Chapter 4 examined poetry associated with a nationalist agenda which is anti-colonial and committed to establishing difference from “Europe.” Such an agenda is inherent in the situation of West Indian territories early in the twentieth century. Chapter 5 considered poetry associated with the West Indian embrace of “Africa.” This opportunity does not derive from any logic or dynamics inherent in the nationalist project or even the West Indian situation; rather, external conditions dropped “Africa” (that amorphous complex of information, attitudes, and values) into the lap of West Indian intellectuals. The paths of these two developments often crossed, and sometimes merged. The efforts to move further from one parent-tradition and closer to another were not necessarily coordinated, but they often overlapped, for example with respect to the high valuation of the peasantry and of folk culture – a feature of nationalism strongly reinforced by the prominence of language and folkways in the perception of “Africa.” So “Europe” provides the occasion for the process of negative definition, via opposition, rejection, and critique. “Africa” makes possible a dialectical definition. The elaborate assertion that the West Indies is less European and more African comprises the main thrust of West Indian thinking in the middle of this century. The renegotiation of relations with metropolitan culture only occasionally took the extreme form of rejection, just as the rediscovery of cultural contact with Africa only occasionally took the extreme form of unconditional identification with Africa. Instead both maneuvers contributed mightily toward the common aim of establishing a space for distinctly West Indian writing.

Even so, West Indian poets sometimes expressed discomfort with this indirect way of establishing a space for themselves.

A self-consciously West Indian poetry develops against the background of cultural awakenings occurring throughout the Caribbean during this century; like colonialism itself, this is one of the shared experiences of nations sharply isolated from one another as much by history as by geography. Literary self-consciousness unfolds at different times in different islands, but while even territories that spoke the same language (such as Haiti and Martinique) were often barely in communication with one another until quite recently, common external pressures induced sometimes strikingly parallel – though not simultaneous – patterns of cultural development across the board.

In 1912 the Panama Canal was completed; in 1914 war broke out in Europe. The first of these events strengthened political, military, and economic ties between the United States and the Caribbean as a whole; the second weakened ties with Europe. Both events had a profound impact directly on the people of the region, since many of them served as workers in the one venture or as troops in the other, and returned home transformed by the experience. Both contributed as well to the momentum of emerging nationalism, for which world events of the 1930s and 1940s would provide the final catalyst. Equally significant for the Caribbean, in the long run, was the transformation wrought by war on the metropolitan cultures themselves, on Europe and North America. When World War I was over, the “modern world” had begun, and an inspired generation survived the Jazz Age and the Depression until World War II ushered in the post-modern period. In those years between the wars, the West seemed to have two cultural capitals: Paris and New York.

This is a general introduction intended primarily for readers of poetry who are making their first approach to the poetry of the Anglophone Caribbean; it pays particular attention to the history of the literary culture, and to the literature's relationship to Caribbean, European, African, and American writing. While the book provides a grounding in the literary history of the West Indies, this is an introduction to issues and developments rather than a chronicle; its emphasis is less on the history per se than on the dynamics of that history. It is not a survey, or a thematic review, or an account of the cultural background. Instead the point here is to provide categories for thinking about this poetry, and to investigate the poems as poems, rather than as documents of social/political developments. The emphasis will be on the texts, and on what they reveal about what West Indian writers are doing when they write poetry. How are writers using the particular resources of poetry (as distinct from those of prose, drama, journalism) to address their concerns? What kinds of problem arise in the act of writing? What decisions are being made about such matters as audience, language, and strategies of representation?

Apart from oral poetry and some scattered early publications, Caribbean poetry in English begins around 1920 – long after colonization, the colonial wars, slavery, emancipation, and indenture.

This chapter traces the separation of West Indian poetry from English poetry, a process which gets under way in the nationalist period. The process is not strictly sequential, though there is an apparent logical succession to the array of strategies by which poets work out their relation to “Europe”: successful imitation or assimilation, uneasy divergence, asserted difference. While this separation is analogous to the earlier rejection of “tracing-paper poets” by nationalists elsewhere in the Caribbean, the best-articulated conceptual model is probably that provided by Houston Baker's analysis of the corresponding phase in African-American literature. Acknowledging that the Harlem Renaissance movement (like earlier West Indian poetry) has been severely criticized for its advocacy of “the standard,” by which he means the norms of received literary practice, Baker argues that such formal mastery entails an element of “masking.” “Such masking carries subtle resonances and effects that cannot even be perceived (much less evaluated) by the person who begins with the notion that recognizably standard form automatically disqualifies a work as an authentic and valuable Afro-American national production.” The model here is close to that of apprenticeship, the assimilation of traditional craft demonstrated in a culminating masterpiece which earns entry into the guild. But there is more to it than that. For Baker, “the mastery of form” makes possible – and legitimizes – what he calls “the deformation of mastery.”

