Anthea Morrison
Senior Lecturer
UWI
Cave Hill, Barbados

Write what I Hear in my Head’: Caribbean Writers Emancipating the Voice

Some twenty years after the publication of Kamau Brathwaite’s seminal History of the Voice, Caribbean writers and critics would appear to have dismantled/transcended the linguistic hegemony of colonial times with which previous generations were confronted. The quotation used in the title of this paper is taken from an interview with Lorna Goodison (Talk Yuh Talk, ed. Kwame Dawes, 2001), a Jamaican writer who takes it for granted that the multiple voices which inspire her are all equally legitimate, equally empowering. Yet while French Creole has for several years been taught in Martinique at the Universite des Antilles et de la Guyane up to the postgraduate level, while a recent Professorial lecture at the U.W.I. was delivered in Jamaican Creole, the issue of language – “nation language”, Creole languages and their literary usage – is far from resolved. It is arguably in the French Caribbean that the choice of the vernacular language continues to be most polemical, no doubt because of the complex, not fully “postcolonial” status of the French departements d’outre-mer. The extent to which Creole represents for writers of the Francophone territories political tool as much as aesthetic resource is memorably highlighted in the provocatively titled literary manifesto Eloge de la creolite (1989)/In praise of Creoleness.

This paper attempts what is of necessity a limited analysis of the particular resonance of Creole – in the critical discourse as well as in creative writing – in the literature of the Francophone Caribbean, in comparison with that of the Anglophone territories. After an initial discussion of theoretical works by the “writers as critics”, the study highlights examples of strategies employed by four novelists (Patrick Chamoiseau, Maryse Conde, Paule Marshall and Olive Senior) who, to different degrees, illustrate a Caribbean openness to multiple voices.