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Réalités et représentations de la violence en postcolonies

 | 
Victorien Lavou Zoungbo
, 
Jean-Godefroy Bidima

II. Ruses et pratiques de la violence politique

Violence and mimicry in Earl Lovelace’s fiction: a social criticism in the anglophone Caribbean

Cherif Saloum Diatta

Texto completo

  • 1 Scott, James. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven and London: Yale (...)
  • 2 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment. 1982. London: Heinemann, 1986. Print.

1In his book Domination and the Art of Resistance, James Scott defines “infrapolitics” as tactics of opposing oppression and ideological subordination. “Infrapolitics” include poaching, foot-dragging, pilfering, dissimulation, flight1, etc. This study examines the resistance to colonial cultural oppression, cultural adaptation and retention, and community survival through such “infrapolitics” in Earl Lovelace’s fiction. Though the analysis incorporates Lovelace’s different novels, it will particularly emphasize The Wine of Astonishment2. Set in rural Trinidad during the American occupation and World War II, the novel narrates the story of the villagers of Bonasse who struggle to preserve their Spiritual Baptist religion after its ban by the colonial government in 1917. Wine significantly demonstrates resistance to colonial violence and cultural imperialism, and humanizes a people whose dignity is negated. A few questions need to be asked here: what is the nature of colonial violence? What is the contribution of the local elite to this violence? How do the Bonasse villagers react to colonial violence? And last, what is the meaning and implication of the resistance and survival strategies such African diasporic groups had adopted in the colonial Anglophone Caribbean? In Wine, colonial violence, through the police and social institutions, aims to repress afro-Caribbean cultures, and create obedient subjects. The tactics envisioned by the community of Bonasse against this colonial oppression range from violent rebellion to mimicry of Catholic and Anglican religious ways. Lovelace suggests that mimicry, as a part of “infrapolitics”, enables the survival of communities and ancestral cultures among diasporic groups in the Caribbean.

2I argue that, in Wine, the Bonasse community’s mimicry or accommodation to colonial ways is neither self-defeat nor is it a mere acceptance of dominant ideology. It is rather a mode of resistance, or a process through which oppressed Afro-diasporic groups like the Bonasse villagers are able to maintain their Spiritual Baptist Church and preserve their community by accommodating themselves to Anglican and Catholic ways. Mimicry appears then, to be a mask of resistance, which underscores what Scott describes as “hidden transcripts”, a tactic of disguise in the “infrapolitics” that the weaker groups use against domination. Mimicry does not only provide an adequate tactic of resistance to colonial cultural repression, but it also represents a metaphor of cultural adaptation and contributes to the making of modern Creole culture in the New World, and Trinidad in particular.

  • 3 Macaulay, Thomas B. “A Minute on Indian Education”. Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theo (...)
  • 4 V. S. Naipaul. The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch – in t (...)
  • 5 Walcott, Derek. “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry”. Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Cri (...)
  • 6 Girard, René. “Mimesis and Violence: Perspectives in Cultural Criticism”. Berkshire Review 14 (1979 (...)

3Scholars have different views of mimicry. Some conceive of it as a form of passive consent. Lord Macaulay believed that mimicry constituted a medium through which Great Britain could produce consenting colonial subjects3. The production of a colonized imitative class, as he suggested, would create consenting subjects that would facilitate British imperial expansionism. V. S. Naipaul, from a different view, describes mimicry in The Middle Passage and Mimic Men4 as uncreative. For him Caribbean people are uncreative because they are mimic men. Unlike Naipaul, Derek Walcott maintains that mimicry has a creative, critical potential. It is through mimicry that various cultural forms, such as Carnival and calypso have emerged. According to Walcott, these cultural forms emanate from imitation and become invention5. (He, however, has occasionally expressed dismissive views of calypso). French scholar René Girard conceives of mimicry as a form of violence. In his article “Mimesis and Violence”, he notes that “Violence is generated by this process [mimicry]; or rather, violence is the process itself when two or more partners try to prevent one another from appropriating the object they all desire through physical or other means”6. Girard is suggesting here that violence is generated through the process of mimesis as individuals desire the same object and confront one another to own it.

  • 7 Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 85. Print.
  • 8 Qtd. in Moore-Gilbert, Bart J. Postcolonial Theory: Context, Practices, Politics. London: Verso, 19 (...)
  • 9 Walcott, Derek. “The Caribbean”, op. cit., p. 262.

4In this study, I equate mimicry with resistance as theorized by Scott and other scholars. Scott speaks of mimicry as a bearer of hidden transcripts and “infrapolitics” of the powerless, essentially functioning as camouflaged resistance. Cultural critics like Homi Bhabha view mimicry also as camouflage and defense. Bhabha sees defense in mimicry “exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare”7. Jacques Lacan develops a theory of psychic mimicry as defense. He gives evidence of his theory, making analogies with “the biological defenses of insects (moths with the coloration of wasps for instance)”8. Likewise, Walcott believes mimicry is not just as “an act of imagination, but also camouflage”, and therefore represents a “design both as defense and lure”9. In order to grasp the idea of mimicry as resistance in Lovelace’s early novel, it is essential to begin with the mechanisms and aspects of colonial oppression in Wine.

IDEOLOGICAL AND REPRESSIVE COLONIAL SUBJUGATION

  • 10 Reid-Salmon, Delroy A. Home Away from Home: The Caribbean Diasporan Church in the Black Atlantic Tr (...)
  • 11 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 133.

5Wine demonstrates that the colonial repression of the Spiritual Baptist religion was an attempt to suppress African spiritual elements that Christianity condemned as evil and barbaric. The Spiritual Baptist religion, which the black community of Bonasse practices, is a syncretic religion born from the contact between European and African religions during the era of plantation slavery. It mainly incorporates European and African spiritual aspects that exist in a dialectical relationship, that is to say, a “mutually interdependent relationship between the African centered and European based religions... an engaging relationship between traditions of faith”10. The African characteristics of the Spiritual Baptist religion consist of singing hymns, shouting, ringing bells, clapping hands, voluntary conversion to the Baptist religion by the followers after having dreams and visions and, most importantly, spirit possession. The element of spirit possession remains essential, because it is the medium through which the Bonasse villagers, as a diasporic group, are able to link themselves to a distant, even imaginary, Africa. As Bee, the Baptist priest, asserts, “the church is Africa in us, black in us...”11.

