UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Secrets of the Bush: Abortion in Caribbean Women’s Literary Imagination A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Leah Meagan Fry Committee in charge: Professor Maurizia Boscagli, Chair Associate Professor Teresa Shewry Associate Professor Stephanie Batiste September 2016 The dissertation of Leah Meagan Fry is approved. _____________________________________________ Stephanie L. Batiste _____________________________________________ Teresa Shewry _____________________________________________ Maurizia Boscagli, Committee Chair May 2016 Secrets of the Bush: Abortion in Caribbean Women’s Literary Imagination Copyright © 2016 by Leah Meagan Fry iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to all those who made me believe that this work was possible. From my undergraduate years, this includes Liz Barnes, my honors thesis director, Deborah Morse, and Melanie Dawson. You continue to serve as my ideal feminist academics, and you guided me to a great PhD program. To Tina Gianquitto, thank you for supporting another a literary scholar writing about women and plants. I won’t forget your kindness. Thanks to the UCSB English department and UCSB Grad Division for helping to fund my research trip to Jamaica in 2015. This research was invaluable as I framed my critical methods. Thanks to my committee: Maurizia, for your enthusiasm and encouragement; Tess, for your unwaveringly excellent notes; and Stephanie, for your incisive questions about my position as a scholar. My parents, Jake, Aunt Beth-Eireann, Karen, MR—thanks for your unwaivering support! Thank you UAW 2865-Local, without whom I would never have had the necessary time each week to do my own research. In solidarity. And Tom: You and Agi are the best reward for all this work. iv VITA OF LEAH MEAGAN FRY September 2016 EDUCATION Bachelor of Arts in English, College of William and Mary, May 2010 (magna cum laude) Master of Arts in English, University of California, Santa Barbara, June 2013 Doctor of Philosophy in English, University of California, Santa Barbara, September 2016 PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT 2011–2016: Teaching Assistant, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara 2014–2015: Teaching Assistant, Writing Program, University of California, Santa Barbara 2014–2015: Research Assistant, Hemispheric Souths Initiative, University of California, Santa Barbara 2014–2016: Editorial Assistant, Camera Obscura, Duke University Press AWARDS Donald Pearce Dissertation Fellowship, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2015 Humanities and Social Sciences Research Grant, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2015 FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Global Anglophone Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature Studies in Twentieth Century Anglophone Literature: Maurizia Boscagli Studies in US Race and Ethnic Literature: Stephanie L. Batiste and Felice Blake Studies in Theories of Literature and the Environment: Tess Shewry v ABSTRACT Secrets of the Bush: Abortion in Caribbean Women’s Literary Imagination by Leah Meagan Fry Secrets of the Bush examines the role of abortion in contemporary literary production by women in the English-speaking Caribbean. In works of fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction by Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Olive Senior, Nalo Hopkinson, Michelle Cliff, Grace Nichols, Lorna Goodison, Loretta Collins Klobah, and the Sistren Theatre Collective, women attempt to terminate pregnancy using bush teas made from abortifacient plants. My central claim is that representations of herbal abortions are a means of imagining how women negotiate reproductive justice in a region controlled by biomedical and neoliberal economic agencies of the Global North. My title plays on the double-signification of “bush” as a wild space of nature as well as slang for women’s pubic hair to underline how the literary texts represent abortion using coded language. This idea is especially resonant in the ambiguity surrounding scenes of abortion in these texts, suggesting unnamed but enduring arts, and a marked reticence about fully revealing these practices. I employ a historical-materialist approach to draw on existing scholarship on contemporary historical fiction concerning slavery, known as the neo-slave genre, to address texts that pose vi slavery as a starting point for interrogating reproductive justice in the contemporary Caribbean. I also engage with contemporary feminist activism and theory to explore these issues as they appear in literature. My project makes two key interventions. The first involves rethinking gender and sexuality in the Caribbean region so that it interrogates spatial and geographic modes of