Visions of Kalinago and Garifuna in Peggy Carr’s ‘Shape of a Warrior’: A Review
Dr. Jacinth Browne-Howard, holding a stack of books as the sea rolls behind her.
Photo by Jannah Browne
Shape of a Warrior by Vincentian poet, novelist and diplomat Peggy Carr acts as a distant origin story for the sole National Hero of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, The Paramount Chief, His Excellency, the Right Honourable Joseph Chatoyer. Considering the 2012 narrative of British journalist Christopher Taylor in The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival, and the Making of Garifuna and that of James Sweeney, whose 2022 novel is based on careful research in the form of Chatoyer: Freedom’s War Chief, there are a few works available which focus on the Indigenous history of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. However, Carr, as a native of the soil, creates in Shape of a Warrior, a localized work of fiction that casts its net far beyond the historical scope of Chatoyer’s own life to a pre-Columbian version of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
As a Vincentian-authored work, Shape of a Warrior becomes part of many visible efforts to reinvigorate the living connection between modern St. Vincent and the Grenadines and its ancestral heritage. St. Vincent and the Grenadines possesses a unique history as the birthplace of the Garifuna people who descended from both the Kalina people already living on the island before the 1400s and people of African descent, many of whom had previously escaped enslavement from other plantations on other islands and had come to find home on the small archipelago by the 17th century. The vitality of this rich history was in some ways irreparably damaged by eventual European occupation and Indigenous exile. Authors like Jamaican Olive Senior, have long lamented the exaggerated absence of the region’s Indigenous people in the colonized curricula offered up until the early 20th century. Consequently, the emphasis on Vincentian Indigenous histories is imperative and the significant efforts are evidenced in acts such as the recent collaboration between the Fancy Government School and the largest existent Garifuna population, which is now located in Central America, to learn the language as part of the school curricula. As a key historical, Indigenous settlement for the Kalinago and Garifuna in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Fancy, along with other local settlements such as Greiggs. Owia and Sandy Bay, should have had access to this linguistic knowledge. However, with the losses sustained in the Second Carib War including the death of Chatoyer and the banishment of 5000 Garifuna to Balliceaux to the south of the island then to Roatan of the coast of Central America.
St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the motherland, suffered a significant cultural haemorrhage. Considering that issues of ownership, access, and belonging still exist as a result of colonialism and neocolonialism, such as the Vincentian government’s battle to reacquire Balliceaux from private ownership; the reacquisition of both tangible and intangible belongings is essential to any anticolonial efforts towards the restoration and futurity of indigeneity in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Since language and education are pertinent and effective tools of restoring much of this exiled knowledge, storytelling via media like Peggy Carr’s novel becomes indispensable.
With the context I’ve outlined above, Shape of a Warrior performs a twofold function, it preserves the past with thoughtful reverence but shows keen awareness that the lives, practices, language, and beliefs of the Kalinago as well as the Garifuna cannot be relegated to relics of history. They literally live among, around, and within us. Carr presents in the young adult historical novel, a work which is holistic and immersive in its apprehension of Indigenous existence concentrated entirely within the borders of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. As the novel charts fairly unexplored territory in terms of a fictional exploration of the pre-1400s on the island, it is difficult to determine a marked, singular climactic climb in the plot or a distinct character arc. The novel instead thrives in its extensive, thorough world-building which serves as backdrop and co-character for the compilation of snippets throughout the lives of its two protagonists. The novel is a bildungsroman, tracing the joint journeys of Yurubi, a Kalina girl and Aloo, portrayed in Carr’s cover description as both “a strange looking boy” and “a boat wreck survivor,” through their adventurous childhoods to the challenges of adulthood. There are exploits, journeys, rituals, losses, romances, rivalries, and secrets, that engage the reader through all of the experiences of the strong-willed deuteragonists.
The temporal environment of Shape of a Warrior is a calculated one. Many of the works which have emerged from the postcolonial Caribbean relate in some way to coloniality, with historical novels largely addressing the Black Atlantic. In this novel, Carr assumes the unique perspective of the pre-Columbian era – before the slave trade and the conquest of the West. Carr further specializes the angle of the text by constructing an account for the presence of African descendants in the Americas before the trade. The veracity of this position is highly contested among historians and most popularly argued for in books like They Came Before Columbus, by Guyanese British professor of literature and linguistics, Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima. Peggy Carr references this book in the paratext of Shape of a Warrior. Still, I think the most powerful facet of selecting this point of view is that firstly, it creates a sort of tabula rasa to explore the origins of Garifuna and secondly, it assembles an unfractured and Edenic account of a world often neglected in Caribbean storytelling, often rife with traumatic subject matter.
