peaks, but does not disappear, in Omeros, a masterpiece of classical form which is simultaneously an ‘epic of the dispossessed’, dedicated to Achille, a

35

Roach 1975, quoted in Rohlehr 1981: 7. Carew [1978] 1988: 91. The quotation is taken from the essay ‘The Caribbean Writer and Exile’ in the collection Fulcrums of Change. The essay was originally published in the Journal of Black Studies, 8/4 (June 1978): 453–75. 37 See Walcott’s reflection on his experience of teaching Latin to the next generation of students: ‘where were those brows heading | when neither world was theirs?’ (Walcott [1987] 1988: 23). 38 39 Walcott in Rowell 1996: 124. Ibid. 125–6, quoting from p. 126. 36


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St Lucian fisherman, who will never read it.40 But although Walcott’s poem, already a classic in his own lifetime, is the best-known engagement with Classics by a Caribbean writer, the ambivalent way in which Walcott represents classics and classical pedagogy belongs to an established Caribbean tradition.

CONTESTING THE CURRICULUM In the mid-twentieth century there was a revolution away from a curriculum dominated by Classics, imposed by the colonial government in the different islands, and towards the history and culture of the Caribbean. This meant that Classics in schools declined along with the British Empire in the Caribbean. Although Latin was initially part of the Liberal Arts Degree at UCWI, it soon fell out of favour.41 The following exchange is indicative of the cultural backlash against classical subjects as being out of touch with the contemporary Caribbean. Recalling her experience at UCWI in the 1950s, the Jamaican lawyer Gloria Knight, who had been admitted to read English, Latin, and Spanish, recalled the moment that she discovered West Indian history as taught by the renowned Guyanese historian Elsa Goveia, and turned her back on Latin: I didn’t carry on with my Latin in my second year because something outstanding happened to me. Quite by chance, I went into a lecture room one day when Elsa Goveia was lecturing and I was so turned-on, I could not believe that history could be like that. She was dealing with West Indian history that I hadn’t had to read at school. I went to Professor Parry and said, ‘Look, I have got to change, I don’t know how you are going to do it, sir, but I have to do history and I want to drop Latin.’42 40 See Walcott 1990: 320 (7. LXIV. i): ‘this book, which will remain unknown | and unread by him.’ For the ‘epic of the dispossessed’, see Hamner 1997a: passim. 41 When the University College of the West Indies was established the Arts Faculty included a department of Classics, but degrees in Classics were never awarded. The first principal of the University College of the West Indies, Sir Thomas Taylor (principal 1946–52), had requested that Durham University should continue its affiliation with Codrington College in Barbados because UCWI was not in a position to offer degrees in Classics (see Simmons 1973: 56–7). 42 Quoted in Sherlock and Nettleford 1990: 83.

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Her contemporary Corinne McLarty describes the steady dwindling of numbers in Mr. Carrington’s Latin classes (ibid.). In fiction of this era Latin is often mocked as a pretentious cultural accoutrement that bears no relation to the experience of the contemporary Caribbean. We have already met Titus Hoyt in Naipaul’s Miguel Street (pp. 75–6 above); when the teacher re-emerges in a later chapter he is studying Latin for his external arts degree and offers to teach Latin to the boys on the street as he learns it himself. The Latin lessons are short lived—they only get as far as the fourth declension—because the pupils start to question the teacher’s authority and the point of what they are learning: Boyee said, ‘Mr Titus Hoyt, I think you making up all this, you know, making it up as you go on.’ Titus Hoyt said, ‘But I telling you, I not making it up. Look, here it is in black and white.’ Errol said, ‘I feel, Mr Titus Hoyt, that one man sit down one day and make all this up and have everybody else learning it.’43

The lessons break down with one of the boys asking the teacher the meaning of the ablative case, a question that goes unanswered. Although Titus Hoyt, with his classical name, is gently ridiculed for the ostentatious way in which he tries to publicize his learning, a deeper point is being made here about the perfunctory teaching of Latin with no attempt to explain its relevance or value. Roberto Strongman points out that the broader cultural context for these lessons is a colonial society in which British English, rather than Trinidadian English, is the language of instruction. Consequently, he argues that ‘Titus Hoyt’s teaching of Latin to Trinidadian students serves to further demonstrate the valorization of European languages, even if they are dead languages, as more prestigious than the local linguistic varieties spoken in the area.’44 The problem here is the retrospective Europeanization of ancient Rome, lumping Latin together with ‘European’ languages, specifically British English. To be sure, in colonial contexts whether in Africa or the Caribbean, the rationale for studying Classics was often presented in strongly ideological terms that saw ancient Greece and Rome as the origins of 43 44

Naipaul [1959] 2000a: 74. Strongman 2007: 91.


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‘western’ or ‘European’ civilization. However, it is important to distinguish between ‘an education imbued in colonial ideology’ and the teaching of Latin tout court (89). Strongman elides the two, suggesting that it is part and parcel of ‘the hegemony and tyranny of imposing foreign cultural models onto a colonized population’.45 Latin is a foreign cultural model, but it is foreign to every modern culture, everywhere. Naipaul mocks Titus Hoyt’s self-regarding teaching of Latin for Latin’s sake, but he would write home to his family in Trinidad about his study of Virgil’s Aeneid as part of his English degree at Oxford and, as we shall see in the following chapter, he would later use this knowledge of Virgil to expose the myth behind the claim of a continuous European civilization stretching back to ancient Rome.46 In the twentieth century, Caribbean readings of the Classics have outgrown this colonial education to use the Graeco-Roman classics in the service of postcolonial critique. An important proviso is that ‘bunking Latin’ was as much a feature of youthful disaffection with education in Britain as it was in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Hence we can compare Derek Walcott’s ‘A Latin Primer’, or Howard Fergus’s ‘At Grammar School’, with Tony Harrison’s ‘Classics Society (Leeds Grammar School 1552–1952)’.47 All three poets mock the incongruity of Classics in their local environment, and the tension between the Standard English into which they translate and the dialects that they speak at home. In addition, all three comment on the cultural elitism of the subject contrasted with the poverty of their surroundings. Recent research by classicists has highlighted how a classical education has frequently been at odds with the class nexus, with the very nomenclature of the discipline ‘Classics’ encoding an implicit message of ranking.48 This nexus was barely disguised in the West Indies. It is instructive to compare Howard Fergus’s poem ‘At Grammar School’, reflecting on his education at Montserrat Grammar School in the 1950s, with Tony Harrison’s poem ‘Classics Society’ about Latin lessons (specifically Latin prose composition) at Leeds Grammar 45

Ibid. 94. Naipaul [1999] 2000c: 42, 44. On Naipaul reading Virgil against colonialism, see pp. 136–58 below. 47 Walcott [1987] 1988: 21–4; Fergus 1998: 54–5; Harrison 2007: 130. For discussion of ‘Latin Primer’, see p. 174 below. 48 Hall 2008b; Schein 2008. 46

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School in the 1950s.49 The narrator of Harrison’s poem ponders the irony that boys at a grammar school in Leeds should devote so much energy to the translation of a ‘dead’ culture, while ignoring or suppressing the social and cultural divide at the heart of contemporary British society. In the poem this manifests itself through rendering into Ciceronian Latin the phrase ‘a dreadful schism in the British nation’ from Edmund Burke’s prose, glossing over the class schism in the present day.50 Another measure of the incongruity in the lesson is the fact that the English that they are translating into Latin is not the dialect of English that they speak at home (‘nothing too demotic or up-to-date’). The absurdity of this artificial exercise is exposed by the idea that the rules of style that apply in Latin prose lessons would have applied in the regulation of speech in ancient Rome: . . . and if Antoninus spoke like delinquent Latin back in Rome he’d probably get gamma double minus.

The use of ‘like’ here—itself an example of so-called delinquent English—hints at the class system that suppresses dialect in favour of standard English,51 as do the lines ‘And so the lad who gets the alphas works | the hardest in his class at his translation’, with the pause at the caesura after ‘class’, allowing the reader to dwell on the dual sense of this word. As far as Classics is concerned, the point here is that the British class system will not work when projected back onto the Romans: the real-life Antoninus probably would have spoken delinquent Latin if the yardstick used is an odd form of translationese culled from Cicero’s prose. Tony Harrison has himself made the connection between the social alienation effected by the institution of grammar schools, plucking bright children from working-class backgrounds and immersing

49 Harrison 2007: 130; for discussion, see Woodcock 1990: 57 and passim; and Hall 2008b: 390. 50 The phrase ‘a dreadful schism in the British nation’ occurs in a letter that Burke sent to Samuel Span, dated 23 April 1778, on the subject of Anglo-Irish relations and trade in the British Empire. 51 In this line the grammatical function of ‘like’ can be construed either as a filler in dialect or else as a conjunction in Standard English (i.e. the latter would have the sense ‘like the delinquent Latin we write’). The ambiguity is deft, since it demonstrates the versatility and richness of supposedly delinquent English.


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them in the subtle exclusions of the British class system, and the social alienation which a similar system of education achieved in Britain’s colonies. Bruce Woodcock quotes comments that Harrison made in a 1985 radio interview for BBC 2’s ‘Arena’ programme: What his time in Africa taught him, he has said, was ‘the internal colonialism of British education. I think that seeing it literally in black and white in Africa helped me to understand it very clearly when I came back to England.’ It was this experience which allowed Harrison to ‘put in perspective my own education’ and realize the common link of cultural exclusion and suppression between these different contexts.52

The colonial perspective is supplied by Howard Fergus’s poem ‘At Grammar School’. We encounter a similar scenario to that depicted in Harrison’s poem: schoolboys wrestling with the incongruity of an arcane culture and language against the backdrop of the British class system and empire. But in Fergus’s poem race is added to the mix. In the environment of Long Ground, the village on Montserrat where Howard Fergus was born and grew up, Latin is lumped together with the British Empire as a foreign body that is difficult to digest: That it was a grammar school was absolutely patent, trade marked in Harrow. The ablative absolute like British rule a little hard to swallow. At Long Ground men kept keepers but puellam amavero53 was gibberish they don’t know nothing so.54

52

Woodcock 1990: 51. Lit. ‘I will have loved a girl’; amavero is the future perfect tense of the verb amo (‘I love’). The phrase is typical of the contrived sentences that students traditionally encountered when learning Latin grammar, phrases for which it is difficult to imagine any practical application. Compare the use of this tense in the poem ‘Late Return’ by Fergus’s fellow Montserratian poet E. A. Markham (Markham 1984: 58–62). Markham’s poem is dedicated to Howard Fergus; section iii of the poem describes the poet as a schoolboy ‘stumped by Latin’, omitted from the school’s cricket team for the team’s excursion to the neighbouring island of Antigua and left behind to slog through Latin verbs while thoughts of cricket flash through his head. 54 Fergus 1998: 54. See also the lines: ‘Caesar’s Gallic | wars put you at risk for colic | an acute accusative of indigestion’ (ibid.). 53

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As with Tony Harrison’s poem, the use of dialect (‘they don’t know nothing so’) exposes the gulf between the school curriculum and the local environment. The contrast is particularly striking because so is rhymed with the long vowel at the end of amavero, bringing Caribbean English into contact with Latin. The elite school reflects the racial prejudices of a former slave society, in which those with lighter skin condescended to those with darker skin (‘which made it right for pot | to label kettle black’): The problem wasn’t purely colour, it was pig mentation pseudo-pedigree and classic illiteracy at grammar school

Here the line breaks, which fracture two words, signify resistance to colonial education. At one level the line breaks effectively censure the two words that they interrupt: ‘pig/mentation’, which is reduced to pig, and ‘classic’, which is reduced to ‘class’. The position of both words at the end of the line encourages the reader to see a conspiracy between hypocritical racial prejudice and class prejudice, masquerading behind the study of classics. At another level, the articulation of ‘pig/mentation’ and ‘class/ic’ also hints at the intonation and stress patterns of West Indian English, rendering these words differently from the Standard English that was the medium of the colonial grammar school education. This is typical of the poem as a whole, which breaks down and demystifies the pretensions of the classical education offered by the grammar school (‘the arcane plot of the elite’), in the spirit of broadening access (‘a common | entrance for the child in the street’).55 The point about class echoes Eric Williams’s conclusion in his report on education in the British West Indies: ‘Secondary education is so severely restricted to the few that the English education that it provides becomes a sign of class distinction.’56 Again, like Harrison’s poem, there is a deep tension between the anti-colonial class-consciousness of Fergus’s poem, and the poet’s elite educational training, with the result that the radical force of the poem is 55 Fergus 1998: 55. The reference to the common entrance refers back to the earlier lines: ‘A foolhardy few of us arrived | past the common entrance | togaed in green and orange ties for greatness’ (54). 56 Williams [1950] 1968: 31.


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contained by recondite learning: those excluded by the grammar school are also excluded by the poem. As Woodcock remarks about Harrison’s poem: ‘In a sense he suffers from the containment he himself identifies in his classical school training, the imperative to translate potentially explosive content into a nicely turned form.’57

AFRO-ROMANS AND IMPERIAL REDISTRIBUTION If the first trope ‘Contesting Latin’ shared affinities with the British experience of Classics as a subject too often used as a vehicle of class ideology, the second trope, ‘Afro-Romans’, is exclusive to the colonized of African descent. In this section I will examine the use of this trope in the work of the Trinidadian scholar and politician Eric Williams (1911–81)58 and the novelist Austin Clarke. Williams wrote about his education in chapters 3 and 4 of his autobiography Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister (1969). After completing his primary education at Tranquility Government Boys’ School (1918–22), in June 1922 Eric Williams won a college exhibition from the Trinidad government to pay for his secondary education at Queen’s Royal College (1922–31).59 Having won this exhibition, his hope of higher education was conditional upon winning the one island scholarship available each year to fund a university education overseas. The scholarship was allocated on the basis of results in the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate (formerly the Cambridge School Certificate). Williams’s period at Queen’s Royal College coincided with C. L. R. James’s stint there as a teacher. In an interview with Paul Buhle, conducted in 1987, James 57

Woodcock 1990: 57. Williams was the Premier of Trinidad 1958–62, and the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago 1962–81. For further discussion of Williams’s engagement with Classics, see Ch. 4 below. 59 See Williams 1969: ch. 3. See the resolution passed by the Board of Council in 1857 committing the colonial government to the establishment of a collegiate school in Trinidad ‘in order to place within the reach of the youth of the Colony the opportunity of obtaining a classical education at a moderate charge’. Quoted in Williams [1962] 1964: 202. 58

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pointed out that he coached Williams for the scholarship: ‘He was in short pants. He was fighting for a scholarship, and I coached him.’60 Williams first sat his Higher School Certificate in July 1929 at Queen’s Royal College, Trinidad.61 In the hope of improving his performance and winning a scholarship, Williams sat the Higher Certificate Exam again in July 1930, altering his range of subjects slightly.62 Finally, Williams sat the Higher Certificate Exam again in 1931, repeating the same subjects as the previous year, but this time gaining a distinction in the History group.63 On the strength of these results, on 19 October 1931 he was awarded an island scholarship to study history at Oxford University, where he studied from 1932 to 1938.64 Classics was one of the cornerstones of the colonial education that Williams received in Trinidad, and as he tells it, his aptitude for Latin was an inalienable part of his intellectual persona. Key stages in Williams’s educational career are punctuated by felicitous encounters with Latin. The first of these encounters takes place on his first day at Queen’s Royal College. In the third chapter of Inward Hunger, which is titled ‘The Education of a Young Colonial’, Williams recalls the occasion of his introduction to Latin as an 11-year-old: We were given our textbooks, and requested to learn for the next afternoon a few tenses of amo. Within a short period at home that night I had learned not only all the tenses of amo, but of moneo, rego and audio, that is to say, all the conjugations; I was fully conversant with the cases of nouns, and had made my first acquaintance with the ablative absolute. I walked up and

60

James and Buhle 1992: 58. James’s mentorship of Williams and the subsequent breakdown of their relationship is well known: see Ch. 4, pp. 206–7 below. 61 (July 1929) E. E. Williams II f h 5 7 g 15. Key: The Roman numerals denote the Group in which the candidate passed. II stands for ‘Modern Studies’; f = Latin (group subject); h = history (group subject); 5 = French; 7 = Spanish; g = English; 15 = Maths (source: OCEX 50/34). 62 II f h 3 (Greek History), 5 (French), 7 (Spanish), g (English), 13 (English Economic History), 14 (English Colonial History) (source OCEX 50/34). 63 Source: OCEX 50/35. The distinction in History is denoted by the capital letter ‘H’. See also Williams 1969: 32–3. 64 Williams graduated with a first-class degree in History in 1935, and from 1935 to 1938 was registered for the D.Phil. degree, which was conferred in December 1938. The title of Williams’s doctoral thesis was ‘The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery’. See Williams 1969: 43–51.


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down the house, reciting all the tenses, beginning with amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant, my father beaming indulgently all the while.65

This account of Williams’s early affinity for Latin is compounded by a roll call of his successes in Latin at QRC: the distinctions, and the special prize for Latin three years in succession.66 As we shall see when we turn to Austin Clarke’s memoirs of his own schooldays, in the colonial schools of the British West Indies in the pre-independence era, Latin was the subject that best defined excellence as the most exclusive, and most elite, subject precisely because the most foreign. To a certain extent, this is a reflection of the continuing domination of Latin in the British school curriculum at the time, particularly the elite public schools on which the region’s elite schools were modelled. More cynically, reading Williams against Williams, we might recall that in his report on education in the British West Indies Williams alleged that pupils preparing for the island scholarship competition tended to favour Classics as opposed to Mathematics and Science, even if they wanted to take mathematical or scientific subjects at university, on the grounds that ‘classics are popularly regarded in the British West Indies as more suited to cramming’.67 This led to a disproportionate concentration on classical subjects: Thus a student, for the sake solely of the scholarship—which means affluence and prestige—begins to specialize in classics from the age of fifteen for a scholarship examination which he hopes to win at nineteen. Then he leaves the British West Indies and goes to England to begin science and study medicine. Or, if he is unsuccessful, he joins the local civil service with much Latin, perhaps some Greek, and no science.68

However, more than this, there seems to have been a sense in which Latin was over and above colonial culture. It did not belong to the colonial powers any more than to their colonies. In fact, with Williams and to an even greater extent with Clarke, we get the playful suggestion that schoolboys in the Caribbean have a greater affinity 65 66 67 68

Williams 1969: 32. Ibid. Williams [1950] 1968: 33. Ibid.

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and aptitude for Latin than their counterparts in the metropolis, enabling them to pull rank in the colonial hierarchy.69 This is suggested by another passage in Inward Hunger, in which Williams recounts the experience of his first Latin class at Oxford, in which he proved his mettle by outstripping his contemporaries in a Latin translation. As narrated by Williams this is no neutral tale of schoolboy rivalry; an exercise in literal translation becomes an expression of the colonial scholar writing back and outwitting the colonizers with his command of Latin—an imperial language which is here claimed and possessed by a Trinidadian on the underside of the British Empire: In our first class in Latin, the lecturer, an ascetic, irascible man, gave us, as a test of our ability, a long passage, about forty lines, of Latin unprepared translation; he told us that, as we almost certainly lacked the ability to complete the passage in the forty or so minutes at our disposal, we should do only the first twenty lines. The passage from Ovid, I believe, was of School Certificate standard, and child’s play as far as I was concerned. I finished the entire passage in twenty minutes, turned in my paper, and walked out of the class.70

The episode is framed as a confrontation between Williams and one of his peers, ‘a tall English chap with a long nose and an air the quintessence of superciliousness’, who questioned his ability to speak English, let alone translate Latin. When the latter expresses surprise at Williams’s superlative performance in the Latin translation, Williams retorts, ‘You see, we speak Latin in Trinidad’ (this alludes to the English student’s remark, upon overhearing Williams talking to someone else, ‘Oh, you do speak English in Trinidad, do you?’). Williams’s interpretation of this incident as a loaded cultural encounter between colonizer and colonized accords with a motif in Caribbean literature where the struggle for political and cultural autonomy is contested through the classics. The pointed dismissal of the test passage as ‘child’s play’ reverses the colonial trope in which the colony is the infant to the metropolitan parent. This is reflected in 69 On Classics as the potential source of an alternative, non-colonial identification, see Makris 2001: 1. 70 Williams 1969: 34. My discussion of this passage repeats material in Greenwood 2005a: 66–7.


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Williams’s description of the state of society and government in Trinidad in 1911, the year of his birth: ‘Trinidad, then, in 1911, was still in statu pupillari, and there seemed little prospect of its ever graduating, far less graduating with honours’ (1969: 13). The classical motif is again apparent when, commenting on his first-class degree in History, Williams echoes Caesar’s famous boast to the Roman Senate in 47 bc about his military victory at the battle of Zela: ‘I had come, seen, and conquered—at Oxford! What next?’71 In this case the vaunting is belied by Williams’s subsequent experience as a postgraduate student, where, even after attaining his D.Phil., he is told both directly and indirectly that, as a colonial, there is no place for him in Britain.72 Be that as it may, as we shall see in Chapter 4 below, in the early phase of his political career (1956–62), prior to independence, Williams was to develop this idea that Trinidadians had a stake in the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome that bypassed British colonial culture. The agonistic tone of Williams’s Latin translation anecdote shows the broader imperial stakes for Caribbean colonials in the pursuit of scholarship. With mischievous irony C. L. R. James recalls the collective pride of his peers in the achievements of Trinidadian schoolboys in the Oxford and Cambridge Certificate Examinations: Periodically one of our island boys would be placed third in mathematics or eleventh in Latin among the thousands who took the Cambridge examinations all over the world, and there was applause and satisfaction that, backward colonials though we were, we could produce scholars as good as any.73

In Britain Classics is still working through its putative relationship with the class hierarchy. In the Caribbean colonial context, with its pernicious race hierarchy, to beat metropolitan students was to defy 71

Williams 1969: 43. Ibid. 52. Another important episode in this intellectual agoˆn is Williams’s humiliating experience at the hands of the fellows of All Souls College when he sat for the All Souls Fellowship examination in October 1935 (ibid. 44–7). Of this latter episode, Gordon Rohlehr commented, ‘Dr. Williams’s entire life since that period has been partly an attempt to prove to the Fellows of All Souls that he is not only their equal, but their superior; not anybody’s pupil, but everybody’s schoolmaster’ (Rohlehr [1970] 1992: 25; Rohlehr’s article was first published in Tapia, 11–12 (29 November and 20 December 1970)). 73 James [1963] 1994a: 42. 72

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implicit arguments about the inferiority of your people. There is a two-stage process here: in the first stage many Caribbean intellectuals of this generation strove to beat the colonizers at their own game, insofar as education at this time was a soundly colonial institution. In the second stage, these same intellectuals looked back critically on their education and realized that this ‘game’ did not belong to the masters, but instead was there to be revisioned and remastered in the light of fresh experience. In the memoirs of his schooldays in Barbados at Combermere Secondary School in the 1940s, the Barbadian novelist Austin Clarke portrays a world in which Latin is part of the strange, arcane world of the colonial school curriculum.74 Published in 1980, the memoirs are entitled Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack, but the title that Clarke proposed originally (Amo, I Love: Amat, Thou Lovest) offers an insight into the centrality of Latin in his schooling.75 In the revised title, the reference to stupidity refers to the popular idiom among the black population of the island that to be a swot was to be a ‘fool’. This idiom conceals a number of different connotations: a fool in the sardonic sense that in a poor society it was considered a foolish enterprise to invest too much time in studies, in the sense that the content of academic studies was so far removed from local Barbadian culture that trying to bridge the gap might precipitate insanity, and simply because studying too hard might bust one’s brain.76 This usage is illustrated in a passage describing Clarke’s entry into the fourth form at Combermere School: 74 To describe Austin Clarke as a novelist is to sell him short; in his long, varied, and distinguished career he has been a journalist, writer, novelist, academic, diplomat, political activist, and civil servant—sometimes fulfilling several of these roles simultaneously. Since 1955, Clarke has been resident in Canada, with periods in America as a visiting professor and in Barbados. Clarke took up Canadian citizenship in 1985. 75 For the original title, see Clarke 1992: 76; and Algoo-Baksh 1994: 146. One of the many losses in modern anglophone Caribbean literature is the biographical novel that C. L. R. James planned to write about his schooling in Trinidad (see James and Buhle 1992: 60). Instead of this biographical novel, our insight into James’s schooling derives from the early chapters of Beyond a Boundary (1963), a work that Sylvia Wynter has described not as autobiography, but as ‘autosociography’ (Wynter 1992: 64). 76 As one of the men of the village puts it more earthily in Proud Empires (1986), the sequel to Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack : ‘Latin and Greek have not one shite to do with comma-sense, the comma-sense that the tailor could learn this boy!’ (10).


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It was time to be measured for the larger stiff khaki short pants and shortsleeved shirts; time to get haircuts which left our heads itching from the dull razor blades and the thick lather of blue soap and carbolic soap; time to memorize new irregular verbs in the Latin Primer, and the tricky French verbs; time to think of personal achievements: to be a Latin fool, a French fool, a Mathematics fool, or simply to remain a fool.77

Clarke began his schooling at St Matthias Boys’ Elementary School, and then went on to Combermere Secondary School in Bridgetown (1944–50), finally doing his sixth form studies at Harrison College (1950–2). Although Clarke enjoyed a privileged education, his background was not. It was up to his mother to fund his education, working extra hard to raise the funds for his school fees both at Combermere and at Harrison College.78 In a touching paragraph Clarke describes acting as scribe for his illiterate mother who would dictate letters to him: My mother sat at my elbow. I would smell the honour and the sweat of her hard labour. . . . The kerosene lamp was placed in the middle of the table. And she would squint her large beautiful eyes, just as we squinted ours at Combermere when we faced a difficult Latin word.79

This intimate scene highlights the gulf in opportunity between Clarke and his mother, as well as the sacrifices that she made through her work for the benefit of his education. In spite of the tenderness in this scene, the contrastive comparison shows the estrangement of the young boy from his community in the fact that the exercise of squinting at Latin is so remote from his mother’s experience. It is pertinent to compare Clarke’s depiction of the mother-son relationship in Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack (1980) and Proud Empires (1986), with Kamau Brathwaite’s critique of the paternal authority of school in Mother Poem (1977), contrasted with the ‘native’ presence and intelligence of the mother figure. In Mother Poem the local Barbadian schoolteacher, Chalkstick, exacts fees from the protagonist’s poor mother with the promise of the social mobility 77

Clarke [1980] 2003: 99. See also ibid. 66. Algoo-Baksh 1994: 21. 79 Clarke [1980] 2003: 34–5. Compare a similar scene centring around the son’s literacy and his mother’s illiteracy in Clarke 1986: 80. 78

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of her son through education. In the poem ‘Occident’ (Brathwaite 1977: 22–4), the narrator imagines the mother’s ambition for her son in a formula that merges the alleged superiority of ‘the West’ with Christian redemption, and the exotic promise of a Latinate education: that the boy would be a lux occidente: her great light riding from the west80

There is an allusion here to the motto of the University of the West Indies (‘Oriens ex occidente lux’—‘Light rising from the west’), presumably chosen to signal the West Indies as a source of learning and higher education, but here in a poem that is deeply critical of colonial education as foreign indoctrination, the quotation is inflected with the irony of ‘light from the West’.81 The Christian imagery is not accidental, and points to the frequent collusion of Classics and Christianity in colonial education, where Latin would be encountered in the context of the Church as well as in textbooks. Keith Sandiford and Brian Stoddart have described the arrival of British (mostly English) public school educated teachers in Barbados, bringing with them the Victorian trinity of Cricket, Classics, and Christianity.82 Like a religious charlatan, Chalkstick ruthlessly exploits the mother’s piety and trusting commitment to her son’s education. In the poem ‘Lix’ (Brathwaite 1977: 19–21), his phoney Christianity and dubious promulgation of Classics is exposed in the description: dreamer of sundaes screamer of adjectives, latin ablutive clauses, madrigal grace notes

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Brathwaite 1977: 23. See the testimony of Sir Thomas Taylor, the first principal of the University College of the West Indies: ‘The motto was a matter of very serious debate since classical studies flourish in some of the Caribbean colonies possibly more actively than they do in Great Britain’ (Taylor [1949] 1962: 189); unfortunately he does not record the content of the debate. ‘Ex Occidente Lux’ is an inversion of an anonymous Latin proverb: ‘ex oriente lux, ex occidente lex’ (‘from the east light, from the west law’). 82 Sandiford and Stoddart 1995: 45. On these three Cs, see also Sandiford 1994: 145. For the context of Classics in England in this period, see Stray 1998: passim. 81


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where the Latin ablative case has taken on connotations of the ablution of sins.83 Naipaul’s satire of the education offered by Titus Hoyt seems mild in comparison with Brathwaite’s depiction of this schoolmaster whose education imprisons his students; in ‘Occident’ he is described as ‘accepting another black hostage | of verbs’, and in ‘Pig mornin’ the children are ‘locked up into their cell | blocks of school’.84 As Gordon Rohlehr notes on the antagonism between the boy’s schooling and his maternal culture in Mother Poem, ‘The School is another version of “mother”. Ideally, the School is conceived as one’s “Alma Mater” or loving mother, a fostering, kindly, agency. In reality the School is an agency of colonialist indoctrination . . .’85 However, although Latin is often lumped together with the paraphernalia of the colonial curriculum, in Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack Austin Clarke suggests that he and his peers nurtured an almost conspiratorial affinity for Latin, imagining the ancient Romans in their own image often with comic, counter-discursive conclusions. Against the backdrop of the Second World War and Barbados’ patriotic support for the mother island—‘Little’ England supporting ‘Big’ England—Clarke and his peers have no problem identifying with the Italians because they are modern Romans.86 Clarke explains that the Romans were easily co-opted into Caribbean male culture through their love of wine and drink.

83 Compare the line break which splits ‘mad/rigal’ to the line break splitting up the word ‘pig/mentation’ in Howard Fergus’s ‘At Grammar School’ (p. 84 above): with ‘mad’ and ‘pig’ hanging as critiques of the colonial educational curriculum. The syncopation of English to yield subversive counter-etymologies is a hallmark of Brathwaite’s poetry. 84 See Brathwaite 1977: 24, 25. Compare the image of coercion used by Olive Senior in the poem ‘Colonial Girls’ School’ quoted on p. 11 above: ‘yoked our minds to declensions in Latin.’ 85 Rohlehr 2001: 278. 86 On Barbados’ loyalty to Britain during the war, see the text of a telegram allegedly sent by Grantley Adams to George VI, satirized on p. 38: ‘And we heard that our leader, Grantley Adams, sent a cable up to the King, His Britannical Majestical George the Sixth, King of England, Northern Ireland an the British Possessions Beyond the Seas, and told the King, “Go on, England, Little England is behind you.” ’

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We didn’t know at first that Mussolini was an Italian, a Roman. All the Italians we knew were in books, dead; speaking a dead language; and wearing togas, and eating while lying on their sides: grapes from a bunch and wine from an urn. We in Barbados loved rum. We loved the Italians (and hated Mussolini) because they were like us, like the men in our village who loved rum and women more than work. And the Romans, like our own men, talked and sang hymns ancient and modern all drunklong.87

The reader is also informed that Clarke and his peers championed Hannibal—Rome’s Carthaginian enemy—not yet aware of the way in which Hannibal might be retro-constructed as a ‘black’ hero: Hannibal, whom we loved (and no one told us he was black like us!) climbed mountains and was smart. Alas, he lost one eye: in oculo altero. But he had crossed the Alps, one of the highest mountain ranges in the whole whirl! We loved Hannibal. (ibid.)

The guise of childhood naivety explains away such apparent inconsistencies, making the ancient world pre-racial, as seen through the eyes of these young boys. In fact, Clarke’s memoir eschews any easy identity politics. In a manner reminiscent of George Lamming’s seminal Barbadian coming-of-age novel The Castle of my Skin (1953), Clarke pushes racial consciousness and black identity to the edges of the story, as an outside influence introduced by Barbadians who had been to America.88 Through use of a double perspective (simultaneously innocent child and enlightened adult narrator) Clarke preserves the vision of childhood while at the same time signalling the ironic possibilities inherent in their indiscriminate admiration for both the Romans and Hannibal. In narratological terms, as author Clarke employs both a homodiegetic and an autodiegetic narrator, and shifts between levels of intradiegetic and extradiegetic narration. Left to their own devices Clarke and his friends annex both Hannibal and the Romans, and do not see any contradiction in this. 87 Clarke [1980] 2003: 46. Compare Clarke 2002: 329 where Mary-Mathilda tells Sargeant that ‘Eyetalians are a black tribe, like me and you’. 88 See Clarke [1980] 2003: 78 ‘Sister Thomas was the first person in our village who mentioned the names of Marcus Garvey and Harlem. At that time they were merely words, strange words.’


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Hannibal may not have been black in their eyes, but by the same token the Romans were not white. Although the classical curriculum at the elite schools was modelled on the British system, which encouraged West Indian students to emulate British schoolboys, it is wrong to label the study of Latin as an extension of white culture.89 Instead, the idea of ancient Rome as a ‘white’ civilization is one particular ideological construction, which superimposes modern ethnicity onto the ancient world. Clarke’s own practice shows how this same civilization could be, and was, construed quite differently by pupils in the Caribbean. Elsewhere in his memoirs Clarke recalls the empathy that he felt as a boy for the beleaguered Israelites in the Book of Exodus (‘Whenever I was in a plight, of small or large significance, I was an Israelite’),90 and notes the potential irony in a black pupil siding with the Israelites against the Egyptians: In my entire schooling in the island, nobody hinted that if I was going to be partial and to identify with a foreign racial group, it should be because of the logic of my own ancestry, not the Israelites but the Egyptians. But in Sunday School we had already been taught to dislike the Egyptians. (ibid.)

In fact, the irony discerned by the adult narrator demonstrates the malleability of constructions of black cultural identity in the Caribbean and North America, since the plight of the Israelites in bondage under Pharaoh was co-opted as a symbol of black liberation in the New World, while the Egyptians were later identified as a source of black pride, through the antiquity of this ‘black’ civilization.91 For instance, the Jamaican Marcus Garvey, a pivotal figure in the Pan-African movement, availed himself of both the legitimizing precedent of the Israelites, and the black inheritance of ancient Egyptian civilization. At a time when the Western academy continues

89 Contra Stella Algoo-Baksh 1994: 21, ‘Combermere continued Clarke’s exposure to a white culture. In Latin, for instance, Clarke did little more than ape English schoolboys as he studied grammar and attempted the translation of Virgil and Caesar into English.’ 90 Clarke [1980] 2003: 146. 91 See the discussion in Gilroy 1993: 205–12, ‘Children of Israel or Children of the Pharaohs?’ Gilroy detects a definite shift towards the Egyptian model: ‘Blacks today appear to identify far more readily with the glamorous pharaohs than with the abject plight of those they held in bondage’ (207).

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to negotiate the legacy of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena,92 a work whose reception has tended to polarize the civilizations of the ancient Nile basin and the Greek Mediterranean, it is interesting to regard the cosmopolitanism of the childhood imagination in which Israelite, Roman, and Carthaginian are all complementary identities, making a hybrid Afro-Roman identity perfectly viable. In this context it is worth noting that Derek Walcott’s hybrid formula ‘Afro-Greeks’ is also a product of childhood autobiography in the poem ‘Homecoming: Anse La Raye’ (see p. 7 above). For the young Clarke the blackness or otherwise of the Egyptians is not even an issue, but Christian theology is.

C. L. R. JAMES: FINDING ONE’S OWN WAY IN CLASSICS Although I began with C. L. R. James, I have deferred further discussion of the role of Classics in his education until the end because in many ways his is the most idiosyncratic engagement with Classics. By James’s own account in Beyond a Boundary (1963), his early predilection for Victorian literature and cricket led to him becoming an eccentric, ‘a British intellectual long before I was ten, already an alien in my own environment’.93 More than anything else, James attributes this eccentricity to his repeated reading of William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–8), a novel that he accredits as ‘my Homer and my bible’ ([1963] 1994a: 17).94 However, although this immersion in Thackeray and other Victorian writers had a lasting impact on James’s prose style, it was to prove something of a false start. James characterizes his adolescence, coinciding with his schooling at Queen’s Royal College (1911–18), as ‘a war that lasted without respite for eight years . . . a war between English Puritanism, English literature and cricket, and the realism of West Indian life’ 92 The most recent reappraisal of Bernal’s work was the ‘African Athena’ conference at Warwick University organized by Daniel Orrells (6–8 November 2008). 93 James [1963] 1994a: 18. 94 See Hall 2003: 42–3 on the social and historical context of Thackeray’s novel in relation to the Caribbean.


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(21). This was essentially a ‘revolt’ (23) against the conventional and highly respectable path that James’s parents and teachers had mapped out for him. As the winner of a prestigious Trinidad Government College Exhibition to fund his secondary education—when James won his in 1910, there were only four of these exhibitions available each year—he was expected to devote his secondary schooling to securing a Trinidad Island Scholarship (27). Instead, he pursued his passion for cricket at the expense of his schoolwork and continued with his self-directed programme of reading the classics of English literature (28–9). James describes a school curriculum that is heavy in Classics—‘I studied Latin with Virgil, Caesar and Horace, and wrote Latin verses. I studied Greek with Euripides and Thucydides’ (28)—but his formal encounter with Classics in the context of the school curriculum seems to have made little positive impression on him. Instead, this exposure to the classics is lumped together with the larger project of colonial education at Queen’s Royal College. As James describes it this education lived up to the Latin etymology of the word (from e-duco, I lead out), leading the pupils out of or away from their familiar environment and turning them towards the metropolis: It was only long years after that I understood the limitation on spirit, vision and self-respect which was imposed on us by the fact that our masters, our curriculum, our code of morals, everything began from the basis that Britain was the source of all light and leading [sic], and our business was to admire, wonder, imitate, learn; our criterion of success was to have succeeded in approaching that distant idea—to attain it was, of course, impossible.95

In Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, James is the embodiment of the intellectual from the colonial or peripheral region who makes the symbolic voyage in to the centre of the metropolitan culture.96 James’s actual voyage into Britain took place in 1932 and was recorded in a series of articles that were sent back to Trinidad and published in the Port of Spain Gazette between 22 May and 28 August 1932.97 The series of articles that James wrote from London chart his 95 96 97

James [1963] 1994a: 29–30. Said [1993] 1994: 288–305. Ramchand 2003: xiv. These articles are republished in James 2003.

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disillusionment with metropolitan culture up close and indeed the demystification of that culture. Although James does not mention racism in his letters from London, as a black West Indian immigrant to Britain, his disillusionment must have been magnified by the profoundly uncivilized experience of racism. The letters are fascinating for the realignment of James, who was later to describe his young self in BAB as ‘a British intellectual long before I was ten’ ([1963] 1994a: 18), away from the culture of Britain. This is conveyed by the articles that James sent home, which, at the same time as they wrote back from the imperial centre, also wrote it down. The concluding article, titled ‘The Nucleus of a Great Civilization’ (published in the Port of Spain Gazette on 28 August 1932), uses the topos of Britain’s status as ex-Roman colony to put the metropolis in its place.98 Focusing his critique on London as ‘the peak, the centre, the nucleus of a great branch of western civilization’ (2003: 111), James ponders, ‘What exactly, as far as can be put into words, did this civilization register on me?’ His conclusion redresses the imbalance of power between his Trinidadian audiences at home in the colony and the imperial centre of which they are colonial subjects. In his analysis the British are levelled to the same, subject status through an ahistorical parallel likening the duration of Roman rule in Britain to the period of growth of Caribbean civilization dating from the ‘discovery’ of the Americas in the fifteenth century: Furthermore, I cannot help thinking, as I look around, of the history of the English. At the beginning of the Christian Era they were quite wild and savage. The Romans spent four hundred years here, four hundred—a period about as long from the discovery of America to the present. Yet as soon as they left the inhabitants slipped back into barbarism again.99

Here the Romans are used to outrank the British. The use of this topos (Britain’s status as ex-colony) is interesting for what it reveals about James’s ability to uncouple the civilizations of Graeco-Roman antiquity from the British imperial framework in which they had been couched at school. But James’s article ends on a conciliatory note by locating the strength of Britain in the ‘north country working 98 99

James 2003: 111–25. Ibid. 122.


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people’ whom he had met in the Lancashire town of Nelson, then home to the great Trinidadian cricketer Learie Constantine who was sponsoring James’s stay in England. James recounts the details of a cinema boycott in the town in protest against an attempt to reduce the wages of the cinema staff, and comments, ‘As long as that is the stuff of which they are made, then indeed Britons never, never shall be slaves.’100 For James, the formal education that he received at Queen’s Royal College was a mis-education in terms of its patent ideological content as a justification of the colonial status quo and its exclusion of the local culture of the students: ‘this school was in a colony ruled autocratically by Englishmen. What then about the National Question? It did not exist for me.’101 In place of this official education, which he equates with indoctrination in a colonial fantasy, James expounds the benefits of his own, idiosyncratic education which he identifies with the holistic education of the Greeks. Not only is James keen to stress that this education did not have anything to do with what he was taught at school,102 but he also pits the conclusions that he reached as a result of his independent reading against the received wisdom of ‘most learned professors of Greek culture’: When I read that the Greeks educated their young people on poetry, gymnastics and music I feel that I know what that means, and I constantly read (and profit by) the writings of most learned professors of Greek culture, who I am sure don’t know what they are talking about.103

Far from mimesis of a western ideal, in adopting the Greek agoˆn as the point of comparison for his study of the culture of cricket in the

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Ibid. 124–5. James [1963] 1994a: 29. On mis-education, see also James 1980: 189, ‘[B]y…all the palaver and so-called education by which the British government claimed that it trained the West Indian population for self-government, a terrible damage was inflicted upon us.… They have not educated us, they have mis-educated us, stood in our way, piled burdens on our backs.’ This quotation is taken from the essay ‘The Making of the Caribbean People’, originally delivered as a lecture in Montreal in 1966. 102 See p. 33: ‘I am the more certain of the Greek education because it was only after I left school that I began to distinguish between the study of cricket and the study of literature, or rather, I should say, the pursuit of cricket and the pursuit of literature. I did with one exactly what I did with the other. I paid no attention to the curriculum.’ 103 James [1963] 1994a: 32. This passage is discussed by Makris 2001: 7. 101

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West Indies, C. L. R. James is making an altogether more subversive move. Bypassing the fantasy of western civilization sold to him at school, James lays claim to fellow feeling with the ancient Greeks in a manner that eclipses the colonialist’s claim. Notice that James talks of ‘feeling’ that he knows the principles of ancient Greek paideia. This conceit of knowledge on the basis of shared social and cultural experience is made even more explicit a few pages later where James states that he worked out the Greek system of education through his immersion in the study of cricket: ‘Amateur though I am, I see signs of it in Greek literature, but you must have gone through the thing yourself to understand them.’104 I discuss the ideological underpinnings of James’s analogy between ancient Greek culture and the culture of cricket in Trinidad in Chapter 4 below; in the present chapter my concern is with James’s claims to knowledge about the Classics and the tension between his formal education on the one hand, and his autodidactic intellectual pursuits on the other. Like any other writer and public intellectual, James was a complex mix of different influences and loyalties. Sylvia Wynter has written of the ‘pluri-consciousness’ of James’s identity, relating this consciousness to ‘the complex structures of both the British-Trinidadian social system and the historical processes that had shaped this system’.105 Specifically referring to James’s account of Trinidadian society in BAB, Wynter identifies an interconnecting web of social values spanning ‘race/education/culture and skill’, with the category of ‘race’ comprising a complex colour hierarchy—the same web of values satirized in Howard Fergus’s poem ‘At Grammar School’ discussed on pp. 83–5 above.106 Entering into dialogue with Wynter’s typology of the different categories of the Jamesian identity, Kenneth Surin has proposed instead that James moves between different singularities in the course of an account which he hopes will enable a society in the future that is free of these divisions.107 It is striking that James attributes the main thrust of his intellectual formation to his lower-middle-class family, and takes great pains to 104 105 106 107

James [1963] 1994a: 33 (my italics). Wynter 1992: 68–9. Ibid. 69. See Surin 1996: especially 196–7.


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emphasize his mother’s uncommon literary habits and her social distinction. James cites his mother’s private library and her voracious reading as one of the influences that shaped and inspired his own habits as a young reader; then there was James’s father, a teacher in a government school.108 The precise way in which James locates his family within the cultural and class system of Trinidadian colonial society in the early twentieth century attests to the importance of these divisions. In this sense the heavy emphasis placed on being selftaught and coming from an educated, cultured background is an ambivalent strategy; while it distances James from colonial education and its values, it also potentially estranges him from the wider community whose presence in the text is so crucial for James’s claim that the Caribbean masses are speaking through him.109 James’s strategy in BAB is to downplay the significance of the colonial education, or rather to suggest that its significance was that of an institution against which to rebel. However, in the context of this rebellion, it is important to stress that James does not reject the canon of European and ancient Graeco-Roman literature. On the contrary he embraces it—although the cultures of ancient Rome are of little interest to James in contrast with those of Greece.110 James draws a fine distinction between the negative influence of ‘European colonialist scholarship’ on the one hand, and the positive source of ‘the learning and profound discoveries of Western civilization’ on the other.111 That the two are not so easily separated is apparent from James’s repeated insistence that he developed his own autonomous, 108 On the influence of James’s mother see James and Buhle 1992: 56 (‘I followed literature because of her.’); Hall 1992: 3; and James [1963] 1994a: 16–17. 109 See p. 201 below. On Jamesian autobiography in BAB, see Pouchet Paquet 1990: 363–65, especially p. 364: ‘His primary concern with the self as autobiographical subject is with the self as an authoritative and reliable way into the collective experience. He continually reidentifies himself in the text as exceptional and, paradoxically, as representative West Indian, colonial, and one of the populace.’ 110 For James, Rome’s significance tends to be confined to the negative legacy of its empire. Witness the following distinction between ancient Rome and ancient Greece: ‘Greco-roman we are, and, as the years of crisis deepen, the heritage of imperial Rome becomes more than ever a millstone around our necks and ball and chain on our feet. On the other hand, as we intensify our countless billions of candle-power so that they threaten to consume us, the luminous glow of the Greek city-state seems to penetrate more searchingly into every corner of our civilization’ ([1963] 1994a: 154). 111 From the essay ‘The Making of the Caribbean People’ (James 1980: 179).

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critical stance towards the literature and material culture of Western civilization, divorcing it from colonialism. In BAB, James depicts a school environment in which learning is dictated by the remit of examinations, with pupils only bothering to read the prescribed portions of their set texts, not caring to know what happens beyond Act III in The Merchant of Venice, for example. According to this picture, among his peers there was virtually no living engagement with either Classics or the classics of world literature as texts and cultures that might mean something in the present and for their Caribbean context: At the end of the school year I would see boys who had made good marks giving away their Shelleys and their Burkes, swearing that they had finished with them for ever, and when I met them in later years they appeared to have kept their promises well. What was even more tragic was that boys who after six years had acquired a remarkable competence in Latin and Greek treated them ever afterwards as dead languages.112

Conversely, James presents his young self as an ancient Greek reincarnated: ‘I believed that if when I left school I had gone into the society of Ancient Greece I would have been more at home than ever I had been since. It was a fantasy, but for me it had meaning.’113 In place of the self-styled ‘British intellectual’ of James’s childhood, the teenage James identified with the Greeks; however, this identification was not straightforward. Reviewing his early intellectual formation in 1963 at the age of 62, James represents one of the main challenges for his self-definition as the challenge of working through this relationship with ancient Greece (‘The first task was to get Greece clear’).114 In the context of James’s emphasis on his autodidacticism, it seems fair to interpret this remark as a comment about the need for James to negotiate between the received knowledge of the Greeks 112

James [1963] 1994a: 33. Ibid. 154. That this was something of a trope is suggested by James’s testimony that Grantley Adams had claimed to him that his Greek was as good as his English by the time he left Harrison College in Barbados: ‘When I was talking to him a few years ago, he told me that before he left Harrison College he had read Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes, and he was a great master of Aeschylus; he could read Greek almost as well as he could read English’ (James 1980: 238). For the classical education of Grantley Adams, see pp. 71–2 above. 114 James [1963] 1994a: 154. 113


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which had been imparted to him at school, and his own independent, intuitive insight into ancient Greek culture and society drawing on the Trinidadian context. In her analysis of the significance of Independence movements in the formation of colonized writers, Elleke Boehmer has suggested the terms ‘self-making’ and ‘selving’ (1995: 196) to denote the attempt to ‘imagine the word from their own point of view’ (ibid. 189).115 In the previous chapter we saw how this self-imagining could take the form of the appropriation of the narrative of the Odyssey.116 In James’s case autodidacticism, albeit self-learning that is overlaid on the foundations of a sound colonial education, is crucial to the project of self-making. The extent to which James was prepared to go his own way in the creation of a New World historiography was first evident in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, originally published in 1938, but it is not until the publication of BAB in 1963 that James’s very deliberate programme of self-education became fully apparent, allowing readers to see aspects of James in his characterization of Toussaint. As Selwyn Cudjoe has shown, when James fashioned his own intellectual identity there was already a strong tradition of the selftaught intellectual in Trinidadian letters.117 Among James’s Trinidadian precursors, Cudjoe cites the example of John Jacob Thomas, the author of an influential work on Creole grammar and a counterdiscursive rebuttal to James Anthony Froude’s The Bow of Ulysses.118 The latter, Froudacity, was originally published in 1889, but James wrote the introduction to the new edition published in 1969.119 Although James ‘fashioned Thomas in his own image’ in this introductory essay, aligning Thomas with the needs and the politics of the present,120 autodidacticism is an undeniable motif in Thomas’s 115

116 See Boehmer 1995: ch. 5. See pp. 39–58 above. Cudjoe 1992. 118 Thomas 1869 and [1889] 1969 respectively. On Thomas’s response to Froude, see Ch. 1, pp. 31 and 38, above. 119 James’s introduction to Thomas’s work took the form of an essay entitled ‘The West Indian Intellectual’. 120 The quotation is from Schwarz 2003a: 19; Schwarz’s essay is an excellent discussion of James’s recuperation of J. J. Thomas as the prototype for West Indian intellectuals addressing the question of West Indian self-determination in the metropolis. 117

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book.121 Moving beyond the Trinidadian context, there is a strong tradition of autodidacticism in the intellectual genealogies told by writers in the British West Indies. Before proceeding with my analysis of James’s self-positioning, I will digress briefly to consider how this larger tradition might help to illuminate James’s depiction of his education, formal and informal, in Beyond a Boundary. In the generation after James, George Lamming, born in 1927, seems to have taken a similarly self-directed approach to his education, expressing disaffection in interviews for the irrelevance of the school curriculum. Lamming received his education at Combermere High School in Barbados, leaving in 1948. In his description of his schooldays, Lamming recounts how he skived off many of his classes and, in those that he did attend, preferred to read books that he had borrowed from Frank Collymore’s private library.122 We were expected to master certain texts for the purpose of examinations. And the whole idea of writers coming out of our own classrooms was unheard of. This is really the irony intended in my phrase ‘the pleasures of exile’. Writers lived somewhere else. They were dead, not people you lived with. But I was very fascinated by Collymore. He used to write a great deal in private. . . . He had a tremendous library which I literally took over, I mean I was there every Saturday morning to collect books, which later caused a lot of trouble. For me the whole school curriculum became absolute nonsense. When I was supposed to be studying school material I was reading books from Collymore’s library. I got into trouble.123

Frank Collymore (1893–1980) taught English and French at Combermere High School in Barbados from 1911 until his retirement in 1958. He was also the founding editor of Bim, a prominent literary magazine that gave lifeblood to the arts in the Caribbean.124 Collymore was 121 See Smith 2002: x and xiii for the myth that Thomas was self-taught, and ibid. 37–43 for an account of the formal education that he received. 122 Lamming 1992b: 58–9; Lamming explicitly mentions that he was ‘very interested in the fifth century Athenian culture’ and that Collymore’s library ‘was full of all sorts of books on the Greeks’ (59). This interview was first published in Munro and Sander 1972: 5–20. 123 Lamming 1992b: 58. 124 For an overview of literary magazines in the British West Indies, see Sander 1979: 46.


