Moving Matter

This essay brings Maryse Condé's Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem (1986) and Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock (1985) into dialogue through the flexibility and dynamism of their shared engagement with language and materiality. Through this dialogue the essay argues that, in Caribbean literature, language can be conceived as a ‘zone of translation’ between different forms of matter. The essay begins with the argument that Caribbean postcolonial literature is heavily concerned with materiality, and argues that the essays and novels of both Maryse Condé and Wilson Harris display a particularly flexible and dynamic view of materiality, allowing an intense engagement with the potential as well as the limits of language, not only in representing materiality, but also in translating between materials. The second half of the essay focuses down on the two chosen novels as offering particularly clear illustrations of the capacity and limits of this form of translation. A brief conclusion explores the implications of this notion of ‘translation’ between different forms of matter for a postcolonial politics that engages materiality critically.