Andy Taitt shares his thoughts on the issue:
Charmaine, I’m particularly interested in your “if being categorized as "Caribbean writer" helps or hurts ... [and] ...the effect of being placed in even broader general categories like "fiction writer" and "non-fiction writer."
When Caribbean literature ‘first’ burst on the scene in the early 50s, writers benefited from a sense of novelty and wonder. We were amazed that people like us could write and were pleased that they were writing about people like ourselves. I don’t know how many of us supported our own writers though. There was also a market, I think largely, in Britain but I suspect a lot of it was fuelled by the colonial connection and a sense of self-congratulation that ‘Look, we civilized these people and now they can even write.’ Now Britain’s focus has shifted away from us. Without doing the research I speculate that as the generation with experience of colonizing moved on, and that with Britain’s entry into Europe there was a shift of focus to Europe. This is clearly an Anglophone bias here but I suspect the same is true of other European colonizers in the region, even down to the shift in focus to Europe.
Now, if Caribbean writers continue to insist that Caribbeanness is the great intrinsic value of their work -they run the risk of isolating - ‘de-globalizing’ – themselves. A bitter truth is that Caribbean people are special but so is everybody else. The Chinese, the Spanish and the Afrikaners also think they are special!
We speak of British writers primarily in the sense of British meaning not French, not German, not Pakistani, although of course there is a sense of British writers having a particular sensitivity that is a result of their britishness. [The Times list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945 has Naipaul 7th and Rushdie 13th.] Within the wide mass of British writing there are champions of Scottish, Irish and Welsh writing but they always seem to carry a sense of trying to prevent their separate but –sorry – minor identities from being swallowed up in the more common sense of Britain meaning London and England.
Our insistence on being seen as Caribbean writers has some of this back-against-the-wall quality to it. We are undeniably, undisputedly Caribbean, whatever that means and whether we were born, grew up or live in parts of London, Toronto, etc - Charmaine, this is your “discussion of the challenges associated with the term "Caribbean writer"”. It is as intrinsic to us as britishness is to British writers. And, just as the Dutch, Czechs and Sri Lankans will read British writers for their britishness but as well for their being simply humans with near-universal/global human concerns, we Caribbean writers may want to lure the same readers into our books both for our Caribbeanness and for our membership of humanity. Through our writing we can just as easily portray ourselves as a unique part of a greater body as we can set ourselves up as unique, distinct and alien. Put otherwise, we can illustrate our globalness rather than ‘de-globalize’ ourselves and so play into the hands of the self-called first world that keeps threatening to leave us out of globalization.
We could ask if we are glorifying our place and our condition as if they truly were the paradise that we sell to the tourists. The bougainvillea flaming across the wall that we hold up as local colour is ignored by many of us going home in the evening standing in the bus hanging on to the rail, and it can be a real pain in the tail when the time comes to trim the damn bougainvillea hedge.
------------
[Feel free to add your comment here, or over at The Caribbean Literary Salon]
