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Caribbean culturess research paper
Thesis statement on african culture in the caribbean
Caribbean culturess research paper
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The ocean is what connects the people of the Caribbean to their African descendants in and out of time. Through the water they made it to their respective islands, and they, personally, crafted it to be temporal and made it a point of reference. The ocean is without time, and a speaker of many languages, with respect to Natasha Omise’eke Tinsley’s Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic. The multilingualism of the ocean is reminiscent that there is no one Caribbean experience. The importance of it indicates that the Afro-Caribbean identity is most salient through spirituality. It should come to no surprise that Erzulie, a Haitian loa, is a significant part of the migration of bodies in Ana Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt. Ana Maurine Lara’s depiction …show more content…
of the experience of Haitian descendants in the Dominican Republic makes clear that their is an African identity in the Caribbean. This identity is portrayed through spiritual expression. The existence of this mixed identity is courtesy of the transatlantic slave trade which forced bodies into the America’s and the Caribbean.
The bodies passed through water, which in what Natasha Omise’eke Tinsley says is the first thing that she remembers about the Black Atlanatic (Tinsley 191). It is important to note that, as she states, “the Black Atlantic has always been the Queer Atlantic” (Tinsley 191). Often times, queerness is erased from the African identity, but it is very much apart of it. Queerness is prevalent in the Afro-Caribbean identity on many levels; one of the most significant ones, in context of spirituality being, its presence in the voodoo religion which holds roots on the African continent. The people who survived the Middle Passage built relationships with people of the same sex. Tinsley stated that they would use terminology such as “mi mati,” which translated to “my girl” (Tinsley 192). The Atlantic brought a mix of people together who became empathetic of each other due to shared experience. There were many different people, who shared an …show more content…
ancestry. The Black Atlantic brought a mix of African peoples to create an even much more mixed people in the Caribbean. A consequence of the transatlantic slave trade was the issue of identity; without the financial resources, the furthest most people can go back is the ocean. The Middle Passage holds a history that will continually be relevant because it is where a large group of people look to, to better understand their ancestry. The assemblage further influences the diffusion of the ocean. Tinsley referenced Antonio Benitez-Rojo to call the sea “the ultimate place of diffusion,” and “a watery body whose history continually splashes into the present” (Tinsley 195). This is to say that the ocean is without time because it’s history remains relevant to the past, present, and the future. Identity dwells in this diffusion; it is the most spread out aspects of the Caribbean. The people understand that they are more than just one, and this translates, on the Dominican side of the island of Hispaniola, to being anything, but black. The transatlantic slave trade is the root of the identity issue in the Caribbean, but these issues, specifically in the Dominican Republic, were further cultivated by the Trujillo regime which is discussed in Erzulie’s Skirt. Ana Maurine Lara Erzulie’s Skirt, incorporates the history of the Trujillo regime to explain the maltreatment of Haitians and people of Haitian descent living in the Dominican Republic. Miriam, the protagonist of the novel, is the daughter of parents who lost seven children to the regime. During General Rafael Molino Trujillo’s reign, in 1937, a reported over 25,000 Haitians were massacred. In context of the book, Miriam’s seven siblings were some of the massacred, but this was not the only violence that they were subjected to in the Dominican Republic. Trujillo made many Dominican people believe that they had no African ancestry, the Haitians were the African people, and there was no room for the African people on their side of the island. As a result of this belief, Miriam’s family, despite the fact that they have generations who were long term residents in the