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himself a poet and author, albeit a self-effacing one, and built up a prominent reputation in the West Indian intellectual scene for his role as a critic and in shepherding the talents of his fellow Caribbean writers.125 In the interview quoted above, it is notable that Lamming portrays Collymore, who in many ways was a prominent member of the educational establishment and was to become Deputy Headmaster of Combermere, as ‘very separate from the school scene’ (ibid.). At the same time, Derek Walcott was busy supplementing his own colonial education at St Mary’s College in St Lucia, where he was a pupil 1941–7. Although Walcott has expressed greater appreciation for the formal content of his ‘sound colonial education’ and the technical competence that this education fostered, his ideological estrangement from this education is manifest in the long autobiographical poem Another Life (1974), which makes it clear that this official education was not sufficient for the development of his individual talent.126 Alongside his formal schooling, Walcott received guidance from several mentors: most notably Harold Simmons (1914–66), a St Lucian painter and some time civil servant amongst whose many contributions to the life of the arts on St Lucia was the establishment in 1945 of the St Lucia Arts and Crafts Society.127 H. D. Boxill, Walcott’s godfather, was also a key influence. Boxill taught French and Latin at St Mary’s College and broadened Walcott’s exposure to poetry.128 It was Harold Simmons who recommended Walcott’s first volume of poetry, 25 Poems (1948), to Frank Collymore and arranged for the latter to sell copies of the work in Barbados, whereupon Collymore became an important promoter of Walcott’s talents.129

125

For a fuller account of Frank Collymore’s life and his significance for the arts in the British West Indies, see Baugh 1986. 126 For Walcott’s appreciative but critical appraisal of the elite colonial education system in the Caribbean of his youth, see Walcott’s comments in an interview with Charles Rowell quoted on p. 78 above, with n. 38. 127 See Walcott 1997f: 28, and King 2000: 26–8. For a detailed discussion of the adult influences on Walcott’s extra-curricular education as an artist and poet, see King 2000: chs. 2–4. 128 King 2000: 23. 129 On Walcott’s relationship with Collymore see King 2000: ch. 4, especially pp. 59–62 and 67–8.

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As an absent presence, Walcott’s father Warwick Walcott, who died in 1931 when Walcott was still an infant, was another guiding influence in Walcott’s self-formation as an artist. In Walcott’s poetry his absent father represents a modest local tradition of self-acquired knowledge in the arts, particularly painting.130 Slightly later, but in the same generation as Lamming and Walcott, V. S. Naipaul has written about how, after emerging from his education at James’s old school, QRC, and from an English degree at Oxford University, he set about teaching himself how to write in the solitary confines of a cousin’s basement flat in Paddington in London.131 Naipaul is perhaps the extreme example of the Oedipal figure, who, in his determination to slough off the skins of every identity—Trinidadian, West Indian, East Indian, English— becomes the literary father to his father Seepersad Naipaul, pushing his father to persevere with his writing and to establish a name for himself, while at the same time testifying to his father’s writing as an inspiration for his own career as a writer.132 In their recent work on Oedipus and Antigone as conceptual icons for the exploration of identities in postcolonial and anti-colonial literature, Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson suggest that the figure of Oedipus assumes an important symbolic role in mediating the play of father figures within Walcott’s Omeros.133 They have suggested that Walcott complicates the idea of an Oedipal quest for postcolonial identity by creating a primary narrator who is ‘a son who adopts fathers’ (ibid.). I find Goff and Simpson’s argument particularly fruitful in the context of thinking about the intellectual genealogy that West Indian writers of James’s and Walcott’s generations constructed for themselves. According to this argument, Walcott’s Oedipal model entails a ‘multiplicity of fathers, signifying the plethora of cultures in the Caribbean’; in turn, this expanded model of genealogy promotes, rather than restricts, ‘the autonomy of the subject’ (ibid.). The notion of multiplying one’s paternity to allow increased room for manoeuvre and self-expression fits the Jamesian annexation of 130 See Walcott 1997f: 28. Walcott never simplifies the influence of his father, pointing out the irony of his name, Warwick, with its echoes of the shire of the most established author in the canon of English literature, as well as the Anglicized pretensions of the educated lower-middle-class circles in which his parents moved. 131 Naipaul 2007: 127–9. 132 133 Ibid. 30–3. Goff and Simpson 2007: 268.


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ancient Greece in BAB. In James’s narrative of his intellectual formation his father and mother root him to the local, to rural Trinidad; his colonial education enables him to acquit himself as an English gentleman drilled in the public school code; and the ancient Greeks with whom James claims a fellow feeling that bypasses the received knowledge of his formal education cancel out any debts to the British Empire by giving him access to a ‘higher’ civilization that is not implicated in the British Empire. The autodidactic persona is crucial to this project, since as we saw in Chapter 1 with the discussion of Froude’s The Bow of Ulysses, Victorian literature abounded in ways of routing ancient Greece through the British Empire; in rejecting the flawed colonial pedagogy of his schooling, James simultaneously discounts its version of Classics. As we shall see in Chapter 4, James’s claim to be an autodidact of the Greeks is not so simple, but it is significant for what it reveals of the trope of making one’s own way in the Classics within a broader tradition of Caribbean receptions. BAB is first and foremost a dialogue with the British Empire through the medium of cricket, a game that in spite of its original British character has been shaped by the receiving cultures in the former empire to the extent that their ownership of the game is at least as strong as that of the former imperial power. However, within this broader imperial framework Classics plays a parallel role as a body of knowledge that was initially transmitted in a colonial context, but which James turns around, taking his cue from cricket, to make it express Trinidadian experience and not just the experience of the British colonial power. Sometimes Greek and cricket seem to have been instrumental to each other in James’s experience. BAB provides ample evidence for the way in which cricket shaped James’s interpretation of ancient Greece, but there were also more practical, contingent associations; for instance, James tells us that he received additional Greek tuition in the holidays from the Reverend F. L. Merry, the vicar at St Jude’s Anglican church in Arima, and that Merry—a Yorkshireman—lent him the yearbooks of the Yorkshire County Club.134

134 James [1963] 1994a: 61–2. Reverend Merry ran a private school at St Jude’s Rectory in Arima.

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James’s determination to understand Greece on his own terms, and indeed to work out his own terms for the study of Classics, is symptomatic of the colonial context. This is not to say that colonialism can take the credit for James’s idiosyncratic genius, but that it supplied him with a set of circumstances, what we might call adversative opportunities, which called for a readjustment between the content of the curriculum and its context. It is no coincidence that C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, both alumni of Queen’s Royal College, in ‘autobiographies’ published in the same decade (the 1960s) both made it a priority to reinterpret their colonial education in terms which readers in the Caribbean might understand and to relate academic subjects to the lived reality in the Caribbean.135 In doing so they were able to draw on the intervening publications of other Caribbean intellectuals, who had established a tradition of autobiographical fiction which put forward the lives of men and women in the Caribbean as of equal historical worth to the history and stories from Over-There.136

CONCLUSION There has been an educational revolution in the Caribbean, leading to a profound discontinuity in the educational experience of different generations. In the anglophone Caribbean those who received an elite colonial secondary education and are now in their sixties, seventies, and eighties recall a curriculum in which Latin was still a dominant subject. With the establishment of the Caribbean Examinations Council in 1972, Latin was effectively phased out of the mainstream school curriculum. Today in the modern Caribbean, ‘Latin’ signifies Latin America, rather than the language of the ancient Romans, fulfilling Jose´ Martı´’s rallying call for the realignment

135 Eric Williams’s Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister was published in 1969, six years after the publication of Beyond a Boundary in 1963. 136 One thinks especially of Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin (1953), although James’s own novel Minty Alley (1936; repr. 1969) was an important precursor.


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of education in the Americas.137 This is a healthy development insofar as it represents the reformation of education to reflect the history and cultures of the Americas, and to meet the region’s economic needs.138 Instrumental considerations aside, the language situation of the Caribbean region is a phenomenally rich resource, which deserves to be studied for its own sake in Caribbean schools.139 But it is to be regretted that this realignment is an exclusive one, rejecting the significance of Classics and a broader liberal arts curriculum for the modern Caribbean. This is not a nostalgic regret for a vanished colonial curriculum, but a regret because many of the towering anglophone intellectuals in the modern Caribbean reworked Classics in order to create a Caribbean classical tradition so that future generations might not labour under a colonial regime of knowledge. When Walcott lamented ‘the lovely Latin lost in all our schools’ in the poem ‘The Hotel Normandie Pool’ (1981), he did so in a poem that tackles his sense of isolation as a Caribbean poet on the wrong side of prevailing cultural politics and aesthetics and aligns this with the reactionary backlash against Classics and the classics through a dialogue with Ovid set against the backdrop of the poolside of a tourist hotel in Port of Spain.140 The phoney cultural war between an African-oriented literature and a European one has distracted critics from the fact that, in the twentieth century, several anglophone Caribbean writers contributed richly to the very classical tradition with which it was suspected that there could only be a relationship of mimetic dependency. These writers included not just the obvious examples like Figueroa, James, or Walcott, but Brathwaite as well, whose bold revision of universal history in X/Self I will discuss in Chapter 5. The colonial curriculum in the West Indies that advocated Classics for its own sake or, worse, for the sake of empire failed in its inability 137

See p. 5 above. See, for example, the Trinidad and Tobago government’s goal that T&T should be a Spanish-speaking nation by 2020. 139 See the comments of John Figueroa in his Society, Schools and Progress in the West Indies (1971: 195), published when Figueroa was Professor of Education at UWI, Jamaica. 140 Walcott 1981: 63–70, quoting from p. 66. 138

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and unwillingness to relate the subject to the society in which it was being taught.141 It became a fossilized elite pursuit and in many cases was probably even more utilitarian than Spanish for business or Tourism in the contemporary curriculum, in the sense that it was regarded as a badge of status and a means to social and economic improvement. The artificial idea of ‘Classics for its own sake’ promotes a monologue at the expense of a dialogue about the past and what it has to say to the present and vice versa. This way lies foolishness, as local communities realized in their designation of Latin scholars as ‘fools’.142 The real loss is not the classical subjects per se, but the fact that without them it is harder for students in the anglophone Caribbean to grasp the totality of the region’s literature. The abrupt discontinuity between a generation of writers and intellectuals schooled in the Classics and those who came after them disrupts the transmission of knowledge locally, in the same way that the colonial curriculum also disrupted local knowledge. One of the ironies of the catastrophe of empire in the Caribbean is that Classics has become part of the archive of local knowledge. I illustrate this last point with an example from St Lucia. In April 2002 I was taken to meet Dame Pearlette Louisy, the Governor General of St Lucia, by her former Latin teacher from her days at St Joseph’s Convent.143 Pearlette Louisy is a linguist by training and holds degrees from the University of the West Indies, a Masters in linguistics from Universite´ Laval in Quebec, and a Ph.D. in education from the University of Bristol. The Governor explained how her interest in linguistics, and the grammar of St Lucian Creole in particular, was fed by her background in Latin. She then recalled how, on a recent school inspection, she had observed an English class 141 See the example of Major Grant, the Latin teacher at Isabella Imperial in Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967), modelled on Captain Achilles Daunt who had taught English and Latin at Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad. Major Grant handles the ethnic diversity of his students ineptly and makes insulting remarks about their socio-economic circumstances; he then implicates Virgil in all of this by mishandling the translation of a colour adjective. See p. 158 below. 142 See pp. 76 and 90 above. 143 Pearlette Louisy has been Governor General of St Lucia since 1997 and was knighted in 1999; my interview with the Governor took place on 2 April 2002.


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in which the class were reading through George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss and had puzzled over the simile comparing Maggie to the Greek hero Ajax: ‘She sat as helpless and despairing among her black locks as Ajax among the slaughtered sheep.’ The Governor recalled how one student had suggested that the simile worked by comparing the cleaning agent (the branded cleaner ‘Ajaxtm’) overwhelmed by the mess created by the blood of the sheep and Maggie Tulliver’s distress over the hair that she has just shorn off her head. One suspects that relatively few secondary-school students in any country would have got this allusion, but in the context in which it was related to me there was an irony that, as a fellow St Lucian, and indeed as a role model for her students, Pearlette Louisy had had educational opportunities that these students would not have and was witnessing the breakdown of the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next, with the irony that knowledge about myths and cultures apparently extraneous to the Caribbean could help these students to make better sense of some of the literature that has been produced in their midst.144 In Derek Walcott Square, renamed from ‘Columbus Square’ in 1992, the bronze busts of St Lucia’s two Nobel laureates, Sir Arthur Lewis and Derek Walcott, stand side by side. As a reflection of the global economy in which we live, these bronzes were cast in China, but as a reminder of the local context in which they are situated, the plaque on the bust of Sir Arthur Lewis, who did so much to illuminate and clarify development economics and the question of education for development, reads ‘A society without the arts is a cultural desert’—a claim that is underwritten by the bust of Walcott alongside him, guaranteeing the island’s cultural capital.145 144 See the question addressed to the young student in Walcott’s Another Life: ‘Boy! Who was Ajax?’ (Walcott 2004: 16 (l. 351)). 145 Sir Arthur Lewis, St Lucian by birth (his parents were from Antigua) was joint winner of the Nobel Prize for economics in 1979.

3 Translatio studii et imperii The Manipulation of Latin in Modern Caribbean Literature

Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi. (V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River)1 ‘The Classics!’ Mr. Bellfeels screamed with admiration, although he did not know the translation. ‘The fecking Classics, boy!’ (Austin Clarke, The Polished Hoe)2

If the lament for the loss of Latin and classical education at the end of the last chapter seemed like an indulgence, this chapter will seek to persuade otherwise by examining the unlikely ways in which three anglophone Caribbean authors have employed their classical education in the services of original anti-colonial and anti-imperial critiques. I centre my discussion around the medieval Latin concept of translatio studii et imperii (‘translation of learning and power/empire’), which assumes the transfer of culture along with power as empires succeed each other. In origin, the translatio looks back to the idea of universal history in Graeco-Roman and ancient Jewish historiography, with its emphasis on the succession of empires.3 However, the medieval translatio places a greater emphasis on the empires 1 Naipaul [1979] 2002b: 29. All quotations from this novel are taken from the 2002 Picador paperback edition. 2 Clarke 2002: 262. 3 On ‘universal history’ and the succession of empire, see Momigliano 1987: 39–52.

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of Europe emanating from Rome’s empire, which in turn was a conduit for Greek culture. Modern theorists of postcolonial translation apply this concept more broadly, to refer to the tenet of the westward-moving trajectory of empire, from the Far East in the distant past to the USA in the present. In origin the concept presupposes the continuity of Rome’s culture passed down through successive European empires, as Douglas Robinson explains: [B]elievers in the translatio studii et imperii insist that learning and empire were successively embodied in a sequence of cultures while remaining fundamentally the same. Thus the bare historical fact that learning and empire have moved from Greece to Rome to France, say, is idealized (and to some extent rendered irrelevant) through the belief that their migration has not changed learning and empire: that they are still the same in the (sic) fourteenth-century Christian Europe as they were in ancient Greece and Rome.4

This contradictory model of translation, which is also a model of stasis, reveals the powerful ideological construction of Classics as a form of western knowledge, transmitted along with empire. The Latin motto of the University of the West Indies (ex occidente lux) arguably attempted to lay claim to this idea of a westwards trajectory of knowledge by inserting the West Indies into the translatio studii.5 In practice, since Classics was transmitted along with empire in the British West Indies, those authors for whom Classics was part of their intellectual apparatus wrestled with the problem of how to use this knowledge while simultaneously avoiding its colonial accretions. In response to colonial appropriations of Classics, transmitted over a putative network of empire, the writers who I examine here offer a strenuous critique, pointing to blatant fictions and gaps in colonial Classics. Moreover, I will argue that they often conduct this critique through subterfuge, under the guise of apparent error, playing on the colonial prejudice that Classics did not belong to them.

4

Robinson 1997: 54; see also the excellent theoretical discussion of the idea of a trans-temporal, never-ending Roman empire in Willis 2007: passim. 5 See the discussion on p. 92 above.

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Translatio studii et imperii TRANSLATING LATIN BADLY

We start with a misquotation of Virgil,6 which forms one of two Latin mottoes that recur in V. S. Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River (1979). When the reader first encounters this Latin phrase on page 29 of the novel, it is not glossed with a translation. In fact, the narrator Salim draws our attention to the lack of translation by expressing his ignorance of the meaning of the phrase: ‘These Latin words, whose meaning I didn’t know, were all that remained of a monument outside the dock gates’ (ibid.). Left untranslated for forty pages (70), these Latin words exert a talismanic force, whose power lies precisely in their incomprehensibility. Once translated, the sentiment that they carry is exposed as a lie as the motto is seen to be a deliberate misquotation, and indeed malappropriation, of a line in Virgil. But as Imraan Coovadia has argued in a recent discussion of misquotation in Naipaul’s novel, this misquotation of Virgil, which has its origins in the colonial history of Trinidad, functions as ‘an insider’s joke, a cache of hidden authority’.7 The second epigraph, from Austin Clarke’s novel The Polished Hoe (2002), ridicules the white Bajan plantation manager, Mr Darnley Alexander Randall Bellfeels, who revels in the attainments of his illegitimate son Wilberforce in winning a prestigious Barbados Island Scholarship on the strength of his results in classical subjects in the Senior Cambridge Certificate.8 Bellfeels’s toast of the ‘fecking Classics’ comes in response to a modified quotation from Book 21 of Livy’s History, quoted in honour of his son’s achievement (see p. 125 below). As with many of the other members of elite Bajan society satirized in the novel, Bellfeels is typical in paying lip service to the Classics as a marker of civilization and class, while being ignorant of what they contain. But Clarke’s portrayal of the superficial veneer of classical learning assumes a deeper classical knowledge in order to grasp the humour of the satire, as well as an appreciation of the significance of Classics in Barbados’ educational history.

6 A misquotation of Virgil, Aeneid 4. 110–12, ‘si Iuppiter . . . misceriue probet populos aut foedera iungi’. 7 Coovadia 2008: 5. 8 On the institution of the island scholarships in the British West Indies, see pp. 72–3 above.


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These particular misquotations and misappropriations of Classics will be analysed in greater detail below, but for the moment they stand as examples of a larger phenomenon—the canny misquotation of Latin in modern Caribbean literature. ‘Canny’ because the (mis)quotation of Latin often involves the complex manipulation of readers’ expectations. For those who recognize and can translate the quotation in question, misquotation may suggest simple error. However, these misquotations simultaneously conceal an additional layer of significance; recognition of the Latin source and its context is not sufficient for interpretation. To fully comprehend the meaning of the (mis)quotation, the reader needs to know the Caribbean context in order to appreciate the intelligence of an error that actually conceals an important truth. It transpires that quoting or translating Latin badly is not a simple matter. Before turning to specific Latin misquotations in Caribbean literature, it will be useful to relate the themes of (mis)quotation and translation to the theoretical study of postcolonial translation. It is a truism that translations are embedded in complex cultural, political, and historical contexts. A corollary is that changed cultural contexts require new translations or adaptations. In the Introduction I suggested that the adaptation of the Classics for a Caribbean context—a new word for a new world—was fundamental to the process of gaining independent recognition and authority for the cultures of the anglophone Caribbean and their art. So too with quotation: the quotations that served under colonialism will not necessarily be the quotations of choice in the post-colony. Or, if retained, these quotations become the subject of transformative irony. In addition, the introduction of deliberate errors in the quotation of Latin, on the part of authors who know what they are doing, signals the contradictory legacy of Latin as an imperial language that simultaneously reflects majority and minority translations: the postcolonial writer sees both. Taking their cue from Homi Bhabha’s word-play on the translational and the transnational, Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi have suggested that to ‘speak of post-colonial translation is little short of a tautology’,9 on the grounds that the metaphorical process of translation (a ‘carrying across’) is omnipresent under empire. One does not 9 Bassnett and Trivedi 1999: 12–13, quoting from p. 13. See Bhabha [1994] 2004: 244, where Bhabha relates translation to ‘culture’s transnational dissemination’.

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have to subscribe to the tenet of translatio studii et imperii to appreciate that texts travel in several different directions as a result of the movements occasioned by empire. And not only do texts circulate as they are carried from place to place, but they also migrate internally as the set of references according to which they are read shifts. Recent work on translation and globalization is helpful here. Exploring parallels between the interplay of globalization and localization in cosmopolitan networks as a model for contemporary translation theory, Michael Cronin has recourse to two concepts that were coined to explain the dissemination of scientific facts and innovations: the ‘immutable mobile’ and the ‘mutable mobile’.10 The first refers to the conception of scientific facts as products of a particular knowledge context ‘where the configuration of facts and context must be held stable if they are to arrive safely at their destination and make sense on the receiving end’ (2006: 27). Conversely, the ‘mutable mobile’ originally referred to a design of water pump in Zimbabwe, which was adapted and tweaked with the result that it was ‘never quite the same from one village to the next . . . the pump changes shape but still remains recognizable’ (ibid.). Applying both concepts to translation theory and taking the example of the inequality between ‘English literature’ and the status of literatures translated into English, Cronin likens the ‘immutable mobile’ to the idea of a national literature premised on a Romantic notion of original, national literary genius, which is ‘transported unchanged through time’. Conversely, the translational equivalent of the ‘mutable mobile’ would be ‘a notion of literature that is networked beyond national borders through the intrinsic duality and mutability of translation’.11 The idea of the ‘mutable mobile’ elucidates the role of the misquotation of Latin in postcolonial Caribbean literature, and its role in writing back to colonial misquotations that pretend imperial immutability even while transforming the message of the transmitted text. The negating prefix mis- suggests error, but like the Zimbabwe water pump these misquotations still work as quotations because the 10

Cronin 2006: 27–32. For the ‘immutable mobile’, see Latour 1987; for the ‘mutable mobile’, see de Laet and Mol 2000. 11 Cronin 2006: 32.


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source is recognizable even though the shape has changed. Given my focus on misquotation, it is pertinent to remember the Latin etymology of the English noun ‘error’: the primary meaning of the Latin noun error is wandering. I will argue that in Caribbean literature the apparent errors involving the misquotation of Latin reflect this wandering and the fact that, like translation, quotation is neither static nor stable, but will depend on the cultural context that it serves. Errors of misquotation draw attention to difference and to change. In the case of the misquotation of a text, particularly a Latin text where so much scholarship has gone into establishing the ‘original’ and authentic text, the change is particularly radical, because the source text itself is altered. With interlingual translation the source text in the ‘original’ language (i.e. in an untranslated state) remains the same, regardless of the changes that a translation might introduce to the target text.12 There is an analogy here with Roger Abrahams’s analysis of the way in which the conventions that govern New World speechmaking have frequently been misinterpreted as flawed or inept reproductions of white speech. Reviewing colonial testimonies of African-American and Afro-Caribbean speech behaviour, Abrahams concluded that negative stereotypes of African-American culture led many white listeners to construe divergence and difference of speech as the misperformance of white norms.13 In the texts discussed in this chapter, the misquotation of Latin plays on these stereotypes, leaving it open for the incautious reader to perpetuate the stereotype by mistaking misquotation for error. These misquotations demand a version of Du Bois’s double consciousness, since competent decoding depends on the reader identifying the error according to one set of conventions, while at the same time understanding the cleverness of an error that is not one.14 12

Granted this is a somewhat artificial scenario, since this Latin source text is not accessible to us without translation, which immediately introduces change. 13 Abrahams 1983: 23. See also ibid. 31: ‘the observer took note of the oration both because of its similarities to British practice and its inappropriateness; he can only fall back on his stereotyping habits to handle his sense of embarrassment by suggesting that these Afro-Americans were trying to copy their master’s verbal practices but misunderstood and therefore imperfectly reproduced them.’ 14 See p. 229 below with n. 11.

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Another of Abrahams’s caveats is helpful here. Abrahams’s study of institutions of speechmaking among Afro-American communities (using ‘American’ in the broad, geographical sense) in North America and the eastern Caribbean led him to argue that European cultures are only one element in a complex system that governs how people speak in different contexts and the content of their speech. To insist on European cultures as the dominant key to interpretation is to occlude the other cultures at work. In the case of representations of ancient Greece and Rome in Caribbean literature, it is particularly important not to immediately classify them as European cultures,15 but rather to see how they are received into a syncretic space in which codes from Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean are all in play.

LATIN AND SWEET TALK IN AUSTIN CLARKE’S THE POLISHED HOE (2002) In Chapter 2 we saw how, in Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack (1980), the Barbadian writer Austin Clarke reconciled his elite classical education with the cultural norms of Barbados society.16 In his recent novel The Polished Hoe, set in 1950s Barbados, Clarke has explored the cultural legacy of the classical education favoured under colonialism and the way in which this seemingly foreign legacy could be adapted and possessed by different groups within Barbadian society. At one end of the spectrum of adaptation, Clarke depicts the use of Latin and Latinate English in the decorous tradition of eloquence or speech genre referred to as ‘talking sweet’, in which speakers attune their verbal register and the content of their speech to correspond to the ceremonial nature of an occasion.17 In the novel such appropriations of Latin are often culturally opportunistic and, in Clarke’s satirical exposure of the plantation society, are often used by a poorly educated hegemonic class to lend assumed civilizational 15 16 17

See pp. 2–3 above. See pp. 90–6 above. For an explanation of ‘talking sweet’, see Abrahams 1983: 34.


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authority to uncivilized behaviour. At the other end of the spectrum, the primary narrator and her interlocutor offer a folk perspective on the classical legacy in the Caribbean.18 At first glance this folk perspective seems unreliable, but is seen upon reflection to contain canny insights that constitute a fresh model for classical reception, one that is attuned to the historical experience of the modern Caribbean. As author, Clarke positions himself in the middle of this two-way cultural flow between received, Western culture on the one hand, and local folk culture on the other hand. The novel itself demonstrates Clarke’s mastery of the rhythms of Barbadian speech, but assumes an international readership alert to the novel’s different cultural codes.19 An insight into the two-way cultural flow at the heart of the novel can be observed in miniature in one of Clarke’s short stories, ‘Privilege’.20 The story begins with a phone-call from the Prime Minister of Barbados (Errol Walton Barrow, 1920–87),21 in which Clarke is asked if he knows the meaning of the word ‘privilege’. As Clarke flounders around on the end of the phone trying to work out what the Prime Minister is getting at, he offers a conventional dictionary definition of ‘privilege’ (right, advantage . . . ). The Prime Minister then teases him that, ‘a former professor at Yale University and at other Amurcan Ivy League universities, teaching people Black Studies and Black

18 To be sure, ‘talking sweet’ is in evidence among the folk just as much as among the more westernized elite, but in the case of the latter, Latin quotations and Latinate phrases are much more common, reflecting their privileged education. In the novel the character of Mary-Mathilda is a deft manipulator of different codes of speech, talking up and down at will, subtly adjusting her register to the social class of her interlocutor. 19 I see parallels between what I call Clarke’s ‘canniness’ and the ‘literary anancyism’ advocated by Ifeona Fulani as a strategy for black writers (African, AfricanAmerican, and Caribbean) to secure international publication without having to silence their voices. Although Fulani writes specifically about Caribbean women writers, what she says about this anancyism could equally apply to Clarke’s strategies of narration in The Polished Hoe: ‘Anancy is the signifyin(g) spider who, in the continuous spinning of his web, tests the limits of language in a perpetual “discourse of trickery” ’ (Fulani 2005: 69; quoting De Souza 2000: 59). 20 ‘Privilege’ is published in the collection of short stories entitled Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit: Rituals of Slave Food ¼ Clarke 2000: 54–66. 21 Errol Barrow was Prime Minister of Barbados in 1966–76 and again in 1985–7.

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Culture, and coming down here getting-on like a black intellectual,’ doesn’t know the meaning of ‘privilege’.22 The key to this enigmatic exchange lies in a confusion of codes. Receiving a call from the Prime Minister Clarke thinks in terms of Standard English, which is just one part of the Barbadian culture that he shares with the Prime Minister, when in fact the Prime Minister is using ‘privilege’ in its local, Creole sense: it transpires that ‘Privilege’ is a local Barbadian dish. Clarke manipulates the confusion of codes further: when he arrives at the Prime Minister’s private residence (named ‘Kampala’—a reminder that there are also African codes at work), Clarke is disconcerted by the broad talk of the assembled company of government ministers.23 The reader is given a mini-bio of each minister, including this description of the deputy prime minister: The deputy prime minister was a man who went to Codrington College in Barbados to study theology. He didn’t like the Bible, though, as much as he liked Livy and Caesar’s Gallic Wars, so he exchanged Codrington for Durham up in England, and read Law and Contracts after Classical Studies.24

When the local referent of ‘privilege’ is finally revealed (pp. 58–9), the Prime Minister remarks: ‘You see what happens to our biggest brains when they leave here, to go Away to North Amurca and learn a lot o’ foolishness? And then come back here and forget their roots?’ This remark and the cross-cultural confusion that precedes it dramatize in miniature the interpretative challenge at the heart of Clarke’s novel The Polished Hoe (2002). In this novel Livy’s History and Caesar’s Gallic Wars recur as a leitmotif of colonial education in Barbados, but the challenge is to understand these quotations in their local context, so as not to fall into the trap set for Clarke by the Prime Minister in ‘Privilege’, in which education and learning equate to foolishness when they are alienated from local culture.25 The plot of The Polished Hoe takes the form of the personal narrative of Mary-Mathilda Gertrude Bellfeels, in lieu of the official 22 Clarke 2000: 55. Clarke was a visiting professor at Yale University in the period 1968–70; see Algoo-Baksh 1994: 83–9. 23 For ‘broad’ talk as the opposite of ‘talking sweet’, see Abrahams 1983: 34. 24 Ibid. 57. On Codrington College, see pp. 74–5 above. 25 See p. 90 above on the topos of elite learning as ‘foolishness’.


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statement which she is supposed to be giving to the local constabulary after alerting them to her murder of the plantation manager Mr Bellfeels, her erstwhile employer, lover, the father of her son, and, as she chillingly reveals at the end of the novel, her own father. The narrative of Mary-Mathilda’s life is told first to a junior constable, standing in for Sargeant, and then to Sargeant himself.26 The narrative explains the island’s history in terms of her personal experience, particularly the institution of slavery and its twisted social legacy, which persists into the present day (the 1950s). In the course of this prose epic Clarke examines the precise nuances and gradations of race and class in 1950s Barbados. As in Clarke’s memoirs Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack, education is seen to be integral to the social hierarchy on the island, furnishing those who have acquired it with cultural capital that can potentially outweigh the burdens of poverty and racial discrimination. As we saw in Chapter 2 above, at this period in the island’s colonial history the curriculum was dominated by Classics, and mastery of the Classics conferred respect; the way in which Classics is used and abused in the novel furnishes an ironic commentary on the cultural ironies at the heart of Barbadian society. Classics is part of the rich tapestry of references that the characters in the novel share; whether, like Miss Mary-Mathilda, they know fragments of the Classics from the colonial readers that they used at elementary school or, like Sargeant, they derived them from basic Latin textbooks or, like the Solicitor-General, they remember their Livy and Caesar from the set texts of the secondary school curriculum. Within these varying degrees of knowledge, Classics fulfils different uses. At one end of the spectrum are the scholastic achievements of Wilberforce, Mary-Mathilda’s son, who won the island scholarship on the basis of his performance in classical subjects in the Oxford and Cambridge Joint Board Higher School Certificate Examination (259–60). At the other end are Mary-Mathilda and Sargeant, whose classical knowledge is faltering and prone to error; although, as I will suggest below, their errors contain important insights. In between these two poles are various social, ceremonial 26 Sargeant is a reworking of the character Sarg in Clarke’s earlier semi-autobiographical novel Proud Empires (1986).

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uses of classics in which Latin (not Greek) is the epitome of high or sweet talk. In contrast to the extreme class hierarchy in 1950s Barbados, with its pretensions to culture, Mary-Mathilda offers a levelling perspective on this culture. For instance, she puts the so-called ‘heights’ of education (203) scaled by her son Wilberforce into perspective: ‘Sometimes, though, when I look at Wilberforce, I have to wonder if, with all the book-learning his father paid for, Wilberforce isn’t still one of the single most stupidest men walking this earth!’ (ibid.). And yet this criticism of her son is tempered by the fact that she accredits him as the source of much of the learning that she possesses. The moral that emerges is that all education, including Classics, has to be informed by its local context. The role of the Caribbean novel as an archive of the historical experiences of the modern Caribbean is well recognized.27 However, The Polished Hoe is notable for the didactic tone of the narrator and the explicit way in which Mary-Mathilda substitutes personal, oral narrative for official, written history, suggesting that the true history of the island is in the lived experience of its people: the experience of the plantation from which all their lives emanate.28 Hence MaryMathilda argues that her son Wilberforce finished his schooling at Harrison College without knowing ‘the history of himself ’ (214–15). This folk perspective on history is in fact an echo of the insight expressed by Eric Williams and other prominent Caribbean historians of his generation. Reflecting on his own colonial education in Trinidad and its inappropriateness, Williams wrote: My training was divorced from anything remotely suggestive of Trinidad and the West Indies. . . . In my special subject, British Colonial history, there were some references to the West Indies, but they were in terms of European diplomacy and European war. What I knew of slavery and the plantation economy came from Roman history. I could discuss quite learnedly the Latin dictum, the plantation economy ruined Italy, but I had not the

27 See, e.g. Nana Wilson-Tagoe’s study Historical Thought and Literary Representation in West Indian Literature (1998). 28 More explicit still, and overtly historiographical, is Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco (1992). On Chamoiseau’s novel as an inspiration for The Polished Hoe, see Clarke’s comments in an interview with Linda Richards for January Magazine (November 2002): http://januarymagazine.com/profiles/aclarke.html (last accessed 9 January 2009).


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slightest idea of how it had ruined the West Indies and was even then ruining Trinidad. . . . It was not until 1939 that West Indian history was included in the secondary curriculum. Even so, it was only at School Certificate level, and I have been told by teachers that it was studied only by the ‘weaker boys’; a ‘stronger’ boy would, it was claimed, be distracted by it from the improvement of his foundation in English history preparatory to the more advanced history of the island scholarship class.29

Like Eric Williams in real life, the character Wilberforce has to go to Oxford to discover the significance of plantation society for his own island (214). In keeping with her distrust of the received, colonial history of their island, Mary-Mathilda also repeatedly challenges the superiority of ‘European Culture’ (198), and protests that the colonial education that they have all received encourages them ‘to believe that anything from Over-and-Away is either more difficult to imitate or is superior to anything we have in this Island’ (199). Showing Sargeant the reproductions of European art hanging in her house, she translates a pieta` scene into local terms for him (197–9), finding a local subject whose pitiful fate stirs their hearts: the tragedy of Clotelle, a plantation worker who hanged herself after being raped by Mr Bellfeels, the plantation manager: ‘So, Europe can’t teach we nothing about Pity! Even if they call it by a different name, “pee-a-tuh”!’ (200).30 This code-switching between dialect (‘can’t teach we’), West Indian Standard English, and the phonetic spelling of pieta` works to foreignize European culture, confusing the cultural centre. Clarke effects a cunning substitution; in place of Sargeant’s cultural alienation from ‘Western’ art and corresponding feelings of inadequacy, the translation of pieta` and the phonetic word-play underscores how alien a word it is in the context of Barbadian folk culture. With the focus on the foreignness of the word pieta`, we are reminded as well that there is a complex game of cultural insiderism at work in Clarke’s novel. The code-switching in the speech of Mary-Mathilda and Sargeant, as they switch backwards and forwards between Barbadian Creole, more formal West Indian 29 Williams 1969: 35; see the discussion of Williams’s education on pp. 85–9 above. 30 See pp. 239–40, where Mary-Mathilda likens the calypso about Clotelle’s death to the creation of a myth.

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English, and ‘Standard’ English, will strike many of Clarke’s readers outside the Caribbean as foreign speech. Although their speech is perfectly intelligible to readers outside the Caribbean, the perception of its foreignness intervenes between the printed word on the page and the reader’s comprehension of it. As Maureen Warner-Lewis points out, within the Caribbean itself there are comprehension gaps between the Creoles in the different anglophone Caribbean islands.31 However, for readers in the Caribbean familiar with West Indian English, and Barbadian English in particular, Clarke’s language has the potential to mean more. As Kenneth Ramchand puts it, ‘this does not mean that outsiders have no access, only that they miss some of what Lionel Trilling calls “the buzz of implication”’.32 While the novel exposes the abuses of a hegemonic colonial culture, the linguistic fabric of the novel reverses the idea that there is any one hegemonic culture. In case this domestication of pieta` as pity seems too simple, I note that Sargeant suggests ‘piety’ as an alternative translation, getting the etymology spot on, ‘It could, in its foreign-language meaning, stand more for piety than for pity’ (201). Mary-Mathilda’s last word on piety is a thought-provoking afterword on this concept in European letters, ‘The man do the action: the woman has to pray to correct that action’ (ibid.). In this way Mary-Mathilda and Sargeant make the inappropriate—what does not belong to them—their own. We can contrast the guileless conversation of Sargeant and MaryMathilda with the posturing of the island’s elite, whose learned appropriations of classics are crude in comparison. There are two scenes in which the island’s elite are depicted garnishing their words with Latin. The first occasion is the party thrown by Mr Bellfeels at the Harlem Bar & Grill,33 to toast his son Wilberforce Alexander Darnley Bellfeels’s

31 Warner-Lewis 2001: 28, ‘West Indian literature sounds differently to different people, depending on the decoder’s language culture and knowledge of other languages. It means that comprehension gaps occur as the literature is received from island to island of the Antillean archipelago.’ 32 Ramchand 1988: 106. 33 As with Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack, and Lamming’s path-breaking In the Castle of my Skin (1953), in The Polished Hoe the black consciousness associated with the Harlem Renaissance is largely dormant, confined to passing references. However, these few references constitute a symbolic counter-discourse to the colonial discourse that pervades the society in the novel. Cf. p. 94 above with n. 88.


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academic achievements in winning the island scholarship based on his performance in Classics (Latin, Greek, Ancient History of Greece and of Rome, and Religious Knowledge): the individual elements of his attainments as a classical scholar are spelled out singly: First in the Island in Latin Prose. First in Greek Prose. First in Latin Distinction Prose. First in Greek Distinction Prose. First in Latin Unseen. First in Greek Unseen. First in Distinction Latin Unseen. First in Distinction Greek Unseen. First in Latin Translation, both at Pass Level and at Distinction Level. First in Greek translation, both at Pass Level and at Distinction Level. First in Roman Ancient History. First in Greek Ancient History.34

The detailed breakdown of Wilberforce’s results reflects the seriousness of the Higher Certificate examinations, both in Barbados and in England, where the papers were set and marked. The satire is reserved for the company’s inept attempts to share in this learning. Based on the testimony of his former Headmaster, we know that Wilberforce’s father Mr Bellfeels never got beyond Standard Four at school (167), but here he is proclaiming the Classics as a medley of random authors and basic grammar: . . . Classics, be-Christ! Wunnuh know what that mean? Virgil! Caesar! Homer! The Aeneid, gorblummuh, Euripperdeees and the Illiad! Jesus Christ, the Classics, boy! Amo, amas, amat. The venerable Classics! (261)

The Solicitor-General then quotes a speech from Book 21 of Livy’s History, inserting Wilberforce’s name in place of Hannibal’s at the beginning of the passage. The Latin passage, which is summarized but not translated, goes over the heads of most of the audience.35 Mr Bellfeels roars approval: 34

pp. 259–60. Pp. 261–2: ‘ “Haec apud Romanos consul,” the Solicitor-General said, quoting from Livy, Book XXI, Hannibal’s decision to let his Gallic captives fight in single combat for the prize of freedom, Wilberforcus rebus prius quam verbis adhortandos 35

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‘The Classics!’ Mr. Bellfeels screamed with admiration, although he did not know the translation. ‘The fecking Classics, boy!’ And the other men, who, except perhaps the Vicar and the Headmaster, did not know their Latin, screamed their delight at the Solicitor-General’s oratory; and this encouraged the Headmaster to join in the declamations.

In the context of the social occasion, the cultural significance of the Latin quotation is rhetorical and superficial: the ability to quote passages from Latin literature is a mark of oratorical prowess. The Latin quotation is pertinent to the occasion only inasmuch as they are celebrating the achievements of a classical scholar; less pertinent is the Headmaster’s choice of quotation—from Macbeth. In this context, being able to appreciate Latin does not depend on being able to translate it. Instead, quotation of the classics is a form of verbal exuberance—a delight in words in and of themselves. For these purposes Latinate words also count, as demonstrated by the Headmaster of the Elementary School in his indictment of Mr Bellfeels on an earlier occasion for his sexual exploitation of the under-age Mary-Mathilda: ‘Is Bellfeels guiding Mary-Mathilda into this beautiful pulchritudinous ripening pubescence’ (167), where the sweet talk glosses over the depraved crime of child rape. The second scene involves a typical dinner party thrown by Mr Bellfeels, where Mary-Mathilda hears the men’s conversation from her vantage point in the kitchen: Standing beside the hot iron stove, she heard the other men laugh; and Sir G’s voice speaking in a foreign language; in Latin: ‘Missus Hannibal in Hispaniam adventus primo statim adventus omnem exercitum in se convertit; Hamilcarem iuvenem vigorem in vultu vimque in occulis, habitum oris lineamentoque intueri.’ ‘. . . and I see that you still remember yuh Six-Form Latin, eh, Judge Jeffreys!’ she heard the Vicar say to Sir G. ... ‘Bellfeelus nec temere credendum nec asperandum ratus,’ Sir G. then said. ‘Oh God, oh-God!’ the men screamed.

milites ratus, circumdato ad spectaculum exercitu, captives montanos vinctos in medio statuit, armisque Gallicis ante pedes eorum proiectis, interrogare interpretem iussit, ecquis, si vinculis levaretur armaque et equum victor acciperet ferro vellet.” ’ The Latin passage quoted here is from chapter 42 of book 21 of Livy’s History.


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‘Sweet-sweet!’ the Vicar said. ‘Too-sweet!’ And the men roared. She could hear the ring of glasses tipped against one another, and the rattling of ice in the glasses, as the men toasted Sir G’s versatility and application of Livy Book XXI to Mr. Bellfeels’ situation. They had all—except Mr. Bellfeels—studied this book in various forms at Harrison College, or the Lodge School; most of them, however, had forgotten the passage . . .36

Clarke specifically names Harrison College and the Lodge School, the two premier secondary schools in Barbados at this time, as the schools where the Solicitor and the others learned their Latin.37 It is telling that the Solicitor quotes from the same book of Livy (Book 21) as he did in the earlier scene (p. 125 above), as though this is the limit of the Latin that he learned by rote at school. Book 21 of Livy’s History was one of the set texts that Clarke read at Combermere Secondary School. In his memoirs of his schooldays he describes spending the first month of the long vacation in between the third and fourth form copying out the textbooks that he would need in the coming academic year, and which his mother could not afford to buy for him: ‘We copied Vergil and Livy, Book XXI, which some boys said was the “hardest piece o’ Latin in the whirl”’ (Clarke 2003: 146). This is Classics as parlour game, used for rhetorical sport. Once again, comprehension is not paramount, and it is not clear how many of the company understand the meaning of the passage quoted by Sir G. The important thing is that they get the gist and recognize the versatility of the speaker in inserting Mr Bellfeels (‘Bellfeelus’) into a scene from Livy. Any pretension to civility is undermined by the men’s profligate behaviour—the fact that in between courses and the evening’s entertainment they wander into the kitchen to touch up Mary-Mathilda (466), or worse (467). The ability to interject Latin into one’s speech is one variety of the tradition of eloquence referred to as ‘talking sweet’.38 In the passage above, the Vicar’s response to Sir G. (‘Sweet-sweet!) encapsulates the speech-context: Sir G.’s oratory is an example of talking sweet, of manipulating respectable speech to fit the social occasion and finding 36 37 38

See pp. 467–8. Here Sir G quotes from chapter 4 of book 21 of Livy’s History. On the classical curriculum at these schools, see Ch. 2 above. See Abrahams 1983: 34 (and p. 118 above).

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an apposite quotation from literature to adorn his rhetoric. This is spelt out explicitly in a later passage during which Sargeant constructs an imaginary court scene for the trial of Mary-Mathilda. The trial is represented as a verbal contest, with a role for the conspicuous performance of classical knowledge: They are here to ‘talk.’ They are here to hear Sir Gerald interject his wisdom, with humour and quotations from Shakespeare and from the Classics, Livy, Book XXI, and Virgil’s Aeneid, and Tacitus’ Histories; . . . The words they will hear, words from the Latin, and with a generous sprinkling of words from Greek classical literature, and from Shakespeare, are words they would not hear every day in their neighbourhoods, on the beach, in the fish market, or at a cricket game on the Pasture . . . but they will like these words, although they do not know Latin, or Greek; or would not have read too much Shakespeare, they will fall in love with these words and make them their own, by repeating them, even when their usage is not exactly relevant, or exact. (462–3)

These quotations are not effective for the texts that they allude to, but for the weight of words that they contain.39 Within this verbal economy it is the relative rarity of Latin, and even more so Greek, that ensures their value; one could even go so far as to say that it is their unintelligibility that ensures their value. At this formal, ceremonial end of the system of speechmaking, success lies in the ability to use words that are out of the way of the majority of the audience and which are associated with ‘over-and-away’, to use Mary-Mathilda’s phrase.40 However, it is important not to confuse the ceremonial flavour of this oratory with mimicry, since this ceremonial use of Latin in ‘high’ speech is a naturalized tradition of speech governed by local codes.41 In contrast to this model of quotation, where classical knowledge is formal and decorous—a remote object that impresses because it is not local—Mary-Mathilda domesticates classical knowledge and coopts it into a repository of stories from different sources (the Bible, British history, the history of slavery in America, and the oral history 39 See p. 463: ‘One man leans closer to the man sitting beside him, and with a hand covering his mouth, whispers, “Words, man! Words.” ’ 40 Quoted on p. 123 above. 41 See Abrahams’s caveat quoted on p. 117 above.


