The Child and the Caribbean Imagination

In The Child and the Caribbean Imagination, twelve emerging and established scholars in the fields of literature, linguistics and education examine and interrogate the representations, roles and realities of Caribbean children. This multidisciplinary volume explores the experiential, discursive and fictive worlds of the child portrayed and treated variously as subject and object in the region’s oral and scribal literatures, formal classroom settings, and other socio-cultural contexts. Divided into four sections – Discourse and Representation, Unstable Identities, Language Development, and Pedagogy – The Child and the Caribbean Imagination offers breadth and depth in its contribution to much-needed academic scholarship aimed at impacting the lives of and paying homage to children in the Caribbean.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of the West Indies Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9789766404406

Book preview

The Child and the Caribbean Imagination

The Child and the Caribbean Imagination

Edited by

GISELLE RAMPAUL

and

GERALDINE ELIZABETH SKEETE

University of the West Indies Press

7A Gibraltar Hall Road Mona

Kingston 7 Jamaica

www.uwipress.com

© 2012 by Giselle Rampaul and Geraldine Elizabeth Skeete

All rights reserved. Published 2012

A catalogue record of this book is available from the

National Library of Jamaica.

ISBN: 978-976-640-439-0

Cover illustration: J. MacDonald Henry, Shine Eye.

© The Estate of J. MacDonald Henry. Courtesy of John Simpson.

Cover and book design by Robert Harris

Set in Constantia 9.5/14.5 x 27

Printed in the United States of America

In memory of Dr Patricia Ismond

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Imagining Caribbean Childhoods

Giselle Rampaul and Geraldine Elizabeth Skeete

PART 1. DISCOURSE AND REPRESENTATION

1 Towards a Poetics of Childhood

Sandra Pouchet Paquet

2 The Child as Symbol of Challenge in Michael Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando

Jennifer Rahim

3 The Thing Without a Name: The Child as Narrative Strategy in Miguel Street

Ryan Durgasingh

PART 2. UNSTABLE IDENTITIES

4 Child’s I and Other in Olive Senior’s Narratives of Self-Invention

Barbara Lalla

5 How the Mirror Broke: Deconstructing Colonial Fairy Tales in I Remember Pampalam

Giselle Rampaul

6 What Child Is This?: Same-Sex Desire among Children in the Anglophone Caribbean Short Story

Geraldine Elizabeth Skeete

PART 3. LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

7 The Child and the Structure of Creoles, Pidgins and Signed Languages

Ben Braithwaite

8 How Yuh Make a Story?: Narrative Development in Young Trinidadian Children

Kathy-Ann Drayton

PART 4. PEDAGOGY

9 Black Heart/White Heart: The Chronicles of Narnia as Literary Text in a Creole Space

Nicha Selvon-Ramkissoon

10 Using For the Life of Laetitia to Teach Character Development to Form 3 Special Students

Karen Sanderson Cole

11 We Supposed to Have Fun: Voice and Resistance in the Primary School Classroom

Rowena Kalloo

12 Do Teachers Make Science Learning Fun and Relevant?

Rawatee Maharaj-Sharma

Contributors

Acknowledgements

THIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE been completed but for the significant contribution of many of our colleagues and friends.

We are grateful indeed to Jennifer Rahim, the driving force behind the Conference on Caribbean Childhood, which yielded the chapters in this book. Without her hard work, determination and belief in the project, this book would have remained simply a good idea. We are also grateful for her contribution to the writing of the introduction.

Paula Morgan and Barbara Lalla, who were part of the initial editing team, were also always generous with their advice and time despite their own demanding schedules.

We would also like to thank Valerie Youssef and Jo-Anne Ferreira for reviewing the chapters that deal with language issues.

Andra K. Ramdeen deserves special mention for her careful formatting of the manuscript and her willingness to work on this project despite the demands of her postgraduate degree and her undergraduate tutoring.

A grant awarded by the University of the West Indies Research and Publications Fund also provided much-needed finances to complete this book.

Adel Bain, Jacintha Jessy Mitchell and so many others have also contributed in one way or another and for this we are truly grateful.

Most of all, we would like to thank the contributors of the chapters who saw this as a worthy project. Thank you for your infinite patience and for helping us to see this book to completion.

