Penelope Speaks: Making the Mythic Specific in the Works of Five Contemporary Caribbean and Italian Writers - Lorna Goodison, Juana Rosa Pita, Derek Walcott, Silvana La Spina and Luigi Malerba

by

Lisa Kathleen Pike-Fiorindi

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Comparative Literature Women and Gender Studies Institute University of Toronto

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Abstract

Using a combination of literary, postcolonial, and gender theories, the following study looks at the figure of

Penelope in works of various genres by five contemporary

Italian and Caribbean writers. It is a synchronic analysis with the aim of addressing each representation of Penelope within its socio-historical and cultural location at the same time that it examines common themes and approaches to her figure. The introduction traces the importance of the figure of Penelope the weaver to European theoretical discussions about narrative and subjectivity as well as her significance to feminism as a metaphor for Western women's writing and to the notion of violence against women in particular. Within the Caribbean, the figure of Penelope as weaver is significant insofar as it embodies an inter- relational notion of subjectivity; her figure is also linked to resisting a logic of domination and

ii objectification. The first chapter presents an analysis of the figure of Penelope as mother. The chapter brings together the poetry of Jamaican-born Lorna Goodison (Guinea

Woman 2000), the Italian author Silvana La Spina's novel

Penelope (1998), and Cuban-born poet Juana Rosa Pita's long poem Viajes de Penelope (1980). Each author's engagement with the figure of Penelope as mother accomplishes things particular to their individual cultural contexts and histories: Goodison's work is invested in outlining an

African maternal geneology; La Spina's novel rises out of an Italian feminist context, concerned with issues such as violence against women and how particular forms of violence are institutionalized; La Spina's writing seeks to create a non-hierarchical model of being between mother and son to challenge both the gender hierarchy as well as the sacrificial notion of motherhood that lies at the centre of

Catholicism which in some ways informs her work. Chapter two examines Penelope as wife in the St. Lucian author

Derek Walcott's The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1993) and in the Italian writer Luigi Malerba's novel Itaca per sempre

(1997). A renegotion of the conjugal bond where each spouse configures as equal partner in a non-hierarchal, inter- subjective relationship serves as the axis of analysis. Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Rocco Capozzi for his continual support and encouragement throughout the composition of this project. His open-door policy and his willingness to discuss and read my work in all of its various stages of development helped to propel the writing and nourish my ideas. Thank you. I would also like to acknowledge my other committee members' unwavering support:

Dr. J.E. Chamberlin, for the amiable discussions which always helped me to see something in a new light; Dr.

Nestor Rodriguez for his thorough feedback, words of encouragement and helpful suggestions; and Dr. Ricardo

Sternberg, for all his support and advice throughout. I would also like to thank Dr. Edward Baugh, external examiner for this project, for his close reading, attention to detail and questions aimed at furthering the research.

Thanks to the Centre for Comparative Literature, the

Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto, for providing a supportive place to write and research.

Sincere thanks and acknowledgement to my family members - especially to my mother Sharon Judith Johnson - for all the acts of support in all their various forms.

iv And, last but not least, I want to give thanks to my daughter Caterina and my son Luca for all they have taught me about language, listening, and love.

v Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Acknowledgments iv

Introduction 1

The Penelope Theme 2 i: The importance of Joyce 2 ii: Penelope as a metaphor for Western women's 7 writing iii: Women's Rights as Human Rights: the issue 10 of women and violence iv: Ulysses 15 v: History as histories 19 vi: Myth and history in the Caribbean 20

Chapter 1: Penelope as Mother in the works of Lorna Goodison, Silvana La Spina, and Juana Rosa Pita 28

i. Situating Maternal Identities 28 ii. Lorna Goodison: Guinea Woman 31 iii. Silvana La Spina: Penelope 55 iv. Juana Rosa Pita: Viajes de Penelope 84

Chapter 2: Penelope as story-teller, wife-lover in the works of Derek Walcott and Luigi Malerba 10 6 i. Cultural Contexts 106 ii. Derek Walcott: The Odyssey: A Stage Version 111 iii. Luigi Malerba: Itaca per sempre 132

Afterward: Penelope into the new millenium 15 9

End Notes 163

Works Consulted 167 INTRODUCTION

There are diachronic studies of the figure of Penelope

outlining how she has moved through time and also how her

representation is part of the values and ideologies of

different periods (Grigar; Mactoux). Rather than establish

a genealogy for the figure of Penelope from classical

Greece into twentieth century Europe, this analysis proposes a synchronic study of five contemporary texts of various genres from the Mediterranean and the Caribbean.

These two particular geographic regions are brought together through Derek Walcott's concept of the echo as

expressed in "A Sail on the Horizon". Presented at the 1996

conference "Ulisse: il mito e la memoria" held in Rome,

Walcott's essay affirms a relationship between the regions that is grounded in the notion of simultaneity and echo

rather than in a margin-centre dichotomy whereby the

Caribbean rewrites a classical, European past. This

synchronic study also aims to suggest the different

influences and criss-crossings of ideas that provide a ground for a particular emergence of Penelope in the 1980s,

1990s, and into the new millennium.

