Synopses & Reviews
This book examines the work of three important twentieth-century Caribbean poets, focusing on one major work by each of them: Pales Matos's Tuntun de pasa y griferia (Puerto Rico); Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Martinique), and Derek Walcott's Omeros (St. Lucia). This book studies the poets' efforts to confront the Archipelago's historical legacy of racism and colonialism as they also articulate and define a space for themselves as artists and intellectuals in post/colonial societies. In order to address those critical issues, these writers craft poetic personae that alternate between the open dialogism of political engagement and the monologic closure associated with lyric self-articulation. That often uneasy process of poetic self-fashioning reflects the unavoidable responsibilities, tensions, and contradictions encountered by public intellectuals in post/colonial societies such as those of the Caribbean. Victor Figueroa is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literatures at Wayne State University.