The real subject of this chapter is the specifically literary project of enabling actual West Indian people to be seen and heard in poetry, unimpeded by the filter of “Europe.” That long-term development of resources is to some extent overshadowed, however, by a particular episode along the way, the vigorous efflorescence of “Africa” (in various senses of that elusive word). This derives not from the dynamics of literary history but from exterior conditions. After World War II a variety of factors drew attention to Africa and increased actual knowledge of Africa. West Indian self-consciousness evolved within the wider context of American Black Power, transatlantic Negritude, African independence, and increasing British racialism (most pointedly legislated in the immigration restrictions of 1962). Awareness of this context was supplemented by reports of the cumulative experience of Caribbean migrants to the United States and England, and in a more limited way by reports of Caribbean visitors to Africa itself.

As both present-day Africa and its history came to be better known and more positively regarded, they played a potent psychological role for black West Indians. In the course of a development that traces its origins to the work of the Jamaican Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, a complex of ideas about Africa, some accurate and some fanciful, contributed to the West Indian self-image in several ways. It transformed attitudes toward race and color. It limned a history before slavery, thereby transforming the Middle Passage from a degraded point of origin to a traumatic but finite episode, on the other side of which a sophisticated culture could be discerned.

The territories of the Anglophone Caribbean share with the rest of the region approximately the same historical circumstances and experience the same intellectual trajectory, which can be described loosely as leading from a prise de conscience through assertion and subsequent exploration of national identity. But there are significant differences in the West Indian situation. Most important, West Indian literature begins in this century virtually from nothing. Writing in Haiti or Cuba builds upon an extensive history of literary activity in the island. However imitative it may be at certain periods, it remains a local phenomenon with a local audience. Literary activity is underwritten by a coherent tradition, and has earned acceptance from the society. Whether an individual writer chooses to embrace or resist this tradition, its mere existence legitimizes his work, and so relieves him of the task of legitimizing himself. In the Anglophone Caribbean, on the other hand, the only literary tradition was metropolitan, not local. This meant that an individual undertaking to write in the West Indies had recourse only to a tradition of books, not one of literary activity. The aspiring poet had to stand in relation to English literary history at its best, as it survived in monuments of accomplishment. Since very few West Indian writers or would-be writers had the experience of working in London (or for that matter in North America) until the 1950s, this intimidating circumstance was not relieved by familiarity with well-known living writers, the contemporary face of English literature as a social activity.

In 1971, the Conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) provided the occasion for a galvanic West Indian event. The main theme of the conference was West Indian literature, “the enactment of national identity in poetry, fiction, and criticism.” The setting, however, was shifted from the usual British university to the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica. As a result, this international academic forum (to the confusion of many of its delegates) served as the stage for a sort of private conversation, though it was as public and histrionic as most West Indian private conversation. What the delegates witnessed was a surprisingly literal “enactment of national identity.”

The lines were drawn up at the opening session. The panel that took up “The Function of the Writer in Society” included the most antithetical figures in West Indian literature at the time: the Barbadian poet and historian Edward (now Kamau) Brathwaite, then recently returned to the region after several years in West Africa, and V. S. Naipaul, the East Indian West Indian turned Englishman, soon to be the most renowned West Indian novelist, and happy to have escaped to the metropolitan capital. Brathwaite's keynote address rephrased the topic as a question: how does the writer develop a new sense of community for a multi-directional culture with a history of slavery, colonialism, and uncertain independence? He argued that the integrating principle must be sought in the submerged continuity of the “Little Tradition,” the culture of ordinary people.

The process of self-confrontation in the first three novels reaches a kind of plateau in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). This is signalled through the idea of a personal awakening – that which is ultimately beyond Magda's reach in In the Heart of the Country, but which becomes a determining structural feature in this novel.

Waiting for the Barbarians crystallizes the central issue of debate concerning the ethical vision of Coetzee's fiction, and his importance as a novelist. This novel about the destructiveness (and self-destructiveness) of an imperial regime – obstructed by one man of conscience – has obvious ramifications for the white opponent of apartheid South Africa in 1980, the year of publication. The parallels, however, are vague in that the time and place of the novel's setting are imprecise. At one level, this is an allegory of imperialism and, as such, it inevitably widens its significance. Yet, if the parallel political situations are various, the novel may still be shown to have its compositional roots in a set of specific responses to contemporary South African concerns, and it is this achieved duality which lends credibility and resonance to the allegorical style: through a broadening and questioning of its one-to-one significance, the novel reinvigorates the allegorizing impulse.

The novel centres on a frontier outpost in an unknown land at an unknown time, a settlement – a walled town – under the auspices of the portentously termed ‘Empire’. The omission of the definite article helps to widen the connotations of ‘Empire’, which becomes available as an emblem of imperialism through history.

Through its explicit exploration of authorial complicity, Dusklands establishes a ground rule which can subsequently be taken as a given. In his first novel, Coetzee identifies his historical links in the literature of the post-colonizer, making the re-presentation of a directly personal guilt superfluous. In In the Heart of the Country (1977), the question of complicity, and an associated metafictional preoccupation, is taken in a new direction.