1 The Penelope Theme

i: The importance of Joyce

In looking at Penelope in this particular context, the

Ulysses of James Joyce is an important starting point. It is with Joyce that there is a movement away from the universal toward the particular. But this movement toward the particular is also a challenge to the universal insofar as it asks, much like the French critic Roland Barthes will do in Mythologies (1957), later translated into English in

1971, to recognize that which has been called universal, myth, and archetype as the prevailing ideology of the moment. To recognize myth as "depoliticized speech"

(Barthes 145) and to know the archetype as disguise for the dominant narrative is to free the story from its mythic and historical weight. Freed from this weight, Ulysses is no longer the hero of epic, a tradition that is one of the founding blocks of Western literature and civilization, passed down as something fixed from generation to generation, but rather, he becomes a man wandering the streets of early twentieth-century Dublin where Ireland still lives as a colony of England. Penelope, too, is freed from this weight; she is no longer the static

2 symbol of patience and virtue, but rather, she becomes a woman called Molly with speech and desires.1

Hand in hand with the unhinging of the characters and their story from the mythic universal which may also in this case be called the dominant historical and cultural narrative, the experimental form and language of Joyce challenges dominant modes of writing in Europe. Joyce's use of language and form in Ulysses influences discussions about language, subjectivity and the novel throughout the twentieth century. In Italy, for example, Ulysses is translated in its entirety for the first time in 1960, becoming an important text for debates about the novel of the neo avant-garde collective, Gruppo 63 (Zanotti 348-54).

Similarly, in France, Ulysses, although first translated in its entirety in 1929, becomes important in the late 1950s and early 1960s for the writers of the nouveau roman (Slote

383) .

More importantly perhaps, for the international impact that it entails, is the influence of Joyce within

French literary, philosophical and psychoanalytic circles.

Joyce's writing is an important part of the debates occurring in the influential French literary journal Tel

Quel (1960-1983) and for Lacanian psychoanalysis, both of which have a close relationship with French feminism

3 (Weedon 12-13) . In turn, French Feminism impacts feminist thought in Italy as well as in the U.S. and Canada. The publication of New French Feminisms in 1980, a collection of essays translated from French into English featuring the work of Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray is an important marker of this influence in the U.S. and

English speaking Canada.

The work of French feminist theorists Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva develops alongside the work of Jacques

Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes. Cixous' doctoral research2 on Joyce moves her to use his writing to define what she calls ecriture feminine, a concept that will preoccupy feminist literary discussions during the

1980s in both Europe and North America. In addition to the central role she gives Joyce's fluid writing style in providing a model for her ecriture feminine, Cixous is

(like many other women writers in this period) also actively engaged in the feminist revisioning of classical myths from the female point of perspective as is seen in works like Le Livre de Promethee (1983) [The Book of

Promethea (1987)]. Kristeva also takes up Joyce in the context of explicating and defining her concept of the semiotic in La revolution du langage poetique (1974)

[Revolution in Poetic Language (1984)] whereby drives and

4 impulses associated with the mother's body and the pre- symbolic speech sounds and rhythms of the child interrupt and disrupt the paternal symbolic order.

The translations of these women's theories in New

French Feminisms (1980) is especially important for the dissemination of ideas into the U.S. feminist context.

However, women's studies in the U.S. Academy is characterized by a liberal feminism where the emphasis lies more on women's writing (writing by women) than concerns about an ecriture feminine. American women's studies is characterized at this time by notions of retrieval and recovery of women's writing to fill in "gaps" in the established literary canon. There is a concentrated effort at this time to produce a women's literary history.3

The Derridian concept of deferral is also linked with

Joyce's writing and for Lacan, this concept of deferral is the process by which desire itself operates (Slote 407).

Discussions about the deferral of meaning operating within texts that Derrida's work incites are complemented by the metaphor of weaving. While the association of weaving with narrative is one that the ancient Greeks themselves made

(Clayton 25,84), it gets taken up in a way that is central to discussions regarding writing and subjectivity in this period of the 1970s and 1980s Europe and North America.

5 With the constant deferral of meaning that occurs within the text that Derrida proposes, the emphasis on the author becomes increasingly diminished. Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author" (1967) is one such landmark text in this respect, followed by his theory of the text as a

"hyphology" where the author/subject "unmakes himself, like a spider dissolving in the secretions of its web" (The

Pleasure of the Text 64) . This idea of hyphology and the concept of deferral will appear more directly linked to the figure of Penelope in the U.S. with critics like Peggy

Kamuf outlining the "Penelopean text" (Signature Pieces

1988).

