The recent passing of two very different regional poets, offers an opportunity to consider the diminishing role of literary culture in the contemporary Caribbean. Aimé Cesaire was a Paris-educated Surrealist, bookish, rebellious, a pioneer of Negritude (a literary and political movement that saw black pride as an antidote to French colonial racism) and was politically active in his native Martinique from the early 1940s up to his retirement as mayor of Fort-de-France in 2001. Wordsworth McAndrew, by contrast, was entirely homegrown, a popular broadcaster and folklorist whose time was mostly spent probing the undertow of Dutch, Hindi, Portuguese and West African currents in local speech. Cesaire’s work delighted in its subversion of traditional literary forms, McAndrew’s was generally (and intentionally) un-literary and came to life in performance in ways that it never could on a page. One tilted at Europe’s bitter legacy to the Caribbean, the other quietly catalogued the ways European culture had taken its place among others in our oral traditions.