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that her mother has handed down to her about plantation life). In Mary-Mathilda’s narrative there are no immovable texts and sources are cited vaguely if at all. Conversely, in the scenes where the island’s elite quote Latin there is a strong emphasis on textual authority—the ability to quote from Livy, for instance; in Mary-Mathilda’s case the story circulates independently of texts. The best illustration of this is her version of the Trojan War (417–18), narrated to Sargeant as an intimate act of story-telling as they lie in the cane-fields gazing at the stars. Clarke draws attention to the unreliability of Mary-Mathilda’s version on several different levels. First, the unreliability of the story is signalled by the fact that its narratological status is obscure; it is neither direct speech nor indirect speech, but is instead narrated as stream of consciousness. It is only at the end of the story, when Sargeant responds, that we realize that Mary-Mathilda has told the story aloud. It is as though we are eavesdropping on a deauthorized version of the Trojan War: If there was a moon, she thinks, lying beside him—the first time in a long while that she has lain beside a man—if there was a moon, this closeness could have been so soft and tender, touching and bathed in the goldenness of the moonlight; and she would be impelled, seduced—not seduced . . . inspired—to tell him stories, like the story of the Greeks who were in battle with the Romans . . . Was it the Romans? . . . in battle with the Romans; and the Romans retired behind their city walls; and their walls were about twenty feet high, and as thick as a man’s arms outstretched; and the Greeks could not break down the gates to the city, further-less scale the wall; they were never good at high-jumping or pole-vaulting; and the Romans would spend the nights, which were all moonlight nights, looking through holes they had bored into the wall to see these Greeks working hard, building a toy horse for Roman children to play with; but the toy was too big even for the biggest child of Roman noble birth; and the Romans laughed, and were convinced now, for the second time, with proof, that they were superior to the Greeks, not only in their knowledge of Latin, and building ruins and monuments and statues of naked men and naked women, and fountains and aquariums, but that they were also superior to the Greeks in their knowledge of philosophy, the philosophy of War and Warfare; and the manufacture of wooden horses, and equestrian toys; and they laughed and laughed and had parties and orgies and drank wine and chewed grapes and olives and spat the seeds into fountains and pools of water, while the Greeks continued, outside the city walls, moonlight night after moonlight nights, to build the toy to be

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given to the children of Rome, but which they must have know was much too gigantic for any child to play with; and one moonlight night led to another, and the Romans forgot that they were at war with the Greeks. And then, certain that the Greeks were stupid, the Romans opened the gates to the city, just to see what the Greeks were doing; and with the help of real, live horses, the Romans hauled the stupid, oversized child’s toy, the Greeks’ gift of a wooden horse, into the city gates . . . 42

Mary-Mathilda’s version begins with an expression of uncertainty over the details (‘Was it the Romans?’). Through this device Clarke is able to dissociate himself from this erroneous version of the Trojan War, while at the same time offering a version whose errors are uncannily perceptive. The substitution of the Romans for the Trojans is not an error if the version one knows is Virgil’s Aeneid, where the Trojans are retro-constructed as the Romans of the future.43 In case we miss the significance of Mary-Mathilda’s canny error, it is made explicit in Sargeant’s response. Sargeant recalls the outlines of this story from elementary school, but not the precise details: ‘I remember the story, but I can’t remember the moral Mr. Edwards tell me was in the story, nor whether it was the Greeks versus the Romans. Or the Greeks versus the Trojans. Is a Trojan a Roman?’ (419). What on the surface is a simple expression of ignorance on Sargeant’s part is from the point of view of scholarship an extremely interesting question: ‘is a Trojan a Roman?’ In fact, this blurring of Trojan and Roman identity from Homer to Virgil recalls E´douard Glissant’s remark about filiation in the Western epic tradition after Homer as ‘me´tissage’.44 As a further twist to the unauthorized version offered by Mary-Mathilda, Clarke throws misattribution of sources into the mix. Sargeant claims that Mr Edwards, his teacher at Sin-Davids Elementary School, told him that he had read ‘the same story in the original Latin, in a book written by Julius Caesar, called Caesar’s Gallic Wars’ (419). It does not matter whether the error is one of memory (Sargeant not recalling what Mr Edwards told him), or

42

See pp. 417–18. Virgil’s version of the Trojan horse is narrated by Aeneas at Aeneid 2.13–267. The best discussion of Virgil’s account of the Trojan horse and its relation to other versions, Greek and Roman, is still Austin 1959. 44 Glissant [1990] 1997: 51. 43


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misinformation on the part of Mr Edwards;45 what is important is that the story has become uncoupled from source-criticism and has taken on a life and meaning of its own in a Barbadian context. Note the addition of comical circumstantial details in Mary-Mathilda’s version: the Greeks could not get over the walls because ‘they were never good at high-jumping or pole-vaulting’ (418).46 The grandeur of classical antiquity is further deflated by the description of the Romans ‘building ruins’. Some of these comic details conceal a serious point about the Romans’ cultural inferiority complex vis-a`vis the Greeks. The notion of the Romans priding themselves on being superior to the Greeks ‘in their knowledge of Latin’ is reminiscent of the attitude of the Roman statesman Cato the Elder on a visit to Athens. Plutarch records that Cato made a point of addressing the Athenian assembly in Latin and then using a translator to render a Greek version, as though not deigning to give a speech in Greek himself, even though he claimed to have been able to do so (Plutarch, Life of Cato the Elder 12. 4–5). As Eric Gruen comments on this passage, ‘Unlike his monolingual audience, so Cato implied, Romans had mastered both tongues, had the option of employing either, and chose the superior one.’47 And yet, for all Cato the Elder’s pride in Roman culture, in Cato’s lifetime educated Romans were conscious of the need to rival the Greek language and the cultural output of Greece through cultivating their own language and literature. What is more, the superiority of Latin alleged by Cato is belied by that fact that it is narrated by Plutarch, a Greek author who wrote in Greek under the Roman Empire. In fact, in Mary-Mathilda’s retelling of the Trojan horse episode, there is a hint of the Horatian phrase ‘Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit’ (‘captive Greece captured its wild conqueror’): although Greece was absorbed into the Roman Empire, Greek cultural imperialism remained a potent force. In Mary-Mathilda’s case, 45 In other words, there may be a suggestion that Mr Edwards is a fallible Latin teacher in the mould of Titus Hoyt in Naipaul’s Miguel Street (1959), on whom, see p. 80 above. More details about Mr Edwards’s tuition of Sargeant in Latin are given on pp. 241–2 of The Polished Hoe. 46 On comic treatments of the Trojan horse episode in extant Greek and Latin literature, see Austin 1959: 17. 47 Gruen 1993: 13.

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the Romans who pride themselves on their culture and intelligence are too dumb to detect Greek cunning at work.48 The final twist in all of this is that this seemingly artless, unreliable rendering of the Trojan horse episode conceals a local moral. Sargeant says that he ‘can’t remember the moral Mr. Edwards tell me was in the story’ (419). In the mouth of Mary-Mathilda this revisionist account has an obvious moral: the plantocracy who pride themselves on their superior culture and intelligence become complacent about the enemy in their midst and, like the Romans of this version, ‘forget that they are at war’ to the extent that, like Mr Bellfeels, they even settle the enemy in their midst, never suspecting the slaughter that lies in wait for them. In Bellfeels’s case, after thirty-eight years, the slaughter comes from his former lover, mother of his child, and daughter, lurking in the shadows of his verandah waiting to strike him down with a hoe. The ultimate irony is perhaps that, throughout the novel, Mary-Mathilda distances herself from the European culture that her son Wilberforce has imbibed, only to show her thorough appropriation of a canonical tale that speaks back to a colonial tradition that has abused the Classics for its own ends. Contrasted with the ability to remember passages of Latin word for word that is a characteristic of the institutionalized speech of Sir Gerald or the Headmaster, Mary-Mathilda tells the story in her own words and her own way. In fact, rather than mere quotation, she adapts the myth of the Trojan horse to a local cultural context. Whereas the men’s quotations ossify their object, deriving value from the words quoted because of the antiquity of Latin and the authority of the Classics, Mary-Mathilda’s creative misreading treats the myth as a living story to be retold. In this she is closer to Virgil, whose own version of the Trojan horse adapted existing mythology to his own story.49 Earlier in the novel Sargeant puzzles over the phenomenon whereby civilizations continue to wield influence ‘even after all the people of those civilizations was dead. Like the Latin and Greek civilizations’ (242). The story at the centre of The Polished Hoe is framed as an oral narrative intended to preserve for posterity the 48

The phrase comes from Horace’s Epistles 2.1.156: ‘Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit j et artis intulit agresti Latio.’ 49 See Austin 1959: passim.


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local history of the plantation and the people who suffered on it so that their civilization, seldom acknowledged as one, might continue after they are dead.50

THE POSTCOLONIAL VIRGIL IN V. S. NAIPAUL A central paradox in the novels of V. S. Naipaul is the paradox of civilization under colonialism and the question of what happens to this tenuous civilization, or even anti-civilization, when the colonial regime collapses. In turn, Naipaul’s critics have had little time for his conception of postcolonial societies in the Caribbean and Africa as loci of disorder premised on non-achievement.51 In this section I will investigate the role that Latin (mis)quotation and musings on Roman history play in Naipaul’s pessimistic appraisal of Western civilization and its postcolonial legacies. Perhaps it is necessary to defend the view that Naipaul offers us a ‘pessimistic appraisal’ of Western civilization in his work. After all, this is a writer who early in his writing career had already earned the unenviable reputation as ‘a despicable lackey of neo-colonialism and imperialism’.52 In his recent authorized biography of Naipaul, Patrick French quotes correspondence between C. L. R. James and V. S. Naipaul, in which James, as one Trinidadian writer to another, suggests that Caribbean writers should offset their frank exposure of the failings of ‘underdeveloped countries’ with an ‘awareness of the terrible crises of Western civilization’, and should make it clear that ‘we are ready to strip or have already stripped the wrappings from Western civilization itself ’.53

50

See p. 392 (Mary-Mathilda): ‘These narratives are the only inheritances that poor people can hand down to their offsprings.’ 51 Naipaul has also been attacked for his representation of postcolonial India. 52 Singh 1969: 85. Some may also choose to read his essay ‘Our Universal Civilization’ in this way (Naipaul 2002d: 503–17; first delivered as a lecture in New York in 1992). 53 French 2008: 244. The archive source for this letter is the C. L. R. James Collection at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, Box 5, Folder 106.

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Central to Naipaul’s critique of Western civilization is the exposure of the mythical tradition that elides modern European empires with the empire of ancient Rome. The chief way in which Naipaul exposes this fiction is by pointing to miscarriages in the way in which modern empires have appropriated the literature of ancient Rome. My starting point for this argument is one of the epigraphs to the second chapter of The Middle Passage (1962), Naipaul’s account of travels in the Caribbean in 1960–1, commissioned by Eric Williams, then Prime Minister of the newly independent nation of Trinidad and Tobago. The second chapter describes Naipaul’s impressions of Trinidad, returning to the island after an absence of ten years in Britain, spent gaining his degree at Oxford and establishing himself as a writer. Naipaul prefaces the chapter with two epigraphs, the first from Thomas Mann’s The Tables of the Law (1945) and the second from Tacitus’ Agricola. It is the latter that I will focus on here: In place of distaste for the Latin language came a passion to command it. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the Britons were gradually led on to the amenities that make vice agreeable—arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. They spoke of such novelties as ‘civilization’, when really they were only a feature of enslavement.54

The preceding epigraph from Thomas Mann describes the cultural displacement of the Israelites after the exodus from Egypt and escape from bondage to Pharaoh. In the Caribbean context, the key details in this passage are the Israelites’ amnesia (‘they had forgotten much’) and their partial assimilation of new thoughts as a function of exile. The quotation is apposite to the Caribbean context insofar as the biblical narrative of Exodus had been adopted in the Caribbean and North America as a metaphor for deliverance from slavery in the

54

Naipaul [1962] 2001b: 33. Naipaul simply identifies the author and the title of the work (Tacitus: Agricola), but does not provide a full citation. The full citation is Tacitus, Agricola 21.2: ‘. . . ut qui modo linguam Romanum abnuebant, eloquentiam concupiscerent. Inde etiam habitus nostri honor et frequens toga; paulatimque discessum ad delenimenta vitiorum, porticus et balineas et conviviorum elegantiam. Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur cum pars servitutis esset.’ Willis 2007: 332 cites this passage as an example of ‘the idea that cultural transmission is an important element in the material-political process of imperial domination’.


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New World and the promise of return to ancestral lands. Exploiting this coincidence, Naipaul has chosen this passage to highlight the theme of confused and fractured cultural identities in Trinidad, in limbo between Britain, America, Africa, India, and other countries and cultures besides. The quotation from Tacitus’ Agricola is intended to pave the way for his critique of the Trinidadian obsession with modernity in the form of imported American goods, and his corresponding judgement that Trinidad, in common with the rest of the West Indies, is dependent on borrowed cultures, leading to a tendency towards mimicry. Throughout the second chapter, excerpts from the Trinidad Guardian are interspersed with Naipaul’s thoughts, many of them intended to illustrate what he regards as the fawning adoption of the foreign and the cult of whiteness and modernity. Naipaul’s prejudicial style exploits his position as insider on the outside and recalls the aloofness of Victorian travel in writing down the natives.55 When praise does come for the unique cosmopolitanism and openness of Trinidadian society, it barely registers with the reader because of the contemptuous tone to which the reader has become accustomed. Notwithstanding Naipaul’s withering account of his homeland, my question is how Western civilization comes out of his critique of the ‘squalid history’ of the region (Naipaul [1962] 2001b: 63). I will try to show that Naipaul does indeed strip away the wrappings of western civilization and that one of the ways in which he does this is by (re)turning to the Classics which have a long history of being read as legitimizing pretexts for this civilization, to reveal them as deeply ambivalent sources for the civilizing projects of imperialism and colonialism. The classical epigraph that Naipaul chose for chapter 2 of The Middle Passage could not have been more apposite for the reassessment of empire and colonization. Tacitus’ Agricola, the biography of the Roman Cnaeus Julius Agricola, dispatched to the province of Britain as governor in ad 77, is already deeply sceptical about the allegedly civilizing mission of Roman imperialism. In the passage 55

On Naipaul’s complex position as insider outsider in his description of Trinidad, see Do¨ring 2002: 34. See ibid. 33–40 (especially p. 39) for a nuanced discussion of Naipaul’s relationship with Victorian travel writing.

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that Naipaul has chosen, Tacitus offers a cynical commentary on the imposition of romanitas (Romanness) on the far-flung Britons.56 The analogy that Naipaul wants to construct is between the Britons, overawed by the amenities of Roman culture, and his fellow Trinidadians, overawed by the modern amenities imported from overseas. More forcefully, the analogy also intimates that dependency on the accoutrements of foreign goods is a form of neo-colonialism. But the beauty of the Agricola quotation is that it puts this critique in a longer perspective, pointing out that the former colonial power in Trinidad also exhibited the same mimic dependency when colonized by the Romans. This is the ‘crisis’ at the heart of western civilization, to use C. L. R. James’s word (p. 133 above): that this civilization, which assumes a fiction of permanence and completeness, consists of disparate cultures that have relied on less than civil means to assimilate each other.

The Past Imperfect: Roman Allusions in Naipaul’s A Bend in the River The misquotation of Virgil Aeneid 4.112 at the beginning of A Bend in the River (p. 112 above) performs this fiction in its selective remembering of the past-as-text to lend probity to self-serving colonial interests. In fact, as a novel about the postcolonial fall-out in a fictional African state, A Bend in the River is preoccupied with the theme of the succession of civilizations and cultures under empire.57 Within this broader focus, Roman civilization has a particular significance as the preeminent empire from which the empires of the recent past drew bogus authority. As such, it is one of several, heterogeneous cultural paradigms lurking in the wings of the nascent African state. 56 See Ramsay MacMullen’s (1990: 32) description of Romanization as ‘a sort of decapitation of the conquered culture’, quoted by Pollock 2002: 25. 57 This fictional state is modelled on the Congo and many of the details derive from Naipaul’s journalistic writing about the Congo (especially, the article ‘A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa’, which was first published in the New York Review of Books 26 June 1975). In addition, Naipaul’s perspective on Uganda, and the position of the Ugandan Asians, gleaned during a fellowship at Makerere University (1965–6), also informs the depiction of this fictional African state.


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The Roman theme in A Bend in the River has multiple roots. As John Thieme and others have shown, Virgil’s Aeneid is an important intertext for Naipaul.58 The motif of ‘miscere gentes’ and the misquotation of Aeneid 4. 112 alert us to a broader mock-epic correspondence between the experience of Salim and the experience of Aeneas. Another Roman strand—the focus on Roman imperialism—owes much to the meditation on the Roman Empire in Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, an even more pervasive intertext in Naipaul’s novel. Linking both of these texts is Naipaul’s interest in the exploitability of Latin in the service of colonial discourse, as evident in the colonial history of the Caribbean, ranging from colonial expropriations of lines of Virgil to the fuzzy alliance between Roman imperium and the British Empire. Over the course of Naipaul’s novels we see a sustained process of ironizing, and indeed satirizing, of the artificiality of the relationship between European (particularly British) colonial power and Roman classical antiquity.59 The landscape in which the novel unfolds is littered with signs of translatio imperii, as power has passed from the Belgian colonial government to a despotic president, modelled on Mobutu. Power, one translation of the Latin noun imperium, is passed on with the passing on of empire, another translation of imperium, and in the process bits of Latin get handed on as well.60 Passions run high over Naipaul’s depiction of Africa in this novel.61 Much hangs on the vision of history that one attributes to Naipaul, and here it is vitally important not to elide Naipaul as author with his intradiegetic narrator Salim.62 Salim sometimes articulates an envy of European history as a documented history of a continuous civilization, in contrast to the fragmented histories of 58 Thieme 1987: 186–8. Like Thieme, King [1993] 2003: 124–8 comments on the Virgilian intertext and traces parallels between Aeneas and Salim. See also Mustafa 1995: 143–4, and Gorra 1997: 98. 59 See Suleri’s widely quoted description of Naipaul’s ‘highly sophisticated ironizing of imperial mythmaking’ (Suleri 1992: 155). On the connection between mimicry and satire in Naipaul, see Ball 2003: 59–60. 60 See Habinek 2002: 54 on the contradiction implicit in Roman ideas of translatio imperii, in that the emergence of Rome over other empires goes hand in hand with the impermanence of Rome. 61 See, e.g., Nixon 1992: ch. 4 on Naipaul’s ‘Conradian atavism’, and Samantrai 2000: 50 on Naipaul as an ‘apologist for European colonialism’. 62 Thieme 1987: 178–9.

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the different African communities that he knows. However, Salim’s envy of European history has often been exaggerated; for example, the critique that comes out of his mouth in the following passage is hardly a paean to European history: If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie. Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were moral. We didn’t lie because we never assessed ourselves and didn’t think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did. But the Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization. It was their great advantage over us.63

Instead it reads more like the famous passage in Aime´ Ce´saire’s Cahier that affirms the advantages for the colonized of being without history since history is all too often the history of conquest.64 The attribution of European superiority to a talent for hypocrisy (‘it was their great advantage over us’) is a masterstroke of irony. Granted, Salim’s grasp of history is uneven and imperfect, and many of the novel’s crude reflections about Africans are focalized through his character, but these colonial sounding prejudices do not prevent him from being a mouthpiece for postcolonial consciousness as well. Nana Wilson-Tagoe’s subtle discussion of historical thought in A Bend in the River is helpful here; she argues that Salim and other characters in the novel operate with an outmoded nineteenth-century, linear concept of history, which sees history as ‘a progressive movement through time’. In contrast, the novel exposes the lie—the lie that Salim alludes to in the passage quoted above—that there is a coherent, continuous narrative of European history that is distinct from the history of the rest of the world.65 63

[1979] 2002b:19 (my italics). Ce´saire 1983: 66–8 ‘ceux qui n’ont invente´ ni la poudre ni la boussole . . . ceux qui n’ont jamais rien dompte´’ (‘those who have invented neither powder nor compass . . . for those who have never conquered anything’). See Ch. 1, p. 48 above. 65 Wilson-Tagoe 1998: 74. ‘The idea of the present as rigidly conditioned by the past, of history itself as a progressive movement through time, are nineteenth century conceptions which continually prove themselves inadequate as descriptions of cataclysmic change in the modern world. For continuity and development are, after all, not the most important features of history as it has been manifested in the modern world.’ 64


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One way in which the lie is exposed is through the cross-examination of a Latin (mis)quotation. In turn, this is part of Naipaul’s larger assault on the whole idea of a stable classical inheritance as a locus of authority for the cultural imperialism of colonial powers, a locus that is apparently immune to the predations of history in the present tense. Naipaul’s tactic in stripping the wrapping off all civilization,66 and western civilization in the process, is to subject these sources of classical authority to ironic treatment. The three explicit classical allusions in A Bend in the River are the Latin motto of the Belgian missionary school (‘semper aliquid novi’), the Virgilian misquotation on the ruined monument erected by a Belgian steamer company, and the work of Theodor Mommsen, the great German historian of the Roman Republic, emulated by the expatriate Belgian academic historian Raymond in his attempt to write a history of the Congo.67 The first Roman theme that I want to focus on here is the Virgilian misquotation, which first occurs on page 29 of the novel. Ruminating on the ruins of colonial Kisangani, Salim describes a monument erected by a Belgian steamship company, which glossed over its self-serving presence in the Congo with a Latin inscription, alleging divine approval for the mixing of peoples: ‘Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi’ (‘he approves the mixing of peoples and forming of treaties’).68 When we first encounter this quotation it is left untranslated, since our narrator Salim lacks the Latin to make sense of it: These Latin words, whose meaning I didn’t know, were all that remained of a monument outside the dock gates. I knew the words by heart; I gave them my own pronunciation, and they ran like a nonsense jingle in my head.69

66 This pessimistic vision of civilization is expressed in the novel’s opening line, which begins, ‘The world is what it is . . .’ (3). That this sentiment is often taken to encapsulate Naipaul’s world vision is suggested by its selection for the title of the authorized biography by Patrick French (2008). 67 For an excellent discussion of these three, cardinal classical allusions, see Thieme 1987: 185–9; and now Coovadia 2008. 68 Naipaul [1979] 2002b: 62. See Thieme 1987: 186–8; Mustafa 1995: 143–4; Gorra 1997: 98; King [1993] 2003: 124–8; Coovadia 2008: passim. 69 [1979] 2002b: 29.

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We have seen how Austin Clarke opens up interpretative play by embedding untranslated Latin quotations in his narrative (see pp. 125–6 above). Naipaul achieves something similar here, as readers will be divided between those able to translate and perhaps also identify the quotation, and those for whom the words are a foreign jingle. For the former, the fact of misquotation may be paramount and there is the potential to leap to assumptions about the corruption of Latin in the tropics. The response of the latter is closer to that of Salim, for whom the misquotation stands veiled behind unintelligible words. Salim’s admission that he gave these words his own pronunciation and that they ‘ran like a nonsense jingle in [his] head’ undercuts the force of the allusion since it has no power to signify in the absence of a larger cultural field. Although the meaning is later explained to Salim, this earlier encounter with the untranslated Latin phrase is important, since it symbolizes the miscarriage of translatio imperii as a larger project. When the quotation resurfaces on page 70, Salim discovers that the misquotation is a malappropriation of Virgil, in that it omits the context for the quotation and alters the grammar, turning what in the Aeneid is an indirect question in the subjunctive ‘si Iuppiter . . . misceriue probet populos aut foedera iungi’, into a statement of fact in the indicative.70 Michael Gorra remarks that in the context of Aeneid 4, ‘the gods emphatically do not approve’ of the mixing of peoples (Trojan Romans-to-be and Carthaginians).71 However, as Imraan Coovadia has shown in a recent article, Naipaul’s use of this misquotation from the Aeneid is even more penetrating than scholars have realized.72 This particular misquotation has a Caribbean provenance: exactly the same misquotation of Aeneid 4.112 was used (and possibly coined) as an early motto for Trinidad by Sir Ralph Abercromby, the British general who took Trinidad from the 70

In the Aeneid the relevant lines are spoken by Venus, Aeneas’ mother, in response to a dissimulating speech from Juno: ‘sed fatis incerta feror, si Iuppiter unam j esse velit Tyriis urbem Troiaque profectis,/ jmisceriue probet populos aut foedera iungi’ (4.110–12). Translation: ‘But I am at the mercy of the Fates and do not know whether Jupiter would wish there to be one city for the Tyrians and those who have come from Troy or whether he would approve the merging of their peoples and the making of alliances’ (West 1991: 84). 71 72 Gorra 1997: 98. Coovadia 2008: passim.


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Spanish in 1797.73 In A Bend in the River Naipaul relocates this misappropriation of Virgil to another theatre of imperial power— Zaire rather than Trinidad—but the implication is the same: Roman culture has been repeatedly appropriated by colonial powers as a way of shoring up their authority through deceptive recourse to alleged classical precedents. For Coovadia Naipaul’s double allusion functions as ‘an insider’s joke, a cache of hidden authority’ (5), since the reader who ‘gets’ the Latin allusion will not necessarily get the colonial, Trinidadian intertext. However, rather than reading this as Coovadia does, as a way of Naipaul interpellating his own authority into the canon (2–5), I take this double allusion as a critique of the faux-authority of colonial (mis)quotations of the classics that were aimed at reaffirming the fiction of a coherent European civilization. In the novel the displacement of classical authority is continually hinted at in the bathetic juxtaposition of these Roman themes with the prosaic reality of the Hellenic club in Kisangani. Unlike the pretension of the Latin themes, which suggest the continuity—albeit much altered—of Roman civilization, the Hellenic club makes no claim to antiquity. Instead, it functions as a refuge from the practicalities of history and politics that impinge on the life of Salim, who visits the club on a daily basis for squash and socializing. The Hellenic club is associated with the modern Greek diaspora, specifically a character called Noimon, the most successful Greek expatriate in Kisangani, who eventually leaves the town for a new life in Australia (232). The other Latin motto in the novel, ‘Semper Aliquid Novi’ (‘always something new’), is attested by Pliny the Elder in the form ‘semper aliquid novi Africam adferre’ (‘Africa always brings forward something new’) (Natural History 8.42). Pliny cites this phrase as a ‘dictum Graeciae’ (a saying of Greece) and, indeed the phrase can be

73 See Coovadia ibid. 3: ‘When Abercromby conquered Trinidad from Napoleon’s Spanish allies, he provided the island with a badge which was subsequently included in the flag of united Trinidad and Tobago. The top section shows a British trading ship arriving in harbour. At the bottom is printed the revised Virgilian motto which, by force of misquotation, confers classical prestige on what is publicised as benevolent British rule.’ The motto was jettisoned at Independence in 1962.

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traced back to Aristotle in the fourth century bc. The proverb was later popularized in the form ‘ex Africa semper aliquid novi’.74 Feinberg and Solodow point out that the Latin adjective novus can suggest unpleasant novelty, and they argue that it probably bears this sense in Pliny. Coovadia interprets Naipaul’s use of this proverb as ironic because he imputes a belief in the circularity of African history to Naipaul and therefore sees a joke in the omitted phrase ‘ex Africa’.75 According to this reading the idea of anything ‘new’ coming out of Africa would be an absurdity. I suggest that the ironies are subtler and more diffuse, and that Naipaul’s point is not primarily about Africa’s capacity for history, or progress, or otherwise, but the role that quotation of the classics can play in narratives about empires and their civilizations. Like the Virgilian misquotation, ‘Semper Aliquid Novi’—the motto of the lyceé in Kisangani—is a relic of Belgian colonialism. The lyceé is dilapidated (40), but at the beginning of the novel, while the nascent state is still negotiating within a framework bequeathed by the colonial government, the motto can still be used as a badge of identity that confers cultural authority and legitimacy. Hence Ferdinand, a young Zairean student whose mother Zabeth has brought him from their village upriver to study in the town and entrusted him to Salim, uses the uniform of the lyceé as part of his selffashioning, modelled on the colonial past.76 But as Ferdinand matures and as the changing cultural politics of the new state celebrate the cultures of the Congo, Salim fancies that Ferdinand puts a new spin on the Latin motto, so that it encompasses his dual identity as both a European sophisticate and a ‘new man of Africa’, presumably punning on the idea of the novus homo in Roman society.77 74

See Feinberg and Solodow (2002), who trace the provenance of this proverb and explain, via Erasmus, the divergence between the version of the proverb that is familiar today and the version in Pliny. 75 Coovadia 2008: 4: ‘Yet for Naipaul, who insists on the circularity of African history, the motto is ironic, an irony shared by author and reader . . . ’ 76 Naipaul [1979] 2002b: 43: ‘He was always dressed as the lyceé boy, in white; and sometimes, in spite of the heat, he wore the lyceé blazer, which had the Semper Aliquid Novi motto in a scroll on the breast pocket.’ See also ibid. 53. 77 Ibid. 54: ‘In his lyceé blazer, Ferdinand saw himself as evolved and important, as in the colonial days. At the same time he saw himself as a new man of Africa, and important for that reason.’ The phrase novus homo is associated with the politics of


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A further irony is that the negative connotations of the adjective novus (novel, radical, bizarre, strange) are borne out by the fact that the motto gets appropriated by young con-men as a means of extorting money from Salim, as though the motto were a claim to entitlement.78 The young men who use the motto in this way unwittingly fulfil one potentially sinister connotation of the proverb ‘(ex Africa) semper aliquid novi’. More sinister still, the ultimate fulfilment of the negative undertones of the proverb is realized when Father Huismans, a Belgian missionary, is murdered and mutilated (92–3). Father Huismans had applied this proverb benignly to the novelty and originality of the local carvings that he was collecting (69), but with savage irony the manner of his death brings a more malign reading of the proverb to mind. Ultimately the adjective novus comes to signify revolutionary character as the new order threatens to implode at the end of the novel. The point is not that one meaning prevails, but rather that the elasticity of the proverb symbolizes the elasticity of the appeal to the classical past: the same proverb can be used to affirm the wealth of African cultures and to strip Africa of civilization, it can also be used with complete indifference to its meaning, as a logo that conveys authority. Surveying the town and its environment, the narrator Salim describes a process of annihilation, akin to the practice of damnatio memoriae whereby the Roman Senate might seek to eradicate traces of citizens who had fallen out of favour from the visible historical record. In this case the population of Kisangani seeks to eradicate the statues and monuments erected by the Belgian colonial power (‘The wish had only been to get rid of the old, to wipe out the memory of the intruder’).79 Contemplating the ruins of an expatriate suburb, Salim comments:

the Roman Republic where it referred to a man who was the first in his family to make the Senate and, in some cases, to a relative outsider who made it to the rank of consul. The general connotation of the Latin expression is of self-made political success. 78 Ibid. 62–5, quoting from p. 62, ‘Young men, not all of them from the lyceé, took to turning up at the shop, sometimes with books in their hands, sometimes with an obviously borrowed Semper Aliquid Novi blazer. They wanted money.’ 79 [1979] 2002b: 29–30.

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Sun and rain had made the site look old, like the site of a dead civilization. The ruins, spreading over so many acres, seemed to speak of a final catastrophe. But the civilization wasn’t dead. It was the civilization I existed in and in fact was still working towards. And that could make for an odd feeling: to be among the ruins was to have your time-sense unsettled.

When Salim protests that the civilization that had created the ruins ‘wasn’t dead. It was the civilization I existed in’, his words are undermined by the fact that this civilization of ruins is clearly not the civilization vaunted by the Belgian imperial mission in the Congo, the civilization of which Joseph Conrad’s characters speak in the short story ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (1897), which Naipaul quotes in his journalistic essay ‘A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa’:80 ‘In a hundred years,’ Conrad makes one of these simple people say in ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (1897), ‘there will be a town here. Quays, and warehouses, and barracks, and—and—billiard-rooms. Civilization, my boy, and virtue—and all.’ That civilization, so accurately defined, came; and then, like the villas at Stanleyville and the Chaˆteau de Venise night-club, vanished.

Naipaul refers to successive European ventures in the Congo peddling ‘the same perishable civilization’ ([1979] 2002b: 220), and although not a European, Salim in A Bend in the River is one of these pedlars. Merely to speak of a ‘perishable’ civilization is to undercut the very idea of civilization; in effect Naipaul strips away the wrapping of Western civilization by showing that all civilizations are mutable. Before the Belgian empire in the Congo was an Arab empire.81 There is no immovable ‘western civilization’, there are only cultures in 80 As noted above (n. 57), this essay was first published in the NYRB 26 June 1975; it was later published in the collection of essays The Return of Eva Peron, with the Killings in Trinidad (1980: 185–219). I quote from the essay as reprinted in the collection of essays The Writer and the World (Naipaul 2002d: 220). 81 Salim refers to the Arab empire in east Africa on p. 16 of A Bend in the River. Naipaul reflected on the Arab empire in the Congo in ‘A New King for the Congo’: ‘The Belgian past is being scrubbed out as the Arab past has been scrubbed out. The Arabs were the Belgians’ rivals in the eastern Congo; and an Arab was once governor of the Stanley Falls station. But who now associated the Congo with a nineteenthcentury Arab empire?’ (Naipaul 2002d: 217). In A Bend in the River, as an exponent of European civilization Father Huismans is keen to downgrade the significance of the Arab empire in the Congo: ‘The Arabs had only prepared the way for the mighty civilization of Europe’ ([1979] 2002b:72).


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conflict and dialogue. The attempt to arrest this ceaseless transition of civilizations, by retro-constructing ancient civilizations in light of the new is the impulse behind the Virgilian misquotation and the ‘lie’ that Salim attributes to Europe. His supposition that Europeans were able to ‘do one thing and say something quite different’ (19; see p. 138 above) because they could rely on their ‘civilization’ is disproved by the narrative of his experience in the Congo. The post-imperial temporality of A Bend in the River represents civilization as Heraclitan flux. The Belgian power has gone, but civilization persists; the colonial power merely stepped into, and disturbed, the current.82 As such the river that runs through the novel is a chronotope. It symbolizes nature as a threat to culture and the temporal-historical threat that every successive regime will be equally transient,83 hence the colonial appeal to the antiquity of the Roman Empire, as though it were removed from this temporal continuum by dint of its status as distant past and as though annexing this antiquity might somehow make present-day empires more permanent. Coovadia has argued for the circularity of African time as depicted in A Bend in the River,84 but I would contend that the time sense that informs the novel is that of a linear flow with the apparent circularity stemming from the fact that it is characteristic of this flow that empires fail recurrently. In A Bend in the River, the way in which the European characters think about empire repeatedly has recourse to the Roman Empire. Correspondingly, Naipaul’s authorial critique of empire makes use of the return to Rome. In contrast to Coovadia’s reading, I suggest that this return to Rome evokes the meditation on 82 Naipaul exploits the symbolism of the river (based on the river Congo) as a metaphor for history and time in the novel. See, for example, the description of the Belgian missionary Father Huismans, envisaging himself as part of ‘an immense flow of history’ stretching back to ancient Rome and beyond ([1979] 2002b: 71). 83 See p. 16: ‘The authority of the [17] Arabs—which was real enough when I was a boy—was only a matter of custom. It could be blown away at any time.’ 84 Coovadia 2008: 7, ‘While Naipaul fuses aspects of Uganda, Rwanda, and Zaire, the fact that the country is unnamed bolsters his imaginative rights over the terrain, as so many nameless African countries have served other writers. The picture of the circuitous river, on its way to nowhere in particular, differs from Conrad’s mighty river in Heart of Darkness. Instead of joining the currents of Roman, British, and African history as in Marlow’s famous meditation, the river images the circular and ahistorical time of his anonymous country.’

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the flow of empires at the beginning of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899)—a crucial pre-text for A Bend in the River: ‘What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth? . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.’85 There the Thames is a historical mirror image to the river Congo at the centre of the novel, envisaged through the eyes of its Roman colonizers as ‘also . . . one of the dark places of the earth’ (ibid.).86 This famous utterance by the narrator Marlow has often been seized upon as a way of levelling out the balance sheet of postcolonial injustice on the grounds that the Britons were themselves victims of empire in the past. But the utterance contains greater subtlety than this: Conrad simultaneously ascribes to Marlow an imperializing mentality that sees the world in terms of ‘dark’ and ‘light’ places, while at the same time making him voice a partial critique of acquisitive empire void of an unselfish idea.87 Naipaul has said that he was inspired by the vision of empire in Conrad’s fiction;88 but an important difference between them is that the fallibilities of Conrad’s imperial vision have become part of Naipaul’s critique, informing as they do the outlook of characters in the novel. And yet Naipaul’s prose perpetuates and repeats some of this fallibility, reproducing aspects of Conrad’s landscape, replete with images of nihilism and primitivism.89 Ultimately Naipaul’s novel is itself part of the very flow of time that it describes. When 85

Conrad [1899] 2006: 5. The significance of London as a locus of gloom and darkness in Conrad’s novel has been emphasized by Watts 1983 as a defence against the charge of racism levelled by Chinua Achebe in his famous critique of the novel (Achebe 1977). Contra Watts, Nixon 1992: 105–6 has argued that ‘the effect of the novella as it has been commonly transmitted and put to work by Western cultures’ eclipses any equivocation that may be present in Conrad’s work. 87 See Conrad [1899] 2006: 7. See Rohlehr [1970] 1992: 22: ‘Joseph Conrad . . . in his Heart of Darkness was one of the few Europeans who realised an idea that is a first principle with Black writers: that in the imperial collision it was the West that was on trial—Western culture, values, mythology, scholarship, tradition, and reputation for humanitariansim. Heart of Darkness, a book which shows neither a love nor an understanding of the African, is nevertheless a macabre study of the decay of the West and ends up expressing a profound disillusion at the process of history itself.’ 88 ‘Conrad’s Darkness and Mine’, Naipaul 2004: 162–80; first published in the NYRB, 17 October 1974. 89 See Nixon 1992: ch. 4, cited in n. 61 above. 86


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Salim remarks on the opening page that ‘I drove up from the coast in my Peugeot. That isn’t the kind of drive you can do nowadays in Africa’ (3), he operates with a foreshortened temporal model, restricted to the past as experienced by him and the present from which he writes. This is what we might call the present tense of empire, signified by the present continuous adverb ‘nowadays’. This conceptualization of the history of modern Africa sees the continent in a postcolonial stasis for which there is no future, only a backwards glance to a lost order of stability under empire. The novel stands within this flow of time, not outside it, and its view of Africa is subject to the same historicist critique as any other view of the continent. Although the return to Rome strips away the wrapping of western civilization by exposing misquotation and misappropriations that reveal miscarriages in the supposed continuity of civilization, Naipaul’s novel is part and parcel of this civilization and ends up simultaneously upholding it and stripping it down. It itself is one example of the studium that follows from the transfer of empire (imperium).

Roman Mimicry in The Mimic Men The ironizing return to Rome is also a feature of Naipaul’s exploration of the ‘lie’ at the heart of western civilization in the earlier novel The Mimic Men (1967). The Mimic Men explores and explodes the fantasy of colonial culture through the eyes of an educated colonial subject, Ralph Singh. I will argue that this earlier novel presents a more plausible stripping down of western civilization than that of A Bend in the River, because its narrator, Ralph Singh, speaks as a disillusioned subject of this civilization who has tried to mimic what he realizes to be an empty fantasy. Although this novel explores the mimic dependency of colonial societies persisting after Independence, Naipaul uses classical allusions to show not only that the British in the Caribbean were themselves mimics of the cultures of Greece and Rome, but also that the presence of mimicry in these ancient cultures reveals the absurdity of the appropriation of the civilizations of Greece and Rome in the service of colonial mythmaking. By the end of the novel the dream

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of a coherent civilization stretching back to classical antiquity is thoroughly emptied out. Naipaul’s novel, published in 1967 and written during a fellowship at Makerere University in Uganda 1965–6, is a fictional autobiography or, in the words of Helen Hayward, ‘a novel masquerading as an autobiography’ (2002: 69). The novel is narrated by a first-person narrator, R. K. Singh, who is writing his memoirs from the perspective of exile in London, having been forced out of politics in his native Caribbean island of Isabella. The title of the novel refers to Singh’s obsession with the condition of imitative dependency in colonial society according to which nothing is original, leading to a profound sense of psychic alienation where colonial subjects are not real, or not real men.90 But it is not only colonial subjects who are embroiled in a drama of colonial shame and fantasy, impersonating alien ideals. Under the influence of imperialism and colonialism, filtered through Singh’s first-person narrative, all the characters in the novel are affected by cultural mimicry. The mimicry extends to the metropolis as well, where everyone—not just the immigrants and the foreign women tourists with whom Singh flirts—is reduced to a racial caricature.91 Even when characters in the novel show allegiance to other cultures, such as Ralph Singh’s father, who becomes a Hindu Guru (Gurudeva), their actions are ridiculed by the narrator as mimicry of a code that they do not properly possess or understand.92 Even Browne, one of Ralph Singh’s Afro-Trinidadian peers, mimes his own blackness in degrading school performances.93

90 The term ‘psychic alienation’ is used by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) to describe the crisis of personal identity and selfhood of the black man in colonial society. See Fanon [1952] 1986: 10, ‘At the risk of arousing the resentment of my coloured brothers, I will say that the black is not a man.’ See the discussion of the realness of the colonial subject in Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey (1970), on pp. 227–9 below. 91 Mustafa 1995: 104–5 argues that Ralph Singh’s cosmopolitanism in London is reduced to a series of ‘fetishistic’ sexual relations with these women. 92 On the ambivalence of Naipaul’s depiction of Hinduism in The Mimic Men, see Thieme 1987: 132–8. 93 Naipaul [1967] 2002a: 99; see French 2008: 38 for the incident on which this is based—a performance that Naipaul witnessed at a Christmas concert in 1941.


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For Ralph Singh, life in the colony of Isabella is schizophrenic because everything that takes place on Isabella takes place in relation to two remote cultural centres: primarily in relation to Britain, and more specifically to London, as the seat of colonial government, but also in relation to India, the ancestral and spiritual home of the East Indian population in the Caribbean who arrived in the region in the 1880s as indentured labourers. The notion that everything that happens is a flawed copy or re-enactment of foreign manners, values, and institutions leads to the suspicion that reality occurs elsewhere and that life in the colonies is a fantasy in which everyone pretends to be what they are not. Singh Anglicizes his name (Ranjit Kripalsingh) to R. R. K. Singh, inserting the name Ralph, while secretly reading and fantasizing about ancient Asiatic and Persian Aryan culture.94 On p. 127, Singh’s shame over an instance of dissembling causes him to contrast the ideal of the metropolis contained in a Greek saying with the disorder of life as a colonial in an obscure colony.95 In contrast, to be born in a country like Isabella, which he describes as ‘an obscure New World transplantation’ is ‘to be born into disorder’ (ibid.). And yet the order of the imperial metropolis disintegrates up close; Ralph Singh is disappointed by London and the English identity that he has fashioned for himself, and Singh’s English wife Sandra is herself disoriented and overwhelmed by London.96

94

Naipaul [1967] 2002a: 100–1 (Singh’s name); ibid. 104–5 (Singh’s fascination with Aryan culture). For discussion of Singh’s reinvention of his name, see Thieme 1987: 132; Feder 2001: 189; and King [1993] 2003: 71–2. There is a precedent for the Anglicizing of a Hindu name in Naipaul’s earlier novel The Mystic Masseur (1957), where the protagonist Ganesh Ramsumair changes his name to G. Ramsay Muir (‘Epilogue’, p. 208). 95 [1967] 2002a: 127: ‘I have read that it was a saying of an ancient Greek that the first requisite for happiness was to be born in a famous city . . . To be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder.’ 96 See King [1993] 2003: 73. King (ibid.) relates Singh’s disappointment at the reality of life in London to Naipaul’s comments in An Area of Darkness at his own disappointment in making London the centre of his world, only to become decentred and alienated.

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Revising the Myth of Roman Order The civilization of ancient Rome functions as an ever-present counterpoint in the novel. There is an attempt to reproduce this civilization in Singh’s construction of a Roman villa—modelled on the House of the Vettii in Pompeii—on his home island of Isabella: I was looking through a picture book about Pompeii and Herculaneum. I was struck by the simplicity of the Roman house, its outward austerity, its inner, private magnificence; I was struck by its suitability to our climate; I yielded to impulse.97

As Anthony Boxill observes, Singh gives us all the information we need to deconstruct this ideal villa; the architecture is dissonant, with an illuminated swimming pool in place of the impluvium.98 This absurd villa embodies the hollowness of a return to an idealized past, and its collapse is indicative of the unreality of ancient Rome as a vanished civilization, rather than as a fixed and timeless reality against which to measure the shortcomings of the present. Singh’s remark about the suitability of the architecture to the local climate merely serves to highlight more fundamental incongruities. Not only is the architecture incongruous, but the template of the Pompeiian villa is also unsettling, particularly when we reflect that these villas were themselves gaudy edifices whose ruins now stand tinged with tragedy because of the accident of Vesuvius’ eruption. What is more, cracks of a different kind undermine Singh’s villa, as he reveals to the reader that ‘I had built it a few years before, when my marriage was breaking up’ (38–9). As though the motif of ruin at the core of this Roman house was not explicit enough, Singh’s housewarming party turns into a scene of vandalism as the guests run riot in the swimming pool and break the furniture and windows (76–9). The alienness of the villa is reinforced by the fact that, while there, Singh takes to reading Martial as an extension of his Roman posturing. There is nothing inherently fake about an East Indian Trinidadian reading Martial in the Caribbean; Martial is no more out of place in the Caribbean then he is anywhere else in the contemporary world. The 97 98

Naipaul [1967] 2002a: 74. References to the Roman villa: Naipaul [1967] 2002a: 38–9, 74, 76–9, 199, 203–5.


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falsity comes from Singh’s use of the accoutrements of a vanished civilization in the construction of his Caribbean cultural identity, in order to project ‘the picture of a man’:99 The blue-and-white Hong Kong raffia chairs and table, the drinks, the illuminated swimming-pool, the Loeb edition of Martial: all this had been meant less to overawe Browne than to create the picture of a man who, whatever might be said about recent events in his private life, had achieved a certain poise. The Martial can be easily explained. I had taken up my Latin again. It was my own therapy. The acquisition in easy stages of a precise, dead language, through an easy author, was curiously soothing. It called for effort; it filled the time; it led from one day to the other.100

Like the Hong Kong raffia chairs, Martial is a cultural import. Naipaul’s allusive play here is particularly subtle: Singh plays down the significance of Martial, suggesting that the choice of the Epigrams is dictated by linguistic criteria alone. Several critics have commented on the figure of Singh as a ‘limited’ or ‘unreliable’ narrator;101 this certainly seems to be borne out by his transparent appropriations of Roman culture and his approach to Martial as a way of reviving his schoolboy’s command of Latin (‘I had taken up my Latin again’), learned from Major Grant at Isabella Imperial.102 John Thieme rightly states that ‘Throughout, [Singh’s] allusions to Latin authors and his adoption of a Roman life-style seem to involve the calculation of a highly artificial persona.’103 And yet behind the narrator Singh is the author Naipaul, responsible for choosing a Roman poet from the Roman province of Hibernia (Spain) whose satiric visions of Rome challenge the very ideals of civilized Roman order repeatedly evoked by Singh.104 99 Feder 2001: 191–2 comments on Singh’s Roman posturing. On Singh’s performance of self in The Mimic Men, see Lindroth 1984. 100 Naipaul [1967] 2002a: 203–4. 101 See, e.g., Thieme 1984: 514–18; Hassan 1989: 263; and Greenberg 2000: 227–8. 102 Naipaul [1967] 2002a: 24, 140–1. 103 Thieme 1987: 120. 104 Much has been written about the blurring of fiction and autobiography in Naipaul’s oeuvre (see especially Hayward 2002: ch. 2). The Mimic Men frequently alludes to Naipaul’s own experience, and Singh’s Latin reading is no exception: Feder 2001: 192 n. 21 cites an extract from Naipaul’s correspondence with Paul Theroux, in which the former is gratified that Theroux has taken up his recommendation of Martial: ‘I’m glad you have got on to Martial at last; he is a delicious writer and brings

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The version of Rome in The Mimic Men reflects the turmoil of the shift from a colonial to a postcolonial society; it is significant that specific allusions to Rome and Latin literature occur at crisis points in the novel. We have seen how the Roman villa provides a stage for the collapse of Singh’s marriage and also provides a backdrop for his crumbling career as a politician. Correspondingly, the beginning of Singh’s impulsive marriage to Sandra is punctuated by a specific Latin allusion to Virgil, Aeneid 2.274: The dark romance of a mixed marriage! Think of me sitting in the Holborn bar, drinking Guinness for strength, holding an evening paper for the ordinariness it suggested—cheatingly, the greyhound edition, it being too early for the others—and being really very frightened. So at the time I thought of myself. I stood away from the pensive figure and considered him and his recent, terrible adventure. Quantum mutatus ab illo! The words ran through my head until they were meaningless, until they became the emotion of loss and sadness and sweetness and apprehension. So nemesis came to the dandy, the creation of London, the haunter of British Council halls, art galleries and excursion trains. Quantum mutatus ab illo!105

The Latin phrase quoted here occurs in the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid in the context of Aeneas’ flight from Troy. Against all odds, the Trojan prince clings to a nostalgic vision of Troy’s power and fights to save his city, overwhelmed by the Greek forces and the overarching imperative of the fate whereby he is destined to leave Troy and found the future city and civilization of Rome. One of the messengers sent to stir Aeneas to leave Troy is the ghost of Hector (2.268–97), once the foremost Trojan warrior, heroized in Homer’s Iliad, now a gory wreck of a man. Aeneas reacts with disbelief to this vision of Hector, which forces him to confront the gap between his ideal image of Troy and the devastating reality: ei mihi, qualis erat, quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore qui redit exuuias indutus Achilli uel Danaum Phrygios iaculatus puppibus ignis! (274–6)

Rome back more vividly than others.’ The letter is dated 21 February 1967, the year in which The Mimic Men was published. 105 Naipaul [1967] 2002a: 51–2.


