Caribbean Gothic

CARIBBEAN GOTHIC 

Nowhere has older and deeper connections to the Gothic than the Caribbean. So there is something quite appropriately circular in the current revisiting of the Gothic in Caribbean writing. There was the fact that the Caribbean collected and mixed together the folk creatures of the European imagination who crossed the Atlantic and joined the images of the terrorised African imagination, and survivals from the legendary spirits of the Amerindians that needed placating, as well as those that had travelled from India with indentured labourers in the 19th century, including those who symbolised a ghostlike sense of being placeless and uprooted. Fiction and poetry discussed below features amongst others, the lagahoo, massacouraman, duppies, douens, doppelgangers, la jablesse/diablesse, cannibals and bacoo. 

Perhaps more to the point, if the beginnings of the Gothic sensibility in Europe in the 18th century imagined such anachronistic places as castles and monasteries as the sites of the repressed underbelly of Enlightenment rationality and respectability, it also found real and present places in the slave islands of the Caribbean. For Britain, the Caribbean was “the other”, a place of real terror, sadistic cruelty, a place where Europeans were able to express their darkest, most repressed desires of power, sexual fantasy and urge to commit bodily violence against those who had no legal means of redress, precisely at the moment when Britain was supposedly becoming a society whose elites prided themselves on practicing a civilised elegance, good manners and rationality.1 It is no accident that two of the founding fathers of the Gothic novel and drama had intimate connections with the Caribbean: William Beckford (1760-1844), whose gothic folly of Fonthill Manor was built on the profits of enslaved labour which had enriched his father (he owned 3000 enslaved people) and made him Lord Mayor of London. The son’s novel Vathek (1786), though orientalist, imagined the sick freedoms of untrammelled power;2 and Matthew (Monk) Lewis (1775-1818), whose novel The Monk (1796), though set in a European monastery, explored the sexual licence and charnel house imaginings that could be found in reality on the islands. Matthew Gregory Lewis was also the mainly absentee proprietor of a plantation in Jamaica and the owner of enslaved people, who wrote about his visit to Jamaica in 1818 to inspect his estates. His posthumously published account, Journal of a West India Proprietor Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1833) ties together Lewis’s interest in the lives of the people he owned and his Gothic imaginings. There is some evidence that Lewis was a humane man – he contacted William Wilberforce for advice about what he should do, though the reported efforts of his acquaintances Shelley and Byron to persuade him to manumit his slaves came to nothing.3 

Further, the defeat of European troops and the killing of Europeans in the Haitian revolution of 1791-1804 added another layer to the image of the Caribbean that played on European fears.4 Novels like Charlotte Smith’s The Story of Henrietta (1800) can be read as both as an abolitionist account of the cruelties of slavery and an expression of white fears of Blackness. Both Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were fascinated by the account of the Zombi that crossed the Black Atlantic and critics have seen this feeding into the picture of the lifeless crew in “The Ancient Mariner”.5 As noted above, critical analysis of the rise of the Gothic sensibility locates it as a response to the eighteenth-century façade of commercial stability, a degree of religious tolerance and the claim that English society had civilised itself to the achievement of polite manners. That vision could only be maintained by ignoring the repressive power of the state in its treason trials of the 1790s,6 the savage violence that the legal system meted out to the rebellious poor7 and the way that the ubiquity of prostitution underlay, as William Blake saw in “London” the claimed religious sanctity of the marriage bed.8 

It is possible to see the present flourishing of the Caribbean Gothic as a response to similar contradictions. At one level, Caribbean societies, with their surface of shopping malls, fast food outlets, car-jammed highways, spreading suburbia around the cities and tourist facilities on the beaches look post-modern in an American way. Where is the old Caribbean, people wonder, also knowing that under the postmodern surface something much darker and nihilistic dwells around the trade in drugs, the private guns that police it, the money-laundering that supports it and elements of the political elites who in some societies feed off this underbelly. 

The beginnings of an indigenous Caribbean Gothic are found in the lurid retelling of the Jamaican legend of the cruel female plantation owner, Annie Palmer, in H.G. De Lisser’s The White Witch of Rosehall (1929) and in the much more refined terror of Edgar Mittelholzer’s work. 

