_Christopher Winks, Symbolic Cities in Caribbean Literature
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 81 (Nov. 2010)
In his remarkable study of Caribbean thought and imagination, Christopher Winks proves an insightful reader of the region as a whole. Drawing on the most perceptive writers and theorists in Spanish, English, and French, he reaches beyond the fragmentary aspect of their archipelago origins in favor of a “tidalectic” approach, to use Kamau Brathwaite’s term; after all, these various nations are shaped by common forces, both in the sea around them and the socioeconomic foundation from which they grew, specifically the brutal machine of plantation societies built on slave labor. By focusing on the notion of the city in this setting---as a site of dreams and resistance---Winks traces the course of Caribbean cultural aspirations as they navigated between a spent European model and some measure of continuity with a suppressed African past.
Nowhere is his capacity to make connections, to unfold multiple implications out of a small kernel more impressive than at the start of the book where he takes up a little-known vignette by the Cuban writer Calvert Casey. Offering a sort of olfactory palimpsest of a shabby seaside neighborhood in Old Havana, Casey links its qualities of decay to imperial Rome, thus encapsulating a resonance with ever-widening effect. As Winks discusses the full text along with its historical and biographical context, he manages to rebound off of V. S. Naipaul’s dismissal of Caribbean culture, invoke Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation, compare a differing view of the region’s self-determination held by earlier Cuban writers, and more, propelling him well past the parallel to Rome. Casey’s narrative, with its liminal moment of self-knowing and a curious final prayer, provides a privileged optic by which to explore African-derived spiritual dimensions of Cuban reality as well as the exiled writer’s own elusive quest for his native city. Winks opens so many paths of inquiry that it can be almost dizzying, yet each turn carries him further as he considers the forces at play in the formation of imagined spaces and settlements throughout the Caribbean.
Though the book embarks from an actual place, Havana’s very multiplicity sets the tone for the two symbolic cities that occupy much of his study. Legends of El Dorado proliferated not only among Europeans in the age of discovery, but also among Amerindian peoples, and this magic city with its wealth waiting to be conquered has persisted as an idea ever since. Its true incarnation, suggests Winks, was to be found in the plantation, city of sugar. He follows its varying figurations---Utopian, delusional---through literature and history, and makes particular use of Wilson Harris’s writings, notably his conflation of St. Augustine’s City of God with the City of Gold. The mythical city that runs countercurrent to El Dorado, as recounted in the West African tale “Gassire’s Lute,” is the invisible Wagadu which is fated to reappear and vanish repeatedly, due to human failings. A prophecy of diaspora in part, it “may be seen as emblematic of a memory of lost grandeur as well as a promise of another, non-oppressive future.” The heritage of Afro-Caribbean religions posits a kind of magic city that “dissolves the Augustinian duality” of sacred and secular spaces, and Winks presents an illuminating analysis of Lydia Cabrera’s classic work El Monte in this regard. Moreover, Wagadu resurfaces in another guise as the hidden maroon settlement located “out there,” representing escape from the plantation, where at great cost self-sufficiency and survival may yet be won.
An entire chapter is devoted to the literary legacies of marronage. The runaway slave communities by their very nature proposed a domain of resourcefulness and innovation, a way forward through group effort in developing an authentic culture on its own terms. Especially pertinent here is the extended discussion of Aimé Césaire’s 1955 poem to René Depestre, “Le verbe marronner,” in which he challenges the younger writer to embrace the tradition of rebellion over the dictates of classical French schooling. The “fugitive consciousness, fugitive community” of marronage, notes Winks, “is a gateway through which the intimations of an ideal Caribbean polity have been and continue to be articulated.” By exploring this theme at length, he is then better equipped to address the multiple layers of Havana again, most of all focusing on how seemingly peripheral neighborhoods in fact bear rich traces of their maroon past. Such traces may be glaring by their absence, as he amply demonstrates in Carpentier’s The Chase, or integral to the vital fabric of the city, which his exuberant appreciation of Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers as a jazz novel makes clear.
Havana since the Cuban Revolution, however, has generated another perspective in literature, highlighting the failures of modernity through variations on the Ruined City. But these are treated more as moments of possible transition, and Winks concludes his study with a brief survey of the attempts by some Caribbean intellectuals to reconceive their cities. C. L. R. James considers the positive lessons of Athenian democracy in advocating the benefits of citizen participation. Derek Walcott, looking to the specific nature of Caribbean societies, celebrates their rich fragmentation, refuting “the notion of a single reductive history.” José Lezama Lima, the “rooted, insular cosmopolitan,” elaborates his own private Havana whose true rhythms are of a “classical and clear measure.” To his enduring credit, Winks does not try to reconcile these many views of the Caribbean city nor seek to rank them in some artificial hierarchy, rather he presents them in such a way that we may behold the marvelous conversation in all its complexity. It is not just an understanding of the divergent strands of the past that we gain, but an eager interest in where they will continue to converge.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 81 (Nov. 2010)
In his remarkable study of Caribbean thought and imagination, Christopher Winks proves an insightful reader of the region as a whole. Drawing on the most perceptive writers and theorists in Spanish, English, and French, he reaches beyond the fragmentary aspect of their archipelago origins in favor of a “tidalectic” approach, to use Kamau Brathwaite’s term; after all, these various nations are shaped by common forces, both in the sea around them and the socioeconomic foundation from which they grew, specifically the brutal machine of plantation societies built on slave labor. By focusing on the notion of the city in this setting---as a site of dreams and resistance---Winks traces the course of Caribbean cultural aspirations as they navigated between a spent European model and some measure of continuity with a suppressed African past.
