Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

Born in Sainte-Marie, Martinique on September 21, 1928, Édouard Glissant, was part of a pivotal generation in the development of French Caribbean thought in the XX century – a generation that included Franz Fanon, that overlapped with that of Aimé Césaire and that set the scene for the emergence of contemporary figures, such as Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant.

Within Caribbean literary circles, Kamau Brathwaite (née Lawson Edward Brathwaite, Bridgetown, Barbados, 1930) stands among the most important, influential, prolific and respected names, alongside, for instance, Derek Walcott and V S Naipaul and George Lamming – all members of the same remarkable generation of writers, who, quite suddenly, put Caribbean literature ‘on the map’ towards the end of the decade of the fifties and through the nineteen-sixties.

On Thursday, October 7, 2010, the Swedish Academy awarded the 103rd Nobel Prize in Literature to the Peruvian novelist, essayist and intellectual Mario Vargas Llosa. It was the first time in twenty years that the prize was awarded to a writer who conducts his/her trade in Spanish language. In the world of Hispanic literature, few names could be paired with Vargas Llosa’s in terms of stature and accomplishment. 

There was something quietly symbolic in the setting of the ceremony where the I Latin American Literary Prize Arturo Uslar Pietri would be awarded to the previously unpublished Venezuelan writer, Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles. Something not quite enunciated, perhaps not even deliberately sought, in the final product of a long process that had required much time, effort, organization and that, ultimately, would come to its successful end, to its climax, with this very ceremony.

Recently, I was reading Jeremy Taylor’s review of Conversations with Caryl Phillips (ed. by Renée Shatteman), a compendium of nineteen interviews with the Kittitian-born, British writer, where, according to Taylor, we learn all kinds of details about the author. Among them, the revelation that Phillips “doesn’t see himself as part of a Caribbean literary tradition; in fact, he hardly thinks there is one.”

Sea, the beach, Bob Marley, sun, chillout, hash, Fidel Castro, Rastafari, Haiti, hot, cool… This is just a short list of the answers people gave me when I asked them what was the first thing that came to their minds when I said the word “Caribbean”. One even came up with “ackee and saltfish”. But no one, not a single one, said literature. Not even “Derek Walcott”, or “Aimé Césaire”. Nothing.