Introduction

Abstract

As Gordon Rohlehr has observed, “Caribbean literature since the 1930s … has been a deepening and prolonged exploration of Caribbean society, politics, and the inexhaustible recesses of the psyche of Caribbean peoples” (“Spiritual” 187). Both the oral and residually oral expressive forms initiate clear streams of thought requisite to this visionary tradition that can be traced back to slave orature, music, and dance. These were channels of heightened joy and relief from routines, and instruments, moreover, for investigating the past as a crucial determinant of cultural and aesthetic lineages—essentially, as marker of mappable spirit passages. The folk thereby invested the imagination with the burden of healing psychic wounds even as their lives tossed in the hurricane swirl of the devastating colonialist history.