Images from the Miami Book Fair International

Caribbean Lit. Luminaries (L. to R.):Heather Russell. Donna Aza Weir-Soley, 

Gordon Rohlehr, Opal Palmer Adisa, Ramabai Espinet

Wimpy Kid Creator: Jeff Kinney

Book Monster Invades Miami

For more, please follow this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geoffreyphilp/sets/72157628094592643/show/

Caribbean Erotic: Book Launch and Sunday Brunch

A buffet never before experienced in the South Florida community!  Come dine with us. The editors and contributing writers of Caribbean Erotic anthology will be reading and signing books at the Irie Isle Sunday Morning Brunch on Sunday, November 20, 11-1 p.m. 


Come join us for great poetry, delicious Jamaican cuisine, and stimulating conversation!


Featured Writers:  Opal Palmer Adisa and Aza Weir-Soley (co-editors), Jacqueline Bishop, B. Alison Richards, Heather Russell, Malachi Smith, and more...

Irie Isle Jamaican Restaurant

1480 South Palm Avenue.

Pembroke Pines, FL 33025 

Donna Aza Weir-Soley, Heather Russell & Geoffrey Philp on PULSE

In case you missed the shows or weren't able to watch, here's the link:

http://video.wpbt2.org/video/1645554495

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Caribbean Writers on PULSE with Jessy Schuster

PULSE with Jessy Schuster

Thursday, November 18 @ 7:30 PM

Sunday, November 21 @ 12:00 PM 

Interview with Donna Aza Weir-Soley
Florida International University associate professor of English, Donna Aza Weir-Soley, joins us on the program to discuss the book she is presenting at the Miami Book Fair International, Eroticism, Spirituality And Resistance In Black Women's Writings.

Interview with Heather Russell
Florida International University associate professor of English, Heather Russell, joins us on the program to discuss her latest book, Legba's Crossing: Narratology In The African Atlantic, which she is presenting at the Miami Book Fair International.

Heather Russell and Donna Aza Weir-Soley will be reading at the Miami Book Fair International

Saturday, November 20 @ 3:30 pm. Room 3315 (Building 3, 3rd Floor)

Interview with Geoffrey Philp


Jamaican author, Geoffrey Philp, joins us on Pulse to discuss his latest poetry collection, Dub Wise, and the criticism and feedback he received from his previous book, Who’s Your Daddy?

Geoffrey Philp will be reading at the Miami Book Fair International

Sunday, November 21 @ 1:00 pm. Room 3410 (Building 3, 4th Floor)

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Heather Russell Launches Legba’s Crossing in Florida

Dr. Heather Russell

By Christine Craig

It is rare that the launch of an academic book creates a buzz in non-academic circles, but the launch of Dr. Heather Russell’s book, Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic, was an exception. A large, appreciative crowd turned out for the event held at the Southwest Regional Library in Pembroke Pines, Florida on March 27, 2010.

In offering her congratulations, Jamaica’s Consul General to the Southern United States, Mrs. Sandra Grant Griffiths, said that Prof. Russell was not only outstanding in the academic field, but was also actively involved in the diaspora and so understood what it takes to have gotten here and what it will take to go forward.

Professor Houston Baker, Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee praised Prof. Russell as “A born egalitarian whose activist scholarship has made a great contribution to diaspora studies.” Also bringing special greetings were Zimbabwean writer Chenjeral Hove and Dr. Donna Aza Weir-Soley, Associate Professor at Florida International University, who kept the event on track with her warm and insightful remarks about Dr. Russell’s many fine qualities as a scholar, teacher, friend and mother.

Dr.  Russell, an associate professor of English at Florida International University in Miami, attended St. Andrew High School in Jamaica, and then, migrated to the U.S. and earned her PhD from Rutgers University. Her parents, Rev. Horace Russell and Beryl Russell headed the family group on hand to add their share of congratulations and good wishes.

Prof. Russell closed the event with readings from her book, introducing the themes of Legba as the intermediary between humans and God - the "divine linguist," and the linkages between history and literature as being practically interchangeable. The books she examines are Salt by Earl Lovelace; No Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff, and John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing.