Nowhere is his capacity to make connections, to unfold multiple implications out of a small kernel more impressive than at the start of the book where he takes up a little-known vignette by the Cuban writer Calvert Casey. Offering a sort of olfactory palimpsest of a shabby seaside neighborhood in Old Havana, Casey links its qualities of decay to imperial Rome, thus encapsulating a resonance with ever-widening effect. As Winks discusses the full text along with its historical and biographical context, he manages to rebound off of V. S. Naipaul’s dismissal of Caribbean culture, invoke Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation, compare a differing view of the region’s self-determination held by earlier Cuban writers, and more, propelling him well past the parallel to Rome. Casey’s narrative, with its liminal moment of self-knowing and a curious final prayer, provides a privileged optic by which to explore African-derived spiritual dimensions of Cuban reality as well as the exiled writer’s own elusive quest for his native city. Winks opens so many paths of inquiry that it can be almost dizzying, yet each turn carries him further as he considers the forces at play in the formation of imagined spaces and settlements throughout the Caribbean.
Though the book embarks from an actual place, Havana’s very multiplicity sets the tone for the two symbolic cities that occupy much of his study. Legends of El Dorado proliferated not only among Europeans in the age of discovery, but also among Amerindian peoples, and this magic city with its wealth waiting to be conquered has persisted as an idea ever since. Its true incarnation, suggests Winks, was to be found in the plantation, city of sugar. He follows its varying figurations---Utopian, delusional---through literature and history, and makes particular use of Wilson Harris’s writings, notably his conflation of St. Augustine’s City of God with the City of Gold. The mythical city that runs countercurrent to El Dorado, as recounted in the West African tale “Gassire’s Lute,” is the invisible Wagadu which is fated to reappear and vanish repeatedly, due to human failings. A prophecy of diaspora in part, it “may be seen as emblematic of a memory of lost grandeur as well as a promise of another, non-oppressive future.” The heritage of Afro-Caribbean religions posits a kind of magic city that “dissolves the Augustinian duality” of sacred and secular spaces, and Winks presents an illuminating analysis of Lydia Cabrera’s classic work El Monte in this regard. Moreover, Wagadu resurfaces in another guise as the hidden maroon settlement located “out there,” representing escape from the plantation, where at great cost self-sufficiency and survival may yet be won.
An entire chapter is devoted to the literary legacies of marronage. The runaway slave communities by their very nature proposed a domain of resourcefulness and innovation, a way forward through group effort in developing an authentic culture on its own terms. Especially pertinent here is the extended discussion of Aimé Césaire’s 1955 poem to René Depestre, “Le verbe marronner,” in which he challenges the younger writer to embrace the tradition of rebellion over the dictates of classical French schooling. The “fugitive consciousness, fugitive community” of marronage, notes Winks, “is a gateway through which the intimations of an ideal Caribbean polity have been and continue to be articulated.” By exploring this theme at length, he is then better equipped to address the multiple layers of Havana again, most of all focusing on how seemingly peripheral neighborhoods in fact bear rich traces of their maroon past. Such traces may be glaring by their absence, as he amply demonstrates in Carpentier’s The Chase, or integral to the vital fabric of the city, which his exuberant appreciation of Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers as a jazz novel makes clear.
Havana since the Cuban Revolution, however, has generated another perspective in literature, highlighting the failures of modernity through variations on the Ruined City. But these are treated more as moments of possible transition, and Winks concludes his study with a brief survey of the attempts by some Caribbean intellectuals to reconceive their cities. C. L. R. James considers the positive lessons of Athenian democracy in advocating the benefits of citizen participation. Derek Walcott, looking to the specific nature of Caribbean societies, celebrates their rich fragmentation, refuting “the notion of a single reductive history.” José Lezama Lima, the “rooted, insular cosmopolitan,” elaborates his own private Havana whose true rhythms are of a “classical and clear measure.” To his enduring credit, Winks does not try to reconcile these many views of the Caribbean city nor seek to rank them in some artificial hierarchy, rather he presents them in such a way that we may behold the marvelous conversation in all its complexity. It is not just an understanding of the divergent strands of the past that we gain, but an eager interest in where they will continue to converge.