“The Biggest Callaloo Anybody Ever See”

Abstract

"Callaloo is central to an understanding of Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace. In fact, the recipe for the dish, as it appears above, is included in the text as one of the many types of discourses sewn together to create this eclectic and unconventional narrative. This dish, made up of various ingredients, becomes a metaphor for this text in which 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. This mixture is evident not only in the racial and cultural diversity of the fictional island of Corpus Christi in which the story is set, but also in the structure and the experimental nature of the narrative. An encyclopaedic wealth of information from science, religion, history, literature and the arts is integrated into a veritable potpourri. It is for these reasons that I regard Divina Trace a “callaloo narrative.”"(pg 1)