SUNDAY 6 MAY, 2018 – UWI TODAY
7
PROFESSORIAL INAUGURAL LECTURE
On June 22, 2015,
a podcast was posted online after an
interview with US President Barack Obama, following the
shooting deaths in the previous week of nine black people in
a church in South Carolina. The shooter was a 21-year-old
white man espousing racist ideology. The podcast interview
with Marc Maron made headlines for many reasons, but
mainly because then President Obama used the ‘n- word’
in the interview. Obama said this:
…race relations have improved significantly
during my lifetime and yours, opportunities
have opened up … attitudes have changed. That
is a fact. What is also true is that the legacy
of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost
every institution of our lives casts a long shadow
and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed
on. Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not
just a matter of it not being polite to say ‘nigger’
in public. That’s not the measure of whether
racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of
overt discrimination. Societies don’t overnight
completely erase everything that happened 200 to
300 years prior…
Still, Obama insisted on the fact that we had made
progress: “progress is real” he said, “and we have to take
hope from that progress.”
Obama knew that the “n” word’s problematic
epistemology would draw attention to the situation;
provocation is always useful tool. But it was the idea of
racism as being part of our DNA that was troubling,
particularly in the racialized world of 21
st
century identity
politics. I begin with this idea because in many ways it is
salient to the problematics of our own history of racism and
trauma and its enduring effects on our 21
st
century psyche.
America is not the Caribbean, and being black in
America is not the same as being black in the Caribbean.
Identity politics remain for the most part a localized
phenomenon. An African-American and an Afro-
Caribbean may share a past of slavery and colonialism
and face racial, economic and class discrimination, but the
distinctions that arise from complex socio-cultural contexts
create particular and unique circumstances for each group
and individual. It is all in the details. This is not a revelation
to anyone and yet the conflation still occurs. Even the word
African is a homogenization and a reduction of a continent
that is diverse and complex. Again, this is not a revelation;
but still, consider the reduction of the prefix: “Afro.” In
the US there are Italian- Americans, Irish-Americans,
Polish-Americans and then there are African- Americans;
no national or implied cultural distinction, no details, but
instead an entire continent contained in a prefix. I would
Cracks in the Edifice:
Notes of a Native Daughter
B Y E L I Z A B E T H W A L C O T T - H A C K S H A W
Professor Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw engaging the audience
at the lecture.
PHOTO: KEYON MITCHELL
…
when dealing with young independent nations, the nation is passed over for the race,
and the tribe is preferred to the state. These are the cracks in the edifice
(Frantz Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
, 119)
Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is a professor of French Literature and Creative Writing at The UWI St. Augustine. This is an excerpt from her Professorial Inaugural Lecture which was delivered on April 19
at the School of Education Auditorium. The full lecture, “Cracks in the Edifice: Notes of a Native Daughter,” can be read online at
argue that the Caribbean is a more racially sophisticated
society than the US. But I would also argue that the legacies
of colonialism and slavery are still very much part of the
DNA of our 21
st
century Caribbean.
This evening, I would like to look at some of these issues
drawing primarily on the work of a young, blackMartinican
writer who wrote, in 1939, a long poem that would become
a seminal work in Francophone Caribbean Literature and
in the literary world as a whole. The poet is of course Aimé
Césaire and the poem
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal
(
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
) is as relevant today
as it ever was in its exploration of the traumas that we face.
The Caribbean has long been a location of trauma. It
is a region traumatized by a past that continues to haunt its
present. Stuart Hall described the region’s violent colonial
history as “the trauma of transportation.” As someone of
Caribbean origin, as well as someone who writes both
creatively and academically about the Caribbean, I have
often felt the resonance of Frantz Fanon’s words: “These are
the cracks in the edifice.” Fanon, Martinican psychiatrist,
activist, writer and theorist (1925-1961), was talking about
the pitfalls of a national consciousness that was inherently
tribal; Fanon affirmed: “… when dealing with young and
independent nations, the nation is passed over for the race,
and the tribe is preferred to the state.” But he also captured
in this phrase, the indelible psychological scar left by the
Caribbean region’s history. Fanon is but one of many since
it would be hard to signal creative and scholarly works
from across the region that have not dealt in some way with
the manifestations of these cracks. This ever-present past
continues to be explored and exposed across languages,
generations, genres and genders.
My research interest in this area is by no means the
first interrogation, much has been written about trauma in
Caribbean fiction. One of the most recent critical studies
is Paula Morgan’s work,
The Terror and the Time: Banal
Violence and Trauma in Caribbean Discourse
(2014). Two
of Morgan’s core questions are noteworthy, she asks: “To
what extent are existing conceptions of trauma useful for
analyzing the ruptures peculiar to Antillean history, with
its attendant anxieties, identity crises and representational
dilemmas? And secondly, “has trauma been normalized
in Caribbean society?” The term “normalized” is of course
part of the knotted problematic that trauma researchers
attempt to unravel.
Trauma scholars like Stephen Craps have argued that
there is a problemwith trauma studies and the lack of focus
on disadvantaged groups. There is still a need to continue
to decolonize definitions of trauma especially when we
examine works from a Caribbean perspective. I am not a
psychiatrist so my approach is literary. I look at the poetics
of trauma to examine the ways in which it is expressed in
our writings and to see what the writing reveals firstly about
the world of the text and the world beyond; in the case of
my research, that world is the Caribbean.
My focus in this lecture is on the writer Aimé Césaire
but my wider project draws from a range of Caribbean
texts written in both English and French. This cross-lingual
perspective opens a new space to navigate the poetics and
problematics of the selected narratives. A comparative
reading also facilitates the formulation of new constructs
of trauma by locating areas of convergence and divergence.
Apart fromCésaire’s
Cahier
, I also examine the poetics
of Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat’s collection
of short stories
, The Dew Breaker
(2004). Danticat looks at
the effects of the Duvalier dictatorship on diverse Haitian
communities.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
(2007)
by Dominican-American novelist Junot Diaz revisits
historical accounts of another dictatorial regime, that of
Rafael Trujillo, andDany Laferrière’s
L’Egnime du retour
(
The
Enigma of return
) (2009) explores the loss of his biological
father and his literary father, Aimé Césaire. Laferrière’s work,
like Césaire’s, focuses on the idea of a return to a homeland
constructed from memory, imagination and his reality.