Carr’s Kalina community is elaborate and generates a believable and immersive experience for readers. The belief system is represented in detail. Instead of months, the Kalina consistently track the passage of time using the hurricane seasons. The roles of each member in the village of Warigara (modern day Sandy Bay) are similarly outlined as they are historically delineated. Warigara prioritises the training of young warriors among the boys to protect and provide for the members of the community, much like the characters of Jamaican author V. S. Reid’s classic historical novel The Young Warriors. The key difference emerges in that in Shape of a Warrior, we are removed from the urgency of looming invasions by external European forces. In fact, the majority of the interactions among the people of Hiroon happen with Amerindians from other Caribbean islands, rival groups and fellow Kalina from different local communities. One such example is the Leeward community of Layou which carries the same Indigenous name to this day.
The islanders travel by boats which they carve themselves to the Grenadines where some of them are born including Becouya (Bequia) and Cannouan (Canouan). The documented journeying of the characters by ocean highlights the authentic, adventurous, seafaring nature of the Kalinago since their initial venture up the Orinoco River to the islands. The book is also an opportunity to showcase the entirety of the Vincentian archipelago. While inevitably, the extra diegetic reality of the arrival of the Europeans in the West looms in the back of any reader’s mind, this narrative performs the important function of redeeming Caribbean identity from the damnation of a strictly postcolonial lens. This is a retrospective healing measure. The leisurely exploration of the plot allows for character development and soul searching through everyday situations including peer pressure, loss of family members and romantic choices, rightfully humanizing people who are often reduced to artifacts in discourse.
Where a novella like John Steinbeck’s The Pearl is similar to Shape of a Warrior in that it foregrounds Indigenous existences and conjures breathtaking landscapes, the latter escapes a Eurocentric lens and the sullying portraits of oppression and exploitation. The Edenic world-building in the story is particularly enhanced by Carr’s vivid imagery and thorough vignettes. As an accomplished poet herself, Carr gives the story a cinematic quality through uses of pathetic fallacy. For example, in one romantic scene, she outlines the “wayward finger of sunlight . . . drawing smiling rainbows in the mist near the waterfall” while “the butterflies flirted with every plant in sight, flopping brief kisses on their flustered foreheads” (158). The human features painted on to the physical surroundings amplifies the emotions of the characters. This artistic decision appeals to the naturalistic focus of the novel evoking romance not only in the more familiar sense of characters falling in love but it is also reminiscent of the Romantic movement of the 1800s. Like Romantic poetry, Carr’s text focuses on how the natural environment becomes its own character and gains a necessary autonomy to illustrate action instead of taking the more common route of adding long adjectival descriptions to character tension. This in turn brings our attention back to the Edenic qualities emphasized by the chronological architecture of the work as a prelapsarian picture of beauty as painted by ancient ancestors and their perspectives instead of the inevitable colonial gaze that infiltrates many post-Columbian texts, whether to romanticise the land for their own pleasure and occupation as Emily Cartwright does in Kittitian Caryl Phillips’ novel Cambridge, or having to use the land and sea as means to plot escape from imperial powers, immediate or implied, but always imposed. Examples of these include Annie who is evicted from Antigua to England across the sea in Annie John or Bola and her ancestors who navigate the land and sea primarily to escape from or manage the impact of colonialism’s vestiges over a series of generations in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon. Despite the implied suspension of belief required to fully engage with the context of Shape of a Warrior, establishing discourse around narratives that focus on Caribbean realities outside of the one the postcolonial citizen has come to know, could be viewed as a part of efforts to decolonize how we think of Caribbean identity and being by providing alternative ways of viewing the region’s heritage.
Unsurprisingly, the setting of Hiroon is one of the prevailing elements in the story, a background and a secondary character at once. I’ve come to expect this in Vincentian work. From the volcanic terrain of Shake Keane’s poem “Soufrière” or Cecil Browne’s well recognized short story “A Hat for Lemur” or the ramshackled huts of Alexis Keir’s Windward Family, or the historical tunnel Black Point in renowned author H. Nigel Thomas’ “Black Point, St. Vincent” (from the poetry collection, The Voyage) or the same Black Point, in my own most recent story, “Salt”, topography becomes a central and grounding pivot for the storytelling. These features become unbridled markers and identifiers of heritage.
A central example of this representation in Shape of a Warrior is embodied by the Great Mountain, the Kalina term for the La Soufrière volcano. This geographical feature is the single, highlighted cartographical aspect on the map of Hiroon in the novel’s front matter. The Great Mountain influences several dramatic events in the novel including the forced exodus of the Warigara people because of the eruption. The chapter “Night of Fire” signifies the ubiquitous power of The Great Mountain which is revered as being possessed by “the mountain spirit” with “a deep angry roar and furious darts of lightning” (35). As seen with the hurricane seasons, the elements control life on the island. The Great Mountain destroys the villages and summons lightning: it can “spew a huge cloud into the air blotting out the moon” (35). Its loud belches permit “a foul smell” to seep through the village, its thunder causes the ground to tremble, and its heat causes the sea water to boil (35). Even though the earth becomes enriched after an eruption and produces bountiful fruit from the ash nourished soil, The Great Mountain is shown to be a fearsome force, capable of destroying everything. Carr’s convincing account illustrates both the strength of the volcano as well as the terror and concern of the people in the story. The picture Carr generates is comparable to the moving, evocative series of poems from “Volcano Suite” written by famed Vincentian musician and poet, Ellsworth Shake Keane.