6 ii: Penelope as a metaphor for Western women's writing

In addition to the idea of the Penelopean text that

Peggy Kamuf puts forth (following concepts of Derridean deferral and the ideas of Barthes hyphology where the text is something into which the subject is woven, written into

"the play of differences itself" (Signature Pieces 164)),

Penelope becomes an important metaphor for women's writing within the U.S. academic feminist context of the 1980s.

Works important for the elaboration and definition of this metaphor and for establishing the link between women's storytelling/writing and weaving are Carolyn Heilbrun's

1985 South Atlantic Modern Language Association keynote address "What Was Penelope Unweaving?" (Hamlet's Mother and

Other Women), Elaine Showalter's "Piecing and Writing", and

Nancy K. Miller's "Arachnologies: The Woman, the Text, and the Critic". A link is established in these writings between the work that women have customarily done - weaving and sewing - to women's stories that have remained untold or unrecognized. Weaving is seen as a language of resistance as well as a type of secret language among women. Both Showalter's "Piecing and Writing" and

Miller's "Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text" are part of the important collection Poetics of Gender (1985) in which

7 other seminal essays of 1980s feminist thought like Gilbert and Gubar's "Tradition and the Female Talent" appear.

Miller's essay is a direct response to Barthes' use of the metaphor of weaving in The Pleasure of the Text. In this

1980s feminist vein of establishing a female writing subject, Miller objects to the effect of Barthes' declamation of the "Death of the Author" insofar as it kills off (by delegitimating) other discussions of the writing and reading subject (271). Miller's attempt to shift the emphasis from the weaving back to the weaver exemplifies both a feminist critique of the death of the subject that postmodernism was perceived to represent in this period and a desire to establish the subject as female. U.S. feminist academics' interest in weaving as metaphor for a specifically women's writing was part of a movement to revalue work that women have customarily performed as well as to recuperate a body of writing by women authors who had been left out of the official literary canon. This revival of women's culture as

Showalter calls it, explicit in the abounding pen and needle metaphors (224), is also present in the work of feminist psychologists writing in this period. Nancy

Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) re-thinks and revalues the mother-child relationship, for instance,

8 and "metaphors of the female web of relationship" (17) are explicated and put forth in a positive light by Carol

Gilligan in In A Different Voice (1982). While this strategic move of revaluing those roles and duties that women have customarily performed - and with radical feminism in particular have been configured as oppressive - ultimately suffers critiques of essentialism, the strain of feminist thinking engaged in theorizing a women's writing and developing a women's literary history is important insofar as it claims Penelope as a model for a feminist poetics. Heilbrun, for example, compares a whole generation of Western women writers and theorists to Penelope who tries out new stories on her loom "that we shall, in wonder and in terror, begin to live"(111).

9 iii. Women's Rights as Human Rights: the issue of women and violence

The idea of Penelope's weaving is often linked by

Western feminists in this period to staving off of violence. It is this weaving that either keeps the violence of the suitors at bay or offers an alternative to the violence: both Helen and Penelope weave while men make war says Heilbrun (103).4 With weaving as a metaphor for women's writing and speech, it is no surprise that such a metaphor becomes invested with an element of resistance, moving from the concept of "speaking" to "speaking out". The concern with the female subject and the lived reality of violence against women is a prominent issue at the international level in this time period. The Vienna Tribunal of 1993 attests to the rise in awareness of specifically domestic violence against women and sexual abuse of both women and girls worldwide. The Vienna Tribunal gathered together women from different generations and countries in an effort to have their stories of violence and sexual abuse told and recognized as crimes against humanity within the United

Nations legal framework.

Within Italy in particular, the awareness of violence against women in a domestic setting manifests itself in

10 novels like Lara Cardella's Volevo i pantalonl (I Wanted to

Wear Trousers, 1989)5 which partake in a more general turn to fiction as a political means of expression. The engagement with fiction in this way grows out of a feminism characterized by efforts in the 1970s and 1980s (like the

Women' s Liberation Movement elsewhere in Europe and North

America) to change laws governing divorce, abortion, as well as the legal definition of rape (Wood 194-96). Silvana

La Spina's novel, Penelope (1998), is a good example of what the ground laid by what is known as second wave feminism can produce. La Spina takes up issues that Italian feminists have politically and legally lobbied for in the

1970s and 1980s and couples these issues with a revisiting of a classical Greek myth. While feminists in Europe and

North America have been engaged in this reworking of classical myth throughout the 1970s and 80s whereby the stories of female characters of the myths are written or re-written (eg: Margaret Atwood's "The Circe/Mud Poems"

(1974), Dacia Maraini's I sogni di Clitennestra (The

Dreams of Clytemnestra, 1981), Christa Wolf's Kassandra

(1983), and Rachel DuPlessis' "Medusa" (1980)) to challenge what was perceived as the foundation of patriarchal Western society - the Greek polis - La Spina' s text makes the move from speaking women's stories to speaking out. Her Penelope

11 speaks out against violence against women and more importantly, against the institutions that support and legitimize it. Indeed, it can be argued that La Spina's

Penelope engages in what is currently called a structural approach to violence whereby the analysis of violence against women is part of a larger analysis of the societal structures, institutions, and economic relations between countries and regions in the world which are the legacies of colonialism that support violence and unequal power relations between people. (Vickers). In this sense, La

Spina's text goes beyond the framework of woman-man/victim- perpetrator used within the discussions of women and violence at the UN where the recognition of women's rights as human rights is in large part dependent upon a paternal narrative of woman as victim in need of rescue (by the UN itself).