Reviewers of the book have praised its scholarship and originality. Author and scholar Arlene Keizer states: “Legba’s Crossing is a fascinating, well-written book of considerable significance to African diaspora literary studies.” And Prof. Carol Boyce Davies of Cornell University says, “Legba’s Crossing puts Heather Russell among the best of her generation of scholars, adept in reading both formal literature and its theory and popular culture. Her work demonstrates a fluidity in its critical movements between Caribbean and U.S. African American textualities.”

Legba’s Crossing was published by the University of Georgia Press and is available from: www.ugapress.org.

***

Christine Craig is Jamaican. Her first published work was children’s fiction, two full-color children’s books in collaboration with artist Karl Craig — Emanuel and his Parrot and Emanuel Goes to Market; published by Oxford University Press. A collection of poems, Quadrille for Tigers, was published by Mina Press, Berkeley, California, followed by a children’s novella, Bird Gang, published by Heinemann Caribbean. Her collection of short stories Mint Tea was published by Heinemann (UK). Her poetry and fiction for adults have been published in British, Caribbean and American anthologies.

***

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In My Own Words: Heather D. Russell (2010)

As with any book, I arrived at Legba’s Crossing:  Narratology in the African Atlantic (2009) through a journey marked by crossroads (life’s experience), pathways (routes/roots), intuition (intrinsic commitment to justice and light) and divine inspiration (strictly a calling).  The following reminiscences reflect some of these:


- I remember the first time I met Damballah, powerful Haitian loa of the sky.  I met him as an undergraduate at Rutgers, reading a John Edgar Wideman novel.  I felt an instant spiritual/ideological connection, BUT I was also just meeting Sambo, Mammy, Jezebel, I mean I had seen them all over…but understood them now.  I wrestled with these counter-narratives:  the debased, dehumanizing, distorted representations of black people and how these images have been used to oppress us…and then, in stark contrast, this god…African, New World, powerful, philosophical, resistant, hidden.  Could/would the one be used/useful to subvert the other?  I could not answer that question definitively then…until I met Legba…


- As a lover of literature, I have never cottoned to linearity.  Grand narratives, neat, tidy endings, building chronologically or even teleologically -- always bored me.  I remember sophomore year, the first time I read Tristam Shandy and Eliot’s The Wasteland…I would not read in quite the same way after…and still…I had not yet gleaned how chronology and linearity were political tools, how these had been used to misrepresent, to distort, to silence, to simplify my history.


- Long before the death of the author was proclaimed, I was always infinitely more intrigued by the experience of reading a novel than the actual details revealed in it! Did it surprise?  Did it refuse to conform to my expectations?  WHO WAS I, at the end of the novel?  I suppose I have always been a non-con-form-ist!


- Legba’s Crossing is an attempt to theorize the revolutionary potential of the experience of reading…


- Growing up in Jamaica as the daughter of a Baptist minister from Free Town, Clarendon, a theologian and a Garveyite, a historian and advocate for the spiritually/materially dispossessed – I was taught by both of my parents to be inquisitive -- to question the status quo, to live a life in which works on earth were the most important manifestation of spirituality.  In 1976, my father was called to the historic East Queen Street Baptist Church in downtown Kingston where I began attending.  I was viscerally struck by social class inequity as a very young child.  My father had established a free medical and dental clinic for the community, housed at the church.  One day, when I was about seven-years old, a woman came for some treatment, but was, according to the deacon that drove her out of the churchyard, improperly dressed.  It was my earliest memory of the pervasive classism that is so deeply entrenched in Jamaica…I would later understand how color, colonialism, sexism, classism, poverty, violence, invisibility were interwoven…


- Legba’s Crossing is the culmination of years of research (some formal, some informal) -- It is a study in African Atlantic form, philosophy, aesthetics, history, politics, literature and the struggle of black people to live lives of dignity, decency, equity and fairness. 

- In Legba’s Crossing, I examine literary texts, all of which engage key historical moments of black subjugation and resistance and which through their narrative structure, break with traditional forms governing time, space, narration, and conventional Western knowledge structures.  Diasporic and cross-temporal, my work includes analyses of:  the C19th Xhosa cattle killing in South Africa, US Reconstruction, the Grenada Revolution and invasion, Independence and post-Independence movement in Jamaica, Trinidad, US Civil Rights, and “globalization and race” in its African diasporic contexts. 

