The Signifyin' Woman (Charmaine Valere)

How close is too close?: Tiphanie Yanique's "Bridge Stories" and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw's "Here"

Years ago, I sat in a course on African American Lit. and discussed Nella Larsen's act of literary theft, which more or less ended her writing career, and I wondered why she did it? As time passes, the theories about why she did it get more and more spectacular and tend to fit the popular literary theories of the current period. But why is ultimately of far secondary importance to the fact that she did. She used another writer's work without attribution or credit of any sort, published it as her own, and that is essentially literary theft.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I read "The Bridge Stories," one of the collection of stories in Tiphanie Yanique's How to Escape from a Leper Colony, and it reminded me of a story I had read (and written on) by Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw in her 2006 collection titled Four Taxis Facing North. At first I was struck by the similarity in each story's major themes--abandonment and alienation--and the similar way they were constructed by both authors--a telling of seemingly unrelated stories during a journey of some kind, and the narrators' attempts to connect the stories in some way or to infer connections for the reader. Then, the characters and their storylines started to look similar, so I paused my reading of Yanique's story to check for an acknowledgment of Walcott-Hackshaw's work, and found none. But I was still reluctant to call it what it appeared to be.

 

To prove I wasn't seeing things though, I started to make comparative notes...

 

In the Walcott-Hackshaw story a woman in Trinidad struggles with the decision to send her daughter to Miami to spend the summer with her father, who she is divorcing. She appears to have lost the battle to keep the child from going to visit him despite the success of her argument that he'd "walked out, like a deserter, a coward," and had abandoned her and their daughter. Among other things, she worries about color issues that may affect her daughter in America: her daughter may look light-skinned in Trinidad, but will be considered black in America, and her daughter's father who looks white, Cuban, may be involved with a "magazine-pretty," blond Miss Miami. The woman makes several observations as she travels along the highway to the airport (a highway they have been fixing "since I was a child," she muses).

 

She observes and makes or infers connections between and among related and seemingly unrelated people, occurrences past and present, and still scenes: three boys walking along the highway recall a memory of three males she saw in a hut some time ago; the contrast of green grass and white mosque with the billboard "Islam, The Fastest Growing Religion In The World"; her feelings of abandonment by her husband, by her father, and by her mother, as well as other familial abandonment. And she recalls how the day of her father's funeral was made much easier mainly because she was hungry, having starved herself for weeks before his death.

 

She contemplates driving off Sans Souci Hill (suicide) as she heads towards the airport, and notes the incongruity of the hill's name with the troubled lives of the people who live there. She doesn't drive off the hill, though arguably, her choice not to send her daughter to Miami is akin to something of a suicidal act. There's more (see my post on it here).

 

In Yanique's story there are several types of bridges, both figurative and literal depending on how far one is willing to stretch the fantasy genre in which the story can be placed. But most important for comparative purposes is that there is an "actual" bridge, which is described as "delicate and pretty, but not able to bear weight," and that it stretches "from Guyana--the place in the world most south--to Miami--the place in the world most north."

 

Then there are the characters and their stories, which all share elements with those in the Walcott-Hackshaw story.

 

A Muslim woman who had abandoned her marriage journeys back to her husband who lives in a house "at the very top of the island [St.Thomas], at the tip of the highest peak." The house is "so ornate when there were so many poor people in St. Thomas," that it fills her with indignity. When the woman arrives at the top of the hill, she discovers her husband is not at home, so she walks back down the hill, and heads towards the bridge. Along the way she reflects on her marriage, her children, her mother, all in a manner very similar to the woman driving on the highway and over Sans Souci Hill in the Walcott-Hackshaw story.

 

In another story in Yanique's bridge collection, a woman abandons her marriage, and leaves her husband and son to deal with her absence, and in a third story, a light-skinned beauty queen (Puerto Rican) wins the biggest title in St. Croix and overcome with feelings about being a fraud, she takes off running towards the bridge where she discovers several truths about herself, including (notably) "when you don't eat or drink for a whole day you forget to be hungry. That hunger doesn't matter..." In a succession of coincidences, the beauty queen, the Muslim woman, and the father and son encounter each other on the bridge. The Muslim woman jumps off, and the bridge collapses.