If contemporary Caribbean writers have been establishing speculative fiction and the Gothic as new ways of exploring the complex realities of the region; Mittelholzer was there long before them. In Peepal Tree’s compendium of his uncollected work, Edgar Mittelholzer, Creole Chips and Other Writings, Mittelholzer's uncollected short stories and his anti-capitalist The Adding Machine show that whilst there is a strong vein of the “speculative” in his writing, it invariably has a Gothic darkness. In his novels too, Mittelholzer challenges the repressions and amnesia about cruelties of the past of slavery in his own day by portraying the past as unquiet memories that take monstrous form to intrude into the rational present. In his novel, Shadows Move Among Them (1951) the unorthodox Reverend Harmston has set up a commune in the forests of the Corentyne in Guyana which is based on the most secular of enlightenment ideals: rationality, sexual openness and apparent egalitarianism. But the darkness of a site haunted by the malign ghost of once being a plantation run by brutalised enslaved labour and the darkness that Mittelholzer sees within the human psyche, not least the pleasure of power, make the commune at Berkelhoost far from a place of equality, humanity and light. On a small scale, it predicts the horrific outcome of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1978. Still giving immense pleasure almost 70 years after it was written, Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute (1955), was chosen as one of the Jubilee books of 2022. Subtitled “A Ghost Story in the Old-fashioned Manner”, there is more than a hint of tongue-in-cheek in this work, though it rises to a pitch of genuine terror and has serious things to say about the need to exorcise the crimes of slavery that still echo into the present in the relationship between the light-brown, upper-class Nevinsons and their black servant, Rayburn. Amongst the barks of baboons, rustles of hidden creatures in the remote Berbice forests, Mittelholzer creates a brilliantly atmospheric setting for his characters and their terrified discovery that this is not a place where they can be at home. 

Guyana, with its ever-encroaching wilderness, is fertile territory for the Gothic, elements of which are part of Cyril Dabydeen’s Dark Swirl (1996) which brings a European naturalist in search of specimens for metropolitan zoos, who hears stories about the mythical massacouraman, the hidden beast of the rivers and determines to capture it. The novel explores the clash between European rationalism and the elastic, folkloric beliefs of the villagers, when they decide the European is trying to take away something that is theirs. In the novel, dreams are the interconnecting territory between the myth of the massacouraman that surfaces when least expected, like repressed desires, and the innermost fantasies and intuitions of the villagers that relate to their fears concerning their loss of authenticity and their unbelonging. And it is in a dreamlike state induced by sickness, where he can no longer disentangle what is real from what is in his imagination, that the ‘divided selves’ of the European stranger begin speaking to him as: ‘twin messengers with contrary tales’. In the process, his whole structure of thought is profoundly altered. 

Though Denise Harris’s Guyanese world is urban, it is no less Gothic. In Web of Secrets (1996) it is 1960s. Anti-communist tales of terror, sudden fearful migrations and the transition following the end of British colonialism form the external anxieties for a family locked into complexes of race and their fragile elitism. The interior shadows the exterior as illness, violence and insanity grip the family, whose house becomes – like the colony itself – a prison of consciousness and “unhappy cage” of terrifying self-doubt and distrust in others. When her grandmother starts seeing faces in the cracks in the walls, who else should Margaret, a lonely teenager, with a gift for evesdropping on adult conversations share her secrets with but the bacoo, the bottled creature with the dangerous talent for escape and irrepressible desires once freed. The bacoo escapes again in one of the stories in Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences (2005) where we read about the alarming sexual awakening of a respectable spinster by a naked bacoo in a jar. 

In Denise Harris’s second novel, In Remembrance of Her (2004) the Gothic is embedded in the mystery surrounding a murder and the question it poses for Blanche Steadman, servant in the Judge’s doom-laden house. What is the significance of the dress of feathers that flames and burns in the eyes of anyone who sees it? How does all this relate to the tragic death of the Judge’s first wife, who was born with caul over her eyes? Blanche has to come to an understanding both of her own capacities and the hidden forces at work in her world. But it is not until the very last chapter that the whole story emerges, and until that point the reader is engaged in a journey of discovery as complex and surprising as life itself. What emerges, beyond the individual tragedies, is the picture of a wilfully amnesiac society that shuts its eyes and ears to past and present suffering. What Harris’s gothic, richly poetic novel shows is the need for a new compassion if the restless dead are to find release and cruelty, pain, guilt and retribution are not to be endlessly recycled. 