- Legba’s Crossing is an attempt to examine the radical, democratizing, revolutionary potential of form…

- Invoking the Haitian loa Papa Legba, who is the “god of the crossroads” --   as the sign of such African Atlantic narrative intervention -- I explore the philosophical, epistemological, and ethical concepts embodied by this god.

- I met Papa Legba, first through Henry Louis Gates’ The Signifying Monkey, who examines Legba’s West African corollary:  Eshu-Elegbara.  By the time I had read about Eshu-Elegbara, Yoruba god of the crossroads, god of divine purpose, meaning, interpretation, I was not only viscerally interrupted, BUT for the first time, after being inundated with European theory, philosophy/ers, in graduate school, I realized that so much of current African Atlantic cultural production made much more sense once I understood Legba’s principles:  indeterminacy, nuance, contradiction, flexibility, Legba’s mandate that the human being must struggle with/for understanding, apprehension, divine purpose.  Jazz made more sense with Legba.  Our propinquity towards improvisation, disruption of flow, linearity, chronology.  Hip-hop made more sense with Legba.  African diaspora literature made more sense with Legba. 

Legba’s Crossing:  Narratology in the African Atlantic is my humble attempt to pull together some of the aforementioned tangled skeins of meaning…àshe.


For ordering information see:
http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/legbas_crossing/0/1

or
http://www.amazon.com/Legbas-Crossing-Narratology-African-Atlantic/dp/0820328677

***

About the author:

Dr. Heather Russell’s research interests examine narrative form and its relationship to configurations of national/racial identities. Her latest book, Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic, was published by the University of of Georgia Press. She has also published in African American Review; Contours; The Massachusetts Review; and American Literature and has essays in a collection on John Edgar Wideman, Jacqueline Bishop’s, My Mother Who is Me, and Donna Aza Weir-Soley and Opal Palmer Adisa’s Caribbean Erotic.

At the undergraduate level, Dr. Russell regularly teaches C19th and C20th African American  Literatures; Major Caribbean Writers; Black Citizenships and Black History and the Fictive Imagination. For the graduate curriculum, she teaches African Diaspora Women Writers and Narratives of Enslavement and Resistance.

***

You are cordially invited to attend the launch of 

Legba’s Crossing:  Narratology in the African Atlantic

by Heather Russell, Ph.D

March 27, 2010

South West Regional Library (SWR)

Pines Center

16835 Sheridan Street. Pembroke Pines, FL 33331

  

1-5pm (reception from 1-2pm)

RSVP:(954)257-8731 or russellh@fiu.edu

Sponsored by:South Regional/Southwest Regional

***

Book Launch: Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic

You are cordially invited to attend the launch of 

Legba’s Crossing:  Narratology in the African Atlantic
by Heather Russell, Ph.D

March 27, 2010

South West Regional Library (SWR)

Pines Center

16835 Sheridan Street. Pembroke Pines, FL 33331
  
1-5pm (reception from 1-2pm)



RSVP:(954)257-8731 or russellh@fiu.edu

Sponsored by:South Regional/Southwest Regional

***

About the author:

Dr. Heather Russell’s research interests examine narrative form and its relationship to configurations of national/racial identities. Her latest book, Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic, was published by the University of of Georgia Press. She has also published in African American Review; Contours; The Massachusetts Review; and American Literature and has essays in a collection on John Edgar Wideman, Jacqueline Bishop’s, My Mother Who is Me, and Donna Aza Weir-Soley and Opal Palmer Adisa’s Caribbean Erotic.

At the undergraduate level, Dr. Russell regularly teaches C19th and C20th African American Literatures; Major Caribbean Writers; Black Citizenships and Black History and the Fictive Imagination. For the graduate curriculum, she teaches African Diaspora Women Writers and Narratives of Enslavement and Resistance.

