Post on 22-Jan-2023
“He said, She says”: Caribbean Thinking and Anglophone Caribbean
Women’s Writing.
By
Aston Agard.
Student No: 00685256.
CARI6001: Caribbean Thought.
Agard 1
Drs. Andrew Armstrong, Grisel Pujala-Soto, and Aaron Kamugisha.
24 May, 2013.
In attempting to conceive of a thing called “Caribbean
Thought,” it is noted that it is as diverse, as contrapuntally
layered, as difficult to pin down as the identities it seeks to
address. From the militant, pro-African thought of Frantz Fanon’s
Wretched of the Earth (1965) to Edouard Glissant’s theories on
rhizomatic Caribbean identities exampled by his Caribbean Discourse
(1989), Caribbean thought has attempted to grapple with what is
the nature of this region’s culture, discussing impinging issues
of history, race, class, and gender politics (to a lesser
degree), attempting to answer the question “What is the
Caribbean?” At times considered more reactionary than visionary,
other times more radical than conservative, the thought of the
Caribbean, or its intellectual tradition to be more specific,
cannot be fully apprehended within the shallow confines of this
paper. In attempting to circumscribe what constitutes the body of
Caribbean thinking, I noticed that most of the thought on the
region’s predicament of identity comes from the mouths of men.
Agard 2
Heather Smyth notes that “the absence of gender and sexuality as
terms in creolization [read as the Caribbean intellectual
tradition] is substantive: theories of creolization are often
deeply marked by gender and sexual ideologies” (2).The Caribbean
Man is the focal point of most treatises on Caribbean identity,
which tends to evade and/or elide the perspective of the
Caribbean Woman. The question “What is the Caribbean?” has been
changed to “How does the Caribbean Man interpret the Caribbean?”
Thus, there are areas within the patriarchally-constructed
discourse of Caribbean thought that have been left completely
untouched. How are the thoughts of men translated by Caribbean
women? Does the thought of the Caribbean bear any resonance with
the concerns of the region’s women? In what ways do Anglophone
women writers speak back to the patriarchal discourse? What I
attempt to do here is to discuss selected Anglophone Caribbean
women’s writing to discern how the region’s women’s literature
tends to ebb and flow in the currents of the Caribbean’s
intellectual tradition.
Agard 3
Why women’s writing? Aside from the general silence on
women’s issues by the majority of Caribbean thought, discussed
before, the focus of Caribbean women’s writing tends to be more
focused on the psychology of its subjects and the intimate
relations between them. Smyth insists
Criticism of Caribbean women’s writing has paid too little
attention to the myriad ways in which Caribbean women
writers respond to existing theories of creolization when,
in fact, these women have responded with a critique of the
absence of gender and sexuality in creolization theories and
with the development of new, specifically feminist, modes of
speaking of Caribbean difference. (2-3)
As the feminist axiom “The Personal is Political” suggests, the
representation of the most basic, personal, and intimate aspects
of life is reflective of a society’s foibles. As Carol Hanisch
notes, women’s writing highlights the nuanced interplay between
gendered politics and everyday affairs because “personal problems
are political problems” (n.p.), and as Brian Meeks suggests,
perhaps Caribbean feminism provides an “alternative way of
Agard 4
looking at the world” (11). An alternative way of looking seems
especially useful in the Caribbean, where “the violence of the
heteronormative postcolonial state” (O’Callaghan 107, F.Smith138)
smothers those marginalized by patriarchal, heteronormative
hegemonic discourse. When one considers that the Caribbean region
also speaks from the margin, it can be said that the writing of
the Caribbean woman speaks both inwardly and outwardly, to the
societies that gave it birth and to the societies that have
historically relegated the Caribbean to the periphery. Caribbean
women’s writing often represents those, like themselves, that are
doubly and triply marginalized based on race, gender and
sexuality. What do these subjects have to say? They speak on
matters of importance that shape even the most mundane aspects of
our lives, while offering solutions to the quandary that is
Caribbean identity.
One such matter of importance is that of race. Issues of
race and its inherent positions of racial superiority have shaped
the region in profound ways. “The word ‘race,’” Michael Banton
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posits, “entered the English language in 1508” (17). This
coincides with the then burgeoning colonial expansions of the
European powers. European expansionism necessitated that its gaze
be placed upon the Other, and required that the Other be found
inferior in order to validate the subjugation of entire peoples.
