Brown Romantics by Chander Manu Samriti;

Author:Chander, Manu Samriti; [Chander, Manu Samriti]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2017-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 2.2. Charles Stephens, The River, 1886. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

I would suggest that the secular standard of taste to which Martin appeals here reinforces the gap between sites of literary dominance and those peripheral and colonial. Martin is acceptable to the international literary market as a kind of native informant, a privileged interpreter whose scope is restricted to the local. If a poem such as “The Negro Village” describes the pagan Afro-Creole population of Guiana for the good of Guianese Christians, a poem such as “A Shaded Spot” describes Guiana for the good of a stable geographical epistemology in which Guiana is figured as “untutored,” “quaint,” and “primitive.” Guiana is the negro village in a global world order, and the potential to critique normative taste in the nineteenth century is lost in Martin’s turn away from the religious.

At the same time, it should be noted that Martin’s strategy would inform a later generation of Guyanese poets who would go on to mobilize the fetishization of the tropics against colonial sensibilities in order to articulate a postcolonial national identity.67 In order to understand this legacy, we need to see how Martin subtly critiques the idea that Guiana is a knowable space, made available to the world by the local poet. The final line of “A Shaded Spot” settles in “the border-land between knowing and unknowing,” challenging our capacity to “know” geographic space and thus confounding colonial epistemology. The line hints that any truth gleaned from the poem about the local is at best partial. Rather than restrict the ways in which the audience can interpret Guiana, Martin opens up the space as one of indeterminacy. This theme is suggested rhythmically, as well, as we move from consistent masculine rhymes to, finally, a trio of feminine rhymes, and from the certainty of steady iambics—punctuated with but not disrupted by occasional substitutions—to the anomalous string of dactyls in the last line, interrupted with a medial iamb. Formally as well as thematically, the poem closes by refusing to meet the expectations of an English or American readership.

The challenge posed to the colonial desire to know its others would be reiterated a century later by (to name but one example) the Guyanese poet John Agard, whose “Palm Tree King” presents a sly and wry native informant, the titular “palm tree king”:

Because I come from the West Indies

certain people in England seem to think

I is a expert on palm trees

So not wanting to sever dis link

with me native roots (know what ah mean?)

or to disappoint dese culturer vulture

I does smile cool as seabreeze

and say to dem

which specimen

you interested in

cause you talking

to the right man

I is palm tree king

I know palm tree history

like de palm o me hand68

The poem goes on challenge the tourist’s quest for local knowledge, finally turning the tables and refiguring the palm tree—synecdoche for Guyana—as a riddle for the tourist/reader to solve, and warning him, “Find the solution / and you get a revolution.”69 The form

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