***

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Book Review: Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic

Perhaps the single most perplexing issue in the discussion African Atlantic aesthetics is the cultural connection among the African peoples who survived the Middle Passage. Drawing on the scholarship of Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, and Kamau Brathwaite, Dr. Heather Russell in Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic weaves the authorial strategies of James Weldon Johnson, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, Earl Lovelace, and John Edgar Wideman into a compelling model for Black Atlantic hermeneutics.

As if to disprove the notion that vibrant cultures could not be built on the holocaust of the African Atlantic, Dr. Russell introduces the concepts of the “jazz novel,” Legba Principle, “quilting,” and Great Time in three sections: Interruptions, Disruptions, and Eruptions. In Interruptions, she discusses the work of James Weldon Johnson and Audre Lorde vis-a-vis the Legba Principle: “the recognition that semantic open-endedness and indeterminacy are always mutually entwined with potentially life-enhancing lessons of the crossroads” (54). What fascinates Russell in her examination of Johnson and Lorde is the “breaking free from the discursive and epistemological expectations of the conventional form” of the autobiography (165). Form is the method by which cultures transmit values and Johnson’s and Lorde’s interruptions suggest alternative methods which ultimately challenge hegemonic notions of race and class.

Building on the ideas of the interruptions of form, Russell introduces two other models of African Atlantic hermeneutics: “quilting” and the “jazz novel.” In No Telephone to Heaven, Russell notes: “Michelle Cliff’s ‘quilted structure’ of narration tasks readers with acquiring an ‘African Atlantic literacy’ in order to glean more fully enduring legacies of the ravages and challenges of colonialism that African Atlantic peoples face in the context of colonialism’s inherited hierarchies of color and class” (166). No Telephone to Heaven, Russell contends, serves as a “tool for powerfully interrogating questions of race, imagination, and of course, the nation” (107).

With Earl Lovelace’s Salt, however, Russell offers a different exegetical model that derives from poet-critic Kamau Brathwaite’s “Jazz and the West Indian Novel”: “it will try to express the essence of this community through its form… and its concern will be with the community as a whole, its characters taking their place in that community, of which they are felt to be an integral part” (127). In praxis the characters and narrator in Salt, Russell asserts, “‘jam’ on the viability of achieving racial understanding, political inclusion, and economic enfranchisement” (127). As with his previous novels, The Dragon Can’t Dance and The Wine of Astonishment, Russell observes, “Lovelace crafts enduring characters, all of whom wrestle with the challenges of national development… and the historic disenfranchisement of blacks" (109). Yet with the democratization of the narrative in Salt, which at times veers seemingly toward chaos, Russell again urges the development of an “African Atlantic literacy”: “Salt teaches us to dream and found the nation in steady ways based upon one multivocal foundation and writerly theoretical exemplum” (138).

The logical conclusion to Russell's hermeneutics is John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing in which the narrative strategy is built around the concept popularized by Mircea Eliade, Great Time, so that the “hegemony of Western linear, cause-and-effect discursive practice is exposed and critiqued” (143). Implicit in Wideman’s anlaysis is that the texts “symbolically ‘redress’ racist historical misrepresentation” (143). Specifically, this has meant that Wideman’s stories uncover “’false prophecies’ (Wideman’s phrase for dominant racist discourses, i.e. the doctrine paradigm of race)” which leads “black subjects to internalize a self-hatred that results in the destruction and death of black bodies” (144). Wideman’s use of Great Time, in which human agency derives from acts of imagination, subverts the idea of linear time and liberates the individual, especially New World Africans, from Western epistemological constructs.

Although Russell’s conclusions suggest that Legba’s influence can only be recognized in disruptions of form and other variations, Legba’s Crossing signals a new dimension in Black Atlantic hermeneutics. The consolidation of paradigms such as the “jazz novel,” Legba Principle, “quilting,” and Great Time are essential because they expand our understanding of the authorial choices of Johnson, Lorde, Cliff, Lovelace, and Wideman and increase our “African Atlantic literacy" of which Russell has become its most lucid advocate.

