...Ben Etherington This essay revisits the early phases of the history of poetry written primarily in an anglophone Caribbean Creole by closely examining the circumstances in which the White Guyanese administrator Michael McTurk launched his Creole-speaking persona “Quow.” It focuses on an 1870 verse...

... of the contrasts in the French and Creole sounds in Nostrom are far from uniform in the text, but their differentiation is. This is certainly readable as an effect of the different needs of the two linguistic systems, as a common compromise to be made in the translation of poetry that must emerge as verse...

...Rhonda Cobham Faith Smith's analysis, in Creole Recitations , of the nineteenth-century scholar John Jacob Thomas's often contradictory allegiances offers us a way of reading the counterintuitively parallel career of the poet Eric Roach a century later. Roach is the subject of Laurence Breiner's...

... in a verse version of Creole, and finally made available in print for interpretation, silent and aloud, by readers to “the ends of the earth”—in this multiplicity itself Cudjoe enacts a kind of accidental poetry that makes a history (and a future) constructed of other accidents seem, for the duration...

... literariness since two of his principal characters—Jacques Chartier (a white Frenchman and amateur novelist bent on aesthetically tapping into Martinique's creole culture) and Monsieur Jean (a black ex-teacher who loses his position after minor acts of collaboration during the war and who turns to poetry...

... in the anthology, as well as others who are not included, produce some or all of their poetry in this language. However, the anthology does not seriously address Creole as a language of literary or cultural production. The colonial implications of the exclusive focus on Spanish and French are demonstrated...

... the creolists constitute the “legacy” in the first place? Is it to say that after the colonial “moment” of the father, “Papa Césaire,” came the postcolonial true understanding of the heirs? In Praise of Creoleness , with its opening as a succession of negations (“Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians...

...—to write the poetry of Caribbean women who are unknown to their own children. Although Brand has not written to date entire poems in Creole, its use represents a distinctive stylistic choice in No Language Is Neutral and in her following work Land to Light On : Creole is used is to mark, both...

... Opening wide the doors to the barbarian a fortiori if what is over there is “unformed.” Little translated himself, Martinican poet Monchoachi has consistently privileged the thought of language(s) in both his poetry and prose. An author whose use of Creole reveals a creative reverence...

... proclamons Créoles,” then goes on to cite the enrichment of the authors' European and African roots from Asia, the Levant, and India as well as pre-Columbian America. 3 Would reference to Ménil's book-length treatment of Caribbean identity have risked stealing its thunder? 4 Non-French-language...

... compari- son between Silvia Monfort’s modulated reading and his own percussive performance. In an extended discussion of Labejof’s claims for the essentially Creole rhythms in Césaire’s poetry, I have argued that the texts certainly support and, in that sense, justify Labejof’s interpretative...

... and its relationship to Creole-usage suggests that male protest poetry is associated with a declamatory public anger,” “excess and overstatement,” whereas in the poetry of women, SShalinihalini PPuriuri Creole often “signals...

... and the characterization of “culture” itself in the context of the region’s history. 7 When Warner-Lewis and other critics analyzed Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry, they could be seen as using Masks in the same way that other critics used New Day —to enter an ideological environment marked by an “unrelenting focus...

...Leah Rosenberg Faith Smith's Creole Recitations offers a feminist critique and compelling alternative to the dominant narratives of Trinidadian and black nationalism. Smith's analysis of Thomas's participation in the anglophone Caribbean public sphere of the late nineteenth century makes visible...

.... For the latter decades of the twentieth century, I use different sources: written material by older Creoles, both male and female, in the form of poetry, life histories, and writings about the Afro-Surinamese Winti religion. In addition, there are the materials of several Afro-Surinamese literary authors who...

... by Small Axe, Inc. 2023 orature University of the West Indies Anglo-Saxon African retentions Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Maureen Warner-Lewis’s voice: mellifluous, pitch-perfect, echoing from deep within and far beyond her body. In my earliest memory of it, she is reciting Anglo-Saxon poetry to my...

... lenguaje híbrido, fusionado con elementos indígenas, negros y chinos en el mestizaje que nos hace lo que somos. 50 The group that affirms its mixtures of African, Asian, and European cultures is not merely marked by the “New World” difference that so many European-descendant creole elites came...

...: as a Pan-Caribbean enterprise, we are increasingly attentive to the importance of expanding beyond the Anglo-Creole space and to the real challenges that arise as we envision such expansiveness. In the last almost-decade we have published three issues devoted exclusively to the French-speaking Caribbean...

... and, more broadly, European poetics and instead create a “new form of poetry, one which leaves poetry of local color, that saccharine, affected creole poetry, to die its quiet death.” 19 Not only does this new poetry decry the sociopolitical problems of the present day, it also employs new forms...

... and alternatives reimagined. Such a debate we would insist is not the prerogative of any single genre, and therefore we invite fiction as well as nonfiction, poetry, interviews, visual art, and reviews. This issue of Small Axe is dedicated to the memory of Alton Ellis (1 September 1938–10 October 2008...