Archiving Creole Voices

Book excerpt: Archiving Creole Voices: Representations of Language and Culturebegins with a re-reading of selected texts by female Caribbean writers, specifically, Joan Anim-Addo, Olive Senior and Merle Collins and proclaims that literary fiction can and does function as a ‘creolised archive’. Marl'ene Edwin argues that historic marginalisation, which has barred Caribbean scholars from entering ‘formal’ archival spaces, has created an alternative discourse. Consequently, Caribbean writers have chosen the imagined landscapes of literature, a new archival space for the Caribbean, within which to document and preserve Caribbean cultural traditions. Fiction allows for the safeguarding of traditions, so how then should Caribbean literature be read? The combination of a physical and a virtual archive, questions the literary and linguistic interface that such a mingling entails in a preservation of Caribbean culture. Edwin argues for an appreciation of orality as performance as well as the reading of texts as ‘creolised archive.’