Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature

Abstract

Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature. By Dorothy E. Mosby. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 248, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth) In her preface to Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature, Dorothy E. Mosby notes that the Creole saying, "me navel-string bury dere," articulates an intersection of place, identity, and belonging. Persons of African descent have not been in Costa Rica from the time of earliest European settlement but were brought in as workers relatively recently, at the turn of the twentieth century. Afro-Costa Rican creative writers, whom Mosby identifies as first, second, third, and fourth generation, demonstrate through their literary works how the location of "home, "nation," and "belonging" has evolved according to the generation to which particular writers belong. Those born early, close to the turn of the twentieth century, located home firmly within a West IndianAnglophone construct and tended to have a more intimate connection with Jamaica, Barbados or Trinidad than with Costa Rica, even if only through parents who were born in the islands. The creative writings of these earliest residents of African descent in Costa Rica identify their culture as West Indian, their national affiliation with Britain as former subjects, and their language as English. They tended to consider their sojourn in Costa Rica as temporary, believing they would make money and return to their islands of origin. Instead, economic circumstances deriving from the advancements of capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with the caste system, relegated Caribbean workers of African descent to the bottom of the economic ladder in Costa Rica. Political and social circumstances, then, combined with thwarted opportunities, prevented the early migrant laborers from returning home and negated their desire to "do better." Later AfroCosta Rican creative writers evinced a sense of longing and of loss in their writing through evocations both of the injustices meted out to them as Blacks denied formal legal status until the civil war in Costa Rica in 1948 and of the racial prejudice Blacks have experienced there from the beginning and on into the twenty-first century. Mosby deftly analyzes Afro-Costa Rican literature published between 1938 and 1999. The introduction gives a thorough analysis of the historical background, provides a review of relevant literature, and describes her use of scholarship by Edward Said, Ian Smart, Donald Gordon and others to provide a framework for examining how language, the fluidity of identity with regard to place and displacement, and the notion of diaspora have become central to the fiction and poetry of Costa Rican writers of African descent. …