Indigo, or, Mapping the Waters (1992) is richly intertextual, taking inspiration, foremost, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Marina Warner’s own family history. The text’s structure is complex, a palimpsest of oral and written narratives, letters, and epigraphs taken from European and Caribbean literature. The main narrative is composed of two stories, moving between seventeenth-century Liamuiga, a Caribbean island, and twentieth-century Europe and Enfant-Béate. Liamuiga and its sister isle Oualie form the colony of Enfant-Béate, and are based on the real islands of St. Kitts and Nevis. In 1623-24, Captain Thomas Warner, the author’s ancestor, established Britain’s first Caribbean colony on St. Kitts. Legend h…
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Citation: Dunn, Jennifer. "Indigo, or Mapping the Waters". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 April 2011 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4448, accessed 23 November 2024.]