Denise deCaires Narain (University of Sussex)
This paper explores the representation of Portuguese subjects in a selection of Caribbean literary texts. In the first section of VS Naipaul’s, The Middle Passage, Mr Mackay, the “coloured man” is cited as saying:
Is these Potogees who cause the trouble, you know, […] They have their hands in the stinking salt-fish barrel and they are still the first to talk of nigger this and coolie that. (p.16)
Richard Allsop also uses this citation to define the word, ‘Portugee’ in the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (p.450). This paper will explore the implications of this definition of Portuguese West Indians in the context of the particular historical circumstances of this group of ‘arrivants’. I will consider the pervasiveness of the representation of the ‘Portugee’ as historically positioned between the dominant white colonials and the majority African and Indian populations of the region. Making detailed reference to the construction of Portuguese West Indians in a selection of literary texts (by Alfred Mendez, VS Naipaul, Edgar Mittelholzer, Olive Senior and others), I reflect on where – if at all – Portuguese West Indians are (or might be) inscribed in the discourses of hybridity and creolization which are so often seen as definitive of the Caribbean. Many of the independence mottos of Caribbean nations invoke an idea of ‘unity in difference’ (‘out of many, one’; one people, one nation, one destiny’ and so on). This paper concludes that Caribbean and/or postcolonial discourses often provide us with a contradictory notion of hybridity, one which requires that the components of this hybridity be disaggregated and then reconstituted as ‘the hybrid’ or ‘the Creole’. If this is so, then seeking to address the representation of Portuguese West Indians as a separate group may simply consolidate this problem.
Is these Potogees who cause the trouble, you know, […] They have their hands in the stinking salt-fish barrel and they are still the first to talk of nigger this and coolie that. (p.16)
Richard Allsop also uses this citation to define the word, ‘Portugee’ in the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (p.450). This paper will explore the implications of this definition of Portuguese West Indians in the context of the particular historical circumstances of this group of ‘arrivants’. I will consider the pervasiveness of the representation of the ‘Portugee’ as historically positioned between the dominant white colonials and the majority African and Indian populations of the region. Making detailed reference to the construction of Portuguese West Indians in a selection of literary texts (by Alfred Mendez, VS Naipaul, Edgar Mittelholzer, Olive Senior and others), I reflect on where – if at all – Portuguese West Indians are (or might be) inscribed in the discourses of hybridity and creolization which are so often seen as definitive of the Caribbean. Many of the independence mottos of Caribbean nations invoke an idea of ‘unity in difference’ (‘out of many, one’; one people, one nation, one destiny’ and so on). This paper concludes that Caribbean and/or postcolonial discourses often provide us with a contradictory notion of hybridity, one which requires that the components of this hybridity be disaggregated and then reconstituted as ‘the hybrid’ or ‘the Creole’. If this is so, then seeking to address the representation of Portuguese West Indians as a separate group may simply consolidate this problem.
