THE 'BILDUNGSROMAN' IN AFRO-AMERICAN AND AFRO-CARIBBEAN FICTION: AN INTEGRATED CONSCIOUSNESS

Since the slaves taken to the West Indies and to the United States came mostly from West Africa, an Afro-American writer like James Baldwin and an Afro-Caribbean writer like George Lamming share a common heritage, and one that they share as well with West African writers. Although Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean writers acknowledge their African roots, the literary tradition in which they write is largely European and their novels of childhood tend to be based on the European Bildungsroman genre, but shape that genre in special ways befitting the experience of growing up Black in the U.S. or the West Indies. By considering the Afro-American and the Afro-Caribbean male and female Bildungsroman, this study is able to make a number of useful comparisons within and between the two cultures concerning growing up Black, growing up as a Black male and growing up as a Black female. The Afro-American writers whose Bildungsroman fiction is studied are male writers James Baldwin (Go Tell it on the Mountain), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), Langston Hughes (Not Without Laughter), and female writers Gwendolyn Brooks (Maud Martha), Paule Marshall (Brown Girl, Brownstones), and Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye, Sula). Their Afro-Caribbean counterparts include Michael Anthony (The Year in San Fernando), Austin Clarke (Amongst Thistles and Thorns), George Lamming (In the Castle of My Skin, Season of Adventure) and Claude McKay (Banana Bottom). The study shows how literature written by modern West Indian and Afro-American writers of the Bildungsroman describes the thematic parallels that mark the literary contemporaneity of each culture, and it also shows the ways in which the writers have used their culture's preoccupations to construct separate and multiple worlds. The West Indian novelist writes a Bildungsroman to recall childhood roots and to discover the truth about himself and his home, while the Afro-American novelist tends to use his experience in order to make a viable protest, which is almost always about race, slave history, and the white establishment.