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What a sight he was! How changed from the Hector who had thrown Trojan fire on to the ships of the Greeks or come back clad in the spoils of Achilles.106

In Virgil the phrase ‘quantum mutatus ab illo’ refers to Hector, rather than the speaker (Aeneas), whereas Singh uses it self-reflexively to refer to his own demise. This passage has been interpreted as a mockheroic allusion to the Aeneid, where the self-pitying use of the Latin phrase exposes the banality of Singh’s experience through juxtaposition with an epic past.107 The repetition of ‘quantum mutatus ab illo’ is indeed melodramatic and self-pitying, and yet this is another instance of a classical allusion, which is used superficially by the narrator, serving a deeper purpose for Naipaul. In Virgil the comment about Hector’s transformed appearance, focalized through Aeneas, can also be understood in terms of Aeneas’ consternation for his own situation. The exclamation ‘ei mihi’ (‘woe is me’) draws our attention to Aeneas and reminds us that Hector’s tragedy is his tragedy too. In his translation David West glosses over the grammar of the phrase ‘ei mihi’, which is a self-regarding expression of personal distress. Although the phrase ‘quantum mutatus’ (‘how changed’) in the past tense refers to Hector’s fate, it is also a proleptic marker for the changes that Aeneas will have to undergo in the poem as he leaves behind his Trojan identity in the process of becoming Roman. The more we dwell on Naipaul’s engagement with Virgil at this point in the novel, the more appropriate the allusion seems. Viewed as an alter-Aeneas, Singh has just failed in the fulfilment of his supposed destiny, through becoming married to Sandra—a Dido figure. Singh muses that the marriage to Sandra diverts and indeed subverts his planned trajectory in life: ‘Also, it might have been that as a result of my marriage to Sandra I had begun to surrender the direction of my life, not simply to her, but to events.’108 Although Virgil’s Aeneas avoids marriage with Dido, his progress towards Italy and the goal of a future Rome is beset with anxiety about cultural

106 107 108

Translation by David West 1991: 38. Thieme 1987: 119; Feder 2001: 186. Naipaul [1967] 2002a: 53.

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identity. Aeneas is faced with a choice between trying to found a new Troy, in the image of the old, and founding a new civilization altogether.109 The former option (a new Troy) is exposed as a nostalgic illusion as the poem depicts the attempts of other Trojan exiles—Helenus and Andromache—to do just this, and exposes the falsity of their attempt. Their reconstruction of the citadel of Troy is described as an imitation (‘simulata’).110 But if this is a ‘mimic Troy’, to use Jenkyns’s phrase (1998: 439), Rome is no less an artificial construction that has to be imagined into existence and Roman cultural identity is a behaviour that Aeneas must learn through observing others.111 In Reed’s words, ‘lacking a final nationality, [Aeneas] most plainly embodies the desirer of the national identity that the poem aims at’.112 The Aeneid that emerges from recent scholarship is not a receptacle of secure Western cultural identity, but rather a poem in which the intermingling of Asia and Europe, represented by the cities of Troy and Rome, destabilizes the idea of a simple cultural and national identity. As Craig Kallendorf observed at the conclusion of his study of appropriations of the Aeneid’s pessimistic vision in early modern European culture, the historical context for the Aeneid was the turbulent transition from the Roman Republic to the Empire, and consequently the poem lends itself to contexts of change and revolution.113 It is easy to imagine how the famous pessimistic sensibility of Virgil’s Aeneid might have appealed to Naipaul in the composition of

109

See Syed 2005: 210. Aeneid 3.349–50: ‘paruam Troiam simulataque magnis Pergama’ (‘a little Troy, a citadel modelled on great Pergamum’). See Jenkyns 1998: 438–9 on the falsity and futility of Helenus’ second Troy. Compare Naipaul’s observations about the ‘fraudulence’ of attempts by the local East Indian population to recreate India in Trinidad: ‘East Indians, British Indians, Hindustanis. But the West Indies are part of the New World and these Indians of Trinidad are no longer of Asia. The temples and mosques exist and appear genuine. But the languages that came with them have decayed. . . . There is no Ganges at hand, only a muddy stream called the Caroni. . . . It is the play of a people who have been cut off ’ (Naipaul 1972: 35; the essay ‘East Indian’ was first published in The Reporter, 17 June 1965). 111 Syed 2005: 209: ‘the Aeneid seems almost consciously to draw attention to the artificiality involved in its own definition of Roman identity.’ 112 113 Reed 2007: 173. Kallendorf 2007: 216. 110


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a novel which the Jamaican novelist John Hearne noted for ‘the unremitting integrity of its pessimism’.114 Ralph Singh’s insecurity about his cultural identity is closely bound up with anxiety about his masculinity. In fact his perception of the colonial predicament entailing a status of dependency, reliant on a borrowed culture, leads to the sense that the world of the excolony is not real and that he and the other citizens of Isabella are not real men. Another of the classical allusions in the novel occurs after an encounter with a German-Swiss woman, Beatrice, with whom Singh enters into a short-lived, unconsummated fling. Singh clearly feels emasculated by Beatrice; reflecting on their first date he is appalled at his passivity: I returned to the boarding-house in an agony of disturbance. I doubted whether I even knew what she looked like. I had fallen in so completely with her mood. She had led; I had followed.115

When Beatrice returns the Isabella dollar note that he had given her as a token of intimacy, he speculates about her reasons for rejecting him: She had sensed more than the absurdity of our relationship; she had sensed its wrongness. And, perhaps, she had seen the absence of virtue. Let me explain. Virtus: how could anyone who had gone through Isabella Imperial and studied Latin with Major Grant fail to know the meaning of that word?116

In supplying the Latin etymology of virtue, Singh offers only an implicit explanation, which presupposes the reader’s knowledge of Latin. The Latin etymology, according to which virtue is the property of being a man (vir), makes it clear that it is manliness and its absence that are at stake here. There is a childish aspect to Singh’s recourse to Latin and his pointed reference to his classical schooling; it is as if he seeks refuge in colonial clubbability, founded on a classical curriculum. 114

115 Hearne 1977: 31. Naipaul [1967] 2002a: 23. Ibid. 24. See Feder 2001: 186 on the significance of the typographic arrangement of this paragraph: ‘Implicit in the contrast between the capitalized Latin and the lower case English is Singh’s ideal image of himself and his inability to live up to it in his relations with the people he comes to know.’ 116

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Again an incidental, apparently superficial Latin quotation may conceal a profounder use of classical allusion. Given that Singh later identifies himself with Aeneas, his lack of virility in this passage may also suggest Aeneas, whose infamous bottling out of his relationship with Dido casts a shadow over his virility in the Aeneid. Although Aeneas’ dutiful adherence to the realization of a future Roman civilization establishes an alternative model of virtus in the poem, it still does not entirely recuperate his manliness. Once the Trojan Aeneas leaves home, he encounters subjective stereotypes about gendered ethnicity, such as Iarbas’ famous sneer that Aeneas and his companions are only half-men (‘semiviro comitatu’—Aeneid 4.215). Singh’s rhetorical question is significant (‘how could anyone . . . fail to know . . . ?’): he talks of knowing the meaning of the word rather than embodying the quality of virtus.117 This distinction echoes one of the novel’s central themes: the gulf between words and reality, and between words and action, which the narrator identifies as being inherent in the postcolonial politics of the excolony of Isabella where real independence and power to act is an illusion: ‘We lack power, and we do not understand that we lack power. We mistake words and the acclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost.’118 In a retrospective statement about the novel in his Nobel lecture, Naipaul claims that the book is ‘about colonial shame and fantasy’ and argues that ‘it was not about Mimics. It was about colonial men mimicking the condition of manhood, men who have grown to distrust everything about themselves.’119 While Naipaul’s attempt to distinguish between ‘mimicry’ and ‘mimicking manhood’ is not wholly convincing, his remark highlights the recurrent intersection of gender and ethnicity throughout his works. This is evident in the recent novel Half a Life (2001), where the protagonist Willie Chandran discovers the courage that had eluded Singh in The Mimic Men. In some respects

117

See Thieme 1987: 118–19 for the use of the word ‘virtue’ elsewhere in the

novel. 118

Naipaul [1967] 2002a: 6. Naipaul, ‘Two Worlds’, The Nobel Lecture, 7 December 2001 (Naipaul 2004: 181–95, quoting from p. 193). 119


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Willie and Singh are parallel narrators: Willie is East Indian whereas Singh is West Indian. They both have their lives derailed by women and endure periods of time in London, the colonial metropolis, during which they experience painful disillusionment about colonial cultural identity. Willie takes flight from London with a Portuguese Mozambican woman and spends eighteen years in Mozambique in a society not unlike the multi-racial society of Isabella in The Mimic Men.120 Expatriate Portuguese society in the novel is afflicted with the same anxieties about hierarchy, status, and the authenticity of identity, and it is against this backdrop that a character called Correia offers Willie the prospect of a career as politician cum entrepreneur, reminiscent of Singh’s ill-fated career in Isabella in the earlier novel. Correia appeals to the familiar idea of virtus: ‘You could do what I do, Willie. It’s just a matter of courage.’121 Instead, Willie pursues courage in the field of sexual conquest, first with local prostitutes and then through an adulterous affair with Graça, an unhinged woman from the local expatriate community. Willie’s version of courage is to divorce Ana and to take flight again: ‘When Ana came to the hospital courage came to me, and I told her I wanted to divorce her.’122 The novel ends with an affirmation of virility, and the simultaneous demonstration of his lack of virtus, in the sense that Willie lacks a clear sense of his own identity and in that sense perceives himself as not a man, not a person. His courage is exposed as an illusion, as virility and virtus are shown to be quite different things. As with classical allusions in The Mimic Men, which expose the pretence of borrowed cultural identities, in Half a Life Rome and Roman culture also function as metaphors for the mirage of colonial grandeur. When Willie Chandran arrives in London as a foreign student he is disconcerted by the ‘disjunction between expectation and experience’, which Helen Hayward has identified as a recurrent motif in Naipaul’s exploration of colonial, and postcolonial cultural displacement.123 Willie compares Buckingham Palace unfavourably to the palaces of Indian maharajas:

120

For analogies between the society of Isabella and the society of colonial Mozambique, see King [1993] 2003: 192. 121 122 123 2001c: 171. Ibid. 227. Hayward 2002: 41.

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He thought the maharaja’s palace in his own state was far grander, more like a palace, and this made him feel, in a small part of his heart, that the kings and queens of England were impostors, and the country a little bit of a sham.124

He also begins to poke holes in the fiction of a western civilization descended from ancient Rome: when he enquires about the black academic gowns which they have to wear on formal occasions at his London college, one of the lecturers tells him ‘that it was what was done at Oxford and Cambridge, and that the academic gown was descended from the ancient Roman toga’.125 His research in the college library reveals that the dress of Islamic seminaries was the more likely model for the academic gown, ‘and that Islamic style would have been copied from something earlier. So it was a piece of make-believe’ (ibid.). Over the course of Naipaul’s novels we see a sustained process of ironizing, and indeed satirizing, of the artificiality of the relationship between British colonial power and Graeco-Roman classical antiquity.126 In The Mimic Men, Major Grant, the Classics teacher at Isabella Imperial—modelled on Naipaul’s own teacher at Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad127—commits a racist faux pas in Latin, in the course of trying to extract the meaning of the Latin colour adjective caeruleus out of Browne, one of Singh’s black classmates. Grant’s slip, an inadvertent pun on Browne’s blackness, gives the lie to the idea that a classical education bestows nobility on those who master it (140–1). On this occasion the potential hollowness of the Classics is suggested by the fact that the Major retreats into his edition of Virgil, turning away from the complicated racial politics of Isabellan society.128 In Half a Life the vacuity of many colonial appropriations of the classics is exemplified by the name of Willie’s

124

125 2001c: 52. Ibid. 59. See the quotation from Suleri 1992: 155 quoted in n. 59 above. 127 See White 1972: 159 ‘from the obituary which appears in the QRC Chronicle for 1949 it is not difficult to guess that Captain Achilles Daunt, who joined the school in 1920 and who taught Naipaul Latin and English from 1945 to 1947, must be the original of Major Grant.’ Achilles Daunt also taught Eric Williams at Queen’s Royal College (Williams 1969: 37). 128 Naipaul [1967] 2002a: 141: ‘Major Grant went red. He fitted his monocle carefully into his eye and looked down at his Vergil.’ 126


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slick Jamaican peer, Percy Cato, the aetiology of whose name is explained in a letter from Willie’s sister Sarojini: This man says he knows you. He is a Latin American from Panama and his name is Cato, because his family has spent much time in the British colonies. He says that in the old days people gave their slaves Greek and Roman names as a joke, and his ancestor was landed with the name of Cato.129

In the version of his identity that Percy has told Sarojini, he has shifted from a Jamaican of mixed parentage to a Latin American from Panama, who has assumed a Latin American revolutionary identity. In this context the absurdity of his classical name (‘a joke’) is a symbol for the fluid constructedness of all identities.130 Accordingly, rather than serving as a model for the integrity of the imperial metropolis, Naipaul’s revised Rome—the Rome of Aeneas the Asian immigrant—is remodelled as a symbol of chaotic cosmopolitanism, as in the following passage from The Enigma of Arrival:131 Cities like London were to change. They were to cease being more or less national cities; they were to become cities of the world, modern-day-Romes, establishing the pattern of what great cities should be, in the eyes of islanders like myself and people even more remote in language and culture. They were to be cities visited for learning and elegant goods and manners and freedom by all the barbarian peoples of the globe, people of forest and desert, Arab, Africans, Malays.132

Hayward remarks that ‘Naipaul courts controversy with the term “barbarian”’.133 However, Naipaul’s relentless exposure and ridiculing of the old colonial certainties implied by terms such as ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’ means that there is little sting in these deeply ironical terms.

129

2001c: 129; Percy Cato is first introduced on p. 61 of the novel. Compare Hayward 2002: 72, who argues that Naipaul’s predilection for autobiographical revisions through fiction implies a fluid conception of personal identity: ‘His multiple reworkings of the materials of his life suggest, moreover, the provisionality of constructions of the self.’ 131 In an article on the new cosmopolitanisms of Naipaul and Edward Said, Joan Cocks suggests the phrase ‘negative cosmopolitanism’ as a description for Naipaul’s own version of cosmopolitanism (Cocks 2000: 50). 132 [1987] 2002c: 130. For comment see Hayward 2002: 42. 133 Hayward 2002: 42. 130

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Even in triumphalist writings on empire the potential for the breakdown of colonial order is apparent, with events threatening to diverge from myths of imperial identity. As we saw in Chapter 1, this tension is evident in The English in the West Indies (1887), James Anthony Froude’s bigoted travel account of the Caribbean.134 Froude’s book promotes an ideal of imperial masculinity, and yet it also represents a crisis in this very masculinity. The sub-title—The Bow of Ulysses—refers to Froude’s thesis that proposals to grant selfgovernment to Britain’s colonies in the West Indies reflect the emasculation of contemporary politics with the ascendancy of orators and the decline of men of action.135 In Froude’s argument, ‘Ulysses’ symbolizes the character of previous generations of Englishmen who fought to acquire and preserve the empire and who, Froude points out, were able to string the bow of Ulysses.136 The sub-title of Froude’s book, and the metaphor of epic masculinity on which it depends, undoubtedly suggests another subtext—a racist sneer at the masculinity of Britain’s colonial subjects in the Caribbean—but the fact remains that the occasion for writing is a crisis in British masculinity which cannot therefore function as an ideal with which to contrast the masculinity of Britain’s Caribbean subjects. Froude’s mimicry of the Classics through his high-handed epic allusions is as fake as the pretenders to Ulysses’ bow who are the objects of his criticism. Some of the most vituperative attacks on Naipaul’s ‘racist’ ethnography of his native Caribbean and the Third World more generally have exploited his alleged affinity for Froude’s vision.137 Rob Nixon concludes that ‘in the decisiveness and scope of his racism, Naipaul concedes little to Trollope and Froude’.138 Several critics have seized on Naipaul’s choice of a quotation from Froude’s work as the epigraph for his first travel work: The Middle Passage: A Caribbean Journey (1962).139 Naipaul chose as his epigraph the notorious passage in which Froude denied personhood to the populations of 134

135 See Ch. 1, pp. 30–1 above. See Froude [1887] 1888: 14. See ibid. 31: ‘The bow of Ulysses was strung in those days.’ 137 See especially Nixon 1992: 43–51. More generally, see ibid., ch. 2. 138 Ibid. 50. Nixon’s argument is challenged by Do¨ring 2002: 39 (quoted at n. 55 above). 139 See Dissanayake and Wickramagamage 1993: ch. 2. 136


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the Caribbean: ‘There are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own.’140 However, as Michael Gorra has suggested, Naipaul’s reason for placing this passage at the head of his work may not have been motivated by the ‘relentless negativity’ and racism that Rob Nixon discerns in this work (1992: 46). Instead, Gorra points to prevailing regional anxieties in the 1950s and 1960s about how to create national, Caribbean identities in the absence of a ‘native civilization’ and in the shadow of colonial rule.141 According to Gorra’s revisionist reading of Froude’s passage as quoted by Naipaul, the sense is ‘Not that there are no people in the Caribbean, but that there is not a people, that there is not a Caribbean people as such. Just who are they?’142 Gorra concedes that the difference between Naipaul’s response to this crisis of national identity and the response of other contemporary Caribbean writers, such as Derek Walcott, is that while they have adopted creolization as a positive model for cultural identity, Naipaul has clung to the negative model of a region void of a coherent cultural identity.143 Naipaul’s fascination with Froude is such that the Victorian writer features in The Mimic Men (80–2), where Naipaul interpolates the fictional island of Isabella into the itinerary of Froude’s travel narrative.144 The irony of this interpolation is that Froude has become part of the historiography of Isabella, giving Isabellans a sense of their past through the work of this ‘imperialist pamphleteer’, and yet Froude’s work emphatically denies any native history to the Caribbean. An ex-colony that derives its sense of its own history from Froude’s book is in a very confused state indeed. In view of Froude’s status as a colonial mythmaker, it is no surprise that he turns up in The Mimic Men. 140

Froude [1887] 1888: 306. See the discussion on p. 47 above. Gorra 1997: 78; Gorra takes the phrase ‘native civilization’ from C. L. R. James’s essay on Caribbean federation, first published in 1958 (James 1984: 97). 142 Gorra 1997: 79. 143 Ibid. 81. On Derek’s Walcott’s artistic conception of the Caribbean nation see Breslin 2001: passim. On the difference between Naipaul and Walcott in this context, see Terada 1992: 79. 144 See White 1972: 165; White points out that in his fictional description of Froude’s visit to Isabella, Naipaul merges two different episodes from Froude’s narrative—one from Froude’s travels in Dominica and one from his travels in Trinidad. 141

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It is time to move beyond the critique of Naipaul’s engagement with Froude, which sees Naipaul in sympathy with the racist, Victorian colonial gaze, or the critique which attributes to Naipaul the same flaw of ‘imitative/mimic dependency’, which it accuses him of projecting onto the Third World.145 Neither critique leaves room for subtle readings of Naipaul’s own exploration of imitative dependency. As Anthony Boxill mused in a perceptive review discussion of A Flag on the Island (1967) and The Mimic Men: In these two works Naipaul seems to be asking himself how can a society which is profoundly mimic produce anything which is not itself mimic; how can a man who is not sure what he is produce anything which is genuinely his own.146

Rather than contempt, Boxill discerns sympathy: In fact, throughout both these novels there is great sympathy and understanding for the predicament of the modern West Indies. How can a small country lacking in resources be expected to withstand the onslaught of the American plastic world? How can a society nurtured in mimicry and selfdisgust by a history of slavery and colonialism remain uncontaminated by the unreality of its controllers?147

Conversely, for Selwyn Cudjoe, the fact that Singh’s persona as writer is linked with the concept of mimesis implicates Naipaul in the same relationship of mimetic dependency.148 However, author and narrator are not identical and, moreover, this line of interpretation confuses mimicry with artistic mimesis.149 Although I disagree with Cudjoe’s identification of Singh the writer with Naipaul the author, his claim goes right to the heart of the matter: is the climate of mimetic dependency so all-encompassing that in his analysis of the subject Naipaul, too, is condemned to mimicry, forfeiting origin145 On Naipaul’s colonial gaze, see Nixon 1992: 131–2 and ch. 6, passim. On Naipaul’s own mimetic dependency, see Cudjoe 1988: 102. 146 Boxill 1976: 13. 147 Ibid. 16. 148 Cudjoe 1988: 102. 149 Contrast Lindroth 1984: 529, who sees mimesis as a way out of the cycle of mimic dependency: ‘Ralph recreates himself as a “free man” (p. 300) and certifies himself as artist-magician who has passed from the mimicry of fraudulent pretence to the mimesis of authentic creative performance.’


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ality and insight? Can judgement only come from the outside; is there no legitimate space for an internal critique of imitative dependency in Caribbean letters? According to Cudjoe’s analysis, Naipaul is arrested in ‘the mirror stage of development’, unable to ‘assume a social identity separate and distinct from that of the mother (country)’.150 Naipaul’s conception of mimicry in The Mimic Men has been read in several different ways: for Homi Bhabha, the novel’s treatment of mimicry explores the ambivalence of colonial cultural mimicry that both sublimates a desired culture through imitation and yet, in the process of imitation, exposes the fantasy behind this culture. In Bhabha’s reading, colonial mimics such as Ralph Singh generate what he calls a ‘double vision’ that disrupts the authority of colonial discourse (2004: 126); this ‘double vision’ refers to the fact that the otherness, or difference, of colonial mimics is visible in their ‘flawed colonial mimesis’ (ibid. 125), thereby deforming the culture which is the object of imitation.151 In an essay entitled ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry’, originally published in 1974, Derek Walcott understands Naipaul as lamenting the inescapable and unproductive mimicry of all Caribbean culture (Walcott 1997b). While Naipaul does sometimes articulate this view, most notably in his damning conclusion in The Middle Passage that ‘nothing has ever been created in the Caribbean’,152 the representation of mimicry in Mimic Men is more sophisticated than this. Walcott argues that Naipaul’s theory of mimicry entails that all art in the Americas—not solely the Caribbean—is derivative (1997b: 53).153 In a careful discussion of 150

Ibid. 111. See Nixon 1992: 156–8 for a discussion of Bhabha’s theorization of colonial mimicry in relation to The Mimic Men. Nixon does not accept that Naipaul’s model of mimicry is capable of the sophistication demonstrated by Bhabha: ‘Naipaul’s account of “mimicry” leaves no room for retaliatory, knowing, partial, appropriations’ (ibid. 157). See also Mustafa 1995: 106. 152 Naipaul [1962] 2001b: 20. 153 ‘[I]f I understand Mr Naipaul correctly, our pantomime is conducted before a projection of ourselves which in its smallest gestures is based on metropolitan references. No gesture, according to this philosophy, is authentic, every sentence is a quotation, every movement either ambitious or pathetic, and because it is mimicry, uncreative. The indictment is crippling, but, like all insults, it contains an astonishing 151

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Walcott’s essay,154 Rei Terada attributes a larger thesis to Naipaul, drawing on the whole of Naipaul’s oeuvre: It is already clear in Naipaul that the English in India were not really English. In the Indian context their mannerisms were absurd; Anglo-India even when it existed was a ‘fairytale land.’ Shouldn’t we take the next step of wondering whether the Indian context merely underscored an absurdity that existed in England itself? Weren’t real English clubs, for example, largely mimicking prior English clubs, a distant subculture of mythic grace?155

It is precisely this idea of an originary culture of ‘mythic’ grace, and mimetic homage to this culture, that Naipaul satirizes so relentlessly, both in his own life and that of others. To return to Naipaul’s use of the misquotation of Aeneid 4.110–12: many of Naipaul’s critics imply that Naipaul has a violent aversion to creolization and the concept of ‘misceri populos’. In fact, Naipaul resurrects this misquotation of Virgil precisely to show that colonial empires, whether in the Caribbean, India, or Africa, had a tendency to simplify complex realities in the construction of their myths of empire, to turn a deliberative proposition (si . . . probet) about the legitimacy of one culture’s interference with and imposition on another, into an affirmative statement (probat). Many readers, myself included, reject Naipaul’s pessimistic response to this proposition, but he cannot be accused of oversimplification. Given that modern studies of the phenomena of empire and imperialism continue to attribute the invention of empire to Rome, Naipaul’s re-reading of Virgil in The Mimic Men serves an important historiographical purpose in the modern Caribbean, exposing the gap between colonial appropriations of the classics and the deeply ambivalent messages contained in these texts.

truth. The only thing is that it is not, to my mind, only the West Indies which is being insulted by Naipaul, but all endeavor in this half of the world, in broader definition: the American endeavor.’ 154 155 Terada 1992: 18–25. Ibid. 19.


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DEREK WALCOT T: TRANSLATING EMPIRE In the two previous sections we have looked at ways in which both Clarke and Naipaul use the misquotation of Latin to reflect on the role of the Classics in modern imperial fictions.156 To an even greater extent than either author, Derek Walcott has unravelled the conceit that the modern empires in the New World are in some way validated by the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome as transmitted via the Roman Empire. In this section I examine the theme of translatio studii et imperii in Walcott’s corpus and the way in which he has translated empire, on his own terms. I start with a passage in the sixth book of Omeros where Walcott, revisiting a theme explored in earlier poems,157 contrasts the Europe of the Holocaust with the Europe of the classical ideal (‘that other Europe’), which was impressed upon colonials in the Caribbean: What my father spiritedly spoke of was that other Europe of mausoleum museums, the barber’s shelf of The World’s Great Classics, with a vanity whose spires and bells punctually pardoned itself in the absolution of fountains and statues, in writhing, astonishing tritons; their cold noise brimming the basin’s rim, repeating that power and art were the same, from some Caesar’s eaten nose to spires at sunset in the swift’s half-hour.

156 Walcott uses the phrase ‘imperial fiction’ in the poem ‘The Fortunate Traveller’: ‘Through Kurtz’s teeth, white skull in elephant grass, j the imperial fiction sings’ (Walcott 1981: 93). 157 See, in particular, ‘The Fortunate Traveller’ (dedicated to Susan Sontag), ‘The heart of darkness is not Africa. j The heart of darkness is the core of fire j in the white center of the holocaust’ (ibid.). For doubt about the efficacy of Walcott’s use of the ‘Heart of Darkness’ motif here, see Nixon 1992: 105, ‘Walcott’s effort to establish the heart of darkness as a figure for a moral condition no longer predicated on an African, or even a Third World locale seems a thin straw in a very strong wind.’ Contra Nixon, I would argue that this is to withhold the power to signify from Walcott. See also the references to the Holocaust in Midsummer (Walcott 1984: 54), and The Bounty (Walcott 1997a: 22, 23, 35).

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Translatio studii et imperii Tell that to a slave from the outer regions of their fraying empires, what power lay in the work of forgiving fountains with naiads and lions.158

The lineage of empire is seen to be an amalgam of different cultures and civilizations, assimilated into a blunt classical ideal symbolized by the ‘classics’ of world literature, classical sculpture (whether portrait busts of a Caesar, tritons, or naiads), and ecclesiastical architecture. This ‘classical’ version of the past is rejected in the spondaic mumble of the phrase ‘mausoleum museums’—a past that is dead. In turn, this rejection takes us back to an earlier chapter (XXXVI), where the narrator had mused on the immortality of art in the setting of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. That chapter begins with the lines: ‘Museums endure; but sic transit gloria j agitates the leaf-light on their concrete benches j in the sculpture garden . . .’159 The marble classics in the museum are cloying until Walcott as narrator comes across the work of a modern Homer: Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream (1899).160 This classic of modern American art with its pregnant symbolism of a black sailor marooned on a wrecked vessel, encircled by sharks with ominous waves encroaching, brings classical past into dialogue with the racial politics of the present. The narrator identifies the black sailor with the Achille of his own poem (‘Achille! My main man, my nigger!’),161 suddenly switching into black slang for the exclamation, identifying the black experience of his Caribbean with the black experience of North America. Although this encounter with (Winslow) Homer enables Walcott to recuperate something from the museum, its classical civilization is shown to be superficial when he emerges into the dusk ‘between the Greek columns j of the museum’ (184) into a world where he has no success in hailing a cab because of 158

159 Walcott 1990: 205 (6. XL. iii). Walcott 1990: 182 (4. XXXVI. i). ‘in the light that entered another Homer’s hand’ (184). This entire section is discussed brilliantly by Hamner 1997a: 99–101 and Goff and Simpson 2007: 248–9. Hamner includes an illustration of The Gulf Stream on p. 100). The Gulf Stream is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, but has been loaned to the Boston Museum of Fine Art in the past for a Winslow Homer exhibition. Do¨ring 2002: 157–8 suggests that Walcott’s analysis of the painting identifies Homer’s painting with Turner’s painting The Slave Ship, retracing ‘the iconographic translatio imperii of visual powers from the Old World to the New, from the British to the American empire’. 161 Walcott 1990: 183. 160


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the colour of his skin, leading to the bathetic pun ‘Sic transit taxi, sport’ (ibid.). Given that the narrator has just surveyed the Shaw Memorial featuring Saint Gaudens’s frieze of the black soldiers depicted with Colonel Shaw, Robert Hamner rightly highlights the wry reflection on racial politics ‘The ironic humour is that after more than a hundred years and thousands of lost lives a black man in this city continues to endure discrimination’ (1997a: 101). However, this section also contains a more universal point about the passing of empires and their civilizations. Walcott translates a trope in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick about white races presiding over ‘every dusky tribe’162 into the dusk settling over Boston Common and the symbolic memento mori of empire contained in the detail of the ‘declining sun’: So I stood in the dusk between the Greek columns of the museum touched by the declining sun on the gilt of the State House dome . . .

museums may endure, and art may be immortal up to a point, but the world about them is in flux and often in tension with the civilizational ideals encased behind the museum’s ‘classic façade’ (182). In this static environment Walcott finds a pivot/hook for translation in the chance resemblance of the black sailor to the fictional character Achille in his own poem, and the coincidence of the painter’s name (‘another Homer’). The irony here is that Walcott has earlier used the more authentic, Greek name of Omeros for his bard (and title), over the name ‘Homer’ with its associations of the American classical renaissance,163 but in this instance this New England Homer chimes in with Walcott’s reinvention of Homeric epic.164

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This is a quotation from the beginning of chapter 42 (‘The Whiteness of the Whale’) of Moby Dick. For a discussion of the complexity of the symbolism of the whiteness of the whale, see C. L. R. James’s study of Moby Dick (James [1953] 2001: 41–2). 163 Cf. Walcott 1990: 14 (1. II. iii), ‘I said: “Homer and Virg are New England farmers, and the winged horse guards their gas-station, you’re right.” ’ 164 I also note Paula Burnett’s compelling reading of the phrase ‘another Homer’; Burnett suggests that there are actually four Homers in play here (Homer, Omeros, Winslow Homer, and Dunstan St Omer), seeing Dunstan St Omer, the St Lucian painter and Walcott’s friend from childhood, as a counterpart to Winslow Homer (2000: 171–2).

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The gap that Walcott opens up between historical regimes and the art that lurks in their museums or the architecture of their public spaces undermines the mantra that ‘power and art are the same’. First, the immortality of art is attacked: art belongs to the material world (‘some Caesar’s eaten nose’) of historical change and decay and, like their artworks, empires fray (sic transit gloria mundi).165 A similar critique is present in the poem ‘Roman Peace’ (The Arkansas Testament), where Walcott depicts a senile Augustus hallucinating about the legions lost along with the Roman general P. Quinctilius Varus in a battle in Teutoburg Forest in ad 9—one of the most humiliating episodes in the history of Rome’s empire.166 The decay at the heart of every empire is beautifully encapsulated in the line ‘The marble phlegm of Rome lies on his chest’, where the decline of an emperor is imagined sculpturally and stands symbolically for the eventual decline of all emperors.167 Secondly, when Walcott retorts that the perspective of ‘a slave from the outer regions j of their fraying empires’ might be different, he hints at the historical and cultural specificity of art and its ability to alienate viewers who do not share in the culture that produced it. There is also a suggestion that the real power—the manpower—that funded or physically built these monuments often came from slaves or subjects of empire.168 On the one hand a failure of cultural translation (translatio studii): art that does not carry over from the old world of Europe to the new world of the Caribbean; and on the other hand the brutal process of translatio imperii through the exploitation of foreign labour. The compact between art and power is there at the beginning of Omeros when Walcott muses on the marble bust of Homer, its nose broken, like the ‘eaten’ nose of the Caesar, and what it would make of the history of the transatlantic slave trade (‘its nostrils might 165

See Walcott in White 1996: 159, ‘And that’s what the ruins of any great cultures do. In a way they commemorate decay. That’s the elegiac point.’ 166 Famously described in Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars (Life of Augustus ch. 23). 167 Walcott [1987] 1988: 71. 168 See the connection between the museums and monuments of London and the exploitation of slave labour in the lines ‘ . . . the City that can buy and sell us . . . the packets of tea stirred with our crystals of sweat’. Walcott 1990: 197 (5.XXXVIII.iii).


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flare’).169 In this context the statue is apparently exonerated from the horror of the slave trade, since it is described as ‘inculpable marble’ and is even incorporated into the suffering through the passivity of the past: perhaps the inculpable marble would have turned its white seeds away, to widen the bow of its mouth at the horror under her table, from the lyre of her armchair draped with its white chiton. to do what the past always does: suffer, and stare.

The question of the past and its role in the present is at the centre of the historiographic nexus of Omeros. Walcott’s narrative fluctuates between a sympathetic vision of a classical past that has been coerced into modern fictions, and a wary or sometimes hostile view of the same past for its role in propping up these fictions. The poet’s impulse to translate the past and to interpret it in a Caribbean context can be likened to domesticating translation, in which a source text is ‘brought home’ to a target culture.170 Hence the significance of the Greek sculptress Antigone authorizing Walcott’s Caribbean Homer (‘“O-meros,” she laughed. “That’s what we call him in Greek” ’).171 Following Alexander Irvine, we could call this a deterritorializing adaptation, as illustrated by the breakthrough in chapter XXX, when Achille views his native land of St Lucia after a hallucinatory return to his ancestral land in West Africa: ‘This was the shout on which each odyssey pivots, j . . . [8 lines omitted] And I’m homing with him, Homeros, my nigger.’172 In place of a canonical, capitalized Odyssey, we get the odyssey as a transferable concept (‘each odyssey’), as Walcott ‘homes’ with his character Achille and, 169

Walcott 1990: 15 (1.II.iii). On the homing instinct in domesticating translation see Steiner [1975] 1998: 398–400. 171 Walcott 1990: 14 (1.II.iii). See Melas 2007: 149 on this erotic encounter as a ‘contingent foundation’ for the poem. 172 Irvine (2005) has written of Walcott’s ‘deterritorialization of Western myth’. Irvine explains this idea on p. 126: ‘The classics aren’t being forgotten; rather it is a way of reading the classics that must be abandoned. They must, in Deleuze and Guattari’s phrasing, be “deterritorializ[ed]”, used in “strange and minor” ways in order for a minority writer to find a voice of any consequence,’ quoting from Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 16. 170

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simultaneously, with Homeros, whose name coincides with home.173 In fact, this passage (159) is the only place in the entire poem where Walcott uses the form ‘Homeros’ (a transliteration of the ancient Greek noun ‘´ˇÅæ ), as distinct from the modern Greek/Patois hybrid form Omeros.174 In other words, this is the closest that the narrator gets to Homer, and yet Walcott keeps his distance from this canonical Homer by making the pseudo-etymology ‘home’ more prominent than the transliteration of the ancient Greek name. This cagey identification with Homer reflects a broader pattern in Omeros, whereby Walcott is careful to keep his distance even in the moment of engaging with epic. Scholars have posited an analogy with the simultaneous proximity and distance that is characteristic of Homeric similes, which typically resist geographical and cultural specificity. Lorna Hardwick has suggested ‘reception as simile’ for a model of Walcott’s reception of Homer, in which distant worlds are brought into contact.175 To quote Oliver Taplin, ‘the great majority of the similes is neither fixed in time nor located in place: they do not belong to Homer’s first audience particularly more than any other audience’ (2007: 179).176 Taplin goes on to posit that the similes are ‘paradigmatic of the coexistence of similarity and difference which is at the core of the power of Homeric poetry as a whole’ (ibid.). According to Melas, Walcott employs ‘Omeric similitude’ as a way of transcending the limiting gaze of the tourist: ‘Whereas the Homeric simile cannily separates specificity from locality, Omeric similitude delocalizes tourism’s reified caricature of local type. Homer or

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For discussion of Walcott’s polylingual etymology of ‘Omeros’ at p. 14, see Dougherty 1997: 335–6. Hamner 1997a: 42 introduces the helpful concept of ‘connotative etymology’. Melas 2007: 150 emphasizes the erotic act between poet and lover and adds the etymology ‘homme’s eros’ to the mix. 174 See Farrell 1997: 264 for an incisive discussion of the cultural politics involved in Walcott’s etymology and the question of dialectal variants. See especially his description of the Anglicized name ‘Homer’ as a ‘spuriously universal Latinate’ form (ibid.). 175 See Hardwick 1997 (‘reception as simile’), 2000: 124, 2007: 61–2—the latter for the suggestion that Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version effectively follows the pattern of a reverse simile in its engagement with Homer. 176 This property of Homeric similes has been widely commented on. Taplin’s article is particularly relevant here because he discusses Walcott’s tentative assimilation of the Homeric simile (2007: 184–6).


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Omeros thus provides Walcott with epic distance, or rather, epicality as distance.’177 This conjunction of similarity and distance domesticates Homeric epic by deterritorializing it; it is home everywhere and nowhere. This is a strategy that liberates the epic from the countless misprisions that it has suffered from antiquity to the present, including Walcott’s own assimilation which is careful to maintain fictional similarities with Homeric epic while insisting that it is not the same. Walcott allows his bard an identity that is foreign to the world of the poem, and that is potentially offended by the ways in which he has been revised and revisioned in world literature, but the flip side of this foreignness is the displacement of Homer from his own poem, as it were. The first aspect (Homer’s alienation from his own poem) is reminiscent of Borges’s immortal Homer in the story ‘The Immortal’,178 where Homer fails to recognize himself in the changed text that we read today. The second aspect is also Borgesian, as John Thieme has observed in the case of an earlier Walcott poem, ‘Map of the New World’, where the poem purports to be the Odyssey: ‘A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain j And plucks the first line of the Odyssey.’179 The answer to this intertextual conundrum is that Walcott largely bypasses the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, instead accessing their mythical traditions,180 which reach back beyond them and extend long after them through other texts with which Walcott engages more directly, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Joyce’s Ulysses.

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Melas 2007: 158. ‘El Inmortal’ is the first story in the collection of short stories entitled El Aleph (1957). 179 Walcott 1981: 25 (CP 413). See Thieme 1999: 167: ‘As with Omeros, this suggests that the poem about to be written is actually The Odyssey, not a derivative Caribbean by-product. Just as in Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” where the fictional Pierre Menard produces his own verbatim version of Cervantes’ novel without any indebtedness to it, so the implication here is that a completely new work is about to be undertaken.’ See Greenwood 2005b: 140. 180 Walcott 1990: 283 (7. LVI. iii): ‘ “I never read it,” j I said. “Not all the way through.”.’ See White 1996: 173. See also Davis 2007: 208, who comments: ‘it is clear . . . that Walcott sees the Homeric epic narratives fundamentally as a matrix of archetypal figures, images, and motifs . . . that constitute a kind of archive for later writers and artists in the Western canon.’ 178

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The received idea of translatio studii et imperii holds that the translation of culture and the translation of power/empire go hand in hand, and that art translates the power of those that rule. Walcott’s counter-strategy has always been to insist on the power of art, leading to the concept of an ‘empire of art’. Accordingly, the era of the end of empire calls for a systematic renegotiation of the literature of empire in order to establish a new empire of literature. Omeros is the centrepiece of this project, involving as it does the translation of canonical Homeric epics into a New World context. Translation in this sense is the metaphorical exercise of carrying over Homeric epic from ancient Greece to the modern Caribbean.

Miscarriage of Empire We have seen how the misquotation of Virgil functions as a critique of the faux-authority of European civilization in Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979). Walcott also uses Virgilian misquotation to highlight the miscarriage of power and justice at the heart of colonial culture. In Walcott’s case the misquotation occurs in chapter 5 of the long autobiographical poem Another Life (1974). This chapter bears as its epigraph the Latin motto on the St Lucian shield ‘Statio haud malefida carinis’, and the motto is subsequently embedded in the poem in a classroom scene.181 ‘Boy! Name the great harbours of the world!’ ‘Sydney! Sir.’ ‘San Fransceesco!’ ‘Naples, sah!’ ‘And what about Castries?’ ‘Sah, Castries ees a coaling station and der twenty-seventh best harba in der worl’! In eet the entire Breetesh Navy can be heeden!’ ‘What is the motto of St. Lucia, boy?’ ‘Statio haud malefida carinis.’ ‘Sir!’ 181 Walcott 2004: 29–30. See Baugh and Nepaulsingh 2004: 250 for commentary on this motto and the harbour at Castries to which it refers.


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‘Sir!’ ‘And what does that mean?’ ‘Sir, a safe anchorage for sheep’s!’

This motto is a deliberate misquotation of the description of the island of Tenedos at Aeneid 2.23 (‘nunc tantum sinus et statio male fida carinis’). I have noted elsewhere that Walcott quite deliberately sends us back to Virgil, alerting us to the Virgilian intertext with the phrase ‘Vergil’s tag’ (line 708).182 Timothy Hofmeister has illuminated this intertextual play, arguing that an awareness of the imperial maladaptation of Virgil prompts us to reassess the relationship between colonial power, colonial subject, and Virgil’s Rome. Insofar as the schoolboy, along with his fellow St Lucians, has been duped by a false motto, they are like the Trojans—the future Romans—of Aeneid Book 2.183 However, as with Austin Clarke’s use of Latin (mis)quotations in The Polished Hoe, the Latin allusion entails complex cultural politics. Not only is the Latin misquotation on which the allusion hangs a sign of colonial duplicity, but it is also part of a classroom exchange in which pedagogy is crossed with colonial domination. This warped colonial perspective reduces the significance of Castries, the capital of St Lucia, to the fact that it can receive the entire British navy in its harbour; and still it only comes in at twenty-third place in a ranking of the world’s harbours.184 Given the imperial subject matter, and the fact that St Lucia still had semicolonial status at the time at which the poem was published, the opening exclamation ‘Boy’ makes the schoolboy’s subsequent ‘Sirs’ resemble an exchange between master and subject.185 As Baugh and Nepaulsingh observe, ‘the schoolchildren, who speak a version of English with an African base, are aggressively 182

Greenwood 2005a: 90 (n. 60). See Hofmeister 1999: 52–3, especially 53: ‘The story of the African diaspora nests inside the ancient myth, in short, when Walcott’s allusive play reverses the imperial revision of Vergil.’ See Baugh and Nepaulsingh 2004: 185–7, who trace the Virgilian themes in Another Life, concluding with a series of parallels between the poet Walcott and Aeneas (187). 184 See Greenwood 2005a: 81. Melas 2007: 119 comments neatly, ‘Walcott mocks this obsessively comparative history of ranking by ordinals.’ 185 St Lucia did not gain full independence until 22 February 1979; for the period 1967–79, it was an ‘Associated State’ of the United Kingdom. 183

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corrected by their teachers who speak English properly and seem culturally distant from their local students’.186 Although Walcott ‘reverses the imperial revision of Vergil’, as Hofmeister puts it (n. 183 above), his own recondite allusive play reinforces the very cultural distance that he criticizes in the teacher. These Latin tags are a world away from the life of ordinary St Lucians, and Walcott’s privileged education divides him from the countrymen and women to whom his poetry seeks to give voice. As the narrator of Omeros comments on the village Olympiad in Gros-Iˆlet: When one wore a crown— victor ludorum—no one knew what it meant, or cared to be told. The Latin syllables would drown in the clapping dialect of the crowd.187

In turn, this passage is strongly reminiscent of the poem ‘A Latin Primer’ (The Arkansas Testament), where Walcott reflects on his experience as a Junior Latin master, and muses that his complicity in disciplining the students ‘made me a hypocrite; j their lithe black bodies, beached, j would die in dialect’.188 Since the narrator likens the pupils to porpoises in the preceding stanza, the sense seems to be that the Latin drilled into them in the classroom will not enable them to survive in the world outside the school, where they will be like proverbial fish out of water. In both poems, Latin is overwhelmed by dialect. Pompous Latin phrases are one of the signatures used to characterize Major Plunkett when he is first introduced in chapter 5 of Omeros.189 In this chapter the phrases ‘Pro Rommel, pro mori’ (25), ‘Pro honoris causa’ (ibid.), ‘memento mori’ (30), and finally ‘victor ludorum’ (32) all feature as part of Plunkett’s stream of consciousness. The first phrase, invented by Walcott, refers to the German AfrikaKorps serving under Rommel in North Africa and possibly alludes to Wilfred Owen’s famous appropriation of Horace’s ‘dulce et 186 Baugh and Nepaulsingh 2004: 186; they cite Walcott’s own comments on this passage in support of their interpretation. 187 Walcott 1990: 32 (1.V.iii). 188 Walcott [1987] 1988: 23. See King 2000: 54–5. 189 For the ‘real-life’ Major Plunkett on whom the character was modelled, see King 2000: 41.


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decorum est pro patria mori’ (Odes 3.2.13).190 The second phrase, ‘pro honoris causa’ (lit. ‘for the sake of honour’), used in the conferring of honorary degrees, has a bathetic comic effect when used in reference to the war: ‘Pro honoris causa, j but in whose honour did his head-wound graduate?’; while the phrase ‘memento mori’ (‘remember that you are going to die’) is used in conjunction with Remembrance Day. But although the Major’s use of these phrases is recherche´ and therefore pompous, the first three phrases contain poignant irony because they pertain to the Second World War—a war of which the Major himself was a victim.191 We might call Plunkett a disillusioned exponent of empire; although he often expresses nostalgia for Britain’s lost empire, he too is a victim of an imperial fiction and, like Philoctete, bears a wound (28). In Plunkett’s case he labours under a double lie: the ‘ancient lie’ that Owen mocks in his poem, the lie that twisted Greek and Latin texts to serve modern interests, and the lie or illusion that St Lucia bears Homeric associations.192 The two lies are related, since the appropriation of Latin tags on the one hand, and the naming of islands and slaves after classical names on the other hand, belong to the same fictional history that relays European civilization back to the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome and makes spurious classical translation serve the transmission of power/empire. In Plunkett’s case this spurious translation takes the form of identifying ‘coincidences’ between the details of St Lucian history and Homeric epic.193 As critics have observed, Plunkett’s enterprise of writing an epical history fulfils A. J. Froude’s statement about the 190 ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ (written in 1917). See Hardwick 2000: 53 on Walcott’s quotation of Owen’s poem in Walcott’s play The Odyssey: A Stage Version (Walcott 1993: 60; Act I, scene vii). 191 Commenting on Omeros 6.LIV.i, Henriksen 2006: 244–5 offers interesting observations about the combination of ‘upper-class sociolect’ and ‘Caribbean English’ in Plunkett’s speech, although some of the phrases the she identifies as Caribbean English are actually typical of army cant in a man of Plunkett’s age and background. 192 See Hardwick 2000: 52 ‘The use by propagandists of this line from Horace in order to justify and console those who were likely to die and to glorify death in battle was another example of appropriation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of ideas and phrases from classical authors without much attention to the context in which they were originally written.’ 193 See Hamner 1997a: ch. 3 for discussion of Plunkett’s approach to history.

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West Indies as the proper arena for a modern English epic.194 His enterprise is also reminiscent of the Belgian historian Raymond in A Bend in the River, who takes the history of the Roman Empire as the model for his history of the Congo. Although Plunkett’s model is Greek mythology, rather than Roman history, in his reading he uses a bookmark that he had won as a prize ‘for an essay j on the Roman Empire. In those days, history was easy.’195 The second sentence can be construed severally: ‘in those days’ can refer to Plunkett’s recollection of the simplicity of ancient history as taught at school, with its factual certainties and coherent narrative. However ‘in those days’ may also refer to ancient Rome, suggesting a progressivist view of historical time, with history becoming increasingly simpler the further back in time one goes. After all, the notion that the history of the ancient world is easy is a presumption of imperial mythmaking, which relies on a knowable and easily transmissible version of the past. When Raymond ponders ‘Do we really know the history of the Roman Empire? Do we really know what went on during the conquest of Gaul?’ he throws into question an entire regime of knowledge.196 Nor is this imperial mythmaking exclusive to the modern world; it is already there in many of the ancient texts that are pressed into modern myths. In Walcott’s poetry the trajectory of the imperial lie goes back to the archetypal, Roman Empire. Caesars figure repeatedly in Walcott as figureheads for the propagation of imperial power and the stratagems used to enforce it—we have encountered a few of them already. The collection In a Green Night, which was published in the year that Trinidad and Tobago gained Independence (1962), includes a sequence entitled ‘Two Poems on the Passing of an Empire’. In the first poem, a heron alighting on a tree stump segues into a vision of the eagle on Roman military standards, ‘such an emblem led Rome’s trampling feet, j pursued by late proconsuls bearing law’, but the poet concludes with relief that ‘time and motion is at a period’ so the heron in this case cannot signify empire.197 The second poem juxtaposes the

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See Hamner 1997a: 59; Henriksen 2006: v–xvi. Walcott 1990: 113 (2.XXI.ii). 196 Naipaul [1979] 2002b: 151 (see p. 139 above). 197 Walcott 1962: 38. Trinidad and Tobago gained Independence on 12 August 1962. Walcott was resident in Trinidad at the time. 195


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British Empire (Britannia) with the Roman Empire of the previous poem, seen through the loss sustained by a veteran of the African campaign. The same analogy is employed in the poem ‘A Letter from the Old Guard’ (The Arkansas Testament), which is written in the persona of another veteran who also served in Africa under the empire.198 The veteran compares his colonial military service to the tax tribute exacted under the Roman Empire: ‘I soldiered for my King and island. My hands catch arthritis, but they rendered unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, just like the Gurkhas. What ferocious blighters!

