“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

Agard 5

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

Agard 6

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”

Agard 9

(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:

Agard 13

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).

Works Cited

Agard 30

Alexander, Jacqui. “Not Just (Any) Body can be a Citizen: The

Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in

Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas.” Feminist Review48 (1994): 5-

23. Web. 17 May 2013.

Banton, Michael. Racial Theories. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Print. Barker, Anthony. The African Link: British Attitudes to the

Negro in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1550-1807. London: F.

Cass, 1978. Print. Brand, Dionne. At the Full

and Change of the Moon. New York: First Grove Press, 1999. Print.

---- Bread Out of Stone: Recollections, Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming, Politics.

Toronto: Coach House, 1994. Print.

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. “Caribbean Man in

Space and Time.” Savacou11/12 (1975): 1-11. Print.

Césaire,

Aimé. “What is Negritude to Me.” African Presence in the Americas. Ed.

Carlos Moore et al. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1995.

Print. Clarke, Richard. "Root Versus

Rhizome: an ‘Epistemological Break’ in (Francophone)

Caribbean Thought?"  Journal of West Indian Literature 9.1 (2000):

12-41.  Print. Cliff, Michelle. No Telephone to Heaven. New York:

Agard 31

Penguin Books, 1996. Print. Cooper, Carolyn. Noises in

the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture.

London: Macmillan, 1993. Print. Dash,

J. Michael. Edouard Glissant. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.

Edmondson, Belinda. “Race, Privilege, and the Politics

of (Re)Writing History: An Analysis of the Novels of Michelle

Cliff.” Callaloo 16.1 (1993): 180–91. Web. 16 May 2013. Fanon,

Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press, 1986. Print.

---- The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin

Books, 1965. Print. Floyd-Thomas, Stacey M., and

Laura Gillman. “Subverting Forced Identities, Violent Acts, and

the Narrativity of Race: A Diasporic Analysis of black

Women’s Subjectivity in Three Novel Acts.”Journal of Black Studies

32.5 (2002.): 528–56. Web. 16 May 2013. Firmin, Antenor.“Early

Classification Systems.” The Equality of the Human Races. New York:

Garland Pub., 2000. Print.

Freeland, Gregory. “Music and the Rise of

Caribbean Nationalism: The Jamaican Case.” California:

California Lutheran University, 2011. Web. 13 May. 2013.

Hanisch, Carol. “The Personal is Political: The Women’s

Agard 32

Liberation Movement Classic.” Notes From the Second Year: Women's

Liberation. New York: Sulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt,

1970. Print. Henry,

Paget. “Philosophy and the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition.”

Small Axe 4 (1998): 3-28. Web. 15 Apr. 2013.

Kortenaar, Neil ten. “Foreign

Possessions: Erna Brodber’s Myal, the Medium, and her Message.”

ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 30:4 (1999): 51-

73. Web. 15 May 2013.

Lewis, Gordon. “The Sociohistorical

Setting.” Main Currents in Caribbean Thought. 49th ed. Maryland: John

Hopkins UP, 1983. Print. Livesay,

Daniel Alan. “Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Migration

from the West Indies to Britain, 1750-1820.” Diss.

University of Michigan, 2010. Mixed Race Studies. Web. 30

Apr. 2013. May,

Vivian M. "Trauma In Paradise: Willful And Strategic Ignorance In

Cereus Blooms At Night." Hypatia 21.3 (2006): 107-135.

Web. 18 May 2013. Meeks. Brian. Envisioning

Caribbean Futures: Jamaican Perspectives. Jamaica: U. of the West

Agard 33

Indies P., 2007. Print.

O’Callaghan, Evelyn. “Form, Genre and the Thematics of

Community in Caribbean Women’s Writing.” Shibboleths: a

Journal of Comparative Theory. 2.2 (2008): 107-117. Web. 15 Apr.

2013.

Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin

America.” Nepantla: Views From South1.3 (2000): 533-580. Web.

23 May 2013. Reddock, Rhoda. “Diversity,

Difference and Caribbean Feminism: The Challenge of Anti-

Racism.” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies: A Journal of Caribbean

Perspectives and Feminism 1 (2007): 2-24. Web. 16 May. 2013.

Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The

Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham and London: Duke UP,

2004. Print. Sethuraman,

Ramchandran.“Evidence-cum-Witness: Subaltern History, Violence,

and the (De)formation of Nation in Michelle Cliff's No

Telephone to Heaven.” Modern Fiction Studies 43.1 (1997) 249-287.

Web. 20 May 2013. Smith, Faith.

“Crosses/Crossroads/Crossings.” Small Axe 24 (2007): 130-138. Web.

16 Apr. 2013.

Agard 34

Smith, Jennifer. “Birthed and Buried:

Matrilineal History in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to

Heaven.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 9.1 (2009): 141-

162. Web. 16 Apr. 2013.

Smyth, Heather. “‘Roots beyond Roots’:

Heteroglossia and Feminist Creolization in Myal and

Crossing the Mangrove.” Small Axe 12 (2002):1-24. Web. 20 May

2013. Thomas, John Jacob. Froudacity; West Indian Fables

by James Anthony Froude. London: New Beacon,1969. Print.

Trotz, Alissa.

“Gender, Generation and Memory: Remembering a Future Caribbean.”

Women Catalysts for Change: Dame Nita Barrow Lecture. 16 Nov. 2007.

Web. 19 May 2013. Valens, Keja. “Obvious and Ordinary: Desire

between Girls in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Frontiers 25.2

(2004): 123-149. Web. 13 May 2013. Walcott,

Derek. What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, and

Giroux, 1998. Print.

Wesling, Meg. “Neocolonialism, Queer Kinship,

and Diaspora: Contesting the Romance of the Family in Shani

Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night and Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes,

Agard 35

Memory.” Textual Practice 25.4 (2011): 649-670. Web. 13 May

2013.

.