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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
In 1962 Jamaica was granted independent status as a member of the British Commonwealth, and the island immediately experienced both a surge in feelings of nationalism and a cultural renaissance. Beginning in 1966, the Institute of Jamaica funded archaeological teams to excavate local sites of historical import, including Port Royal and some Indian burial grounds at White Maul. In 1968 British honors were replaced with Jamaican or National honors, the British honor of knighthood, for example, making way for the Order of Jamaica. The year 1968 also marked the creation of the new rank National Hero, awarded posthumously that year to Marcus Garvey, Paul Bogle, and George William Gordon. Rastafarianism, a Jamaican-born religion fast gaining worldwide attention and followers, was celebrated in the 1972 film The Harder They Come. The island contributed to the musical world with developments in reggae, ska, and calypso, and reggae in particular helped to make available to the Jamaican population an Afro-Caribbean identity. Stuart Hall, who grew up in Jamaica, comments on the growing awareness of a Jamaican identity during that era:
I never once heard a single person refer to themselves or to others as ....
or as having been at some time in the past, "African." It was only in the
1970s that this Afro-Caribbean identity became historically available to
the great majority of Jamaican people, at home and abroad ....
This... discovery.., could only be made through.., the post-colonial revolution, the civil rights struggles, the culture of Rastafarianism and the
music of reggae--the metaphors, the figures or signifiers of a new
construction of "Jamaican-ness."
(398)
Addressed to and emerging from this culture, Andrew Salkey's epic poem Jamaica, published in London in 1973 by Hutchinson and reissued with the subtitle An Epic Poem Exploring the Historical Foundations of Jamaican Society in 1983 by Bogle-L'Ouverture, signals the beginning of Jamaican national literature.(1)
Having witnessed Algeria's struggle for independence from its French colonizers, Frantz Fanon says this about the place of imaginative literature in the creation of a national culture:
A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the
sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which
that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence ....
While at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his work
to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of
charming him or of denouncing him through ethnic or subjectivist means,
now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his
own people.
It is only from that moment that we can speak of a national literature.
(155)
Jamaica fulfills one of the primary functions of a traditional epic poem: teaching its audience members about their own national history as part of their "training in citizenship," as Eric Havelock declares (43). But though traditional in his desire to teach his readers to recognize, value, and embrace Jamaican history, Salkey shuns one of the most deeply embedded characteristics of epics with Jamaica: he avoids acknowledgment of its generic predecessors, or what Joan Malory Webber calls his "hostile but loving responsibility to its [the genre's] rejected past" (10). His 107-page epic makes no reference to any other epic, or to any other literature from the Western tradition, for that matter; but he crafts this omission as part of the "training in citizenship" and historical instruction his poem offers his Jamaican readers. Salkey self-consciously signals a Jamaican national literature as his poem addresses his own people in language that, although English, heralds its distinction as an island language. Salkey uses this language to tell his people how to escape the distorted picture of their past foisted on them by their colonizers. Salkey believes Jamaicans can lay claim to a national culture by studying and knowing the island itself, thereby undoing the devaluation of Jamaican culture which was part and parcel of the colonial process. In learning the island's history as it is imprinted on the land and reinforced in the islanders' relationship with the land, Jamaicans will realize that the violence Jamaica has endured--both natural and human--actually contributes to its survival. Salkey's epic presents this reconfigured notion of violence in the appropriate Caribbean metaphor of the hurricane.
Salkey's poem is divided into four parts of unequal length, framed by introductory and concluding poems that express a desire to participate in history by obtaining land. Part 1, Caribbea, consists of only one poem, "Xaymaca," a tribute to the resilience of the island and its surrounding sea. The longest section, part 2, Slavery to Liberation, offers a tour of two hundred years of Jamaican history, dedicating poems to the Port Royal earthquake of 1692, the Maroon uprising of 1796, the emancipation of slaves set into motion in 1833, the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, and the Kingston earthquake of 1907. Part 3, Mento Time, follows a poet-wanderer as he records the musical and vocal sounds of Kingston. Jamaican history provides the focus again for part 4, Caribbean Petchary, covering the popular unrest of 1938, the granting of universal adult suffrage in 1944, and the hurricane of 1951. This part closes with another tribute to a Jamaican entity with "Caribbean Petchary," a tribute to a local bird. To read Jamaica is to immerse oneself in the history and the language of Jamaica.
Ironically, Jamaicans themselves have had little access to this epic. Never published in Jamaica, the poem nevertheless qualifies as national literature, which critics are careful to define by content rather than relative popularity. (Indeed, low literacy rates combined with high poverty rates limit readership of any literature in the Caribbean.) C. L. Innes identifies national literature as that "ad dressed not just to the colonizing power, nor even primarily to it, but to the people of the emerging nation, and [which] seeks to engage them in their own project of self-definition" (120). If that project defines the self solely in opposition to the definitions and descriptions employed by the colonizing power, it risks the label nativist rather than national, the former a kind of writing Kwame Anthony Appiah criticizes for "the topology that it presupposes" (157). Focusing primarily on Africa, Appiah criticizes literature that leaves unquestioned the "ideology of universalism" which is usually "eurocentric hegemony posing as universalism" (159), especially when that literature "inhabit[s] a Western architecture" (163).(2)
Though we may consider the epic the quintessential Western genre, the pillars of Homer and Virgil laying the foundation for the tradition, the truth is that the epic is not a uniquely Western or European genre. Guida M. Jackson's recent Encyclopedia of Traditional Epics identifies precolonial epics from areas as diverse as Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Jackson's introduction identifies several conventions common to most epics, suggesting that even the definition employed by critics steeped in the Western tradition is not derived from European epics only. It is within this non-Western epic tradition that Salkey's poem participates.
Even though the language in which Salkey pens Jamaica is English, he ensures that his readers will notice that his is not the English of England: In the introductory poem, "I into history, now," all the reader need do is observe the punctuation, the pronouns, and the simile to realize that Salkey is not "charming... or denouncing" his oppressor but "addressing his own people":
I sittin' down,
scratchin' me 'ead
an' watchin' the scene,
an' I ol' as Anancy
but wit'out f'him brain-box[.]
All o' we losin' out,
'cause we won't own up to weself[.]
(11)
Addressed to the "we" of Jamaica, the language that Salkey uses here is explained later, when two elderly Jamaican men, Joshua and Emmanuel, converse in a particularly metapoetic portion of the poem. Emmanuel suggests that they look at problems in Jamaica:
Take the language t'ing, now,
as f'instance!
It not even f'we own
proper yet.
Look how we force
f'fingle wit' it
when we want
f'write as we talk;
look how much mark an' stop
we got f'drop
'pon top o'it
when we write it down!
(74-75)
The written form of Emmanuel's lament perfectly matches its meaning. No reader can navigate that passage without recognizing the finagling both Emmanuel and Salkey must perform...
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