It’s hard to understate the importance of the classical tradition to postcolonial literature. The Puerto Rican playwright Luis Rafael Sánchez recast Sophocles’ Antigone in La pasión según Antígona Pérez, set in the fictional Caribbean republic of Molina, to portray the United States’s extreme economic and political suppression of 1960s Puerto Rican nationalist movements. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the Dominican-British novelist fabulated a Creolized backstory for the “mad wife” Rochester abuses and keeps stashed away in his attic, painting a picture of colonial detest and neglect.
The Martinican poet/playwright Aimé Césaire brilliantly adapted and enriched Shakespeare’s The Tempest into Caliban’s existential drama after having his name, language and identity stolen from him upon Prospero’s arrival in Une Tempête, dramatizing the colonial dilemma of all Caribbean island nations. More contemporaneously, Jamaican poet and memoirist Safiya Sinclair viscerally wrote to and through Césaire’s own seminal rewrite in her guttural poetry collection Cannibal to reframe the issue of postcolonial identity for one who has immigrated to the metropole of the imperial power, in this case the United States. This Caribbean tradition of literary hybridity, intertextuality, and relation is long.
In college, I didn’t know or care about any of that. In his words, the Iliad could be more than a story of glory, pride, war, and death; it was a framework for one’s struggle with vanity and the dark paths down which it might take you. I would sit in well-crafted chairs in grand lecture halls or ornate classrooms arranged around large, elegant tables, listening to my professor and classmates debate Homeric epithets, patrilineal descent, and dactylic hexameter, watching the lazy sun flitter in through the windows, and nearly doze off.
I remembered my childhood as largely idyllic. I had grown up in a close-knit Haitian immigrant family in a South Florida so peopled with immigrants it seemed a microcosm of Latin America and the Caribbean. My sister, cousins and I hung out together often as children, and as we got older would take the rare night trip to Miami to celebrate the holidays or special occasions.
We had a nice neighborhood park with green fields and a basketball court, the occasional Black boy-directed police aggression aside. We would ride our bikes through the streets for hours, late into the evening. Both of my parents worked good, stable jobs: my father, a former physics teacher in Haiti, was a construction worker and plumber; my mother put herself through school and became a nurse, at least until illness forced her to step away from work.
We weren’t rich but we certainly weren’t poor. Away at school, I enjoyed the Beaux-Arts and Neoclassical architecture on campus, the impassioned discussions on imagery, meter, and line in poetry workshops, and the idea that academic prestige would one day help me find a job in a respectable field. Still, I had trouble envisioning how reading dry texts by ancient Greeks—the proverbial Dead White Men—about men killing each other in gory detail while waging pointless wars would benefit my future.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
