Reimagining the Caribbean by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

A. The Street Scene into the Theater

In contrast to the absence of drama in much Caribbean literary criticism, performance is continually invoked in the analysis of other genres in the Caribbean literary canon, most recently, in the postmodern sense of the performativity of identity categories as well as in performance studies approaches to the embodied practices that form Caribbean epistemologies. European colonialism and, especially, the African and Asian diasporas, have yielded a rich legacy of expressive cultures in the region, ranging from carnival and religious rituals, to music, dance, and storytelling (among many other oral traditions). This repertoire, born and creolized in the space of the colonial plantation, a “machine” that replicated itself across the region and throughout the globe, is summed up by Antonio Benítez‑­Rojo in The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective as the crux of a Caribbean poetics: “If I were to have to put it in one word I would say: performance. But performance not only in the terms of scenic interpretation but also in terms of the execution of a ritual. . . . In this ‘certain kind of way’ there is expressed the mystic or magical (if you like) loam of the civilizations that contributed to the formation of the Caribbean culture.”[12] Benítez‑Rojo’s readings of performance in Caribbean texts are brilliant, but I am wary of wedding performance with “a certain kind” of gendered and racial essentialism that characterizes some of his observations about Caribbean culture. On the contrary, in this essay, I want to look precisely at “scenic interpretation” and ask whether we can identify dramatic strategies and themes that point toward a Caribbean poetics in plays destined for the stage. That is to say, if the Caribbean is a culture defined by performance might not the formal staging of these dynamics also be illuminating? More in line with Benítez-Rojo’s pains to characterize his reading of Caribbean culture as postmodern, I would suggest that the scenic framing of Caribbean bodies and stories makes visible the powers of colonialism and the strategies to contest it, demonstrating the slipperiness, not the essence, of West Indian subjectivity.

Any approach to Caribbean drama must take into account the centrality of popular culture and the folk as the material from which to invent stories for staging. In the following examples, life on the street offers episodes that foster the writer’s sense of Caribbean performance. In both, a lighter-skinned young male subject watches a scene unfolding from his balcony on the street below. In The Repeating Island, Benítez-Rojo recalls that during the Cuban missile crisis, despite the tensions, he was comforted by knowing that his island was not facing a true apocalypse when he saw two elderly black women “‘pass in a certain kind of way’ beneath my balcony. I cannot describe this ‘certain kind of way’; I will say only that there was a kind of ancient and golden powder between their gnarled legs, a scent of basil and mint in the dress, a symbolic, ritual wisdom in their gesture and their gay chatter.

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