A Caribbean Literature of Traces in #douenislands

How are such innovations as anonymous social media platform accounts, co-written blogs, and Internet publication changing our definitions of authorship? In a reading of the Douen Islands project, this paper considers how collaborative modes of authorship, and specifically experimentation with Twitter, adds a new dimension to Glissant’s characterization of Caribbean literature as “a literature of traces.” Published in 2013 as a pdf available for download on a tumblr account, Douen Islands is an e-book comprised of poetry, images, and tweets, co-created by a group of Trinidadian artists, including poet Andre Bagoo, graphic designer Kriston Chen, and artist Rodell Warner among others. The project’s title refers to the folk figures of douen, the spirits of children who had died before baptism who then become faceless beings with backwards-pointing feet; as Bagoo highlights, the position of the feet means that the traces of their footprints lead to detours for anyone who might follow them. In this paper, I suggest that the incorporation of the image of tweets that no longer exist on the Internet in the e-book is an evocation of the douen’s misdirecting traces and furthermore, amplifies our concept of textual authorship. Here, the inclusion of the image of tweets recalls the practice of back-channeling, where the public can critique an in-progress event. In its digital publication, external commentary can become integral to the subject of its critique and the figure of the douen, originally faceless and therefore voiceless, articulates its own erasures. Douen Islands is an evolving, collaborative project that uses Internet publication as a means for, as Bagoo notes, Caribbean writers “to publish our own stories in our ways.” Through the analysis of the structural ephemerality of Twitter, I propose that Douen Islands practices a literature of traces for a digital age.