WHAT IF THE CARIBBEAN DID NOT EXIST?
TOWARD THE EMERGENCE OF THE CARIBBEAN.
A SPACE TORN APART..
A SPACE TORN APART…
· WK 2 The Caribbean is a Story in Any Language The Caribbean is a Story in Any Language Imagine asking someone who lives in the Caribbean to describe the Caribbean. He or she could describe it in the way one would describe any place: by naming the landmarks that make up the area, and giving their relative positions. In other words, this person would paint a visual picture of what is physically there – like a mental map or a verbal landscape painting. Inevitably, the person doing the describing puts some things into the description, and leaves some things out, even landmarks that might seem blatantly obvious to others. It is often easy to tell a lot about the person doing the describing, or painting the picture, by what he or she puts in and what he/she leaves out. Likewise, there is a deeper significance to the picture anyone paints of the Caribbean, whether in words or in maps. As strange as it may sound, the Caribbean is not actually a real place. Yes, there are a real set of land masses in specific locations, but there is nothing natural which demands that these land masses must constitute something called the Caribbean. Nothing natural determines which land masses get put in the picture and which ones get left out. In fact, depending on the country of residence or the native language of the speaker, the picture painted of the Caribbean can be surprisingly different. For an English-speaker, the word “Caribbean” most likely conjures up an image of the archipelago that borders the Caribbean Sea. If that English-speaker lives in a territory of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Caribbean may then be seen to include the archipelago, plus Guyana and Belize, but nothing else. To assume that the Spanish and French names - El Caribe and La Caraïbe – are exact translations for the English word “Caribbean” would be a mistake. For most Spanish-speakers El Caribe refers to the Spanish-speaking islands of the archipelago (Girvan 1999). For others, it describes all of the Central and South American nations which have coastlines on the Caribbean Sea. The French-speakers use of the term La Caraïbe tends to have a focus on the islands, particularly those of the Lesser Antilles. There are other names that are used for the region as well, such as the West Indies and Les Antilles. Though some people use these terms interchangeably with terms like Caribbean and Caraïbe, closer examination reveals that they have their own specific connotations and associations. Even among speakers of the same language, different people use different criteria for deciding what places make up their picture of the Caribbean. Most academic literature describes the Caribbean as a space outlined by a common history of slavery, plantation society and colonisation (see Knight and Palmer 1989 and Benítez-Rojo 1996). At the same time, there are others who focus more on popular culture for their definitions of the Caribbean, painting a picture of the Caribbean as an area where common rhythms and messages that permeate the music (see Rohlehr 2007, and Ho and Nurse 2005 for examples). Either approach to defining the Caribbean would make it possible to include or exclude several islands and countries in Central and South America. The truth is that the Caribbean only becomes a reality as we paint its picture in our verbal and written descriptions, and draw its maps. A place is not just an area on the earth’s surface, it really consists of three things: a geodetic location (a set of coordinates that position it on the globe), a material environment, and the subjective attachments that people have to it (see Creswell 2004). A location really only becomes a place when the latter sets in; that is, when people attach meanings to it. Therefore, the Caribbean, like any place, is more imagined than real. Consequently, when a person describes the Caribbean or draws a map of it, he or she is representing an imagined landscape. The basic dictionary definition of landscape describes it as “a portion of territory that can be viewed at one time from one place” (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, 2011). Therefore, what is included and what is omitted is really a product of one’s particular vantage point or perspective. For this reason, we can say, paraphrasing the words of the geographer Pierce Lewis, that any representation of the Caribbean landscape is really a story that people tell themselves about themselves: their own “unwitting autobiography” (Lewis quoted in Lippard 1997). It is less important to come up with a single definition of the Caribbean than it is to understand how people come up with their image of what it is. However, the Caribbean is defined, and whatever goes into painting its picture, the act of definition itself tells a story: a story both of who we are, and who we want to be. CATÉGORIE : Cite this Article: : (2013). "The Caribbean is a story in any language" in Cruse & Rhiney (Eds.), Caribbean Atlas, http://www.caribbean-atlas.com/en/themes/what-is-the-caribbean/the-caribbean-is-a-story-in-any-language.html. RÉFÉRENCES Benítez-Rojo, A. (1996). The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Translated by J. E. Maraniss. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Creswell, T. (2004). Place: a short introduction. Malden, MA, Oxford, and Carlton: Blackwell. Girvan, N. 1999. Reinterpretar al Caribe. Revista Mexicana del Caribe, 7, 6-34. Ho, Christine G. T., and K. Nurse. (Eds.) 2005. Globalisation, diaspora and Caribbean popular culture. Kingston: Ian Randle. Knight, F. W., and C. A. Palmer. (Eds.) 1989. The Modern Caribbean. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. “landscape.” 2011. In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Retrieved March 31, 2011, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/landscape. Lippard, L. 1997. The Lure of the Local. New York: The New Press. Rohlehr, G. 2007. A Scuffling of Islands: The Dream and Reality of Caribbean Unity in Poetry and Song. In The Caribbean Integration Process: A People Centred Approach, edited by K. Hall and M. Chuck-A-Sang (pp. 48-121). Kingston, Miami: Ian Randle. · Wk. 2 What is the Caribbean? What is the Caribbean? Introduction · Things seem very simple at first glance. The Caribbean appears to be a set of territories – essentially insular - bordered by the Caribbean Sea. However, despite this apparent simplicity, understanding this regional space is quite a complex matter since the definitions vary according to the regions, authors and their areas of expertise (see for example: Gaztambide-Geigel, 1996; Kempado, 1999; Guarch-Delmonte, 2003; Sheller, 2003; Godard and Hartog, 2003; Girvan, 2005). What exactly does Caribbean mean? Is this designation the most appropriate one? Does it only refer to the islands? The islands and Central America? Should Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Louisiana, or even Florida be included? Can the islands situated outside of the Caribbean Sea (The Bahamas or Barbados) be considered part of the Caribbean? Similarly, what about the territories located outside of the Caribbean Sea that are historically and culturally connected to the region (Guyana and Surinam for instance)? Conversely, how should we consider the islands located at the heart of the Caribbean Sea, whose political status links them directly to Europe (Saba, Martinique and the Cayman Islands just to name a few)?The articles in this firt theme of the Caribbean Atlas are aimed at demonstrating that there is no clear-cut answer to all these questions. There are various points of view, resulting from different approaches placing an emphasis on location, culture, history, language, the economy or even political status. WHAT IF THE CARIBBEAN DID NOT EXIST? The multiplicity of views encompasses diverse and often complementary visions. Thus, for sociologist M. Sheller (2003), the Caribbean is just a “fantasy”, a “context”, a European ideological “construction” (and “destruction”), an “object of study produced in the academic centres of the North”. In other words, Mimi Sheller is somewhat in agreement with Aimé Césaire (1939) who describes our “archipelago arched with an anguished desire to negate itself”.Sheller’s argument is based on the European construction, over several centuries, of an imaginary paradisiacal space called “Caribbean”, sold as a sort of “Garden of Eden”. Sheller clarifies, however, that this imaginary paradisiacal space, which is sold in travel agencies, in no way reflects reality.Haitian author Dany Laferrière(1), whose work is as inspired by Césaire’s as it is by Hemingway’s admits to not sharing “the idea of the Antilles”. “It is, in his view, a colonialist vision of the space(2).” He prefers to consider himself American, in the broad sense of the word. It is true that the very exonyms that we still use today to describe our space were imposed on us and are profoundly Eurocentric: “Antilles” (from the Latin Ante and Illum, literally “before the continent”, if one considers the route from Europe naturally), “Caribbean” (from the Kalinago Amerindians, referred to as Caribs by the Europeans, rooted in Cannibal), in English, “West Indies”...Various arguments against the idea of a Caribbean regional group can also be invoked. How can one speak of a regional group when there are so many dividing lines: different languages within a single territory and among the territories, populations of different origins, differences in political status, etc.? What is worse is that the Spanish-speaking populations of the Caribbean islands are only rarely considered “Caribbean” (their main identity being that of “Latinos”). Additionally, one of the studies in this Atlas demonstrates that the same is true of several inhabitants of the islands that still belong to France. TOWARD THE EMERGENCE OF THE CARIBBEAN However, to consider the Caribbean a figment of the imagination is to deny a geographical, historical, cultural and social reality. The term Caribbean denotes an arc/intersection, where all the great civilisations met. Admittedly, the Caribbean is American, yet it represents a sub region that is well-identified by the structural and cultural heritage of the sugarcane plantations (Best 1967) and the “habitat” that supports them (Chamoiseau and Confiant 1999). The “habitat” is the Caribbean reproduction of the slave organisation that prevailed in Rome and Ancient Greece, and on which were built, inter alia, the economies of Western Europe (Patterson 1982). The Caribbean is also a physical space of extraordinary beauty; the atrocities of history do not detract from this. The St. Lucian writer Derek Walcott (2000) regrets in this regard that “no historical study recognises that the beauty of the Caribbean islands may have contributed to the survival of the slaves”. In his view, the beauty of the islands, the magical light of cloudy evenings, the serenity of the majestic mountains are comparable in all respects to the beauty “of the strength and endurance of the survivors”. Moreover, the poetic beauty of the Caribbean space is found in the expression of its authors, poets, storytellers, singers and other