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New Book: Legba's Crossing by Heather Russell

In Haiti, Papa Legba is the spirit whose permission must be sought to communicate with the spirit world. He stands at and for the crossroads of language, interpretation, and form and is considered to be like the voice of a god. In Legba’s Crossing, Heather Russell examines how writers from the United States and the anglophone Caribbean challenge conventional Western narratives through innovative use, disruption, and reconfiguration of form.

Russell’s in-depth analysis of the work of James Weldon Johnson, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, Earl Lovelace, and John Edgar Wideman is framed in light of the West African aesthetic principle of àshe, a quality ascribed to art that transcends the prescribed boundaries of form. Àshe is linked to the characteristics of improvisation and flexibility that are central to jazz and other art forms. Russell argues that African Atlantic writers self-consciously and self-reflexively manipulate dominant forms that prescribe a certain trajectory of, for example, enlightenment, civilization, or progress. She connects this seemingly postmodern meta-analysis to much older West African philosophy and its African Atlantic iterations, which she calls the “Legba Principle.”

Advance Praise for Legba's Crossing

"This text contributes to intellectually and academically pertinent concerns on nation and nationhood, freedom and slavery, and race, gender, and sexuality as contentious ontological sites in the conquest and reformulation of the Americas."
—Glyne Griffith, coeditor of Color, Hair, and Bone: Race in the Twenty-first Century

  "Legba's Crossing is a fascinating, well-written book of considerable significance to African diaspora literary studies. Professor Russell's readings of the simultaneous 'materialist immersion and formal innovation' of these writers is an original and highly generative theoretical perspective."
—Arlene R. Keizer, author of Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery

"The words Legba and crossing signal far more than another predictable book tracing the here and there of a so-called Black Atlantic. Legba’s Crossing heralds, instead, a virtuoso scholarly cross over. Russell arrives resolutely at comprehensively nuanced and analytical ports of call. Her critical voyage is scintillatingly original, manifestly interdisciplinary, and instructive. Readers will find themselves renewed by her activist scholarship as well as her formalist analyses. Legba’s Crossing indisputably pilots Diaspora Studies to the forefront of contemporary expressive cultural analysis and debate."
—Houston A. Baker, Distinguished University Professor, Vanderbilt University

"Legba’s Crossing puts Heather Russell among the best of her generation of scholars, adept in reading both formal literature and its theory and popular culture. Her work demonstrates a fluidity in its critical movements between Caribbean and U.S. African American textualities. Her book dislodges the earlier Black Atlantic discourse from its North Atlantic framing and makes it applicable to a larger African diaspora understanding. Legba, who has been coming through in a variety of other texts, is a prominent articulator of a middle-passage epistemology, which finally gets full presentation here. Above all, Heather Russell demonstrates an ease, confidence, and critical astuteness, particularly in her attention to what she calls the "formal eruptions of the African Atlantic."
—Carole Boyce Davies, author of Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones

Source:  University of Georgia Press

***

Introduction to Caribbean Literature: Dr. Heather Russell

Dr. Heather Russell’s research interests examine narrative form and its relationship to configurations of national/racial identities. Her forthcoming book, Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic, will published by the University of of Georgia Press. She has also published in African American Review; Contours; The Massachusetts Review; and American Literature and has essays in a collection on John Edgar Wideman, Jacqueline Bishop’s My Mother Who is Me and Donna Aza Weir-Soley and Opal Palmer Adisa’s Caribbean Erotic.

At the undergraduate level, Andrade regularly teaches C19th and C20th African American Literatures; Major Caribbean Writers; Black Citizenships and Black History and the Fictive Imagination. For the graduate curriculum, she teaches African Diaspora Women Writers and Narratives of Enslavement and Resistance.

Heather Russell grew up in Jamaica and attended St. Andrew High School for girls. Legba’s Crossing is available for pre-order at Barnes & Noble and Amazon

Presentation for the Florida Humanities Council Florida Center for Teachers (K-12)

By Heather Russell, Ph.D.

Anglophone: Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, St. Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Lucia, Grenada, Belize, Anguilla, Cayman, British Virgin Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guyana, The Bahamas.

Hispanophone: Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico

Francophone: Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana

A Few Definitions

Derek Walcott’s description for Caribbean geo-spatiality in which individual island-states are reconceived as a group – and term is metonymic for Caribbean peoples who are themselves navigating national/regional configurations and identities.