While La Spina' s Penelope is part of a larger international discussion of women and violence occurring in the 1990s, it is also part of a particular heritage of

Italian feminism with roots in left-wing political parties and activism within trade unions. Unlike feminism in North

American contexts which developed in tandem with the creation and expansion of women's studies departments in universities, and French Feminism which through its close

12 ties with Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean philosophy was also tied to the Academy, Italian feminism remained largely separate from these institutions. This separation is illustrated in the creation and proliferation in the

1970s of women-run and organized independent publishing houses and theatre groups such as II Teatro della

Maddalena founded by Dacia Maraini6. Also important during this time was the concept of affidamento, or "entrustment" whereby younger women entrusted themselves to the experience of an older woman mentor. As Sharon Wood in

Italian Women's Writing 1860- 1994 writes, there was an effort to "understand [...] female subjectivity not in relation to institutions or men, but to other women"(196).

With the turn to fiction in the 1990s, however, there is what might be called a slide of feminist concerns into male academic circles.

This slide can also be seen as occurring in the 1980s with a strain of feminist criticism engaging with established Italian male writers. Writers like Italo

Calvino and Umberto Eco who revisit the past and are part of Italian postmodern fiction are interrogated by critics like Teresa de Lauretis, for example, and called upon to respond to and be accountable for how their critical engagements with the past represent women and reinforce or

13 potentially revision traditional gender relations where unequal power relations have been the norm.7 The slide can also be seen in work of Italian women academics engaging in fiction writing, bringing "theoretical insights of linguistics, post-structuralism and literary theory" (Wood

212) . While La Spina is not among those female academics like Maria Corti, Ginevra Bompiani and Elisabetta Rasy, her fiction nevertheless can be seen as participating in this shift whereby political feminist concerns blend with discussions about history and representation in academic circles. The publication of La Spina's Penelope in 1998 in particular, can be seen as being spurred on and influenced by the academic conference organized by Boitani and held in the capital of Rome.

14 iv. Ulysses

Beginning in the early 1990s, Piero Boitani did much to promote an interest in and reconsideration of the figure of Ulysses within academic circles at an international level. Giving lectures at Oxford, Berkeley, the University of Tokyo and elsewhere, Boitani looked at the figure of

Ulysses in "Euro-American Literature and History", as well as at the incarnation of Ulysses particular to Dante. His publications from this period include L'ombra di Ulisse

(1992) and Sulle orme di Ulisse (1998).

Of particular importance is the art exhibit and literary conference held in Rome in 1996 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Gathering together pieces of sculpture and artwork from ancient Greece and Rome up through the ages, as well as bringing together writers from around the world who have engaged with the figure of Odysseus, the conference marks the site of an important international cultural and artistic event. Gathering together artifacts and "contemporary singers of Ulysses" as Boitani calls them in the introduction to the published conference proceedings, Boitani embarks on a journey into the past that does not free Ulysses from the weight of history and history from the weight of one truth. Rather, his project

15 has the effect of solidifying one story about Ulysses, one truth in the intersection of myth and history which serves to bolster a male Eurocentric literary and cultural genealogy. The "cantatori contemporanei di Ulisse"

("contemporary singers of Ulysses"; 16) from across the globe are not so much present because their songs signal other possible voices and truths, but rather, they are, within the context of the conference, proof of the greatness of a literary and cultural tradition that has, because of its 'greatness', been taken up in other parts of the world. Ulysses is taken into "una prigione africana e nella terra di Mandela" (an African prison and into the land of Mandela; 28) by Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott, says Boitani, "f[a] disegnare una mappa del Nuouvo Mondo"

"draws a map of the New World" with his figure (28) . The inference here is that the centre is Europe; Ulysses moves outward, discovering and being discovered, and then back toward the centre the conference defines and embodies in its physical location in the city of Rome. Indeed, through a skilful use of rhetoric, Boitani performs much the same maneuver as the ancient Roman emperors he describes in this introduction who used myth to consolidate existing political power. Indeed, he interlaces appearances of

Ulysses in myth, history, and literature throughout the

16 ages and places them in a past Roman origin that somehow reflects and justifies the location of the present conference. Creating "1'immagine di Ulisse come luogo in cui coincidono il passato e il presente" (the image of

Ulysses as place in which the present and the past coincide"; 17), Boitani's introduction is a carefully wrought piece where European origins are established and legitimized and non-European presences are rendered

European through "i trionfi della lingua e della poesia"

(the triumphs of language and poetry"; 17).