Introduction

Imagining Caribbean Childhoods

» GISELLE RAMPAUL AND GERALDINE ELIZABETH SKEETE

THE ADAGE CHILDREN MUST BE SEEN and not heard¹ points to an inherent ambivalence in the Caribbean’s collective psyche about the place and role of children in its social order, since it simultaneously recognizes and silences their presence. The child and adolescent have occupied a seminal place in the region’s culture and creativity. Children, for instance, have key roles in folk tales, songs and games. Novels of childhood and adolescence, such as Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey, and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, have been central to Caribbean literary culture, often analogizing the developing nation and its cultural consciousness, as well as its citizenry’s migratory practices.² However, despite the long-standing interest in representing the child in different kinds of media, the issues surrounding Caribbean childhood have not been given sufficient academic attention.

The current social climate of the region demands that the conditions under which children live, the issues that directly have an impact on their holistic development and the valuable contribution they make to society be brought into focus. A number of issues affecting and surrounding the Caribbean child and the experience of childhood are in dire need of critical enquiry and analysis. It is hoped that this multidisciplinary book will have direct bearing, not only on guiding the understanding of childhood’s cultural significance in the region, but also on social policy development and the influencing of necessary attitudinal changes – for example, in childhood rights and education.

Internationally, the study of childhood and adolescence has developed fairly rapidly, particularly in the United States and in the United Kingdom, where increasingly popular and highly theoretical postgraduate programmes exist. For example, the University of Reading and the University of Newcastle, UK, both have well-established and well-subscribed postgraduate programmes in children’s literature. The University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania State University and San Diego State University in the United States also offer postgraduate degrees in children’s literature. Further, there are many publications devoted to the scholarly analysis of representations of the child in literature and arts, which have both sprung out of the study of children’s literature.

Yet this is an area of scholarship that has been largely overlooked in the Caribbean. There are only a few publications devoted to Caribbean childhood, including Christine Barrow’s Caribbean Childhoods: Outside, Adopted or "Left Behind"; Debra Curtis’s Pleasures and Perils: Girls’ Sexuality in a Caribbean Consumer Culture; Zanifa McDowell’s Elements of Child Law in the Commonwealth Caribbean; and a few handbooks like Emiliana Vegas’s The Promise of Early Childhood Development in Latin America and the Caribbean; Rosamunde Renard’s Handbook for Caribbean Early Childhood Education Caregivers; and the Children’s Issues Coalition’s annual serial, Caribbean Childhoods: From Research to Action. However, these publications largely deal with sociological or pedagogical issues.³ A collection of essays on trauma, social policy and popular culture as they relate to Caribbean childhood is being compiled for the inaugural issue of Tout Moun: Caribbean Journal of Cultural Studies. These forays into representations of the child and Caribbean childhood are but starting points for what is an increasingly important area of critical enquiry.

The chapters in this collection were initially presented at the very successful International Cultural Studies Conference, First They Must Be Children: The Child and the Caribbean Imagi/nation, hosted by the Department of Liberal Arts at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine campus, in May 2009. The presentations have since been extensively revised and upgraded to form the present book, which engages in multidisciplinary discussions on the representational patterns related to the Caribbean child and childhood. The chapters, taken together, provide analysis of the ideological perspectives and discursive practices employed in constructions of children as social and imaginative subjects; the roles, language and identities they have been assigned; their acts of resistance and transgression as cultural agents; and the multiple meanings of their presence in traditional and contemporary Caribbean mythologies of being and becoming. It is hoped that this book will provide distinctly Caribbean perspectives on the role of childhood in the making of societies and cultures.

The chapters in part 1, Discourse and Representation, examine Caribbean novels of childhood and move, as Sandra Pouchet Paquet’s chapter title indicates, towards a poetics of childhood. These chapters explore issues relating to representing the child in literary discourse, focusing on problems of child characters being represented through adult consciousnesses, autobiography and memory, for example. Ryan Durgasingh also examines the marginalization and subordination of children to the fringes of their own narrative. The chapters in this section also analyse the problems of identity formation in societies dominated by specific sociopolitical agendas, the tendency to construct narratives about children as allegories of national development, and, as Jennifer Rahim points out, the preference for child characters as symbols of social change and renewal.

In Towards a Poetics of Childhood, Sandra Pouchet Paquet examines narratives of childhood by men and women of different ethnicities from various parts of the Caribbean. Through these autobiographical narratives, she explores the constituent elements of childhoods remembered and expressed in self-narration, the functional relationship of adult consciousness to the childhood self and the idea of childhood that mediates the temporal world of childhood, as well as the adult’s perspective and memories of childhood. Pouchet Paquet assumes that the intimate connection between childhood and adulthood that drives this study can contribute to our understanding of the nature of human consciousness in our world, and she invites us to reflect on the recurring themes of childhood experience and the burden of consciousness that the literature of childhood represents.