Lucius Outlaw posits that the notion of race is a concept
deployed in the presence of sociocultural and biological
difference (58). Phenotypical and physical traits were used to
deduce a person’s race, and also to connote one’s position in the
social hierarchies set in place by the colonial enterprise. As
Banton intimates, ‘race’ was used to outline one’s lineage (18),
and when taken together with the medieval theories of scala naturae
or the Great Chain of Being, provided a framework that afforded
those of the ‘pure’ races dominancy over those of ‘impure’
lineage. Antenor Firmin reminds us of the early classification
systems, and is quick to highlight that these were all “ingenious
attempts to impose a serial order where nature has put the most
wanton irregularity” (18). This irregularity is especially
virulent in the Caribbean, where centuries of racial mixing have
made any attempt at ‘racial purity’ impossible. As Daniel Alan
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Livesay suggests “The culture of miscegenation that developed in
the British West Indies came from demographic conditions, as well
as customary promotions of common practice” (29-30).He also
reminds us that “[c]ross-racial relations became a part of West
Indian culture; married and single men alike had their mistresses
of colour ….[f]or imperial observers, this confirmed long-
standing associations between the West Indies and anarchic morality”
(30, my italics). Therefore, ‘race’ as a system of
classification, which has no true bearing upon the region, as no
‘pure’ race exists, is not only tied to issues of social
stratification and biogenetic impurity, but also to moral
integrity. Gordon Lewis suggests that precepts of race were
subsumed into an ethos of social class division as the possession
of money “whitens” (10) in the Caribbean. Race, therefore, is not
only a biological classification, but occurs at the intersection
between society’s need for hierarchy, and phenotypical
difference.
Agard 7
Race thus creates a lens through which Caribbean identity
has been re/mis/interpreted. Caribbean societies were, at heart,
racist societies. Rhoda Reddock has noted that “constructs of
race and colour became the bases of social and economic
disparities, as well as of cultural diversity and creativity”
(3). J. J. Thomas’ explanation of West Indian Fables by James Anthony
Froude, entitled Froudacity, provides insight into how the Negro
was perceived by the colonial powers. Here, Froude absurdly
argues “the African element in the population of the West Indies
is, from its past history and its actual tendencies, a standing
menace to the continuance of civilization and religion” (6). For
Froude and others, the African and those of African descent
constituted an affront to European sensibilities and mores. Using
“Hayti” as an example, Froude attempted to paint Caribbean
societies as “horrent lairs wherein the Blacks, who, but a short
while before, had been ostensibly civilized, shall be revelers
[sic], as high-priests and devotees, in orgies of devil-worship,
cannibalism, and obeah” (Thomas 8-9). Thus, the African presence
was, and still is, maligned, stemming from a conception that the
African was bred from “a culture that was to be condemned”
Agard 8
(Banton 25). In reaction to centuries of this Eurocentric
sentiment and the strictures of colonialism, Caribbean
intellectuals have striven to reverse the notion of racial
inferiority. Caribbean Nationalism grew, in part, from the
affirmation and validation of the African presence in the region.
As Gregory Freeland notes, “[t]he steely and vise-like grip of
this era of oppression and slavery forms the painful remembrance
and backdrop that fuels … the binding force in individual
identity and consequently nationalist identity” (4). Paget Henry
concurs, stating that the Caribbean’s intellectual tradition
“emerges as a series of extended dialogues that arose out of
attempts to either legitimate or delegitimate European projects
of building colonial societies around plantation economies that
were based on African slave labour” (5). Race thus became a
marker of belonging, and conversely a boundary of exclusion.
However, the focus on the black man in the postcolonial era,
which is sharply brought into view by the literature of the day,
for example Mimic Men (1967) and The Castle of My Skin (1970), created
another essentialist frame that marginalized women, even though
“women are the grounds on which claims to community are made”
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(Trotz 8). David Scott and Carolyn Cooper both suggest that
anticolonial thought and its successive postcolonial thinking
have both committed the same essentialism they tried to overturn
(Cooper 15; Scott 3).