 

When read alongside each other, the Walcott-Hackshaw story seems like the template for Yanique's story, from which she selects the details and characters for her story. And in some instances (my reading of it) her story appears to be written as a "talk-back" to the Walcott-Hackshaw story. Could she have done it deliberately? Or is it all just a strange coincidence? Is it a case where one island story just happens to resemble another? Is it possible that Yanique never met Walcott-Hackshaw or ever read her book? Is the story some kind of folklore that can be considered belonging to no one (as Nella Larsen argued in her case)?

 

And let's say it can be proven that they met, and that Yanique had to have come across Walcott-Hackshaw's story (maybe while she was in Trinidad on her Fulbright?), why is there no attribution, no acknowledgment, no mention of the Walcott-Hackshaw story in her book? Would she allow a student of hers to do the same thing?

 

Two final questions, which may or may not have to do with geographic / literary space: Is it possible that Yanique expects that Caribbean readers would read her story and recognize her nod or her "talk-back" to Walcott-Hackshaw, as a reader might if the elements are from the work of a recognizable, established writer? And if so does it matter that many of Yanique's readers--the majority, perhaps--may not be familiar with Walcott-Hackshaw's work and will then most likely not catch the nod?

 

Whatever the case of why may be, I, and I'm sure others, certainly recognize Yanique's use of / nod to Walcott-Hackshaw's text, and still find the absence of formal attribution very troubling. 

Poets & Passion (Brooklyn, NY) : Wrap up of Season 4

One of the ways we Caribbean immigrants have cultivated an identity which sustains us by allowing us an outlet to document our experiences as “diaspora” people--one that in part resembles life in the Caribbean, and that in part looks nothing like it—is through our arts and letters. This Spring I had the pleasure of being included in an arts and letters project of that nature, which was sponsored by The Caribbean Cultural Theatre of Brooklyn, and curated by Anton Nimblett, a Trinidadian writer who made a guest appearance here last year, and whose collection of stories (Sections of an Orange), his first, I featured here as well (see review sidebar left).

I asked Anton to sum up his experience as curator for the past season of Poets and Passion, which ended earlier this month (June), and he kindly obliged.

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Poets and Passion (P&P) is one of several projects mounted each year by Brooklyn's Caribbean Cultural Theatre (CCT). P&P's host E. Wayne McDonald is sometimes asked why he does what he does, all the work involved with being director of CCT. He invariably deflects the question with a funny, self-effacing response, charming more than answering.  

This year I worked with CCT and E. Wayne on the Poets and Passions series, and the question "why" was never far from my mind. My answer is clear though: I believe in the mission of Posts and Passion. I believe in what it can do, what it wants to do. And I believe in continuing what I have seen the series actually do.

Posts and Passion is what we call a mix of featured performers and open mic, conversation and after-work lime. At Posts and Passion, the audience is integral to the performance. This season P&P met on the second Tuesday of each month at St. Francis College in downtown Brooklyn, and featured the following generous and distinguished writers: 

November - A reunion of Season 3 with Jacqueline Bishop (Jamaica), JaBez (Jamaica), Anthony Wendell DeRiggs (Grenada), Anton Nimblett (Trinidad), Yolaine St. Fort (Haiti)

February -  Cheryl Boyce Taylor  (Trinidad)

March-  Yolaine St. Fort (Haiti), Josophat-Robert Large  (Haiti)

April-  Geoffrey Philp (Jamaica), Charmaine Hamilton Valere (Guyana)

May - Elizabeth Nunez (Trinidad), Tiphanie Yanique (St. Thomas)

June- Thomas Glave (Jamaica), Mervyn Taylor (Trinidad), Stefhen Bryan (Japan/Jamaica) Jamaica

It's hard to know what to include in a “wrap up,” or where to start. So like any contrary Trinidadian I'll start from the end. After the June event, I thanked Thomas Glave for not only sharing his work and ideas that evening, but for being the first author to respond to the call we sent out. Thomas has a long list of accolades including an O'Henry Award, Lambda Literary Awards, and MLK visiting writer at MIT, to name the first that come to mind. But he willingly came to join us because, in his words "it's for community."  

