Keywords

Donna Haraway, an important scholar of the history and significance of science and of feminism, offers us a new way to understand the world, to radically remap it, so to speak. She says we “exist by permission of a vast and complex web of life and the resources which support it,” biodiversity providing opportunity for productive exchanging of resources, in which the human and nonhuman “compose and decompose each other” (2017, M45). Haraway offers the term “sym-poesis,” adapting from the biological term symbiosis. This she explains means “complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding” (2017, M45). She adds “we are compost, not post-human; we inhabit the humusties, not the humanities” (2017, M45). One form of life needs another, to facilitate survival and evolution. But she warns this is in grave danger of being destabilized in our time, though we have a great deal of collective knowledge that should have enabled our clever species to foresee and avert disaster. Such thinking asks how we can imagine complex interactions between one form of life and another, when there is reciprocal need and such interactions ensure survival. This goes beyond culture, beyond species, to enter a consciousness that is planetary, not to ignore the damaging divisions that human society endures but to offer a way to embrace the glorious diversity of both human and nonhuman, intended to live in productive interaction.

The Caribbean is a very complex region, diverse in every respect, but it has to battle divisive, siloed thinking imposed by colonial race, gender and class hierarchies. Among its people (and of course among them, its writers), there are alternative and often hidden ways of being and imagining. Learning to live with imposed structures and hegemonic acceptance of them does not necessarily erase resistance and understanding of other ways of imagining the world, often inherited from the long past.

Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997) and Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter (2006) each tell stories about environmental consciousness as an ally in dissolving race, gender and class division and prejudice. A healthy environment thrives on diversity, inclusion and inventiveness, on symbiotic interdependence that shifts according to need, so do human cultures and literatures. Given that within Caribbean space and time, it is possible to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously, both of these novels ask important questions as to how to bring together seemingly insurmountable divisions resulting from a painful past and a complicated present, and try to answer them in environmental, sympoetic terms.

At the Crossroads of Colonial and Caribbean Thought

In a postcolonial Caribbean world, survivals from ancient cultures (Amerindian, African, Asian) exist alongside a colonially induced set of hard divisions (race, class, gender). In trying to imagine ourselves more toward the old ways, we have sought for models and what we have found has been helpful as part of the journey. The crossroads is an example of which I once thought was helpful, imaging a central intersection where the separate pathways of race, gender, class, nation could be in conversation but from which it is possible to understand the separate sources of identity and the choices made about them, as paths leading away (1990, 30–31). Henry Louis Gates in The Signifying Monkey (1988) showed the significance of the crossroad in Yoruba culture and in the diaspora, wherever the trickster god Esu is understood and honored. The crossroad has associations with misunderstandings that might turn into productive transformations with other kinds of exchanges and transitions. As Lydia Cabrera shows, in Haitian Vodoun, the crossroad is a place that absorbs dangerous energy and infection, and is deeply associated with healing: “The patient is cleansed three times with a rooster that is passed over the entire body. The rooster dies because it has absorbed the illness and is taken to a crossroad (2001, 37). The crossroad thus has an important ongoing place in Caribbean and in West African collective memory as Brathwaite’s work shows us.Footnote 1

Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic vision of the cosmos MR (2002) is a crossroad with MAN at the center encircled by NAM, the spirit, a reversal and an opening in West African tradition.Footnote 2 But this map of the cosmos has a strong connection to a West African understanding of the crossroad and explicitly permits transitions of time and space as in Vodoun ceremonies. Brathwaite’s concept of space/time comes from many places (Africa, Asia, Europe in the person of Einstein) (251). He combines them into the idea that the cosmos is both a “clock” of Time and a “series of thresholds/mirrors/corridors” that is Space. Time is both ancient and disturbingly modern; space both the old infinite world and the new imprisoned one of colonially shaped modernity. Time and space are not necessarily understood in Einstein’s kinetic relation. Beryl Gilroy, describing her own novel, Boy Sandwich, identified space as a “psychological and physical construct” and time as “organic and linear memory” (n.d., 1). Their interrelation opens up infinite possibilities, but as two separate identities in implicit dialogue in her text.

