TIMEHRI

The most significant feature of West Indian life and imagination since Emancipation has been its sense of rootlessness, of not belonging to the landscape; dissociation, in fact, of art from act of living. This, at least, is the view of the West Indies and the Caribbean that has been accepted and articulated by the small but important ‘intellectual’ elite of the area; a group-call it the educated middle class-ex-planter and ex-slave-that has been involved in the post-plantation creolizing process that made our colonial polity possible…

‘Creolization’ is a socio-cultural description and explanation of the way the four main culture-carriers of the region: Amerindian, European, African and East Indian: interacted with each other and with their environment to create the new societies of the New World. Two main kinds of creolization may be distinguished: a mestizo-creolization: the interculturation of Amerindian and European (mainly Iberian) and located primarily in Central and South America, and a mulatto-creolization: the inter-culturation of NegroAfrican and European (mainly Western European) and located primarily in the West Indies and the slave areas of the North American continent. The crucial difference between the two kinds of creolization is that whereas in mestizo-America only one element of the interaction (the European) was immigrant to the area, in mulattoAmerica both elements in the process were immigrants. In mestizo-America, there was a host environment with an established culture which had to be colonized mainly by force-an attempted eradication of Amerindian spiritual and material structures. In mulatto America, where the indigenous Indians were fewer and more easily destroyed, and blacks were brought from Africa as slaves, colonizing Europe was more easily able to make its imprint both on the environment (the plantation, the North American city), and the cultural orientation of the area… In mulatto America…the process of creolization began to alter itself with the waning of the colonial regime. It simply fragmented itself into four main socio-cultural orientations: European, African, indigeno-nationalist and folk.