In some ways, In the Heart of the Country is Coetzee's most difficult and forbidding novel. It is a disruptive and disturbing book which offers an implicit admission of the semi-impotence of the white intellectual/writer in South Africa, and an oblique reflection on South African literary culture, and Afrikaner mythology This has a particular resonance for South Africa after the Soweto riots (1976–7), which galvanized Black Consciousness, and produced a disregard for white assistance, at this time, in the anti-apartheid struggle. A full understanding of all the Coetzee novels, of course, depends upon a knowledge of the South African context, but, where the allegorical dimension of, say, Waiting for the Barbarians invites broader reflections on power and morality, this novel is explicitly inward-looking. In the South African edition, in fact, the dialogue was presented in Afrikaans, with the rest of the narrative written in English. If other editions – written entirely in English – represent a concession to the international English-speaking audience, the original conception suggests that the Afrikaner was Coetzee's principal target reader.

It has become a truism in criticism of Coetzee that Dusklands (1974) introduces a new postmodernist strain in the novel from South Africa. Gordimer, it is true, is progressing towards a discursive self-consciousness at this time (notably in The Conservationist, also 1974); but Dusklands offers no mimetic representation of the South Africa with which it is contemporaneous: it also introduces the characteristic Coetzee style, in which an interrogation of the chosen narrative modes is an integral aspect of the fiction.

This interrogation, at one level, is straightforward, relating to different discourses of imperialism which are parodied in the novel. At another level, however, the interrogation becomes more complex, designating a reflexive self-critique which implicates the austerity of postmodernist expression itself (or at least the idea of this austerity). The impetus of this built-in critique is to anticipate a charge of moral failure, an absence of judgement on the horrors depicted. An incipient ethical stance emerges, often where a self-consciousness about discourse – postmodernism in caricature – is made to betray its own will-to-power.

The book is divided into two main sections (each with its own subsections), though it is probably wrong to speak of these two sections as separate novellas as their meaning is dependent upon their interrelationship, and the development of theme and motif. The first section, ‘The Vietnam Project’, details the collapse into insanity of its narrator, Eugene Dawn, writing an analysis of the psychological war in Vietnam for the US Defense Department.

The projected silencing of the post-colonizer at the end of Foe, signalled by an anticipated post-colonial history, continues a leitmotif of relinquishment that runs through the novel sequence, and which becomes the dominant feature in Age of Iron (1990). This novel takes the form of a letter narrated by the elderly Mrs Curren, and notionally addressed to her daughter in the United States. Mrs Curren, a retired classics lecturer, begins writing on the day she is diagnosed as suffering from terminal bone cancer. The dynamic of the novel is that of personal dissolution involving Mrs Curren's relinquishment of all personal investment in life in South Africa, a movement which is necessary to generate a reverse process, the gradual acquisition of political enlightenment. The novel is thus a paradoxical, inverse novel of personal development, a procedure which depends upon the self's acceptance of its own unimportance.

On the day that Mrs Curren is given her bleak diagnosis, she is ‘adopted’ by an alcoholic down-and-out named Vercueil, an impassive shadowy character (his race is not mentioned) who accompanies her – without offering her comfort or succour – on her path to death and semi-enlightenment. He eventually agrees to take responsibility for posting the letter which forms the novel to the US after Mrs Curren's death, though his unreliability makes him an improbable messenger. The idea that Vercueil may represent an angel of death to Mrs Curren introduces an allegorical dimension to the novel, but one which is clearly held at the level of ideas, even within the world of the text.

The title of Coetzee's fourth novel, Life and Times of Michael K (1983), announces a challenge. It alludes directly to a tradition of thinking about individual identity in relation to history – ‘The Life and Times’ – which is represented in a variety of genres, including the historical novel and the Bildungsroman, as well as non-fictional modes such as the political memoir. Life and Times of Michael K proclaims itself as having an involvement with this tradition in which the individual life is held to interact intimately with social and political development. The challenge is that the novel ironically undermines the association by presenting the life of an anti-hero who resists all obvious contact with the social and political milieu.

Despite this dynamic, there is some sense of political urgency in the conception of this novel when set against the vagueness – in the time and setting – of its predecessor, Waiting for the Barbarians (even though there are strategic reasons for that elusiveness): the new novel is set in modern South Africa, at a time of revolution. Neither is this merely future projection. The scenes of Michael K Kevoke the social breakdown of post-Soweto South Africa in the 1980s, just as the novel's themes represent governing fears and concerns of the time. The operations of Umkhonto we Sizwe (the military wing of the ANG) are of especial significance. The most dramatic action, in a campaign of strategic bombings, was the attack against the SASOL oil-from-coal plants in June 1980, part of a series of acts of symbolic resistance which are representative of the historical background evoked through the setting of guerilla warfare in the novel.