"The Biggest Callaloo Anybody Ever See": The Callaloo Metaphor in Robert Antoni's Divina Trace

Abstract

This paper argues that Robert Antoni's Divina Trace may be considered a 'callaloo narrative.' The callaloo dish, made up of various ingredients, becomes a metaphor for this text in which various types of discourses and stories converge and diverge to construct the myth of Magdalena Divina, the central character. Callaloo may be seen as a metaphor for the West Indian identity that is associated with heterogeneity, hybridization and indigenousness, but the comparison is sufficiently complicated to simultaneously (and perhaps paradoxically) represent homogeneity, fusion and integration.
Antoni's intricately constructed text is therefore an extremely important work in its redefinition and reinterpretation of West Indian literary theory, history and epistemology. Although the callaloo narrative supports Glissant's poetics of relating and Benítez-Rojo's Chaos theory in that it shows the paradoxes, contradictions and complexities inherent in attempts to define the Caribbean, Caribbean identity and cultural practices, it presents another model that further interrogates almost every aspect of personal and communal identity in ways that obfuscate any kind of definite conclusion. The callaloo metaphor, representative at once of heterogeneity and diversity but also of assimilation and fusion, constructs the West Indian identity as complicated and convoluted by various influences and elements but one that is delicious by virtue of these various seasonings and merging of flavours.