The moral balance of the poem is further weighted towards the veteran with this echo of Christ’s words to the Pharisees,199 and the confusion of culture that empire brings is evident in the mixed linguistic register with which the veteran voices his letter: the expression to ‘catch arthritis’ is West Indian English, while the exclamation ‘What ferocious blighters!’ is in the idiolect of the British army. In the poem ‘Tropic Zone’ (poem 43 of Midsummer), Walcott aligns his poetry with the unregulated, tenseless space of the ocean: ‘and my own prayer is to write j lines as mindless as the oceans of linear time, j since time is the first province of Caesar’s jurisdiction.’200 Similarly in Omeros in a passage where the narrator compares the expulsion of the American Indians (specifically the Lakota tribe) from the Dakotas with the forced migration of African slaves and the decimation of native Amerindian peoples in the Caribbean; these acts of deracination are relayed back to Caesar: ‘This is the first wisdom of Caesar j to change the ground under the bare soles of a race.’201 The burden of history in Walcott’s poetry is freighted with the classical gravitas of Rome’s empire, which provided a pretext for subsequent empires. Hence the assault on the classicism of the Republic of America—Walcott’s ‘new

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Walcott [1987] 1988: 40–3. Gospel of Matthew 22: 21. See Walcott’s discussion of this phrase in his 1990 interview with J. P White (White 1996: 159). 200 Walcott 1984: 57. 201 Walcott 1990: 208 (5.XLI.ii). Compare Hamner 1997a: 122. 199

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empire’—as a shallow façade in Omeros.202 In the modern world the argument about empire is always also an argument about the classical past and how to interpret it.

New World, New Word One of the ways in which the so-called ‘Old’ World powers inscribed themselves in the ‘New’ World was through old words, as a way of disarming the foreign and unknown.203 These old words included the Bible and classical mythology, and Latin nomenclature for the flora and fauna of this new world. This was a case of translation following the trajectory of empire/power and its legacy was the metaphor of ‘the colony as a translation, a copy of an original located elsewhere on the map’.204 Writing about local folklore in the poem ‘White Magic’, Walcott complains that the wood nymphs of classical antiquity—the dryads and hamadryads—have been preserved in literature, while Papa Bois, the old man of the forest in Trinidadian folklore, is dismissed as a copy of Pan, the satyr in GraecoRoman mythology: ‘but when our dry leaves crackle to the deer-j footed, hobbling hunter, Papa Bois, j he’s just Pan’s clone, one more translated satyr.’205 This poem famously concludes with a terse statement of the inequality at the heart of the colonial condition: ‘Our myths are ignorance, theirs are literature.’206 On both sides of the caesura are myths—those of the colonized and the colonizer—but there is an inscrutable inequality that means that on one side the myths are relegated to the status of ignorant superstition, while on the other side they are elevated to literature. In seeking to level this equation, Walcott has often turned to translation, as a means of both dismantling power and conveying a new cultural order. In the poem ‘The Almond Trees’ (The Castaway), Walcott tackles translation through the phenomenon of metamorphosis.207 He 202

203 Walcott 1990: 206 (5.XLI.i). See p. 8 above. Bassnett and Trivedi 1999a: 5. Consider, for example, the spectacle of Barbados as ‘Little England’ in George Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin and Austin Clarke’s Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack, discussed on p. 93 above with n. 86. 205 Walcott [1987] 1988: 38. 206 Ibid. 39. 207 Walcott 1965: 36–7. For discussion see Thieme 1999: 80–2. Thieme is more optimistic than I am in his interpretation of the imagery of this poem. 204


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describes a typical beachscape as a scene of carnage in which trees washed from Africa, like enslaved Africans, have been stripped down and rebranded with classical tags in the New World: Welded in one flame, huddling naked, stripped of their name, for Greek or Roman tags, they were lashed raw by wind, washed out with salt and fire-dried, bitterly nourished where their branches died, their leaves’ broad dialect a coarse, enduring sound they shared together.

Taking his cue from the Froudian insult that there is nothing here and that the region is without history, Walcott depicts a landscape that unwittingly echoes classical mythology as a result of the classical names that have been put upon the trees. Alluding to Ovid’s famous description of the metamorphosis of Daphne into a laurel tree in Book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Walcott casts the women who come to the beach as ‘brown daphnes, laurels’ in ‘Pompeian’ bikinis whose metamorphosis through tanning reflects the metamorphosis undergone by the trees. However, this trivial skit on classical mythology stands in stark contrast to the wound of history at the centre of the poem; Walcott contrasts the artistic, erotic transformation of Daphne into a tree with these eradicated trees, whose ‘grief j howls seaward through charred, ravaged holes’ (1965: 37). The theme of wounding through translation is revisited in ‘The Schooner, Flight’ (The Star-Apple Kingdom), where the narrator Shabine muses on ‘the pain of history words contain’ (1980: 12). In this poem the naming of trees again symbolizes cultural imperialism.208 As the ship approaches Barbados, Shabine spots casuarinas on the shore and considers the different names by which these trees are called: ‘cedars, cypresses, or casuarinas’ (ibid.). He explains what is at stake for the colonial in the choice of a name:

208 There is an excellent discussion of this section of ‘The Schooner, Flight ’ in Breslin 2001: 204–6.

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Translatio studii et imperii but we live like our names and you would have to be colonial to know the difference, to know the pain of history words contain, to love those trees with an inferior love, and to believe: ‘Those casuarinas bend like cypresses, their hair hangs down in rain like sailors’ wives. They’re classic trees, and we, if we live like the names our masters please, by careful mimicry might become men.’209

Everywhere, botanical translation implies metamorphosis, transforming the landscape through language.210 In both ‘The Almond Trees’ and ‘The Schooner, Flight’ this transformation is a site of pain, a scene of humiliation since the value of the landscape lies only in its resemblance to foreign landscapes.211 Hence the healing of Philoctete’s affliction in Omeros entails, among other things, ‘The yoke of the wrong name lifted from his shoulders’.212 Note the interpellation of the classical in all of this: in Omeros the fisherman’s wrong name is a Greek name (in the French transliteration), and here the advantage that the cypresses have over the casuarinas is that they are ‘classic’ trees. Although Walcott successfully domesticates this classical past in Omeros, with the result that readers of the Homeric epics are now just as likely to hear Walcott in Homer as Walcott heard Homeric echoes in the quarrels of local fishermen, the anxiety over naming persists in subsequent collections of poetry (The Bounty, Tiepolo’s Hound, and The Prodigal), as Walcott mediates between the languages of empire: primarily his ‘two languages’: English and St Lucian Creole, but other

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Walcott [1979] 1980: 12, echoed in Omeros (Walcott 1990: 208 (5.XLI.ii)). Describing the botanical classification undertaken by the Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius (1526–1609), Richard Drayton has remarked ‘After Clusius, the botanist was no longer a mere commentator on the ancients, he now had the daunting Adamic responsibility of naming every new herb’ (Drayton 2000: 14). 211 Breslin (2001: 206) emphasizes Shabine’s progress in realizing and ultimately rejecting the ‘colonial subservience’ (205) involved in privileging foreign names over local names, but I would stress that although Shabine has reached this realization, the colonial mindset that Shabine describes is narrated in the present tense, as an enduring condition. 212 Walcott 1990: 247 (6.XLIX.ii). 210


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languages feature as well. Throughout his career, Walcott has written and spoken about the Adamic thrill of naming in poetry in English what had never before been named: elements of St Lucian landscape and culture, flora, fauna, and topography.213 These new words from the New World pose an implicit challenge to the dominant English language in which Walcott writes. Nouns such as pomme-arac, boiscanot, laurier canelles, and bois-flot require translation and remind us that St Lucia is not wholly within the language of empire. Maria Tymoczko has written perceptively about the analogies between translation from minor culture into dominant culture, and the cultural inequalities exposed in the circulation of postcolonial literature. With reference to translations, Tymoczko writes of unparalleled, untranslatable words from the source culture that persist into translations, causing ‘perturbations in the lexis’ of the translation.214 Similarly, Lawrence Venuti has written of ‘language use as a site of power relationships’, and the ability of literary texts in so-called ‘minority’ languages to ‘submit the major language to constant variation, forcing it to become minor, delegitimizing, deterritorializing, alienating it’.215 Walcott invites this power play, commenting on words as the inalienable resource of the Caribbean writer (‘But that’s all those bastards have left us: words’).216 I think that the writer writing in English or in Spanish is lucky in the sense that he can master the original language, or the language of the master himself, and yet have it fertilized by the language of dialect. Someone who knows what he is doing, a good poet, recognizes the language’s essential duality. The excitement is in joining the two parts.217

Walcott’s comments describe, at the level of language, what he has described elsewhere at the level of culture, condoning the idea that, in art, ‘maturity is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor’.218 Lorna Hardwick has explored this position in the work of Walcott 213

214 See, e.g., Walcott 1998: 79–80. Tymoczko 1999: 24. Venuti 1998: 9–10; here Venuti draws on Lecercle 1990, and Deleuze and Guattari 1987. 216 ‘The Schooner, Flight ’, Walcott [1979] 1980: 9 (CP 350). 217 Walcott in Ciccarelli 1996: 45 (the interview was conducted in 1977). 218 In the essay ‘The Muse of History’, Walcott 1998: 36; originally published in 1974. 215

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and Seamus Heaney, explaining that ‘here we are dealing with consciousness which recognizes both the assimilationist impact of classical texts on colonised peoples and the capacity of writers to use the texts to build new works’.219 I have suggested elsewhere that Walcott repeatedly uses Latin etymologies in his poetry to highlight the interpenetration of languages, such that Latin, Creole, and Standard English are found to share many roots.220 In Walcott’s poetry Latin has the capacity to level out the inequities in cultural translation by pointing up an imperial debt at the heart of English.221 The process is analogous to that which Maria Cristina Fumagalli has identified in the poetry of Seamus Heaney: with Heaney activating Latin etymologies at the heart of ‘English’ words in the midst of dialect, leading to a middle form, which she likens to Dante’s use of the vernacular.222 If we read the line ‘civilization is impatience’,223 in The Bounty with this mechanism in mind, then the characteristic of civilization is not just restlessness, but also impassivity—drawing on the Latin etymology impatiens. This word-play takes us right back to ‘Prelude’, the opening poem of the collection In a Green Night (1962), which contains the line ‘Time creeps over the patient who are too long patient’, where both senses are active: both suffering (from the Latin verb patior, I suffer) and impatience at this suffering.224 Walcott then manipulates the Latin etymology of this adjective in the declaration that his life ‘must not be made public j Until I have learnt to suffer j In accurate iambics’. As though, even though the poet writes in the midst of real suffering, the suffering of art is the only suffering that counts. This critique of civilization as restless agency that inflicts suffering in its wake recalls Ce´saire’s emotive balance sheet of civilization and its victims, and is a good example of how Walcott, like Ce´saire, draws on the linguistic copia of western civilization to question its values.225

219

220 Hardwick 2002: 241. Greenwood 2009. See Prince 2007: 184, who suggests the term ‘post-colonial philology’ to describe Walcott’s linguistic creativity, ‘creating new language and new connections between language’. 222 Fumagalli 2001: xxv. 223 Walcott 1997a: 35. 224 Walcott 1962: 11. 225 Elsewhere Walcott echoes Ce´saire’s famous negation more directly (see, e.g., Omeros : Walcott 1990: 22 (1.IV.ii)). 221


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CONCLUSION Starting with Austin Clarke’s canny misquotations of Latin and classical mythology in The Polished Hoe, this chapter has explored the fiction of imperial succession (translatio imperii), which sees modern European empires continuing Rome’s civilization through the very act of empire.226 I have suggested that all three writers, Clarke, Naipaul, and Walcott, tackle this fiction by getting at the texts that are supposed to transmit this civilization (translatio studii). In both Clarke and Naipaul, misquotation shows up a miscarriage in the process of translation and, correspondingly, a miscarriage in the succession of empire. If the texts quoted mean something else, or are misquoted, then the imperial narrative loses cogency. In the case of Walcott, I have suggested that the translation of empire and the simultaneous translation of Classics, which often accompanied empire, is one of the major themes of his poetry. The complexity of Walcott’s engagement with the Classics stems from the fact that translatio imperii is at the same time a reality and a fiction for him. It is a reality insofar as the colonial education that Walcott received inculcated the idea that the British Empire and the empire of art were one and the same, and that access to the Classics was only to be had through the school of empire. This confusion of art and empire is articulated in Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), where the artworks in the Phaidon series are said to have: . . . opened the gates of an empire to applicants from its provinces and islands, in the old argument that the great works we admire civilise and colonise us, they chain our hands invisibly.227

However, the phrase ‘old argument’ suggests that it is time to move on. The innovation in Walcott’s view of the classical past, realized in Omeros, is to distinguish the transition of western empires228 from 226

227 See Willis 2007: 331–2. Walcott 2000: 57. See Omeros 5.XXXVIII.ii: ‘And the sunflower sets after all, retracting its irises j with the bargeman’s own, then buds on black, iron trees j as a gliding fog hides the empires: London, Rome, Greece’ (Walcott 1990: 196). 228

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the works of art produced under these empires.229 Through his reinvention as Omeros, a rough, vagrant bard from Greece, Homer is decolonized and estranged from the classical ideal suggesting that it is not arts that civilize and colonize, but that they are themselves colonized. Crucially, in Walcott’s engagement with Homer, Homer is not ‘western’.230 Even some of the subtlest studies of Omeros miss a beat here. For instance, Jahan Ramazani’s description of the warrior Philoctetes as ‘the classical white male war hero responsible for victory in the Trojan War’ (my italics) elides ancient Greek literature, modern constructions of ethnicity, and a periodization (‘classical’) that is alien to Greek mythology.231 The very point about Walcott’s Homeric theme is to spring characters like Philoctetes from this trap. The different approaches taken by Clarke, Naipaul, and Walcott can be summarized under two headings: ‘the ellipsis of empire’ and ‘the elision of empire’. The former (ellipsis) refers to the glossing over or suppression of aspects of ancient Greece and Rome in the flow of empire. V. S. Naipaul has coined the phrase the ‘classical half view’ to express the gulf between writers in the ancient world ‘who possess the whole apparatus of ancient Civilization’, and subsequent generations of readers who attempt to fill in the gaps in the history of a Polybius, or a Caesar.232 Naipaul cites the bafflement of modern schoolchildren who translate Caesar’s compressed vocabulary and who lack the cultural references to make sense of what they are translating. Furthermore, Naipaul suggests that this half-view is an integral feature of classical literature itself, which sometimes uses words ‘to hide from reality’ (166). If we accept that our view of the past is only a half-view, then it seems absurd that a line from Virgil, say, can stand as a self-explanatory shorthand for Belgian colonization in the Congo, or the British maritime empire in the Caribbean.233 Similarly, 229 Do¨ring 2002: 208 uses a reading of Omeros to counter George Steiner’s conception of ‘translational continuity’ within the Western canon (Steiner [1975: 467] 1998: 479). 230 On shifting perceptions of the ‘Westernness’ of Homer in the twentieth century, see the introduction in Graziosi and Greenwood 2007: 1–24. 231 Ramazani 2001: 54. 232 Naipaul 2007: 151. 233 Recall Raymond’s plaintive question in A Bend in the River : ‘Do we really know the history of the Roman Empire?’ (Naipaul [1979] 2002b: 151), see p. 176 above.


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Clarke’s retelling of the Trojan horse episode, which raises the question of whether the Trojans were Greeks or Romans, reminds us that the past is plural and cannot be conscripted into a single story. The ellipsis view of empire holds that there are gaps in our knowledge of the past and that the very existence of these gaps permits new ways of looking at the past. The existence of these gaps then negates the fiction of a continuous western civilization, or the elision of empire whereby disparate empires are elided into a seamless succession.

4 The Athens of the Caribbean Trinidadian Models of Athenian Democracy

The previous chapter concluded with the suggestion that Clarke, Naipaul, and Walcott have developed their own distinctive receptions of the Graeco-Roman past, which all turn on the rejection of the elision of empire implied by translatio studii et imperii. However, in the present chapter we shall see the elision of empire—specifically the Athenian empire—being put to work by C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, in an attempt to appropriate ancient Athenian democracy as an argument for Trinidadian democracy and as an enabling analogy in the formation of a national identity. James and Williams approached this task in different ways, but they shared the realization that they had to take back Classics from the colonial archive through which it had been transmitted. The title of this chapter alludes to a remark that Harold Macmillan made to Eric Williams about popular participation in politics in preIndependence Trinidad. Through his involvement in the People’s Education Movement (PEM), and subsequently the People’s National Movement (PNM),1 Williams had been instrumental in starting a programme for the education of the masses with a view to Independence. Under the PNM the locus of this mass education movement was Woodford Square in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, which was duly christened ‘the University of Woodford Square’.2 On learning about this institution of open-access 1 2

The PNM was launched on 24 January 1956. I return to the University of Woodford Square on pp. 208–13 below.

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education, which Williams referred to as ‘free university education for the masses’ (1969: 133), Harold Macmillan is alleged to have remarked that Trinidad and Tobago was ‘the Athens of the Caribbean’ (ibid. 136). As related by Williams, Macmillan’s remark affirms the parallel that Williams laboured to construct in his lectures on the PEM circuit—that in their version of direct democracy and mass education for all held in public venues, the Trinidadians were the natural inheritors of Athenian democracy. However, the role of Macmillan as metropolitan witness complicates the picture. Should we understand the topos of Trinidad as the ‘Athens of the Caribbean’ as just another facet of the imitative, colonial complex that some critics have discerned in Caribbean intellectuals of Williams’s generation? Or, is all this intellectual effort to align the Trinidadian experience with the society and culture of ancient Athens a way of putting one over on British colonial culture? By inserting Trinidad into the equation linking civilization with ancient Athens, were James and Williams anticipating the critique of the ‘Athens-to-Albion’ conception of Europe that has since been exploded by Bernal?3 Moreover, given that the crux of James’s and Williams’s very public falling-out was James’s criticism that as leader of the PNM, Williams was not prepared to implement direct, participatory democracy, it is also important to consider how seriously Williams took the model of Athenian direct democracy in his appeals to Athens. In exploring the significance of the analogy between Athens and Trinidad and Tobago in the works of C. L. R. James and Eric Williams in the 1950s and 1960s, I will suggest that it is important to differentiate between the ways in which each man appealed to Athens. Building on my reading of James’s intellectual formation in Chapter 2, I contend that he consciously fashioned an independent, selfsufficient interpretation of ancient Athenian culture, which was premised on the unique insight afforded him by the Trinidadian experience. Although Eric Williams also developed his own interpretation of ancient Greek society and culture, his use of the analogy between Trinidad and Athens is more obviously instrumental and

3

Bernal 1987–2001. The quotation is from Ahmad 1992: 183.

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agonistic. As with the anecdote about his triumph in his first Latin unseen at Oxford (p. 88 above), there is a sense in which, for Williams, the successful Trinidadian appropriation of the Classics is a proof in a larger argument about the preparedness of Trinidad for political independence through beating the British at their own game. Crucially, James distinguished between Classics as colonial intellectual discipline, on the one hand, and the ‘content’ of this knowledge—the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. However, as we shall see, this brief sketch of the differential positions of James and Williams vis-a`-vis ancient Athens needs substantial qualification.

ATHENS IN TRINIDAD I: C. L. R. JAMES C. L. R. James develops the analogy between Trinidadian society and Athenian democracy in three separate works: ‘Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece’ (1956),4 ‘The Artist in the Caribbean’ (1959),5 and Beyond a Boundary (1963). There are many passing references to Athens and ancient Greece in James’s other works, but this is the cluster that I will concentrate on for the purposes of this discussion. The essay ‘Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece’, initially published in the magazine Correspondence, illustrates some of the contradictions in James’s intellectual adoption of ancient Athenian democracy.6 James’s conception of ancient Athenian democracy was inextricably bound up with his passionate ideological commitment to Marxism. Although James’s intense self-study of ancient Athens preceded his encounter with Marxism, which did not occur until his arrival in Britain in 1932, by the time James sat down to write his autobiography Marxism was an inalienable part of his conceptual apparatus.7 In the case of this article, the title of which quotes Lenin, James brings the ideology of democratic 4

5 James 1977: 160–74. Ibid. 183–90. Correspondence, 2/12 (June 1956). 7 On James’s Marxism, see the essays by Castoriadis (1995) and Glaberman (1995). 6


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Athens into dialogue with Marxism. However, rather than giving a straight Marxist reading of ancient Athenian society, James’s critique of Athenian democracy considers what lessons Athens might offer to modern (socialist) democratic movements: ‘this modest attempt to bring before modern workers the great democrats of Athens.’8 The thrust is not to find affirmation for Marxism by back-projecting dogma onto ancient Athens, but rather to hold Marxism and other revolutionary socialist movements to account by confronting them with the higher democratic ideals of Athenian democracy.9 This critical thrust is in keeping with James’s independent brand of Marxist-Leninist thought. James’s portrait of Athenian democracy is idealizing: several of the more celebratory claims about Athenian democracy are prefaced by the provisory clause ‘at its best’.10 More controversially, given the location from which James wrote as a descendant of slaves, it is hard to square his apologia for the inequalities at the heart of Athenian democracy with his emphatic praise for ‘these Greeks who when they said equality meant it’ (161). On the subject of the painful exclusions at the centre of this alleged paradigm of inclusive, direct, participatory democracy, the disenfranchisement of women and the exploitation of slave labour, James challenges the communis opinio that these exclusions were as bad as they seem to modern readers; and here one should bear in mind that these exclusions appear even worse to students of Athenian democracy in the twenty-first century than they did in 1956. In an attempt to deflect the criticism that Athenian democracy was vitiated by its reliance on slavery, James attacks those who level this criticism by suggesting that they ‘are not so much interested in defending the slaves as they are in attacking the democracy’ (164).11 As the second plank in his argument, James has recourse to a famous passage 8

James 1977: 173. However, it is notable that the only ‘scholarship’ that James cites in this essay is Frederick Engels’s 1884 work Origins of Family, Private Property, and the State (James 1977: 164). 10 See, e.g., 1977: 160: ‘At its best…the public assembly of all the citizens was the government.’ 11 Contrast the more condemnatory tone of James’s contemporary George Thomson (1903–87): ‘By the middle of the century Athens had entered irrevocably on the 9

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about the lack of visible distinction between free Athenian citizens and their slaves, as evidence that many slaves ‘lived the life of the ordinary Greek citizen’: In the best days of the democracy, there were many slaves who, although denied the rights of citizenship, lived the life of the ordinary Greek citizen. There is much evidence of that. One of the most important pieces of evidence is the complaint of Plato that it was impossible to tell a slave to get off the pavement to make way for a free citizen (especially so distinguished a citizen as Plato) for the simple reason that they dressed so much like the ordinary citizen that it was impossible to tell who was a citizen and who was a slave. In fact, Plato so hated Greek democracy that he complained that even the horses and the asses in the streets walked about as if they also had been granted liberty and freedom.12

Although James attributes this testimony to Plato, he is eliding two different sources: the correct source for the comment about the indistinguishability of slaves and free men is Pseudo-Xenophon’s (also known as the Old Oligarch) Constitution of the Athenians 1.10, while the idea of freedom extending to the animals under radical democracy comes from Book 8 of Plato’s Republic (563c3– d1). Paradoxically, one can refute James’s appeal to Plato with the same argument that James uses against the hypothetical critics who point to the institution of slavery in ancient Athens not because they care about the slaves, but because they want to undermine democracy. Similarly, Pseudo-Xenophon’s snide comment about slaves in Athens resembling Athenian citizens is not concerned with the position of slaves, but is in fact part of a familiar anti-democratic critique that exploited widespread prejudice about the inferiority of slaves in order to malign the Athenian demos.13 In fact, Pseudo-Xenophon’s comments are an excellent example of how, to quote Paul Cartledge, path of imperialist expansion.…Its immediate effect was to relieve the class tension among the citizen population by joint exploitation of slavery and empire. The conflict underlying the democratic revolution was now to be solved by the negation of democracy’ (Thomson 1946: 231; my italics). See also ibid. 350. Like James, Thomson was a Marxist and a passionate advocate of Athenian democracy. I return to the relationship between James and Thomson on pp. 197–200 below. 12 James 1977: 164–5. 13 For a good discussion of the ideological underpinnings of Pseudo-Xenophon’s text, see Ober 1998: 14–27.


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‘oligarchs utilized the ideology of slavery as a weapon in the class struggle against their domestic democratic enemies’.14 James’s conclusion that, ‘on the whole, the slave code in Athens has been described by competent authorities as the most enlightened the world has known’ (165) strikes the contemporary scholar as a case of extraordinary special pleading and rich irony besides. However, just as the Old Oligarch misrepresented the reality of Athenian slavery to get at democracy, James erred in the other direction by distorting the reality of Athenian slavery in order to champion Athenian democracy and democratic ideology in the modern world.15 It is also the case that James’s Marxist approach leads him to privilege the class system as a category of analysis, resulting in the neglect of those groups who were not part of the Athenian citizen community (slaves, metics, and women) and not so easily mapped onto the class system. That James plays down the disenfranchisement of women is arguably less remarkable, since James relied heavily on Victorian scholarship on the ancient world and it has been suggested that his conception of the West Indian intellectual was ‘silently but powerfully male’.16 However, the crux of James’s eulogy of Athenian democracy is the latter’s ideological commitment to the soundness of collective judgement and direct democracy in action, whether through the 14

Cartledge 1993a: 148. See Cartledge 1993b: passim on the tension between the idealization of the Greek slogans of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and the institution of slavery in classical Greece. Cartledge (ibid. 177) advocates that ‘we should re-evaluate that complex [Greek] legacy in the light of the indispensable enabling contribution made towards its creation by the hundreds of thousands of anonymous and socially dead slaves, but for whom there would have been no—well, no Aristotle’. 16 Schwarz 2003a: 20. James’s comments on the treatment of women under Athenian democracy are at James 1977: 165. James summarizes the prevailing view that the ‘position of women in Athens during the democracy was very bad’, but suggests that the reality of women’s lives may have been better (‘we believe that before very long, the world will have a more balanced view of how women lived in the ancient Greek democracy’). James cites ‘some modern writers’ and is perhaps thinking of Gomme [1925] 1937. To some extent James correctly identified the trend in scholarship towards a more inclusive understanding of the Athenian political community as one in which non-citizens could still be important players in civic life. This inclusive approach argues that women played a much more central role in the life of the city than their exclusion from the narrow political sphere would suggest. However this is not the same as arguing that women were well treated. For an excellent discussion of this debate, see Katz 1999. 15

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empowerment of the average citizen as upholder of the laws of Athens through jury service, or through the institution of collective voting in the Athenian assembly, or through the collective power of the citizen-body-as-theatre-audience to influence the outcome of the dramatic competition at the City Dionysia (163–4).17 Just how sound this collective judgement was and the extent to which judgements genuinely emanated from the mass of citizens is debatable, but Athenian democracy’s ideological commitment to this principle is absolute. In the current essay which is directed at a left-wing North American readership, James does not mention the Caribbean; but collective judgement and public participation in the arts is the principle that would make the analogy with ancient Athens so pivotal to his construction of national consciousness in the modern Caribbean. James believed passionately in the Marxist idea of the revolutionary role of the artist and intellectual and applied this ideal to the creation of national consciousness in modern Caribbean society. The corollary of this ideal is that there must be a sense of collaboration between public and artist. As we shall see in ‘The Artist in the Caribbean’ (1959), James seized upon the idea that Athenian tragedy belonged to the public sphere and that the general public was competent to judge it and had a role in shaping the canon.18 Before we turn to this next essay, I note that ‘Every Cook Can Govern’ is also instructive for what it reveals about the complex intertwining of different cultures in James’s cultural identity. Among the triumphs of Greek civilization that James enlists for his argument are the battles of Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea in which forces composed of an alliance of Greek city-states defeated an invading Persian army. James portrays these conflicts in the classic Orientalist mode, as a victory of Western freedom over Oriental despotism: The Greeks fought and won some of the greatest battles that were ever fought in defence of Western civilization. . . . The oriental despots knew very well what they were doing. They came determined to crush the free 17 James also took Athenian direct democracy as the starting point for his 1960 study Modern Politics (1960: 2–4). 18 James 1977: 164: ‘They were the ones who repeatedly crowned Aeschylus and Sophocles, and later Euripides, as prizewinners. It is impossible to see how a jury consisting of Plato and his philosopher friends could have done any better.’


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and independent states of Greece. Never before and never since was so much owed by so many to so few, and as the years go by the consciousness of that debt can only increase.19

James’s phrasing is a curious distillation of English sentiment: combining John Stuart Mill’s famous declaration about the significance of the battle of Marathon (490 bc) for English history, and one of Winston Churchill’s most iconic utterances, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’20 But this is not the whole story. James also uses his extolling of Athens to put down the modern empires of Britain and America. On pages 167–8 the United States is criticized for its hegemonical bullying of nonconforming minorities, and few were better positioned to make this judgement than James who, as both a black man and a communist, was doubly demonized in 1950s America. Then James also takes a side-swipe at the tyranny of ‘good form’ and ‘what is not done’ in the British class system—key components of his education in Englishness described in BAB.21 His conclusion: ‘the Greek democrat would have considered such attitudes as suitable only for barbarians’ (168). Continuing this line of argument, James defends the Athenian system against the argument that its eventual decline is proof of inherent weaknesses by pointing to the finite span of modern empires: ‘the system lasted nearly two hundred years. The empires of France and Britain have not lasted very much longer, and America’s role as a leader of world civilization is mortally challenged before it has well begun’ (169). Again and again in his discussion of ancient Greece, James uses this ‘neutral’ civilization to beat modern imperialism and colonialism over the head and to construct an identity for Trinidad 19

James 1977: 166. ‘The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings. If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods.’ Mill made this claim in his review of the first two volumes of George Grote’s History of Greece (the review appeared under the title ‘Early Grecian History and Legend’, Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1846; I quote from p. 343). Churchill’s memorable phrase was used in a speech before the House of Commons on 20 August 1940. 21 For the description of the code see James 1994a: 26, and for his subsequent rejection of the code see ibid. 43; although James himself suggests that although he disavowed the code intellectually, he was never able to jettison fully something that had been so deeply engrained (see pp. 44–5). 20

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and the British West Indies that is separate from British culture. And yet he does this while availing himself of the Englishness that was part of the inheritance of his colonial background. As Stephen Howe reminds us, when James came to Britain in the 1930s, and for several decades after that, one could ‘think of oneself as Trinidadian or Antiguan, and West Indian, and British’, and this conjunctive identity could also accommodate cultural and political dissent.22 James broadly subscribes to the idea of a continuous western civilization, perhaps strengthened by the evolutionary conception of world history in classical Marxism. He was also not part of the generation of intellectuals for whom First and Third World were divided along an axis separating the west from the rest. On the contrary, although James passionately supported the creation of a West Indian identity and political federation, this identity was part of the larger entity of the ‘west’.23 For James the important condition was that no modern empire had exclusive ownership of western civilization; moreover, this civilization was not fossilized, but an ongoing civilization that is still being worked out in the present. In his 1969 essay on the emergence of a West Indian literature in the 1930s, James connects his allegiance to western civilization with the particularity of his background, but stresses that this identification with western civilization is inevitable in the Caribbean, and that identification with English literature is inevitable in the British West Indies: Now I am emphasizing our relationship with Western civilization, with Western philosophy, with Western literature. That’s the way I grew up, but I’m not saying others have to grow up that way, for they will grow up as they please. But I am pointing out that because we have the same language as the British and the outline of our civilization is based on theirs, we are in the same situation that has created the great writers of the twentieth century. We are members of this civilization and take part in it, but we come from the outside. . . . And it is when you are outside, but can take part as a member, that you see differently from the ways they see, and you are able to write independently.24 22 Howe 2003: 160–1, quoting from 161. See James [1963] 1994a: 154, ‘I was British, I knew best the British way of life’, but note also the use of the past tense. 23 See Lamming [1960] 1992a: 32–3 on ‘the problem of what we might call the Euro-centred James’. 24 James 1980: 244. This essay was first published in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature in July 1969.


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But there is nothing mimetic about this identification; instead, James insinuates that the present and future of English literature are in the hands of ‘foreigners’, outsider-insiders.25 This distance facilitates the exercise of ‘stripping the wrapping from Western Civilization’ that James had urged on Naipaul (see p. 133 above). The same equivocal engagement with western civilization is evident in the ‘The Artist in the Caribbean’, initially delivered as a lecture at the Mona campus of UCWI in 1959. There James consoles his audience that the economic factors that might seem to be against the flourishing of art in the Caribbean are actually for them: the smallness of their societies and economies puts them on a par with the Greek city-state which, in the case of Athens, produced a very high per capita ratio of world-class artists.26 The smallness of many Caribbean societies is meant to guarantee the circulation of the arts and the feedback of social energy into the arts: ‘Our world is small but it is (or soon will be) complete, and we can all see all of it.’27 This is the belief that motivates the more extensive comparisons in BAB between the popular art form of cricket in Trinidad and the theatrical culture of ancient Athens. Clearly the Caribbean experience is inextricably bound up with the history of modern European nations, but it is also inextricably bound up with other histories and cultures as well—primarily Africa, but also India and China—and the experiences of slavery and colonial rule serve to bind and alienate simultaneously. The ancient Greek connection offers European civilizational authority without imperial and colonial interference. One does not have to look far to see potential contradictions. James wields the elitism of the discipline of Classics, while simultaneously disavowing the elitism of one of its central subjects—the civilization of ancient Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries bc— and claiming it for the Trinidadian people. One could also, as I have hinted, take issue with many of the details of James’s version of ancient Athens, but this would be to miss the point. James’s version of Greece is present-centred; in systematically re-educating himself 25 ‘So when you look at English literature in this century, it is foreigners who are important, men who know the language and can take part in the civilization, but are not part of it, who are outsiders and looking at it from the outside.’ Ibid. 26 27 James 1977: 186–7. 1977: 187; see Howe 2003: 157.

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about the Greeks he took his cues from the Trinidadian society around him. In his call for artists to take part in the creation of national consciousness in the Caribbean, James suggests a role for the historian in this process: He may be a great historian. (His history might be denounced by professional historians and justly. It would not matter. It would have served the national need: look at the illusions most of these European nations have had of themselves.)28

The last remark is particularly suggestive for James’s appropriation of ancient Greece in BAB. The version of Greece that James had encountered in the colonial school curriculum was filtered through partisan Victorian scholarship. BAB reveals the invention of a new, Caribbean tradition of engaging with ancient Greece, one that is intended to supplant the colonial version. In practice, there was a residual Victorianism in James’s positions on ancient Greece, but this should not obscure the fact that James made a concerted, largely successful effort to overthrow the Victorian appropriation of Greece. In fact, James’s own appropriation of Greece poses an important corrective to Simon Gikandi’s portrait of James as a paradoxical adherent of Victorianism.29 On the surface the classical motifs that run through BAB may look like the replay of a tired colonial fancy—the dignifying of the oppressed through an epical vision of cricket, in which the cricketers are elevated through comparison with Homeric heroes.30 It is helpful to consult Walcott’s review of BAB here.31 Walcott’s review was first published in 1984, before he had begun to work on Omeros, but Walcott had already been tackling the paradoxes of the Caribbean Aegean for decades. Walcott raises hypothetically, only to dismiss them, the same superficial objections to Caribbean classicism that he himself would have to endure after the publication of Omeros. Walcott ponders: ‘Mr. James’s ancestors are African; why does he 28

29 1977: 189. Gikandi 2000b. See Walcott’s description, ‘his [James’s] epic poem, the cricketer’s Iliad ’ (Walcott 1998: 116). 31 This review was first published as ‘A Classic of Cricket’, New York Times Book Review, 25 March 1984; it was reprinted in Walcott 1998: 115–20. The occasion for the review was the 1984 reprint of BAB by Pantheon Publishers, New York. 30


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find mimesis in Periclean and not African sculpture when he describes the grace of his cricketers?’ (1998: 118). In his lyrical prose, Walcott spells out some of the ironies in James’s appropriation of Greece: The empire that Mr. James, who was born in Trinidad in 1901, lived under, like Greece, had its slaves. He is one of their descendants. Like Rome, Britain sent out its governors, its consuls, its educators. But Mr. James was never blinded by the plaster casts and hypocritical marble copies of the Victorian ideal. He always had a hard mind, and this book does not try to make marble from ebony. It would be laughable if it were yet another paean of gratitude, a fake pastoral with classical echoes, but it would also be incredible . . . 32

before concluding that the integrity of James’s commitment to all his influences, Marxism, Caribbean nationalism, Victorian manners, and Greek tragedy, contributes to an unlikely subversion: ‘it undermines concepts that feel safe, it beats tradition by joining it, and its technique is not bitterness but joy.’33 In Chapter 2, I discussed James’s agonistic account of his reassessment of the Greeks upon leaving school; in the remainder of this section I will explore the nature of James’s Athens in BAB, relating it back to the Athens of his earlier essays discussed above. As with James’s early discussions of the Greek legacy, in BAB there is a blurring of the heterogeneity of ancient Greek culture as ancient ‘Greece’ gets elided with ancient Athens. James homes in on a particular aspect of Athenian society: the role of dramatic festivals in the life of the community. On page 157 of BAB James sketches the gradual emergence of Athenian democracy in the late sixth and first half of the fifth century bc (c.515–460 bc) and relates Aeschylus’ invention of Greek tragedy as we know it to the firm establishment of democracy. James’s interpretation of Greek tragedy points to the influence of a groundbreaking study on Greek tragedy by George Derwent Thomson, another Marxist scholar who was almost James’s exact contemporary.34 We know that James possessed a copy of the 32

Walcott 1998: 116–17. Ibid. 118. In Walcott’s words we can detect echoes of Walcott’s own Caribbean aesthetic: ‘bitterness’ is an important motif in ‘The Muse of History’ (1974) = Walcott 1998: 41 and 64. 34 Thomson was born in 1903 and died in 1987, while James was born in 1901 and died in 1989. 33

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first edition of Thomson’s Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama (1941), as it was in his library in his London house at the time of his death and is now in the C. L. R. James collection in the library of the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. Of course the mere fact of possession of a book does not prove much beyond mere acquaintance; one would need to examine the book for notes and annotations and to search James’s papers for material on Thomson. However, the influence of Thomson seems undeniable. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that there was a distinct bias towards Aeschylus in James’s personal library: nine works on Aeschylus, including Thomson’s (both critical studies and translations), but only three on Sophocles and one on Euripides. A more compelling argument can be constructed from the details of James’s representation of the culture of Athenian theatre. The contours of James’s account of Athenian theatre are dictated by the parallel with cricket in the Caribbean and his thesis that cricket is an art, specifically a social art that involves the whole community—what Neil Lazarus has referred to as his ‘sociopoetics of cricket’.35 Accordingly, James focuses primarily on the context for Athenian tragedy, rather than the transmitted texts that constitute the canon of Greek tragedy. James stresses that, for the mass audiences who watched the performances of their plays,36 ‘Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were not culture’ in the exclusive, bourgeois sense, although they would be culture in Raymond Williams’s definition of culture as ‘a whole way of life’.37 At the same time, the idea of Athenian tragedy as a socially and politically embedded ritual helps James to articulate his vision of the ‘intimate connection between cricket and West Indian social life’.38 Once every year for four days the tens of thousands of Athenian citizens sat in the open air on the stone seats at the side of the Acropolis and from 35

Lazarus 1999: 155. The mass audiences for the open-air performances of Greek tragedy at the Athenian festival of the City Dionysia (also referred to as the Great Dionysia) numbered in the region of 14,000–17,000 spectators; see Goldhill 1997: 57–8. 37 [1963] 1994a: 157. See Williams 1958 and the specific statement about different types of culture in Williams 1976: 80. On points of convergence between James’s and Raymond Williams’s conceptions of culture, see Surin 1996: 189–91. 38 James [1963] 1994a: 225. 36


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sunrise to sunset watched the plays of the competing dramatists. All that we have to correspond is a Test match. The manner in which the drama arrived will tell us something valuable about Test matches and (for the moment let us whisper it) the way Test matches arrived may start a trail into that vexed question: the origin of Greek drama. There are so many that another wouldn’t hurt.39

It is striking that James positions his thesis in the context of scholarship on the development of Athenian drama, suggesting provocatively that the institution of the Test match in the Caribbean approach may help to illuminate the origins of Greek drama.40 Compare this passage to the following passage from Thomson’s Aeschylus and Athens: Of all the features of the Oresteia, the most conspicuous is this organic union between the drama and the community out of which it had emerged and for which it was performed—this special harmony between poetry and life. In this respect it is almost unique. The audience of the Globe Theatre which witnessed Shakespeare’s plays was a cross-section of the community, ranging from the Court to the proletariat, but the audience at the City Dionysia was more than that—it was the community itself, assembled for the performance of a collective ritual act. . . . The only thing in my experience which seems to me comparable is what I saw one evening a few years ago at a dramatic festival in Moscow.41

It is too simplistic to point to Thomson as the inspiration of James’s theorization of the link between cricket and Greek drama, since both men wrote in a tradition of Marxist thought about the social role of the arts.42 Instead, Thomson offers an interesting parallel to James, who may have been drawn to the former’s work not just by the Marxist connection, but also by his own particular experiences in Trinidad and his determination to merge his intellectual world with 39

Ibid. 158. No one has taken James up on this provocation yet, but he is cited by Simon Goldhill, who has recourse to the phenomenon of the Test match to illustrate the way in which the presence of the crowd means that the game (or the play, in the case of Athenian tragedy) will necessarily be expressive of social, cultural, and national tensions (Goldhill 2000: 39 n. 25). 41 Thomson 1946: 297. 42 On Thomson’s Aeschylus and Athens in the context of Marxist theories of art, see Solomon 1974: 342–7. 40

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the folk culture of Trinidadian society. In Chapter 2 we saw how James claimed to have rethought ancient Greece for himself as part of his repairing of the mis-education that he received in the colonial curriculum (pp. 99–103 above). It is striking that Thomson credited an island and its people, in his case the Blasket Islands off the west coast of Ireland, as one of the principal sources for his study of the revolutionary social character of Aeschylean drama.43 In his preface to the first edition, Thomson claimed that the fishermen of the Blasket Islands ‘taught me, among many other things that could not have been learned from books, what it is like to live in a precapitalist society’.44 This idea of accessing the spirit of ancient Greek cultural life through folk experience finds parallels in James, as when for instance he claims that cricket in Trinidad afforded him an insight into the socio-cultural function of athletic games in ancient Greece (p. 100 above). In James’s analysis, the social life that is played out in cricket includes race, caste, and class rivalries, and the struggle for the expression of national identity in the context of colonialism. In chapters 4 and 5 of BAB James recounts how some of the social and racial inequalities that were endemic in Trinidadian society in the 1920s (the period in which James played cricket for Maple) were expressed on and off the cricket field. James comments that ‘the cricket field was a stage on which selected individuals played representative roles which were charged with social significance’,45 but offstage was often just as important, since who was or was not selected to play was also of great social significance and part of the communal drama. The paradigmatic example is the case of a Trinidadian cricketer called Telemaque who played for Stingo.46 Telemaque worked as a stevedore in Port of Spain and was excluded, essentially on grounds on race, from the Trinidadian team for a match against Barbados.

43 On the influence on the Blaskets on Thomson’s conception of Aeschylus, see Gathercole 2007. On a related note, Richard Martin has explored the influence of the Blasket Islands on Thomson’s engagement with Homer; see Martin 2007: 85–91. 44 Thomson 1946: vii. 45 [1963] 1994a: 66. 46 James described the demographics of the best cricket clubs on the island in ch. 4 of BAB; of Stingo he writes: ‘totally black and no social status whatsoever’ (50).


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James describes the way in which his exclusion was treated as an occasion for public grief. I heard later that of his fellow waterfront workers, an independent lot, several were all ready to pay their own way to Barbados to see him play, and no doubt to fraternize and rejoice with their fellow stevedores at this great honour which one of their number had conferred upon the whole. No wonder men and women stood around and wept. Plato and Pythagoras, Socrates and Demosthenes would have understood that these public tears expressed no private grief.47

The image of the intellectuals of Athens empathizing with the stevedores of Port of Spain is a nice, if fanciful touch. A better parallel would be the way in which the significant action of the annual Athenian dramatic festival of the City Dionysia lasting five days in March—roughly equal to the duration of a Test match—was constituted no less by the pre-play (and post-play) preparations and ceremonies than by the plays themselves. As Simon Goldhill has demonstrated in his analysis of the pre-play ceremonies at the City Dionysia, the civic context for the dramatic performances is crucial to understanding the social and political import of Athenian drama.48 In theory, James’s analogy between Greek dramatic action and the play of cricket also applies to those outside of the Caribbean. After all, amongst the cricketers whom he celebrates as heroes there are many Englishmen, not to mention men from other parts of the British Empire and Commonwealth (and here we should recall that James was a cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and the Glasgow Herald in the 1930s).49 The popular democracy of Greece, sitting for days in the sun watching The Oresteia; the popular democracy of our day sitting similarly, watching Miller

47

[1963] 1994a: 68–70, quoting from 70. See Goldhill [1987] 1990; 2000. There has been some difference of opinion among scholars, with Goldhill wanting to make the democratic context for the performance of Athenian drama a crucial factor in understanding the relationship between drama and civic ideology, while Rhodes 2003 has suggested that the polis context, and not the democratic context, was paramount. 49 Some of James’s writings on cricket from this period have been collected in James 1986. 48

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and Lindwall bowl to Hutton and Compton—each in its own way grasps at a more complete human existence.50

This aesthetic conception of cricket as popular art form extends beyond political issues such as class divisions, national identity, and cultural identity; in a formula reminiscent of Aristotle, James argues that ‘the end of democracy is a more complete existence’ (210) and that cricket in the twentieth century developed to meet this need. What James has in mind here is the confrontation between ideal and reality in the game of cricket: the social realities of the players, their clubs, communities, and countries on the one hand, and the ideals and ethics invested in the game. But James goes further than this in arguing for cricket as a quintessentially dramatic spectacle (196) that bears analogy with the structure and form of drama: The second major consideration in all dramatic spectacles is the relation between event (or, if you prefer, contingency) and design, episode and continuity, diversity in unity, the battle and the campaign, the part and the whole. Here also cricket is structurally perfect.51

However, the main thrust of James’s thesis is that in the Caribbean cricket was adapted to become a means of playing out tensions in colonial society and that consequently it was the perfect medium for the formation and expression of national identity. When James describes the clash of race, caste, and class (66) on and off the field, the situation that he is describing was unique to the microcosms of West Indian societies at the time. The same race tensions that played out internally in Barbados, say, or in Trinidad would then become amplified in the selection of the Windies side for international matches and the reluctance to select black cricketers to captain the

50 James [1963] 1994a: 211. The cricketers referred to are the Australians Keith Miller (1919–2004) and Ray Lindwall (1921–96), and the Englishmen Sir Leonard Hutton (1916–90) and Denis Compton (1918–97). James is presumably referring to the encounters between these cricketers during the 1948 Test series between Australia and England. 51 Ibid. 197. Lazarus 1999: 155 expresses this dialectic between art and social function very eloquently: ‘hence the indispensability, for James, of a sociopoetics of cricket, an approach to the game that will make neither the mistake of supposing it to be less a form of art, nor the mistake of supposing it, as a form of art, to be autonomous of society.’