For Antonio Benitez-Rojo the Caribbean is conceived as a “repeating island” – a meta-archipelago which has no center/periphery and hence reconfigures conventional conceptualization of colonial paradigms: center-margin, core-periphery, metropole-outpost. The Caribbean is thus polyrhythmic – or like “a ray of light with a prism.”

The Limbo Gateway

The Middle Passage is the site where New World identities are born: former African identities become disassembled and new world African identities get reassembled. 

Wilson Harris calls this the "limbo gateway." Caribbean literature is thus produced by the "limbo imagination."

Colonial Values

Caribbean Values

English/Spanish/French Protestant/Catholic Reality v. Fantasy/Myth Fact v. Fiction History: linear, causal Literature: 7 elements: Meaning,Form, Narration, Tone, Character, Use of Language, Structure

Nation Languages: Creoles Vodoun, Santeria, Obeah Magical Realism Storytelling Historiography: Great Time Literatures

Literary Comparison of Elements

Colonial Literature	Caribbean literatures
Meaning: fixed, clear, identifiable Form: genre identifiable Narrative Voice: principle narrating subject (epic) Character: archetypal, fixed Use of Language: consistent Structure: parallelism, linearity,etc.	Meaning: flexible, indeterminate Form: mixed genres Narrative Voice: multiple narrating subjects (jazz) Character: unstable, fluid Use of Language: mixed Structure: hybrid, asymmetrical, disruption of linearity

Caribbean "Quilted Discourse" 

Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido’s concept of the “quilted structure” of Caribbean women’s writing as a reconfiguration of fragmentation (modernist angst) and linearity (phallocentricity).

No Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff

We are a fragmented people. My experience as a writer coming from a culture of colonialism, a culture of black people riven from each other, my struggle to get wholeness from fragmentation while working within fragmentation, producing work which may find its strength in its depiction of fragmentation, through form as well as content.

The truck struggled on up through the Cockpits. Its side was painted with the motto…NO TELEPHONE TO HEAVEN. How these words had come to him [the owner] they did not know…NO TELEPHONE TO HEAVEN. No Voice to God. A waste to try…the motto suited them…Depression. Downpressions. Oppression. Recession. Intercession. Commission. Omission. Missionaries…all the same t’ing mi dear.

We is in Babylon. Yes mi dear Bredda. NO TELEPHONE TO HEAVEN. Maybe the line it is engaged and God can’t bodder wid de likes of we. God nuh mus’ be Hinglish…But how could Massa God be their enemy? The seawater which hid their history was not at fault. The moon which lit the sea…the blue mountains. The black widow. The brown widow. The thick stands of Black Mangrove.

None of these were the enemy.

They were tired of praying for those that persecuted them. (17)

*No Telephone repetition like a jazz riff; Blended prose-poetic form; Platform English/Jamaican blended.

Jazz and the West Indian Novel

“Jazz and the West Indian Novel" by Kamau Brathwaite

The jazz novel in the normal course of things, will hardly be an epic. Dealing with a specific, clearly-defined, folk-type community, it will try to express the essence of this community through its form.

History of the Voice by Kamau Brathwaite

It is not language, but people who make revolutions. I think however, that language does really have a role to play here, certainly in the Caribbean. But it is an English [French/Spanish] that is not the standard, imported, educated English, …It is what I call, as I say, nation language. I use the term in contrast to dialect…Dialect is thought of as “bad” English. Dialect is “inferior” English. Dialect is the language when you want to make fun of someone. Caricature speaks in dialect…Nation Language on the other hand, is the submerged area of that dialect that is much more closely allied to the African aspect of experience in the Caribbean. It may be in English, but often it is in an English which is like a howl, or a shout, or a machine-gun, or the wind, or a wave. It is also like the blues.(266).

A “JAZZ” NOVEL

Salt by Earl Lovelace

Watch the landscape of this island…and you know they coulda never hold people here surrendered to unfreedom.’ The sky, the sea, every green leaf and tangle of vines sing freedom.

