Spaces of Creation by Connolly Allison;

Author:Connolly, Allison;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Maternal Identities and the Natural World

When considering the role of nature in literature, one often thinks of pastoral scenes or of Romantic poets wandering through the woods, seeking inspiration in the landscape. Yet the role of the natural world is not always idyllic and comforting, as literature of the French Caribbean demonstrates. Eric Prieto’s chapter “Landscaping Identity in Contemporary Caribbean Literature” calls attention to the “determinant role played by the landscape in shaping the character and identity of the populace,” citing novels by Glissant, Chamoiseau, and Condé to underscore the central role of the landscape in Creole literature. Prieto briefly recalls the history of the islands, pointing out the fact that virtually no one can claim a privileged connection to the land,[7] and so “this absence of an originary bond—aggravated by the injustices of colonial history and the absurdities of its ideology—seems to have instilled in West Indian writers a particularly acute sensitivity to the landscape’s power as a symbol of regional identity, but also to the unstable, ideological nature of all such symbols” (142). As Prieto explains, geographic landmarks help form and reinforce a group’s Creole identity. The literature of the region reflects the inextricable link between people and the unpredictable natural world. Through literature, their relationship with their environment therefore manifests in both positive and negative representations, some of which will be explored in this chapter.

The study of people’s relationship to and interaction with their surroundings calls to mind a field of study that has thrived in English departments in the last several years—that of ecocriticism. Ecocriticism “takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of language and literature” (Nixon 234). It is a field that studies the relationship between literature and the physical environment, which, of course, can be composed of both natural and manmade landscapes. At first, ecocriticism was considered primarily as an offshoot of American studies and concentrated on the work of American literary figures such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aldo Leopold, and Annie Dillard (Nixon 234). Yet recent years have seen a wider application of its principles, taking into consideration diverse urban and rural environments, such as inner-city America or the environmental disasters brought on by development in rural India. Herbert Tucker pares the field down to its most basic principles: “Ecocriticism thus claims as its hermeneutic horizon nothing short of the literal horizon itself, the finite environment[8] that a reader or writer occupies thanks not just to culturally coded determinants but also to natural determinates that antedate these, and will outlast them” (qtd. Love 1). One of ecocriticism’s central concerns is, understandably, the state of the environment, but as Tucker explains, the literal horizon and the finite environment that people know and see every day play an integral role in the unfolding of their lives. This holds true for any landscape or environment, whether one lives in a bustling city, a steamy tropical climate, or a rural village.

In his article “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” Rob

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