This idea is picked up by Jennifer Rahim in "The Child as Symbol of ‘Challenge’ in Michael Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando", in which she points out the tendency for Caribbean authors to use the child figure to represent, if not vicariously theorize, the region’s myriad sociocultural issues, political evolutions and articulations of identity. Rahim argues that, more often than not, these narratives function as avenues for social protest and allegories of national development. Michael Anthony’s novel, The Year in San Fernando, is revisited in light of the dialogical strain Martin Carter illuminates between dream and disappointment and vision and reality in which the child is cast in his poem The Child Ran into the Sea. Rahim discerns, in the novel’s early but covert engagement with the social politics of multi-ethnic, pre-independence Trinidad and Tobago, the author’s effort to theorize a pathway for national development in which the twelve-year-old protagonist, Francis, plays a major role as symbol and agent of challenge and, therefore, of transformation.

In "‘The Thing Without a Name’: The Child as Narrative Strategy in Miguel Street, Ryan Durgasingh also draws attention to narrative issues involved in representing childhood by focusing on the unnamed child narrator of V.S. Naipaul’s novel. The child narrator relates the picaresque exploits of his neighbours to the reader while his past-self, the child who has ostensibly experienced these events, remains peripheral throughout most of the narrative. The child’s own development follows an anachronous path and complicates notions of the Bildungsroman as his life is often overshadowed by the colourful characters with whom he associates. In this chapter, Durgasingh analyses the child" as narrative strategy and as a character who is not allowed to be central to what first appears to be his novel of development.

In part 2, Unstable Identities, the focus on literary texts continues but the focus is on the subjectivities that are available to child characters in the narratives. These chapters, taken together, reveal the constructedness of identity as the child characters, through various means and for different reasons, try on different personas that are significant to the formation of their personhoods. These chapters concern ideological, conceptual and psychological perspectives on identity formation and tackle political issues related to patriarchy, colonization and sexuality. In Barbara Lalla’s essay, the child character’s story becomes a means of creating reality in the face of psychological trauma. Giselle Rampaul examines the borrowed images of colonial culture that are fed to the child, who is ultimately torn between competing realities. The section ends with Geraldine Skeete’s discussion of the issues surrounding same-sex desire in children as depicted by contemporary, Caribbean diasporic short fiction writers.

Barbara Lalla, in her chapter, Child’s ‘I’ and Other in Olive Senior’s Narratives of Self-Invention, analyses how Senior conveys the displaced child’s attempts at self-construction through a range of narrative strategies. By focusing on the unmothered child character, Lalla reveals the psychological crisis that results from worlds where game and reality horrifyingly intersect. In such circumstances of dissociation, Senior characteristically identifies potential for adult intervention, but the alignment of vision may never be achieved in the narrative, even as narration becomes the crucial mechanism for imposing coherence on a shattering consciousness. In this chapter, Lalla examines how the child’s I experiments with alternative identities may become a desperate effort to impose order on her life as she searches for a sustainable story for going forward.

Drawing upon a quotation from Olive Senior’s poem Colonial Girls’ School, which alludes to the irrelevance of colonial education and its dissemination of European cultural myths in the Caribbean, Giselle Rampaul examines the effects of the colonial fairy tales passed down to the child character in Joyce Gittens’s 1947 short story I Remember Pampalam. These fairy tales, especially Snow White, include assumptions about race, colour and class and serve to indoctrinate the child into social norms involving gender performance and sexuality, patriarchy and family structures. These norms become an imitation of and are measured by inevitably European standards, which have very little to do with the character’s reality of living in a barrack yard in Trinidad. The difficulties involved in shattering the colonial mirror and attempting to construct a Caribbean identity and world view become clear in this chapter.

In ‘What Child Is This?’ Same-Sex Desire among Children in the Anglophone Caribbean Short Story, Geraldine Skeete analyses the short story as a literary form considered in dialectical and binary opposition to the novel, as children are to adults, and as heterosexuals are to homosexuals. In this chapter, Skeete includes award-winning writer Lawrence Scott, who has actively focused on the gay, intersex or transvestite youngster in his long and short narratives. She also includes the writers Dionne Brand and Shani Mootoo, among others. Skeete examines how some literary critics’ description of short stories as, in part, being peopled with characters that are non-hegemonic, peripheral and at odds with the dominant culture can also fit the subject position of the non-heterosexual. Of interest are the links between form and content; gender and genre; and the writers’ use of the short narrative with its paradoxical features of brevity and tightness, flexibility and openness to explore the sometimes fraught, sometimes satisfying experiences of Caribbean gay and lesbian children in the literary discourse.