  • 12 Reddock, Rhoda. “Contestations over Culture, Class, Gender and Identity in Trinidad and Tobago: The (...)

6The Christian aspects in the Spiritual Baptist religion include the belief in Jehovah and Jesus, the reading of the Bible and holding services in a church. Africans incorporated some of the aspects of Christianity because these aspects were compatible with African belief systems. Rhoda Reddock argues that the capacity of Afro-Caribbean religions to acculturate and interculturate facilitated the incorporation of “aspects of other belief systems which were in concert with theirs whether these were forcibly introduced like Christianity or more subconsciously incorporated as with aspects of Hinduism”12. As in Christianity, in their spiritual ethos, Africans believe in the existence of a supreme God, the creator of the universe, although they worship other lesser gods or deities. Also, Africans see the stories in the Bible as representative of their experience as victims. In Wine, Bee and his community in Bonasse associate their situation as victims with the plight of Jesus and the Jews of Egypt. But it was ultimately the Afro-related elements of the Spiritual Baptist religion that the colonial power sought to suppress.

  • 13 Althusser, Louis. “Ideological State Apparatuses”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed (...)
  • 14 Gramsci, Antonio. “Hegemony”. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael (...)
  • 15 Althusser, Louis, op. cit., p. 1487.

7Lovelace perceives the suppression of Afro-Caribbean religious practices as an attempt to dehumanize and deculturize Afro-Caribbean people through ideological and repressive colonial apparatuses. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist thinker of the twentieth century, lists religion, the church and the school as among the ideological apparatuses that the state uses to control its subjects. Althusser calls them the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). He believes that hegemonic ideology, which is the consciousness of the dominant class, is best maintained by the ISAs through the process of what he calls “interpellation”13. Like Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, believed that the ISA operated through the maintenance of hegemony, involving not just external forces but the willing or manufactured acceptance of dominant ideology. For Gramsci, power and domination can be achieved through the intervention of educational, religious, social and political institutions14. However, Althusser suggests that the state also uses physical violence to subjugate people. The Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs), such as the law, police, the military, and so on serve to strengthen and maintain the power of the state against its subjects15. He was to later revise any strict distinction between the forces of the RSA and the violence of the ISA. Both the ISAs and RSAs are prevalent as modes of colonial subjection in Wine.

  • 16 Lovelace, Earl. “Black Community Building”. Growing in the Dark. Ed. Funso Aiyejina. San Juan, Trin (...)

8The Western school and the Catholic Church represent the ISAs that the colonial power uses to subjugate the villagers of Bonasse. Both the school and the Catholic Church teach the villagers that the services of the Baptist church are barbaric and uncivilized. Lovelace himself admits having undergone such propaganda. In “Black Community Building”, he emphasizes that “[w]e were being told that Black people were ugly and retarded, that we were of no value, that we had produced neither civilization nor scholars nor great men”16. In Wine the Western school and Church instill in the mind of the children that joining the Anglican or Catholic Church and following their rituals remain not only a way to attain civilization, but also a guaranteed pathway to Heaven. Eva, Bee’s wife and the narrator of the novel, presents Lovelace’s critique:

  • 17 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 33

All of a sudden they start to teach in their schools and in their church that we [black people] uncivilized and barbarous. They start telling the little children all kinda lies to scare them away from us – Spiritual Baptist bad, Spiritual Baptist stupid, Spiritual Baptist does deal with the devil, Spiritual Baptist ain’t going to heaven.17

  • 18 Qtd. in Gibbons, Rawle. “Syncretism and Secretism in the Manifestation of African Spirituality: The (...)
  • 19 Aiyejina, Funso. Self Portraits: Interviews with Ten West Indian Writers and Two Critics. St. Augus (...)
  • 20 Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. 1965. Trans. Howard Greenfeld. Boston: Beacon Press (...)

9In the eyes of the colonizer, as Bridget Brereton suggests, the attempt to do away with supposed primitivism constitutes the struggle of civilization against savagery, from which victory should emerge with the erasure or taming of barbarism18. In an interview with Funso Aiyejina, a distinguished scholar and critic of Lovelace’s work, Lovelace asserts that the colonial project of civilization goes along with propaganda about the creation of darkness where light exists19. Through such oppositions and the demonization of non-Western ways, colonial authorities justified the Western civilizing mission. Albert Memmi corroborates this idea, as he believes that the construction of the colonized as a lesser being allows a justification of the economic extortion of colonies. Memmi observes that for the colonizer, the colonized needs protection. In other words, the colonizer labels the colonized as weak, lazy, irresponsible, and decides that it was to his benefit that he should be governed through a “protectorat” (“protectorate”)20. This ideology of benevolence, however, largely served the interests of the colonizer and disguised the brute violence of the colonial enterprise.

  • 21 Ibid. p. 87.
  • 22 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of African Language in Literature. Oxford: Ja (...)
  • 23 Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1963. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004 (...)

10Consequently, colonial brainwashing remained a cause of alienation among the colonized elite. The effects of the colonial politics of denigration and deculturation of the colonized are almost inevitable. Memmi reminds us that “[w]illfully created and spread by the colonizer, this mythical and degrading portrait ends up by being accepted and lived with to a certain extent by the colonized”21. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o refers to colonial education as a “cultural bomb” that “annihilate[s] a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves”22. Frantz Fanon asserts that in order for the colonized subject to enter and assimilate the culture of the oppressor, “he had had to assimilate... the way in which the colonialist bourgeoisie thinks”23.

  • 24 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 13.
  • 25 . Ibid., p. 13.
  • 26 . Macaulay, Thomas B., op. cit., p. 130.

