Kevin Frank
Assistant Professor
English and Caribbean Studies
Baruch College, CUNY
New York

The Gift of Creolization: Unwrapping Its Pleasures and Paradoxes

In The Pleasures of Exile George Lamming correctly identifies the colonizer’s “gift of language” as a problem for all Caribbean critical traditions: “Caliban is his [Prospero’s] convert, colonized by language, and excluded by language. It is precisely this gift of language, this attempt at transformation which has brought about the pleasure and paradox of Caliban’s exile.” Lamming adds that while he is a direct descendant of slaves (Calibans), he is also “a direct descendant of Prospero . . . using his legacy of language . . . to push it further, reminding the descendants of both sides that what’s done is done, and can only be seen as a soil from which other gifts, or the same gift [may be] endowed with different meanings.” Another such gift is creolization, a signal critical model applied to Caribbean culture. For instance, though the Caribbean is not his sole focus, creolization is at the heart of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. But critical perspectives on creoleness suggest that what’s presumed to be done is actually not.

The gift of language and the other gifts that have sprouted from its soil may well be connected to what Wilson Harris terms an “unfinished genesis of the imagination.” Speaking of the paradoxes of creoleness, he asks: “Does creoleness sanction new World tribes . . . who designated themselves now African Americans . . . and so forth?” Or, “does creoleness complexly, hiddenly, overturn tribal bias; does it involve a spiritual subversion of idols through symbolic portraitures of blackness? Harris suggests, disingenuously I believe, that he does not know the answer to these questions. This essay is in search of those answers. Among other things, I argue that “the mask of the creole” is a problem when it functions as an attempt to avoid the “terror of the African bush,” to use Lamming’s phrase.