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The Rhetoric of Recovery in Africarribbean Women's Poetry

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The Rhetoric of Recovery in Africarribbean Women's Poetry APOCRYPHA OF NANNY'S SECRETS APOCRYPHA OF NANNY'S SECRETS: THE RHETORIC OF RECOVERY IN AFRICARIBBEAN WOMEN'S POETRY. By DANNABANG KUWABONG A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy MCMASTER UNIVERSITY ~ Copyright by Dannabang Kuwabong September 1997. DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (1997) MCMASTER UNIVERSITY (ENGLISH) HAMILTON, ONTARIO TITLE: APOCRYPHA OF NANNY'S SECRETS: THE RHETORIC OF RECOVERY IN AFRICARIBBEAN WOMEN'S POETRY. AUTHOR: DANNABANG KUWABONG, B.A. (GHANA) M.LITT (STIRLING) SUPERVISOR: PROFESSOR LORRAINE YORK NUMBER OF PAGES: viii, 295. ii AMISE€R€/(DEDICATION) N boarang na de a gban nga N nang di dogee segi baare ko Ng poga Hawa, aning te biiri: Mwinidiayeh, Angtuonq.mwini, Delemwini, aning ba nabaale nang ba la kyebe--Matiesi Kuwabong. Ka ba anang da ba are N puoreng a puoro kpiangaa yaga kora ma, N ba teere ka N danaang tuong baare a toma nga. Le zuing, N de la a tiizis nga puore ning ba bareka. (I wish to dedicate this work to my wife, Hawa, and our children: Mwinidiayeh, Angtuongmwini, and Delemwini, and their grandfather who is no longer alive--Matthais Kuwabong. If they had not stood solidly by me, and constantly prayed for me, I would not have been able to complete this thesis. On account of that, I offer the thesis to them). iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Hau do I talk when there are no words say it again spicy words ride on spicy sounds say it again and there are times for such feasts but not today for now I surrender to what I have done but so have we this thesis treats unsalted words boiled on stones of herstory given on the day of sound starvation amidst drums of power this thesis feeds on bleeding words of sisters of the sun without whose pain i have no re-membering negations to them I offer thanksgiving for lending me their sighs but una mot bear wit mi. no tire yet. For ai wan tek wan marti salut wit bokuu respekt trowey for una, Plofesa Lorraine York. Na yu com save mi from bakyad wahala, wei i no sabi find leg put for ground in de tizzis. And den yu naaaa, yu liid mi to dis brait spot. I no shame at all at all mek yeye all de taim about hau yu gib mi korage, darektion, and ekseelent supervion all de way. To yu also, Plofesa Donald Goellnicht! Na yu mek reada namba 1 kpatakpata. For de wey yu tek taim com read all drafts of de tiizis wit nice nais nais commentary, na yu I de salut woo. Mek I no kuku forget Plofesa James Dale. Hal hal how yu run comot retirement sign papers mek I finis, I say barka yaga. Last but not little, Plofesa Jefferey Donaldson, I tank yu for taking mi tru de ealy iv stages of dis wahala tiizis. Nuns and Priest, Trinidad, Brickdam Cathedral, Guyana, Plofessas Jnae Bryce, Edward Baugh, Mervyn Morris, Mark McWatt, etc etc, all dem UWI librarians, writers, in de Caribbean, RedCloth Sisters, I salut una yu all. McMaster University and Ghana Government, tank yu for supporting mi financially. To all de rest, I trowey wan maiti salut woo ..•.. September 1997. Dannabang Kuwabong. v -- ---------------------- ABSTRACT This thesis is a comparatoive study of four Africaribbean women's poetry: Marlene Nourbese Philip, Claire Harris, Lorna Goodison, Cynthia James. It is also a study of what it means to be a minority writer who happens to be female and Black in Canada. I look at how various factors affect the way these poets use language to develop an Africaribbean/Canadian feminist rhetoric of recovery, not only for themselves as individuals, but also for Africaribbean group healing and growth. The thesis is divided into five chapters and a tentative conclusion. In Chapter One, I address the various theoretical locations or un-locations and paradigms of Caribbean literary and critical history in order to contextuatlize my reading of the work of these poets. I discuss the salient issues of silence, voice, marginality, language, and audience. Chapter Two takes me through an exploration of the evolution of voice in Marlene Nourbese Philip's poetry within antagonistic yet receptive Canadian literaryscape. I explore her work through theories and practices of decontructing and deterritorializing the imperial father tongue--English--in search of a lost mother tongue. Claire Harris vi developments through high modernist, feminist/postcolonial territories become the framework for my examination of her poetry. But this examination is also done within the background of prairie culture and Canadian political of multiculturalism. Her treatment of Africaribbean femininity, gender relations, race, mother­ daughter relations through a collage of linguistic paraphenalia and literary models is traced and explained. In Chapter Four, I compare the politics of cultural location that produce the discourse of contestation in both Philip and Harris with Lorna Goodison's exploration of Africaribbean culture, and religions from her Jamaican location. I opined that Goodison unlike Philip and Harris to some ecxtent is not very concerned with contesting any domionant group for space and audeince, but