Dominican Republic, are considered Haitian and do not belong. This discrimination resurfaces throughout Miriam’s fathers career and when she wants to get a visa to travel; the officer told her that she is standing for Dominican’s only (Lara 137). By birth Miriam is Dominican, but this occurrence indicates the complications that the country has with race. It is further portrayed when the protagonist’s father works. Miriam’s father worked in the sugar cane industry, probably because of his Haitian ancestry, and was cheated which is also due to his black identity. In chapter one, he weighed sugar cane for seventy pounds, but was only paid for fifty pounds and could not do anything about because of the industry he was working in (Lara 22). His mistreatment did not take away his pride in being of Haitian ancestry; he also made sure that Miriam was also proud. This pride is closely related to the queerness discussed by Tinsley. The Haitian people were wronged because of the acceptance of their blackness and the Dominican’s denial of their own. The violence towards the Haitians is a byproduct of the European violence towards the Africans of the Middle Passage. The Haitian response to hate is love and realization, they “loved their own kind when their kind was supposed to cease to exist” (Tinsley 199) after the Trujillo regime. Pride in one’s African ancestry is then realized through spiritually expression, most salient through the actions of women throughout the book. The main spirit of the book is Erzulie. The loa Erzulie, is first introduced through her introduction of Miriam as belonging to her mother. Her relationship to the women in her family was important to the salience of the Afro-Caribbean identity. This relationship would also be her freedom from the oppression of the society of which she lives. Ana Maurine Lara stated in Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora that freedom is one of the reasons she wrote the book. She wanted to address where the Afro-Latina bodies are found (Lara 44). This notion is denied by some people in the country, but it does not counter the fact that these bodies exist. Ana calls the book “a direct link between Dominican Africanity and the slave trade, a link that has long been obscured by discourses on Haitian-ness as Blackness” (Lara 45). She did not have to include that Dominican is blackness to because Erzulie’s Skirt does so through the incorporation of Las 21 Divisiones and Haitian Voudoun. The book begins with a conversation between the loa’s Erzulie and Agwe. Agwe and Erzulie are representative of traces of African religion in voodoo because of the relationship they have with the supreme God and orishas. The term loa is used to represent them as spirits who the people interact with because they cannot directly interact with the supreme God. Agwe is the spirit that rules over the sea. The Haitian voodoo religion sometimes depicts him as being married to be married to Erzulie, “la sirene,” who he calls my sirene in the the novel. In Erzulie’s Skirt, he is portrayed as an old man who is passed through by many people. He and Erzulie discuss his grow which is significant to the migration of Afro-Caribbean bodies about the ocean. The people who are passing through him are the many voices of the the African Diaspora in the Atlantic. Agwe’s existence is also significant to temporal time. When the sea is referenced, Agwe is referenced with regard to his position as the spirit of the sea. He is who the ancestors go through as spirits. This is clear when he states “some lights shine, others dim. And then there are these spirits walking through my bones” (Lara XIV). The dynamic of their relationship is important to understanding the religion and how it intersects with spirituality. Erzulie is called la sirene, which translates to the term mermaid. There is a sense of duality between her and Agwe’s work. She known as the spirit of love, Joan Dayan states in Erzulie: A Women’s History of Haiti that, she tells the stories of women’s lives that has not been told (Dayan: 6). Her identity is specific to that of the Caribbean because, with respect to Dayan, Erzulie holds no precedence in Yorubaland (Dayan: 6). Erzulie’s existence in this novel is important to the history of women’s past and present in the Caribbean; Dayan express that she represents women, white, black, and or mulatto. She intersects with the African identity with respect to her duty as an intermediary.