It's just that spirit of community -- that spirit I saw over and over --  that seems to wrap up the season. Authors traveled by plane, train and automobile to join us. They shared spectacular, moving and thought provoking poetry and prose. And then, they thanked us! Audiences became impassioned about the discussions -- discussions that almost always took unexpected turns into realms of sex and religion and politics, riding on the path of "good writing" -- so passionate that we literally had to urge people out the door, knowing that we'd gone way over our allotted time in the space. 

I think everyone who attended, even once, has a story—a special memory. Meh know seh, as the Jamaicans would have it, that one of  E. Wayne's favorites was the passionate conversation about Haiti past-present-and future, Haiti of myth and misconception, Haiti in literature and in the news. For me: getting to host Cheryl  who has hosted me many times, who energized writers by her thoughts on craft; Geoffrey who seemed to walk in a halo of love (are there really still people who are that nice?); Charmaine coming back to join us after she featured  (and I can't say how her beauty stunned me in person because she won't print it [I most certainly did. Thank you!]); the close-to-full house that the January showcase brought out; friends new and old; family; and the writing, the writing, the writing. 

Published works featured this season:  Who's Your Daddy (Philp);  How To Escape From A Leaper Colony (Yanique); Anna In-Between (Nunez); Black Passenger In Yellow Taxicab (Bryan); Sections Of An Orange (Nimblett); The Torturer's Wife (Glave); Snapshots From Istanbul (Bishop); Convincing The Body (Boyce Taylor); Gone Away (M. Taylor); Keep On Keepin'On (Large).

Poets and Passion Season 4  delivered the poetry and the passion. 

If you want to know more about Posts and Passion or The Caribbean Cultural Theatre find the group Caribbean Cultural Theatre on Facebook, or call 718-783--8345

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"Poets & Passion Wrap-up" contributed by Anton Nimblett

Caribbean Women Writers (series): Tiphanie Yanique's How to Escape from a Leper Colony

There were beds that were still made up, kitchens where there were plates on the tables, offices that still had files on people who had been sick. It seems like people just vanished. The lore was that the place was haunted, that something had happened to the lepers. When I started doing research, I couldn’t find anything. No one knows what happened to them.

– Tiphanie Yanique on the Chacachacare story, which provides the fodder for her creative matter in the title story in How to Escape from a Leper Colony.

Yanique’s “How to Escape from a Leper Colony” is intricately woven with the elements one can detect there in the author’s initial intrigue with the true story of an island that was once home to lepers. The story she weaves is one of folklore and fantasy, mystery, childhood innocence, abandonment, death and disease, all of which have the ability to hold the reader captive from beginning to end.

Most of the other stories in the collection are just as well-crafted and contain similar elements of lore, mystery, abrupt abandonment or escape, and disease of some sort, which combine to create believable gloomy worlds both in the Caribbean and outside of it. Four stories, for instance, are created around a bridge built by a bridge-maker more famous for building ornamental bridges—for earlobes and fingers—than for building a functional bridge. The bridge he builds is described as “huge and stretching from Guyana—the place in the world most south—to Miami—the place in the world most north.” In mysterious turns of fate, characters in the four stories—a Muslim woman, a man and his son, and a beauty queen, whose lives don’t intersect at any time in the stories, end up on or near the bridge at the same time, and their arrival there, each with the goal of doing something akin to soul searching, is on one hand overly manipulated, and on the other hand, quirky and funny (darkly so) enough to achieve a satisfying conclusion to their stories.

Two other long pieces in the collection are well woven works of opposites. In “The International Shop of Coffins” three characters meet in a coffin shop—the proprietor, an immigrant priest, and a schoolgirl—and like the bridge characters, though their lives are vastly different, they become intersected, but in this case (unlike the case of the bridge characters) in a more believable manner. Their stories become entwined by paired thematic opposites—loss and recovery, innocence and awakening, freedom and imprisonment.

In “The Saving Work,” the stories of two families of mixed ethnicities are woven together by their children who leave the Virgin Islands to study in America. At the end of their first year abroad, they surprise their families back home with the news that they are getting married. As the details of the stories move back and forth between countries, questions about race, class, identity, and displacement are raised but are submerged or condensed as the events zero in on the impending wedding, and the shattered innocence of the young couple.