In the Eurocentric paternal genealogy of Boitani's tightly-woven tapestry, there is no room for the consideration of Penelope. Penelope in this view, remains both marginal and static, an object to be reclaimed and conquered (24). In a context where such a genealogy is cultivated and those who have, at least culturally, represented the threatening xother' are brought into the

Eurocentric fold, it is not surprising that the image of woman - the ^other' in terms of sex and gender - is not an articulate speaking Penelope, but instead, as the art exhibit "Ulisse: il mito e la memoria"8 held in conjunction with the conference shows, is the carefully re-constructed image of the familiar devouring woman-monster woman, Scylla and Charybdis.9

17 Unlike Boitani's reinstatement of a paternal

Eurocentric cultural genealogy whereby non-Europeans in some way become European through their engagement with the figure of Ulysses, Luigi Malerba, one of the best known authors to take up the story of the Odyssey within this time period, works to question the status of the event, historical or otherwise. In this way, his engagement with the story of Ulysses serves to go beyond a reinstatement of a particular genealogy and established tradition to move toward imagination and possibility. Other stories can begin to be heard.

18 v. History as histories

Unlike the project of Boitani, the work of Luigi

Malerba is engaged in the strand of metanarrative Italian historical fiction. Works such as Le rose imperiali (1974),

II pataffio (197 8), II fuoco greco (1990) , Le maschere

(1995) and Itaca per sempre (Ithaca Forever, 1998) attest to Malerba's engagement with the past. Ruth Glynn, in her recent article "Fiction as Imprisonment in Luigi Malerba's

II fuoco greco" (2002), notes that although Itaca per sempre takes up myth and not historical events, it nevertheless performs the same operation as these historical novels insofar as the ,truth' of an event is shown to exist in the narrative structure it is given.

Glynn makes the connection between this type of engagement with the past and the representation of events with debates occurring around postmodern historiography as represented by the work of Hayden White in Metahistory (1973) . The loosening of the historical and mythical event from a truth beyond the one constructed in its narration is important because it allows for the existence of multiple truths; indeed, this is why it is possible to hear the voice of

Penelope and not just that of Ulysses.

19 vi. myth, history, and subjectivity in the Caribbean

In Myth and History in the Caribbean (1992), Barbara

Webb identifies the use of mythic symbols to explore and create a history for the Caribbean other than the one of dispossession and exploitation that it has been assigned within History. Webb examines the fiction of Alejo

Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant while drawing on the work and theorizing of other Caribbean writers such as Derek Walcott. Her purpose is to outline the intersection of myth and history in the Caribbean carried out as a "poetics" of history through which the region is released from the alienation experienced within the dominant narrative of History (3-5).

While a parallel may be drawn between Western feminist efforts to write back to what was seen as the beginnings of patriarchal institutions in the West and the idea

^marginal' or colonized cultures writing back to Empire,

Derek Walcott and Lorna Goodison, along with the writers

Webb, for example, takes up in her study, work to resist this margin-centre dichotomy that has often characterized theories of the postcolonial.10 The resistance to a margin- centre Eurocentric framework is part of a resistance to understanding the Caribbean and its history as exclusively

20 one of dispossession. Goodison's engagement, for example, with the figure of Penelope and with the communities of black women she represents in her poems simultaneously explores the relationship between European culture, classical myth and colonialism and a history of black women's relationships and resistance rooted in African culture. Viewing Goodison's work from this angle, her

"poetic divination", to use a term from Glissant, coincides with current challenges to the construction of feminism as a European and North American phenomenon. Drawing on the work of Ifi Amadiume, Roberta Timothy asserts, for instance, that African feminisms predate white feminisms insofar as African women have always been active participants in their communities fighting for change(5).

But like Walcott, Goodison's poetic history is not one of a simple African return. Instead, identity is explored in its complexities and inheritance is seen as a multi- faceted crystal that can be picked up, looked into and looked at, its colours and light changing in direction shape and shade as we run our fingers along its smooth but sharp edges again and again. Penelope, in this context, serves as a figure through which many principles of

Caribbean thinking and theorizing come alive and become embodied into a living subject.

21 While Penelope is used as a metaphor for women's writing and for textuality and narrative within a Western feminist and literary context of the late twentieth century, her figure, as taken up by Walcott and Goodison, goes beyond an essentialized view of a subject ^forgotten' or written out of History that Western feminism projects.

Similarly, it goes beyond a theoretical articulation of the continual deferral of meaning that a deconstructionist view might promote to put forth a vivid rendering of a relational and shifting subjectivity that has been and is a lived experience in the region of the Caribbean. Penelope and her weaving become a place where principles of

Caribbean thinking and theorizing are not only articulated but embodied in a gendered historical subject.

The challenge to the unified humanist subject and to the notion of transcendental origins that deconstruction and postmodernism present is linked to the type of subjectivity both lived and theorized in the Caribbean.

