Clear Word and Third Sight

Clear Word and Third Sight examines the expression of a collective African consciousness in the work of a number of Caribbean women writers. Catherine A. John shows how a shared consciousness, or third sight, rooted in pre-colonial African cultures and disseminated in a rich oral tradition, has served diasporic communities by creating structures of feeling linking those of African descent across centuries and continents. Contending that Ngritude discourse provides a crucial philosophical perspective on the connections between folk practices, cultural memory, and collective consciousness, John considers the articulation of an African consciousness in the work of the Ngritude writers Lon Damas, Aim Csaire, and Lopold Senghor. She traces the manifestations and reworkings of their ideas in Afro-Caribbean women's writing by authors including Jamaica Kincaid, Earl Lovelace, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, and others. She explores the various ways these writers represent the African oral tradition. By incorporating what she calls "folk groundings"--such as poems, folktales, proverbs, and songs--into their work, John argues, Afro-Caribbean writers invoke and continue a transcendent pre-colonial consciousness in the ongoing postcolonial struggle.