A Cruzan Medievalist Signifies

In Derek Walcott's Nobel lecture entitled: The Antilles: fragments of epic memory, a fondness and a nostalgia surfaced over my mind and heart like the mist in Christian mythlore that soaked the eorðan in le Jardin d'Eden.

It is difficult to engage in the discourse of memory without acknowledging the erudition found in the ouevre of Bergson, Russell, and Yates. Still, what interests me is how the Caribbean has come to be viewed as abject other--that extension of and from the center.

As Walcott notes: "Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed," and again, "[it is] the way that the Caribbean is still looked at, illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized." Applied to St. Croix, the largest of the known U.S. Virgin Islands and my home--this is a case in point.

St. Croix is an island located Southeast of Florida and is nestled in the Caribbean Sea south of St. Thomas and St. John, and further east of Puerto Rico (Vieques and Culebra, respectively). Growing up in Christiansted, or the mid-east end of the island as oppose to the west-end of the island offered distinction and cultural stereotyping. That is, those who were a part of the east side were a bit more civil in terms of wealth, job opportunities, education, et cetera.

On the other hand, those who were part of the west side were a bit more rural and lived in the rain forest area, went to a more public education system versus private school opportunities offered on the east end, culturally represented the "savage" side of the island in terms of rastafarian ideology, children diving off of the pier performing for white tourists, et cetera. Of course, the above statement is not only racist and prejudicial--it is ridiculously essentialized and incorrect! This view, however, predominates and its misconceptions proliferate.

In terms of language and communication St. Croix is distinct and diverse. The island has boasted seven national flags, of which Dutch, English, French and Spanish tenure have affected its present standing. Dialect formation has taken effect, wherein Cruzan (also, Crucian) is the broken English spoken. Some areas still speak the Dutch language as well as French and Spanish. We turn to Walcott, himself a native son of St. Lucia, a French colonized island, and where my father was born, as he asserts:

Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries, and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions.

Growing up on St. Croix was a treat in itself, but there always seemed to be an asterisk next to my identification regarding citizenship of these United States of America. In other words, though born on an island and educated in the private school system--I was conferred U.S. citizenship status, but readily adhered to the cultural aesthetics of an island upbringing. I still carry this stigma wherever I happen to be stationed.

Currently, I am a medievalist studying at Purdue University--main campus, in West Lafayette, Indiana. Still, I am a Cruzan medievalist who breaks into my Cruzan dialect and accent on the phone with my family, Spanish with my peers and associates at school, French and attempted patois with my father and English with my professors in the Department of English.

Yet, how did an appreciation for Medieval Studies enter my mind? And, for that matter, how does a Cruzan signify? What literature gets privileged, and moreover, in what language does one read or misread the Caribbean mind? As a critic and writer I challenge myself with these inquests, which may seem familiar to other islanders. Again, we refer back to that Caribbean genius--Derek Walcott. He posits:

and what delight and privilege there was in watching a literature--one literature in several imperial languages, French, English, Spanish--bud and open island after island in the early morning of a culture, not timid, not derivative, any more than the hard white petals of the frangipani are derivative and timid [...] this flowering had to come.

At last then, there it was--signifying signification! The Caribbean had been de-flowered within its own borders by its own people as well as by those imperial controllers of sun and water and earth. I was given a grand opportunity, which I thought to be privilege, selectivity, Morrisonian access but, in reality my people and their mental vacuum proved to be the impetus for such intellectual depravity and disparity.

I am a reader of both culture and non-culture; an examiner of books and humans as text; and moreover, I am a seed of St. Croix that has traveled up until this point, perfect in time and purpose--to signify. As I open my mouth I signify, and as I close it--I signify. I am a product of a whatever it means to have a Cruzan education. This is not a secondary attempt at a real education, or a misgiving toward a prurient and savage identity construction away from the masters of power. I read, and am read--daily. As Walcott asserts:

Yet, deprived of books, a man must fall back on thought, and out of thought, if he can learn to order it, wil come the urge to record, and in extremity, if he has no means of recording, recitation, the ordering of memory which leads to metre, to commemoration.

This is the charge and the methodology assigned, which leads me to raise my left fist, to place my right hand over my heart and to pierce the world with my light, brown eyes as I echo in present tense the Nobel laureate's chanson de tristesse et espère:

Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture.

St. Croix you are my home and I your native son, and wherever my travels occur, this Cruzan medievalist, will ever--always signify.