The crossroads also implicitly acknowledges separations. Sylvia Wynter’s metonym “Man,” echoed in Brathwaite’s use of the crossroads, is also reminiscent of James Baldwin’s similar term for white racist maleness in America [see his collection of stories Going to Meet the Man (1967)]: Man is what has failed us, and she asks us to adopt “Human” instead as a fully inclusive concept for our species. As Aaron Kamugisha (2006) says, Wynter’s thinking reimagines “our very understanding of what is the nature of being human” (142). Caribbean thinking has demonstrated over and over again strong moves to undo the hegemony of Western separatisms, in defiance of persistent neocolonial continuities of them.

Environmental awareness requires us to embrace interconnection, an interaction across difference, a move against the divisiveness of the colonial, neocolonial and capitalist enterprise. As early as Wynter’s “Afterword” to Kumbla, she asked us to see our “human self-interest” in the frame of its increasing degradation “in our planetary environment” (1990, 366). In her conversations with Katherine McKittrick (beginning 2007), Wynter notes that whereas the Industrial Revolution laid down the path to our present climate crisis, liberation from formal colonization in the mid-twentieth century continued an impassioned persuasion of the formerly colonized into thinking they had the problem of third-worldness or underdevelopment and that to escape this they needed to imitate the colonial centers in their pillage and burn habits with fossil fuels and other forms of capitalist exploitation of natural resources. Kathryn Yusoff (2018) reminds us that Wynter represents a vital moment in slave resistance as also an environment pact, so the kissing of the earth before slave rebellions was “an oath-act that maintained a social contract with the earth often to the point of death” (37). Yusoff, a geologist, explains there is a “White Geology,” which is “a category and a praxis of dispossession” (68). She goes on:

It has determined the geographies and genealogies of colonial extraction in a double sense, first, in terms of settler colonialism and the thirst for land and minerals, and second, as the category of the inhuman that transformed persons into things. (68)

Cultivation of the plantation by the enslaved, even whilst ordered and supervised by planters, as well as the cultivation of provision grounds, had to be also resistance to that attempt to reduce people to exploitable resources. Wynter argues that people of African descent fashioned a new environmental language, as they could, what Yusoff names, following Wynter, “the praxis of the human through a relation to the earth” (2018, 39), a relation, not separation. By the time of the conversations with McKittrick (2015), Wynter had come to think that our species now has to confront “the overall negative costs” on a planetary level, of pursuing “neoliberal consumer-driven cum politically liberal democratic” goals and strategies (2015, 43). What has brought us to this dire place in terms of threat to long-term human survival is thinking of the world and all we do divisively.

A Transformative Sympoesis

Scholarly work often traps the writer in terminology that reinforces divisions even when the writer, like Melville or Nunez, tries to avoid them. When Wynter tries to write beyond separatisms in academic work she is sometimes hobbled by language itself employing hyphenated pairs of terms such as “nature-culture” or “bios-logos”. Similarly, Ladelle McWhorter lists separate elements by which we codify identity, “racial, ethnic, religious, and other forms of diversity” (2010, 75), reinforcing them as separate categories even as she argues for a collective social change embracing everyone.Footnote 3

Post-structuralism enabled us to see how language so often works by defining what is in terms of what is not (red is not blue, rich is not poor). But creative uses of language can layer and juxtapose meaning and bypass the literal. It is important to remember that Wynter began as a creative writer, a novelist (The Hills of Hebron, 1962). Her  academic style is convoluted and sometimes circular in argument, perhaps moving toward creative assimilation of disparate modes of expression, importantly avoiding straight lines of limited argument. Carole Boyce Davies (Black Women, Writing and Identity, 1994 and Caribbean Spaces, 2013) has experimented with combining scholarship, theory, criticism and memoir in one work as a way of encompassing her Caribbean experience and knowledge, raising important questions about how we might integrate different formal modes of approaching a topic, weaving them together.Footnote 4 For writers concerned with social justice like Melville and Nunez postcolonial perception can planetary and species-wide thinking without enabling globalizing power. The novels discussed here go beyond the crossroads and Wynter’s concept of Man to speak to an ecological spacetime that proposes symbiosis between peoples and their places, between humans and other species.

