Tell Me/‘I Am Listening’: Ocean Stirrings and the Creole Vocalization of Nelson’s Royal Readers
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe author presents a convincing discussion of Merle Collins' creative engagement with the legacies of colonial education in the Caribbean as encoded in the Royal Reader book series. The essay shows a sound understanding of the necessary role played by both scribal and oral sources of knowlege in any project of decolonization in the Caribbean. And it pays keen attention to the gendered aspects of the process of literary decolonization in its careful analysis of the the novel's maternal voices. A recently published novel, Ocean Stirrings has not yet received much serious critical attention. This article is, therefore, a welcome opening to what hopefully will be a long series of conversations on the novel. It is also a welcome addition to the existing body of scholarship on Collins and her fiction.
I would have loved to have seen a more rigorous introduction to the Royal Readers series and their imporatnt within the history of education in the Caribbean. But the aims of the article are clearly articulated and the author's stated intentions have all been achieved.
Author Response
Reviewer's Comment: I would have loved to have seen a more rigorous introduction to the Royal Readers series and their important within the history of education in the Caribbean.
Agreed. NEW TEXT
In 1877, Thomas Nelson and Sons introduced the Royal Readers series in response to the enactment of compulsory schooling laws in Great Britian and her colonies, and the increasing demand for instructional textbooks. The Royal Readers series consisted of eight books. The Infant Reader and Royal School Primer were the first two books, followed N0.I through V. Purposefully, the Royal Readers series was structured in graded format, each book being progressively more advanced in its delivery of vocabulary and comprehension lessons that emphasized the importance of sound, moral (colonial) values. The British colonial government mandated or strongly recommended the use of this series in schools throughout the colonies. Accordingly, the widespread use of the Royal Readers series throughout Britian’s colonies helped standardize English language education in Africa, India, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. The stories, poems and lessons that made up this series of educational textbooks emphasized loyalty to the British crown and the superiority of British civilization. More perniciously, it promoted the ideal of universality of colonial values while simultaneously devaluing indigenous knowledge systems and languages. In their novels, Caribbean writers such as Erna Brodber in Jane and Louisa will Soon Come Home (1972), Merle Hodge in Crick, Crack Monkey (1970), Jamaica Kincaid in Annie John (1985), George Lamming in In the Castle of My Skin (1953), Earl Lovelace in The Schoolmaster (1968) and V.S. Naipaul in The Mystic Masseur (1957) and The House for Mr. Biswas (1961), have cogently depicted the consequences of this. The nineteenth up to the late twentieth century primary school curricula, so richly dependent on the Royal Readers series, were geared towards the creation of the ideal colonial subject, regardless of the particularities of indigenous cultures, histories and vernaculars. Brathwaite in The History of the Voice (1984) captures the consequence of this reliance: “ we were educated away from ourselves, [it] made us see ourselves as perpetually inferior, and made us always look towards the metropolitan center for approval and confirmation (13). In Ocean Stirrings, Collins’s narrative manipulation of the Royal Readers textbooks as a decolonized poetics to represent Oseyan’s imaginative maneuvering into selfhood speaks to strategies of resistance to this miseducation. Her subversion of British-based literary authority is to my mind what makes this fictive tribute so distinctive.
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsReview comments for essay re Merle Collins’s Ocean Stirrings
Overall, this is a strong essay that makes an important scholarly contribution. As far as I know, it is the first article to focus on this rich and important novel. It offers a persuasive analysis of the narrative voices that are used to tell the story of Oseyan (Helen). The author asserts that Collins portrays the colonial Royal Readers as a double-edged sword that includes both pleasure and indoctrination. By analyzing the “decolonized poetic versification” of the novel, the author demonstrates how the Royal Readers’ narrative point of view is changed through the Kwèyol epistemology of Ma Maryam. The article deftly shows how Collins deploys complex linguistics in the novel that undermines the colonial logics of the Royal Readers.
The author discusses how this “decolonized poetic versification” continues when Oseyan is institutionalized as an adult in a Kalamazoo, Michigan mental hospital. By recalling Ma Maryam’s voice, she narrates poems that counter the naïve poems that she learned as a child from the Royal Readers.
Recommendations:
- The essay does a good job of delving into the themes of mental illness, gender, and migration. A suggestion to add: Kelly Baker Josephs’ Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature.
- It would be helpful if the author foregrounds the feminist/womanist point even more, in that by writing this novel about Malcolm X’s mother, Collins expands the Black Radical Archive of the Caribbean.
- I would suggest including Collins’s non-fiction essay about her research: Merle Collins, “Louise Langdon Norton Little: Mother of Malcolm X” Caribbean Quarterly 2020
With these minor revisions, I highly recommend this essay for publication.
Author Response
- A suggestion to add: Kelly Baker Josephs’ Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature.
All these women are what Kelly Baker Joseph (2013) so pithily referred to as ‘disturbers of the peace,’ unsettling a status quo that decides on what is normal and what is abnormal; challenging with righteous anger and frustration, categories which seek to contain them. The readers of these texts, as is the reader of Ocean Stirrings, are co-opted into the task of making sense of “the tension between the label of madness and the actions and interactions of the characters labelled as mad (20) and of interrogating how “madness defines community, defines, gender, defines the form of the text, and, for some characters, defines reality itself” (20). Baker Joseph’s position on madness in Anglophone Caribbean literature serving as a deliberate critical device that unsettles colonial ‘peace’ and exposes its psychic violence finds congruence in Collins’ representation of Oseyan’s literary innovation of her marginalization and resistance. Oseyan, like the female characters who populate these novels of the aforementioned writers, is creatively restructuring her experience, to make known her inner world of pain, suffering and trauma.
- It would be helpful if the author foregrounds the feminist/womanist point even more, in that by writing this novel about Malcolm X’s mother, Collins expands the Black Radical Archive of the Caribbean.
In a deliberate, archival sweep, Collins, in Ocean Stirrings, reinstates indigenous voices into the necessary memorializing of the legacies of all the grand women in Caribbean history who have, at home and in their communities, quietly yet powerfully, done the political work of consciousness-raising and the building of national identity. Functioning as an archive of these lives, Ocean Stirrings addresses the importance of various forms of documentation, both oral and scribal, in challenging willful omissions and deliberate absences of the rural poor in colonial records. Once hidden from Grenada’s history, these women, through Collins’ fictional reconstruction of the past, can now be added to the annals of Grenada’s history. In an early poem, “Chant me a Tune”, Collins (1992) cautions against historical effacement: “Don’t try to dust my story / into the crevices of time” (33). In Ocean Stirrings, she compensates for that erasure by intentionally entangling the lines of history and biography with that of fiction and autobiography so as to create a broadly representative, postcolonial archive that gives agency to the marginalized. “Here/ hands and eyes and ears/ begin to shape answers / to questions / tongue can find no words / for asking” (Collins 1992, 68). The creative and purposeful deployment of these various genres showcases the fullness of Collins’ literary reconstruction of the life of Louise Norton Little—a woman of courage, a woman of resilience, a woman of activism—whose story was once subsumed in the autobiography of her famous son, Malcolm X. Additionally, Ocean Stirrings makes a welcoming space for oral archives of resistance to sit alongside written ones . This accommodation reminds us that in our decolonial, archival mission, we need to be mindful of the precarity of reliance on only one medium or on only one point of view.
Collins poetics of ethical engagement is manifested in relation to her amplification of the many voices that animate the different communities to which she belongs.
