ALH Online Review, Series X 1. Sarah Phillips Casteel ... masters of African slaves, and progenitors of hybrid contempor
ALH Online Review, Series X 1
Sarah Phillips Casteel, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 336 pp. Reviewed by Caroline Rody, University of Virginia Sarah Phillips Casteel’s richly informative study will find its audience not so much among experts on the book’s precise subject—for these cannot be numerous—but among two larger groups her book will help to connect: scholars in Jewish and scholars in postcolonial studies. Like Bryan Cheyette, Michael Rothberg, Jonathan Boyarin, and Paul Gilroy, whose work she cites, Casteel makes a compelling case for the need to think about modern Jewish and postcolonial historical cultures together, as multiply linked and mutually illuminating conditions. Readers for whom Casteel opens a somewhat new territory—“the strikingly persistent presence of Jewishness in Caribbean writing” (5)—may encounter several kinds of surprises. They may be surprised first of all to learn of the sheer extent of Jewish presence in the early modern Caribbean. In Casteel’s account, “[f]ew Caribbean islands have been untouched by a Jewish presence, despite official prohibitions” and limits on Jewish civil rights in various colonies (27, 29-30), and despite the extension of the Inquisition into the island world in the late sixteenth century. On the Dutch islands of Suriname and Curaçao in the colonial period, Jews constituted “roughly one third of the European populations” (29). Salient clues suggest the size and importance of the colonial Jewish population of Jamaica: the major newspaper, the Jamaica Gleaner, was founded by two Jewish brothers; to this day, “[t]he Kingston phone book . . . contains columns of Jewish surnames such as Levy and Cohen”; and multiple notable sons and daughters of Jamaica “are reported to have Jewish ancestry,” including Harry Belafonte, Colin Powell, Bob Marley (!), and Elizabeth Alexander (27-28). More sobering are the facts of Sephardic Jews’ “key role as cultural and economic brokers of empire” (5). While Jews were mainly merchants and traders who “played a relatively minor role in the [slave] trade” (104), still they were significant land- and slaveholders in Suriname and Jamaica, among other places, where they also followed the common practice of slave concubinage (27). Through Casteel’s nuanced soundings of “the double resonance of 1492 as the moment not only of Columbus’s first voyage to the New World but also of the onset of the waves of expulsion that prompted Sephardic resettlement in the Americas” (38), she gives us Jews as victimized European exiles, privileged colonial masters of African slaves, and progenitors of hybrid contemporary Caribbeans. A second potential surprise is Casteel’s main claim, that Caribbean literature tends to figure Jews not in competitive but in “identificatory modes of comparing histories of © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
[email protected]
Online Review, Series X 2 ALH
trauma” (2-3). In the imaginative portrayal of the Caribbean, Jews function symbolically to signal the interlacing of historical strands of displacement, loss, and longing, amidst the multiplicity of Caribbean creolization. The first half of Casteel’s study takes up late twentieth-century literary texts that include in their sweep the initiating violence and dislocation of the distant era often called, in shorthand, 1492. A key impulse here is literary “sephardism” (on which Casteel cites Edna Aizenberg, Yael Halevi-Wise and Dalia Kandiyoti), an attraction to Iberian diasporic history and an “understanding of the Sephardim as one of the founding peoples of the Caribbean . . . a space of contact and entanglement” between enslaved Africans and diasporic Jews (40). Some of the most poignant texts Casteel considers scatter traces of the Sephardim amidst the present-day Caribbean, where they yield a kind of melancholy fruition, strands of lostness helping to constitute a potential collectivity of the dispossessed. Thus Derek Walcott’s Nobel address, gathering fragments of Caribbean memory, includes this memorable evocation of forgetting: “the rites of that Sephardic Jewish synagogue that was once on Something Street.” The persistent, identificatory sephardist strain in Walcott’s oeuvre culminates in the book-length poem Tiepolo’s Hound, a “verse biography” (48) of the Sephardic Jewish, St. Thomas-born painter Camille Pissarro (born Jacob Abraham Pizarro), whom the St. Lucian poet calls an “island artist” (52) and reimagines in a kind of “double portrait” with himself (52): “Our tribes were shaken like seeds from a sieve. / Our dialects, rooted, forced their own utterance” (qtd. on 49). Casteel’s fine, extended treatment of this poem draws out the nuanced strains of affiliation and homage, distance and critique offered by the Afro-Caribbean poet to the “French” impressionist he adopts as double, but castigates for abandoning his island home: “He paints in dialect, like an islander / In a fresh France; when his swayed poplars tilt / You catch an accent in their leaves” (qtd. on 61). In Casteel’s telling, sometimes the Jew observed in Caribbean literature becomes a figure of racial, geographical, and moral in-betweenness and ambiguity; at other times, he or she is “a type who embodies an ethical principle of compassion borne out of the suffering of exile” (109). The archetype of the “port Jew” appears in slavery novels by Maryse Condé, David Dabydeen, and others to offer an enslaved character a way to mobility and freedom, and at the same time to “confound racial binaries, suggesting “the profound unreliability of representations of the Other” (132-33). Another recurrent Jewish figure is the marrano, who becomes “identified with practices of concealment for the purposes of survival that also were cultivated among New World Africans” (70). In the fiction of Jamaican American, Michelle Cliff, marranos are symbolically fused with those fiercest Caribbean resisters, their near-namesakes, the Maroons, in an analogy that reaches for radical cross-cultural alliance.