Melville has Guyanese ancestry (mixed British and Amerindian) and knows her cultural inheritance from Guyana though she resides in the UK. Nunez is Trinidadian and has long worked in New York. Both Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago have diverse populations, and while tensions have at times divided the population (African/East Indian), both cultures embrace the idea of mixing. Indeed, Kit Candlin (2012) argues that Grenada, Trinidad and mainland Demerara (now part of Guyana) constituted a group of frontier societies difficult for colonial administrations to manage, “a place of competing empires and confusing racial mixes in barely developed colonies” (175), where, nevertheless, enslaved people labored on plantations in appalling conditions. Contradiction and plurality of existence have particularly marked these societies. In these stories, colonially determined racial and class binaries are both supported and resisted and mixing is commonplace, destabilizing those very same colonial racial and gender hierarchies, what Greg Thomas calls “the sexual politics of empire” (2007, 11).

Prospero’s Daughter represents a battle between old “purities” and separations and new amalgamations of cultural difference that oppose racial hierarchy. In this sometimes too programmed retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), Dr. Gardner is another version of the worst of Wynter’s white supremacist “Man.” He is a reincarnation of Prospero, not a magician now but a British doctor who has betrayed his profession at home and fled to escape a malpractice accusation. His name is an ironic echo of “gardener,” but he has no instinct to nurture anything, only to control it as in forcing interconnection in plants by making hybrids, an echo of actual planter attempts at eugenics with regard to their slaves’ procreation. Cultivated and wild plants as well as health and disease are two major threads in the novel by which Nunez explores colonial and decolonial odes of existence, both deeply engaged with the environment.

In Shakespeare’s play, Prospero exerts power over Caliban because he is afraid of a union between him and his daughter, a union even Caliban does not imagine as more than sexual. The island on which Prospero and his daughter are shipwrecked is a magical place. Nunez’s story is set on the real island of Chacachacare, off the main island of Trinidad. The novel references people suffering long-term leprosy and the actual island really did hold a leprosarium (1920–50). Patients were isolated because of lack of an effective cure, when leprosy was sufficiently widespread to seem like a sort of plague.Footnote 5

Leprosy is not centrally a part of the novel, but rather an important context for it. In this time of COVID-19, we especially understand that health in the human body is also a matter of delicate balance, of exchange between elements both within the body and in its environment. A body is a delicate ecology, and if it becomes seriously unbalanced, there is disease (which we can understand as dis/ease, lack of ease). People vulnerable in a society made unhealthy by racism, sexism and class division might develop an illness because their body cannot defend against it.

Janarden Subedi and Eugene B. Gallagher (1996) open the introduction to a collection of essays on society, health and disease by saying “(i)t is accepted today that health and disease are related to, and often stem from, the structure of a society” (xv).Footnote 6 Colonial Caribbean governments began to consider establishing public health legislation and a bureaucracy to administer it only after severe crisis (De Barros and Stitwell 2003, 2).Footnote 7 In the past, they had felt that the “inexhaustible supply of labour made health expenditures seem unnecessary” (De Barros and Stitwell 2003, 3). So, Gardner’s behavior carries on this attitude toward health and wellness in the disadvantaged.

Dr. Peter Gardner is infected by an arrogance that does not value either the people or the island he comes to know. He is only on the island to evade the consequences of medical malpractice. He amuses himself by grafting one plant onto another, a bizarre and unnatural version of mixing. He has no interest in the few people left on the island with leprosy and represents a corrupted form of Western medicine (coming out of a culture dominated by mercantilism). This betrays its oath to do no harm. When Lucinda, who raised Carlos, the Caliban figure, is dying of terminal cancer, it is the remaining lepers on the island who help her and her household (133). Her illness just makes her vulnerable to Dr. Gardner, offering him opportunity to appropriate the house that should have belonged to Carlos.

Marguerite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (2001) point out metaphors of healing as a “counterargument to the metaphor of illness has become perhaps the most frequent and effectively deployed weapon against colonial discourse.” (xx). They also argue:

With a reevaluation of traditional curative practices taking place worldwide, we would appeal for a reconsideration of the healing methods used by peoples accustomed to adaptation and reinvention; alternative and integrative strategies have been the tools of survival in these creative Caribbean societies. (2001, xix)

But Gardner’s scientific training is alien to the island and turns plants into objects for experimentation.

