Proceso de fabricación de comprimidos farmacéuticos

Who is a Caribbean writer? What is Caribbean literature? Is it defined by the subject treated, the artist’s origin or the artistic form? Or is it just a question of marketing strategy: sea, text and sun, white sand and blue colours nurturing a Caribbean plural texture? In the inner lightning of Walcott’s twilight, the West Indians write against the grain, because their very origins suggest hybridity:

I see the word “Ashanti” as with the word “Warwickshire,” both separately intimating my grandfathers’ roots, both baptizing this neither proud nor ashamed bastard, this hybrid, this West Indian. (W T S, 9)

This sentence encompasses the Caribbean writer’s questioning. By examining evocative words like “Ashanti” and “Warwickshire,” Walcott foregrounds their common consonance, embodied in the sound ‘sh’, which may be sug- gestive of waves scratching against the Caribbean sand. The binary structure “neither proud nor ashamed” follows the same ambivalent pattern. The Carib- bean artist is always between two shores, the western side, that of the Carib- bean Sea, and the eastern part, that of the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, the string of phrases “this neither proud nor ashamed bastard, this hybrid, this West In- dian” reminds us that the denomination ‘West Indian’ is an oxymoron. With India representing the East, ‘West Indian’ is itself an instance of hybridiza- tion. This expression involves geographical directions, but also points to dis- placement in its construction. Indeed, ‘West Indian’ does not merely contain the opposition of signifiers, east versus west. What we literally notice is not the absence of a clear single direction, but the existence of both – east and west in the same phrase. Beyond this opposition, we predict an opening on two horizons and a bridging of the infinite space between them.

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It is no surprise, therefore, that in the introduction to the Caribbean part of

A New World Order entitled “The Gift of Displacement,” Phillips defines

Caribbean authors as having a very special “migratory condition” (NWO, 131). For him, the cultural hybridity of the Caribbean heritage allows the writer to create narratives away from the simplistic divisions of race or national identity. To support this argument, Phillips tells his own story as a writer. And this story starts with two books by Frantz Fanon: “Black Skin,

White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth became my Old Testament and

my New Testament” (NWO, 129). In Fanon’s humanism, Phillips found a means to depart from African-American authors’ focus on race: “The shadow of purity does not extend far south beyond the Florida Keys” (NWO, 133). As Phillips himself explains, he was inspired by African-American writing but, when encountering Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, he was able to link his Caribbean heritage to his writing. The comparison with the Old and the New Testament evokes the image of Moses opening a pas- sage between the Florida Keys and the Caribbean Sea. Phillips also uses Fanon’s personal story as a motif. Fanon was born in Martinique, lived a part of his life in Europe and North Africa, died in the U S A, and was buried in Al- geria. Even after death, Fanon’s body was displaced. This idea relates to Phil- lips’s own wish to have his ashes scattered in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (NWO, 304), and also reminds one of Walcott’s comment on Antillean people’s relationship with death: “we have not wholly sunk into our own landscapes, as one gets the feeling at funerals that our bodies make only light, unlasting impressions on our earth” (WTS, 18). Clearly, Fanon’s story, as viewed by Phillips, brings to light the Caribbean sense of displacement, but using someone else’s personal story to describe one’s own journey represents yet another form of displacement: Fanon’s biography and his dead body signi- fy on Phillips’s own life. In addition, displacement is suggested, on the formal level, by Phillips’s rhetorical choices in the “The Gift of Displacement”: this essay does not feature a unique grammatical subject. Predictably, Phillips uses the first-person singular, “I,” to refer to himself, and the third-person singular, “he,” for Fanon; but he also employs some phrases referring to Caribbean artists – such as “the Caribbean artist,” “Caribbean writers,” “a Caribbean voice” – and the first-person plural, as in the question “How do we explain our new hybrid selves without recourse to the simplistic discourse of race?” (NWO, 132). In this multiplicity of grammatical subjects, hence of perspec- tives, the reader gets a sense of grammatical displacement akin to the geo- graphical dislocation experienced by Phillips.

Walcott also had to face a sense of displacement. For him, the archipelago is synonymous with a journey, a life journey, starting with the childhood of twin brothers who had to deal with the colonial experience:

Yet, like the long, applauded note, joy soared farther from two pale children staring from their upstairs window, wanting to march with that ragged, barefooted crowd, but who could not because they were not black and poor [...]. (W T S, 19)

In these autobiographical and meditative sections of What the Twilight Says, Walcott employs the third person, the singular for himself, and the plural for himself and his twin brother, Roderick. He intertwines his own perception with that of his sibling. This splitting of the autobiographical subject displaces the reader’s focus, for, according to Philippe Lejeune, using the third person enables self-distantiation and irony.6 _{But here, distance is not only established}

between a speaker and an autobiographical subject; it also suggests the colo- nial condition. In this passage, the Walcott brothers observe the marching of a patrol, “the black faces of men in white, martial uniforms” (WTS, 19). The split identity of the colonial subject is highlighted by this ironical remark, a variant of black skins wearing white-mask uniforms. And the distance is not only physical – upstairs from the backyards – it also refers to skin colour: up- stairs are the spectators, pale and not poor, and in the yards are the poor, the blacks, the barefooted. These “were the shadows of his first theatre [...], and the rhythms of the street itself were entering the pulse beat of the wrist” (20). The crowd is in the yard, the writer and his brother stand upstairs behind a window, so the writer’s gesture is to cross the distance between the two groups, and this process involves a metamorphosis. Walcott begins by using the third-person plural to describe his brother and himself. Then, in becoming a playwright, he uses the third-person singular. At the same time, the beat of the streets and the numerous shadows of the crowd direct his wrist and there- fore his writing. Thus the St Lucian artist finds his personal voice by trying to incorporate his fellows’ sounds and rhythms. His birth as a writer in this case seems to be going from ‘twinphony’ to polyphony, from uncertain identity to the embracing of many identities, from a window in a house to an entire en- vironment.