Orality and Caribbean poetry

Abstract

The purpose of these notes is to analyze a peculiarity of the relations between oral tradition and literature in the contemporary cultural space of the Caribbean region, as a contribution to fix aspects of what is usually called cultural identity. At the basis of the formation of a set of Caribbean literary expressions are the powerful roots of the oral tradition of Africans, East Indians and Amerindians. The long process of transculturation has given rise to contemporary modalities that include the presence of the performing poets and the jazz poem in the English-speaking area; the critical projection of the calypsonian text; the social interaction of the Nueva Trova Movement in Cuba; the self-representational tendency of the theater that rescues both the heritage of the storyteller and ritual expressions, and that in Cuba specifically has expanded with the theater of communities in the peasant and working class sectors; the strength of Creole literature in Haiti and its rising prestige in the French dependent territories; and many other examples.