When John Mumsford, inspector of police, arrives on the island to investigate a complaint of rape, he is struck by the odd vehemence of green at Dr. Gardner’s house:Footnote 8

Plastic, artificially, brilliantly green … he saw that the flowers, too, were brilliantly colorful, artificially colorful. But what made him suck in his breath was not the brilliance … but the variety … of the colors on a single plant … bougainvillea … their petals splashed with polka dots, blue upon pink, violet on orange, yellow on red, the petals on some opened out flat like lilies. (Nunez 2006, 47)

Flowers are the sexual part of plants, so there is an important suggestion here that Gardner has a desire to pervert nature. British colonialism, as Richard Drayton’s important study (2000) demonstrates, was obsessed with moving plants from one part of the Empire to another and “improving” them along the way, often by means of a sojourn at Kew Gardens in London, so they could be grafted and domesticated—changed from their original botanical nature to suit a new environment. Gardner (or any colonialist) corrupts knowledge for self-interest and mastery over not only other humans but also the environment.

His botanical experiments are not the only violence he visits upon the world, human and nonhuman alike. He wants to cut down trees. In this he repeats Prospero’s desire to claim the island as his own. The trees he fells were planted by Carlos’s father. First the chennette, then the coconut, breadfruit, chataigne, avocado, plum, orange, grapefruit, sapodilla, soursop and two mangos (Nunez 2006, 128–9). Gardner gets rid of other plants (ixora, wild poinsettia, a vine called chain of love, buttercups). He could not be more different than Carlos’s father, who taught him to respect the nonhuman (iguana, snake, nightjar, butterfly, keskidee, mockingbird, parrot). Not only does Gardner want to have control over plants, he orders all fruit to be cooked (and he bans tropical fruits altogether). He thinks nature threatens to destroy him in the tropics.

Jill Casid (2005) makes the persuasive argument that European landscape gardening contained the seeds of its own undoing, through “transplantation and intermixing,” which “release the garden’s uncanniness,” so that it might become an “unsettlingly queer place of overwhelming and excessive beauty and stench” (xxi). Gardner is terrified by natural ebullient growth, even though he grows plants boisterous in their manufactured monstrosity. His own desire is turned into an extension of material possessiveness and power-seeking. He abuses his daughter sexually whilst protecting her virginity (even her name, a bit too obviously, underlines this obsession), equating that with her marriage market value.

Gregg Thomas points out that “the rule of Europe has assumed a notably erotic form” (2007, 23). Gardner lets slip that Virginia’s mother was too pure for sex and she died in childbirth. Carlos also thinks the man Gardner has in mind to marry Virginia was more impressed with an orchid Gardner bred than with her. Gardner too has a vicious hostility toward the evident attraction between his daughter and Carlos. His sense of nature is as sick as his warped understanding of science. Though he loves to graft plants onto each other, he resents the mixing of races. He is clearly unfit to be a father, but he wants to interfere with the potential for other men to have families. Greg Thomas’s essay, “The ‘S’ Word” (2006) engages with Wynter’s discussion of the ways the plantation displaced enslaved men from their own family life. The plantation exploited land and people together, distorting the sexual and emotional lives of those working on it whenever possible.

Virginia and Carlos express a very different attitude to the natural world when they come together. They reach toward the nonhuman in fellowship, in mutual resistance to Gardner. It is in saving a wild bird from his fury, respecting its right to be, that Carlos and Virginia begin their friendship (161–3). They are both sensitive to the natural world. On a walk with Gardner, when still young, Carlos describes a place where razor grass and trees grow freely, and there are colorful orange berries and pink, yellow, red and lavender flowers. When Carlos tries to warn Gardner about the poison in the manchineel fruit, the doctor yells “everything on this island is diseased” (Nunez 2006, 191).