Reddock avers that “[i]t is not accidental or surprising
then that ideas of race and colour eventually came to be
solidified” (3) within the Caribbean context. Have racial issues
been made concrete within women’s writing? Like nationalist
writing attempted to validate the coloured man, does Anglophone
Caribbean women’s writing simply validate the black woman? Brand
alludes to the pervasive sentiment of the Caribbean towards race
and correlated class in her At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999)
where Marie Ursule tells us of M. de Lambert’s wife “a free
coloured woman” (12). Mme. De Lambert avoided the outdoors since
“One good sitting in the sun and the African in her would come
out” (13). Of course, this brings to mind the interrelated
notions of the African inferiority and his being bred for work
through his environment (Banton 25; Barker 100, 62). Brand’s
Agard 10
conception of race seems bounded within the confines of lineage,
though. Her project of ‘unforgetting’ places race within a rubric
of genealogy. However, like Edouard Glissant who believes that
the search for roots is impossible within the Caribbean context,
Brand admits through Eula, that race conceived as a genealogical
line is not feasible. Eula, in At the Full and Change, laments:
I would like one single line of ancestry, Mama. One line
from you to me and farther back, but a line that I can trace … One
line like the one in your palm with all the places where
something happened and is remembered. I would like one line
full of people who have no reason to forget anything, or
forgetting would not help them or matter because the line
would be constant, unchangeable. (246-47, emphasis mine)
Here, Brand illustrates that race in the Caribbean can be more
readily apprehended through Glissant’s rhizomatic scheme, as Eula
cannot pin her lineage down to one specific line of ancestry. As
Richard Clarke has intimated “the work of Edouard Glissant
represents a decisive epistemological break … in Caribbean
cultural discourse” (1), and J. Michael Dash offers that Glissant
Agard 11
“[breaks] free from ideas of cultural purity, racial authenticity and
ancestral origination” (148, emphasis mine). Brand seems to agree to
this, even as she ostensibly traces Marie Ursule’s family tree.
This tracing of course only portrays half of the story,
obfuscating any attempt at apprehending a specific race within
her family, and by extension the Caribbean.
Like Brand, Michelle Cliff explores the issue of race in
relation to the Caribbean diaspora. However, she interrogates the
issue from the standpoint of the biracial Clare Savage, in her
No Telephone to Heaven. For Cliff, ‘race’ is never just a matter of
colour, having other societal issues impinging upon it. Reading
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the black man tries to
reconcile with a conflicting self-image that sets himself in
reference with the white man and other black men. The black man
is “given two frames of reference” (1986: 83), and undergoes a
type of schizophrenia (1986: 119) when brought into contact with
the white man. For the black woman, the frames of reference
increase to three as she is not only black but also a woman which
Agard 12
comes with certain societally-predetermined roles under
patriarchal discourse. These frames multiply, perhaps
exponentially, for the “red-skinned” Clare. For Jennifer Smith,
Clare’s experiences not only “expose the often arbitrary but
always powerful constructions of race and gender” (142), but also
“expose the omission of women, particularly of African descent,
from history” (142).Race for the Caribbean woman appears at the
intersection between phenotype and gender, with sexuality and
class being as much factors of her race as her skin colour. As a
“backra” (No Telephone 123), Clare’s race is bounded within the
binds of propriety, as the narrator allows us to know: “Her twang
was coming back, rapidly, in Harry/Harriet’s presence, voice
breaking the taboo of speaking bad. Discouraged among her people” (121,
emphases mine). Harry/Harriet also points towards the conflation
of race and sexuality where he/she notes that he/she was no more
welcome in the Pegasus nightclub, an upscale tourist spot, than
at the rum shop “at Matilda’s corner” (121), as his/her
transgendered body is a site of rejection both racially and
sexually. The narrative voice makes this clear:
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None of her people downtown let on if they knew a male organ
swung gently under her bleached and starched skirt … [h]ad
they suspected, what would they have been reduced to? For
her people, but a very few, did not suffer freaks gladly –
unless the freaks became characters, entertainment. Mad,
unclean diversions. Had they known about Harriet, they would
have indulged in elaborate name-calling, possibly stoning,
in the end harrying her to the harbor [sic]. (Cliff 171)
Skin colour and sexuality collapse upon each other, melding into
a very tangible but permeable barrier, circumscribed by notions
and concepts of citizenship for Clare, Harry/Harriet, and Kitty,
Clare’s mother. As Jacqui Alexander posits, “naturalized
heterosexuality shapes the definitions of respectability, Black
masculinity and nationalism” (7). I would extend this even
further to include notions of Caribbean women’s propriety and
femininity as well. Thus, when Harry/Harriet asks Clare if she
was ever tempted by “loving [her] own kind” (122), Clare cannot
help but feel uncomfortable, as the choice is embedded within her
own belonging in Jamaica. Her choosing to belong to that place
and race stifles the potential for ‘loving her own kind’ as the
Agard 14
burgeoning relationship between herself and Liz comes to a
screeching halt when confronted with the issue of race (No
Telephone 138-140). The female body, under the purview of race
within the Caribbean intellectual tradition becomes a site of
multiple political meanings. Its exclusion from the region’s
discourse on race, however, is quite glaring but mitigated
through the literature of Caribbean women.