A shorter piece, “Canoe Sickness” (a condition of paralysis) takes place in the U.K. and in Ghana, and though its main characters are non-Caribbean people, the story contributes seamlessly to the collection’s portrayal of broken dreams, and various psychological effects of immigration.

But while the stories previously mentioned soar and certainly meet the expectations one would have of the author of the title story, which debuted separately to high acclaim, other stories in the collection fall short. One longer piece, “Kill the Rabbits,” is an ambitious working of three characters’ real and imagined issues with identity and belongingness to place that seems to either lose its way in carnival revelry or make a statement about carnival's effect on one or the other. I'm not sure. And other shorter pieces—“Where Tourists Don’t Go,” and “Street Man,” for instance—appear chopped or less fleshed out than the others though they contain high points. None of the stories is a complete disappointment.

A Caribbean conclusion

How to Escape from a Leper Colony is either a question one would ask of a psychiatrist or a magician, or it could be a prescriptive from one or the other of them, because presumably one would have to either escape such an incurable condition by way of mind over matter control or by some form of the surreal. Tiphanie Yanique’s characters (placed as they are in their exotic worlds of exaggerated antagonists) escape their incurable conditions—toxic relationships, trauma associated with displacement, and other forms of imprisonment--by making sudden desperate moves that sometimes take on surreal overtones. So if “Leper Colony” is analogous to any current or past Caribbean condition, then the picture is an overwhelmingly gloomy one. The book is fictive, of course, but I agree with Yanique here that there is something about seeing yourself in falseness that makes you feel real. That considered, probably the biggest compliment, and the most gut-honest reaction I (or anyone for that matter) can give to How to Escape from a Leper Colony is that it feels frighteningly real.

(But that may be my outside-of-the-Caribbean, penchant-for-a-well-told-fantasy talking.)

Be the first to comment, and I'll send you a copy for you to decide.

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How to Escape from a Leper Colony, by Tiphanie Yanique (Graywolf Press 2010, 240 pp).

Another book about gloom and doom in the Caribbean?

One of the overwhelming tones of the collection of stories in Tiphanie Yanique’s How to Escape from a Leper Colony is a gloomy one. It probably begins with the connotations of the words “escape” and “leper,” and their relationship to “colony”-- flight from place by group / people either themselves afflicted with an incurable disease, or from an incurable condition of dis-ease. The feeling of imprisonment in one form or other permeates the collection. And the act of escape from these conditions in many instances in the stories is in the form of desperate moves which end in death, or some form of departure, which may leave the reader (high and dry) with more questions than answers...

The reader who is looking for prophecy about the Caribbean and its people in the collection—as some readers do, particularly those fond of digging out predictions or otherwise from texts set in specific geographic spaces—may find its portrayal gloomy, and may even cringe at moments when the wisdom in the message about place seems too buried under exoticism to be fully appreciated. But even he or she (that reader with the discriminating magnifying glass) and anyone else interested in well-crafted stories may find much that is worthy of an appreciative nod in the collection.

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Coming Wednesday: My review of Tiphanie Yanique's How to Escape from a Leper Colony.

What is a Caribbean classic?

Geoffrey Philp poses the question, and invites opinions on who and what should be considered "Caribbean classic." So far, the responses have focused on books and writers: Opal Palmer Adisa has given her picks and definition, and I have given mine. I hope to see many more. But should "Caribbean classic" only pertain to books?

Congrats to Geoffrey for continuing to raise the bar on blog discourse and participation.

Caribbean Women Writers (series): Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River

Jamaica Kincaid is said to have described At the Bottom of the River (her first collection of stories) as a very “unangry, decent, civilized book . . . sort of this successful attempt by English people to make their version of a human being or their version of a person out of me,” and that she would “never write like that again." It would be interesting to know if she felt that way as each was being published individually, or if that suddenly dawned on her when she looked at the collection of them in  Bottom of the River. I do believe a collection gives meaning to a writer’s work that may not be there when you look at each individual separate piece.