11Ivan Morton is the prototype of the alienated colonized subject in Wine. His alienation causes him to be in contradiction to and in conflict with his community. Morton upholds the principle of freedom of worship, but he is concerned about the fact that the villagers “should still be in the dark ages in these modern times” when they “could settle down and be civilized”24. He later claims that “[w]e can’t change our colour... but we can change our attitude. We can’t be white but we can act white”25. Morton’s statement describes the category of the educated colonized subjects that Lord Macaulay theorizes in the context of colonial India as a class of intermediary people, Indian in physical appearance and origin, but European in mentality and attitude. In his “Minute on Indian Education”, Macaulay argues that “we must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but British in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”26. Fanon uses the phrase “black skin, white masks” as the title of his book to characterize the black elites in Africa or in the diaspora who are black in color but European” in taste, in opinions... and in intellect”. W.E.B. Du Bois, from a different standpoint, frames this identity as “double consciousness” in The Souls of Black Folk.

  • 27 . Gibbons, Rawle, op. cit., p. 76.
  • 28 . Lovelace, Earl. Ibid., p. 33.
  • 29 . Lovelace, Earl. The Dragon Can’t Dance. 1979. New York: Persea Books, 1998, p. 225. Print.

12Moreover, Ivan’s view constitutes a debasement of African traditions, which, according to Rawle Gibbons, enacts difference not just between white and black but also between black Caribbean people and the lighter-skinned Creoles. As Gibbons asserts, “Creoles had Christ; Africans worship the devil. Creoles had access to civilization; Africans were damned in their savagery”27. In addition to the demonization of the Spiritual Baptist Church, the colonial authorities compelled the Spiritual Baptists to convert to Catholicism or Anglicanism by denying them educational and job opportunities. For instance, Ivan cannot win a college exhibition despite his intelligence, solely because he is a Baptist. It is by turning Catholic that he manages to get a job as a teacher. The young people are also told that they would have jobs if they converted to Christianity28. In Lovelace’s novel The Dragon Can’t Dance, Philo’s mother compels him to join the Catholic Church “not because Catholic was his religion, but because he would need every help he could get in the world”29. The denial and promise of opportunities to the Baptists had serious material consequences, which strengthened colonial ideology developed through the Western school and Church. These ideological colonial apparatuses, though working through indoctrination, exert a form of repression that is not seen on the surface.

  • 30 . Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 36.
  • 31 . Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin. 1970. New York: Schocken Books, 1991. Print; Of Age an (...)
  • 32 . Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. Novels of George Lamming. London: Heinemann, 1982, p. 55. Print.
  • 33 . Walcott, Derek. Dream on Monkey Mountain. and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1 (...)

13Besides the ideological colonial apparatuses, the colonial system attempted to control and suppress Spiritual Baptist practices through violent repression and punishment. The police and the law epitomize the colonial repressive system. In Wine, the police, under the lead of the ruthless Corporal Prince, strictly see to it that the Prohibition Ordinance against the Spiritual Baptists is observed. Offenders are beaten and imprisoned by the stout and ruthless Corporal Prince30. He reminds the reader of the figure of the overseer in Caribbean literature. The ruthlessness that characterizes Corporal Prince in Wine is seen in the figure of the overseer in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin and of Baboo in his novel Of Age and Innocence31. Sandra Pouchet Paquet conceives of Corporal Prince as another version of the overseer in Castle32. Corporal Lestrade, the mulatto prison keeper, in Walcott’s play Dream on Monkey Mountain33 also epitomizes the oppressive overseer.

  • 34 Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin, op. cit., p. 26. Print.
  • 35 Walcott, Derek. Dream on Monkey Mountain, op. cit, p. 279. Print.
  • 36 Walcott, Derek. Op. cit., p. 299.
  • 37 Appiah, Kwame A. Forward. Black Skin White Masks. By Frantz Fanon. 1952. Trans. Richard Philcox. Ne (...)

14Often, the violent character of the overseer does not just stem from an intention to enforce laws, but also from a will to exert authority and foster respect from the masses that resent such authority. Like Corporal Prince in Wine, the overseer in Castle has the duty of protecting the landlord’s property and securing his own privilege against the interests of their villagers. It is through perpetrating violence and adopting aggressive and authoritative attitudes that the overseer seeks to gain respect from his people34. In Dream, Corporal Lestrade represents the repressive agency in charge of the enforcement of the white man’s law. Addressing Souris, he admits that “I am the instrument of the law, Souris. I got the white man work to do”35. His violent verbal attack on the prisoners, Makak, Tiger and Souris, and the resentment he harbors against them are not only manifestations of his desire to exercise authority, but also a castigation of the thing he hates in himself, which is the black part of his identity. As Corporal Lestrade confesses to Makak in the second scene of Part II, “I jeered thee because I hated half of myself, my eclipse”36. Fanon believes that the associations of black skin with impurity by the mainstream colonial culture foreground the factors of black people’s self-loathing37. The black prisoners therefore remind Corporal Lestrade of his own “impurity”. Thus his oppression of the prisoners is an attempt to control his anxiety born from his hatred of his African heritage. The denial of Afro-Caribbean people’s dignity goes along with the process of colonization through ideology and repression, which inevitably results in resistance from the oppressed.

VIOLENT RESISTANCE AND “INFRAPOLITICS”

  • 38 Lovelace, Earl. Personal interview. Port of Spain, Trinidad. 20 June 2013.
  • 39 Lovelace, Earl. Is Just a Movie. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Print.

15The practical option to preserve Afro-Caribbean cultural practices amidst colonial repression that Lovelace offers is twofold, which is the central point that Wine is making. On the one hand, he presents the possibility of violent revolt. And on the other, he proposes mimicry or accommodation to the orthodoxy. As Lovelace points out, “in The Wine of Astonishment there’re two points of views... one is the view of rebellion or resistance, or confrontation. And the other one is the view of acquiescing, even temporarily”38. However, although he believes that both approaches are valid, in this novel he favors mimicry over violent resistance in this context of colonial repression, as seen in the subplot revolving around Bolo. The majority of the community of Bonasse does not opt for physical confrontation against the authorities. Yet, Bolo, the stickfighter, refuses to bow down to colonial power. He does not see any other way of facing the colonial authorities than fighting back against the repressive apparatus. He thinks the only way to liberate the church is to kill Corporal Prince. Neither marronage nor what he sees as passivity appeals to Bolo. He belongs to the category of warriors, in Lovelace’s fiction, who find meaning in turning to violence as a way of coping with their problems. Bolo’s prototype is Fisheye in Dragon. Both characters’ warrior tendencies bring them to act destructively against their own communities. Sonnyboy is a badjohn prototype in Lovelace’s novel Is Just a Movie39 but unlike Bolo and Fisheye, Sonnyboy evolves, and grows out of this confinement of warriorhood.