Cliff’s focus on sexuality provides an excellent link to the
Caribbean’s intellectual discourse on decolonization. Alexander
reminds us that heteronormativity as a facet of Caribbean culture
is subsumed within a “native sexuality” that was policed and
scripted by the colonial powers, in the attempt to inscribe
imperial authority (8). Keja Valens insists that “[c]olonial
gender conformity proscribes the satisfaction of [Caribbean
women’s] desires” (126).Alexander offers that the process of
decolonization, which was claimed by the nationalist state, has
been “seriously disrupted” (7), with the region’s attempts at
self-determination being undermined by “its antithesis, tourism”
Agard 15
(19-20). The significance of tourism is derived from a
foregrounding of sexual pleasure as a commodity, as the old
imperial trope of the land and people as sexualized objects,
subsumed in and regurgitated through the production of ‘culture’
(Alexander 19) One need only to look at a ‘Bahama Mama’ or a
‘Mother Sally’ to recognise this to be true. Thus there is a
prescribed culture for the region based on patriarchal
heteronormativity, as the region is primed for, and depends on,
consumption by the former colonial masters. European desire for
alterity, albeit heteronormative alterity, becomes part and
parcel of the culture produced. Caribbean women’s writing
critiques this culture of heteronormativity, pluralizing it
through representing sexual alterity, which now serves as an
object of European desire. Harry/Harriet alludes to this when he
recalls his sexual abuse by an officer at “Up Park Camp” (Cliff
128). Cliff makes it clear that Harry/Harriet’s transgendered
identity is not one of deviance, founded upon his sexual abuse,
and illustrates that white desire extends far beyond
heteronormative confines. Metaphorically, Harry/Harriet’s rape
stands in for the rape of the colonies by Europe and, more
Agard 16
contemporarily, the United States. However, Cliff seems to agree
with Derek Walcott who entertains a view that the chaos and
trauma characteristic of Caribbean history can be the origin
point of something beautiful. Walcott uses the metaphor of a
broken vase to illustrate: “Break a vase, and the love that
reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took
its symmetry for granted” (69). This coalesces in Harry/Harriet
who despite brutal rape asserts his/her transgendered identity,
even though his subjectivity in Jamaica necessitates a choice.
The patriarchy of nationality demands that she/he cannot be both
“sun and moon” (Cliff 128, italics mine) but must choose a
gender, in much the same way that Clare must choose a race and
nationality. Ultimately, Cliff illustrates the dangers of
choosing, as Clare is killed for her choice.
