With a Carib Eye

Edgar Mittelholzer's With a Carib Eye was published in 1958, a fateful year in the British West Indies, but also only 4 years before V.S. Naipaul's The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies - British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America. While Naipaul's text is more ambitious and travels beyond the confines of the British colonies of the Caribbean, there are some rather fascinating parallels in how both Mittelholzer and Naipaul approach their region as "natives." Naipaul, coming from the Indian community of Trinidad, for example, does not depict Indo-Trinidadians as entirely creolized as Mittelholzer's text seeks to do. 

Both, however, linger on the Western character of Caribbean society, but for Mittelholzer there is no problem with "mimicry" of British or European cultures and norms. Thus, in a very surprising way, Naipaul's actually "right" in a sense that in the West Indies, the tragedy of the black man is to be recast in so many European moulds, but Mittelholzer accepts this as proof that the West Indies is "modern" and not primitive. One sees their ideological and biases play out in Naipaul's praise for calypso as a Trinidadian art form while Mittelholzer looks down on calypso, preferring to praise the accomplishments of West Indian artists, poets, and writers hampered only by economic conditions. 

This continues in their differing approaches to "modern" as defined in Trinidad, where Naipaul criticizes the notion that modernity in Trinidad's middle and upper classes equals consumption of overpriced Northern products while excellent Trinidadian coffee or furniture is cast aside and equated with the poor. One suspects that Mittelholzer is framing his travelogue in the tradition of J.J. Thomas's Froudacity (both are quick to distance themselves from Haiti and its alleged voodoo, not to mention Mittelholzer's eagerness to identify Barbados as an extension of England or brush aside the African and local influences in Saint Lucia's Creole-speaking population)) just as Naipaul embraces Froude and Trollope as a foundation for his self-distancing from the lack of wholly original or "new" societies legitimately rooted among the people. 

Of course, both Mittelholzer and Naipaul offer problematic views of the Caribbean culturally and historically, but how the two intersect and depart from each other and relate to their respective 19th century ideological forebears provide some interesting contrast on how two well-known writers of Trinidad and Guyana approached region, race, culture, and their sense of themselves in the world. A fine synthesis of Naipaul and Mittelholzer is likely to lead to a more holistic view of the West Indies and its people, one in which creolization and even, God forbid, African influences, are not incompatible with Caribbean modernity and the development of national cultures. Perhaps one could even suggest that time has sided with such a perspective as scholarship and Caribbean literatures point to a much needed nuance of complicated concepts such as  modernization, creolization, colonialism, and racial identity.