The article suggests that, in the creative negotiation of their multiple cultural heritage, Caribbean women poets create a poetic counter-archive where different forms of knowledge (both written and oral, European and African) intersect and displace the western division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms. They can be heard in the poetry of Merle Collins, who weaves into her poetry lines from a famous calypso (“She sings on a train and sings inside”), or in Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s use of dub, and in her reworking of the quadrille through the mento tradition in “Soun de abeng fi Nanny” and in The Fifth Figure. While during slavery music constituted a means of communication and ineffable resistance, the traces of that musical revolt are still visible or, as Gilroy argues, audible today. Yet, music is obviously much more than a mere metaphor, providing on the contrary a complex methodological approach to the exploration of Caribbean literary imagination. The Caribbean has often been described in musical terms as ‘fugal’, as a culturally polyphonic society.
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