Carlos and Virginia, in their union, represent a healthy response to nature, but their mixing provokes strong responses from those who fear it. She is white. He has blue eyes and freckles and “the skin color of a colored man” (Nunez 2006, 64). Gardner, trying to dismiss Carlos, says his mother was a “blue-eyed hag” and his father was Black (reflecting Prospero’s description of Caliban’s mother in The Tempest (54)). Mumford repeats a Trinidadian story that mixing Black and white blood produces “black and brown dots on the white” (55). Carlos explains that his mother was born in Algeria to English parents, who disliked living in Algiers but did so to make money. Her African nanny, a Black woman, taught her Arabic. Her first love was a Black man, though her parents forbid it. Her second love was also Black, Carlos’s father. Carlos represents a healthy mixing of the races, and he is also keen on Gardner’s daughter. It is significant that he and Virginia find themselves alone as two potential lovers in a paradisiacal spacetime “untouched, unchanged by human hands,” an “organic,” “pure” place (Nunez 2006, 209), where they are building a relationship within nature, trying to evade the gender, class and race tensions of the cultures in which they were raised.

By the end of the novel, they keep flowers grown by her father as an act of healing the past. They watch fruit trees flourish which replace those he cut down (332) and establish an alternative way of living, healthy, simple, calm, as they expect their first child, whom they will raise as an islander. Their relationship transcends race and embraces nature just as it is, without a desire to shape or curb it. Virginia, however, is not as fully rounded a character as Carlos, and her love of nature as well as her sexuality seem tepid. She knows the botanical (scientific) names of plants because she learned them from her father, but she is not entirely shaped by him or she could not be Carlos’s partner.

As she rides in a small boat to confront her father, along with Carlos and Inspector Mumsford, almost at the end of the story, Virginia becomes absorbed in watching tiny fish:

[B]lue, purple with blue; red, yellow with red; green, orange with green, all the dazzling colors of the rainbow-dating through the emerald-green reeds of sea-plants shimmering above the speckled white sand … I was not thinking of my father when I saw those fish, when I saw those green reeds, when my eyes traveled further across the silken blue water. I was thinking: This is my sea, my place in the world. This is where I belong. (Nunez 2006, 302)

This is not an escapist adoration of nature as compensation for something being lost (as pastoral was a coping mechanism for European elites separated from the country). It expresses a claim to belong to what is not human, to a world that appears to have some sort of balance and equity. But to her credit Virginia makes no attempt to name the fish or the reeds formally, a kind of possession.

Derek Walcott (2005) reminds us that this impulse to name is at the core of colonial appropriation: “Here is an unknown plant. Take the arrogance of an Old World botanist naming this plant then, this one on the grass verge of the beach that I do not even have a name for, and I now believe that my ignorance is more correct than his knowledge” (56). At the end of the novel, Virginia tells Carlos that her father violated her, emphasizing a strong link between colonialism and incest in regard to the region. Sexual predation in the past threatens the happiness of the present. Virginia is afraid, for she carries Carlos’s child, but he just takes her hand supportively. Carlos’s embrace of all nature, including plants cultivated by Gardner, is one with his acceptance of Virginia. The novel has an evident polemic, which reduces character complexity, and so maybe the ending is not as convincing as it might have been if Nunez had set her story free from the controlling project of rewriting The Tempest.Footnote 9 But if we think of it as an extended parable that critiques European colonialism as destructive to both humans and flora and fauna, it works well.

Meanwhile, The Ventriloquist’s Tale, published nine years earlier than Nunez’s novel, portrays forbidden love in different generations of Guyanese society through complicated characters who at the same time protect and reinvent traditions. In this story, the environment is also a powerful player and mixing is a kind of dialogue not just between people but between people and their places. The McKinnon family has as patriarch Scotsman Alexander McKinnon. He has mixed race children with his two Wapisiana wives, who are also sisters. His cultural practice has changed through his experience of living with the nomadic Atorad people in the rain forest of Guiana and through learning Wapisiana and accepting Wapisiana custom. He knows the land and the plants he grows, and his thinking reflects Amerindian cultural norms toward European attempts at forcible farming: “[T]he land seemed set against it” (1997, 98). In Georgetown, the capital, gossip says he is more Indian than European (100). This raises some important questions about what we mean by mixing. Intrusion of outsiders who seek to impose alien ideas and practices that violate balance and equity is conquest: But when the outsider changes, going toward local norms, then they come to belong to a multiracial culture.