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Windies team. James examines the struggle to overcome this discrimination in chapter 18 and identifies it as a struggle for national expression, between lofty ideal and sordid reality, which was finally resolved with the selection of Sir Frank Worrell as captain of the Windies team for the tour of Australia in 1960–1: ‘The “Case for West Indian Self-Government” and “It isn’t cricket” had come together at last and together had won a signal victory’ (241). In conclusion, we might ask what work the analogy with Athens does in all of this. Critics have debated the extent to which cricket, as ‘the game of the master’, can do the revolutionary work that James means it to do in BAB.52 Similarly, critics also have misgivings about James’s use of classical Greek allusions on the grounds that this too, is a perpetuation of the game of the masters. In his review of BAB, Derek Walcott reconciles the Caribbean mastery and appropriation of cricket with James’s mastery of ancient Greece: ‘the Greek past is a lesson that Mr. James appropriates as authoritatively as blacksmiths, yard boys, and groundsmen dominated the sport of their masters.’53 Here one can turn to a passage from James’s essay ‘Discovering Literature in Trinidad: The 1930s’, which is sometimes derided for its apparent turning away from the local: I didn’t learn literature from the mango-tree, or bathing on the shore and getting the sun of the colonial countries; I set out to master the literature, philosophy and ideas of Western civilization.54

In a move that exposes, rather than elides, the history of slavery in the Caribbean, James uses the language of domination to express his relationship with the classics of civilization. To use Edward Said’s phrase, this is James’s ‘voyage in’ to the metropolis, reversing the imperial voyage.55 The appropriation of the metaphor of imperial exploration is also present in the enigmatic statement in the preface to BAB (‘To establish his own identity, Caliban, after three centuries, must himself pioneer into regions Caesar never knew’).56 The 52

Stoddart 1995: 9; Patterson 1995: 144. For discussion see Lazarus 1999: 163–4. Walcott 1998: 115. 54 James 1980: 238. See Cudjoe 1992: 41. 55 Said [1993] 1994: 295–310. 56 For discussion of the significance of Caliban for BAB, see Henry and Buhle 1992a. 53

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paradox of mastering the master’s culture, which some might construe as service, is solved by the radically autonomous nature of James’s mastery which appeals to the Greek experience independently of European colonial scholarship, representing Greece in the light of the Caribbean.57 This subtle Jamesian legacy continues to echo in Caribbean literature. In a poem celebrating the achievements of the Antiguan cricketer Sir Viv Richards, Howard Fergus deploys the metaphor of imperial conquest (‘Children of the empire, | we did not dream to capture lords’), and has Richards, Marching in an epic line of marshals— Worrell, Sobers, Kanhai, Lloyd— you infected us with victory, leveling Montgomery’s England.58

The allusion to Field-Marshal Montgomery is apposite, recalling as it does a British war hero who brought his tactician’s mind to bear on his love of cricket, opining that a ‘test match is a battle’. As an alumnus of St Paul’s School, Monty had gone through the public school system whose playing fields were regarded as propaedeutic to the battles of empire.59 James never figured his conception of cricket as anti-imperialist struggle as all-out war, but the conquests of colonization and the idea of the empire fighting/writing back are never far beneath the surface, particularly when one recalls James’s 1938 work The Black Jacobins, which put forward a Caribbean history of a successful anti-imperial revolution. This trope is taken to its fullest extent in Fergus’s panegyrics celebrating the achievements of the Trinidadian cricketer Brian Lara in the collection Lara Rains & Colonial Rites (1998). In the poem ‘BC LARA’—Lara’s initials are 57 Compare Hulme 2000b: 229 on George Lamming’s reading of The Tempest (Lamming [1960] 1992a) in which the Caribbean intellectual may overcome Prospero by taking possession of his text, ‘ground which Prospero had long thought of as rightfully his’. 58 From the poem ‘Conquest’ (1986) = Fergus 2003a: 59. 59 See Hall 1992: 13: ‘James often remarked that the British said that the Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton and would be lost on the playing fields of Lord’s Cricket Ground. Just as the British had trained themselves to create the Empire on the playing fields, so on the playing fields they would symbolically lose the Empire.’ See also E. A. Markham who likens loyalties in cricket to loyalty in war (2008: 92).


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conveniently BC, Brian Charles—Fergus celebrates the year 1994, Lara’s annus mirabilis, and proclaims: We shall build a new temple for the sun and date time from the year of Lara write a new gospel according to Charles BC, BL 1994 Anno Lari We shall open a new window on chronology, plunge Caesar and Columbus into a millennium of eclipse Lara! Lara! Papa Lara!60

The eclipsing of old imperial chronologies, Caesar’s and Columbus’s, is the fulfilment of Caliban’s quest in BAB. Fergus marks the collapse of empire linguistically as well, playing on the resemblance between Lara’s name and the Latin masculine proper noun Lar, Laris (third declension)—a tutelary household deity.61 In the phrase ‘Anno Lari’—in the year of Lara—Fergus has coined his own genitive (Lari, not Laris the correct genitive of the third-declension noun), as though Lara had become Larus, a Latin second-declension noun. Lara becomes the god of a new world religion, eclipsing the Christian god of the colonizers and supplanting a Roman deity through verbal coincidence. This synthesis of cricket and national identity articulated through classical knowledge is an essential part of the Jamesian legacy. In the following section I argue that the analogy between classical knowledge and national identity falters in the case of Eric Williams for

60 Fergus 1998: 11–12, quoting from p. 12. In 1994, playing county cricket for Warwickshire against Durham, Lara scored 501 runs (not out) at Edgbaston; this achievement, which still stands as the record for the highest individual score in firstclass cricket, is alluded to on p. 12. The year 1994 was also a fantastic one for Lara in Test cricket, scoring 394 for the Windies against England. See Searle 1995. 61 This noun is more often encountered in the plural, Lares, referring to the tutelary household gods; however, the singular, Lar, is common enough. In Fergus’s word-play there may conceivably be an allusion to chapter 19 of BAB, which bears the title ‘Alma Mater: Lares and Penates’ (James [1963] 1994a: 253).

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whom the criterion of political expedience meant that use of the Classics could go either way.

ATHENS IN TRINIDAD II: ERIC WILLIAMS One frustrating silence in Trinidadian intellectual history pertains to the transfer of knowledge when C. L. R. James, then a junior master at QRC, coached Eric Williams for the scholarship examination (roughly 1927–30).62 Williams attributed the kernel of his D.Phil. thesis to James’s influence, and the resulting book Capitalism and Slavery (1944) is heavily indebted to James’s The Black Jacobins (1938),63 but we can only speculate and wonder about the broader content of what James taught Williams, including about the ancient Greeks. Tantalizingly, from James’s account of this period of his life in Beyond a Boundary, we also know that his tenure at QRC in the 1920s coincided with a programme of self-directed reading with a particular focus on ancient Greece and on establishing his own interpretative framework for thinking about Greek civilization.64 The relationship between the student and his former mentor was later to implode as they disagreed publicly and in print about the appropriate course on which to steer democratic politics in Trinidad.65 The nature of the disagreement between James and Williams has been widely documented, but I will summarize it briefly here insofar as it provides an important context for their respective appropriations of Athens and Athenian democracy.

62

See pp. 85–6 above. See Hall 1992: 4; and Look Lai 1992: 178, citing Oxaal 1968: 74–6. Millette 1995: 330 with n. 2 (346) points to James’s contribution to ch. 13 of Capitalism and Slavery. In the copy of Capitalism and Slavery that Williams gave to James, he wrote the dedication ‘Dear Jimmy | Your godchild! | In appreciation | Bill | November 21 1944’ (reproduced in Cudjoe 1993b: 327, and discussed by Cudjoe 1993a: 72). For his part, James referred to Williams as his figurative ‘son’ (Cudjoe 1993a: 72). 64 See pp. 102–3 above. 65 For James’s involvement in Trinidadian politics and the schism with Williams, see Look Lai 1992; and Millette 1995. 63


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In December 1955 Williams consulted C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and Arthur Lewis, who were all then in London, on The People’s Charter—the draft constitution for the People’s National Movement (PNM), which was founded in January 1956.66 After the PNM’s victory in the general election of 24 September 1956, Eric Williams was sworn in as the first premier of Trinidad and Tobago on 26 October 1956. In 1958 Williams invited James to return to Trinidad to assume a prominent but ill-defined role in the PNM. James returned to Trinidad on 18 April 1958 and took responsibility for the PNM’s newspaper, the PNM Weekly—whose title was later changed to The Nation.67 Tension between James and Williams came to a head in 1960, over the pretext of the former’s mismanagement of the editorship of The Nation.68 Williams gives an obfuscatory version of these events in Inward Hunger,69 while James had offered his own account in Party Politics in the West Indies (1962). James subsequently left Trinidad in August 1960, returning in April 1965 as a cricket correspondent to a country in a state of political ferment over the Industrial Stabilization Act (ISA). James was swiftly placed under house arrest and conceived a political challenge to Williams, which he made good by standing as a candidate for the newly formed Workers’ and Farmers’ Party (WFP) in the general election of 1966. James’s defeat and the defeat of the entire party marked an end to his active involvement in Trinidadian politics.

Democracy and Elitist Knowledge Although the precise details of the quarrel between James and Williams are hard to reconstruct, it is clear that James had grave reservations about the sidelining of popular sovereignty by the PNM under Williams’s leadership, particularly since the movement 66 See Williams 1969: 143 on consulting James et al. in London; and ibid. 144–60 on the foundation of the PNM. 67 The PNM Weekly was inaugurated on 14 July 1956 under the editorship of Williams (Williams 1969: 152). The new title came into effect on 6 December 1958 (Williams 1969: 267; Cudjoe 1993a: 74). 68 Hall: 1992: 12–13; Look Lai 1992: 193–6; Millette 1995: 337. 69 Williams 1969: 267–8.

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privileged the masses in name and ideology.70 It is in this context that I wish to revisit the question of what Selwyn Cudjoe has called ‘the politics of language’ in Eric Williams’s political oratory.71 In 1954 Eric Williams had embarked upon a demagogic campaign to educate the Trinidadian masses in politics and Caribbean nationalism, with a view to political independence;72 to this end he set up an adult education programme in September 1954, under the auspices of the People’s Education Movement (PEM). This educational programme consisted of a series of lectures based at the Trinidad Public Library in Port of Spain, but also touring other venues in Trinidad.73 On 8 September 1954, for example, Williams had lectured on ‘The Educational Problems of the Caribbean in Historical Perspective’, and on 10 September he addressed the question ‘Is there a Caribbean Literature?’ On 21 June 1955, Williams addressed a huge crowd in Woodford Square on the occasion of his split with the Caribbean Commission. The lecture ‘My Relations with the Caribbean Commission, 1943–1955’ marked the inauguration of Woodford Square as the PEM’s free, open-air university (‘The University of Woodford Square’) for the people of Trinidad and Tobago. Williams recorded that he took his audience ‘through a lecture of fifty-one printed pages’ and that the crowd was estimated at 10,000 people.74 Subsequently Williams delivered his public lectures under the auspices of the University, and with the launch of the PNM on 24 January 1956, the lectures were organized by the PNM rather than the PEM.75

70

Campbell 1995: 408. Cudjoe 1993a. The discussion below repeats material from Greenwood 2008, with significant differences and supplementary material. In this earlier publication I argued that Williams’s appropriation of ancient Greece changes in the postIndependence period. 72 See the slogan ‘education is emancipation’ in Williams’s ‘Massa Day Done’ speech (1961). 73 For a summary of the PEM’s adult education programme, see Williams 1969: 113–15. 74 Williams 1969: 131. 75 Cudjoe 1993b contains an appendix (397–406), reproduced from the PNM Weekly, 156, 18 June, pp. 2–3, listing the lectures delivered by Williams in the period June 1955–6. 71


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Although the egalitarianism of Williams’s politics is debatable, his public speeches in the period 1954–62, culminating in the Independence Day Address of 31 August 1962, are widely regarded as a demotic triumph of the academic speaking as a man of the people, to and for the people. However, an examination of the ways in which Williams manipulates the example of ancient Athens reveals his appreciation of the ambiguities in Athenian political rhetoric in which a political elite played to the masses, glossing over the inequalities that divided speaker from audience. The Athens of the mid-fifth to late fourth century bc (462–322) was governed by a famously participatory radical democracy in which elite orators (rheˆtores) effectively led the demos in debate in the assembly (ekklesia), one of the main organs of Athenian government.76 Recent scholarship has analysed the tensions inherent in the relationship between the Athenian demos and its political advisers, pointing to the contradictions between the democracy’s ideological commitment to the political intelligence of each and every citizen and the role of these experts in instructing the demos on how to go about its politics.77 Surviving sumbouleutic speeches reveal orators whose rhetoric operates within the constraints of democratic ideology, but who nonetheless used their platform for their own ends and who consciously exploited the gap in knowledge between speaker and audience.78 Williams’s references to Athenian democracy are subject to similar constraints insofar as he was presenting his arguments to mass audiences. Examination of his political rhetoric reveals similar techniques to those used by Athenian politicians in order to co-opt their audiences into the privileged knowledge that qualified them to speak in the first place. At the same time, the context for speaking

76

See Yunis 1996: 7–12. Yunis emphasizes that the principle of iseˆgoria (equality of speech) enabled any citizen to address the assembly, thus becoming a rheˆtoˆr (lit. ‘speaker’), although in theory there was a high degree of specialization, with individuals opting to train as professional political speakers—the specialist sense of rheˆtoˆr. 77 See Ober 1989: ch. 4 (‘Ability and Education’). 78 As a category of ancient rhetoric (Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.3), ‘sumbouleutic’ means ‘advisory’ or ‘deliberative’ and derives from the role of the sumboulos (adviser), which was effectively a synonym for ‘politician’ (see Yunis 1996: 12–15).

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demanded an air of studied amateurism—of not knowing anything that the audience could not know in principle. Concentrating on the rhetorical commonplace ‘as you all know’ in Athenian public discourse, Jon Hesk has explained the importance of these topoi in democratic rhetoric as ‘the means by which mass and elite colluded in dramatic fictions’.79 Williams deploys similar topoi, but the additional irony is that in citing ancient Greek orators and philosophers he is playing the elite card. To offset this elitism he interprets these authors in a popularist, post-slavery, and anticolonial light. Furthermore, he makes a show of elite education, but purports to share this education with his audience at the same time. Writing in his autobiography, Williams makes the intellectual calibre of his public lectures a point of pride: Particularly in my lectures at the University of Woodford Square, I made it a point not to talk down to the people. It was straight university stuff, in content and in form as well as in manner, designed to place the problems of Trinidad and Tobago in international perspective.80

However, this was not exactly ‘straight university stuff ’; on pp. 213–19 below, I show that in one famous series of lectures (‘The Aristotle Debate’), Williams covered academic topics but omitted dissent between scholars, and pursued arguments that were politically expedient. Williams deliberately cultivated this antiacademic style in order to ingratiate his historical works with popular audiences and readership. Arguably this trend increased as Williams made the shift from historian trying his hand at politics to the politician putting his hand to history. Scholars have noted that Williams’s 1970 study From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969 does not contain any footnotes or source citations for the data that he cites.81 In an article entitled ‘Trinidad and the Revolution in Intelligence’, originally published in the PNM Weekly on 30 August 1956, the Bajan novelist George Lamming identified Eric Williams’s flair for public lecturing as the ability to 79

Hesk 2000: 227; see further ibid. 227–31. But see also Hesk 2007: 378–9. Williams 1969: 149. 81 Rohlehr [1970] 1992: 28; and Maingot 1992: 155. On p. 151 Maingot cites Williams’s admission that he set about popularizing his history of the Caribbean (Williams 1969: 109). 80


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turn history into news, and to give it the character of street-corner gossip.82 In the same vein, writing about Williams’s ‘Massa Day Done’ speech, Selwyn Cudjoe comments that Williams had finally ‘liberated himself from the psychological constraints of his formal academic training’.83 Williams evidently regarded the University of Woodford Square as a source of considerable pride, as he refers to it often, drawing parallels between this open-air auditorium and ancient Athenian institutions in which the demos was schooled in the ways of politics: The University of Woodford Square has for the past 12 years been a centre of free university education for the masses, of political analysis and of training in selfgovernment for parallels of which we must go back to the city state of ancient Athens. The lectures have been university dishes served with political sauce.84

Williams’s account of the University of Woodford Square is selfaggrandizing and the analogies with ancient Athens are loose. However, in this Williams was closer to the politician-historians of ancient Athens than he lets on. Surviving Athenian political oratory is also self-aggrandizing. For all that the intelligence and power of the demos as audience are extolled, the leading role goes to the oratory of Demosthenes, Aeschines, Lycurgus, or Pericles (in Thucydides’ account). The looseness with historical detail is also a feature of Athenian political oratory, where differing spin can be put on identical data and historical exempla depending on the needs of the occasion. These traits are illustrated in the passage in The History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago in which Williams highlights the role of the University of Woodford Square in educating the masses for government: The political education dispensed to the population in these centres of political learning was of a high order and concentrated from the outset on placing Trinidad and Tobago within the current of the great international movements for democracy and self-government. The electorate of the country was able to see and understand its problems in the context of 82 83 84

Lamming [1956] 1993: 322. Cudjoe 1993a: 80. Williams 1969: 133.

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the ancient Athenian democracy or the federal systems of the United States and Switzerland, in the context of the great anti-colonial movements of Nehru and Nkrumah, and in the context of the long and depressing history of colonialism in Trinidad and Tobago and the West Indies.85

This education in self-government seems to have specialized in movable, changeable analogies, which had the effect of collapsing the historical, cultural, and social differences between different democratic forms of government, and of blurring democratic ideology with anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism.86 Speaking on ‘Party Politics’ in Woodford Square on 13 September 1955, Williams ended his lecture with a quotation from Pericles’ Funeral Oration (Thucydides, History 2.35–46), promising that the PEM would hold up to the electorate ‘the ideal of the ancient democracy of Athens’. After recounting the occasion of this lecture in his autobiography, Williams recalls that when Harold Macmillan visited Trinidad and heard about the institution of the ‘University of Woodford Square’, he described Trinidad and Tobago as ‘the Athens of the Caribbean’.87 However, there are deep tensions underlying Williams’s use of the analogy with Athenian democracy. Like the Athenian politicians referred to above, Williams’s political rhetoric is largely audience-centred, and shifts depending on the audience being addressed. The mass Trinidadian audiences attending his public lectures at the University of Woodford Square were encouraged to think of themselves as qualified judges of any argument, and to participate in the egalitarian society that was being held out to them. It was no accident that Williams concluded his seminal political lecture ‘The Case for Party Politics in Trinidad and Tobago’, delivered at the University of Woodford Square on 13 September 1955 and then repeated at eleven other venues around the country,88 with a quotation from Pericles’ funeral speech that has become a classic statement of the Athenian democratic belief in the wisdom of 85

Williams [1962] 1964: 243. By this I do not mean to imply that imperialism and colonialism are ‘democratic’ as we now use this term, but simply to observe that many so-called democracies in history have had colonies and empires. 87 Williams 1969: 135–6; see p. 186 above. 88 See Cudjoe 1993b: 400 for details of the performance of this lecture/speech; and see Cudjoe 1993a: 63–70 for analysis of the speech. 86


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popular judgement.89 Williams quoted selectively from the section 2.37.1–2.40.2, using Richard Crawley’s translation. Among the excerpts that he quoted was the passage from 2. 40. 2 on the core institution of popular judgement: Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, we regard the citizen who takes no part in these duties not as unambiguous but as useless, and we are able to judge proposals even if we cannot originate them; instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.90

Arguably once the PNM’s ‘revolution in intelligence’—to use George Lamming’s phrase—had served its purpose, and Trinidad had achieved Independence, Williams offered a more pessimistic analysis of the reality of democracy in Trinidad and Tobago.91 Addressing the Library Association of T&Ton 5 March 1966, Williams took issue with a society in which professional expertise and specialization were undermined by the prevailing ideology ‘that one person is a good as another to do a particular job that requires a particular competence’.92 Not only did Williams employ politically opportune quotations from Greek classical texts in his early speeches, but he also represented his achievements as a classicist as a political qualification. This notion of a classical education as a political qualification is exemplified by the so-called ‘Aristotle Debate’—an episode that commentators widely regard as the making of Williams’s political career.93

The Aristotle Debate For two weeks in November 1954, a debate about the interpretation of Aristotle’s political and ethical philosophy gripped Port of Spain, 89 Pericles’ Funeral Oration survives in the version offered by Thucydides in Book 2 of his History (2.35–46). 90 Strassler 1996: 113. 91 A phrase that Lamming used in an article for the PNM Weekly, 30 August 1956 (Lamming [1956] 1993). See p. 210 above. 92 Williams 1981: 257–8. 93 Oxaal 1968: 104; Cudjoe 1993a: 49; Rohlehr 1997: 851.

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the capital of Trinidad and Tobago. On 4 November, Williams had selected the theme of ‘Some World Famous Educational Theories and Developments Relevant to West Indian Conditions’ for the topic of a lecture at the University of Woodford Square. During the course of this lecture, he quoted from Aristotle’s Politics to support his thesis that state control of education was desirable. At question time, the Reverend Dom Basil Matthews, a black Trinidadian Benedictine monk with a Ph.D. in theology from Fordham, rose to challenge Williams’s citation of Aristotle in support of his argument for secular education. Matthews followed this up by giving his own lecture in the public library on Tuesday, 9 November, on ‘Aristotle, Education and State Control’ in an attempt to refute Williams’s interpretation of Aristotle. This was followed, in turn, by a lecture from Williams on 17 November on ‘Some Misconceptions of Aristotle’s Philosophy of Education’. This debate, conducted through public lectures, was covered in the Trinidad Guardian, which, in addition to providing editorial commentary on the debate, also quoted at length from both Williams’s and Matthews’s lectures. To my knowledge, complete texts of the lectures that Williams and Matthews gave do not exist; consequently I have relied on the excerpts published in the Trinidad Guardian. An important proviso is that the excerpts, divorced from the full texts of the lectures, not to mention the original contexts for performance, may misrepresent the arguments of the speakers. However, this reliance on journalistic coverage is not entirely distorting, since the newspaper itself played a role in the debate. For instance, in his lecture of 17 November, Williams supplemented his recollection of Matthews’s speech of 8 November with excerpts from the speech as published in the Trinidad Guardian. As Gordon Rohlehr has remarked, ‘the Williams/Matthews debate was a piece of intellectual stick fighting that was totally irrelevant to the concrete issues of Trinidad and Tobago’.94 However, he concedes that the debate was central in establishing Williams’s intellectual charisma—a commodity that was extremely important in Trinidadian politics.95 The way in which Williams and Matthews wielded Aristotle in this 94

Rohlehr 1997: 851. Compare Worman’s comments (2008: 272–3) on the importance of character and character assassination in the Attic orators. 95


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debate gives a good insight into the politics of using Classics during this transitional period between colonialism and Independence. On Thursday, 11 November 1954, the Trinidad Guardian carried an article on ‘Religion the Essence of Civilized Living’, in which the editor summarized Matthews’s argument that Aristotle’s stress on the ethical aims of education is fully compatible with religion in education. Judging from the published excerpts, Matthews’s interpretation of Aristotle’s views on the role of ethics in education involved a close reading of passages from the Politics, with the proviso that he placed a strong Christianizing spin on Aristotle’s text, claiming that Aristotle’s arguments for ethics in education ‘support’ Christianity’s claim for religion in education.96 On 18 November, the Trinidad Guardian covered Williams’s rejoinder to Matthews in his lecture on the previous day, under the headline ‘ “Dom Basil Concealed Slavery in Aristotle’s Ideal State”: Dr William replies to Monk’s Eulogy’. Dom Basil’s enthusiasm for Aristotle’s ideal state was said by Dr. Eric Williams last night to conceal ‘slavery, the exclusion of workers from citizenship, the subordination of women and imperialism’. But, Dr. Williams added later, ‘he can’t smack his lips at the thought of his ideal omelette and then say he doesn’t want, however, the ideal eggs of which it is made.’97

Williams’s tactic was to turn this debate about education into a debate about slavery. Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery in Book 1 of the Politics is undeniably relevant to a history of the arguments for and against the slave trade in modern history and, correspondingly, would have been an emotive, indeed explosive, issue in Trinidadian society in 1954—where slavery was, and is to this day, a ‘live’ issue. But it was disingenuous of Williams to turn a debate about secular versus religious education into a debate about slavery. Furthermore, it was sophistic of Williams to argue that, in citing Aristotle as an authority, Matthews was endorsing slavery implicitly. When tackled on his omission of Aristotle’s ideas about slavery, Matthews seems to have played into Williams’s hands:

96 97

Trinidad Guardian, Thursday, 11 November 1954, 12. Ibid., Thursday, 18 November 1954, 10.

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‘Dom Basil in his lecture,’ said Dr. Williams, ‘said not so much as a whisper of the slave basis of Aristotle’s state. I had to drag it out of him with a question. What was his reply? Listen to it as given in the Trinidad Guardian “slavery was sometimes necessary to the common good but that you could enslave men’s bodies but not their minds.” So slavery was sometimes necessary to the common good!’ ‘Necessary for whom?’ Dr Williams asked. ‘And what was the definition of the common good? The moral and religious excellence of the life of the Greek citizen which Dom Basil so extols is nothing more than the life of the slaveowner. If Dom Basil is so enthusiastic about Aristotle’s ideal state which is based on slavery, then I must ask Dom Basil whether he opposes the abolition of slavery.’98

Dom Basil Matthews’s (alleged) argument at this point, that ‘slavery was sometimes necessary for the common good’, perhaps needs to be seen in the context of the quietist Christian theological tradition which played down the appalling institution of physical slavery by applying the metaphor of enslavement to sinful human existence to argue that all men are slaves.99 Williams’s rhetorical opportunism in the above passage is evident if we read Williams against himself. In his famous ‘Massa Day Done’ speech, delivered in 1961, he places a different gloss on the same material. In the present speech he dismisses ‘the moral and religious excellence of the life of the Greek citizen’ as ‘nothing more than the life of the slaveowner’. Conversely, in the later speech Williams claims that ‘Ancient Greek society, precisely because of slavery, has been able to achieve intellectual heights that so far have had no parallel in human history’.100 Granted, in the latter speech Williams plays up the cultural achievements of the slave society of ancient Greece in order to ridicule the cultural impoverishment of the Caribbean plantation societies. Nonetheless, this inconsistency is a good example of Williams’s versatility and sophistry in spinning the same material in different ways to meet the needs of the rhetorical occasion. Throughout the ‘Aristotle Debate’ Williams plays the role of the populist demagogue who alerts the Trinidadian demos to the elitist, 98 99 100

Trinidad Guardian, Thursday, 18 November 1954, 10. See the texts and discussion in Garnsey 1996: 157–235. Williams 1997: 728.


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pro-racist, and pro-imperialist strain in Dom Basil Matthews’s arguments. At the same time, Williams styles Matthews as an academic who tries to obfuscate the truth with scholarly quotations from professors: Dom Basil in one of his numerous quotations from professor this, professor that, and professor the other, says that Aristotle would have but scant sympathy with any scheme of education that laid the emphasis on technical and utilitarian training . . . I am not going to allow Dom Basil any longer to hide his light under the bushel of odd quotations from stray professors. . . .’ Then he addressed the question to the parents in the audience. ‘Would you be willing to pay the price of slavery, subordination of women, contempt for work in order that your sons should become what Aristotle calls a great-minded man, and what we would today call a dilettante and a snob?’ (my italics)

Williams, like Matthews, commanded authority by virtue of his doctorate; in the Trinidad Guardian he is invariably referred to as ‘Dr Williams’. And yet here Williams uses Matthews’s elite education as a weapon against him—to throw doubt on his democratic and patriotic credentials. When Williams does philosophy with the masses in the context of the ‘Aristotle Debate’, one is reminded of the boast in Pericles’ Funeral Oration that the Athenians ‘love knowledge’ without it making them soft: ‘We love what is beautiful without giving way to extravagance; and we love knowledge (philosophoumen) without it making us soft.’101 This qualification is a nod to the popular prejudice—familiar from Aristophanes’ comedies and Plato’s dialogues—that philosophers were soft and weak creatures who spent their time indoors abstaining from outdoor work and exercise. When Pericles tells his audience that ‘we love knowledge’, he preempts this prejudice and co-opts his mixed audience into a single, shared identity that is at some remove from the reality of the different groups and cultures within the Athenian citizen body.102 As Nicole Loraux has convincingly demonstrated, the genre of the funeral oration is an ideological hybrid that sustains parallel elite and democratic discourses, addressing a divided audience as though it was one,

101 102

Thucydides, History 2.40.1. See the excellent discussion in Wohl 2002: 43–7.

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yet containing traces of the different interests and affiliations of the audience members.103 The intellectual condescension in Williams’s early speeches was always counterbalanced by the popular flavour of his rhetoric, which was shaped in part by the audiences that Williams addressed. As with Athenian political rhetoric in the era of democracy, there was an implicit contract between speaker and audience, which established the broad terms of cultural reference and socio-political ideology for the speaker. Eric Williams spoke as one of the most educated men in Trinidad to audiences that included men and women with only the rudiments of education. Consequently, he had to develop an appropriate rhetoric and to attune his educated prose to the language of his audience. That he succeeded is evident in C. L. R. James’s comments in his ‘Convention Appraisal’ of Williams.104 Although the debate on Aristotle may have gone over the heads of many of the members of the audience in the Trinidad Public Library, the learned idiom would not have been foreign to the audience. Trinidad in the 1950s was a society that prized educated language and rhetorical finesse.105 To construct another analogy with Athenian democracy, Williams’s popular audiences liked their politicians to tell them something they didn’t know whilst flattering them with the assumption that they were intelligent enough to take it all in and to evaluate what they heard. Similarly, Josiah Ober has suggested that Athenian audiences willingly suspended incomprehension in listening to speeches that went over their heads in order to ‘smooth over ideological dissonance’ and latent inequalities of birth, wealth, and education between speaker and audience.106 In the ‘Aristotle Debate’ Williams deliberately eschews an academic approach to Aristotle, plays down his own elite education to side with the audience, and encourages the audience to think of themselves as competent judges of these questions. 103

Loraux [1981] 1986: 184 and ch. 4 more generally. James [1960] 1993: 349, ‘The long scholarly training and rigorous intellectual discipline seemed to have been nurtured to find fulfillment in the untutored but eager Trinidadian masses.…Dr. Williams is one of the people, even though some who listen can neither read nor write.’ 105 See Cudjoe 1993a: 42–3 on the premium placed on ‘speaking properly’. 106 Ober 1989: 190. 104


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Ladies and gentlemen, it has been my privilege this evening to teach you more Aristotle than is known by many learned people with university degrees. You are in a position now to judge for yourselves how profound is the gulf separating Dom Basil and myself on this question, and how very closely related to your own problems of today is the Aristotelian philosophy handed down to us 2,300 years ago. . . . Have not Dom Basil and I moreover been the humble instrument for bringing out the very best in the Trinidad community and positive evidence of the emergence of an active and enlightened democracy in Trinidad? Neither Dom Basil or I will win this battle. The victors are you, the people of Trinidad and Tobago.107

The strategy of instructing the audience and then praising the knowledge that they have as a result of the speaker’s instruction is also a classic Demosthenic tactic.108 As we have seen in the passage from Pericles’ Funeral Oration quoted on p. 213 above, the idea that rhetorical instruction was a crucial propaedeutic for political debate was fundamental to Athenian democratic oratory.109 Williams had turned this didactic motif in democratic oratory into a reality by instituting a public education programme to educate the masses in politics. In the next speech that I will examine, Williams does not invite any direct comparisons between Trinidad and Athens, but his self-fashioning and the crowd-pleasing invective that he directs against his opponents call to mind the rhetorical strategies of the Athenian orator-politician Demosthenes in his legal contests with Aeschines. The absence of any overt references to Demosthenes may strike the reader as a particularly frail connection (see p. 1 above), but following E´douard Glissant I assert that even a silent, ignored, or passive presence still constitutes a relation.110

107

Trinidad Guardian, Saturday, 20 November 1954, 10. See Demosthenes 18. 88. 109 See Thucydides 2.40.2; the didactic motif does not come through in Crawley’s translation, quoted on p. 213 above. Pericles says that it is not words that harm action, but rather ‘not having been instructed previously (prodidachtheˆnai) by speech(es) before approaching action’. 110 Glissant [1990] 1997: 177. 108

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Massa Day Done Further analogies with the culture of political rhetoric under Athenian democracy are evident in the Speech Massa Day Done (22 March 1961).111 The background to this speech lay in a quarrel between Williams and Sir Gerald Wight, a prominent (white) businessman, originating with a letter that Wight had sent to Williams raising concerns about the PNM’s conduct of politics, which had also been published in the Trinidad Guardian.112 In his reply to Wight, which Williams couched as an ‘open’ letter, read out at the University of Woodford Square, Williams had used the rallying phrase ‘Massa Day Done’, which caused controversy for its potential racial provocation. In the ensuing controversy the opposition party, the DLP (Democratic Labour Party), weighed in and demanded a retraction of the phrase. This was the prompt for Williams’s virtuoso speech deriding the opposition and tarnishing them by association with the culture of ‘Massa’. In a recent study of the rivalry between the Athenian politicians Aeschines and Demosthenes, Nancy Worman has examined the way in which they used typecasting and defamation to alienate their opponent from the Athenian demos, playing to stereotypes and invective vocabulary familiar from comedy and iambic poetry.113 Massa Day Done offers a particularly rich source of character defamation and the manipulation of ludic folk culture—in Williams’s case the genre of calypso and the speech genres of picong and the lime. In a widely quoted passage Williams lets rip at the collective character of the DLP opposition: This pack of benighted idiots, this band of obscurantist politicians, this unholy alliance of egregious individualists, who have nothing constructive to say, who babble week after week the same criticisms that we have lived through for five long years, who, nincompoops that they are, think that they can pick up any old book the day before a debate in the Legislative Council and can pull a fast one in the Council by leaving out the sentence or the 111 Williams gives an account of this speech at 1969: 264–6. The full text of this speech is reprinted in Cudjoe 1993b: 237–64. For discussion of the speech see Rohlehr [1970] 1992: 33–6; and Cudjoe 1993a: 77–83. 112 This background is taken from Williams 1969: 263–4. 113 Worman 2008: 213–74.


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paragraph or the pages which contradict their ignorant declamations—for people like these power is all that matters.114

Williams’s attack on the specious intelligence of his DLP opponents is reminiscent of Demosthenes’ assault on Aeschines in the speech On the False Embassy delivered in 343/2 bc, where Aeschines is accused of quoting lines from Euripides’ Phoenix in an early speech—a play in which he had never acted—but of neglecting to quote from Sophocles’ Antigone, a play in which he had acted during his career as an actor before his entry into politics.115 In particular, Demosthenes accuses Aeschines of omitting to quote from lines spoken by the tyrant Creon (Antigone, lines 175–90), a part that he is presumed to have been very familiar with, which were of direct relevance to the civic duty of the politician, supposedly contravened by Aeschines on the embassy to King Philip of Macedon II in 346 bc.116 The analogy with Williams’s DLP opponents consists in the fact that the gist of Demosthenes’ argument here is that, for his prosecution speech Against Timarchus, Aeschines had deliberately looked up less well-known passages to try to outwit his audience—the Athenian demos.117 Similarly the opposition is accused of using random scholarship to bolster their intellectual authority in the Legislative Council and to dupe their fellow politicians. As Gordon Rohlehr notes in a discussion of this speech in the context of Williams’s historiography, it is ironic that Williams turned on his political opponents criticism that would be meted out to him in reviews of his academic work: ‘professional historians have shown that Dr. Williams too tends to

114

Williams in Cudjoe 1993b: 239 (my italics). Aeschines quoted from Euripides’ Phoenix in the speech Against Timarchus (1.151–4)—a case that Aeschines had successfully brought against Timarchus, one of Demosthenes’ close political associates, in 346/5 bc (see Macdowell 2000: 304). 116 Demosthenes 19.245–7. See especially ibid. 246: ‘That play contains some splendid iambic verses that you would find edifying, and though Aeschines performed those verses often and knows them by heart, he omitted them from his speech’ (trans. Yunis 2005: 187). 117 See Macdowell 2000: 304 on Demosthenes 19.246–50, ‘Aischines has cunningly selected his quotations from old and unfamiliar texts, avoiding the obvious one [from Sophocles’ Antigone ] which is unfavourable to himself.’ Since it related to state business, Demosthenes’ prosecution of Aeschines was a public case. The jury would have consisted of c. 500 Athenian citizens, chosen by lot. 115

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omit passages which contradict his argument.’118 It is notable that, for all that Williams decries the opposition’s attempt to project intelligence, his criticism is predicated on his superior intelligence as historian of Caribbean history and the slave trade. The tenor of the entire speech, which is heavily didactic, proclaims his individual learning and elevates it about the level of everyone else, both at home and abroad.119 Yet at the same time he persists in the fiction that he is on a par with the masses in the audience who know the truth of his words. This fiction of shared demotic/democratic knowledge relies on an unequal contract between Williams and his audience, who, due to the context of the University of Woodford Square, are cast in the role of his students. However, although I emphasize Williams’s promotion of his own intellect and his patronizing manipulation of the audience, there was give-and-take between audience and speaker insofar as Williams had to perform on the audience’s terms. At Woodford Square and at other mass venues around the country, Williams was speaking in front of audiences who were sophisticated consumers and users of the spoken word due to the rich diversity of Trinidadian oral culture. In the case of Williams, the linguistic exuberance of his rhetoric certainly owed much to local Trinidadian culture. Selwyn Cudjoe and Gordon Rohlehr have both written excellent studies of the performance context for Williams’s speeches in terms of Trinidadian oral culture and the audience expectations reflected in and manipulated by calypso.120 Rohlehr has analysed Williams’s rhetorical prowess in terms of the role of the folk hero-intellectual who blends erudition with popular culture.121 Cudjoe stresses that Williams’s political rhetoric was influenced by its local cultural context: most notably the ‘lime’ (a social mode of persuasive argumentation that places emphasis on body language), the give and take of ‘picong’

118

Rohlehr [1970] 1992: 34. As Gordon Rohlehr comments (ibid.): ‘Here was Dr. Williams, the national schoolmaster, fulfilling his dream which has become an obsession since the days of his humiliation before the fellows of All Souls Oxford, of castigating unruly schoolboys by a display of his intellectual superiority.’ See p. 89 above with n. 72. 120 121 Cudjoe 1993a; Rohlehr 1997. Rohlehr 1997, especially 852–3. 119


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(a mode of playful criticism, which ranges from friendly teasing to sharper invective), and the cultures of calypso and carnival.122 These audiences belonged to a society in which speaking ability was a badge of status and demanded a good performance. And here there is a real point to James’s analogy between the mass, citizen audiences for theatre and political debate in ancient Athens and mass audiences in Trinidad at Test matches and in calypso tents. In fact Trinidadian crowds probably embodied theatrokratia to an even greater extent than the Athenian demos. While the defamation of Williams’s opponents and the broad talk in which he couches it are keyed in to Trinidadian speech culture and were intended to chime with his audience, this defamation is also reminiscent of the use of scurrilous, iambic vocabulary to vilify one’s opponent in the speeches of Demosthenes and Aeschines.123 Williams accuses his opponents of babbling; coincidentally this was one of the terms of abuse that Aeschines deployed against Demosthenes, calling him battalos (‘Babbler’).124 The other terms of abuse that Williams levels at the opposition (‘benighted idiots’, ‘band of obscurantist politicians’, ‘unholy alliance of egregious individualists’, ‘nincompoops’) are striking for their use of a sweet, elevated register to talk broad.125 Although the Athenian context is very different, Nancy Worman has demonstrated how Attic oratory could also exploit the broad register of the iambic genre to connect with mass Athenian audiences. Her comments on Demosthenes’ use of this register correspond with Cudjoe’s and Rohlehr’s analysis of Williams’s mastery of folk speech: ‘he found appropriating such comic techniques particularly useful, as a means of offsetting his prim persona. His bold, roguish vocabulary made it possible for him to charge his

122 Cudjoe 1993b: 41, 46, 75, 100; on calypso furnishing the performance context for Williams’s political rhetoric, see Rohlehr 1997: passim. 123 See Worman 2008: 238. 124 Aeschines 1.126 and 2.99; Demosthenes 18.180. There has been some debate about the derivation and meaning of this Greek noun, which some scholars derive not from the verb battarizoˆ (to babble), but the noun batas (Kenneth Dover suggests the curious translation ‘bumsy’). See Worman 2008: 240 with n. 89, and 256 with n. 141. More generally, see ibid. 238–41: ‘Demosthenes and Aeschines on booming and babbling.’ 125 For an explanation of the terms sweet and broad, see pp. 118–19 and 120, respectively.

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opponents with all kinds of excesses while simultaneously promoting his own restrained and careful type.’126 The fact remains that Williams repeatedly exploited the esteem in which he was held as an academic to enhance his own personality. In ‘Massa Day Done’ he repeated the didactic strategy that he had used in his speeches in the ‘Aristotle Debate’, and in ‘The Case for Party Politics in Trinidad and Tobago’, delivering a biased, political lecture on the pretext of educating, and thereby (mis)educating his audience. At the same time Williams misled his political constituency by glossing over the debate that existed over many of his confident assertions.

CONCLUSION There is a genuine conflict here between the nationalist commitment to educate the masses for government, which was the rationale of the PEM, and the idea that debate and the exchange of ideas is a prerequisite for an open, democratic society. Prioritizing the former might mean condoning necessary fictions or Platonic ‘noble lies’ in the interests of inventing a national identity;127 conversely prioritizing the latter would result in a more ambivalent and perhaps less persuasive interpretation of past and present history. James seems to have become alarmed about the increasingly closed nature of ‘democracy’ under Williams’s PNM, and was himself a victim of Williams’s intolerance of opposition. However, James himself did not have a solution to the tension between the academic commitment to truth, and the involvement of the academic in modern party politics, which tends, particularly under the exigencies of speechmaking, to promote dogma and regimes of truth.128 In his study of the development of Williams’s political historiography, Anthony Maingot identifies several conflicting Williamses corresponding to the different roles that he fulfilled, 126

Worman 2008: 219. Here it is pertinent to note that Williams was sometimes labelled a ‘philosopher king’ (Oxaal 1968: 96; Rohlehr [1970] 1992: 17), although Renton 2007 has appropriated this term for James (‘cricket’s philosopher king’). 128 See James’s appraisal of Williams the academic in his ‘Convention Appraisal’ (James [1960] 1993: 331). 127


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which ranged from scholar, academic, international civil servant (under the auspices of the Caribbean Commission), and politician to Prime Minister.129 As George Lamming commented on the rift in the formerly close relationship between James and Williams: ‘What [James] didn’t understand but should have understood was that the Williams, in the relation of disciple and mentor, was not the Williams who exercised power.’130 But James did acknowledge the blurring of these roles; we may recall his bald statement in the essay ‘The Artist in the Caribbean’ that the Caribbean historian in his capacity as public intellectual can be forgiven tendentious research: ‘his history might be denounced by professional historians and justly. It would not matter. It would have served the national need.’131 The divergence in the ways in which James and Williams appealed to Athens and the divergent conclusions that they drew from their study of the past show up the complex politics of appropriating the past. James had justified the writing of self-serving history (i.e. to serve the national self) in the Caribbean by pointing to the kind of colonial fictions that Naipaul exposes in A Bend in the River (p. 138 above): ‘look at the illusions most of those European nations have had of themselves.’132 And yet, for both James’s and Williams’s purposes in the political arena, they could not afford to expose the illusions and half-fictions in their own appropriations of the ancient Greek past. Whereas the fictional writers studied in Chapters 1 and 3 do not assign any positivist, factual value to their dialogue with the Graeco-Roman past, James’s and Williams’s political writings are more ambitious in their attempt to use this past to serve concrete needs in the present, and in the process they become implicated in the loop of classical appropriation in which successive readers debate the cultural politics of Classics back and forth.133 129

Maingot 1992: 165–9 ‘Williams Versus Williams’. Lamming [1960] 1992a: 31. 131 James 1977: 189, cited on p. 196 above. 132 Ibid. 133 See Fleming 2006, who raises important questions about the way in which reception studies tackles unsettling appropriations of the Classics. On the basis of Caribbean counter-appropriations of Classics in response to racist/imperialist appropriations I would argue that misappropriations can engender further misappropriations that seem appropriate because of the liberational politics which they serve. As Fleming notes, the question of who calls the (mis)appropriation is crucial, and inevitably reflects the implication of scholarship in politics. 130

5 Caribbean Classics and the Postcolonial Canon THE UNSTABLE CANON: A TALE OF TWO HELENS I start with a tale of two Helens: the first Helen is a fleeting double in the semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman Crick Crack, Monkey (1970) by the Trinidadian novelist Merle Hodge. The second is the St Lucian character Helen, in Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990), whom the narrator struggles to liberate from the status of being Helen of Troy’s double. To be clear, Crick Crack, Monkey is not remotely concerned with the ancient Greeks or Romans. As with many other Caribbean women writers, Hodge is principally concerned with maternal relationships and the space of the home as essential constituents of Caribbean identity. The novel tells the story of Cynthia Davis (nicknamed Tee), a young girl who is sent to live with her Aunt Beatrice when she wins a scholarship to fund her secondary schooling. This move involves leaving behind the home of Aunt Rosa (Tantie) and, more distantly, the Creole world of Tee’s grandmother (Ma). Tee’s schooling unfolds in the absence of both parents, since her father has emigrated to England for work. Consequently, Tee’s quest for identity between the worlds of school and her several homes takes on an Oedipal cast as she struggles to establish her genealogy in the fullest sense. The narration of the novel is complex and belongs to a rich Caribbean tradition of autobiography in which the writing of self performs a dual function: not only inscribing oneself within the

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experience of the community, but also simultaneously contributing to the archive of national historical experience—what Boehmer has described as ‘self-making’ or ‘selving’.1 The first-person narrating voice or consciousness is that of the adult Tee, but the narrative is focalized in turns through the perspective of the adult narrator and through the perspective of her childhood self. Often these perspectives converge in one and the same passage; with the result that Tee’s childhood world is shot through with ironizing adult commentary.2 In chapter 13 of the novel Tee describes her invention of a double called ‘Helen’ while she was in Standard Three at school. This double is a construct gleaned from the books that Tee was borrowing from the library van, books full of foreign scenes and foreign protagonists. The twist is that Tee adopts this fictional world as her preferred reality, downgrading her surroundings and the Creole culture of her upbringing. Books transported you always into the familiar solidity of chimneys and apple trees, the enviable normality of real Girls and Boys who went a-sleighing and built snowmen, ate potatoes, not rice, went about in socks and shoes from morning until night and called things by their proper names, never saying ‘washicong’ for plimsoll or ‘crapaud’ when they meant a frog. Books transported you always into Reality and Rightness, which were to be found Abroad. Thus it was that I fashioned Helen, my double. She was my age and height. She spent the summer holidays at the sea-side with her aunt and uncle who had a delightful orchard with apple trees and pear trees in which sang chaffinches and blue tits, and where one could wander on terms of the closest familiarity with cowslips and honeysuckle.3

In fact, so extreme is Tee’s willed identification with Helen that the double replaces the original: ‘Helen wasn’t even my double. No, she couldn’t be called my double. She was the Proper Me. And me, I was her shadow hovering about in incompleteness.’4 There then follows a 1 Boehmer 1995: 196–7; see p. 103 above; and Wilson-Tagoe 1998: 3 on the importance of subjectification in West Indian literature. 2 See Thomas 1990: 214 on ‘the peculiar double voicing of a child who experiences and an adult who remembers’. 3 Hodge [1970] 1981: 61. 4 Ibid. For Lacanian readings of Tee’s double, see Gikandi 1991: 19–21; and Hitchcock 2001: 760.

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breathless paragraph narrated as stream of consciousness, in which Tee rationalizes doubleness as a fact of life in a colony in which there was a two-tier hierarchy with everything from the metropolis accorded superiority and ontological priority, and everything local and indigenous being regarded as inferior copy.5 The inversion of subjecthood, whereby Tee, who is black, becomes the shadow of a white fictional construct, evokes the pathology of colonial subjecthood, where the colonial subject was the dark shadow of a white form.6 Lance Callahan has described this phenomenon in relation to Caribbean identity: ‘In the centuries leading up to emancipation, and for the most part in the century that followed, the black citizen was considered to be the white citizen’s “shadow”.’7 In this pathetic attempt to alienate herself from her environment, Tee consigns her people to the margins or the shadows: ‘there were the human types who were your neighbours and guardians and playmates—but you were all marginal together, for there were the beings whose validity loomed at you out of every book, every picture.’8 The pathos of this inverted prejudice is heightened by the ironic gap between the adult and child narrators. Nana Wilson-Tagoe has written of the ‘monumental irony (tempered with sympathy) that Hodge constantly marshals against Tee’.9 In the extracts quoted above there is a striking instability of pronouns; Hodge uses both the first person ‘I fashioned Helen’ for her intradiegetic narrator, and the vague second-person plural pronoun ‘you’ (‘books transported you always’ . . . ‘you were all marginal together’) for this narrator’s stream of consciousness, in which the extradiegetic narrator intervenes. But the pronoun ‘you’ deauthorizes and distances this consciousness, as though what is being relayed is a sequence of foreign values that Tee has only half internalized. It is 5 Hodge [1970] 1981: 62 ‘For doubleness, or this particular kind of doubleness, was a thing to be taken for granted. Why, the whole of life was like a piece of cloth, with a rightside and a wrongside.’ 6 A dehumanizing condition famously decried and analysed in Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (1952). 7 Callahan 2003: 50. 8 Hodge [1970] 1981: 62. 9 Wilson-Tagoe 1998: 243. See also Thomas 1990: passim on Crick Crack, Monkey as a picaresque novel.


