Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 16, 1993 TAG: 9302160103
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID BEARD ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO LENGTH: Long
A CARIBBEAN VIEW
THEY'RE WRITING with passion about conflict in their homeland, the Caribbean, about people caught between the underdeveloped and developed worlds. Derek Walcott, the poet and playwright recently awarded the Nobel Prize, is but one of several Caribbean writers attracting attention in literary circles.
They write in English, Dutch, French and Spanish, and sometimes a mixture of all.
They write of slavery, of poverty, of war, of political oppression and the alienation of the uprooted.
They are the novelists, poets and playwrights of the countries of the Caribbean area.
When one of them, poet and playwright Derek Walcott, won the Nobel Prize in October, it brought into the limelight a literary movement that has quietly flowered in this crucible of colonization.
Walcott bridges the generations from such older writers as V.S. Naipaul and George Lamming to young, outspoken award-winners such as Martinique's Patrick Chamoiseau and Puerto Rico's Roberto Ramos-Perea.
"James Baldwin once pointed out that there was nothing better for a writer than to be born black and poor," says John Wickham, longtime editor of the small but influential Caribbean literary magazine Bim. "Nothing better sharpens your senses and skills of observation."
Wickham, 69, says the region's literature has blossomed over the past four decades, evolving to a deeper, angrier contemplation of the growing economic divide between the Caribbean and its former U.S. and European masters.
Among giants of regional writing, Wickham lists Walcott, the St. Lucian poet first published by Bim as a teen-ager, and Naipaul, the novelist and essayist who views the world through the prism of his impoverished youth in Trinidad and his privileged university years in England.
Wickham includes another Nobel winner, Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, among regional writers, even though the South American nation only abuts the Caribbean Sea.
"If you read Garcia Marquez's novels, especially his later works, such as `Love in the Time of Cholera,' you get such a familiar feeling - it reads Caribbean," Wickham says.
The region's literature itself is "excessive, dense, uncanny, asymmetrical, entropic, hermetic," writes Cuba-born Antonio Benitez-Rojo in his book-length essay, "The Repeating Island."
Writers such as Chamoiseau, whose novel "Texaco" won the Prix Goncourt, share the broad sweep of Garcia Marquez in telling their island's history through the eyes of shantytown residents.
After winning the top French-language prize in November, the 38-year-old former social worker told reporters his novel saluted "the struggle of those who wanted a roof and the means to survive."
Likewise, the play that won Spain's prestigious Tirso de Molina award in December focuses on what is pictured as the continued exploitation of the region, this time the tests of primitive birth control pills on prostitutes in Puerto Rico in the 1950s.
"There were deaths, and many people who suffered severe damage," says playwright Ramos-Perea. "One character, trying to figure out why Puerto Ricans were chosen, said, `Maybe it's because we're black and ugly.' Another said, `No, it's because we're cheap.' "
Ramos-Perea's rage in the play, entitled "Mienteme Mas," or "Lie To Me Some More," extends to the growing influence of American cable TV, culture and business in Puerto Rico and throughout the Caribbean.
In an interview in his disheveled, book-lined office in Old San Juan, the bearded, 33-year-old author acknowledged that the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' first voyage to America may have been the impetus behind some of the new attention.
But, he adds, "For the first time in 500 years, we're being looked at as equals."
Ramos-Perea and other Caribbean authors, such as Chamoiseau, hope to use the limelight to speak out for multilingual, multicultural literature, seeking to protect their heritage and infuse European-language writing with new themes and sounds.
Their prose, often as lush as the islands themselves, reflects a strong oral storytelling tradition. Many seek to capture local rhythms of island languages such as Papamiento or Haitian Creole, which still have no generally agreed-upon written form.
"It's incredible that a small place like the Caribbean can produce writers who are influencing so many world languages," says Dominican novelist Viriato Sencion.
But Benitez-Rojo, the Cuban-born college professor now living in Massachusetts, notes "the uncertainty that every Caribbean person must feel in trying to write about the Caribbean, especially when suspecting that any chosen rubric is never one's own but realizes itself wholly in some alien language, in some ordering code that comes from over THERE."
Compounding the confusing differences between island homelands and former colonial powers, many of the region's best-known writers have moved overseas, joining a migration northward of millions of West Indians in the past three decades.
They live and work in an alien land, often bound to other West Indians by racial and economic discrimination. In Caribbean neighborhoods in New York, Miami, London, Paris, Madrid and Amsterdam, their ethnic identity has survived.
That identity, in turn, has spawned a literature of exile by writers such as Caryl Phillips, who was taken from his native St. Kitts to Britain as an infant.
Like Hemingway, who captured rural Michigan while writing from 1920s Paris, dislocated writers such as Naipaul, Sencion, Kelvin Jones and Jamaica Kincaid portray their homelands with the sharp focus of clear memories and distance.
Emigre writers such as Sencion, 51, say their distance permits them to escape the truth-muting civility of the islands and state things more bluntly.
"I come from the North American school where you can write whatever you want," he said from his home in New York City. His first novel, "Those Who Forged The Name of God," was savagely attacked by the Dominican government as a thinly veiled critique of the Dominican Republic's blind, 86-year-old leader, Joaquin Balaguer.
Sencion says that inside one's own, small Caribbean country, "you're immersed in a terror. I'd like to help break that terror."
Kincaid's booklength essay on her homeland attacked Antigua's ruling Bird family, which led the former British colony to independence but has used its influence over the decades to gain a personal interest in nearly every private enterprise. Similar power brokers dominate many of the other islands.
But each island has its distinctive history and concerns. Revolution - and its effects - has dominated Cuban literature since Fidel Castro came to power in Havana in 1959.
In choosing octogenarian poet Dulce Maria Loynaz for the Cervantes Prize, Spain picked a Cuban artist whose best work came before the revolution, sidestepping a choice between pro-Castro and exile literature.
Sencion and Ramos-Perea say that writers throughout the tropical region may serve in the future as consciences and town criers to stop flagrant abuses of power, sovereignty and the environment, such as the dumping of toxic wastes along Caribbean beaches.
"The Caribbean is a drama, and it carries on," Sencion says.