A look at Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1985) and Shani
Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) as well may prove useful to
deduce how Caribbean women’s thematization of alternative
sexualities and notions of family tie into the region’s project
Agard 17
of decolonization. In Annie John, Kincaid, through her protagonist,
toes the line of homoeroticism. Valens posits Kincaid’s mining
and undermining of the bildungsroman form is best described as
“queer” (123), bending the narrative of a typically white
heterosexual male into a Caribbean narrative of desire between
girls, twisting the clear lines of the bildungsroman form (Valens
124). Just as CLR James illustrates in Beyond a Boundary (1963) how
cricket, “specifically British” (55) with its Puritan ethics, has
been ‘Caribbeanized’ and decolonized, Kincaid seems to suggest
that Victorian morality, “whose imposition forms part of British
colonialism” (Valens 124), couched within the “insistence on
heterosexuality as the norm that can and must not be violated”
(Valens 124) has been Caribbeanized and made queer. What is
interesting is that Kincaid does not implicate heterosexuality by
supplanting it with homoeroticism. Her representation of
homoeroticism just is, which “pluralizes” (Valens 124) the
heterosexual norm. The representation of plurality places Annie
John both within and in direct opposition to the Caribbean
intellectual tradition as the issue of female homosexuality is
Agard 18
hardly discussed but plurality and the presence of multiple
epistemologies form the foundation of Caribbean thought.
The decolonization of the Caribbean’s heteronormative stance
is taken a step further in Cereus Blooms at Night. Here, Mootoo
denaturalizes familial blood bonds, deconstructing and exploding
the notion of the heterosexual family. Mootoo demonstrates that,
under colonial patriarchy, “‘home’ and family become sites for
the reproduction of state violence, episodes in which the
enforcement of political power is privatized into the realm of
the family and thus rendered natural, ‘private’, or invisible”
(Wesling 651). Her focus on the home can be aligned almost
congruently with Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of the inner
plantation, where he offers that “the family … has been conceived
as an ‘institution,’ given an abstract/functional treatment”
(Brathwaite 6). He goes on to suggest the family reflects a
“relationship to the embodying culture” (6). Thus, Mootoo’s
‘queering’ of the family and the home constitutes a decolonizing
of Caribbean culture from the entry point of the cornerstone of
Agard 19
culture. Imploding the notion of home inside the fictive space of
‘Lantanacamara’ is circumscribed within Mootoo’s striving “to
rethink the Caribbean outside of or at least against the
colonizers’ epistemic norms” (May 108). The ‘colonizer’s
epistemic norms’ of course include history, and in much the same
way that ‘Lantanacamara’ is “not tied down by real geographies
and maps, not limited to the spaces named by colonial rulers and
mapped by colonial cartographers” (May 108), Mootoo endeavours to
find the spaces unnamed by the colonial hegemony of history. The
mining of the Caribbean imaginary to find such spaces has been
pointed out by Wilson Harris as well. In his “History, Myth and
Fable,” Harris famously states that a “cleavage exists in [his]
opinion between the historical convention in the Caribbean and
Guianas and the arts of the imagination” (156). Mootoo’s
‘Lantanacamara,’ which occupies a space within and without
colonial history can be seen as an example of myth that has
undergone a “sea-change” (Harris 156), the mythical ‘Garden of
Eden’ twisted and perverted by colonialism but healed by queer
alterity. As May asserts “Mootoo is clearly toying with clichés
of the Caribbean as a lost Eden, a pastoral idyll” (108) and is
Agard 20
thus mines the European fairy tale to present an “alternative
social imaginary” ( May 108, Floyd-Thomas and Gillman 528).
Mootoo’s representation of therapeutic queerness also
resonates with the inner plantation which, for Brathwaite, is
focused on “cores and kernels; resistant local forms; roots,
stumps, survival rhythms; growing points” (6 emphasis mine). Vivian
May entertains the view that Mootoo’s demonstration of queer
identities as healing and survival within the dominant, and
violent, patriarchy of ‘Lantanacamara’ is a facet of strategic
ignorance. For her, this entails “a (different) positive interest
in knowing or imagining the world ‘wrongly’ so that critique,
reinvention, and reimagination are possible, both individually
and collectively” (109). Critique of the colonial institution and
resistance have long been the focal points of the Caribbean’s
anticolonial thought. The representation of queer sexuality can
be interpreted as active revolt against the sexual imperialism
perpetuated by the power dynamics within colonialism. It can even
be suggested that the aim of representing alternative sexualities
Agard 21
runs almost parallel to that of negritude, which is associated
with Aime Cesaire et al. Cesaire outlines what constitutes
negritude thus:
Negritude arises from an active and aggressive attitude of
the mind.
It is a sudden reawakening.
It is refusal.