  

 Unlike her, Kincaid’s critics have found much evidence of anger and rebellion against British colonialism in the collection, which some say is dramatized (played out by way of metaphor) in the mother-daughter relationships in the stories. Well, so much for the writer’s own view of his or her work, right?

  

 If woman-centered is rebellion, then there is rebellion in the collection. The images and relationships of and between women dominate the stories. But arguably, the images are speculative, not conclusive about much. Individually, they are thought-provoking, gender-assertive at best. And while I certainly see that it’s possible to extract conclusions from the collective images, I find much of it elusive and ambiguous. The collection’s true beauty is (for me) not necessarily in its images of women / womanhood, but in the lyrical language and in the broader philosophical wisdom it presents.

 

Dominant images of women

 

From “Girl”:

A pointed interruption…

 

The piece is a series of warnings and advice for a girl on how to live and behave, particularly in the presence of men. It is written in one long punctuated sentence, which gives forceful, kind of breathless monotony to the warnings: “always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming…” For most of the piece, the tone is abusive and threatening. But then there is one moment, which arguably changes the tone and allows another level of interpretation. That moment is when the girl being addressed interrupts the speaker with this question: “but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?” Her question causes the speaker to remind her of the reason for the warning—"you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?"—and her reminder is laced with ridicule for the question the girl asks, but the interruption gives the reader pause to place this new logic alongside the one being presented by the admonisher, and the ridicule in her tone loses effect. Some may say it is undermined by it. And that moment of interruption is the lasting effect of the piece.

 

 

From “In the Night”:

Is this one pure folklore?

The night-soil men can see a bird walking in trees. It isn’t a bird. It is a woman who has removed her skin and is on the way to drink the blood of her secret enemies. It is a woman who has left her skin in a corner of a house made out of wood. It is a woman who is reasonable and admires honeybees in the hibiscus. It is a woman who, as a joke, brays like a donkey when he is thirsty.

 

And regardless of how you feel about same-sex marriages, I’m sure you can enjoy the magical realism and the humor in this:

Now I am a girl, but one day I will marry a woman—a red-skin woman with black bramblebush hair and brown eyes, who wears skirts that so big I can easily bury my head in them . . . Every day red-skin woman and I will eat bread and milk for breakfast, hide in bushes and throw hardened cow dung at people we don’t like . . . put on John Bull masks and frighten defenseless little children on their way home from school . . . This woman I would like to marry knows many things, but to me she will only tell about things that would never dream of making me cry; and every night, over and over, she will tell me something that begins, “Before you were born.” I will marry a woman like this, and every night, every night, I will be completely happy.

From “Wingless”:

Every girl’s dream?

I shall grow up to be a tall, graceful, and altogether beautiful woman, and I shall impose on large numbers of people my will and also, for my own amusement, great pain. But now, I shall try to see clearly, I shall try to tell differences. I shall try to distinguish the subtle gradations of color in fine cloth, of fingernail length, of manners . . . I swim in a shaft of light, upside down, and I can see myself clearly, through and through, from every angle . . . I am not yet a woman with a terrible and unwanted burden. I am not yet a dog with a cruel and unloving master. I am not yet a tree growing on barren and bitter land. I am not yet the shape of darkness in a dungeon . . . I am primitive and wingless.

From “Blackness”:

A mother’s view of the perfect daughter?

My child haunts the dwelling places of the useless-winged cormorants, so enamored is she of great beauty and ancestral history. She traces each thing from its meager happenstance beginnings in cool and slimy marsh, to its great glory and dominance of air or land or sea, to its odd remains entombed in mysterious alluviums. She loves the thing untouched by lore, she loves the thing that is not cultivated, and yet she loves the thing built up, bit carefully placed upon bit, its very beauty eclipsing the deed it is meant to commemorate.

View from the bottom of the river

 

The title story of the collection is the longest piece, and like the others, it raises questions about interpretation and meaning, and possibly about who (man, woman, young, old) can best interpret or find or give the true meaning of a given terrain--geographical or otherwise.

