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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2018

Quashie & Lucy have been up to London to visit the Queen - Una Marson and James Berry Chronicle Diasporic Migration

Résumé

From the Atlantic slave trade to indentured labour to more recent migrations, transportation and migratory patterns to and out of the Caribbean have structured Caribbean reality and imagination. Going beyond the discourse of loss, uprooting, exile and separation, Caribbean literature has (re-)presented these transportation and migratory patterns but also shaped the diasporic, or even ‘metasporic’ consciousness (Joel Des Rosiers, 1996, 2013). Among the genres most often used, and played with, by Caribbean writers, the epistolary speaks to the Caribbean historical, geographical and mental space in very peculiar ways. The letter is the diasporic artefact par excellence, sent across land and water when bodies cannot meet in the same time and space. A flurry of Caribbean authors such as Caryl Phillips, Jamaica Kincaid, Alicia McKenzie, Patricia Powell, Myriam Chancy, Gisèle Pineau have used it as the epitome of a presence beyond the absence, an object that aims at abolishing distance yet creates a new time and space in which individuals can reinvent themselves. This paper will focus on authors who fictionalize or poeticize the letter to chronicle the diasporic migrations from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom. Una Marson (‘Quashie Comes to London’, 1937), James Berry (Windrush Songs, 2007; Lucy’s Letters, 1982), Linton Kwezi Johnson (‘Sonny’s Lettah’, 2006) or David Dabydeen (‘Coolie Son’, 1988), have used the letter to chronicle the migrations from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom, some forty years later, and have helped us take a fresh look at the ways literature may have empowered a response to the xenophobia and racism Caribbean immigrants have been faced with.
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Dates et versions

hal-04407440 , version 1 (20-01-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04407440 , version 1

Citer

Judith Misrahi-Barak. Quashie & Lucy have been up to London to visit the Queen - Una Marson and James Berry Chronicle Diasporic Migration. Transcending Boundaries: Migrations, Dislocations and Literary Transformations, Centre for the International Study of Literatures in English, Jul 2018, Ljubljana, Slovenia. ⟨hal-04407440⟩

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