belonging. This brings in an ecocritical component to my dissertation, especially because recent ecocriticism has increasingly been concerned with accounting for racial and gender difference in how people relate to the natural world. My study of these literary texts suggests that women are bound together by their knowledge of anti-reproductive agents and their willingness to use them. The land is a site of this communal relationship. Abortions using botanical agents enact an alternative way of interacting with our world, and, paradoxically, a way of sustaining human cultures in an increasingly precarious climate. Second, I explore theorizations of Caribbean nationalization, bringing in a critique of discourses of creolization in history and social science disciplines. “Secrets of the Bush” contributes to African American and Caribbean literary studies of motherhood and nation. vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Undated survey map of Papine Estate, National Library of Jamaica……………33 viii I. Introduction I, me, I am a free black woman. It must be known now how that silent legacy nourished and infused such a line such a close linked chain to hold us until we could speak . loud enough to hear ourselves . and believe our own words. — Christine Craig, “Poem” On March 12, 2009, Sistren Theatre Collective presented “A Slice of Reality,” a fifteen-minute performance before the joint select committee of the Jamaican Parliament. Eight women (Althea Blackwood, Pauline Blake, Sonia Britton, Carlene Campbell, Lana Finikin, Patricia Riley, and Joanne Stewart) performed sketches that were accompanied by Sistren’s drummer, Julian Hardie.1 In one short piece, two women discussed a teenage girl named only “X” who has secretly had an abortion; this was followed by a monologue protesting the fact that a well-known wealthy man repeatedly raped a mentally disabled woman.2 Sistren ended the performance with a refrain spoken 1 Heron, Toppin, and Finikin, “Sistren in Parliament,” 53. 2 Ibid., 46. 1 by all of the women onstage: “Woman you have your own life ina yuh hand . we a nuh murderah.”3 These lines were a direct rebuke to the joint select committee, which was formed in 2008 to debate constitutional reforms to abortion policy in Jamaica. This short 15-minute performance sheds light on a problem that has dogged Jamaican women for decades: the postcolonial nation’s failure to fully accommodate their needs and rights. The term postcolonial nation encompasses a wide range of states across the globe. Some nations, like Canada, are former settler colonies with significant political and economic power on the global stage. Others, like Jamaica, are former colonies that, despite their political independence from colonial powers, continue to suffer structural inequities due to a global governmental and economic system—neoliberalism—that rewards the capitalistic exploitation of natural and human resources.4 Despite these differences, postcolonial nations share one thing in common: they are historically colonized spaces that seek to define themselves as independent from the colonizers. But as Hershini Bhana Young writes, “the democratic promises made by newly independent postcolonial governments have shriveled in the sun as racial, sexual, and gender inequalities, inherited from colonialism, become more firmly entrenched.”5 Jamaica’s 2009 debate on abortion policy reform makes clear the ways in which “sexual and gender inequalities” persist, even after formal 3 Ibid., 46. This translates as: Women, you have your own lives in your hands. We are not murderers. See Cassidy and Page, Dictionary of Jamaican English, 1, 219, 234, 322, 489. 4 For an exhaustive list of the ways in which Caribbean countries continue to suffer under this regime, see Sen and Grown, Development, 28–29. 5 Young, Haunting Capital, 15. 2 independence in 1962. Religious fundamentalism and rigid adherence to colonial law continue to further “entrench” women’s inequality. At its heart, Secrets of the Bush explores the problem of reproduction in the Caribbean geography. Abortion, contraception, rape, and miscarriage all play significant roles in contemporary Caribbean women’s literary imagination, and as such, highlight that women’s reproductive experiences are mediated by and respond to the demand for reproductive sexuality by the state. This state, as Sistren’s performance argues, is merely itself a shadow of former imperial power. It mimics and reproduces power relations—particularly in racialized, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies—that have been entrenched in the Caribbean plantation economy for centuries. By writing, or performing, about reproduction and women’s attempts to abort it, women of the contemporary Caribbean seek to create a better, more just world. In this way, my project works