 

At the beginning of the piece is the description of a mountainous, dangerous terrain, where only the bravest, surest, most deeply arched of human feet will venture. It is a terrain that awaits the eye, the hand, the foot that will give it meaning. Two questions arise: who will give it meaning, and what will that meaning be. The piece first presents a man who lies in his bed (as if) isolated in a small room, waiting. He is deemed unfit to interpret and give meaning to the terrain because he has no depth of insight—"he cannot conceive of the union of opposites, or, for that matter, their very existence, he cannot conceive of varying emotions, he cannot conceive of the chance invention that changes again and again and forever the great turbulence that is human history." This line underscores his impotence: “He sits in nothing, in nothing, in nothing.”

 

Next up is another man who has a wife and child, and who seems to be gainfully occupied with his hands: “He sees before him himself, standing in sawdust, measuring a hole, just dug, in the ground, putting decorative grooves in a banister, erecting columns, carving the head of a cherub over a door…” But despite his ability to create and love, and participate (as opposed to the previous man who does not), he too is deemed incapable of giving meaning and interpretation to the landscape because he is uncertain, vain, and weighed down: “…he stands, forever, crossing and recrossing the threshold, his head lifted up, held aloft and stiff with vanity; then his eyes shift and he sees and he sees, and he is weighed down. First lifted up, then weighed down—always he is so.”

 

Further along in the piece comes revelation—revelation about the terrain and the person who will give it meaning or interpretation. Guided by a woman--described as "naked with long black hair that stood out in a straight line away from her head, and her insteps were high as if she had been used to climbing high mountains. Her skin was the color of brown clay, and she looked like a statue, liquid and gleaming, just before it is to be put in a kiln"--the narrator makes a life changing discovery at the bottom of a river (The allegorical cave? The genesis? Ground zero?). That discovery is of a place or condition, where unquestionable truth, beauty, and purpose exist. It is a place where the sun and moon shine together uniformly on everything, a place where there are no divisions, and nothing in nature has been examined or numbered, and nothing has died. Upon seeing this place, the narrator declares, “I felt . . . I was not made up of flesh and blood and muscles and bone and tissue and cells and vital organs but was made up of my will, and over my will I had complete dominion . . . how bound up I know I am to all that is human endeavor, to all that is past and to all that shall be, to all that shall be lost and leave no trace. I claim these things then—mine—and now feel myself grow solid and complete, my name filling up my mouth.”

 

Now it’s possible to determine that the person (the narrator) who discovers this indisputable truth about the terrain is female. The use of “I” which gives it an autobiographical feel certainly lends to that interpretation. And that would give the collection an overall complete feminist feel. To have one woman be the guide and another make the discovery of the answer to life's biggest riddles would serve to tie up some of the loose ends left by questioning, paired females in some of the other pieces. But I don’t necessarily see the use of “I” as conclusive in that sense. I feel the narrator is stronger when you look at the character. The narrator is someone who is willing to be open–minded, willing to follow a woman's lead, and someone who is unfettered by belief systems… That person could be male or female, in my view.

 

Meaning and interpretation is ultimately up to the individual eye, isn’t it? Nevertheless, I liked the overall conclusion that there is an absolute truth to be found somewhere—an unquestionable truth. Whether that is the state of death, or the state of the devout, or some new to be imagined state, I won’t venture to speculate. But I did feel comforted by it.

 

A Caribbean conclusion

 

Some have pinpointed Antigua as the setting for the stories—not too hard to figure out why. Jamaica Kincaid was born there. But the setting could just as well be wherever in the Caribbean you’ll find or imagine women giving young girls advice on how to behave in front of men, wherever night-soil men come and go, walking on the damp ground in straw shoes, wherever you’ll find jablesse and people who walk through a door backward when they see a dead man standing under a tree, wherever women wet-dream about babies being born, wherever people fill houses with dreams and skeletons, and beautiful things. They can easily be seen as Caribbean stories about conquering evils or adversities—winglessness, oppressive voices—and about finding alternative ways to make sense of one’s dreams and aspirations. They present a certain reality that maintains the element of surrealism that Caribbean people are familiar with. The stories speak of the alternative worlds many Caribbean people create for survival. Those qualities, as well as the strong presence of women in the stories, make the collection an evergreen Caribbean gem.

 

You can see and interpret for yourself. Be the first to comment, and I’ll send you a copy of the book.

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At the Bottom of the River, by Jamaica Kincaid (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1983, 82 pp).

