For the Reader

As a backdrop for a national identity, the Caribbean has been a cultural region in tension and conflict. A traumatic synthesis of a long and turbulent historical process mixing various components that integrate the final result, the pressure of acculturation has made “Caribbeanness” a spiritual adventure, and over time, an anguishing definition. .

Black Africans from astonishingly ancient civilizations and Europeans originating from luminous epochs interacted within a convulsive setting of confrontations with indigenous cultures even more remote in antiquity. This arduous process nevertheless succeeded in constructing an identity whose definition places a wedge in a number of places …trying to be the summary of ethnic variations. As a consequence, the Caribbean world has nurtured a creative amalgam of literatures in a contexture of truly robust imagination.

From the lyricism of Aimé Césaire to the magical realism of Alejo Carpentier, from Nicolás Guillén to Derek Walcott, from Jacques Stephen Alexis to George Lamming, from Maryse Condé and Marie Chauvet to Edwidge Danticat, Myriam Chancy and Nancy Morejón, from Aída Cartagena Portalatín to Blas Jiménez and Norberto James, the literature of the Caribbean has produced significant inserts in a kind of Latin American “peculiarity” --- with all the characteristics derived from its unique historical process. As much as anything else, the Caribbean has been a fierce battleground for contending histories and cultural interpretations. The first European invaders into the region were more than greedy and ambitious conquistadores and self-righteous missionaries of the Catholic Church. They were also clerks and chroniclers who saw their arrival as the “beginning of Caribbean history and even ‘civilization’ itself.” This deplorable tendency has persisted as the New Territory on a whole and the Caribbean in particular has been projected as an artificial extension of European history and culture.

With the publication of Alan Cambeira’s works and the literary production of many other authors from the region –each in her or his manner in redefining Caribbeanness, serious efforts have been made to reverse this trend in Caribbean historiography and to reinterpret Caribbean history and culture, but this time from the “inside.” This task has been a somewhat problematic undertaking; traditionally the singular view of the ruling and aspiring élites has dominated the interpretation of reality -- the past as well as the present. Now, however, all this is changing dramatically.
“Jou va, jou vien, m’pa di passé ça!” Day comes, day goes;
I will way nothing more than that!