A Poetics of Postmourning

Whereas the historical trauma of the Middle Passage and enslavement has been a prominent subject of Caribbeanist scholarship, there is surprisingly little sustained consideration of how poems and other imaginative works mourn this violent past, even though melancholic grief is a crucial component of the literary response. Building on the concepts of “postmemory” and “rememory,” this essay proposes the concepts of postmourning for the representation of transgenerational grief and remourning for its embodied enactment in creative work. Elegies exemplify the poetic response to both the historical losses of transatlantic slavery and to intimate, recent losses shadowed by this primordial, collective grief. Poets such as Dennis Scott and Lorna Goodison Caribbeanize elegy by drawing on rituals, songs, spiritual discourses, music, and other collective or “folk” vehicles of ancestral memory and shared ur-grief, combining them with the idiosyncrasy and aesthetic self-reflexivity of lyric, ars poetica, and writerly technique.