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THE CARIBBEAN, as much as it is a place, is also an idea. In this, the Caribbean is not unique. Any good geographer will tell you that. The ways that we humans develop our sense for place—the ways in which we vest location with meaning—have to do always, in some sense, with experience and memory. Especially so, and in a direct way, if the place in question is a hometown or spot in which you’ve spent time. But even with towns or regions we know well, our conception of a place is also always shaped by the stories we hear or tell about it. The images or ills that attach themselves to the name of New York or New England or the Wild West, via songs and films and books, lodge in our minds. And such stories, more than merely informing how we imagine, say, Bruce Springsteen’s New Jersey or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq can both reflect and shape them. From ad campaigns to attract tourists to propaganda that shapes governments’ decisions about whether to protect or aid or bomb places foreign or domestic—the ways in which a place is imagined, especially by those with power to act on it, matters. And if stories matter with regard to single places, they especially matter for those collections of places we know as regions: assemblages of towns or states that may or may not share anything beyond their proximity, but that some party or group of people has joined together, for better or worse, in a common story.
This is certainly the case with “Caribbean,” a moniker in which lie many of the torturous turns that made its islands as they now exist. The sea that gives the region its name was, for the first two or three centuries after Columbus’s arrival, basically nameless, registered by the Spanish as an undifferentiated part of the Mar del Norte (as they termed all parts of the western Atlantic), and known to English navigators as the Spanish Main (the term, confusingly, that they also used for the South American littoral to the sea’s south—what the Spanish called Tierra Firme). When exactly the Caribbean Sea—a body of water more or less discrete, ringed by the Antilles and the Central and South American coasts, saltier than the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean it abuts—first began to be called the Caribbean is unknown. But in 1773, the British cartographer Thomas Jefferys published The West-India Atlas, in whose introduction he wrote, “It has been sometimes called the Caribbean Sea, which name it would be better to adopt, than to leave this space quite anonymous.”12 He did so on his maps. “Caribbean” referred to the indigenous group once predominant on the Lesser Antilles, the Carib, who according to Spanish lore were distinguished from the more peaceable Arawak, whom the Carib had driven from the islands in pre-colonial days, by their practice of cannibalism. Evidence of any Carib actually eating people is scant. But the phonetic resemblance of the word “Caribbean” to “cannibal” was noted by writers from Shakespeare on; it seemed a fitting tag for this savage sea of pirates and slaves far from civilization’s mores. The name stuck.
While, to be sure, today the Caribbean may no longer be associated with cannibalism, the region was defined by fantasy and myth from the moment Columbus gazed out from the Santa Maria’s deck at what he mistook for an island off of India, and wrote in his journal of “the most beautiful land that human eyes have ever seen.”13 Islands quickly shorn of their native peoples, societies built to enrich Old Europe, the Caribbean—and its literature—were for many centuries tied to imperial endeavor. From the diaries and strivings of conquistadors seeking El Dorado, straight through the fierce panoply of glossy websites and guidebooks depicting the islands as unchanging places of smiling natives and eternal sun—the Caribbean has long figured as a place to be consumed, like the sugar it brutally produced, as commodity.
The Caribbean isn’t the only world region shaped by its colonizers to exist, in Old Europe’s mind, as “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.”14 But unlike the Orient of legend described by Edward Said in Orientalism, the Caribbean has also long been full of something else. C. L. R. James is anything but the first or last person from these islands to have made a vocation of describing the region’s attributes, and its “Caribbean-ness,” for himself.
As a white kid who’d grown up in snowy New England, my early ties to the islands themselves were strictly long-distance. By the early 1990s, ten years after Bob Marley’s martyrdom from cancer in 1981, the dreadlocked singer whose posters I stuck to my bedroom wall had long since become a symbol of mellow moods and mellow music, extra well suited to the countercultural hills of northern Vermont, where as a teenager I shared my obsession with others of my generation. As an icon of racial justice and wry romance, Bob Marley caught my teenage aims and ideals through lovely melodies, from “Get Up, Stand Up,” to “No Woman, No Cry.” More important, though, he translated deep subjects like the Triangle Trade (“I remember on the slave ship / how they brutalize our very souls”)15 into great pop—and, in so doing, sent me less to smoke up than to read every book I could find on Jamaica and its music and the history of the region.
When I moved south to college in New Haven, Connecticut, I brought my Marley posters with me to hang first in a dorm room and then in the off-campus apartment in a town where my quotidian life also included—from the Puerto Rican bodega owners from whom I bought my Cheerios, to the Jamaican promoters who brought the island’s top dancehall acts to Toad’s Place, behind the Yale library—no small imprimatur of the Caribbean. I had by then developed an inchoate sense that would soon become a conviction: that it was in the Caribbean that many of the salient characteristics of the Americas at large—traumatic histories of colonialism and genocide and slavery; migration and creolization as facts of life; the persistent sense of cosmopolitan possibility and newness inherent to a New World—were brought into starkest relief.
Which is when and how I began on a course of study and exploration of the Caribbean. I spent most of the next four years immersed in a tradition of storytelling and intellection that went from José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban patriot who argued that the Caribbean’s creole cultures would be a source of native strength for all of the Americas; through the Dominican poet Pedro Mir’s “Countersong to Walt Whitman” (1945) (“I / a son of the Caribbean / Antillean to be exact. / The raw product of a simple / Puerto Rican girl / and a Cuban worker, / born precisely, and poor, / on Quisqueyan soil. / Overflowing with voices, / full of eyes / wide open throughout the islands”)16; to all the island thinkers, with surnames like Brathwaite and Brodber and Césaire and Walcott, who, in the decades after James released his revised version of The Black Jacobins, have described what was “sui generis” about the Antilles, and what, if anything, unites them. I was lucky to get to study under some of the leading scholars in the field, and in a new Yale program that became my major, in “Ethnicity, Race, and Migration,” I studied the writings of Edouard Glissant, the great poet and thinker from Martinique who described the Antilles as informed by a “poetics of relation,” and of Stuart Hall, the Jamaica-born doyen of British cultural studies, who wrote that the Caribbean was the “home of hybridity.”17 I wrote papers on great Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s idea of the “marvelous real” and on Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.18 I thrilled to the essays that Sylvia Wynter, the Cuban-Jamaican dancer-cum-novelist-cum-brilliant-cultural-theorist, wrote after the quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, contending that since the Caribbean was the place where all the planet’s peoples were joined in a single world history, for better or worse, it was also the place where a “re-enchantment of humanism” could occur.19
In Trinidad, I spent happy days in the library at the University of the West Indies, where C. L. R. James’s papers are housed just down the traffic-choked road from where he grew up. The village of Tunapuna is now a dusty stop along the highway between Trinidad’s airport