ALH Online Review, Series X 3
The second half of Calypso Jews considers Caribbean literary treatments of the Holocaust, ranging from depictions of Holocaust refugees in the islands (among them, a group of immigrant Trinidadians who called themselves by the phrase that titles this book) to fictions that imagine the fates of Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans in Nazi concentration camps. Yet perhaps the most moving texts considered here are testimonials by writers, including Gilroy, Cliff, Caryl Phillips, and NourbeSe Philip, to their “adolescent crosscultural identification with the Holocaust,” a generational phenomenon “among Caribbean/diaspora writers and intellectuals who came of age” in the midcentury (205). Casteel’s final chapter offers sustained readings of novels later written by two of these writers, Phillips and Cliff, who pay tribute to the influence of Anne Frank on their own writerly development. Untaught about their own history, such writers in their youths cathected the betterdocumented and media-disseminated history of the Holocaust, making that trauma a “surrogate issue” enabling them to uncover their own slave past. In this way, Casteel argues (adapting theories of “multidirectional” memory (Rothberg) and “palimpsestic memory” (Max Silverman), “attention to the Other’s history opens up, rather than impedes, access to one’s past” (239). The Caribbean Anne Frank texts acknowledge powerful cross-cultural inspiration from the strong model of an unlikely young author, also victimized because of her race, who yet left a book for the world’s young to read. Casteel even includes a photo of the adult Caryl Phillips writing at his desk, with a large poster of Anne Frank’s face behind him. And so perhaps the most lasting, surprising effect Casteel may produce for her readers is the sense one can have, reading this lucid, thorough study, of pieces one had not noticed missing now being fitted into a vast jigsaw puzzle, the puzzle of the relations of the world’s peoples, over the centuries, and across the world. Casteel helps us see that paths across “the Jewish Atlantic” were always imbricated in the paths of other world-crossers: Africans, Europeans, Asians. In that great human enmeshment, ironically, “the disproportionate presence of Jews in the colonial enterprise was a reflection of their own persecution and marginalization” (104). In a place long regarded as a backwater of empire, a place of tragedy, loss, and remaking without a US-style credo of mass welcome or dream of mass success, where the world yet arrived to hybridize in transformative ways, the Jew found a spot in the literary imagination as a figure neither of stark otherness nor of triumphant ethnic overcoming, but of ambiguous yet recognizable membership in the collective, a vivid presence hurrying to prayer on Something Street or writing in an attic hideaway, still valuable to memory. As Casteel puts these pieces together, readers’ wonder at discrete instances gives way to a sense of pervasive pattern, so that it becomes easy to see that when “Black
Online Review, Series X 4 ALH
British” writers Gilroy and Phillips forge intellectual convergences with Jewish thinkers and Jewish history, they are working within a particularly Caribbean tradition that has not been well acknowledged (11). The foil to this tradition, Casteel argues centrally and repeatedly, is the US “Black-Jewish relations” model of encounter that has been treated, in a plethora of published works, as inevitably competitive, based on a presumed essential separation of the two groups’ identities that does not translate to the Caribbean. Perhaps this thesis would be even more persuasive if Casteel attended to the significant demographic and historical differences shaping relations between Jews and diasporic Africans in the US and in the Caribbean. Similarly, more consideration of Caribbean literary texts that portray Jews negatively or resentfully (Kamau Brathwaite’s “Miss Own” with its “cold-shouldered jews” comes to mind) might balance well the substantial body of work that finds grounds for affiliation. Still, I am grateful for the way Casteel shows us that the peoples of the world do not merely trade and compete with, love and harm one another; they also watch each other in history, become compelled by one another’s stories. For the Caribbean and its diaspora, her book beautifully illustrates, the Jews have become intimate inhabitants of the collective imagination.