In part 3, Language Development, Ben Braithwaite and Kathy-Ann Drayton consider the ways in which Caribbean children, through their own creativity, contribute to the development of languages and discourses. These chapters take a linguistic perspective and present children not simply as cultural products of society but as individuals who are producers of language and who have a hand in shaping the cultural terrain of their societies. Whereas Drayton explores the ways in which children use their imagination to construct linguistically coherent stories, Braithwaite argues that children have played a key role in the development of the very languages used to tell these stories. The chapters in this section, therefore, emphasize the role of children as active social participants and cultural agents.

Ben Braithwaite, in his chapter, The Child and the Structure of Creoles, Pidgins and Signed Languages, focuses on some linguistic similarities between creole languages and signed language and discusses the special role of children in the development of language. Braithwaite reviews some recent typological findings relating to creoles, sign languages and pidgins, paying particular attention to Caribbean languages, and considers what these findings tell us about the role of children in the formation of these languages. He argues that the productivity of reduplication found in signed and creole languages (but not in pidgins) may be attributed to the regularizing role of child learners. He also suggests that further comparisons between these three types of language may contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which children aid the development of languages.

In ‘How Yuh Make a Story?’: Narrative Development in Young Trinidadian Children, Kathy-Ann Drayton examines narrative development as part of children’s linguistic, cognitive and social development. Narrative development helps them to organize their experiences, construct multiple and changing identities, analyse events as logical episodes and develop metalinguistic and metacognitive skills to reflect on their own thinking and communicative processes. Drayton charts children’s growing ability to produce narratives from their employment of basic chaining of events and little use of complex phrase structure or evaluative devices to being able to narrate complex and coherent stories with well-organized story grammar and increased linguistic sophistication.

In part 4, Pedagogy, the authors raise issues regarding the advantages of cross-disciplinary instruction and considerations of how children’s everyday lives are beneficial to decisions relating to pedagogy, how they should be given more agency in the teacher-pupil relationship, and how children can be taught subliminal messages from instructional material that may seem inimical to ideals of ethnic and racial harmony necessary for productive relationships in a Caribbean space. Descriptors usually define this space with the multi-affix, yet teachers can use such material as countermeasures to teach valuable lessons about discrimination and prejudice, tolerance and acceptance. These chapters therefore explore the real-life situation of the Caribbean classroom – three of them present actual case studies with a Trinidad and Tobago context – and the philosophies and practices that engender a learner-centred and learner-autonomous environment. They interrogate the pedagogical implications of using traditional versus modern teaching and learning methods and of allowing the voice of Caribbean children to be heard as a factor both in the teacher-pupil relationship and in the development of educational policy at the primary and secondary levels in Trinidad and Tobago.

In her chapter, "Black Heart/White Heart: The Chronicles of Narnia as Literary Text in a Creole Space", Nicha Selvon-Ramkissoon discusses how literature can teach vital life lessons to twelve- to fourteen-year-olds in Trinidad and Tobago’s secondary school classrooms. Using a literary linguistic approach and a close reading of the novels, she investigates and uncovers the perceived subtext or underlying messages of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, which is recommended reading material in the language arts curriculum for the aforementioned age group. Selvon-Ramkissoon examines the novels’ perpetuation of racism, misogyny and fundamentalist religion. She explores how the ideological orientation of characters, narrator and implied author is betrayed through the use of language, of which teachers should be mindful and which they should be able to identify. While acknowledging the challenges of reading and studying a book like this in a Caribbean classroom that typically includes children of diverse groups based on race, class, gender, colour and religion, Selvon-Ramkissoon nonetheless offers perspectives on why such a text can still be retained on the reading list and also be used for counterdiscursive purposes.

In "Using For the Life of Laetitia to Teach Character Development to Form 3 Special Students, Karen Sanderson Cole recounts and analyses her teaching experience with low-achieving students in a secondary school in Trinidad. This chapter provides a provoking and sobering insight into the struggles of underachieving students in the Trinidad and Tobago secondary school system and the extent to which teachers need to painstakingly apply creative ideas to enhance students’ critical thinking, reading and literature skills. The chapter is a revealing pedagogical discourse on how to improve the academic and life skills of special" children. Thus, it reads as an inter- and cross-disciplinary paper, encompassing the fields of literature, family life education, reading and writing. With this remedial class, whose members are, on average, fourteen years old, Sanderson Cole uses both qualitative and quantitative assessment and employs the principles and methods of critical literacy to teach a lesson on character development so that students can make meaningful correspondences between their real-life context and that of the fictional character in the Caribbean novel, For the Life of Laetitia, by Merle Hodge. The statistics, analysis, recommendations and appendices are very informative to the reader who may not belong to the field of education.