In the introduction, Erzulie says that she fought with Ogun, a Yoruba orisha, on behalf of Micaela, a character that Miriam becomes close to. Loa’s are the intermediaries between the God, the creator of everything, and people. Erzulie is not just an intemediary, one of her representations, Erzulie-Freda (Dayan: 6), is the lover of Ogun, but her sexuality is fluid. She crosses lines of both the feminine and masculine which is important to Miriam’s and the identity of every Afro-Caribbean. This indicates that the Afro-Caribbean identity is also one that includes queerness. Erzulie’s sexuality is first presented when she states that many people, both men and women, will marry her and dedicate things to her (Lara: XV). She proves that queerness is not out of the self identifying as Afro-Caribbean; this is also salient in
Miriam. Miriam has a relationship with Micaela that is more than just a friendship, but she also has a son. Her character shows the reader that queerness is not one thing; it transcends sexuality, race, through the three representations of Erzulie, and gender, through Chango’s possession of her. Their shared experience cannot be realized outside of the Black Atlantic; it is connected. They are connected to the Atlantic through space and time. The religion further connects them to their black identity, and their space doe not exist without it. A central theme of Erzulie’s Skirt, was the temporality of time and the past. They are a people of water, which makes the spirits Agwe and Erzulie even more significant to their lives. They are a people of water who were protected and saved by the people of the water. Erzulie serves as a representation of the temporality of time. She is the female spirit with access to the future of women; the future of these women is significant to the past and the present. Being that the women of the past upheld the voodoo religion, Miriam and Micaela was able to access the power that came with that. Despite the distance between the people and the gods, Miriam, was possessed by Chango. This possession transcends sex and gave Miriam a material power. She was more than a woman oppressed or who has been oppressed before. Again, this possession is exemplary of the fluidity of sexuality being that Chango is a man. Miriam mirrors Erzulie, who is a representation of the women’s experience, through her crossing the boundaries of both femininity and masculinity. Erzulie’s Skirt fits in context of the Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic, discourse perfectly because Ana Maurine Lara makes salient, rather than erases, the queer identity in the Afro-Caribbean. The passage through which the lovers, Miriam and Micaela follow is also similar to that of the Middle Passage and enslaved Africans. Both experiences can be considered forced experiences due to the lack of resources spread out for people in the Caribbean presently. The travel on the yola is very dangerous for the people on the boat, similar to that of the boats on the Middle Passage. Both travel boats were extreme overcrowded experiences of which many people have died along the way. Tinsley stated in Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic, that people were either thrown of to create space, or died of dehydration and starvation, which expresses that these are the parts of history that get drowned out or erased (Tinsley 200). This type of migration is what further makes the African experience in the Atlantic relevant to the present. There are people embarking on journey’s on the waters that brought their ancestors to a new land. To travel these waters, they face similar extreme conditions as their ancestors did. They are reliving a past that is relevant to the present because of its impact on nations. Tinsley calls the waters that they are crossing as a “temporal cross-current” (Tinsley 200). The specific waters that they cross is the Mona Strait, “where the Atlantic and the Caribbean violently meet” (Tinsley 200). The shared experience that Miriam and Micaela have as people who travel together grows. They have the same empathy that their ancestors had as shipmates on their rides through the Middle Passage. This bond and connection is even stronger through their worship. They are interdependent to their ancestors through shared experience and spiritual expression. In many ways there travels is symbolic of a journey to both, Miriam and Micaela’s Afro-Caribbean identities. It is on the water that Micaela has visions and speaks to “La Mar;” it is on the water that they get the guidance they need from the spirits and gods of the Vodoun religion. The water embodies, and is symbolic of memory; they are not memories of the Miriam and Micaela, but that of the women before them, which is significant to Erzulie’s existence. The water is also where the love that the have for each other is most realized, which should come to no surprise, as this was also the experience of their African ancestors on the Middle Passage. The Queer identity in the Black Atlantic is transcendent on the levels of sexuality, race, and gender, especially in religion. This identity is also a form a freedom, the freedom that Ana Maurine Lara was referring to in Women Warriors of the Afro Latina Diaspora. It exists and proves that there is no such thing as a standard. Straightness is not where everything meets and ends; there is queerness. Tinsley states in Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic that the erotic relationships on the Atlantic do not exist as metaphors nor sources of disempowerment (Tinsley 199). There are as symbolic of freedom as practicing the voodoo religion. The queer identity and the voodoo religion make sure that a part of history thrives and survives. Micaela is a symbol of the survival of a history. She exists so that the spirits and the gods of the voodoo religion will not be forgotten. Her visit from La Mar is indicative of the importance of what was and what is (Lara 159). She represents a freedom in identity and sexuality. Queerness is more than just a sexual relationship, it is empathy and it is pride. The Afro-Caribbean identity is one of multiplicity. Oneness and attributions to one thing, such as blackness being synonymous to Haitian-ness has erased the many faces that is the variation in the identity. Blackness is most salient through spiritual expression, and through this study more aspects of it surface, such as queerness. The Afro-Caribbean identity is diffused because it holds a substantial amount of things. This identity is not limited to anything and should not be portrayed as such.