 

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Other posts on Jamaica Kincaid:

 

http://signifyinguyana.typepad.com/signifyin_guyana/2010/05/summer-reads-caribbean-women-writers.html#tp

 

When Twitter works for me

When Twitter works well for me, I get updates (like the one below) that help to remind me I should plan my lists and categories a bit more carefully sometimes. And so with pleasure, I add Peggy Carr to my now happily burgeoning list of women writers from the Caribbean.

Debra Providence asks, "Whose Caribbean Literature?"

Interpreting Twitter

No, it's probably not worthy of being considered a mode for delivering "prophecy," as Geoffrey Philps' poem suggests here, but its promise of a succinct, timely message relayed between friends, (and enemies), networkers, netidlers, and all other kinds of purposeful or purposempty folk, is probably why Twitter is so seductive to many. I have been all those types in my year or so now on Twitter. Today, I squeezed two lines from Jamaica Kincaid's "At the Bottom of the River" into two tweets. I didn't quite feel like a prophet or prophetess, or as if I were repeating the words of one, but something in them . . . the comfort in one, and the wisdom in the other (I felt) was worth sharing.

I see myself as I was as a child. How much I was loved and how much I loved.

Each moment is not as fragile and fleeting as I once thought. Each moment is hard and lasting and so holds much that I must mourn for.

And Twitter's brevity (though brevity is successfully defeated by those who tweet all day long) may present the problem of interpretation... From knowing friend to knowing friend, the message and tone may be clear, but to others... Can you ever be sure of how to read the clipped writing of a stranger? Literary interpretation is not really useful on Twitter, by the way. Getting the tone wrong can cost you a follower or two. After all, we're not birds. We may participate in a common mode of communication, but we don't all speak the same language. Half the time we don't even speak the same English. What's natural to birds is certainly not natural to us.

When Kincaid wrote the following lines, twittering was just for birds, but (here's where literary interpretation can work) the lines bear some relevance to the Twitter experience no?

And the twittering bird twitters away, and that bears a special irritation, though not the irritation of the sting of the evening fly, and that special irritation is mostly ignored, and what could be more natural than that? 

(Or maybe it's just me and my Twitter experiences.)

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Coming Friday: My review of Jamaica Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River.

How significant is Caribbean-American heritage month?

Outlish Magazine asks on Twitter:

US-based peeps. Does National Caribbean-American Heritage Month have any meaning for you? How do you feel about it? http://ht.ly/1SV5M

When I heard of it, my first thought was hey, now I could decorate my sons' school things--clothing, books, and so forth--with Guyanese flags for a whole month and not receive a call from school officials concerned about anti-American behavior. But I know my sons would call me ridiculous and refuse to go along with any Guyanese flag pride demonstration that would make them stand out in school. Who really wants to stand out as some token member of an underrepresented minority? And besides, they'll tell me, we're Americans! Born and bred! 

So I suppose this recognition of Caribbean-Americans would mostly mean something to folks like me, immigrants from the Caribbean. On one hand I can see the wonderful prospects of it. Its predecessors--Black History Month, and Hispanic Heritage Month--have succeeded in highlighting the history and culture of Blacks and Hispanics in America, by at least getting some schools to include Black and Hispanic-focused activities and more in their curriculum during those months. So one definite plus to look forward to is the chance to educate kids and adults about the Caribbean beyond the extremes that most of them see: that the Caribbean and its people are not simply "either or". . . not either beaches, sun, and drunken fun, or crime, poverty, and lawlessness...

On the other hand of my reaction to Caribbean-American Heritage Month, having just experienced the disappointment of filling out a census form with no place for me to indicate my Caribbean identity, I wonder how long it will take for full identification status to be available for us, which of course would mean true recognition of our numbers and needs.

Nothing before it's time, right? Look how long it took for Black folk to be recognized!!

I guess (though it's only in its early stages) I see this month-long dedication to Caribbean-American people as an all too recognizable bit of tokenism -- we've been highlighted with a token form of appreciation, and I respond with conflicting feelings. Pride is among them; as is frustration, and hope that eventually I'll get my American sons to feel proud about being sent to school draped in Guyanese flags.