This essay reviews Belinda Edmondson’s literary yet cross-disciplinary study Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance (2022), which questions the Blackness of orality versus the Whiteness of narrative in the growth of Caribbean literature. Caribbean language history and discourse analysis have much to contribute to the exploration of ventriloquist beginnings of the regional narrative as well as to the nuancing of interpretation, and the review calls for such exchange across the relevant disciplines. The review also welcomes comparisons between literary developments of Black American and Caribbean literature that highlight the cross-cultural relevance of Edmondson’s analysis. Creole Noise is timely and useful in contributing positively to such matters as border disputes on Caribbeanness, with regard to regional and diasporic writing, and to challenges that face writers who are native speakers of Caribbean Creole as they convey local voices to foreign readers.
Noising Creole Abroad: Chatting about Voice; Some Thoughts on Belinda Edmondson’s Creole Noise
Barbara Lalla is professor emerita of the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, and for many years has taught and published on Caribbean language history, literary discourse, and the rereading of other canons. She is author of Postcolonialisms: Caribbean Rereading of Medieval English Discourse (2008); coauthor, with Jean D’Costa and Velma Pollard, of Caribbean Literary Discourse: Voice and Cultural Identity in the Anglophone Caribbean (2014); and coeditor, with Nicole Roberts, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, and Valerie Youssef, of Methods in Caribbean Research: Literature, Discourse, Culture (2013). She is also author of the novels Arch of Fire (1998), Cascade (2010), Uncle Brother (2014), Grounds for Tenure (2017), and One Thousand Eyes (2021).
Barbara Lalla; Noising Creole Abroad: Chatting about Voice; Some Thoughts on Belinda Edmondson’s Creole Noise. Small Axe 1 November 2023; 27 (3 (72)): 246–253. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-10899246
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