Footprints in the Sand: Attornies, Redlegs, and Red-Haired Women in African-Caribbean Stories

The book collects the results of a research funded by the University of Trento on Scottish participation in colonial history in the Caribbean and its representation in language and literature. It analyses various aspects of the relationship between the Caribbean and Scotland; explores the cultural impact of Scots, their customs, religion and language on Caribbean culture and society, the significance of Scottish characters in West Indian literature, the awareness of the Caribbean in Scottish literature, along with the symbolic meaning of landscapes regarded as sites of the memory of colonial relations rather than as icons of national identity. Caribbean-Scottish Relations regards both what has cast the two regions apart as well as what has brought them together; the questions it raises are neither pleasant nor reassuring, but they are mind-changing. Covi’s essay regards the characterisation of Scots in West Indian literature. It considers the compound cultural spectrum of the Caribbean with attention both to its modernist and postmodernist articulations and to its memory of the plantation system, a ‘strange attractor’ (Antonio Benitez- Rojo). Looking into this shared Circum-Atlantic reality entails confronting the plurality of forces that concur to ‘the cross-cultural process’; this involves understanding ‘creolization’ not as a category but rather as a ‘consciousness’ which is ‘always tormented by contradictory possibilities’ and as ‘an unceasing process of transformation’ (Edouard Glissant). The essay undertakes a voyage between fiction and the inferno in search for those displacements and paradoxes that may satisfy a need for wider cross-cultural understanding in the globalised multicultural world. Relying on Douglas J. Hamilton’s Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750-1820, the essay opens with “True Facts” to then move to material that is “Related to True Facts” and analyse J. W. Orderson’s Creoleana (1767), which puts us directly in touch not only with the contrasting roles reserved for women of different colours in colonial society, but also with the different forms of sexual exploitation that they underwent. This Section also considers Mary Seacole (1805-1881) and Claude McKay (1889-1948) whose representations of creolisation do not subsume Scottishness into Britishness. Further, it reflects upon the writings of Una Marson, which enrich representations of nation and internationalism because they always critically engage representions of Scottishness. Marson’s committment to speaking truth to power without concessions to simplifications nor preconfigured ideologies brings her to articulate a cosmopolitanism which strenuously resists abstractions and rootlessness, and to offer a vision which allows us to re-figure universality in terms that are materialistic, mind-changing and prolific in the creation of multiple networks and interconnected alliances significant also for today’s articulations of the local within the global. The next Section considers the “Embodiment of True Facts”: readings of Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Looking for Livingstone (1991), Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1986), The Autobiography of My Mother (19996) and Mr Potter (2002), Barbara Lalla’s Arch of Fire, Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting (1995) lead through history that is written in the blood and in the land and theory that is made in the flesh. Thius brings to the conclusive Section—a praise to the indeterminacy of history that must be made with poetry, in order not to forget and move forward, through painful and fruitful relations.