  • 40 Rohlehr, Gordon. Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad. Trinidad: Gordon Rohlehr, 1990, (...)

16Bolo expresses warriorhood through the culture of stickfighting, which originated from disputes over jobs in squatter settlements where employment opportunities were scarce. The struggle over access to the rarely available resources and jobs in these squatter settlements resulted in “the rise of calinda/stickfighting street gangs, formed to defend turfs. Each such band had a lead singer/chantwell whose duty... was to harangue the stickfighters into action, to sustain the courage of his champion, and to pour scorn on the rival group or champion”40. As part of the celebration of Carnival, stickfighting became a representation of manhood and warriorhood, as Lovelace depicts it in both Wine and Dragon.

17By invoking the tradition of stickfighting in Wine through the character of Bolo, Lovelace demonstrates both the promises and risks of vernacular cultures. Bolo is the champion of stickfighting in the community of Bonasse. He valiantly represents his community in stickfighting, which gives him a sense of belonging, dignity, and humanity. As Eva narrates,

  • 41 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 21.

Bolo was a special man; not only to us, women, to everybody. If you have a house to build or a dead to bury, you could call him to lend a hand, and though he’s a man who fears nobody, he knows how to laugh, and if you down to cheer you up, and he could feel sorry.41

  • 42 Ibid. p. 21-22.

18Bolo sees stickfighting not so much for the battle as for its performance, as a space for self-affirmation and an invitation to acknowledge that he and his destitute community exist42. Stickfighting emerges, then, as an art form that not only gives a sense of meaning to the individual, but also contributes to the survival and recognition of the whole community. With the outbreak of World War II, the arrival of the Americans in Bonasse, and the ban of the Baptist Church practices, along with restrictions on Carnival and stickfighting, Bolo’s life takes a dramatic turn.

  • 43 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 104-06.
  • 44 Ibid., p. 102.
  • 45 Lovelace, Earl. Is Just a Movie, op. cit., p. 54-55.

19The ban of Carnival and of stickfighting contests signals the end of the stickfighter as a hero. The Yankees become the new heroes, drawing the attention of young men and women, who start ignoring Bolo. The sense of significance and belonging that he has enjoyed as a warrior dissipates. From then on, Bolo develops a sense of anger, frustration, and inclination towards violence, even against his own community43. Like Fisheye in Dragon, Bolo looks for any opportunity to get into fights. He drinks and refuses to pay, expecting to be challenged into a fight. The hero-stickfighter becomes a badjohn, exerting “a full terror in the village”44. Similarly in Is Just a Movie, Sonnyboy, growing into manhood and feeling resentment at the world, goes “to fetes in the RC school, daring the girls to refuse to dance with him, waiting for a fella to oppose him and so provide the confrontation he was inviting”45.

20As a warrior, Bolo despises what he considers his community’s passive response to colonial repression. He cannot understand and does not accept his community’s subordination to the will of the established authority, disguising or changing their traditional ways of celebrating the Baptist spiritual religion. As Eva describes:

  • 46 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, ibid., p. 17.

Bolo stand up there, his lower jaw dropping out his face, his eyes disbelieving, his head turning to look at Bee, at me, at all of us as if he can’t believe that after all these years this is where we is. He stand up there in the church, in the midst of our hymn singing, with amazement and heartbreak in his face... when I look back for him he wasn’t there, was gone. He would never come back to our church again.46

21Eva’s description clearly expresses Bolo’s strong opposition to his community’s accommodation to the religious orthodoxy. He is a warrior, and believes that only direct confrontation can liberate the Spiritual Baptist church. However, his determination to fight eventually makes him a tragic figure. His battle with Corporal Prince leads to his imprisonment. After his release from prison, Bolo is disillusioned both by the authorities’ refusal to grant him land and his rejection by his community. His disappointment reinforces his anger, and causes him to increase his tendency toward violence. Marjorie Thorpe notes in her introduction to Wine that:

  • 47 Thorpe, Marjorie. Introduction. The Wine of Astonishment. By Earl Lovelace. 1982. London: Heinemann (...)

the suffering which Lovelace’s heroes endure becomes the prelude to creative action, the Bolos are seduced into a posture of violent confrontation, directing their rage not only against a hostile establishment, but also against the very people they desire to save.47

  • 48 Lovelace, Earl. “Black Community Building”, op. cit., p. 154.

22Bolo represents, in fact, a threat to both the orthodoxy and the survival of the community of Bonasse and the Baptist church. On the one hand, Bolo’s resistance constitutes a risk to established colonial order. On the other hand, it can cause his own destruction, the destruction of the community, and that of the church, as the police physically attack the villagers to maintain order. Rebellious attitudes of an individual can be a factor of destruction for a community in the colonial West Indies. As Lovelace declares, “They [Lovelace’s parents] were telling us: behave yourself, calm yourself, be very quiet – because they understood that that was the only way for us to survive”48. Violent insubordination and defiance are a risk to both the individual and the community.

  • 49 Aiyejina, Funso. Personal interview. Port of Spain, Trinidad. 17 June 2013.

