Haunting in postcolonial Caribbean literature: Ghosts of the plantation, political ecology of King Sugar, and enchantment of capitalsit modernity in Jamaica, Dominica, and Guyana
(Originally posted elsewhere on 17 August 2020.)
A compilation of two scholars, side-by-side. Each writes on ghosts/haunting/spectral presence in twentieth-century and contemporary literature of the Greater Caribbean, in fiction which grapples with (post/neo)colonial legacies.
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Excerpt 1:
[In Mittelholzer’s novel] the reworking of Euro-American Gothic tropes in a Caribbean context [...] illuminate the particular inflection of capitalist modernity in Guyana. [...] Mittelholzer’s text [...] registers in striking fashion the felt experience of the restructuring of ecological regimes at local and global scales, a process that in Guyana is inseparable from the development of the sugar frontier. Set in the 1930s, My Bones and My Flute revolves around a cursed manuscript belonging to an eighteenth-century Dutch planter, Jan Voorman, who died during the Berbice slave rebellion of 1763. […] Nevertheless, in the use it makes of Guyanese folk beliefs, the novel does gesture towards a transition from the colonial Gothic into something like a [...] [locally-specific] magical realist aesthetic [...]. The allusive presence in My Bones and My Flute of local supernatural traditions complicates the novel’s Gothic register, pushing the narrative towards a form of the fabulous or marvellous grounded in the specific inflection of capitalist modernity in Guyana.
Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of the plantation and plot as contrasting organizational models for Caribbean literature is helpful in understanding this movement. For Wynter, the rise of the capitalist world-economy, as both cause and effect of the region’s plantation-societies, marked “ a change of such world-historical magnitude that we are all, without exception, still ‘enchanted’, imprisoned [...] in its bewitched reality.” In fact, she argues, history in the plantation context is “fiction” [...]. Wynter cites the magical realist style of Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias, but we might also read those writers referred to earlier in connection with the reworking of the Gothic mode (Harris, Frankétienne, Brodber, Carpentier) in this light. [...] Wynter’s argument has the great benefit of problematizing what Jennifer Wenzel calls the “empty globalism of the label magical realism, in which the magical might be anything unfamiliar to a European and American reader.” On a Wynterian reading, the ‘magic’ in magic realism is to be equated not only with the folkloric traditions and magico-religious practices of the colonized, but also with the unreal reality produced by the socio-economic pressures of the plantation regime and the disjunctive, alienated relationship to the land it installs.
The irrealist tonalities of Mittelholzer’s novel might be understood as mediating this plantation-induced bewitchment. More particularly, they might be understood in relation to the contradictory social reality engendered by the political ecology of the dominant plantation crop in Guyana — King Sugar. […] The story itself is structured around an inversion of the developmental pattern of the plantation complex in Guyana [...]. The Dutch were the first European colonizers to establish durable plantation settlements in the Guyana region. Initially, their agricultural activities were focused “within a belt that lay between approximately thirty to one hundred miles upriver.” By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, many planters had shifted operations to the more fertile soils of the coast. […] Meanwhile, the plantations upriver fell into decline and were lost to the jungle. This dynamic of coastal development in tandem with interior underdevelopment was reinforced throughout the nineteenth century [...] due to active resistance on the part of planters who, as Walter Rodney notes, “viewed the hinterland as a potential competitor for labour and sought to dissuade free blacks from moving in that direction.” [...]
The journey Milton and the Nevinsons make upriver in My Bones and My Flute replays in reverse the migration of the sugar estates to the coast. […] If he thereby conjures up a spectre of the plantation system’s past and of the impact of the dynamics of uneven development, he also, in the particular way in which he perceives the re-conquest of the former plantation grounds by the jungle, summons up a spectre of the sugar industry’s future, of its potential decline and fall. […] My Bones and My Flute would seem to fit this pattern, its publication in the 1950s coinciding with the transition between the end of the ‘long’ nineteenth -century cycle of accumulation and the beginning of the post-war global economic boom. In the Caribbean, the pressures of this transitional period were manifested in massive economic and political upheaval, including crisis in the sugar industry, widespread labour unrest, and — in the 1950s — the introduction of modernization programmes in many areas. [...] As the existing ecological regime is overturned, the anamorphic and catachrestic features of Gothic texts register the feelings of rupture, strangeness, and irreality engendered by the transformation of stabilized structures […].