It is struggle.
It is revolt. (15)
All of the Caribbean women’s text discussed so far can be fit
within this rubric of anticolonial thought, as they seek to
reconcile with the silences and domination of colonialism. Anibal
Quijano connects nationalist and anti-imperialist movements to
anticolonial thought as they all struggle against “the
coloniality of power,” (572)which corresponds to Brathwaite’s
concept of the outer plantation in that the coloniality expresses
itself within the domains of historically unbalanced, racially
Agard 22
constructed, dynamics of economic relations and power,
foregrounded by the Caribbean sugar plantation and slavery.
The vestiges of slavery are at the root of anticolonial
thought, for these are what anticolonial thinker opposes. It
appears no different within the literature of Caribbean women,
for each of the texts discussed firmly rebuke the ‘fallout’ of
colonialism by illustrating subaltern voices. Michelle Cliff, for
example, works against the European gaze which positions
[T]he white male in possession of the symbolic while
relegating the female outside it in a negative relation; men
and women of color [sic] (which is not to ignore the complex
gender and cultural differences between and within the two
groups) are also jettisoned to the margins of the symbolic,
to the limits of meaning and representation within
Eurocentric traditions. (Sethuraman 254)
To combat this homogenizing gaze, Cliff presents a multi-layered
narrative that turns the violence of the colony back upon the
colonizer. Through Christopher, a black outcast, and Paul, a
Agard 23
middle class “backra,” Cliff presents an “ambivalent ‘double’
view” (Sethuraman 260) one that robs those inscribed with
patriarchal power of their dominance and ascribes the subaltern
with a different kind of power through violence. Sethuraman is
keen to note that in the scene where Paul comes across his
murdered family, Paul cannot come to terms with the feminized
body of his father, as his phallus has been removed. He avers
that Paul is emasculated by the sight. The queerness of his
father’s mutilated body unmans him:
“With the fictional power of the phallus taken away from
him, Paul also loses the concomitant power to signify. His
defense mechanism is to turn his disgust at his father's
dereliction of the paternalistic duty to protect his wife
into disgust for the feminized body that his father now
symbolizes. (Sethuraman 260)
Cliff here illustrates the powerlessness of patriarchy when
confronted with the violence of subaltern history, in which lies
of course the history of the Caribbean woman. As Sethuraman notes
“[t]he doubling of the scene produces an uncanny liminal effect,
Agard 24
blurring the boundaries separating Paul from Christopher,
bourgeois from subaltern, the pure from the contaminated” (267).
Frantz Fanon has noted the need for violence in decolonization
and associated anticolonial thought. In The Wretched of the Earth he
states “[t]he naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the
searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it”
(1965: 28). Cliff seems to suggest that while violence against
the coloniser may provide some measure of parity between the
powerful and powerless, the particular gendered reality of the
Caribbean woman is much more effective. For her, the resistance
offered by her acceptance of her matrilineal line, connects the
patriarchally-constructed passivity of maternity with political
and gendered resistance.
Kincaid plays with maternity as a tool of anticolonialism as
well, placing Lucy’s mother in the rather ambiguous position of
the source of anti-patriarchy and conversely the source of the
propagation of Victorian mores. A matrilineal line of resistance
becomes visible in Annie John through the intervention of Lucy’s
Agard 25
grandmother, Ma Chess. Here, Fanon’s observation of an a priori
Negro psychopathology that manifests “on the slightest contact
with the white world” (1986: 111) is useful, as Lucy falls victim
to a cognitive dissonance that is not unlike the “schizophrenia”
(1986: 119) Fanon outlines. However, Lucy’s mental breakdown is a
result of her position as a black, colonized woman, and of her
unwillingness or inability to conform within the strictures or
race and gender placed upon her. Ma Chess’ alternative
epistemologies constitute resistance and healing mechanisms for
Lucy, offering renewal and the opportunity for the assertion of a
self, removed from the model of identity offered by Lucy’ mother.