Ayiti, by Roxane Gay, is a collection of fifteen short narratives about Haiti and its people, which gives the readers insights into the complex Haitian diaspora experience. The novel seeks to offer a deeper view into Haitian society and covers an array of themes such as the politics of survival, resiliency, and feminist culture in Haiti. Throughout the novel, Gay is highly critical of mainstream media because of how they depict and silo Haiti as a poor and helpless country. Haiti’s historical stance on censorship is well documented, and as a Haitian writer living in America, Gay is successful in giving agency to the voiceless by chronicling the stories of the Haitian diaspora. Ayiti explores stories that explain what it is like to be a Haitian
In Brent Hayes Edwards essay, “ The Use of Diaspora”, the term “African Diaspora” is critically explored for its intellectual history of the word. Edward’s reason for investigating the “intellectual history of the term” rather than a general history is because the term “is taken up at a particular conjecture in black scholarly discourse to do a particular kind of epistemological work” (Edwards 9). At the beginning of his essay Edwards mentions the problem with the term, in terms of how it is loosely it is being used which he brings confusion to many scholars. As an intellectual Edwards understands “the confusing multiplicity” the term has been associated with by the works of other intellectuals who either used the coined or used the term African diaspora. As an articulate scholar, Edwards hopes to “excavate a historicized and politicized sense of diaspora” through his own work in which he focuses “on a black cultural politics in the interwar, particularly in the transnational circuits of exchange between the Harlem Renaissance and pre-Negritude Fran cophone activity in the France and West Africa”(8). Throughout his essay Edwards logically attacks the problem giving an informative insight of the works that other scholars have contributed to the term Edwards traces back to the intellectual history of the African diaspora in an eloquent manner.
When I first read “We Are Ugly, But We Are Here,” I was stunned to learn how women in Haiti were treated. Edwige Danticat, who was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1969 and immigrated to Brooklyn when she was twelve years old, writes about her experiences in Haiti and about the lives of her ancestors that she links to her own. Her specific purpose is to discuss what all these families went through, especially the women, in order to offer the next generation a voice and a future. Danticat writes vividly about events that occurred in Haiti, leading up to an assertion about the strength of Haitian women. Her essay is powerful in large part because of how she manages tone.
The events of Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart and the film Sugar Cane Alley detail the lives of a fictionalized Nigerian village and sugar cane harvesters in remote Martinique, respectively, during similar time periods of the 1900s. Both works contain explicit references to Christianity, and how the imposition of religion and white culture have negatively affected the African characters. European religious practice was used as a means of pacifying as well as terrifying the Umuofian people and the inhabitants of Sugar Cane Valley.
The opening of the novel places the reader not in Falola's shoes as a child, but rather as an adult scholar attempting to procure information from his own family. This proves easier said than done as Falola takes us through the process of obtaining specific dates in a society that deems them irrelevant. By examining the difficulty that Falola has in this seemingly simple task, the reader begins to understand the way in which time and space are intertwined and weighed in Africa. This concept of "connections between words, space, and rituals" encompasses the way that Africans perceive the world around them - as a series of interrelated events rather than specific instances in time (Falola 224). This approach also stems from the concept that the family unit, the village, and the elders come before the individual in all instances, making a detail such as a birthday unimportant when it comes to the welfare of the whole. Introducing the reader to the complexities of African conventions, Falola expands their minds and challenges them to view the forthcoming narrative with untainted eyes.
His identity was very twofold: African and English. For instance, Equiano had not just one African name, “Olaudah Equiano”, but a second English one as well. Equiano interchanged his African name with the name he was given by his master, “Gustavas Vassa”. In daily life Equiano used these two names, but the fact that Equiano takes the time to include both of these names in the title of his narrative shows that even his primary way of identifying himself – his name – was bicultural. This dichotomy of Equiano’s cultural identification may suggest that he does not fully participate in his African identity and he therefore cannot be a true representative of their humanity. If Equiano considers himself to be just as African as he is English, is his assimilation into European culture demonstrating the humanity of black
The Root of It: Deconstructing Creole Identity in Crossing the Mangrove. “I like to repeat that I write neither in French nor in Creole. I write in Maryse Conde,”1 (“Liaison dangereuse,” 2007) is a statement that could not be less accurate for the Guadeloupean writer. Writing in French is especially problematic for post-colonialist Francophone authors; using the language of the colonizer while attempting to dismantle cultural and linguistic hierarchy seems to be an act of futility. To be sure, Conde, the author of Crossing the Mangrove, apparently writes in the French language, but she capably deconstructs the notion that a language must be necessarily tied to the culture and history it traditionally represents.