Also, Guyanese in origins, the stories in Meiling Jin’s Song of the Boatwoman (1996) traverse the world of the Chinese diaspora, but it also contains the unforgettably gothic story, “The Tall Shadow”, in which the elderly Indian man, Sultan, resisting his loss of youth, sends out his shadow to court a young woman called Maralyn, and she finds herself, against her will, visiting him. She feels a curious terror to see his collection of handsomely framed photographs of young women, all with looks of surprise on their faces. She turns to flee and crashes into a mirror… 

But Guyana is not the only Caribbean site for the Gothic. Trinidad, with its lagahoos, its douens, its soucouyant and la diablesse, and its immense distances in time and space between its utterly contemporary shopping malls, its guarded housing blocs for the wealthy, and a countryside in which much older lifeworlds persist, and where gross inequalities in standards of living give rise to endemic states of criminal violence, is also ripe territory for the Gothic. As a high court judge, who explores, with dangerous ambivalence the spirit of anarchic revolt, James C. Aboud’s Lagahoo Poems (2004) finds in the shape-shifting image of the lagahoo, the Trinidadian version of the werewolf (the loup garou), a perfect alter ego for both himself and for the tumultuous energies that rise up from time to time in Trinidad. The world of the court and of folklore connect,in the epigraph he uses where a man is acquitted of cutlasing a another man because he cannot be shaken in his belief that the other is a lagahoo. In Aboud’s poems, Lagahoo is the creative, subversive creature of ‘deep dark mud-lust and rebellion’, who, unlike men, makes no distinction between himself and the earth he lives off (‘I wear the red earth by staying low’) whilst men live in a state of alienation and ecological enmity until their deaths when (‘the earth will stitch their bodies/ With roots and vines, Like stupid little buttons.’)

 The idea of contradictory impulses living in the same person (RL Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is the framing of Kevin Jared Hosein’s The Repenters (2016) who in the character of the orphaned Jordon Sant explores a young man continually torn between his best and worse selves, who confesses to doing seemingly unforgivable things. In Shivanee Ramlochan’s words, Hosein “maps a sinister, smart, surprisingly funny cradle of T&T where villains and heroes wear interchangeable masks: a world of scorpions and frogs writ large...” 

The kinds of incommensurable worlds suggested in Aboud’s Lagahoo Poems are acutely juxtaposed in Sharon Millar’s The Whale House and Other Stories (2015), stories which range wide: across different ethnic communities; across rural and urban settings; across the moneyed elite (and illicit new wealth) and the poor scrabbling for survival; locals and expatriates; the certainties of rational knowledge and the mysteries of the unseen and the uncanny. It is a world where mothers pray to both the Orisha and the Catholic gods for the protection of their disappeared sons, where in the story “Gayelle”, dreamings that carry characters back into the Amerindian Warao past, and a child is summoned to walk across water by a ghostly woman who turns out not to be his mother, where the dead first wife blights the womb of the second, where in “Centipede”the dreaming involved in picking Whe-Whe numbers bleeds into life, where in “Fleas” a murdered gangster still speaks, and in “Brian and Miss Zanana” where a romance, a murder and the use of the deadly mapepire snake all take place in the zoo, where the narrator has to remember “Bury the dead with the head and tail of the killer. If not, the mate will seek you all the days of its life” – the essence of the Gothic where the buried refuses to stay buried. 

In the title story of Keith Jardim’s, Near Open Water (2011), the isolation and loneliness of the terrified narrator takes him into hallucinatory territory, of things seen from the edge of the eye, but where the reality turns out to be horrifically down to earth. The Gothic as a state of mind trying to make sense of the presence of evil in the world is part of the sensibility of Shivanee Ramlochan, Everyone Knows I am a Haunting (2017) which Loretta Collins Klobah describes as “a subversive tour-de-force, a poetry of Holi powder and sari-silk drifting with beauty; of flayed predators, persistent hunger and thirst, broken bodies of daughters and sons; of cultural keep-down, wedding-weep, rape-ache, and the raw dreaming of rebel lovers; of abeer-streaked bodies’ sex-throb and split and Kali hex words brutally gleaming in the moonlit museum. These stunning poems fiercely and inventively wrestle language of beast, wolf, fishtail, and gods monstrous, singing firesongs of purification for the island dead and survival for the living. In these pages of la sangre viva, “spirit does linger.” 

