Philip Nanton
Writer in Residence
UWI School of Continuing Studies
St Vincent

St.Vincent as ‘Frontier Society’: Two Literary Comparisons

In the opening of Gordon K. Lewis’ ‘Main Currents in Caribbean Thought’ he chose to identify as his first diagnostic characteristic of Caribbean societies that ‘they were, in brief (and among other things) frontier societies’ (Lewis, 1983, 4) He went on to bemoan, with one exception, the lack of scholarship in the region based on the concept of frontier and to emphasize its importance in the region. One way to take up Lewis’ challenge is to locate the ‘frontier’ as the boundary between ‘civilisation’ and ‘the wild’.

In St.Vincent, although the process of conquest and settlement was protracted, the notion of the island as frontier has long receded as a focus of analytical interest. However, colonialism, characterized by both the ‘civilizing mission’ involving the importation of slave labour, and the ‘Great Experiment’ of implementing free labour, continued, albeit through fundamentally racist ideologies, to direct attention to the relationship between changed notions of ‘wild’ and civilized’. In the twentieth century, political independence brought with it a revival of interest in civilization as part of the official ideology of nation-building. At the same time notions of the place as ‘wilderness’ were apparently lost. The demands of developmental ideology and modernity in the context of political independence and nation state formation in the twentieth century; the second wave of globalization and the associated revived interest in enhanced regionalism have all provided ideological constructs which appear to be antithetical to the development of contemporary frontier analysis.

It appears to be generally assumed that because the society was settled long ago, any identification with an idea of frontier belongs to the past. In this paper I intend to argue otherwise and provide what I identify as a corrective to the neglect of the frontier element of this relationship. I wish to argue that the concept of frontier, linked to concepts of civilization and wilderness, continues to be important to the Caribbean or at least to the way that parts of the region are perceived. To do this my paper will first sketch some ways in which the region is perceived as a modern frontier – holding the balance between ‘wilderness’ and ‘civilisation’. Then I propose to compare two views of St. Vincent as frontier society. One is presented through the journal of the stipendiary magistrate John Anderson and the second is to be found in Margaret Atwood’s novel ‘Bodily Harm’ part of which is set in a thinly disguised St. Vincent in the late twentieth century.

I suggest that the frontier for both insiders and outsiders to the society continues to be located through a combination of untamable environment, personal dislocation and a context of experimentation where the rules are opaque.