23Bolo’s inclination to violence ineluctably brings him misfortune. In an attempt to take revenge on his own people, he kidnaps Primus’s two daughters and is eventually killed as the police try to rescue the young women. By turning against his community, Bolo becomes a false hero like Fisheye. The problem with Bolo is that he refuses to accommodate himself to the new conditions, that is to say, finding a form of resistance that is less harmful to his commitment to preserving traditions. Aiyejina asserts that Bolo enters into conflict with his own self and his community, because he “was not historical; he was locked in a time warp”49. The representation of the figure of the stickfighter in Wine expresses Lovelace’s ambivalence towards popular cultural traditions. Although he admires these vernacular cultures, Lovelace does not romanticize them. He believes in the humanizing and uplifting potential of popular cultures, but he also remains conscious of their destructive capacities.

24In opposition to violent resistance, the mimicry of colonial cultural practices as “infrapolitics” in Wine appears to be a pragmatic response against the orthodoxy. Far from surrendering itself, the community of Bonasse, under the leadership of the priest Bee, opts to imitate the Anglican and Catholic ways as a masked resistance, a means to ward off the brutal reprisals and to maintain its Spiritual Baptist Church. The Bonasse villagers’ acquiescence and passivity contrast Bolo’s choice of violent confrontation. Faced with the reprisals of the colonial repressive apparatus, Bee and his community decide to comply with the ways of worship the colonial authorities have decreed. Through his sermon, Bee’s encourages his brethren to mimic the Anglican and Catholic worship styles. He pleads that:

  • 50 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, ibidem, p. xii.

if a man compel you to walk one mile with him, go two; if he ask for your cloak, give him your coat too. We going to do what they want us to do. We going to try it their way. They want us to not ring the bell, we not going to ring the bell. They want us to be Anglican and Catholic, we going to be like Catholic and Anglican. We going to sing how they want us to sing, we going to pray quiet just as they pray. We are going to worship like them. The war can’t go on forever.50

25Bee calls on his community to mimic, and pretend to follow the Catholic and Anglican methods of worship until the war ends, which will hopefully bring the repeal of the Prohibition Ordinance.

  • 51 Memmi, Albert, op. cit., p. 88.
  • 52 Scott, James, op. cit., p. xiii.
  • 53 Ibidem, p. xii.
  • 54 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 34-35.

26It is a misreading of Lovelace’s novel, however, to consider that the villagers’ decision to mimic or accommodate Christianity as a complete acceptance of colonial ways, or resignation and defeat. This is far from being an acceptance of hegemony or from representing a form of false consciousness. Memmi, developing on the Marxist view of hegemony, observes that “It is common knowledge that the ideology of a governing class is adopted in large measure by the governed classes... By agreeing to this ideology, the dominated classes practically confirm the role assigned to them”51 Lovelace’s representation of mimicry in Wine, however, functions as a mode of resistance. The Bonasse villagers’ adoption of the ways of the religious orthodoxy in Wine characterizes what Scott calls “infrapolitics” of the powerless”, that is to say “patterns of disguising ideological insubordination”, which “are somewhat analogous to the patterns by which... peasants and slaves have disguised their efforts to thwart material appropriation of their labor, their production, and their property”52. Through mimicry, the subordinate groups reproduce “public transcripts” to divert the eye of the oppressor and dissimulate their dissent. For Scott, there are “hidden transcripts” beyond the enactment of the public transcripts, which some scholars fail to see when they read passive obedience into those who do not openly revolt. As Scott argues, “[e] very subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a ‘hidden transcript’ that represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant”53. So, in his speech, Bee only encourages his followers to pretend that they worship in the ways of the colonizers. It is clear, then, that the villagers’ mimicry of the Anglican and Catholic ways is not simply out of blind belief in those ways. Rather, it stands for a means to escape the ruthlessness of the police, maintain the Baptist Church with its Africanized rituals rather than have it destroyed, and safeguard the integrity of community of Bonasse. In this sense, mimicry represents a means of resistance and survival. Another vivid instance of mimicry as “infrapolitics” is seen in Bee’s suggestion that they should stage agricultural meetings to deceive the gaze of the police after establishing their church on the hill. Bee declares that they should “have a look-out to watch for the police so if they creep up on us and we don’t have time to run we could pretend that we keeping agricultural meeting”54. The supposed agricultural meetings stand for an active deception, which is meant to dissimulate the actual Spiritual Baptist services.

  • 55 Scott, James, op. cit., p. 137.
  • 56 Ibid., p. 137.
  • 57 Qtd. in Olmos, Margarite Fernández and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. “Religious Syncretism and Caribb (...)
  • 58 Qtd. in Olmos, Margarite Fernández and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. Op. cit., p. 4.
  • 59 Aiyejina, Funso. Personal interview. 17 June 2013.
  • 60 Arneaud, Thalia T. M. “Square Thought and Plastic Memory in the Novels of Earl Lovelace”. M A Thesi (...)

27What is specific in Scott’s theory of hidden transcripts is his focus on linguistic patterns. Scott tries to provide proof of how subordinate groups resist through the development of “a veiled discourse of dignity and self-assertion within the public transcript”55. He believes the speech acts incorporate an “ideology resistance [that] is disguised, muted and veiled for safety’s sake”56. While Scott emphasizes linguistic patterns in his study, he provides a peripheral space to the treatment of cultural performance as hidden transcripts. In the context of the Caribbean, however, where the diasporic experience involved cultural adaptation and survival of ancestral cultures, hidden transcripts are often embedded in performance. Carnival and religious practices like the Spiritual Baptist services, Vodoun, and other Afro-Caribbean religious practices, are examples of performances that are sites where the oppressed resort to mimicry as bearers of hidden transcripts. Historians have documented how, for instance, slaves who practiced Vodoun would mimic Catholic ways of worshipping saints to escape their masters’ oppression. In the public space they worship the Catholic saints, while in reality they have in mind their own gods. This process evokes “syncretism by correspondence”, or as Leslie Desmangles names it, “symbiosis by identity”57. As Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert explain, symbiosis by identity is the development “through which an African deity and a Catholic saint became one on the basis of mythical or symbolic similarities”58. Symbiosis by identity resulted from the imposition of Christianity upon the African slaves, and the latter’s will to perpetuate their religious beliefs. Aiyejina argues that because Africans in the Caribbean were forced to practice Christianity, they reinterpreted that religion, and infused it with the African spirit and ethos59. The cannes brûlées (cane burning harvest celebrations) were also moments whereby Africans recreated their dances and practiced their traditional rituals60. Also called Canboulay, the cannes brûlées emerged during slavery, and celebrated the extinguishing of the cane burning flames. Africans gradually transformed this seasonal ritual into a festival that included carrying lighted flambeaux, ribald dancing and masking. In Wine, drawing from such subversion, Lovelace captures the art of religious performance to demonstrate mimicry as a way of resistance, cultural retention, and community survival.

