Caribbean Literature

Introduction

The symbiotic relationship between Caribbean literary and environmental theories and criticisms is still emergent in the Caribbean though a growing compendium of theories and analytical approaches in the fields of postcolonial and cultural studies address the Caribbean environment of Caribbean literary texts as separate sites. Few Caribbean studies generally show how environmental issues are addressed in Caribbean literary production, such as few exploratory sketches that analyze Caribbean children's and young adult literatures and their environments. For instance, Jaqueline Lazu's “National Identity, Where the Wild, Strange and Exotic Things Are; In Search of the Caribbean in Contemporary Children's Literature” (2004), deploys postcolonial theory to observe a “constant negotiation” (Lazu, 195) in the formation of Caribbean identities as expressed in Caribbean young adult and children's literatures, and to argue that an understanding of this confluence of environment and identity formation is pivotal to any study of Caribbean 21st century global cultural relations, “within the ideological contexts of race, colonial and postcolonial history, and contemporary asymmetrical power” (200).

In light of these conditions and the quality of our current environmental existence due to the devastating human imprint on our world, there is an urgency to view children's and young adult literature set in the Caribbean with an environmental criticism and/or critical lens.

Postcolonial scholarship provides us with insight about how any study of the diasporic self needs to be investigated within the ideological contexts of race, colonial and postcolonial history, and contemporary asymmetrical power relationships between cultures…similar models can be applied to children's literature and all cultural production aimed at young consumers (200).

The late luminary, Edouard Glissant opined that the dialectic between Caribbean ecology and culture had not yet been brought into productive relation. He argues that the Caribbean “landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be traced on the underside. It is all history” (1).Departing from this to argue that environmental decolonization is necessary for Caribbean survival, I analyze how environmental issues are coded as cultural and historical narratives in Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey (1970) and Nicholasa Mohr's Going Home (1986). In these narratives, ecological issues become new paradigms to offer the next Caribbean generation another avenue for the process of cultural and historical decolonization.

Discussion

The locally-based Trinidadian author, Merle Hodge and New York based Puerto Rican of the diaspora author, Nicholasa Mohr are strategically paired for comparative analysis across Caribbean language traditions, with an eye to an English language pedagogy that builds Caribbean-wide environmental awareness, which is particularly needed in Puerto Rico. First, these Caribbean women writers vary approaches in their narrative perspectives and representations of their particular Caribbean island's ecological landscape, from both local and exilic locations, and the effects of these environments on children as they grow up. Second, they offer comparative historical, cultural, and linguistic advantages to reveal links and specificities between these Hispanic and Anglophone Caribbean countries and to differentiate how they use environmentalism as trajectories for the construction of children's literatures. Third, the two novels provide a plethora of literary examples that invoke the natural ...