The Caribbean‐American Connection: A Paradox of Success and Subversion

The Caribbean-American connection has many dimensions. The hegemonic Monroe doctrine defined the terms within which political relationships were conducted in the recent past, as for instance during the Missile Crisis in Cuba, or the Grenada excursion during the Maurice Bishop regime, or the liberation of Haiti. Our economic imperialism, or the so-called new colonialism, is visible in Club Med and other resort properties which have appropriated the best beaches in the islands for the use of tourists, often deliberately excluding the islanders from use of these beaches. But if the U.S. casts a long shadow over the Caribbean, the Caribbean, too, has shaped the U.S. in equally profound although more subtle ways. Immigrants from the Caribbean have achieved considerable influence at the level of both culture and politics. Their drive for economic success, their emphasis on education as the means of liberation and assimilation are not unique. But in literature and in other endeavors, and most especially for the people of African descent, the Caribbean experience becomes the symbol and source of values that challenge the prevailing norms of an individualistic, materialistic consumer society, even as these people embrace those norms in order to navigate the new world with success. At another level, their multiracial, polyglot Caribbean experience also makes them flexible, open to multiple perspectives, receptive to alternate ways of doing things, even selfconsciously celebratory of their hybridity, and thus more adaptive to the American experience. Their cherishing of the hybrid and the polyglot has, in fact, given a new meaning to the discredited notion of America as the melting pot. These formulations can be supported by the work of almost all the major writers of Caribbean origin: Derek Walcott, Earl Lovelace, Jamaica Kincaid, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, and Paule Marshall. We have chosen Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow for our case history because it embodies these formulations in somewhat unusual and very dramatic ways. For our case histories of public and political figures, we go to Marcus Garvey and Colin Powell. They represent almost the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of how they came to be viewed by the establishment and by American people in general. But both have had an abiding influence on the American psyche and both embody crucial elements of what we have termed the paradox of success and subversion. To turn to Marshall now, she (like Colin Powell) is not a first generation immigrant. In her recreation of the community in Carriacou, off the coast of Grenada, she is not drawing on her immedate past, as is true of the other writers. Her protagonist, Avey Johnson, has no Caribbean ancestry. Indeed, Avey arrives in the Caribbean as a typical American tourist, in one of those decadently opulent cruise ships that empty the tourists like locusts on ports of call to sample the native culture, and shop the duty free shops. However, despite the marginalization of the Caribbean as an extension of America's tourist resorts, the region continues to hold a special place in American culture because of historical and geographical connections. The proximity of the islands, the continual influx of immigrants, and a shared history of slavery for people of African descent ensure a continuing impact; the vitality of the Caribbean hybrid culture ensures its continuing relevance to America's anxieties about race and multiculturalism. Marshall's protagonist, Avey, is an affluent widow from North White Plains who must come to terms with the price paid by her and her husband in their drive for material success. It has led them to deny joy and all those small rituals of pleasure that came to be viewed as sinful and wasteful in the pursuit of progress. As her husband, Jay, declared: "If it was left to me I'd close every dancehall in Harlem and burn every drum! That is the only way these Negroes out here'll begin making any progress" (132). …