  • 61 Scott, James. Op. cit., p. 37.

28Cultural retention and community survival entail the preservation of life and cultural forms. In this respect, mimicry operates as a protective measure. In Lovelace’s novel it functions to ward off colonial violence, dissimulating the villagers’ intention to perpetuate their religion in order to safeguard the integrity of their church and community. By mimicking the Anglican and Catholic ways, Bee and his followers intend to preserve the Baptist Church and their community, which can only be possible if they control the anger and violent insurgency of followers like Bolo and prevent colonial retaliation. As sociolinguists and social psychologists suggest, mimicry functions as “masking one’s feelings” and “controlling what would be natural impulse to rage, insult, and anger and the violence that such feelings prompt”61. It is therefore important to underline that mimicry would not by itself cause the Prohibition Ordinance to be lifted. Mimicry allows the church and the community to live until the day comes when colonial authorities lift the ban of the Spiritual Baptist practices. Bee recommends that his people just pretend to follow the colonizer’s ways, and put their own man on the Council to negotiate the repeal of the Prohibition Ordinance, or just wait until the war ends, when the colonial authorities will be compelled to lift the ban.

29In Lovelace’s novel, mimicry appears to be a tactic of resistance and cultural survival that emanates from the inability of the powerless to wage open revolt against colonial oppression and brute power. The compliance to the will of the powerful, in Wine, remains indicative of Lovelace’s ideology that where violent revolution is self-destructive, non-violent resistance should prevail. Brother Oswald clearly expresses this view when he claims:

  • 62 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 38.

I don’t mean that they not brave. The men have to think more than their bravery. They have to think about the church and how it going to live. They have to think about our children who we want to see grow big. Because once you start against the police, you have to continue.62

  • 63 Scott, James. Op. cit., p. 86.
  • 64 Gal, Susan. “Language and the ‘ Arts of Resistance’”. Cultural Anthropology, 10.3 (1995): 407-24, p (...)
  • 65 Ryan, Selwyn D. Race and Nationalism in Trinidad: A Study of Decolonization in a Multicultural Soci (...)
  • 66 Ibid., p. 8.
  • 67 Lovelace, Earl. “Creole Culture: The Genesis of the Creole Culture”. N. d. TS. West Indiana & Speci (...)

30As Scott argues, oppression inspires hidden transcripts that benefit the oppressed, especially when it is impossible to carry out violent resistance63. Susan Gal, expanding on Scott’s argument, states that “[it] is thus often in the interest of the subordinate to maintain their differential public transcript, even though they do not believe it, especially if open rebellion is seen as a practical impossibility. The weak are most likely to resist in devious ways, without any open confrontation”64. While Selwyn Ryan agrees with the Caribbean radicals’ claims of violent struggle based on Fanon’s advocacy of open resistance against colonialism, his book Race and Nationalism in Trinidad, especially Part Four, argues that “revolutionary violence in the Caribbean context is neither a meaningful nor desirable alternative”65. For him, the Algerian struggle for independence that Fanon emphasizes does not provides any reason for hope, and the local and international contexts that favored the success of the Cuban revolution are not likely to happen again66. Lovelace likewise maintains that “African culture was always on the run. It had to operate underground, quietly and to survive at all had to see all sorts of camouflages”67. The essential thing to grasp here is not that Lovelace is against resistance as such but he values the survival of the Caribbean people over reckless, self-destructive violence. As he argues in “Creating Communities”,

  • 68 Lovelace, Earl. “Creating Communities”. Growing in the Dark. Ed. Funso Aiyejina. San Juan, Trinidad (...)

If one is to pay tribute to our fathers under slavery and colonialism, to me, it would not be that they fought or that they were humiliated, but that they survived, when all around them, indigenous peoples were being exterminated – in the Caribbean, in Central America, in
South America, in North America.
68

31The survival of Caribbean people is not just about heroic revolts but has also been obtained through seemingly unheroic modes of resistance and even accommodation and adaptation.

32Unlike Lovelace, Fanon advocates violent resistance as a means to put an end to colonialism and establish a national culture. Yet, in saying so, Fanon does not reject all non-violent opposition to oppression. He is in fact suggesting that the passive ways of struggle, in the past, are inadequate during the struggle against Western colonialism. As Fanon argues:

  • 69 Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., p. 129.

When a people undertakes an armed struggle or even a political struggle against a relentless colonialism, the significance of traditions changes. All that has made up the technique of passive resistance in the past may, during this phase, be radically condemned... This is why the intellectual often runs the risk of being out of date.69

  • 70 Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., p. 210.
  • 71 Memmi, Albert, op. cit., p. 127.

33In the above passage, Fanon makes a critique of the intellectuals of Négritude, who are only concerned about nostalgically recovering an idealized past without engaging an armed struggle for their people. He perceives the role of the black intellectual as not just singing about the past, but also to be involved in armed struggle for the liberation of his people. For him, a national culture cannot exist under colonization. That is why, as Fanon asserts, “to fight for national culture means in the first place to fight for liberation of the nation, that material keystone which makes the building of a possible culture”70. Memmi corroborates Fanon’s argument that only violent resistance can eradicate colonialism. He emphasizes that “Far from being surprised at the revolts of colonized peoples, we should be, on the contrary, surprised that they are not more frequent and violent... revolt is the only way out of the colonial situation”71. Memmi’s argument characterizes non-violent means of resistance as irrelevant in the face of colonialism. Both Fanon and Memmi conceive of colonialism as a form of heightened violence, and only a similar violence can do away with it. This emphasis on violent revolt as resistance to oppression does not, however, appeal to Lovelace, especially in contexts when such open resistance causes destruction on the side of the oppressed.

