Rolstan P. Adams
Lecturer
Dept of Literatures in English,
T.A Marryshow Community College, Grenada

The Global, Structural and Post-Colonial in Merle Collins’ ANGEL

Collins’ ANGEL has attracted as varied a following of critics as any other West Indian novel. Probably more than most, and with good reason. This is a novel, like Martin Carter’s “Poems of Resistance” won out of eruption and cataclysm in historical struggle, invasion and imprisonment. To use imagery suggested by Wilson Harris for this experience, it is the weak link in the watershed of our tradition: a fissure out of which flowed, in a moment of history, the eruption of East-West ideological confrontation. The particular circumstances qualify the novel for inclusion in the Post-Colonialist revolutionary politics which Grenada now shares with Latin America and Africa.

To some extent, to take in the full global complexity of both the fundamental approach to Literature and the circumstances of the novel itself, Criticsm must adjust its sights to potentials and possibilities in such a novel as ANGEL which fall somewhat outside Leavisite analysis,for instance. Among its critics who have complained of the novel’s solemn preoccupation with historical events and less with Great Tradition style – authorial expansion, through commentary, description, intrusion - are included those who seem not to feel comfortable with the avowed Marxism of Post-Colonialist writing and criticism. Thus, one sees a tendency to soft-pedal criticism of this novel as a novel of Feminism (three generations of Grenadian women), of Dialect (and not the Dialectic of Struggle). Indeed, in a privileged statement of informing the author, herself, explained the novel as part of her explorations of the African ‘Cautionary Tale’. But even while admitting the writer’s right to state her intention, I am still firmly of the opinion that ANGEL is best understood in terms of popular feelings towards the Grenadian Revolution, a faithful record of