“Other and More”: Indian Ocean Literature and the Archipelagic Discourse of the Caribbean

Abstract

In his 1992 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Derek Walcott imagines the broken vase and the subsequent reassemblage of its “African and Asiatic” fragments as a metaphor for Caribbean art forms, especially poetry. His vision of the particular archipelagic form of art that is invested in remaking from fragments, while specific to the Caribbean, is also visible in writing from other archipelagic spaces in the Indian Ocean. This article connects the Caribbean concept of the archipelago to the Indian Ocean through an analysis of the way Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's The Dragonfly Sea (2018) and Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2005) each present the littoral island spaces of the Indian Ocean. These texts construct alternatives to the possessive ontology of global capital through their articulation of the unique ontology and aesthetics of the Indian Ocean archipelago, borne out of the specificity of the littoral and its association with permeability, symbiosis, and a “back and forth” mirroring the tides themselves. The article argues that while Owuor's novel, like Walcott, is invested in the ontology and aesthetics of the archipelago as transformative and resistant, Ghosh's novel can be read with Braithwaite's concept of tidalectics as well as Glissant's creolization, to similarly depict the ontology and aesthetics of the archipelago as emerging out of fluidity and change rather than linearity or stasis.