Landscape and Poetic Identity in Contemporary Caribbean Women's Poetry‪.‬

This paper explores some of the ways that Caribbean poets handle nature, landscape, and place in a selection of recent works. My first epigraph, taken from Grace Nichols' most recent collection of poems, acknowledges the enduring image of the land-as-Eden in Caribbean poetry but it does so with a knowing wariness which I argue is characteristic of women's poetry. The second and third epigraphs are taken from two of the region's most renowned male poets because Derek Walcott and Edward Kamau Brathwaite have been so instrumental in establishing the parameters which have come to define a recognizable (if not 'authentic') Caribbean poetic tradition. In the second epigraph, Walcott argues that the sheer weight of poetic representations of the seasonal cycles in temperate lands has accreted meanings that slide onto the subjects of those lands and, by contrast, deny the full subjectivity of those who do not inhabit temperate lands. Brathwaite, too, suggests a close connection between geography and cultural production when he argues that the steady rhythms of the pentameter cannot give voice to the volatile geography of the Caribbean. (2) He goes on to argue that the reliance on European literary models to express the realities of the Caribbean resulted in impossible formulations in local writing (he gives the example of a West Indian child writing in an essay, "the snow was falling on the cane fields") and a confused and contradictory aesthetic in which writers tried "to have both cultures at the same time" ("History" 264). Where Brathwaite sees confusion, Walcott sees possibilities, as this address to his European and African grandfathers, in "The Muse of History," makes clear: Again, poetry and Nature are implicitly linked in the idea of the mother tongue as a kind of Eden. The positions associated with Walcott and Brathwaite and the polarized trajectories they imply of hybridity-versus-nativism respectively (to summarize crudely), although derived from the ferment of the pre- and post-independence cultural moments of the 1970s and 1980s, continue to inflect Caribbean poetry. It is worth noting here, too, that despite obvious differences in their engagement with debates about an appropriately Caribbean poetics, both poets have consistently represented the Caribbean landscape in feminized terms and the Caribbean subject in search of agency as resolutely male. If, in colonial discourse, the New World was routinely represented as virgin land to be penetrated, conquered, and mapped as territory, then nationalist/post-colonial discourses have also routinely metaphorized the nation as woman--as that which is being fought for, the symbolic currency through which competing claims for the land are made visible. This conflation of woman with the land is inseparable from woman's natural association with the home and the sense that the domestic space provides an obvious and uncomplicated site of belonging for women--and one which should, and can, be protected from colonial intrusion. Men are perceived as being located exclusively in the public sphere, doing the dirty political work necessary to maintain kith and kin. In this highly gendered and over-determined context, what are the possibilities for women's participation in cultural activity?