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sufficiently ambiguous that it may also denote the distance between the extradiegetic narrator (the adult Tee) and the intradiegetic narrator (the child Tee), in which case ‘you’ has an accusatory ring, with the former accusing the latter of false consciousness. The gap that this ‘you’ opens up enables the revision of the prejudicial notion of doubleness articulated by the unreliable intradiegetic narrator by the slightly more reliable extradiegetic narrator who introduces a perspective akin to Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’.10 This latter consciousness is conscious of the wrong and the absurdity of having to constantly mediate one’s world through the eyes of another world.11 Is it merely a coincidence that the name of Tee’s fictional double is ‘Helen’? Probably, since the reader is not given any overt textual cues prompting her to interpret Crick Crack, Monkey in the light of the classical tradition, although one must immediately concede that Helen and her elusive double extend far beyond ancient Greek and Roman literature.12 Without implying authorial intention, I propose to exploit this coincidence in order to reflect on the politics of classical reception in modern Caribbean literature. Helen (of Troy) happens to be the most famous double in western literature. Already in the Iliad Helen in Troy, in the foreground of the narrative, is shadowed and supplemented by competing versions of her life of which there are traces in the poem. Thus in Book 3 of the Iliad in the episode known as the teichoskopia (‘the view from the walls’), critics have suggested that a passing reference to Aithre as one of Helen of Troy’s handmaids hints at another mythological tradition about Helen in which she was raped by the Athenian hero Theseus, son of Aithre.13 10 I use the terms ‘unreliable’ and ‘reliable’ narrator hesitantly, conceding Lane’s argument that this opposition is often of limited explanatory value in postmodern and postcolonial texts, in which ‘all narrators are necessarily unreliable’. See Lane 2006: 72–6, quoting from p. 73. 11 Du Bois [1903] 1965: 2, ‘[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.’ 12 Gumpert 2001: passim. 13 Iliad 3.141–4: ‘And at once, wrapping herself about in shimmering garments, | she went forth from the chamber, letting fall a light tear; | not by herself, since two

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More pertinently, given the present context, in Book 4 of the Odyssey, the Homeric narrator appears to allude to a diametrically opposed mythological tradition about Helen of Troy, while in the midst of following the version that is familiar from the Iliad.14 According to this counter-tradition, made infamous by Stesichorus’ Palinode, Helen never went to Troy, but instead a phantom (eidoˆlon) went in her place; meanwhile the real Helen spent the Trojan War in Egypt.15 In extant Greek literature this phantom haunts Helen, erupting in Stesichorus’ famous palinode, and forming the subject of a tragedy by Euripides (Helen). In Norman Austin’s phrase, Helen is characterized by ‘ontological ambiguity’ with the result that the double is always threatening to displace the ‘real’ Helen.16 Hodge’s ascription of a double called Helen could be read as a subversive intervention in this tradition: as a New World fragment Helen has become a child’s double. It is perhaps significant that Helen is a figment of the imported books that Tee has been reading, books full of English scenes and alien flora (apples, pears, cowslips) and fauna (chaffinches, blue tits).17 But most subversively of all, just when the reader begins to despair at the self-hating implied by Tee’s identification with this alien double, the double is abruptly jettisoned as a vagary of Tee’s childish imagination: ‘Helen was outgrown and discarded somewhere, in the way that a baby ceases to be taken up with his fingers and toes.’18 So although the double seems dangerously real, ultimately realness is reasserted. In fact, when one considers the way in which Hodge deploys this double, it is as though the double is a means, rather than a hindrance, to a realization of the complex double identity foisted on colonial subjects and the repercussions of this doubling in the life of the post-colony.

handmaidens went to attend her, | Aithre, Pittheus’ daughter, and Klymene of the ox eyes’ (trans. Lattimore [1951] 1961: 104). See Gumpert 2001: 9. 14 Homer, Odyssey 4.227–30. 15 See Herodotus, Histories 2.116.4, who uses the passage from Odyssey 4 as evidence that Helen never went to Troy. 16 Austin 1994: 9. 17 On p. 21 of the novel, Tee refers to ‘two English children known as Jim and Jill’ who featured in her ‘Caribbean Reader Primer One’. On colonial readers of this type, see Ashcroft et al. 1989: 19. 18 Hodge [1970] 1981: 62. See Gikandi 1991: 21.


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Although the double is ultimately rejected as a construct of the childhood imagination, she is instrumental to the author’s depiction of the deleterious effect of imported, colonial fiction on the cultural identity of Trinidadian schoolchildren. This depiction clears the space for future schoolchildren to engage instead with characters from their own environment, characters like Tee in Hodge’s novel. In fact, Tee’s impressionable reading is repaired by Hodge’s extradiegetic act of writing. This link is suggested by a comment that Hodge made in a discussion of literary fiction as a form of activism: I began writing, in my adult life, in protest against my education and the arrogant assumptions upon which it rested: that I and my world were nothing and that to rescue ourselves from nothingness, we had best seek admission to the world of their storybook.19

Hodge’s insistence that ‘fiction gives substance to reality’ (1990: 206) and her consequent argument for ‘putting the literary classics of a people on their school curriculum’ (ibid.) suggest how Helen, by virtue of her incongruity, acts as a foil for Hodge’s character Tee. In Hodge’s novel, Tee (a homegrown ‘classic’) supplants Helen as a more appropriate fictional alter ego for students in the Caribbean. Hodge’s Helen encapsulates many of the interpretative problems that surround reception in postcolonial contexts, where even to suggest a relationship between a postcolonial text and a foreign ‘original’ might be misconstrued as the intimation of (colonial) dependency. This problematic has been discussed recently in relation to the character of Helen in Walcott’s Omeros, in separate works by Line Henriksen and Helen Kaufmann.20 Kaufmann alerts us to a potential analogy between reception and colonization: ‘There is a sense in which receivers are also colonizers. Both in reception and in colonization an “other” is subjected to the all-defining points of view of the appropriators.’21 In the case of Omeros Kaufmann examines how the characters Denis Plunkett and the poet-narrator, in their different ways, both construe the local Helen as ‘Helen of Troy’ and compares this reception to inadvertent (re)colonization. At the same 19 20 21

Hodge 1990: 202. Henriksen 2006: 249–58; Kaufmann 2006. See also Terada 1992: 183–4. Kaufmann 2006: 192.

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time Kaufmann interrogates her own reading of the poem, qua classicist, and the temptation—which she resists—for classicists to use Homeric associations as ‘the only basis for their understanding of Omeros’.22 Both Henriksen and Kaufmann draw attention to the passage in Omeros, which Walcott himself has highlighted, where the poetnarrator rejects the Homeric associations that he has put on Helen throughout the poem.23 However, this rejection should not be pushed too far. As Henriksen has argued, in spite of this disavowal the poem and its poet ‘remain[s] involved in a practice of dispossessing a number of its characters’, of whom Helen is one.24 Although the desire to ‘see Helen | as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow’ (6.LIV.ii) expresses a serious commitment to the cultural integrity and right to self-determination of Walcott’s fellow St Lucians,25 it does not cancel out the metaphors comparing Helen in St Lucia with Helen of Troy, which are also a part of the island’s history.26 To omit them would be to disqualify the validity of Walcott’s own St Lucian experience, his education, his reading, and his monumental body of work. What is more, to focus solely on the receiver of Omeros and the receivers of Helen within the poem as colonizers is to overlook the two-way appropriation at work in Walcott’s poem and the two-way process of influence. After all, a reception-based approach presupposes that it is not only Homeric epic that exerts influence on Walcott’s poem, since in the very process of reception Homeric epic is itself influenced by Walcott’s

22

Kaufmann 2006: 199. Walcott 1990: 270–2 (6. LIV. ii–iii); Walcott has discussed the significance of this passage in Walcott 1997e: 232–3. For discussion see Henriksen 2006: 249–54; and Kaufmann 2006: 200–1, 203. 24 Henriksen 2006: 250; Henriksen’s choice of phrase (‘dispossessing’) responds to the title and thesis of Hamner 1997a; see also Henriksen 2006: 237. 25 Specifically self-determination in the context of the history of colonization on St Lucia and the forces of neo-imperialism in the present (see the reference to ‘the gold sea | flat as a credit card’ (Walcott 1990: 229 (6.XLV.ii)). 26 Including the warped naming of slaves with classical names on the Caribbean’s slave plantations; see Figueroa 1991: 211–12 who cites Thomas Thistlewood’s diary for the slave name Achilles (with reference to Thistlewood’s tenure as overseer of a sugar plantation in Jamaica). 23


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appropriation. As several readers have noted, Walcott’s Omeros now exercises a powerful force field in the study of Homeric reception.27 Without dismissing Kaufmann’s argument, which is important and convincing, I would like to suggest that an exclusively postcolonial framework obscures the dynamics of Walcott’s reception and appropriation of Homer. In a comparative literary study that takes in ancient Greek, Latin, French, English, and modern Greek literature, Matthew Gumpert has argued that Helen of Troy functions as a figure for the cultural appropriation of Homer.28 Although the Homeric shadow haunting Walcott’s Helen evokes the prejudice that every act of artistic creation in the New World is a copy of an Old World form,29 it overcomes this prejudice by introducing another Helen into the canon, one whose difference adds to the phantasmic doubling of the Homeric Helen. Walcott’s Helen signifies so much else, but in her rich field of signification she also signifies a powerful revision of Homer—the kind of revision hinted at in the poet-narrator’s quip to Omeros: ‘Master, I was the freshest of all your readers.’30 Conversely, in view of the fact that Helen of Troy is a figure whose ontological ambiguity (p. 230 above) speaks to the heart of the relationship between fiction and reality, she is a particularly apt shadow for Walcott’s Helen. Unlike Tee’s Helen, who is the double who temporarily threatens the real Tee, Helen of Troy, whose identity is notoriously unstable, is less real than Walcott’s Helen. Rei Terada anticipated this line of argument in her brilliant study of Walcott’s poetry, which explores the theme of mimicry in every direction, including the imitation of life by art.31 Terada points out that these 27 Mishra 1992: 11; Dougherty 1997: 355–6 (see p. 55 n. 116 above); Greenwood 2007: 205, 210; Vasunia 2008: 615. In an interview the translator Robert Fagles cites Walcott’s Omeros as one of the works of modern poetry that he might have to hand when working on this translations of Homer (in Storace 1999: 151). Given the chronology of Fagles’s translations, Walcott’s Omeros would have been available only for his translation of The Odyssey, published in 1996. 28 Gumpert 2001: xi and passim. 29 I note that the Homeric Helen is the shadow of the St Lucian Helen, and not vice versa, but the connotations of ‘the Homeric shadows’ are of shadows that overshadow and threaten to eclipse. For a discussion of the symbolism of shadows and shade in Omeros, see Davis 1999: 46. 30 Walcott 1990: 283 (7.LVI.iii). 31 Terada 1992: 3.

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Homeric shadows ‘revivify’ Walcott’s own poem: ‘By appearing to model “real” St. Lucians upon fictional Greeks, Walcott suggests that “life” imitates “art”—and thereby distracts the reader from the fact that what he calls life is already “art”.’32 Consequently, Helen as Homeric double becomes a fictional foil who complements the reality effect of Walcott’s St Lucian Helen. If we, particularly those of us who are classicists, are going to talk about Homeric interference in our reception of Omeros as a potentially colonizing force, then we should also extend this potential to Walcott’s reception of Homer. In Walcott’s aesthetics and his empire of art, he can just as readily colonize Homer’s poetry as Homer can his. This is the contention behind John Figueroa’s poem ‘Problem of a Writer Who Does Not Quite . . . | For: Derek Walcott, his brother Roddy, his Mother Alix and after Reading Helen Vendler’s Review of Walcott in the New York Review of Books’, which offers a brilliant satirical critique of Helen Vendler’s review of Walcott’s The Fortunate Traveller.33 As one of Walcott’s former mentors and teachers,34 Figueroa takes on the persona of mentor addressing a younger poet— who is repeatedly addressed as ‘bwoy’/‘boy’—instructing him on the racial and colonial politics of poetic form and subject matter: ‘Watch di pentameter ting, man’, ‘Mek I advise yu boy’, ‘Long time I school yu’ (1992: 137): No more of the loud sounding sea Or the disjecta membra Homer, Horace are not, are not for you and me Colonials with too high diction instead of simple drug addiction.35

The Latin phrase disjecta membra alludes to Walcott’s poem ‘Ruins of a Great House’,36 while ‘Homer’ is metonymy for Walcott’s 32

Terada 1992: 185. Figueroa’s poem was first published in the poetry magazine Ambit, 91 (1982), 84–5, and was reprinted in Figueroa 1992: 137–8. Vendler’s review was published in the New York Review of Books (4 March 1982). 34 Figueroa was Walcott’s tutor for his Diploma of Education (1953–4) at UWI in Mona (see King 2000: 99–100). 35 Figueroa 1992: 138. 36 ‘Ruins of a Great House’ was first published in 1956, and subsequently in the collection In a Green Night (Walcott 1962: 19–20). King 2000: 100–1 explains that the 33


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classicism, as ‘Horace’ is for Figueroa’s classicism—Figueroa published several translations of individual Odes of Horace.37 As one West Indian poet to another, both schooled in Classics, Figueroa’s poem brings out the irony that critics should assume that there is something fake and mimetic about Caribbean poets engaging with Classics.38 The majority of the poem is written in Jamaican English, with deviating line lengths hinting at the critical debate which pitted Walcott against the free-form jazz poetics of Brathwaite, but the final stanzas are in Standard English, demonstrating the linguistic versatility of anglophone Caribbean poetry and the absurdity of the expectation that the region’s poets should confine themselves to just one of its many languages or to just one poetic tradition. In his study of the metrical programme behind Omeros, Lance Callahan has suggested that Walcott deliberately mixed his metres in a unique experiment with prosody so as to avoid categorization, inflecting classical metrical forms with Caribbean diction and vice versa, using lyric metres that are not part of the mainstream canon.39 The result is to estrange Classics and the literatures of Greece and Rome from any easy association with the West or with Europe,40 making Homer as germane to the ‘horal tradition’ of Caribbean poetry as to classical English poetry.41

idea for this poem occurred to Walcott after a trip with John Figueroa to ruins on Guava Ridge in the Blue Mountains during Walcott’s Dip. Ed. year at UWI. 37 For Figueroa’s translations and adaptations of Horace see Figueroa 1976: 84 (Odes 1.5) (repr. 1992: 125); 1976: 79 (Odes 1.9) (dedicated to Derek Walcott, repr. 1992: 117, and in Fumagalli 2002/3: 107); 1976: 84 (Odes 2.14) (repr. 1992: 124); 1976: 82–3 (Odes 3.13) (repr. 1992: 118–19); and 1979: 80–1 (Odes 3.30) (repr. 1992: 34–5). For further discussion of Figueroa and Horace, see pp. 249–50 below. 38 See Jenkins 2002: 581: ‘Figueroa argues for the retention of the European classics—Horace and Homer—as legitimate literary models for the West Indian poet.’ See also Baugh 2001: 244–5, who compares Figueroa with the Jamaican poet A. L. Hendriks in this respect. 39 Callahan 2003: 47–9. 40 See Kaufmann 2006: 201. 41 Cf. Figueroa 1992: 137: ‘Wha de hell you read Homer— | A so him name?—fa! | Yu his from the horal tradition | And must deal wid calypso and reggae na!’

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Caribbean Classics and the Postcolonial Canon CLASSICS OF NATIONAL LITERATURE?

Perhaps the real story here is not the irony of Walcott’s classicism and his secure place in the canon of World Literature, but the relative obscurity outside the Caribbean of a poet dubbed ‘perhaps the most classical of West Indian poets’ by James Livingston.42 As Paula Burnett notes in her introduction to The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, John Figueroa was an important precursor to Walcott in his commitment to an eclectic poetics drawing on the Caribbean’s manifold cultural inheritance.43 Classical allusions run throughout Figueroa’s poetry, but the idea that Classics should play the part of a syncretic Caribbean aesthetic is stated most clearly in the poem ‘Cosmopolitan Pig’, first published in the collection Ignoring Hurts (1976) and republished in The Chase (1992).44 The poem is dedicated to George Lamming and bears a triple epigraph: ‘Nihil alienum mihi humanum est’, a popular version of a line from a play by the Roman-African playwright Terence;45 a dialect quotation, ‘Man ’top yu ’tupidness’; and a quotation from David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature.46 Linking the architecture of a poem with physical architecture and the formation of art from matter the world over, Figueroa elaborates a concept of universal humanism in which man is at home everywhere, playing on the superficial resemblance between the words ‘home’ and ‘human’. What is Barbados, or Peru Provence or Rome But places which Any Man Can make their home? Home is too human

42

43 Livingston 1974: 180. Burnett 1986: lxi; see also Breiner 1998: 114. Figueroa 1976: 104–5, and 1992: 96–7. 45 Terence The Self-Tormentor (= Heauton Timorumenos ) 77: ‘homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto’—‘I am a man; I regard nothing human as alien to me.’ This quotation is perhaps alluded to in Ce´saire’s Cahier : ‘Je ne suis d’aucune nationalite´ pre´vue par les chancelleries. | Je de´fie le craniome`tre. Homo sum etc.’ (Ce´saire 1983: 62). 46 Figueroa 1976: 104/1992: 96. 44


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Work, making, building Too much a part of us To be particular47

In rhyming ‘home’ with ‘Rome’, Figueroa accesses a topos in European literature about Rome as cosmopolitan centre. At the same time that Figueroa was insisting on an inclusive, cosmopolitan definition of Caribbean identity, in the poems that were later published as The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973), Edward Kamau Brathwaite was working out his concept of a Caribbean history, culture, and literature in which Europe could be largely displaced by African connections.48 However, Brathwaite has ceaselessly revised and expanded his poetics, and his later poem X/Self (1987), while far from recognizing Rome as home, acknowledges Rome and its empire as an inalienable part of myth and history in the Caribbean.49 Figueroa’s poem ends with a long sentence in which a series of negatives, linked by anaphora, culminate in a positive affirmation of universal cultural ownership: No sharp stroke shaping stone No bend of metal or curve Of well-kept hill No plotted field of cane Or wheat or rice; No garden by the railroad Or formal as the French No Ife bronze Or illuminated script Is alien to me.50

The negatives may allude to the trope of the negation of culture in the Caribbean, which we have observed in Froude, Ce´saire, Naipaul, Brathwaite, and Walcott. Figueroa’s negative sequence surprises expectations, since the string of negatives yields a positive conclusion. The very last line translates the Latin quote adapted from Terence in 47

Figueroa 1976: 105/1992: 97. The Arrivants comprises the following, revised poems: Rights of Passage (1967), Islands (1968), Masks (1969). 49 See the discussion of X/Self on pp. 243–9 below. 50 Figueroa 1976: 105/1992: 97. 48

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the epigraph, with the etymology of the Latin adjective alienus (not one’s own, foreign) active in the English adjective. This process of internal translation where the meaning of a Latin phrase is revealed over the course of a poem occurs elsewhere in Figueroa’s work, for instance in the poem ‘Lacrymae Rerum’, where an equivocal classicism is suggested by the interruption of the Virgilian quotation ‘sunt lacrimae rerum’51 from which the poem takes its cue: Sunt leave the latin alone lacrymae things are full of tears for what cause rerum cognoscere for what cause who knows but that tears are too deep in things52

The voice that instructs ‘leave the latin alone’ is anonymous, and possibly points towards a prevailing aesthetic in Caribbean letters which was hostile to classicism. Either way, the ambivalence between a classical education and its insights and other cultural sources and forces (including Christianity and the poet’s personal experience rooted in the Caribbean) typifies the alienation effect that Classics might be felt to have on the lives of the poets, even while it paradoxically connects them with a larger, all encompassing humanism in which nothing is alien to them. In fact, one way of reading the ending of the poem ‘Cosmopolitan Pig’ is to see the poem’s version of classical humanism as a way of opening up routes to every ancestor 51 Virgil, Aeneid 1.462 ‘sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’ (lit. ‘there are tears for things and the affairs of mortals touch the mind’, or more idiomatically, ‘the experiences of men evoke tears and touch human hearts’). 52 Figueroa 1976: 32–5, quoting from 32 (also id. 1992: 83–6). With the introduction of the phrase ‘rerum cognoscere’, Figueroa splices together quotations from two different works of Virgil. The quotation from the Aeneid, ‘sunt lacrimae rerum’, segues into a quotation from the Georgics (2.490), where the narrator refers to the Roman poet Lucretius—author of De Rerum Natura (‘On the Nature of Things’)—as ‘felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas’ (‘happy was the one who was able to find out the cause of things’).


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in a process in which ancient Rome and ancient Ife are conjoined loci of cultural identity, rather than tritely opposed loci of difference.53 It is instructive to compare Figueroa’s conception of cosmopolitanism in this poem, premised on the Latin quotation ‘nihil alienum mihi humanum est’, with the medieval Latin quotation from Hugo of St Victor’s Didascalion, ‘perfectus vero cui mundus totus exilium est’ (‘perfect is the one to whom the whole world is an exiled state’), which Edward Said found such a powerful expression of the ideal of the secular intellectual who transcends imperial, national, or provincial limits.54 Put crudely, the distinction is between a position that holds ‘nothing is alien’ and one that holds that ‘everything is alien’, although, as Said points out, in Hugo’s text this worldly exile is a product of the transcendence of attachment, not the lack of attachment.55 What is refreshing about Figueroa’s statement is that, in the context of debates about the relationship between cosmopolitanism and postcolonialism and the extent to which the dominant conception of cosmopolitanism is western and colonial, here we have a vision of cosmopolitan identity from a ‘postcolonial’ writer who has not been co-opted into the postcolonial canon and has not been pressed into theories of multiculturalism, transnational identity, or cosmopolitanism by western critics.56 Moreover, he puts forward a countercultural model of cosmopolitanism at a time when many Caribbean writers were opposed to the inclusion of classics in Caribbean culture on the grounds of its colonial associations. For Figueroa the challenge is to include all the cultures of the Caribbean in this model of expanded, cosmopolitan humanism. As Van der Veer 53 Figueroa quotes this Latin proverb approvingly in his discussion of the cultural context for education in the West Indies (1971: 97): ‘The real question which we, in places like the West Indies, have to settle for ourselves—and to the benefit of mankind—is whether we cannot help man to find his reason for existence in the human condition rather than in any nationalist, parochial, tribal basis . . . “Nihil humanum mihi alienum est” can be the only kind of motto suitable to groups of people now assuming responsibility for their own affairs.’ 54 Said [1983] 1991: 7 and [1993] 1994: 406–7. 55 Said [1993] 1994: 207. 56 For this debate see Brennan 1997: 36–44; Huggan 2001: especially 23–33, engaging with Brennan; and Van Der Veer 2002: passim, but especially 166–9. Van der Veer has argued that cosmopolitanism is colonial in conception, and that it represents ‘the Western engagement with the rest of the world’ (166).

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notes, cosmopolitanism is always rooted to a particular context,57 and Figueroa’s is no exception. Instead, it is one of many possible cosmopolitanisms, with the Latin quotation intended to enhance its universality, rather than tie it to a parochial western vision.58 While it is easy to resolve these tensions in poetry, the reception of Classics in the Caribbean continues to be undermined by perceptions of the proprietary nature of the discipline, in a region where knowledge of Classics was implicated in the inhuman presumption that some humans were entitled to possess others as their property. In previous chapters we have seen the play on Classics, class, and racial classification in modern Caribbean literature, but we have also seen the emergence of a classical tradition that is germane to the anglophone Caribbean, plucked from the archive of colonial education and given a new life and sense. Ultimately, the obstacle to Caribbean Classics lies not with the Graeco-Roman classics, but with how we use the nomenclature of Classics in the Western academy. Harish Trivedi has recently reminded us that the referent of ‘Classics’ is not given.59 In the context of India, Trivedi notes that the study of Graeco-Roman ‘Classics’ in India under the British Empire had to contend with the presence of indigenous, non-western Sanskrit classics: Not only are our classics our own classics (unlike in England or America where they come from foreign lands in foreign languages), they are still our classics in a living sense.60

In the Caribbean context there are no indigenous classics of this kind that can be used to contest the western Graeco-Roman classics, although Caribbean nationals of East Indian descent may lay claim to the ancient Sanskrit epics as ‘our classics’.61 However, the 57

Van Der Veer 2002: 169. The plural ‘cosmopolitanisms’ is stressed by Pollock et al. 2002: 8, who also note that ‘specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitely is an uncosmopolitan thing to do’ (ibid. 1). 59 See also Lianeri and Zajko 2008, cited on p. 13 (n. 47) above. 60 Trivedi 2007: 298. Compare Pollock 2002 on the parallel cultural imperialisms of the Latin language and the Sanskrit language. 61 In their Nobel lectures both Walcott and Naipaul refer to the presence of the Ramayana in Trinidad, but Naipaul emphasizes its tenuous survival: Walcott 1998: 65–6; Naipaul 2004: 188. 58


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Graeco-Roman classics are not indigenous to Britain either and in that sense proprietary discussions of the Classics are vain. More pressing is the question of how classics are created in contemporary canon formation and the accessibility of this canon to writers from the Caribbean. In the essay ‘Western Education and the Caribbean Intellectual’, George Lamming has volunteered a definition of what ‘classics’ might mean in the context of Caribbean intellectual life.62 For Lamming classics are books that stay alive through the preservation of popular tradition, because they are taken to express the history and experience of a people: The sovereignty of a literature depends on the possession of the text by the total society over the most varied terrain of meditation. The text has to become familiar and an ordinary part of daily conversation. Books stay alive only when they are talked about in a variety of situations by people who recognize that the book is talking about them and may have originated with them. This is all that is meant by the term ‘classic’ in reference to any national literature. And every literature is a national literature: it does not endure exclusively by virtue of the gifts of the writers, but largely through the persistence of those mediators (intellectuals of categories two and three)63 who persist in extending the terrain of mediation. It helps to be part of the machinery of a ruling class, as was Thomas Arnold of Rugby who contributed enormously to the number of intellectual casualties we would honour as loyal subjects of that formidable imperial enterprise which we have called Western education.64

However, Lamming’s definition needs to be supplemented by the pragmatic realities of publication as a global enterprise. Foreign presses and international readerships still play an inordinate role in deciding who or what gets into print, and in deciding to what to accord the status of a classic. Aijaz Ahmad has described this process in terms of a canonizing agency, which ‘selects certain kinds of authors, texts, styles, and criteria of classification and judgment, privileging them over others which may also belong in the same

62

Lamming 2000: 3–26. ‘Academics, technocrats, teachers, and the more general enthusiasts of forms of cultural expression’ (ibid. 18). 64 Lamming 2000: 18–19. Compare Merle Hodge’s argument for ‘putting the literary classics of a people on their school curriculum’, quoted on p. 231 above. 63

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period, arising out of the same space of production, but which manifestly fall outside the principles of inclusion enunciated by that self-same agency’.65 In the case of Walcott, as a canonized author his work is often read within the framework of a canon of, largely European, world literature rather than in relation to the work of poets like Figueroa who provide an important context for Walcott’s work, as he does for theirs.66 This remote canonization is reinforced unwittingly by postcolonial theory, which often speaks as though Caribbean literature must be exported for interpretation, because of the lack of homegrown theory. Contrastingly, Silvio Torres-Saillant advocates that we ‘consider Caribbean intellects as providers, rather than recipients, of the paradigms that the Western academy has marketed as “postcolonial theory” ’.67 As Figueroa’s poem ‘Cosmopolitan Pig’ articulated long before it was fashionable, the situation of the Caribbean poet is inescapably cosmopolitan; but the cosmopolitanism is not necessarily reciprocated as not all polities are admitted to the cosmos of world literature.68 One consequence of the patchy circulation of Caribbean literature is that the classicism of Figueroa and the more subversive classicism of Kamau Brathwaite seldom have a voice in debates about Walcott’s engagement with Classics.69 And yet Brathwaite offers a 65 Ahmad 1992: 123 (see also ibid. 113). Torres-Saillant 1997: 288–98 discusses the relationship between the Caribbean and the (Western) canon. See also chs. 1 and 4 of Huggan 2001 for a discussion of the neo-colonial potential of the canonization of postcolonial writers by the Western literary market, with the qualifications in Innes 2007: 197–208. 66 On Walcott’s inclusion in the canon, see Melas 2007: 116. 67 Torres-Saillant 2006: 104; see also id. 1997: 24–9, and ch. 2 ‘Toward a Caribbean Poetics’. Compare the reflections of Edward Baugh on the tendency for theory to overlook the extent to which some of the Caribbean’s ‘major creative writers’ offer sophisticated theorizations of the Caribbean in their works. These reflections were expressed in Baugh’s plenary address to the 2nd Caribbean Culture Conference at UWI, Cave Hill, 4–8 June 2001 (Baugh 2006b: 3–4). See also the remarks of Puri 2004: 2–3. 68 See, e.g., Appiah 1995: 55 on the debate about the constituency of ‘comparative literature’. See more generally Appiah 1995; Pratt 1995; Prendergast 2004a; and Melas 2007: 1–43. 69 See Pollard 2004: 184 on the relative publication record of Brathwaite and Walcott and the implications for the circulation of their respective poetics. Savory 1995: 208–10 and passim offers an incisive discussion of the cultural politics of the market forces that have affected the (un)willingness of publishers to publish


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kindred conception of the role that Classics can play in the fashioning of a New World cosmopolitanism.

POSTCOLONIAL CLASSICS: WRITING FROM ROME IN BRATHWAITE’S X/SELF Arguably the most direct treatment of the phenomenon of translatio studii et imperii in anglophone Caribbean literature occurs in Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s collection X/Self, first published in 1987, and subsequently incorporated, in revised and excerpted form, into the trilogy Ancestors (2001).70 X/Self takes the form of a series of letters written by a protean narrator, whose identity shifts from that of the nephew of Septimius Severus (Rome’s ‘African’ Emperor) serving as a provincial governor in Rome’s empire, to a quasi-autobiographical Caliban poet figure giving an epistolary account of his craft to his mother Sycorax.71 The concept of selfhood at the centre of the poem is cryptic. As Gordon Rohlehr has explained it, ‘The New World Sensibility, a product of widely contradictory and at times bizarre forces, becomes “X/Self”—the unknown, undiscovered self.’72 We might also add that ‘X’ can have messianic overtones as well, in the form of the Greek letter Chi (X), a symbol for Christ (christos in Greek).73 The poem’s point of origin is Rome and the collection starts with a letter from Rome, appointing the narrator ‘governor of the thirteen provinces’ and setting in train the complex sequence of historical causation that runs throughout the poem, although this sequence is non-linear and eschews conventional historical narrative, opting Brathwaite’s work. See also Brathwaite in Mackey and Brathwaite 1995: 30; and Torres-Saillant 1997: 140–3. 70 Roughly half of the poems in X/Self were cut in the revised version that was incorporated into the Ancestors trilogy (Brathwaite 2001: 373–468). 71 See Breiner 1998: 226, who writes of the poem’s ‘multiform eponymous hero’. 72 Rohlehr 1995: 181. Savory 1995: 225 (n. 3) compares Brathwaite’s use of ‘X’ (‘a graphic sign of difference’) with the use of ‘X’ as a cultural sign for black identity and experience in the North American context. 73 See the line ‘cry of krystos ’ in X/Self, in the poem ‘Salt’ (Brathwaite 1987: 8).

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instead for the temporal shuffling familiar from the genre of magical realism.74 Rome is the original cause in another sense as well, indicated by the refrain ‘Rome burns | and our slavery begins’.75 But the significance of this refrain is complex. The first-person plural pronoun ‘our’ is used variously to refer to the black diaspora, as in the pivotal poem ‘Mont Blanc’ (1987: 31–3), but also to refer to a larger collective victimized by the scourge of empire in which erstwhile Romans, including the narrator figure, are among the enslaved. Throughout the collection Brathwaite’s narrator maintains a subtle equilibrium between being both in and out of Rome. Rome is a locus of conquering power, and as such becomes a byword for imperial conquest,76 as when Brathwaite glosses the following lines in the poem ‘Phalos’ (1987: 16): And since that day at addis at actium at kumas our women have forshook their herbs forshorn their naked saviours

with the note ‘addis . . . actium . . . kumas: Ethiopia (1935), Egypt (31 BC), Ashanti (1902): Third World cities/forces overrun by Caesar’, running together Octavian’s victory at Actium, the coercion of the Ashanti empire into the British empire, and Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia.77 But in the phrase ‘Rome burns | and our slavery begins’, Rome is not the cause of ‘our slavery’, other than in the sense that the fall of Rome might be said to be a proximate cause in a much larger succession of events. Well, the basic idea is one of equilibrium, right? That if an empire collapses a vacuum is created and new forces rush in. What I’m saying is that Rome created some kind of law, order, structure for the ancient world and with Rome’s fall mercantilism, commercialism and materialism, unbridled materialism, rushed in to fill that gap. . . . The death of Rome signals the

74 See the discussion of the complex manipulation of temporality in the novels of Wilson Harris on pp. 41–2 above. 75 This refrain occurs at Brathwaite 1987: 5, 8, 11, and 31. 76 See Rohlehr 1995: 181 ‘X/Self is about this consolidation of “Rome” as structure, law, ideology, cosmology, long after “Rome” has ceased to exist as the administrative centre of empire. “Rome” emerges as a metaphor, a paradigm of the convergence of forces into a massive and dominant polity; so that today “Rome” is America.’ 77 Brathwaite 1987: 116.


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beginning of Western expansion, which includes slavery and the slave trade and resultant disequilibriums throughout the world and within, therefore, the word.78

This succession of events is akin to a translatio imperii, ultimately leading to the trafficking of slaves to the New World by modern European empires, the Holocaust, the atrocities of war, and the ecological fallout of global capitalism. In the poem ‘Mont Blanc’, which Brathwaite describes as ‘the pivot’ of X/Self ’s critique of ‘the Euroimperialist/Christine mercantilist aspect’79 of world history, capitalism is envisaged as a malign machine, entombed in Mont Blanc, which ‘has burnt rome | but preserved europe’.80 Dennis Walder has described X/Self as a ‘Blakean, neo-apocalyptic struggle to reorder history as it is rewritten into the present’.81 Part of the struggle in this reordering of history is to sustain the tension between assimilation and differentiation when juxtaposing whole civilizations.82 On the one hand it is part and parcel of the figure of translatio imperii that empires relate themselves to preceding empires, leading to assimilation—whether it is the Victorians using the Greeks as a mandate for masculine imperialism, or Mussolini’s appropriation of the mantle of Caesar Augustus and the exemplum of imperial Rome. As the tide of history turns, these opportunist appropriations subsequently come back to bite as critics and victims of modern empires can ascribe a transhistorical aggregate of wrongs to imperial powers using the same process of assimilation. Hence the logic of Brathwaite’s sequence ‘addis . . . actium . . . kumas’ (p. 244 above). And yet, on the other hand, the very need for translation signals difference and hence the need to differentiate between different empires. This explains how Rome can be the same but different from the ‘Europe’ of the poem, which in turn yields distinct civilizations. The poem’s representation of ancient Greece and Rome is further complicated by Brathwaite’s own implication in the translatio studii. Brathwaite has written an entire treatise on the politics of language in 78

Brathwaite in Mackey and Brathwaite 1995: 15. Brathwaite 1987: 118. 80 Ibid. 32. For an explanation of the symbolism of Mont Blanc, see Brathwaite [1985] 1995: 245; and Rohlehr 1995: 165. 81 Walder 1998: 137; see also Rohlehr 1995: 171–80. 82 On the assimilation of different empires in X/Self, see Rohlehr 1995: 189. 79

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the anglophone Caribbean, identifying and advocating nation language as the lifeblood of the region’s literature.83 Brathwaite locates nation language within a plurality of regional languages, which include Standard English (‘an imperial language’), Creole English (the hybrid of English that evolved through contact with other ‘imported’ languages in the Caribbean), and remnants of ancestral languages. It is defined as ‘the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers’ (5), and is said to be ‘very influenced by the African model, the African aspect of our New World/Caribbean heritage’ (13). Crucially nation language is associated with the spoken word and the Africanness is a property of language, rhythm, and tonality. But in appealing to the idea that the English of nation language is ‘influenced by the underground language, the submerged languages that the slaves had brought’ (7), Brathwaite obscures the full resources of nation language as practised by the region’s poets. For example, in X/Self, published after History of the Voice, Brathwaite’s nation language goes back to the roots of words in English, including Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon, while simultaneously uncovering remnants of the ancestral African languages, which he is readier to acknowledge. In the poem ‘X/Self’s Xth letters from the Thirteen Provinces’ (1987: 80–7), the narrator types out a letter to his mother on a computer, as Caliban to Sycorax, with typographical infelicities to show how foreign and familiar this technology is. As with Clarke’s canny classical errors discussed in Chapter 3 above, the narrator’s infelicities—which Brathwaite refers to as ‘Calibanisms’—open up intriguing interpretative possibilities.84 no mama! is not one a dem pensive tings like ibm nor bang & ovid nor anything glori. ous like dat! but is one a de bess tings since cicero o kay?85

83 History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (Brathwaite 1984); this essay was originally delivered as a lecture at Harvard University in 1979. 84 For the term ‘Calibanisms’, see Brathwaite’s notes on the poem (1987: 113). 85 Brathwaite 1987: 80–1; for a slightly revised version of these lines, see Brathwaite 2001: 445.


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At one level ‘bang & ovid’, a misprision for ‘Bang & Olufsen’, implies the narrator’s ignorance. As Brathwaite wryly observes in a commentary on an early draft of X/Self, ‘but then, you see, colonial caliban is not supposed to get it right’.86 But at another level the substitution of ‘Ovid’ for ‘Olufsen’ is in keeping with X/Self ’s critique of the transmission of the technologies of empire from Rome to the empires of Europe. On yet another level, this word play relies on Brathwaite’s knowledge of Ovid and other classical writers too, as the subsequent reference to Cicero shows. We find canny classical errors elsewhere in the poem, where the narrator’s confusion of Democritus with Demosthenes serves to emphasize the futility of his invocation, which is anyway couched in the conditional (‘if ’): save me Democritus if it was you who practiced those speeches with pebbles in your mouthings87

Meanwhile, in ‘The fapal state machine’, via one of Brathwaite’s characteristic neologisms, Demosthenes (‘strength of the people’) has morphed into ‘Demonsthenes’ (‘demon strength’) as though to reflect the corruption of language/logos.88 Other subversive fauxetymologies such as the pairing of ‘herod herodotus’, or the allusion to the roman senate-house (curia) in the adjective ‘incurious’ in a passage about juridico-religious state institutions and the corruption of law, suggest that Brathwaite’s poetic practice of nation language is more accommodating of ‘imperial English’ than he professes.89 By ‘imperial English’ I mean an English that has both suffered and 86

Brathwaite [1985] 1995: 241. This commentary is contained in ‘Metaphors of Underdevelopment: A Proem for Hernan Cortez’, which was first published in 1985 and previewed sections of X/Self. Brathwaite also remarks, ‘the classical reference is sometimes (?) distorted into something “other” ’ (ibid.). 87 Ibid. 56. An allusion to the anecdotal tradition, related in Plutarch’s Life of Demosthenes (11), that the Athenian orator and politician Demosthenes practised speaking with pebbles in his mouth to overcome his stutter. See Worman 2008: 215 with n. 7. 88 ‘scholars whose minds will smile like cheese | their ragged theses straggeling to please the new demonsthenes’ (Brathwaite 1987: 20). 89 For ‘herod herodotus’ see Brathwaite 1987: 5, and for ‘incurious’ and crooked laws, see ibid. 19–20. In his interview with Nathaniel Mackey, Brathwaite glosses the word play ‘herod herodotus’ as follows: ‘What I’m saying in X/Self is that whenever two empires meet or two people, like Herodotus and Herod, meet, the result of their

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imposed empire, as pointed out by the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett in her radio monologue ‘Jamaica Language’: My Aunty Roachy seh dat it bwile her temper an really bex her fi true anytime she hear anybody a style we Jamaica dialec as ‘corruption of the English language.’ For if dat be de case, den dem shoulda call English Language corruption of Norman French an Latin an all dem tarra language what dem seh dat English is derived from.90

The interpenetration of empires and languages is an integral part of Brathwaite’s original, Caribbean revision of world history in X/Self, and the inclusion of Greece and Rome—alongside the ancient civilizations of Africa and Asia—is key to the poem’s cosmopolitan sweep. In turn the cosmopolitanism of nation language as a language that speaks from and to the world is enhanced, not diminished, by the incorporation and manipulation of imperial languages, which themselves bear remnants of ‘ancestral languages’. Writing about Brathwaite’s use of language, Edward Chamberlin uses the suggestive phrase ‘voices at the intersection of languages’.91 Brathwaite’s ambivalent classicism can be explained by his reticence about the role that scholarship plays in his poetry, as revealed by his apologia for the explanatory notes printed at the end of X/Self on the grounds that they might seem to contradict the folk credentials of the poem.92 Indeed, the dual function of X/Self as ‘not only the biological history of the Caribbean but the personal one, the intellectual history’ contributes in no small part to the poem’s complexity.93 Brathwaite reconciles these two aspects (popular register and elite educational background) through the figure of Caliban, describing the poem’s cross-cultural synthesis of language, literature, and history as ‘the Calibanization of what I have read’ (ibid.). frisson and fusion is a creole event. And that they can live together in the same space, even if they come from two different time centres’ (Mackey and Brathwaite 1995: 22). 90 Bennett 1993: 1. Bennett was an important model for Brathwaite’s nation language; see Brathwaite’s description of Bennett as ‘a poet who has been writing nation all her life’ (1984: 26). 91 Chamberlin 1995: 37. 92 Brathwaite 1987: 113, ‘Which therefore makes my magic realism, the dub riddims and nation language and calibanisms appear contradictory: how could these things have come from a learned treatise? ’ 93 Brathwaite in Mackey and Brathwaite 1995: 15.


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In his adoption of a provincial, off-centre persona ‘X/Self’, Brathwaite recalls Joseph Brodsky’s claim about the importance of the Caribbean as a ‘real genetic Babel’ for Walcott’s mastery of English: Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them comes a moment when centers cease to hold. What keeps them from disintegration at such times is not legions but languages. Such was the case of Rome, and before that, of Hellenic Greece. The job of holding at such times is done by the men from the provinces, from the outskirts.94

For the writers studied here, the fall of Greece and Rome gives rise to a paradoxical Classics from below, in which their status as witnesses of the collapse of empire qualifies them to revisit Greece and Rome on revised terms. Furthermore, there is a strong identification with the ambiguities of empire, as demonstrated by John Figueroa’s affinity for Horace as a poet ‘of ’ empire in a double sense: as both provincial subject and agent of Roman cultural imperialism. In the poem ‘Written at Sea’, a version of Horace, Odes 3.30—arguably the most famous statement of the monumentality of poetry in Graeco-Roman literature—John Figueroa inscribes his own poetry into the canon, proofing it against the elements and the ‘saecula saeculorums’: O they will speak of me As the man who heard Across the harsh shushing Of the seas from this dry land— Drily ruled—the broken line Of Horace and his consonants Clustering with maturing promise. For he, a colonial, also colonised An imperial tongue 94 Brodsky 1983: ix. See also C. L. R. James’s statement (1980: 244) about the importance of West Indian writers as ‘men who know the [English] language and can take part in the civilization, but are not part of it’ (quoted on p. 195 (n. 25) above). Compare Habinek 1998: ch. 8, especially 152: ‘The Rome-centred nature of most literature of the late republic and early empire reflects the general principle that in imperial or colonial systems the metropolis imagines itself as constructing the periphery rather than acknowledging that it is the periphery that constructs the metropolis, both objectively through its expropriated resources and figuratively in that there need to be clearly defined margins in order for a center to be a center.’

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Caribbean Classics and the Postcolonial Canon And led distant rhythms To breed on his own.95

In Figueroa’s reading, Horace—a poet from the Roman region of Apulia—is a precursor for his own practice as colonial poet. Horace’s dominance of the empire of Latin reassures the colonial that peripheral origins are no bar to monumentality. However, whereas Horace’s ode is confined by the finite temporality of human empires—in this case Rome’s,96 Figueroa suggests that his poem will outlast time itself, aligning the persistence of his poetry with the ‘oncoming cobalt sea’ that encroaches upon the Caribbean islands. O dear Jack I have built A monument more lasting than bronze Standing taller than the royal Resting place of the Pharaohs, Your dripping rain And the strong sirocco, impotent, Cannot wear it out nor All the saecula saeculorums Nor time itself like a flying-fish Skimming so many, but too few, Of the spray-twisted out-stretched crests Of this oncoming cobalt sea.97

Readers of Walcott will recognize several motifs in Figueroa’s poem. The last line anticipates the last line of Omeros, in which the poet cedes place to the ongoing rhythms of the Caribbean Sea: ‘When he left the beach the sea was still going on’;98 while the image of the poet hearing ‘the broken line | of Horace and his consonants’ in the ‘harsh shushing of the sea’ echoes in The Bounty (1997) with the line ‘All of

95

Figueroa 1976: 80, also id. 1992: 34. As Guy Rotella observes (2004: 3), ‘Horace’s expectation of future fame is hedged by timeful phrases: “So long as”; “Once.” Those phrases support his hope for permanence in terms that also temper or subvert it.’ 97 Figueroa 1976: 81/1992: 35. 98 Walcott 1990: 325 (7. LXIV. iii). See Figueroa’s discussion of Omeros in which he calls attention to the Homeric motif of the line of the sea, and Walcott’s fondness for this motif (Figueroa 1991: 195, 203, 212). 96


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these waves crepitate from the culture of Ovid’.99 These echoes testify to the emergence of a Caribbean tradition of reading and translating the Classics and, more broadly, of the free circulation of Classics beyond restrictive cultural paradigms.

CONCLUSION The idea of the Caribbean as the centre of cultural identity in the era of globalization has been proposed by James Clifford, who suggested controversially that ‘We are all Caribbeans now in our urban archipelagos’.100 There is an ironic echo here of Shelley’s proclamation that ‘We are all Greeks’.101 In the Prelude and first chapter, I argued that Hellenism has been an important analogy for the cosmopolitan dimension of anglophone Caribbean literature. As a small place with an extensive archipelago and a prodigious cultural empire, Greece represents a model for what Stuart Hall describes as ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’, or Brathwaite’s concept of a creolized Caribbean national identity constituted by ‘parochial wholeness’.102 Granted, the extent of Greece, both actual and imaginary, has fluctuated enormously over time, from the micro-polities of the Greek city-states, such as the Athens used as an object of comparison by C. L. R. James, to the Greek empire of Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BC, to the Greater Greece of Greek irredentist movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the Greece of the present in Walcott’s dialogue with Seferis. In contrast to the macro-cosmopolitanism of European Hellenism, Caribbean authors suggest a micro-cosmopolitan Hellenism, where the comparability of Greece lies in the smallness of the Greek city-states, its submission to Rome, and its paradoxical position as cultural giant on 99

Walcott 1997a: 11. Clifford 1988: 17; on which see Puri 2004: 2. Compare Retamar’s concept of ‘el Caribe europeo’, cited on p. 68 above (n. 166). 101 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Hellas (1822); see Shelley 1977: 409. 102 See Hall 2002, with Cronin 2006: 12 for comment. For ‘parochial wholeness’, see Brathwaite 1971: 311 with Clarke 2001: 218. 100

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the periphery of Europe.103 In Chapter 3 I suggested that the Rome remembered in modern anglophone Caribbean literature is a compromised, deceased empire whose legacy is paradoxically that of the limits of empire. Throughout this book I have tried to tease out the paradox at the heart of Caribbean Classics: the rejection of a Classics tainted by empire and colonialism, and the countervailing appropriation of Classics as a source and site of cultural resistance. This latter tendency recognizes in Classics a model for the cosmopolitanism of the region’s literature, enabling it to travel and circulate widely while at the same time eschewing an essentialist, disjunctive construction of Caribbean culture. 103 See Reiss 2004: 128 ‘For metropolitan critics, the Greek case offers a special sort of unfamiliar familiarity’; see also ibid. 125–8 (discussing Jusdanis 1991).