Text above by: Michael Niblett, “Specters in the Forest: Gothic Form and World-Ecology in Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute,” Small Axe, vol. 18 (2014). [Emphasis mine.]
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Excerpt 2:
In the liminal spaces teeming with supernatural beings of contemporary Caribbean ghost stories -- among them ... loup-garous, bacoos, duppies ... soucouyants -- [...] darkness [can be] a quintessential ghostly threshold, a terrain where the dark night has come to be associated with the horrors of colonialism, slavery, violence, and the plantation. [...] What happens to the Caribbean ghost tale when the spectres of history are forced into the light of day? [...] It allows for a ghost story that opens with the affirmation: “in the beginning, there was laughter”, as in Jamaican writer Marcia Douglas’s Madam Fate (1999). The relationship between ghosts or spirits and darkness in contemporary Caribbean fiction, however, has shifted partly as a result of profound changes in regional conditions -- political as well as infrastructural. Ever-present electrical lighting, for example, has transformed nocturnal Caribbean landscapes, particularly during the last three decades, altering the cultural tenets and meanings linked to light and darkness. [...] Complete darkness has become elusive, rarified, changing the context [...]. In places now flooded with electrical light, the uncanny has been freed from the darkness, emerging into the light, both expanding and transforming the realm of the ghost story. Perhaps the best example of this transformation is [...] in “Teresa Irene” (1989) a short story by Dominican writer Angela Hernandez Nunez, from her collection Alotropos. [...] Hernandez offers a version of the story as a poetic tale of horror centered on the luring of a young girl into a river pool whose bed was “traversed by underwater currents forming treacherous whirlpools [...].” In this story the transformation of light into the source of horror marks a new direction [...]. The space of horror, the luminous pool, is superficially Eden-like [...].
Teresa Irene finds a strange counterpart in another child at the centre of a haunting tale: Margaret, the eavesdropping narrator of Denise Harris’s Web of Secrets (1996, Guyana). Set in Guyana in the 1960s, the novel explores the tangle of family secrets -- slavery ... physical and emotional abuse ... racism -- that young Margaret believes must come out in the open if the family is to survive. [...] Margaret’s tale is of interest in [this] context because [...] she seeks to improve the family’s precarious finances with the help of a baku or bacoo. A folkloric figure of West African provenance [...], Bacoo are a common element in recent Guyanese fiction focusing on the supernatural, albeit through reinterpretations that move away from the quintessentially folkloric figures of Web of Secrets, linking it to the brutal history of Dutch planters and gold prospectors in Suriname and Guyana. In many of these tales the power of the bacoo-like spirits is linked to colonial violence, brutality [...]. Such is the case of Peter Hill’s The Bacoo (1998), where an entity released from an old rum bottle takes control of the body and spirit of the suburban Toronto housewife [...]. Hill’s interpretation of the bacoo resonates against similar “possessing” figure in Raywat Deonandan’s “Children of the Melange” (from his 1999 collection Sweet Like Saltwater) […]. The transformative power of light as it enters the Caribbean ghost story has led to sweeping reimaginings of the nature and significance of the ghostly and the terrifying in Caribbean literature. It allows for a ghost story that opens with the affirmation: “in the beginning, there was laughter”, as in Jamaican writer Marcia Douglas’s Madam Fate (1999). [...] “There is laughter which comes from so far”, Douglas writes, and “only those ears sensitive to high frequency can hear it” once the threshold from darkness to light has been crossed and fear has no dominion.
Text above by: Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “The Ghost and the Darkness: Creole Hauntings in Caribbean Literature” [Proof version] (2017).
