The empowering re -memberings of history and myth in the poetry of three African Caribbean writers: Walcott, Brathwaite, and Philip.

摘要

This study analyzes texts of three Anglophone Caribbean poets of African descent, placing them in historical and literary contexts. It first examines prose writings by Derek Walcott, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Marlene Nourbese Philip, maintaining that they resist victimization, objectification, and rage and recover voices and names through dismantling and subsequently re-membering (recalling and reconstructing) colonial and ancient history and myth.;"'Once That Parallel is Crossed, and Cancels the Line of Master and Slave': Derek Walcott's Omeros, Philoctetes, and the Iliad," discusses the poet's transformations of classical themes, his Caribbean characters and his challenging of hegemonic colonial paradigms. While Walcott works within the English poetic tradition and focuses upon internal battles of the individual ego, he links characters from St Lucia to Africa, Europe, and North America, claiming world history as his own.;In "'Down to the Deep Drown Pools of Human History': Edward Kaman Brathwaite, the King James Bible, and the Centrifugal Forces of a Fragmented Roman Empire," this dissertation analyzes poems that fragment language, move through time and space, and trace African slavery to the fall of Rome. It reveals through close reading, discussions of historical references, and the author's stated purposes that Brathwaite acts as a linguistic archaeologist to overcome for the community of the African diaspora the objectification resulting from Europe's historical expansion and global domination.;"'Might I Like Philomela Sing': Nourbese Philip, Dr. Livingstone, Ovid, and Rape" reads Philip's Looking for Livingstone and She Tries Her Tongue: Her Silence Softly Breaks intertextually with Ovid's Metamorphoses and other texts that draw upon the legends of Proserpine and the raped and silenced Philomela, whose voice Philip retrieves for women of the African diaspora silenced through the rape of slavery and patriarchy. The dissertation's conclusion fords that these Caribbean poets fulfill Wilson Harris's call for an empowering "underground imagination" that frees the descendants of the Middle Passage and offers the Caribbean a healing, re-membering history and poetics.