Melville’s story is centered in Amerindian apprehensions of modernity, which combine traditional knowledge and awareness of the outside world that has brought change. Her novel’s narrator is Brazilian novelist Mário de Andrade’s eponymous character Macunaíma, as the amusing opening makes clear (other narrator avatars are Chico and Sonny). Albert Braz (2007) points out that Andrade’s character can be seen both as the symbol of South American cultural and racial hybridity, and also its opposite, cultural resistance to mixing. He argues that Melville’s novel can be read as suggesting that “cultural and biological mingling poses a major danger to the people of the savannah” (19). But it is surely more complicated than that: it is not miscegenation itself which is the problem, but the retention of hierarchies from alien cultures which prevent openness to change and learning. Traditional cultures are not static, even when isolated from outside influences. Further, the novel suggests that when cultures remain primarily endogamic, they become unsustainable.

Take for instance that Danny’s father is Alexander McKinnon, so he is mixed race. Danny identifies with the Wapisiana. He is accepted by his Wapisiana grandmother because he is “reddish-brown” and speaks her language, ignoring his mixed ancestry. She tells him a creation story of the Macunaima. Her story describes the sun as “still a person like us” looking for a wife. He tries to seize a woman bathing, who to get away promises to send him a wife. She sends a white woman who crumbles into white earth, then a black woman who melts as wax. Finally, a “reddy-bronze colour” woman becomes the sun’s mate, with whom he has several children, who become the Macunaima (105). This fable suggests preference for separate identifying characteristics, sitting alongside the many elements in the story that identify mixing, for good or ill.

Quite early in the novel Rosa Mendelson, in Guyana to do research in an aspect of colonial literary history, explains to anthropologist Michael Wormoal that she believes in “a mixture of the races” (78). But he thinks this idea is against the tide: meaning, presumably, the Eurocentric intellectual tide. Everyone, he says, is retreating “into their own homogenous group” (78). Rosa’s assertion was provoked by Wormoal worrying about “how rapidly Indian culture is disintegrating these days–contaminated mainly by contact with other races” (78). The European scholar defines Indigenous spacetime as unchanging and static in relation and in opposition to a European sense of spacetime as progress and continual movement. He teases Rosa that as a Jew she must stick together with other Jews in Israel, to which she responds that she often supports the Palestinians. She brings Wormoal to admit that his work is itself risking “contaminating the Indians” through his presence, and that in the end it will only enrich European and American cultures, not the people he studies (79). Thinking of interaction as contamination argues for separation. But if it is done the right way, Rosa has faith in its importance. This is affirmed by her attraction to Chofy McKinnon, mixed himself.

The narrator, voice of Amerindian belief in a contemporary moment, explains that: “[T]he sort of death you die determines your afterlife, not the sort of life you lived … We progress through life towards the perfect state of being an animal. … Animals that behave badly—a jaguar, for instances, that hesitates before the kill—would slide down the scale to become human” (355). This is a striking refutation of the usual view of “developed” people that animals are below humans. The narrator says, “In my language, hunting means making love with the animals. The hunt is courtship, a sexual act. … You have to understand the desires of your prey” (7). Danny repeats a folk belief, “Animals are people in disguise” (122). The traditional healer, Koko Lupi, cured her measles infection when she was very young, by summoning the spirit of the jaguar. This is another example of an embrace of the other which challenges the primacy of human experience.

There is a tension between old mores (Amerindian traditions) and new, imported ones. For Danny and Beatrice, brother and sister, incest is a phase in their growing up. Tanya Shields (2014) reads this as an important part of Amerindian tradition and cultural identity. But its moorings seem uncertain as the novel proceeds. Perhaps Melville is suggesting that in this shifting social situation, sexuality, like everything else, has to be evaluated from multiple directions. Tradition unmoored from its full meaning is confused but beliefs that are certain, like the Christian Father Napier’s, are likely to do damage.

Sexuality is a prime avenue for undermining social rules. Ballantyne and Burton, (2009) introducing a book on gender and intimacy in global empire, ask “not just how intimacy was constructed but also how it was embodied across the restless world of empires” (7). Imperial regimes “were invested in governing the ‘unruly and unfulfilled passions’ of their subjects, both European and native” (Ballantyne and Burton 2009, 8). Beatrice and Danny refuse to curb their youthful desires, resisting the intrusion of Father Napier’s alien and strict moral codes. Beatrice’s sexual desire is deeply connected to her experience of plants, as when “the vivid electric blue of jacaranda petals started her nipples tingling in the same way. Certain blossoms with a particularly vibrating wavelength of color affected her sexually like that” (Melville 1997, 129).