And as in Shivanee Ramlochan’s poetry, Helen Klonaris’s title story in If I Had The Wings draws linkages between a queer Caribbean sensibility and the Gothic, in her image of the boy who manages to escape from persecution by growing wings and flying above the repressive mob. 

Perhaps of all the recent Trinidadian collections of stories, Breanne McIvor’s Where There Are Monsters (2019) is perhaps the most explicitly Gothic in the way she embeds terror in the everyday. The Trinidad of her stories is utterly contemporary but also a place defined by its folk mythologies and its cultural creations, its traditions of masking and disguises. Her stories confront the increasing economic and cultural divisions between rich and poor, the alarming rise in crime, murders and an alternative economy based on drug trafficking. Their daring is that they both look within the human psyche and back in time to make sense of this reality. The figure of the loup-garou, the hyperbolically violent rhetoric of the Midnight Robber of the carnival parade – or even cannibalism taking place far off the beaten track – have become almost comic tropes of a dusty folklore. In Mc Ivor’s stories they become real and terrifying day-light presences, monsters who pass among us. 

Two recent anthologies of short stories that both employ the badge of the “speculative” as their defining feature. Both show that in writing speculative fiction, authors are drawn to the gothic. In New Worlds, Old Ways, edited by Karen Lord (2019) the editor locates this collection of stories by Caribbean-based writers as being about finding new ways of addressing the tension between the economic oppressiveness of the Caribbean world for many of its peoples and the beauty to be found in the culture of resilience. Here the “speculative” draws together multiple parents, from the Gothic past and sometimes from outside the region, but versioned to be utterly Caribbean. In Kevin Jared Hosein’s “Maiden of the Mud”, the folk spirit of the churile, a woman dead in childbirth, is located in a contemporary setting of violent male misogyny; in Richard Lynch’s “Water Under the Bridge”, the folk spirit of baku (alias bacoo) aids in an abused child’s revenge, and other stories remind us the science fiction writers who invented the idea of teleporting were preceded by a couple of hundred years in the Caribbean storytellers who told of Ol’ Higue or the soucouyant or fire rass, who can leave her skin to fly as a ball of fire. 

Similarly, the UK-based collection of Black British writing, Glimpse (2022) Leone Ross as editor brings together work that shows that the Gothic can be accommodated within the most futuristic science fiction. As the collection’s introducer, Reynaldo Anderson, indicates, the stories in this anthology are about hauntings of various kinds, not least from the ghosts of slavery and colonialism. “Speculative” here owns various parents, most visibly science fiction and the Gothic. In stories like Joshu Idehen’s “Green”, the imagery is postmodern but the sensibility Gothic; in Pat Cumper’s and Melissa Jackson-Wagner’s stories, the folk hauntings of the Caribbean imagination, the variously named Ol’ Higue and the Soucouyant, rematerialize in modern urban settings. There are also connections to the very much pre-Gothic, the narratives of metamorphoses and bodily transformations that go all the way back to Ovid, Hindu and African mythology. In Pete Kalu’s gloriously imaginative “Fall of the House of Penryn” there are connections made in style to the 18th century Gothic and of course to Poe – and his theme roots the fall of the house in its origins in the profits of Caribbean enslavement, to the slave and plantation holding Pennant family. 

Endnotes 

1. For this connection, see Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (2004) and Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011). 

2. On the connection between William Beckford the capitalist owner of slaves and Lord Mayor of London and the writer and aesthete art collector who blew this fortune on the folly of Fonthill Manor see Derek E. Ostergard, ed. William Beckford 1760–1844: An Eye for the Magnificent (2001). 

3. For a contemporary biography of Matthew G. Lewis, see D.L. MacDonald, Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography (2000). 

4. See, for instance, Lady Nugent’s Journal of her Residence in Jamaica 1801-1805 (2002) on how news from Haiti terrified whites in Jamaica. 

5.On Southey and Coleridge, see Rebekah Owens, wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2016/09/22/is-the-ancient-mariner-a-zombie/ 

6. On the “Pitt terror” see John Barrell, Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (2000). 

7. On the savagery of the state in its protection of property see Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (1991). 

8.William Blake, “London”, from Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794).