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Index Abercromby, Ralph 140, 141 n. 73 Abrahams, Roger 117–18 Abyssinia 244 accident, see also contingency 14, 21, 38, 39 Achebe, Chinua 146 n. 86 Achilles, see also Achille 45, 66 n. 156, 153 as slave name 232 n. 26 Actium 244, 245 Adams, Grantley 71–2, 93 n. 86, 102 n. 113 Aegean black 9 Caribbean 20–1, 35, 37, 65, 196 Greek 14, 20 n. 1, 27 n. 22, 35 New Aegean 21, 35, 68 Aeneas 130 n. 43, 137, 140 n. 70 parallels with Ralph Singh 152–6 Aeneid see Virgil Aeschines 211 rivalry with Demosthenes 219–23 Against Timarchus 221, 223 n. 124 Aeschylus 197–200 Afro-Greek 6–8 Afro-Latin 6–7 Afro-Saxon 6–7 Afro-Victorian 7 agoˆn 99 Agricola, Cnaeus Julius 135 Ahmad, Aijaz 2 n. 7, 18, 56, 187 n. 3, 241–2 Aithre 229 Ajax 64, 111 Albion 33 n. 41, 187 Alexander the Great 60, 251 alienation 35, 43, 52, 62, 67, 77, 82–3, 120, 123, 148, 149 n. 96, 168, 171, 181, 195, 228, 238 alienus 236 n. 45, 238, 239 n. 53 All Souls’ College 74, 89 n. 72, 222 n. 119 America Afro-American 7, 9, 12 n. 44, 43, 117–18, 119 n. 19, 229 n. 11

American imperialism 177–8, 193, 244 n. 76 American Indians 177 Latin America 24 n. 13, 36, 46, 108, 159 North America 5, 13, 15, 40, 94, 95, 134, 135, 162, 166, 167, 177, 192, 193, 229 n. 11 ‘our’ America 5 slavery in 128 South America 10, 55 the Americas 5, 10, 37, 43, 50 n. 99, 98, 109, 163, 164 n. 153 the ‘other’ America 46, 50 n. 99 amnesia 44, 47, 134 Anansi…anancyism 43, 119 n. 19 Anghelaki-Rooke, Katerina 66–7 Anguilla 72 n. 15 anoˆnumos 45 Antigone 106 in Omeros 169 Sophocles’ Antigone 42, 221 Antigua 72 n. 15, 83 n. 53, 111 n. 145, 194, 204 Antilles 27 n. 22, 29, 59 aporia 51–2 appropriation 16–17, 41 n. 64, 46, 57–8, 103, 132, 147, 174, 175, 188, 196–7, 203, 208 n. 71, 225, 232–3, 245 archipelago Caribbean 23, 36, 124 n. 31, 251 Greek 23 meta-archipelago 20 n. 1, 4, 23, 35 archons 5 Arima 107 Aristotle 142, 191 n. 15, 202 ‘Aristotle debate’ 210, 213–19, 224 Politics 215 Rhetoric 209 n. 78 Ashanti 48, 244 Athena 49, 53 n. 108

284

Index

Athens 10, 26, 27, 131 democracy 186, 187, 188–92, 197, 201 n. 48, 206, 209, 212, 220 model for Trinidadian democracy 16–17, 186–225, 251 modern city 58 n. 126, 66, 67 political rhetoric 209–11, 212–13, 217–23 slavery in 189–91, 215–16 Attica 25, 26, 27 Augustus, see Caesar, Augustus Austin, Norman 230 Banda, Hastings Kamuzu 3–4 Barbados 27, 29, 30, 34, 50, 93, 105, 118–33, 179, 200, 201, 202, 236 education system 71–2, 73, 74–5, 76, 90–6, 102 n. 113, 104, 114, 120, 125, 127 as Little England 93, 178 n. 204 Barrow, Errol 119 Bassnett, Susan 115, 178 n. 204 Baugh, Edward 46 n. 85, 47 n. 87, 48 n. 91, 63, 64 n. 147, 66 n. 156, 105 n. 125, 172 n. 181, 173, 174 n. 186, 235 n. 38, 242 n. 67 Bearden, Romare 35, 39, 43, 49 Beaton, Roderick 59, 61 n. 137, 62 Beckles, H. A. M. 71 Benı´tez-Rojo, Antonio 2, 4–5, 14, 21, 22, 23, 24 n. 15, 38 n. 56, 53–4 Bennett, Louise 248 Bernal, Martin, see also Black Athena 6, 96 Bhabha, Homi 50 n. 98 hybridity 8 mimicry 14, 163 translation and transnationalism 115 Bim 104 Birbalsingh, Frank 7 n. 28 Blachernae 34 n. 43 Black Athena 6, 96 black classicism 9, 15, 43, 49 n. 92 black internationalism 7–8 Blasket Islands 200 Boehmer, Elleke 103, 227

Borges, Jorge 171 Boxill, Anthony 150, 162 Boxill, H. D. 105 Br’er Rabbit 43 Brazil 31 n. 35, 54 n. 110 Brathwaite, (Edward) Kamau 11, 19, 21, 41 n. 63, 109, 235, 242–9 Africa in 237, 246, 248 calibanism, calibanization 246, 248 and the canon 18, 242–3 catastrophe 18, 21, 56 counter-etymologies 93 n. 83 on education in the Caribbean 91–3 island scholarship 73 nation language 245–8 neologisms 247 translatio imperii 18, 243–9 poetry Ancestors 18 n. 56, 243 The Arrivants 237 Mother Poem 91–2, 93 Rights of Passage 47–9, 57 X-Self 18, 19, 109, 237, 243–9 ‘Lix’ 92–3 ‘Mont Blanc’ 244, 245 ‘Occident’ 92, 93 ‘Pig Mornin’ 93 ‘Phalos’ 244 ‘Salt’ 243 n. 73 ‘The fapal state machine’ 247 ‘X/Self ’s Xth Letters from the Thirteen Provinces’ 246–7 prose History of the Voice 246 ‘Metaphors of underdevelopment’ 247 n. 86 Breslin, Paul 44 n. 77, 45, 47 n. 87, 49 n. 96, 161 n. 143, 179 n. 208, 180 n. 211 British Guiana 54, 72 British Virgin Islands 72 n. 15 broad talk, see also sweet talk 120, 223 ‘broad dialect’ 179 Brodsky, Joseph 249 Burke, Edmund 82 Burnett, Paula 6 n. 23, 43 n. 71, 64 n. 148, 66, 167 n. 64, 236 Byzantium, see also Constantinople 29–30, 34 n. 44, 36

Index Caesar, Augustus, see also Octavian 244, 245 Caesar, Julius 89, 95 n. 89, 97, 125, 184 Gallic Wars 83 n. 54, 120, 121, 130 Caesar, Caesars 165, 166, 168, 177, 205 Caliban…Calibanism, Calibanization 203, 205, 243, 246–7, 248 Callahan, Lance 48 n. 90, 228, 235 calypso 123 n. 30, 220, 235 n. 41 influence on Williams’s oratory 220, 222–3 Cambridge certificate 15, 70–4, 78, 85, 89, 114, 121, 125 Campbell, Carl 71 n. 6, 72 n. 14, 208 n. 70 Campbell, Mary Baine 52 Canon canonizing agency 18, 241, 242 English 106 n. 130 European 101, 242 of Greek tragedy 192, 198 Homer in 171, 169–70, 171, 172 postcolonial 18, 239, 242 n. 65 western 18, 19, 65, 132, 141, 169, 170, 171 n. 180, 184 n. 229, 233, 235, 241 and world literature 19, 236, 241, 242 capitalism 245 Carew, Jan 78 Caribs 27, 46 Carpentier, Alejo 4 The Lost Steps 53–4 Cartledge, Paul 190–1 cartography 38 Castille 50–1 catastrophe Asia Minor 62 Caribbean history of 18, 21, 56, 110 Cato, the elder 131 Cato, Percy 159 Cavafy, Constantine ‘Ithaca’ 59 ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ 64 n. 149 Ce´saire, Aime´ 48, 51, 138, 236 n. 45 Chalkstick 91–3 Chamberlin, Edward 248 Chamoiseau, Patrick 18, 122 n. 28 chaos theory 21 Christianity 92, 96, 205, 215, 216, 238 three C’s 92

285

chronotope 35, 145 Churchill, Winston 193 Cicero 82, 246, 247 civilization African 143, 248 Asian 248 black 95 and Classics, see also translatio 3, 13, 114, 142, 166 European 61, 81, 137–8, 141, 144 n. 81, 172, 175, 195 Graeco-Roman 3, 13, 32, 70, 98, 132, 165, 175 Greek 14, 20, 192, 206 Roman 136, 141, 150, 152, 154, 156, 183 western 69, 81, 98, 100, 101, 102, 133–6, 139, 144, 147, 158, 182, 185, 192, 194, 195, 203 white 7, 95 Clarke, Austin anancyism 119 n. 19 autobiography 76 n. 28, 121 n. 26 career 90 n. 74 education Combermere 90–1, 95 n. 89, 127 Harrison College 76 n. 28, 91 St Matthias 91 University of Toronto 76 n. 28 irony 95, 132 language in 119–20, 123–4 misquotation 125–6, 128–32 and racial identity 94–6 Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack 15, 76, 90–1, 93–6, 118, 121, 124 n. 33, 178 n. 204 Pig Tails ’n Breadfuit (‘Privilege’) 119–20 The Polished Hoe 16, 112, 118, 120–33 Proud Empires 76 n. 28, 90 n. 76, 91, 121 n. 26 class 6, 13, 85, 119 n. 18, 122, 175 n. 191, 193, 200, 202 and Athens 190 n. 11, 191 and Classics 81, 89, 114, 240 and education 76–7, 82–4, 100–1, 106 n. 130

286

Index

classica Africana 9 Clifford, James 251 Clusius, Carolus 180 n. 210 code-switching 123 Codrington College, Barbados 72 n. 12, 74–5, 79 n. 41, 120 Collymore, Frank 104–5 colonial discourse 2, 40, 51, 58, 124 n. 33, 137, 163 Columbus, Christopher 36, 46, 111, 205, 210 Combermere School (Barbados) 76, 90–1, 95 n. 89, 104, 105, 127 comparative literature 10, 242 n. 68 comparison (and ethnography) 24–6 Compton, Denis 202 n. 50 Congo, see also Zaire 136 n. 57, 139, 142, 144, 145, 176, 184 river Congo 145–6 Conrad, Joseph 137, 144–7 The Heart of Darkness 137, 145 n. 84, 146 ‘An Outpost of Progress’ 144 Constantine, Learie 99 Constantinople, see also Byzantium 34 contingency, see also accident 21 Cooper, Frederick 40 n. 62, 55 n. 115 Coovadia, Imraan 114, 139 nn. 67–8, 140–2, 145 copy, see also mimicry 117 n. 13, 149, 228 new world as copy 178, 233 corpus 65 Cortez, Hernando 36 cosmopolitanism 18, 67, 96, 116, 148 n. 91, 159, 237–40, 242–3, 248, 251–2 as colonial 239 n. 56 cosmopolitanisms 240 n. 58 micro-, macro- 19, 251 negative cosmopolitanism 159 n. 131 Rome as cosmopolis 237 vernacular 251 Crawley, Richard 213, 219 n. 109 Creole 11, 52, 103, 226, 227, 246, 248 n. 89 Barbadian 120, 123 St Lucian 110, 180, 182

creolization 64, 161, 164 Creon 221 cricket, see also Learie Constantine; Brian Lara; Viv Richards 99, 128, 199–202, 204–5 C. L. R. James on 96, 97, 99–100, 107, 195, 196, 198–202 and colonialism 200, 202–6 culture of 100, 195, 198, 200, 202 and Greek tragedy 195–202 three C’s 92 Cronin, Michael 39–40 n. 60, 116, 251 n. 102 Cudjoe, Selwyn on James 102, 203 n. 54 on Naipaul 162–3 on Williams 206 n. 63, 207 n. 67, 208, 211, 212 n. 88, 213 n. 93, 222, 223 cultural identity 6 n. 23, 9–10, 106, 142, 155, 157, 159, 161, 192, 193, 194, 202, 239 black 94–6, 243 n. 72 Caribbean 47, 67, 106, 151, 161, 194, 226, 228, 231, 237 English 13, 106 national identity 16, 59 n. 127, 130, 153–4, 161, 186, 200, 202, 205, 224, 251 Trojan/Roman 130–2, 153–4 Cyclops 44 D’Aguiar, Fred 1 n. 1 Dante 39, 61, 171, 182 Darius 52 Dash, Michael 1, 4 n. 15, 5 n. 17, 36, 38 Davis, Gregson 39 n. 59, 171 n. 180, 233 n. 29 Davis, Nicholas Darnell 31 dećalage 8 decolonization 2 Deleuze, Giles 169 n. 172, 181 n. 215 democracy Athenian 186–7, 188–93, 197, 201 n. 48, 206, 209–10, 212, 220 and slavery 189–91, 215–16 Trinidadian 186–7, 212, 219, 224 Democritus 247 Demosthenes 201, 211, 247

Index invective in 223–4 rivalry with Aeschines 219–23 as model for Eric Williams 219–24 On the Crown 18.180: 219 n. 108, 223 n. 124 On the False Embassy 221 deterritorialization 169, 171, 181 diaspora African 9, 10, 21, 173 n. 183 black 244 Caribbean 67 Greek 29, 60, 66, 141 Irish 39 and return 56–7 Dido 153, 156 Dionysia, City 192, 198 n. 36, 199, 201 DLP (Democratic Labour Party, Trinidad) 220, 221 dolos 45 Dominica 22 n. 9, 27, 72 n. 15, 161 n. 144 Do¨ring, Tobias 10 n. 39, 23 n. 12, 30 n. 28, 32 n. 36, 34 n. 42, 50 n. 98, 135 n. 55, 160 n. 138, 166 n. 160, 184 n. 229 double, see also copy 11, 226–31, 233–4 double consciousness 117, 229 Drayton, Richard 180 n. 210 Du Bellay, Joachim 60–1, 63 dub poetry 8, 248 n. 92 DuBois, W. E. B. 117, 229 Durham University 75 and Codrington College 72 n. 12, 74–5, 79 n. 41 East India 24, 56, 106, 149, 150, 154 n. 110, 157, 240 education classical education in the Caribbean 9, 10–12, 14–15, 17, 69–111, 112, 114, 120–3, 158, 174, 183, 210, 213, 238, 241, 248 mis-education 99 n. 101, 103, 200 the PEM 186–7, 208, 210–12, 214–19 Edwards, Brent Hayes 7–8 Egypt, Egyptians 95, 134, 230, 244 Eliot, George 140 Eliot, T. S. 39, 59 Ellison, Ralph 49

287

empire, see also mythology; Rome 1, 26, 44 n. 73, 51, 69, 78, 184–5, 205, 212 n. 86, 244–5, 247–9, 251, 252 American 177–8, 193, 244 n. 76 Ashanti 244 Athenian 186 classics and empire 3, 15, 39, 109, 110 British 16, 30–3, 72, 79, 82 n. 50, 83, 88, 107, 193, 197, 201, 240, 244 Byzantine 30, 34 empire of art 234 empire of Latin 250 micro-cosmopolitan, macrocosmopolitan 19 Persian 52 translatio imperii 16, 112–85, 245 writing back 58 Engels, Frederick 189 n. 9 epic 41, 46, 176, 196 n. 30, 204 Caribbean 59 classical 44 Homeric 42–5, 49, 62, 66, 167, 170–2, 175, 232 of the dispossessed 78, 79 n. 40 and masculinity 160 mock-epic 28 pseudo-epic 28, 64 Roman 130, 136–7, 140–1, 152–6, 164, 173, 238 western 130 Erotokritos 61–2 error 16, 46, 57–8, 113, 115, 116–17, 121, 130, 246–7 Eton 204 n. 59 Euripides 32, 97, 102 n. 113, 192 n. 18, 198 Phoenix 221 Helen 230 Europe, European, see also civilization, European 17, 19, 22, 60, 101, 109, 142, 146 n. 87, 154, 165, 168, 204, 235, 237, 242, 252 Europe and Classics 2–3, 9, 13, 19, 63, 65, 80–1, 175, 235 n. 38 constructions of Europe 2–3, 17, 138, 145, 196, 225

288

Index

Europe, European, (cont.) European culture(s) 21, 39, 58, 66, 70, 118, 123–4, 132 European empires 13, 134, 183, 245, 247 European Hellenism 4, 60–1, 68, 251 European languages 80 European literature 69, 38 n. 56, 40 European history 2, 3, 137–8 examinations, see also Cambridge certificate 15, 70, 72–4, 87, 89, 102, 104, 121, 125, 206 exile 43, 61–3, 78, 134, 148, 239 Exodus 95, 134 Fagles, Robert 233 n. 27 Fanon, Frantz 7 n. 29, 31, 148 n. 90, 228 n. 6 Farrell, Joseph 65 n. 154, 170 n. 174 Feinberg, Harvey 142 Fergus, Howard 13 n. 47, 15 poetry Lara Rains & Colonial Rites 204 ‘At Grammar School’ 13 n. 47, 81, 83–5, 93 n. 83, 100 ‘BC LARA’ 204–5 prose A History of Education in the British Leeward Islands 72 n. 15, 73 n. 16 Fermor, Patrick Leigh and epic 28 and Froude 30–4, 42 philhellenism 23–4, 26–30, 35–6, 38, 58 fiction The Violins of St Jacques 27 n. 22 travel writing Mani 29 n. 27, 36, 37 n. 52 Roumeli 23 n. 10 The Traveller’s Tree 15, 20–1, 22–4, 26–36, 38 Figueroa, John 4 n. 15, 18, 19, 47 n. 87, 232 n. 26 classicism 236 cosmopolitanism 236–40 translator of Horace 235, 249–51 Walcott’s Dip. Ed. tutor 234 n. 34 as reader of Walcott 234–5, 250 n. 98

Professor of Education at UWI 109 n. 139 classicism poetry The Chase, 236 Ignoring Hurts 236 ‘Cosmopolitan Pig’ 236–40, 242 ‘Lacrymae Rerum’ 238 ‘Problem of a Writer Who Does Not Quite…’ 234–5 ‘Written at Sea’ 249–51 Prose Society, Schools and Progress in the West Indies 109 n. 139, 239 n. 53 Fitzgerald, Robert 54 Fleming, Katie 225 n. 133 Fort de France 22, 29 French, Patrick 133, 139 n. 66, 148 n. 93 Froude, J. A. and classics 21, 31, 32, 39, 42 and the British Empire 30–4 Englishness 23 n. 12, 33, 34 in The Mimic Men 16 racism in 31, 36, 160, 162 The English in the West Indies 14, 20–1, 23, 27–8, 30–4, 39, 42, 47, 67–8, 103, 107, 160–2, 175–6 Oceana 32 n. 39 Fulani, Ifeona 119 n. 19 Fumagalli, Maria Cristina 39 n. 59, 182 n. 222, 235 n. 37 Garnsey, Peter 216 n. 99 Garvey, Marcus 94 n. 88, 95 Gates, Henry Louis 2 n. 5 genocide 56 Gikandi, Simon 7, 30 n. 29, 31 n. 31, 32 n. 38, 40 n. 62, 196, 227 n. 4, 230 n. 18 Gladstone, William 30 Glissant, E´douard 1, 4 n. 16, 21 n. 3, 36, 52 n. 105, 130, 219 globalization 116, 251 Goff, Barbara 2 n. 4, 9–10, 30 n. 30, 35 n. 46, 42 n. 68, 106, 166 n. 160 Goldhill, Simon 6, 43 n. 70, 198 n. 36, 199 n. 40, 201 n. 48

Index Gomme, A. W. 191 n. 16 Goodison, Lorna x, 12 n. 45 Gorra, Michael 137 n. 58, 139 n. 68, 140, 161 Goveia, Elsa 79 Greece, see also Hellas; Hellenism and the Caribbean 4–5, 7, 18–23, 26, 30, 33, 35, 37–8, 41 as heterotopia 20 modern 14, 21, 23, 26, 28, 35, 36, 38, 58–68, 141 ‘our Greece’ 5, 6, 68 Grenada 23, 26 Grote, George 193 n. 20 Gruen, Eric 131 Guadeloupe 2 n. 6, 26, 28, 59 Guattari, Fe´lix 169 n. 172, 181 n. 215 Gumpert, Matthew 229 n. 12, 230 n. 13, 233 Gurkhas 177 Guyana 54 n. 110 Habinek, Thomas 137 n. 60, 249 n. 94 Haiti 27 Hall, Catherine 96 n. 94 Hall, Edith 9 n. 35, 43 n. 69, 81 n. 48, 82 n. 49 Hall, Stuart 101 n. 108, 204 n. 59, 206 n. 63, 207 n. 68, 251 n. 102 Hamner, Robert 64, 79 n. 40, 166 n. 160, 167, 170 n. 173, 175 n. 193, 176 n. 194, 177 n. 201, 232 n. 24 Hannibal 94–5, 125, 126 Hardwick, Lorna ix, 2 n. 4, 9 n. 35, 39 n. 59, 44, 49, 63 n. 142 Harlem 94 n. 88, 124 Harris, Wilson 46 The Carnival Trilogy 44, 54 The Mask of the Beggar 54–5 Palace of the Peacock 53 Four Banks of the River of Space 54 Harrison College, Barbados 70–1, 76 n. 28, 91, 102 n. 113, 122, 127 Harrison, Tony ‘Classics Society’ 81–3, 84, 85 Hartog, François 24–6, 27, 31 n. 35, 51–2 Hayward, Helen 148, 151 n. 104, 157, 159

289

Heaney, Seamus 182 Hearn, Lafcadio 22 Hearne, John 155 Helen in Homeric epic 11, 29, 64, 226, 229–34 in Omeros 46 n. 84, 226, 231–4 in Crick Crack, Monkey 11, 226–31, 233 Hellas (Greece) 4–5, 23, 36, 251 n. 101 hellenism 4, 14, 20–1, 26, 58, 60, 65–8, 251 neo-hellenism 58 hellenocentrism 26 Hendriks, Arthur Lemiere 59 Henriksen, Line 56 n. 119, 175 n. 191, 176 n. 194, 231, 232 Herbert, Nick 54 Herculaneum 150 Herod 247 Herodotus 32 ethnography 24–6, 51–2 in X/Self 247 Histories 24–6, 51–2; (4.99.4–5) 25; (5.28–9) 32 Herzfeld, Michael 35 n. 47 Hesk, Jon 210 heterotopia 20 Heubeck, Alfred 43 history African 142, 145 n. 84, 147 ancient 9, 125, 176, 184 British 128, 145 n. 84 Caribbean 18, 21, 39, 42, 46, 56, 78, 79, 114, 121, 122, 123 colonial 31, 39, 47, 55, 114, 121, 122, 123, 137 European 2, 3, 137–8 historiography 17, 122, 175–6, 184, 196 revisionist 12 n. 44 Roman 122, 125, 133, 145 n. 84, 168, 176 as school subject 70, 71, 86, 79, 89, 123 universal 18, 54, 109 world history 54, 194, 245, 248 Hodge, Merle 231, 241 n. 64 Crick Crack, Monkey 11, 73 n. 17, 148 n. 90, 226–31, 241 n. 64

290

Index

Hofmeister, Timothy 173, 174 Holocaust 165, 245 Homer, see also epic, homeric Caribbean reception of 70, 166–72, 175, 180, 184, 232–45 Iliad 65, 66 n. 156, 152, 171, 196 n. 130, 229, 230 passages 3.141–4: 229 n. 13 Odyssey modern Greek reception 14, 61–3 Caribbean reception 14, 39–58 recognition in 49 and travel literature 21, 22, 43, 52 characters Alkinoos 45 Arete 53 n. 108 Laertes 63 Odysseus 31, 42–6, 49, 52, 53 n. 108, 54 n. 113, 55, 56 Penelope 30, 53, 63 Phaeacians 45. 53 n. 108 passages 1.3 31 n. 35 4.220–1 29 4.227–30 230 n. 149 7.53–5 53 n. 108 8.550–4 45 n. 81 9.19–20 45 9.366–67 44 n. 74 13.187–94 49 13.194–202 54 Homer, Winslow 166, 167 n. 164 Homeros 169–70 Horace 19, 97, 234 Epistles 132 n. 48 Odes 174–5, 235, 249–50 Howe, Stephen 194, 195 n. 27 Hugo of St Victor 239 Hulme, Peter 22 n. 8, 39 n. 58, 40, 57 n. 125, 204 n. 57 Hume, David 236 Hurston, Zora Neale 77 hyphenation 6–7 Iarbas 156 Iliad, see Homer, Iliad imperialism, see empire Incas 5 Irvine, Alexander 169 iseˆgoria 209 n. 76

island scholarships 15, 71, 72–3, 76 n. 28, 85–6, 87, 97, 114, 121, 123, 125, 206 Israel, Israelites 95, 134 Italians 93–4 Ithaca 22, 30, 54 n. 113, 59 Jamaica, Jamaican 11, 18, 23 n. 12, 59, 77, 95, 109 n. 139, 155, 232 n. 26, 235, 248 James, C. L. R. on Athenian democracy 188–93 as autodidact 100, 101, 102–4, 106–8 and cricket 96, 97–102, 107, 196–6, 198–202 on Greek slavery 189–91 on Greek tragedy 192, 197–203 and J. J. Thomas 103 Marxism 188–9, 197 at Queen’s Royal College 70–1, 96–7, 99, 108 rift with Eric Williams 86 n. 60, 206–7, 224–5 and Trinidadian politics 207 works Beyond a Boundary 15, 17, 90 n. 75, 96–104, 106–8, 188, 193, 196–204, 205–6 The Black Jacobins vii, 103, 204, 206 Letters from London 97–9 Minty Alley 108 n. 136 Modern Politics 192 n. 17 Party Politics in the West Indies 207 individual essays ‘The Artist in the Caribbean’ 188–95, 195–6 ‘The Case for West Indian Self Government’ 203 ‘Discovering Literature in the Trinidad’ 194 ‘Every Cook Can Govern’ 188–93 ‘The Making of the Caribbean People’ 99 n. 101, 101 n. 111 James, William 54 jazz 15, 43, 235 Jenkyns, Richard 154

Index Kallendorf, Craig 154 Kambalu, Samson 4 n. 12 Kampala 120 Kamuzu Academy (Malawi) 3–4 Kardamyli 36 Katz, Marilyn 191 n. 16 Kaufmann, Helen 231–3, 235 n. 40 Keeley, Edmund 62 n. 141, 65 n. 152 Kemal, Mustafa 62 Kenyatta, Johnstone 7 King, Bruce 137 n. 58, 139 n. 68, 149 nn. 94 & 96, 157 n. 120 biography of Derek Walcott 35 n. 45, 105 nn. 127 & 129, 174 nn. 188 & 189, 234 nn. 34 & 36 Kingsley, Charles 23 Kisangani 139, 141, 142, 143 Knight, Gloria 79 Kornaros, Vitsentzos 62 n. 141 Lamming, George 18, 20 n. 2, 39 n. 58, 106, 194 n. 23, 204 n. 57, 236 education 104–5 definition of classic 241 In the Castle of My Skin 15, 94, 108 n. 136, 124 n. 33, 178 n. 204 The Pleasures of Exile 57–8 ‘Trinidad and the Revolution in Intelligence’ 210–11, 213 Lane, Richard 229 n. 10 Lara, Brian 204–5 de Las Casas, Bartolome´ 36 Latin, see also Afro-Latin; Latin America etymologies 182 Latinate English 118, 119 n. 18 mottoes 113, 114, 139, 141–2, 172 neologisms 205 as school subject 70, 71, 73, 76, 78 n. 37, 79–84, 86–93, 102, 108, 109, 110, 112, 125–32, 155, 158, 183, 188 and sweet talk 122, 126, 127–8 Lazarus, Neil 198, 202 n. 51, 203 n. 52 Leeward islands 27, 72, 73 n. 16, 74 Le´ger, Alexis Le´ger, see St-John Perse Lenin, Vladimir 188 Leontis, Artemis 26 n. 20, 35 n. 48, 68 n. 165 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude 31 n. 35

291

Lewis, Arthur 111, 207 Lewis, Gordon 72–3 Lianeri, Alexandra 13 n. 47, 240 n. 59 lime, liming 220, 222 Lindroth, James 151 n. 99, 162 n. 149 Livy 114, 120, 125, 127 Lodge School, Barbados 127 London University (external degrees) 73, 74, 75 Loraux, Nicole 217–18 Louisy, Pearlette (Dame) viii, 110–11 L’Ouverture, Toussaint 103 Lucretius 238 n. 52 Lycurgus 211 Macmillan, Harold 186, 187, 212 Maes-Jelinek, Hena 44, 46 n. 82 Mahon, Michael 33 Maingot, Anthony 210 n. 81, 224–5 Makerere University 136 n. 57, 148 Makriyannis 62 Malawi 3–4 Mann, Thomas 134 Marathon, battle of 192, 193 Markham, E. A. 15, 83 n. 53, 204 n. 59 Martı´, Jose´ 5–6, 108 Martial 150–1 Martindale, Charles 2 n. 4, 9 n. 35 Martinique 2 n. 6, 22, 28 Matthews, Dom Basil 214–17 McLarty, Corinne 80 Mediterranean 14, 23, 24, 25, 35, 68, 96 new world Mediterranean 4, 5 n. 17, 14, 65, 68 Melas, Natalie 18 n. 58, 40 n. 61, 64 n. 148, 65 n. 151, 169 n. 171, 170 n. 173, 170–1, 173 n. 184, 242 nn. 66 & 68 Melville, Herman 167 Merry, K. L. 107 middle passage 44, 55, 56 Miletus 32 Mill, John Stuart 193 Miller, Keith 202 n. 50 mimicry, see also Mimic Men 7, 49, 128, 180, 233 misquotation 114–5, 117, 136–7, 139–40, 141 n. 73, 142, 145, 147, 164, 165, 172–3, 183

292

Index

misreading 132 Mobutu, Sese Seko 136 n. 57, 137, 144 Moby Dick 167 Modernism 40–1, 65 n. 151, 66 Momigliano, Arnaldo 112 n. 3 Mommsen, Theodor 139 Montgomery, Field Marshal 204 Montserrat 72 n. 15, 81, 83 monumentality 50, 249, 250 Morea 34 Munson, Roasaria Vignolo 24 Mussolini, Benito 94, 244, 245 Mystra 34 Mytilene 27 n. 22 myth 1 n. 1, 5 n. 18, 12, 17, 38–42, 49 n. 92, 56–8, 60, 64, 81, 111, 123 n. 30, 132, 169 n. 172, 171, 173 n. 183, 176, 178–9, 237 imperial mythmaking 134, 137 n. 59, 147, 160, 161, 164, 176 mythology 12, 32, 39, 44, 64, 132, 146 n. 87, 176, 178, 183, 184, 229–30 Naipaul, Seepersad 106 Naipaul, V. S. Africa in 133, 136–9, 141–7 civilization 133–6 correspondence with C. L. R. James 133 with Paul Theroux 151 n. 104 education at QRC 106 at Oxford 106 island scholarship 73 racism 160, 162 travel writing 47 n. 87, 134–6, 160, 163 novels A Bend in the River 16, 17, 112, 114, 136–47, 172, 176, 184 n. 233, 225 Africa in 133, 136–9, 141–7 civilization 141, 142, 143, 144–5 Joseph Conrad in 137, 144, 145–7 empire 137, 139, 145–7 history 137–8, 146–7

Characters Noimon 141 Father Huismans 143, 144 n. 81 Ferdinand 142 Raymond 139, 176, 184 n. 233 Salim 114, 137–47 Zabeth 142 The Enigma of Arrival 159 Half a Life 156–9 Miguel Street 15, 73–4, 75–6, 80–1, 93, 131 n. 45 Mimic Men 16, 110 n. 141, 147–64 and the Aeneid 152–6 Froude in 161–2 Isabella island 110 n. 141, 148–51, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161 Martial’s Epigrams 150–1 mimicry 15, 147–8, 156–7, 158, 162–3 roman villa 150, 152 virtus 155–6 characters Beatrice 155 Browne 148, 151, 158 Gurudeva 148 Major Grant 110 n. 141, 151, 155, 158 Ralph Singh 147–58, 162–3 Sandra 149, 152, 153 The Mystic Masseur 149 n. 94 non-fiction ‘A New King for the Congo’ 136 n. 57, 144 The Middle Passage 47 n. 87, 49 n. 93, 134–6, 160, 163 The Return of Eva Peron 144 n. 80 The Writer and The World 144 n. 80 Nardal, Jane 7 nation language 245–8 Nehru 212 neo-colonialism 133, 136 Nepaulsingh, Colbert 46 n. 85, 63, 172 n. 181, 173, 174 n. 186 nepenthean 28–9 Nevis 72 n. 15 Ngugi, wa Th’iongo 4 n. 12 Nicaragua 29

Index Nixon, Rob 39 n. 58, 137 n. 61, 146 n. 86, 160, 161, 162 n. 145, 163 n. 151, 165 n. 157 Nkrumah, Francis 7, 212 Nobel Prize Arthur Lewis 111 V. S. Naipaul 156, 240 n. 61 St John Perse 59 George Seferis 59 Derek Walcott 59, 111, 240 n. 61 nostalgia 34 n. 44, 35–6, 53, 56, 152, 175 nothing, nothingness 11, 45–52, 148, 163, 179, 231 novus 139, 141, 142–3 O’Meally, Robert 9 n. 36, 15 n. 52, 39, 43 Octavian 244 Odysseus, see Homer, Odyssey Odyssey, see Homer, Odyssey Oedipus 106 Old Oligarch, see Ps. Xenophon Onassis, Aristotle 65 orientalism 192 Orinoco 53, 54 n. 110 Orpheus 64 Ovid 19, 65 n. 154, 88, 109, 179, 246, 247, 251 Owen, Wilfred 174–5 Oxford University 72, 73 n. 17, 74, 81, 86, 88, 89, 106, 123, 134, 158, 188, 222 n. 119 Padmore, George 207 Palaeologus, Ferdinando 29, 34 Papa Bois 178 Papadopoulos, Stephanos 67 Patterson, Orlando 77, 203 n. 52 Payen, Pascal 52 Penelope (‘The Mulatta as Penelope’) 12 n. 45 Odyssey 30, 53, 63 Penelopiad 12 n. 44 Pericles (funeral speech) 69, 211 212–13, 217, 219 Pharaoh 95, 134 Philip of Macedon 221 Phillips, Caryl 56 n. 118

293

Philoctete 175, 180 Philoctetes 184 picong 220, 222 pieta`, piety 123–4 Pietri, Arturo Uslar 46, 50 n. 99 Pizarro 36 Plataea, battle of 192 Plato 32, 190, 192 n. 18, 201 Pliny the Elder 141–2 Plutarch 131, 247 n. 87 PNM 17, 186, 187, 207–8, 213, 220, 224 PNM Weekly 210, 213 n. 91 Pollard, Charles 39 n. 59, 41 n. 63, 48 n. 91, 242 n. 69 Pollock, Sheldon 136 n. 56, 240 n. 58, 240 nn. 58 & 60 polutropos 43, 44 Polyphemus, see also Cyclops 45 Pompeii 150 Port au Prince 27 Port of Spain 109, 186, 200, 201, 208, 213 Port of Spain Gazette 97, 98 postcolonialism 49, 55, 65 n. 151, 81, 106, 133, 136, 138, 146, 147, 152, 156, 157, 229 n. 10, 233, 242 postcolonial canon 18–29, 239, 242 and modern Greece 68 postcolonial translation 113, 115, 181 Pratt, Louise 31, 39, 42, 242 n. 68 Prometheus 5 n. 18 Ps.-Xenophon 190 Pucci, Pietro 43 n. 70, 56 Pythagoras 201 Queen’s Royal College, Trinidad (QRC) 11, 70, 71 n. 6, 85–6, 96–7, 99, 108, 110 n. 141, 158 quotation, see also misquotation 16, 32, 53, 54, 63, 92, 114–17, 119 n. 18, 120, 126, 128, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 139–41, 142, 156, 160, 163 n. 153, 212, 213, 217, 221 n. 117, 136, 238, 239, 240

294

Index

race, racism 6, 7, 13, 31 n. 31, 76, 83, 89, 100, 121, 160, 162, 167, 177, 200, 202 Ramazani, Jahan 184 Ramchand, Kenneth 97 n. 97, 124 Rankine, Patrice 9 n. 36, 15 n. 52, 49 n. 92 rape 126 Rayner, Joan 22 n. 9 Reiss, Timothy 4 n. 13, 252 n. 103 relation 1, 34–8, 53, 58, 109, 149, 162, 219, 231 repetition 21–2, 30, 56 Retamar, Roberto Fernańdez 5 n. 20, 24 n. 13, 251 n. 100, 68 rhetoric Athenian 209–10 democratic 209–19 demosthenic 221–3 Richards, Viv 204 Ricks, David 36 n. 50, 60–1 Roach, Eric 78 Robinson, Douglas 113 Rohlehr, Gordon 3 n. 11, 49, 69, 78 n. 35 on Brathwaite 49, 93, 243, 244 n. 76, 245 nn. 80–82 on Conrad 146 n. 87 on Williams 89 n. 72, 210 n. 81, 213 n. 93, 214, 220 n. 111, 222, 223, 224 n. 127 Rome empire 16, 18, 19, 32, 101 n. 110, 113, 134, 137 n. 60, 145, 164, 165, 168, 177, 183, 184, 243, 244, 247, 249 n. 94, 250 Roman Britain 32 Roman Republic 139, 143 n. 77, 154, 249 n. 94 as cosmopolis 61 n. 136, 237 in X-Self 243–9 Rotella, Guy 44 n. 73, 51 n. 101, 53, 250 n. 96 Rowell, Charles 78, 105 n. 126 Saba 27 Safran, William 56 n. 118 Said, Edward 2 n. 7, 66 n. 158, 97, 159 n. 131, 203, 239

Salamis, battle of 192 Sandiford, Keith 92 Sanskrit 13, 240 Savory, Elaine 242 n. 69, 243 n. 72 Schoelcher library, Martinique 22 Schomburgk brothers (Richard and Robert) 54 n. 112 Scythia 24–5 Seferis, George 58–68 ‘Dialogue on Poetry’ 60–1 ‘In the Manner of G. S.’ 67 Mythistoreˆma 65 ‘On a Foreign Line of Verse’ 60–2, 66 self-making, selving 103, 226–7 Severus, Septimius 243 Shakespeare, William 39, 61, 102, 204 n. 57 Shaw, Robert (Colonel) 167 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 251 Sherrard, Philip 62 n. 141, 65 n. 152 Simmons, George 74 n. 24, 75 n. 25, 79 n. 41 Simmons, Harold 105 Simpson, Michael ix, 9, 10, 30 n. 30, 35 n. 46, 42 n. 68, 106, 166 n. 160 Skiathos 62 slavery 121, 128 American 128, 134 Athenian 189–91, 215–6 Caribbean 134, 162, 195, 203, 215, 244–5 middle passage 44, 55, 56 plantocracy 121, 132 slave names 159, 175, 232 n. 26 Williams on 86 n. 64, 122, 206, 215–16 Smith, Faith 31 n. 32, 104 n. 121 Snead, James 21–2 Solodow, Joseph 142 Sophocles 32, 102 n. 113, 192 n. 18, 198 Antigone 42, 221 Sparta 29, 34 speech cultures 117–18, 127–8, 132, 175 n. 191 Barbadian 119, 123, 124 speech genres, see also sweet talk 118, 220, 222–3 Spinalonga 26

Index St-John Perse 59 St Martin 23 St Matthias school, Barbados 91 St Omer, Dunstan 6, 167 n. 164 St John, Church of 29–30, 32–3 St Joseph’s Convent, St. Lucia 110 St Mary’s College, St. Lucia 40 n. 60, 105 St Mary’s College, Trinidad 70, 71 n. 6 Stanford, W. B. 43 Steiner, George 169 n. 170, 184 n. 229 Stoddart, Brian 92, 203 n. 52 Strongman, Roberto 74 n. 21, 75, 80–1 submarine unity 64 Suetonius 168 n. 166 Suleri, Sara 137 n. 59, 158 n. 126 Surin, Kenneth 100, 198 n. 37 Swanzy, Henry 4 n. 15 sweet talk, see also broad talk 118, 119 n. 18, 122, 126, 127, 223 Tacitus 134–6 Tagoe, Nana Wilson 122 n. 27, 138, 227 n. 1, 228 Taplin, Oliver 170 Tar Baby 43 Taygetus, Mt. 34 Taylor, Thomas 79 n. 41, 92 n. 81 Tee 11, 226–31, 233 Tennyson, Alfred 54 Terada, Rei 47 n. 87, 49 n. 93, 161 n. 143, 164, 231 n. 20, 233–4 Terence 236, 237 Teutoburg Forest, battle of 168 Thackeray, William 96 Theroux, Paul 151 n. 104 Theseus 5 n. 18, 229 Thieme, John on Naipaul 137, 139 n. 67, 148 n. 92, 149 n. 94, 151, 156 n. 117 on Walcott 64 n. 148, 65 n. 153, 66, 171, 178 n. 207 Third World 3 n. 8, 160, 162, 165 n. 157, 194, 244 Thistlewood, Thomas 232 n. 26 Thomas, J. J. 31, 38, 103, 104 Thomson, George 189–90 n. 11, 197–200 Thucydides 97, 211–13

295

History 2.35–46 212, 213 n. 89 2.40.1 217 n. 101 2.40.2 219 n. 109 Timarchus 221 n. 115 Torres-Saillant, Silvio 6 n. 23, 10 n. 39, 57 n. 122, 242 nn. 65 & 67, 243 n. 69 tourism 110, 170 tragedy, Greek 9, 192, 197–200, 230 Tranquility School, Trinidad 85 translation, see also Bassnett; Cronin; Steiner; Trivedi; Venuti domesticating translation 169 and empire 112–13, 175, 178, 183 and error 116–17 immutable/mutable mobile 116 and minority literatures 181 and misquotation 115–17 as school exercise 82, 88–9, 95 n. 89, 125 translatio 112–13, 116, 168, 172, 183 transnational, transnationalism 115, 239 travel writing, see also Fermor; Froude; Naipaul 14, 20–31, 35, 36, 37, 54, 55, 67–8 and accident 20, 38 comparison in 24–6, 40 Odyssey as 22, 43, 52 Victorian 23, 30–4, 135, 160–1 Trilling, Lionel 124 Trinidad education in 69–71, 72, 73, 80–1, 85–7, 89, 90 n. 75, 97, 110 n. 141, 122–3, 158 history 85 n. 58, 89, 114, 140–1 independence 134, 141 n. 73, 176 intellectual tradition 103 politics 85 n. 58, 186–8, 206–24 society 75, 100–1, 135, 200, 202 Trinidad Guardian 37 n. 51, 135, 214–20 Trivedi, Harish 9 n. 35, 13, 115, 178 n. 204, 240 Trollope, Anthony 23, 47 n. 87, 160 Troy 22, 140 n. 70, 152, 154 Helen of Troy 11, 226, 229–33 Trojan horse 129–32, 185

296

Index

Troy (cont.) Trojan War 28, 129–32, 184, 230 Turkey 62 Tymoczko, Maria 181 Uganda 136 n. 57, 145 n. 84, 148 UWI (formerly UCWI) 109 n. 139, 195, 234 n. 34, 242 n. 67 classics at 79 n. 41 founding 72 n. 12 motto 92 n. 81 Varus, P. Quinctilius 168 Vendler, Helen 234 Venezuela 54 n. 110 Venuti, Lawrence 181 Versailles 50 Victorian, see also Victorian travel writing 7, 12, 15, 32, 69, 92, 96, 107, 191, 196, 197 Afro-Victorian 7 vir 155 Virgil Aeneid 81, 114 n. 6, 125, 128, 130, 136–7, 140–1, 152–6, 164, 173 1.462 238 nn. 51–2 2.13–267 130 n. 43 2.23 173 2.268–97 152 2.274–6 152–3 3.349–50 154 n. 110 4.110–12 114 n. 6, 136–7, 140, 164 4.215 156 Georgics 2.490 238 n. 52 virtus 155–7 Walcott, Derek adamic naming in 181 Afro-Greeks in 7, 78, 96 and Romare Bearden 35 and H. D. Boxill 105 schooling 40 n. 60, 76, 78–9, 105 and Frank Collymore 105 on comparisons between the Caribbean and Greece 35, 37–8, 50–1 and John Figueroa 234 n. 34 on epic 28, 43–6, 49, 65–6, 78, 167–71, 172, 175, 180, 196, 232

on C. L. R. James 196–7, 203 languages 180–1 Latin in 165–8, 172–8, 182 mimicry 35, 49, 163–4, 180, 233–4 on modern Greece 58–9, 64–7 Nobel Prize 59, 111, 240 n. 61 referentiality 37–8 and Stephanos Papadopoulos 67 ruins in 33 n. 41, 168 n. 165, 234 and Harold Simmons 105 as teacher 78 n. 37, 174 translated into modern Greek 66–7 and translation 178–82 and Warwick Walcott 106 poetry 25 Poems 59 n. 128, 105 Another Life 6, 28 n. 25, 46, 47, 49, 63–4, 105, 111 n. 144, 172–4 The Arkansas Testament 168, 174, 177 The Bounty 20 n. 1, 165 n. 157, 180, 182, 250 The Castaway 59 n. 128 Epitaph for the Young 59 n. 128 The Fortunate Traveller 64 n. 148, 234 The Gulf 59 n. 128 In A Green Night 6 n. 23, 37 n. 51, 59 n. 128, 176, 182, 234 n. 36 Midsummer 47 n. 87, 165 n. 157, 177 Omeros, see also ‘Reflections on Omeros’ 37–8 as classic 79, 242 n. 66 metre 48 n. 90, 235 narrator 45–6, 166–7, 170, 174, 177, 226, 231–3 Homeric similes 170–1 characters Achille 44–7, 48 n. 90, 64, 78, 166, 167, 169–70 Afolabe 45, 47 Antigone 169 Hector 46, 64, 66 n. 156 Helen 46 n. 84, 226, 231–4 Homeros 169–70 Omeros 170, 233

Index Philoctete 175, 180 Major Plunkett 174–6, 231 The Prodigal 180 Sea Grapes 8 The Star-Apple Kingdom 179 Tiepolo’s Hound 180, 183 individual poems ‘Almond Trees’ 178–9, 180 ‘For Pablo Neruda’ 8 ‘The Fortunate Traveller’ 165 nn. 156 & 7 ‘From This Far’ 59, 64–6 ‘Greece’ 65 ‘Homecoming, Anse La Raye’ 7 ‘The Hotel Normandie Pool’ 109 ‘A Latin Primer’ 81, 174 ‘A Letter from the Old Guard’ 177 ‘Names’ 50–1 ‘Origins’ 45 ‘Prelude’ 182 ‘Roots’ 6 ‘Ruins of a Great House’ 33 n. 41, 234 ‘The Schooner, Flight’ 179–80 ‘Tropic Zone’ 177 ‘White Magic’ 178 prose ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’ 59 ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry’ 49, 163–4 ‘Reflections on Omeros’ 35, 37–8 ‘The Muse of History’ 35, 181 n. 218, 197 n. 33 play, The Odyssey: A Stage Version 43 n. 71, 49, 62–3, 64, 170 n. 175 Walcott, Warwick 106 Walder, Dennis 245 Warner-Lewis, Maureen 124 Warren, Kenneth 57 Watts, Cedric 146 n. 86 West, David 153 Wight, Gerald 220 Williams, Eric classical education 85–9 education

297

at Tranquility 85 at QRC 11–12, 85–7, 206 at Oxford 88–9, 188 as historian 210, 222 invective in Williams’ oratory 217, 219, 220, 223 interview at All Souls College 89 n. 72, 222 n. 119 island scholarship 86 and the PEM 17, 186, 187, 208, 212 political rhetoric 208–25 Premier of T&T 85 n. 58 Prime Minister of T&T 85 n. 58, 134, 225 quoting Thucydides 212–13 rift with C.L.R. James 86 n. 60, 206–7, 224–5 Capitalism and Slavery 206 Education in the British West Indies 74, 76 n. 29, 77, 84, 87 From Columbus to Castro 210 Inward Hunger 15, 17, 85–9, 108 n. 135, 207 The History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago 211 speeches ‘Massa Day Done’ 208 n. 72, 211, 216, 220–4 ‘The Case for Party Politics in Trinidad and Tobago’ 212, 224 Williams, Raymond 198 n. 37 Willis, Ika 113 n. 4, 134 n. 54, 183 n. 226 Wilson-Tagoe, Nana 122 n. 27, 138, 227 n. 1, 228 women 3 n. 11, 28, 94, 129, 148, 157, 179, 189, 244 in Athens 189, 191, 215, 217 Caribbean women writers 10–12, 119 n. 19, 226 Woodcock, Bruce 82 n. 49, 83, 85 Woodford Square, University of 186–7, 208, 210–12, 214, 220, 222 Woodhouse, Christopher 26 n. 20 world literature 19, 102, 166, 171, 236, 242 World War, second 23, 93, 175

298 Worman, Nancy 214 n. 95, 220, 223, 224 n. 126, 247 n. 87 Wynter, Sylvia 90 n. 75, 100 Yale University 119, 120 n. 22 Yeats, William Butler 34 n. 44

Index Young, Robert 3 n. 8, 33 n. 40 Yunis, Harvey 209 n. 76, 221 n. 116 Zaire, see also Congo 141, 145 n. 84 Zajko, Vanda 12 n. 44, 13 n. 47, 240 n. 59 Zela, battle of 89

Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century

Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature

Anglophone Jewish Literatures (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

The Counterfeiters (Twentieth Century Classics)

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Mysticism in Twentieth-Century Hebrew Literature

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Loser Takes All (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Angle of Repose (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature

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The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English

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Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century

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Anglophone Jewish Literatures (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

The Counterfeiters (Twentieth Century Classics)

The Counterfeiters (Twentieth Century Classics)

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The Bell (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

The Bell (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

The Painted Veil (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

Mysticism in Twentieth-Century Hebrew Literature

Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon (Classical Presences)

Liza of Lambeth (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Angle of Repose (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Loser Takes All (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Angle of Repose (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature

The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature

Paris in the Twentieth Century

Poland in the Twentieth Century

Paris in the Twentieth Century

Imperialism in the Twentieth Century

Paris in the Twentieth Century

Poland in the Twentieth Century

Greece in the Twentieth Century

The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English

Science and Society in the Twentieth Century

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