Michael Dash, in The Other America (1998), for example, cites Derrida and Foucault's challenges to concepts of unified subjectivity and transcendental origins as important for the concept of creolization in the Caribbean

(103). Celia Britton, too, in a study on Glissant within postcolonial theory, outlines what she calls the "overlap"

22 of Glissant's theorizing of the Caribbean and other postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha for whom Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan are

"essential reference points"(5). Britton, in this study, looks at postcolonial theory's debt to French theory as well as Glissant's own intellectual formation within French postructuralist theory "characterize[ing] the French intelligentsia from the 1950s to the 1970s" with which

Glissant was, in different ways, engaged(5).

These connections, however, are not meant, in the context of this study, to be read as a type of

'development' or genealogy, but rather, they are intended to provide a vision of how the figure of Penelope and the various ideas with which she is connected might be both grounded in specific cultural contexts and travel across threads of thought that stretch over, through and back again amongst these specific cultural contexts and locations. Too, it is important to consider how, for a writer and theorist like Derek Walcott, the ideas of heterogeneity which challenges to a unified subjectivity are made are not ones that belong exclusively to the twentieth century, somehow coming into existence with postmodernist thought. As Dash points out in his analysis of the relationship between the Mediterranean and the

23 Caribbean in Walcott's writing, ancient Athens and contemporary Port of Spain are both, as articulated in

Walcott's Antilles, a site of intercultural relations and

"complex polyglossia" (Mikhail Bakhtin qtd in Dash, 103) .

"It is as if", Dash states, "the promise of the polyglossia of the Aegean Sea is not so much fulfilled by Europe as by the Caribbean"(106).

It is on this point that readings like Valerie Bada's of Walcott's The Odyssey: A Play might go further. Bada, in her 2000 article "Derek Walcott's The Odyssey: A Post-

Colonial "Odd Assay" of the Epic Genre as a Regenerative

Source of "Latent Cross-Culturalities"", outlines how the postmodern concepts of deferral and refusal of closure as well as Wilson Harris' concept of "cross-cultural latency" are at the core of the play. Bada singles out the reference in the play to the horizon and waves of the sea as

Penelope's "bowstring" and "lyre" in order to support the elaboration of what she identifies as the "metaphor of sea as poetic site" (234). Bada compares Penelope's unstitched knots of a tapestry whose completion is deferred to the nautical knots of Odysseus whose return home is also continuously deferred, and indicates that the waiting and weaving of Penelope, through her connection to the sea as place of poetic site, comes to represent a "fecund

24 creativity" (234). Coupled with the exploration of how the postmodern concept of deferral is at work in the play is

Bada's interest in how mythic elements of ancient Greek and

Yoruba epic are interwoven both to bring out the "cross cultural latencies" spanning both time and space which

Harris elaborates in The Radical Imagination (1992). While

Bada's reading reflects in some way Walcott's own view of ancient Greece and present-day Port of Spain as contemporary, it does not go beyond reading the figure of

Penelope as metaphor.

Bada is not alone. Paula Burnett's discussion of

Penelope in the play is framed in terms of a "feminine principle" that is greater in Walcott's work than in that of Homer. Peter Burian, too, refers to Penelope as a type of tool with which to question a heroic code. While it is clear that Penelope and her weaving is a metaphor for a poetic process, it is also important to see her as living subject. And this is where reading Walcott's Penelope together with Lorna Goodison's Penelope proves fruitful.

While Bada and others pick up on how Odysseus and his wanderings exemplify a specifically Caribbean subject and identity linked to concepts of exile in the sense of the

Barbadian writer-theorist George Lamming's "pleasures of exile", shifting the focus to Penelope in terms of

25 examining a particularly Caribbean subject and identity would move the discussion closer to the ideas of "relation" and "opacity" of Martinican writer-theorist Edouard

Glissant whereby a model of non-hierarchical inter- subjectivity is elaborated. The reality that Walcott creates on stage is indeed one of inter-subjectivity where all people and things are connected. Penelope is at the centre of this model, her weaving linked to the concepts of deferral and heterogeneity that have found expression in the discourse of Western poststructuralism and postmodernism. However, Penelope and the type of subjectivity and way of understanding and being in the world she represents is also that of a living historical woman. In some ways, this type of local embodiment of a subjectivity characterized by a non-unified nature without origins can be proposed as a means of quelling the crisis which many Western feminists thought themselves to be facing in the late 1980s and early 1990s regarding the proclaimed death of the humanist subject: just as women and other marginalized people were gaining a place and voice within this humanist framework of being in the world, they claimed, the notion of the subject suspiciously disappears.

Walcott's Penelope is flesh and blood on the stage.