Kincaid’s validation of alternative medicinal practices through
the intervention of Ma Chess reveals an anticolonial mode of
thinking when taken in conjunction with Kincaid’s portrayal of
colonial education. It is here that the anticolonial thinking of
Kincaid, Cliff and Erna Brodber can be conflated as they all see
the institutions of colonialism and its inherent colonial
education as harmful. Where Kincaid conceives it as an insidious
concealment of histories, as it spreads the notion that the
slaves “just [sat] somewhere, defenseless” (76), Cliff represents
Agard 26
it as resulting in and manifesting as a “raging infection in
[Clare’s] womb” (169). Erna Brodber’s Myal (1988) conceives of
colonialism as the chief perpetrator of “spirit thievery.” Smyth
avers that Brodber, through Myal, participates in the
anticolonial project “by illustrating how heterogeneous community
can provide the cultural and spiritual resources to transform
social and psychic rupture into political revolution” (4). The
focus on heterogeneous community as a healing mechanism and
bastion of resistance brings to mind the thought of Wilson
Harris, “who posits that the creative rejuvenation of
heterogeneous community rediscovering its own sedimented cultural
resources can heal the wounds of violent and exploitative
colonization” (Smyth 4).Brodber attempts to represent the
violence of colonialism and its inherent cultural assimilation
through the notion of spirit thievery. Three separate attempts of
spirit theft are made: one through misappropriation of an
alternative knowledge (obeah), the other two through an
“imaginative colonization of … community, and … the ‘obeah’ of
colonial education” (Smyth 6). Brodber, like Kincaid, Cliff and
Mootoo, inscribes the anticolonial project upon the bodies of
Agard 27
women, for just as Mala’s, Clare’s, and Lucy’s bodies bear the
wounds of violent patriarchy (figurative or actual), Ella and
Anita are the victims of imperial patriarchy and colonialism.
Interestingly, both Brodber and Cliff equate the colonial regime
with death and stagnation by figuring it within the motif of the
stillborn fetus. By foregrounding gender within their projects of
anticoloniality, Caribbean women writers at once speak out
against the deafening silences of the Caribbean intellectual
tradition and its opposing colonial hegemonic discourse on issues
of gender and female sexuality within the purview of Caribbean
anticolonial thought and identity as “it is women who are at the
dangerous interface between the community and its enemies”
(Kortenaar 61). Therefore, the literature of Caribbean women
seems to suggest that the focus of the Caribbean intellectual
tradition on the black male as the site of colonial oppression is
errant, as it is upon the black woman that colonial norms and
‘spirit thievery’ are inscribed most brutally. Neil ten Kortenaar
suggests that in Myal “The chiasmic reversal in the spiritual
realm of the gendered relations normal in the social sphere
hinges on the parallel between the subordination suffered by the
Agard 28
women of the community and the community's own subordination
within the colony” (61).
Caribbean women’s literature’s response to the absence of
discourse on the issue of gender within the region’s intellectual
tradition creates a frame for Caribbean feminism, which is falls
within and runs counter discursive to the patriarchy that fuels
both colonial and anticolonial discourses. The literature of the
region’s women has also “helped to foreground what has not been
achieved in our societies: the emancipation of the marginal (race
and ethnic groups, queer subjectivities, underclass women and
children)” (O’Callaghan 108). Caribbean women’s “search for a
black history/identity is intimately bound up with a latent
feminism as well as with a revolutionary social consciousness”
(Edmondson 182, J. Smith 142). Although Tracy Robinson avers that
Caribbean feminism is guilty of passively showing, in that it
does not vigorously “speak to and work through what we want to
save women to” (Robinson qtd in O’Callaghan 108),what these
groups need to be saved from (qtd in O’Callaghan 108), Caribbean
Agard 29
feminism, if understood as coterminous with Caribbean women’s
writing, provides a good enough starting point. The search for a
black history must entail the representation of alternative
epistemologies “that allow one to know oneself and the world
other-wise, apart from, or at least against the grain of, harmful
and dehumanizing logics” (May 109-110). It seems that these
‘dehumanizing logics’ appear in the male-oriented thought of both
colonized Caribbean and European master. What Caribbean feminism
and women’s writing seem to strive for is a nonoppositional
politic of inclusion, a true hybridity, one that “reads
connections rather than differences in order to map a new concept
of belonging in the Caribbean – a decolonization, in the fullest
sense, for all” (O’Callaghan 110).
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