The Great Mountain is more than a dominant physical feature, it is regarded as a point of guidance for the village’s shaman Ikupo. Although the shaman does not possess the virility of the Chief, he is regarded as the most influential voice in the village. This points to the highly spiritual nature of the Kalina people, who are serious about their induction rituals and the rites of their communities in order to avoid harassment by evil spirits (known as Maboya). The influence of The Great Mountain Spirit is so strong that Ikupo rationalizes that because of his complexion, a darker shade than the other young warriors, and his unknown origin, the volcano has marked Aloo as its own son. This interpretation, aligned with Aloo’s own prowess on the land and aversion to the sea exhibits the power of alternative beliefs, but it also empowers Aloo who is often misjudged for his differences within the community.
As the land empowers Aloo, the other protagonist, Yurubi, has had a strong connection to the sea and the rivers since she was a child. This symbolic link, where Yurubi sees the water as her friend, becomes a driving force for Yurubi’s rebellion against the limitations of her abilities as a result of gender. Everyone warns Yurubi of the dangers the water holds for her since she was a girl, but it is with the water that Yurubi obtains many of her triumphs. Yurubi becomes a woman, but one who is a fierce protector, talented with her hands, courageous in the face of danger, and a lover with her whole heart. Yurubi rescues small children and rescues Aloo and her connection with the water is so strong that at first, he believes that she is a water spirit. For the two characters, the ocean acts both as foreshadowing of the future forced migration of Aloo’s people as well as a reminiscence on Yurubi’s ancestors' love of sea exploration. In Yurubi, Carr constructs an ambitious and endearing girl turned woman whose episodes inspire the reader to invest in every chapter.
Although the novel takes place in the past, it possesses strong appeal to the present, particularly for Vincentian readers. Through the map, it is evident that many locations in St. Vincent and the Grenadines have retained their native names such as Ayoa (Owia), Bayra (Byrea), Byabou (Biabou), Jambou (Yambou), Colonery (Colonarie), Cannowan (Canouan), Becouya (Bequia), Myreau (Mayreau), Troumaka and Layou. These villages are physical reminders of the Kalina’s presence on the island chain which continues to live on each time those names and homes are uttered.
Food is another way in which Carr creates a living link between the Kalinago and Garifuna history and the present-day Vincentian context. Fishing for barracudas, crayfish and crabs, killing iguanas for meat and picking fruits such as maamee apples create a sense of nostalgia for Vincentians who are familiar with the cuisine. The weaving of the baskets and the cooking of soups, corn, sweet potatoes, yams and cassava are also practices still maintained throughout the territory even if there’s no longer a need for crafting physical weapons. Food in itself is an especially important anticolonial weapon in Indigenous studies considering that Indigenous cultures have long exemplified what scholar Grace Dillon (Anishinaabe) coins as “Indigenous literacies” which are fundamentally aboriginal methods and “practices used by Indigenous native peoples to manipulate the natural environment in order to improve existence in areas including medicine, agriculture, and sustainability” (470). These methods became indispensable survival tools for the enslaved people of African descent who used their provision grounds to cultivate their own crops amidst the largescale planation systems which exploited them. Presently, these methods remain essential in keeping Vincentians alive through craftsmanship, fisheries and agriculture. The inculcated resilience represented in these means are central to the Kalinago, Garifuna, African influences on the Vincentian spirit.
Vincentian diplomat, poet, and novelist Peggy Carr immersive and exciting novel in The Shape of a Warrior. Carr’s commitment to the combination of veracity and the imagination shines in the text and sustains several stories worth telling about endearing and courageous characters. Carr’s novel is a beautiful tribute to the Kalina and Garifuna people as well as to the legacy of the country’s National Hero, Chatoyer. It is clear numerous strides are being made toward preserving the Indigenous heritage of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and literature is an indispensable part of ensuring that that inheritance becomes accessible and thrilling for present generations and those who are to come.
Works Cited
Carr, Peggy. Shape of a Warrior. Emmanuel Publishing House, 2020.
Dillon, Grace. “Indigenous Scientific Literacies in Nalo Hopkinson’s Ceremonial Worlds.” Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, edited by Rob Latham, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 470-487.
“Government to Acquire Island of Balliceaux.” Searchlight, 17 Jan. 2025, www.searchlight.vc/front-page/2025/01/17/government-acquire-island-balliceaux/.
Robinson, Lonnie. “Garifuna Exile Story.” Home, tourism.gov.vc/tourism/index.php/51-culture-department/general-information/324-garifuna-exile-story#:~:text=The%20British%20Government%20of%20the,to%20Balliceaux%20then%20to%20Roatan. Accessed 17 Jan. 2025.
Setirma, Iván Van. They Came before Columbus. Random House, 1976.
“Students of Fancy Government School Learning Things Garifuna.” Searchlight, 10 Jan. 2025, www.searchlight.vc/news/2025/01/10/students-fancy-government-school-learning-things-garifuna/.