Four hundred years it take them to find out that you can’t keep people in captivity. Four hundred years! And it didn’t happen just so. People had to revolt. People had to poison people. Port-of-Spain had to burn down. A hurricane had to hit the island. Haiti had to defeat Napoleon. People had to run away up the mountains. People had to fight. And then they agree, yes. We can’t hold people in captivity here.

But now they had another problem: it was not how to keep people in captivity. It was how to set people at liberty (7).

*History v. Historiography. This excerpt provides both alternative/resistant history to conventional narrative of Slavery and Emancipation and alternative/resistant historiography: through its form.

Migration Stories

Home	Adopted Country
Developing nations: post-independence, post-industrial, globalization Political upheavals: political instability, economic instability Colonialism’s legacies: class/color stratification Cultural homogeneity: religioussyncretism, creoles/nation languages, music, dance,food, customs, sports, national pride	Developed nation: free market, economic alienation for many immigrants: credit system, legal status issues, underemployment Political stability: high numbers of non-citizenship, limited representation Racism, ethnocentrism Cultural diversity: cultural enclaves, nostalgia, displacement, cultural memory, border crossings

Migration Story 1
 

Let It Rain Coffee: A Novel by Angie Cruz

The more she bought, the more insatiable she became. -God, can you help me out here? she asked, hoping he’d help her win the lottery she played on Sundays. Within days of her prayers, she found a letter in the mail. Esperanza Colon: You have been preapproved. After working as a home health attendant for five years, Esperanza was eligible for a credit card, her very own five-hundred-dollar credit card…Days later another latter arrived. You have been preapproved for up to 1,000 dollars. Preapproved. Esperanza mouthed the words in front of the mirror…it felt good to get some approval for once…When the bills came, Esperanza put them in a drawer. She planned to pay them when she had extra money…And when she reached the credit card’s limit…she filed the credit card itself in the drawer, expecting to pay it all one day, little by little” (33-4).

Migration Story 2:

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

My mother came forward...She tried to lift my body into the front seat but she stumbled under my weight…She did not look like the picture Tantie Atie had on her night table…she had dark circles under her eyes…her fingers were scarred and sunburned. It was a though she had never stopped working in the cane fields after all…
…Am I the mother you imagined?” ...as a child, the mother I imagined for myself was like Erzulie, the lavish Virgin Mother. She was the healer of all women and the desire of all men…” In the mirror…new eyes seemed to be looking back at me…a new face altogether. Someone who had aged in one day, as though she had been through a time machine, rather than an airplane. Welcome to New York, this face seemed to be saying: Accept your new life. I greeted the challenged as one greets a new day. As my mother’s daughter and Tantie Atie’s child (59; 49).

Two South Florida Caribbean Poets

Florida Bound by Geoffrey Philp

Florida Bound

For our exile will never end until we free
of those who teach only the whip and rope.
And black man still can’t live in him own
black land without facing the drawn bayonets
of those who exact lives as payment, who disown
with a kiss our martyrs, our prophets.
so we end in the hot and homeless cities
of the South to be free of them.
The last dry months, like bitter molasses.
Tired of dreams, New Jerusalems.

First Rain by Donna Aza Weir-Soley

Migratory Patterns

It’s natural for birds to fly south in winter but we fly north in every season
leaving warmth in search of dreams
that sometimes leave us cold.
Like birds of a feather we fly in formation,
vulnerable at hunting season
yet do not stop or break our ranks
when one of us falls victim
to the hunters’ need for feathery trophies…
…It is natural for birds to fly south in winter,
But Caribbean people fly north in every season
Leaving the warmth of familiarity and family
In search of dreams that sometimes leave us freezing in the snow.

Epilogue

Caribbean Discourse by Edouard Glissant

History [with a capital H] ends where the histories of those peoples once reputed to be without history come together.

The struggle against a single History for the cross-fertilization of histories means repossessing both a true sense of one’s time and identity: proposing in a new unprecedented way a revaluation of power.

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Important Related Post: Toward a Floribbean Literature.  Speculative theory about the creation of a sub-genre of Caribbean-American and Caribbean writing in the diaspora:The work of Caribbean-American authors living in Florida.

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Books by Geoffrey Philp