  • 72 Lovelace, Earl. Personal interview, op. cit.

34Mimicry constitutes a mode of resisting the orthodoxy and makes it possible for the Bonasse villagers to retain their Spiritual Baptist religion and safeguard the integrity of their community. A key point in Lovelace’s philosophy and political ideology defines survival as trumping violent resistance. The essence of Lovelace’s vision is that survival should be achieved no matter what the means. Lovelace is of course aware that violent revolt can be an adequate way of confronting power as in the case of the Haitian Revolution. The community of Bonasse is also aware of the possibility of open rebellion as an option. Wine underscores that both the option of passive resistance and that of physical struggle linger in the psychology of the Bonasse villagers. Bee’s argument that they should not have stopped the real worship of the Baptist faith after the loss of spirit possession in the wake of the repeal of the Prohibition Ordinance denotes the situation of psychological limbo in which the villagers have been living. But the survival of the villagers and their religion is paramount, and that is achieved through non-violent resistance. Lovelace believes that “Those who had to endure this journey [Middle Passage] were the one who made it possible for us to be present. And being present, we can now change things”72. Lovelace’s point is that the Africans who survived and endured the Atlantic slave trade are the foundation of the existence and evolution of many Caribbean people.

  • 73 Aiyejina, Funso. Self Portraits, op. cit., p. 4-5.
  • 74 Lovelace, Earl. “The Creative Arts And National Reconstruction”. N. d. TS. West Indiana & Special C (...)
  • 75 Reddock, Rhoda. Op. cit., p. 75. Print.
  • 76 Lovelace, Earl. “Introduction”. Moko Jumbies: the Dancing Spirits of Trinidad. New York: Pointed Le (...)

35Lovelace’s focus on the Spiritual Baptist Church followers’ experience is variously motivated. First, he intends to pay tribute and give visibility to the lower-class people who struggle to reclaim their dignity. In his interview with Aiyejina, Lovelace acknowledges his fascination for ordinary people – uneducated people – whose action remains underground and unsupported by the intellectual elite73. Additionally, the Spiritual Baptists’s story in Wine demonstrates Lovelace’s opinion that it is through culture that Caribbean people have mostly resisted74. Another point is that the Spiritual Baptist religion seems to be the most encompassing and inclusive religious practice among Afro-related spiritual beliefs in Trinidad. Apart from the African and European religions, the Spiritual Baptist church also incorporates East Indian and Chinese ethnic groups’ religious beliefs75. The Spiritual Baptists’ struggle might then speak to a national cause, not just an Afrocentric one. Also, the retention of African religious facets in the Spiritual Baptist church refutes the idea that “Africans were stripped culturally naked by enslavement and colonialism”76.

  • 77 Springer, Pearl E. “Orisa and the Spiritual Baptist Religion in Trinidad and Tobago”. At the Crossr (...)
  • 78 Hayles, Donna E. “African Cultural Retention in Selected Works of Earl Lovelace”. M A Thesis. U of (...)

36Finally, Lovelace seems to suggest that adapted religious practices like the Spiritual Baptist Church are more fulfilling and more likely to survive in a Caribbean context of colonial cultural repression. According to Pearl E. Springer, the Baptist Church underscores an “attempt for practitioners to find self-realisation within a Christianity where racism was and is endemic”77. Most of these cultural artifacts, as Donna Hayles emphasizes, “became creolized in the Caribbean, as the process of Creolization was necessary to ensure the survival and continuity of African cultures in the Caribbean”78. Caribbean culture, then, had to encompass a composite nature, or creoleness, which mimicry and other survival dynamics helped to achieve.

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Lamming, George. Is Just a Movie. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Print.

Lamming, George. “Black Community Building”. Growing in the Dark. Ed. Funso Aiyejina. San Juan, Trinidad and Tobago: Lexicon, 2003. 153-57. Print.

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Notas

1 Scott, James. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1990, p. xiii. Print.

2 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment. 1982. London: Heinemann, 1986. Print.

3 Macaulay, Thomas B. “A Minute on Indian Education”. Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism. Eds. Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2005. 121-31. Print.

4 V. S. Naipaul. The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch – in the West Indies and South America. 1962. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. Print; Mimic Men. 1967. New York: Vantage International, 2001. Print.

5 Walcott, Derek. “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry”. Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Criticism and Theory. Eds. Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 2005. 257-73, p. 261. Print.

6 Girard, René. “Mimesis and Violence: Perspectives in Cultural Criticism”. Berkshire Review 14 (1979): 9-19, p. 9. Print.

7 Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 85. Print.

8 Qtd. in Moore-Gilbert, Bart J. Postcolonial Theory: Context, Practices, Politics. London: Verso, 1997, p. 133. Print.

9 Walcott, Derek. “The Caribbean”, op. cit., p. 262.

10 Reid-Salmon, Delroy A. Home Away from Home: The Caribbean Diasporan Church in the Black Atlantic Tradition. London: Equinox Pub. Ltd., 2008, p. 60-61. Print.

11 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 133.

12 Reddock, Rhoda. “Contestations over Culture, Class, Gender and Identity in Trinidad and Tobago: The Little Transition”. Caribbean Quarterly 44.1-2 (1998): 62-80, p. 74. Print.

13 Althusser, Louis. “Ideological State Apparatuses”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 1483-1507, p. 1491. Print.

14 Gramsci, Antonio. “Hegemony”. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 673, p. 673. Print.

15 Althusser, Louis, op. cit., p. 1487.

16 Lovelace, Earl. “Black Community Building”. Growing in the Dark. Ed. Funso Aiyejina. San Juan, Trinidad and Tobago: Lexicon, 2003. 153-57, p. 155. Print.

17 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 33

18 Qtd. in Gibbons, Rawle. “Syncretism and Secretism in the Manifestation of African Spirituality: The Restitution of the Spirit”. At the Crossroads: African Caribbean Religion and Christianity. Ed. Burton Sankeralli. St. James: Caribbean Conference of Churches, 1995. 67-84, p. 76. Print.