She does not simply represent an abstract interrogation of

26 a heroic code as Peter Burian might suggest, nor is she a

"feminine principle" as Paula Burnett says; instead, she is a woman who boldly questions Odysseus' wanderings and slaughter of the suitors by very graphically calling attention to the fact that she is a living breathing woman with thoughts and desires of her own: IT'S FOR THIS I KEPT

MY THIGHS CROSSED FOR TWENTY YEARS?" (2.6.153). Goodison's

Penelope, too, is "The Mulatta as Penelope", a living West

Indian woman simultaneously grounded in the future and the past, with infant son on one side and great grandmother guinea woman on the other. Goodison's mulatta as Penelope can even be read in this sense as Guinea Woman herself,

"higgler with pencil in her tiehead / to cancel old debts, seamstress with the scissors / in her right hand who will cut for us fit pattern"("Controlling the Silver" 78-80).

The Caribbean subject here is one that is not framed in the concept of exile or displacement, but rather, it is one that exudes a continual interconnectedness that has the healing powers of forgiveness, redemption and a love that springs, above all else, from self-love. The subjectivity which Walcott and Goodison develop in their writing is one of a living Caribbean woman acting in on and through her world.

27 Chapter 1: Penelope as Mother in the works of Lorna Goodison, Silvana La Spina, and Juana Rosa Pita

i. Penelope: situating maternal identities

The point of interest in bringing these three authors together for examination is in the way they foreground

Penelope's identity as mother rather than as wife. Indeed, the portrayal of Penelope as mother is an integral part of

Lorna Goodison, Silvana La Spina, and Juana Rosa Pita's engagement with her figure. Differing from the European literary and artistic tradition beginning with Homer where

Penelope is defined by her relation to Odysseus, these authors' depiction of Penelope are invested in telling the mother's story and preoccupied with how this story relates to ideas of community.

In bringing these three authors and their stories of

Penelope as mother together, it is possible to begin to see a picture of motherhood that is made up of diverse experiences grounded in differing socio-historic locations.

In the recent Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), Carole Boyce Davies asserts "the need for feminists to racialize and historicize their

28 definitions of motherhood. Questions of "maternal splitting" (Suleiman) and "maternal thinking" (Ruddick) and critiques of the "perfect mother" (Chodorow and Contratto)11 become empty and limited understandings if they do not configure the issues of race and history"(137). While Boyce

Davies call for a discussion of the mother that is socio- historically grounded (in response to a general theorizing about the mother and the maternal that characterized both

European and North American feminist thinking of the 1970s and 1980s in particular) and for a contextual criticism of literary texts ("Feminist Consciousness and African

Literary Criticism", 12; Out of the Kumbla, 60), the figure of Penelope as mother in the works of authors hailing from

Jamaica, Italy, and Cuba provides an interesting point of reference for an examination of the intersection of both sameness and difference. In Lorna Goodison's writing, an

African maternal identity is claimed and made tangible through the conjuring up of ancestral voices via poetry.

The fusion of past, present, future, and the creation of a spiritualcorporeality in which the spirit cannot be seen as separate from the flesh hold the writing together and come to push forward the renewed subjectivity of the mother. The need for and importance of inter-generational story-telling is also present in Silvana La Spina's work. Narrative

29 techniques that include shifts in tense, and shifts from first person narration to direct dialogue facilitate a fusion of past and present similar to, although not the same as, that of Goodison's writing. For La Spina, the experiences of oppression, violence and resistance of different women from differing cultures of differing times and places, serve to mirror one another, both reflecting and ricocheting off eachother in sameness and in difference. The use of writing to enact a spiritual and emotional meeting of people from differing times and locations is also carried through in Pita's poetry where the poem itself becomes a physical location, its lines and verses standing as parts of an edifice in which people search for one another and for themselves; this is not unlike the work of Goodison' s poetry whereby the poet and the act of writing poetry serve as a junction for the meeting of people and differing moments in time. For Pita, as well as for Goodison and La Spina, Penelope as mother is central to the participation in and conducting of this search for interconnecting moments of subjectivity.

30 ii. Lorna Goodison: Guinea Woman

Lorna Goodison picks up the figure of Penelope to tell the story of the mulatta mother. The term mulatta has been read in different ways in relation to Goodison's work.

Edward Baugh, for instance, sees Goodison's use of the word as part of a larger poetic strategy whereby symbols and

"symbolic personae" are used to "shape the raw personal feeling, to contain it, and at the same time to release it

[...]" ("Goodison on the Road to Heartease" 19). For Baugh, the mulatta identity is to be understood as a "persona" or

"device" that is not intended to comment upon "what might be called the mulatto condition, whether cultural or psychological"(20) . Baugh arrives at this position in part via the description Goodison gives in an unpublished interview with him that he quotes in the context of this article. Baugh quotes Goodison as saying: "I went somewhere in Latin America once and there were these people who kept referring to me as a mulatta, which I found very funny, because I'd never thought of anything like that ... They told me I was mulatta and I said all right, I kind of like the sound of that ..."(20). While Baugh sees the mulatta as persona or device, Kim Robinson analyses the poems "Mulatta