But nature does not always stay in balance. The rains can be a disaster, inundating the land and bringing ill-health to the cattle and people through invasive insects and parasites (136). Weather, the manifestation of the nonhuman, can be treacherous, as much subject to imbalance at times as the human world. It is something with the power to change lives in an instant.

The red earth blows in the wind, coats drinking water, and filled the creases of clothing, clogged the feathers of the bows and arrows, blocked up the barrels of guns, covered the saddles and harnesses hanging on the walls, choked the plants and made everyone’s skin thirsty, like a red plague (91).

Some humans live close enough to nature to identify with its changes and rhythms.

This is true of the boy who is said to have his existence “tied into the landscape and the seasons, rainy or dry” (14). Chofy carves turtle-shell patterns onto flat stones (18), linking the animate and inanimate. The Wapisiana tell of a time long ago “when we could all speak the language of plants and animals,” until a man made a bow and arrow and killed a deer. After that, they lost their immortality: they were separated from nature (122–3). Descriptions of the city, by contrast, in the novel are dominated by the human.

The narrator tells us he discovered a word at the bottom of a muddy lake, which turned into many words and then into many “ramshackle bones” (5). This language, while associated with loss of Amerindian people and culture, is not gone, but capable of informing the world in its own way and on its own terms. Alexander Weheliye, in a discussion of race and the body, cites Zora Neale Hurston’s striking statement “the white man thinks in written language and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics” (2014, 51). Sweeping generalization as this is, such a bold claim reverberates not only with the “hieroglyphics” Melville’s narrator finds on the first stone from the lake, which are language, but also with Kamau Brathwaite’s employment of hieroglyphs in his later work (e.g., Golokwati 2000; Born to Slow Horses 2005). In both, postcolonial metropolitan language and the ghost of prior language, represented by hieroglyphics, are creatively in dialogue. Melville’s narrator speaks of many skeletons coming back from the dead bringing their words with them, words the narrator understands: Rosa, too, is interested in ways the past informs the present: the two are braided and many-stranded.

Father Napier turns into Wynter’s figure of the “Man,” working as an agent of Eurocentric power, specifically Catholicism. In trying to remake relationships and attachments, he triggers a coalition of enemies, led by Beatrice. She obtains poisonous beans that are hidden in his food by a female ally, who is afraid of Napier’s attempt to limit men to one wife. The poison severely harms Napier and kills his young companion. The boundaries between food and poison are understood well in a place in which ancient knowledge has long known a whole range of plants and their properties: it becomes an ally in a cultural war.

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert calls the clearing of forest for sugarcane farming “ecological trauma” (2011, 183). As forests disappeared, so did much of the knowledge of plants in those forests. But in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, forests still survive, and with them, to some extent, the ancient practices of traditional healing that drew on plants that grew there. That Beatrice uses a plant-derived poison to try to murder someone in the twentieth century demonstrates the extent to which the intrusion of colonialism causes a reactive violence, quite against the nurture brought by old communal values.

The Ventriloquist’s Tale, like Prospero’s Daughter, links divisive thinking with illness. The narrator tells us:

It was while I was in Europe that I nearly became infected by the epidemic of separatism that was raging there. The virus transmutes. Sometimes it appears as nationalism, sometimes as racism, sometimes as religious orthodoxy. My experience in the rain forests of South America provided me with no immunity to it (355).

This connection of sickness and separatism is important: health comes from integration, plural identity and complex cultural experience, drawing on both present and past (Time) and on infinite and finite space.

Though the anglophone novel, like much of colonially inherited cultural forms, had its birth in a British culture increasingly turning toward hierarchy based on class, race, gender and nation, Caribbean writers have often tried to reinvent it to tell stories that express resistance to such reductive strategies. Nunez and Melville tell stories that encourage us to embrace the realization of universal interconnection in a world still mired in division, a worlding that we so badly need in our moment where greed and power have so damaged the fecundity and balance of our earth. This is a radical remapping, not only of places but of the people who inhabit them who have forgotten from whence they came.