searching for an ideology of healing the wounded souls of her people. In Chapter Five, I study Cynthia James's poetic of healing in a Trinbagonian society. My central concern t here is how James makes use of innovative collages of Trinbagonian traditional belief systems, cultural musical productions, and religious and literary traditions to get her people to move from moaning ground to heartease. I arrive finally at a tentative conclusion which stresses a transnational, inter- and intra-theoretical, paralinguistic, and multicultural reading of any of these poets. vii CONTENTS DEDICATION iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv ABSTRACT vi CONTENTS viii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE "Silence I welcomes I the hungry word": Marlene Nourbese Philip's Rhetoric of Recovery 53 CHAPTER TWO Claire Harris and the Rhetoric of Detoxification 106 CHAPTER THREE Lorna Goodison's Rhetoric of Heartsease 157 CHAPTER FOUR Cynthia James: From Moaning Ground to Wholeness Songs 222 CONCLUSION Conclusion in Transit... 269 Bibliography: 280 viii CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCING AFRICARIBBEAN1 RHETORIC OF RECOVERY: OPENING CONCEPTUALIZATIONS. Africaribbean literature originates from a desire to recover the Africaribbean personhood from the history of slavery and colonization. I see in Africaribbean literature a search for a rhetoric that can facilitate that recovery. In saying this, I do not imply that the concept of recovery originated among Africaribbean people, nor do I wish to suggest that it is the only preoccupation of Africaribbean writers. Let me state here then that the concept of recovery is fundamental to all communities that have undergone dramatic or cataclysmic changes in history. The rhetoric of recovery can take several forms, including literature, language, politics, cultural revivalism, religion, and remigration to a homeland from exile. The urgency of the rhetoric is proportional to the magnitude of the interruption of the community's history and patterns of life. Thus a displaced people, such as Africaribbeans, who have lost a significant part of the original mother tongue(s), cultural ethos, cosmological space, religion and land, have a greater urgency in developing a rhetoric of recovery. Africaribbean people have had their histories distorted, denigrated or denied for so 1 I use the terms Africaribbean, Afrisporic, Africentric, in the thesis because they are more gender neutral terms than Afro-Caribbean, African­ Caribbean, Afra-Caribbean, Afrocentric, and Afrosporic. My terms remove the sense of hyphenation and male biases that the other terms suggest. 1 2 long that there is an urgency in their desire to develop a rhetoric of recovery without the agency of an original mother tongue. In this thesis, I analyse the various paradigms that have been used by·four Africaribbean women poets--Marlene Nourbese Philip, Claire Harris, Lorna Goodison, and Cynthia James--to contribute to an Africaribbean rhetoric of recovery. Starting with figures such as Claude McKay, A. J. Seymour, Vic Reid, Paul L. Dunbar, Una Marson, and Louise Bennett, through to Philip, Harris, Goodison, and James, linguistic creolization has been the most important asset for Africaribbeans in their resistance to European cultural domination on slave plantations. The preoccupation of Africaribbean writers with the question of language should not, however, be read as a new age post-colonial strategy for recuperation. It is not the same type of nostalgic poetics engaged in by settler colonists, but a continuation, consolidation, and expansion of a historical legacy of struggles against Euro-American domination. George Lamming brilliantly explicates this position in his review of Caliban's situation in The Tempest in his book The Pleasures of Exile. Taking a poststructuralist stand on language, Lamming contends that language, for the Africaribbean individual and community, extends beyond the colonizing European tongue into an act of "speech and concept as a way, a method, a necessary avenue towards areas of the self which could not be reached in any other way" (109) . Thus in spite of whatever codification that Africaribbeans may engage to exclude the European "Other," they still remain subjects of the European language and are, therefore, always constituted by it. 3 Like their prototype Caliban, they remain captives of the rules, nuances, and consequences of that European language (109). I discuss this point further in Chapter One. Most Africaribbean poets recognize their personal levels of entrapment in this problematic of language. They make use of this predicament by exploiting it for consciousness-raising, however, and as Wilson Harris in Tradition, the Writer & Society says, to "literally rediscover and reinform" themselves in "the face of accretions of accent and privilege, the burden of 'sacred' usage or one-sidedness" (64). The ability of Africaribbean poets to turn captivity in a language into a site for recovery and freedom, comes from their awareness that language can be both the medium and the message, and thus the poet's epistemology can transcend emotional, intellectual, or informational functionality (21).
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