“Now the Half Has Been Told”:Amdntertextual—- •A-Onroach~To"(Erenderandresistance in the Fiction of Four Contempora
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“Now the Half Has Been Told”: Amdntertextual—- •A-onroach~tO"(ErenderandResistance in the Fiction of Four Contemporary Caribbean Women Writers Suzanne Scafe A Thesis submitted to the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. London, September 2005 ProQuest Number: 10673189 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10673189 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 ABSTRACT This thesis focuses on the articulation of political resistance in contemporary fiction by Caribbean women writers and, by using a dialogic approach to reading selected texts, theorises the difference that gender makes in the representation of these dominant themes. Representations of political resistance and transformation in novels by Merle Collins, Zee Edgell, Brenda Flanagan and Ema Brodber are examined in the context of an analysis of Caribbean fiction by male and female writers, which spans a seventy-year period. It begins by arguing that, although Caribbean writers have traditionally used creatively transformed linguistic and textual strategies to signify resistance to colonial domination, Merle Collins’ first novel, Angel, extends these traditions of novelistic transformation to produce a text which is more radically oppositional and at the same time dependent for meaning on its literary precursors. Subsequent chapters focus on different aspects of resistance and trace dialogic connections between fiction by contemporary women writers, colonialist narratives and writing by earlier canonical and non-canonical Caribbean novelists: these connections are used to reveal the ways in which ideologies of gender shape the character of resistance and determine the conditions and possibilities of political, social and cultural transformation. The study concludes by arguing for the need to resist merely reproducing the over determining categories of resistance and liberation that have characterised fictional and theoretical treatments of these themes: it argues for a need to take into account women’s complex and sometimes contradictory interventions in the process of anti colonial resistance and for the construction of a model of resistance which is inclusive, plural and dialogically defined. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction: Critical and Theoretical Frameworks for a Dialogic Reading of Resistance and Gender in Caribbean Women’s Fiction 5 Chapter 2 Political Resistance and Narrative Transformation in Merle Collins’ Angel 55 Chapter 3 Confrontational, Counter-Discursive and Symbolic Acts of Resistance: Merle Collins’ Angel and George Lamming’s In the Castle of Mv Skin 106 Chapter 4......... Refusing “Slave Man’s Revenge”: Reading the Politics of the Resisting Body in Zee Edgell’s Beka Lamb and Brenda Flanagan’s You Alone Are Dancing 155 Chapter 5 Cultural Resistance and Gender in Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron, George Lamming’s Season of Adventure and Ema Brodber’s Mval 207 Chapter 6 Considerations of Gender in Post-Modern Narratives of Resistance to Colonial Historiography: Merle Collins’ The Colour of Forgetting and Earl Lovelace’s Salt 258 Conclusion 308 Bibliography 314 3 Acknowledgements Gratitude beyond words to my husband Michael and my children Akil and Seth for their patience and support to the end. I would also like to thank Joy Fraser and Jan McKenley, dear friends, for their kindness and willingness to listen; my colleagues at LSBU, in particular, Margaret Kinsman; my supervisor at SOAS Nana Wilson-Tagoe. Finally, my heart felt thanks to Jane Miller, who was there in my hour of need and without whom I would not have submitted. 4 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: Critical and Theoretical Frameworks for a Dialogic Reading of Resistance and Gender in Caribbean Women’s Fiction This thesis focuses on the articulation of political resistance in the fiction of four contemporary Caribbean women writers and, by situating women’s fiction in a context of repeated representations of themes of resistance and liberation in male and female-authored Caribbean fiction, theorises the difference that gender makes in the representation of these dominant themes. It begins and ends with Merle Collins’ fiction: her two novels are used to set the questions that this work addresses and to demonstrate the importance of gender both as a dominant mode of representation in Caribbean fiction, and as a category of analysis. My aim is to investigate the extent to which fictional representations of resistance are inflected by ideologies of gender and my analysis is driven by the following questions: How and in what ways does gender power determine the modes of resistance available to men and women? How do ideologies of gender affect the nature and effectiveness of that resistance? Does contemporary Caribbean women’s fiction re-envision tropes of resistance that dominate literary representation in the Caribbean? Can their fictional work be used to theorise new readings of resistance that use gender as a dominant category of analysis? In the process of this investigation I examine the ways in which women-authored texts portray acts of political resistance as complex and as compromised by personal struggles and responsibilities. I demonstrate that women’s engagement with political resistance is mediated by the struggle against patriarchal authority, male abuse and male violence and examine the ways in which these struggles, that take place within the broader effort to resist colonialism, radically transform acts of resistance and the process of liberation. In order to reveal the comiections, interconnection and echoes within the group of texts on which I focus, I use a dialogic approach to reading the fiction and non-fiction that is the subject of this thesis. This, as I demonstrate in later sections of this introduction, represents a new interpretative strategy, which allows for the creation of new meanings in individual texts, meanings that derive from their interconnection with other texts. In addition, the value of dialogism is that it offers the opportunity not merely to compare and contrast representations of resistance in these texts, nor simply to illustrate how works converge and contest each other, but to demonstrate that representation itself depends on the “already uttered” word, or the revision and recreation of the “already bespoke” quality of the word in dialogue (Bakhtin 331). Bakhtinian dialogics also, importantly, allows for a focus on how meaning is created from each new historical, social and political context within which the “word” - that is the fictional work, its repetition and revision of other work and critical interpretations of it - is uttered. Using this theoretical approach, I argue that language, as a site of contestation, is central to literary representations of resistance; language not only mirrors the context within which it is used, it also resists and contests it: meaning is produced from that struggle. My aim is to demonstrate that the figures of resistance and the ideologies of gender that both inform and emerge from these novels, are freighted with meaning that derives from external sources: other works of fiction, historical and political narratives, oral narrative, songs, proverbial sayings, and so on, and that their meaning is woven from the thread of these external referents. The title comes from Ema Brodber’s novel, Myal which is the focus of Chapter 4 and in her novel refers to the untold history of cultural practices which have been used 6 not only to resist the dominance of colonial culture but also to heal those who have been damaged by the uncritical internalisation of that culture. I have used Brodber’s words to refer primarily to the hidden histories of women’s participation in resistance; the use of the word “now” points both to untold histories of the past and to their recovery in the texts of contemporary women writers. RATIONALE FOR THE THESIS As previously stated, resistance is a dominant mode of representation in literature from the Caribbean, and as the fictional, critical and theoretical material referred to in the following section demonstrates, many instances of resistance are not straightforwardly oppositional, nor are they heroic gestures of refusal and escape that are claimed, by some critics, to constitute the basis of liberation.1 In this thesis I argue that Caribbean fictional narratives do create differences between male and female forms of resistance, but that these differences are neither categorical nor clear cut. By focusing on the way in which fictionalised representations of gender power mediate the character, effect and effectiveness of resistance, this study gives a new emphasis and a new direction to interpretations of themes of resistance and liberation in Caribbean fiction. The first section of this introduction begins by exploring the dominant trajectories that have emerged in the treatment of resistance in Caribbean literary criticism, and