19 Aiyejina, Funso. Self Portraits: Interviews with Ten West Indian Writers and Two Critics. St. Augustine: The University of the West Indies Press, 2003, p. 6. Print.

20 Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. 1965. Trans. Howard Greenfeld. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991, p. 82. Print.

21 Ibid. p. 87.

22 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of African Language in Literature. Oxford: James Curry, 1986, p. 3. Print.

23 Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1963. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004, p. 13. Print.

24 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 13.

25 . Ibid., p. 13.

26 . Macaulay, Thomas B., op. cit., p. 130.

27 . Gibbons, Rawle, op. cit., p. 76.

28 . Lovelace, Earl. Ibid., p. 33.

29 . Lovelace, Earl. The Dragon Can’t Dance. 1979. New York: Persea Books, 1998, p. 225. Print.

30 . Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 36.

31 . Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin. 1970. New York: Schocken Books, 1991. Print; Of Age and Innocence. 1958. London: Allison and Busby, 1981. Print.

32 . Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. Novels of George Lamming. London: Heinemann, 1982, p. 55. Print.

33 . Walcott, Derek. Dream on Monkey Mountain. and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970. Print.

34 Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin, op. cit., p. 26. Print.

35 Walcott, Derek. Dream on Monkey Mountain, op. cit, p. 279. Print.

36 Walcott, Derek. Op. cit., p. 299.

37 Appiah, Kwame A. Forward. Black Skin White Masks. By Frantz Fanon. 1952. Trans. Richard Philcox. NewYork: Grove Press, 2008, vii-x, p. ix. Print.

38 Lovelace, Earl. Personal interview. Port of Spain, Trinidad. 20 June 2013.

39 Lovelace, Earl. Is Just a Movie. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Print.

40 Rohlehr, Gordon. Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad. Trinidad: Gordon Rohlehr, 1990, p. 52. Print.

41 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 21.

42 Ibid. p. 21-22.

43 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 104-06.

44 Ibid., p. 102.

45 Lovelace, Earl. Is Just a Movie, op. cit., p. 54-55.

46 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, ibid., p. 17.

47 Thorpe, Marjorie. Introduction. The Wine of Astonishment. By Earl Lovelace. 1982. London: Heinemann, 1986. vii-xiv, p. xiii. Print.

48 Lovelace, Earl. “Black Community Building”, op. cit., p. 154.

49 Aiyejina, Funso. Personal interview. Port of Spain, Trinidad. 17 June 2013.

50 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, ibidem, p. xii.

51 Memmi, Albert, op. cit., p. 88.

52 Scott, James, op. cit., p. xiii.

53 Ibidem, p. xii.

54 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 34-35.

55 Scott, James, op. cit., p. 137.

56 Ibid., p. 137.

57 Qtd. in Olmos, Margarite Fernández and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. “Religious Syncretism and Caribbean Culture”. Introduction. Sacred Possessions. Eds. Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. New Brunswick, Rutgers UP, 1997, p. 4. Print; Desmangles, Leslie G. The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Print.

58 Qtd. in Olmos, Margarite Fernández and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. Op. cit., p. 4.

59 Aiyejina, Funso. Personal interview. 17 June 2013.

60 Arneaud, Thalia T. M. “Square Thought and Plastic Memory in the Novels of Earl Lovelace”. M A Thesis. University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, 2009, p. 7. Print.

61 Scott, James. Op. cit., p. 37.

62 Lovelace, Earl. The Wine of Astonishment, op. cit., p. 38.

63 Scott, James. Op. cit., p. 86.

64 Gal, Susan. “Language and the ‘ Arts of Resistance’”. Cultural Anthropology, 10.3 (1995): 407-24, p. 410. Print.

65 Ryan, Selwyn D. Race and Nationalism in Trinidad: A Study of Decolonization in a Multicultural Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972, p. 8. Print.

66 Ibid., p. 8.

67 Lovelace, Earl. “Creole Culture: The Genesis of the Creole Culture”. N. d. TS. West Indiana & Special Collections. Alma Jordan Lib. St. Augustine, Trinidad, p. 6.

68 Lovelace, Earl. “Creating Communities”. Growing in the Dark. Ed. Funso Aiyejina. San Juan, Trinidad and Tobago: Lexicon, 2003. 111-17, p. 115. Print.

69 Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., p. 129.

70 Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., p. 210.

71 Memmi, Albert, op. cit., p. 127.

72 Lovelace, Earl. Personal interview, op. cit.

73 Aiyejina, Funso. Self Portraits, op. cit., p. 4-5.

74 Lovelace, Earl. “The Creative Arts And National Reconstruction”. N. d. TS. West Indiana & Special Collections. Alma Jordan Lib. St. Augustine, Trinidad, p. 1.

75 Reddock, Rhoda. Op. cit., p. 75. Print.

76 Lovelace, Earl. “Introduction”. Moko Jumbies: the Dancing Spirits of Trinidad. New York: Pointed Leaf Press, 2004. 13-43, p. 13. Print.

77 Springer, Pearl E. “Orisa and the Spiritual Baptist Religion in Trinidad and Tobago”. At the Crossroads: African Caribbean Religion and Christianity. Ed. Burton Sankeralli. St. James: Caribbean Conference of Churches, 1995. 85-108, p. 99. Print.

78 Hayles, Donna E. “African Cultural Retention in Selected Works of Earl Lovelace”. M A Thesis. U of the West Indies, St. Augustine, 2006, p. i. Print.

Autor

Ancien élève de l’École Normale Supérieure de Dakar-Sénégal, est chercheur Fulbright au Centre d’Études Latino-Américaines et Caribéennes de Tulane University, New Orléans, USA. Sa thèse de doctorat a porté sur les écrivains caribéens anglophones notamment Earl Lovelace, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, V. S. Naipaul et Samuel Selvon. Il poursuit ses recherches sur la créolité chez les écrivains anglophones postcoloniaux, sur le genre, la politique des religions, les identités, les résistances, le nationalisme et les utopies dans les diasporas afro-caribéennes

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