Beryl Markham’s West with the Night is a collection of anecdotes surrounding her early life growing up as a white girl in British imperialist Africa, leading up to and through her flight across the Atlantic Ocean from East to West, which made her the first woman to do so successfully. Throughout this memoir, Markham exhibits an ache for discovery, travel, and challenge. She never stays in one place for very long and cannot bear the boredom of a stagnant lifestyle. One of the most iconic statements that Beryl Markham makes in West with the Night is:
There is no other experience in history where innocent African Americans encountered such a brutal torment. This infamous ordeal is called the Middle Passage or the “middle leg” of the Triangular Trade, which was the forceful voyage of African Americans from Africa to the New World. The Africans were taken from their homeland, boarded onto the dreadful ships, and scattered into the New World as slaves. 10- 16 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic during the 1500’s to the 1900’s and 10- 15 percent of them died during the voyage. Millions of men, women, and children left behind their personal possessions and loved ones that will never be seen again. Not only were the Africans limited to freedom, but also lost their identity in the process. Kidnapped from their lives that throbbed with numerous possibilities of greatness were now out of sight and thrown into the never-ending pile of waste. The loathsome and inhuman circumstances that the Africans had to face truly describe the great wrongdoing of the Middle Passage.
Examination into the true heart of experience and meaning, Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage looks at the structures of identity and the total transformation of the self. The novel talks about the hidden assumptions of human and literary identity and brings to view the real problems of these assumptions through different ideas of allusion and appropriation. As the novel tells Rutherford Calhoun’s transformation of un-awareness allows him to cross “the sea of suffering” (209) making him forget who he really is. The novel brings forth the roots of human “being” and the true complications and troubles of African American experiences. Stuck between posed questions of identity, the abstract body is able to provide important insight into the methods and meanings in Middle Passage.
When sixteenth and seventeenth century explorers returned to Europe from their journeys to Africa, they constructed and disseminated degrading stereotypes of African women based on the observations they had made abroad. Basing their perceptions of women off of European women’s bodies, these explorers noticed and commented on how African women’s bodies differed in many aspects—these disparities then became justifications for the differential treatment between these two groups of women. Because these African American women didn’t conform to the basic norms of womanhood that the explorers were accustomed to, they were quick to categorize them as strange, animalistic and hypersexual; their bodily forms, attire and skin color called attention to their otherness in the corporeal and social realm. Skin Deep, Spirit Strong offers a compilation of essays that document the observations made, the generalizations that were produced and the treatment that resulted from these interactions. The negative generalizations that these early European explorers made about African American women, had and to this day continue to have a significant effect on the way in which black women are viewed physically and sexually not only in the private sphere but also publicly.
Gabriel, Deborah. Layers of Blackness: Colourism in the African Diaspora. London: Imani Media, 2007. Print.
In this context, Madonna’s “Vogue” video restylizes a strict, gendered physicality into a representation of the significant nuclei of cultural change within the distinct homosexual Afro-Latin community—a community which exists as an “oppositional identity” (87) in juxtaposition with the rigid definitions of appropriate gender expression. This both redefines and reinforces the
Enter Mary Lefkowitz. A classical historian, she discovered the Afrocentric movement in the early 1990s. In 1996, she published Not...
As the Hispanic Caribbean has evolved it has managed to grow and thrive beyond belief, whether one is discussing art, music or just the culture alone the Hispanic Caribbean is truly reaping the benefits of allowing themselves to be influenced by many other cultures. While the Hispanic Caribbean is thriving they are still facing the many new found struggles that come along with the territory of becoming more affluent as well as more accepting to other cultures and their beliefs. Often with the growth of large proportions comes many problems, problems also can come about when incorporating of different cultures as a whole as well as just bringing in their beliefs and mannerisms. None the less it can be argued that the struggles being faced in