Rowena Kalloo’s chapter, ‘We Supposed to Have Fun’: Voice and Resistance in the Primary School Classroom, centres on the pressures affecting students preparing for the Secondary Entrance Assessment examination and, as a consequence, the learning and behavioural outcomes evident both in and out of the classroom. As participant-observer, Kalloo traces how this preparation impacts students’ cognitive and affective development, their attitudes to study and play, and their perceptions of and relationship with their teacher, and vice versa. She uses as her representative study a co-educational elementary institution and one of its classes, investigating concepts of power and how student voice is a means of resistance in such a setting. She presents the direct speech and first-person narratorial voices of the students, as well as the teacher and captures the nuances of the speakers’ maturational age, sex and ideological orientation towards the questions posed. Kalloo highlights the human aspect of the process, rather than emphasizing the rigorous requirements of a syllabus for an examination that is a rite of passage from childhood to adolescence and from primary to secondary school.

In the final chapter, Do Teachers Make Science Learning Fun and Relevant?, Rawatee Maharaj-Sharma focuses on the implementation of the primary school science syllabus in ways that are both fun and relevant. She argues that although teachers purport to use a variety of strategies during science lessons, they ultimately rely on traditional resources and methods because of time constraints, limited resources, restrictive physical accommodation, lack of creativity and insufficient support from administration. Like Kalloo, Maharaj-Sharma also interrogates the cognitive and affective domains of teaching and learning in the real classroom setting, but she examines the psychomotor domain, as well. Whereas Kalloo focuses more on the learner, Maharaj-Sharma turns her attention more specifically to the teacher. Like Kalloo, she bases her findings on classroom observations and personal interviews with teachers, offering their direct statements and reflections on their delivery of the science curriculum. Because Maharaj-Sharma is involved in teacher education, she critiques this delivery, providing statistical data to track the use of traditional versus modern and dull versus interesting teaching and learning strategies used in a sampling of classrooms in Trinidad to determine if an optimum balance is being struck between the child as learner while enjoying the world of science and that same child acquiring the requisite knowledge and skills.

Childhood is largely an overlooked topic in the Caribbean, as is evident in the surprising dearth of publications devoted to it. And yet understanding childhood is crucial to the perpetuation and preservation of culture and necessary to the formation of stable and productive societies. By foregrounding the experience of the child as far as possible and by examining childhood from a variety of disciplinary lenses, these chapters offer a variety of new perspectives on the importance of childhood as an area of critical enquiry and provide a foundation for further study and for effecting practical improvements in the lives of children.

Notes

1. Although this saying is not of Caribbean origin, it is often quoted to describe attitudes towards children in the Caribbean. See, for example, Jaipaul L. Roopnarine and Janet Brown, eds., Caribbean Families: Diversity among Ethnic Groups (Greenwich, CT: Ablex, 1997), 5; Simon Taylor, A Land of Dreams: A Study of Jewish and Caribbean Migrant Communities in England (London: Rout-ledge, 1993), 150; and Zanifa McDowell, Elements of Child Law in the Commonwealth Caribbean (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2000), 91.

2. Merle Hodge, Crick Crack, Monkey (London: André Deutsch, 1970); Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).

3. Christine Barrow, Caribbean Childhoods: Outside, Adopted or Left Behind (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2010); Debra Curtis, Pleasures and Perils: Girls’ Sexuality in a Caribbean Consumer Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Zanifa McDowell, Elements of Child Law in the Commonwealth Caribbean (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2000); Emiliana Vegas, The Promise of Early Childhood Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2009); Rosamunde Renard, Handbook for Caribbean Early Childhood Education Caregivers (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 1998); Children’s Issues Coalition, Caribbean Childhoods: From Research to Action (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2003).

Part 1.

DISCOURSE AND REPRESENTATION

1.

Towards a Poetics of Childhood

» SANDRA POUCHET PAQUET

IN APPROACHING THE SUBJECT of the child and the Caribbean literary imagination, I am keenly aware that writers like Olive Senior carve out the space of childhood that others like me struggle to occupy with some understanding of Caribbean childhood in the time and place they designate. It is in this spirit that I attempt to lay out some of the parameters of childhood experience remembered and expressed in self-narration and to explore the functional relationship of adult consciousness to the childhood self in enduring works of art created by men and women of different races and ethnicities from different