Song," "Mulatta Song II," "The Mulatta as Penelope," and

31 "The Mulatta as Minotaur," all from the collection I Am

Becoming my Mother (1986) with an eye to how the term mulatta is "informed by slavery, the plantation economy, colonialism, class, race" (62). Most importantly for

Robinson, however, is how Goodison' s use of this term is part of the poet's larger project of questioning the concept of categorization itself. In her treatment of "The

Mulatta as Penelope", for example, Robinson states that

"the Greek myth is appropriated for the mulatta's history"; and that the nature of this appropriation "confound[s] boundaries such as those between western literary tradition, between high and low culture, between public man and private woman" (65) . While there is much to be said for

Baugh's investigation of Goodison's rich and varied use of

"fresh central symbols" and "symbolic personae" (19) - of which the mulatta is one - as poetic strategy, within the context of the African maternal genealogy and personal history Goodison consistently works to establish in her poems, the mulatta is something more than persona. The

"first mulatta", for example, is the daughter of great great grandmother, Guinea Woman. It is within this confluence of appropriation, complication of fixed categories, and recounting and creation of personal history, I believe, that Goodison can be seen as taking up

32 the story of white Penelope, renowned wife, and telling it as mulatta mother. Here is the poem in full:

Tonight I'll pull your limbs through small soft garments your head will part my breasts and you will hear a different heartbeat. Today we said the real good-bye, he and I but this time I will not sit and spin and spin the door open to let the madness in till the sailor finally weary of the sea returns with souvenirs and a claim to me. True, I returned from the quayside My eyes full of sand and his salt leaving smell fresh on my hands. But you're my anchor awhile now and that goes deep, I'll sit in the sun and dry my hair while you sleep.

The very first image of the poem "The Mulatta as

Penelope" works to ground the reader in this mother's body.

The poem simultaneously addresses the infant son and the reader with the use of the second person. Like the infant son, the reader is drawn through "small / soft garments" toward the space between the mother's breasts to both feel and hear her heart beat. Positioned against mulatta skin, the story of this "different heartbeat" can begin; the

33 position created for the listener is one of connection, intimacy, and vulnerability.

The use of the word "Tonight" as the first word of the poem and of "Today" as the first word of the second phrase create a pivot upon which the past and the present turn, marking this moment of reclamation of the self from other moments of madness. Unlike white Penelope, whose weaving is associated with her waiting patiently for her husband's return from the sea and with her fidelity insofar as it is also interpreted as a ruse to stave off the advances of her suitors, the mulatta as Penelope equates weaving and waiting with spinning and madness. It is a madness that comes from the danger of waiting for others to lay claim to and define the self.

The mulatta as Penelope abandons dependence on external validation from Odysseus and rejects his worthless souvenirs. And while Odysseus is not named as a white man here, the sailor returning from the sea recalls the bakra called up the straits of Africa to Guinea Woman in

Goodison's poem of the same name; Guinea Woman, the poet/speaker's great great grandmother from whom will come the first mulatta, "blue-eyed" (24). This echo, coupled with the use of "souvenirs", . word derived from the Old

French verb "souvenir" - to remember - and coined in the

34 late 1700s to express a concept of travel linked to colonial practices and cultural appropriation,12 serves to give a particular shape and shade to the undescribed

Odysseus. His figure not only represents the absent man and father for whom woman and child wait, but it also alludes to a colonial system of domination that the mulatta mother rejects, asserting the validity of her own story, and that of the child, her "anchor", centre, and grounding.

The mulatta mother's story is also one of sexual agency. She recounts her final meeting with the sailor.

Like the words "Tonight" and "Today" that begin the first two phrases of the poem, acting as pivots around which the past and the present rotate, the word "True" provides a point around which contradictory notions of agency and submission can freely move. Upon first reading, it would seem that the mulatta as Penelope somehow submits to

Odysseus by meeting him and giving into his sexual desires.

Indeed, the offsetting of this word with the pause of a comma suggests that the story of the quayside is a type of admission, a fault on her part for seeking out that for which she has said she will no longer wait. However, the striking tactile and olfactory nature of the image demands that the reader both see and smell the semen on the mother's hands: the image, like the hands, held there,

35 outstretched for all to see. The close succession of the words "salt" "leaving" "smell" and "fresh" contribute to the suspension of this image, the alliteration of both the sibilant "s", liquid "1", nasal bilabial m's movement into the dental labial "v" making the striking image also be felt by the reader on mouth lips, tongue. The image asks the reader to participate in physically feeling a sense of the mulatta mother's power and independence in place of what might be called a stereotypical gaze of objectification whereby the woman alone would be seen as crumpled, broken, and resigned to waiting by the quayside.

The establishment and reclaiming of the mother's sexual agency is particularly significant, if we follow the line of thinking about Odysseus as white bakra, insofar as it works to combat the colonial vision of black women's bodies as objects to be used for their capacity to produce a slave labour force (Bost 210; Collins 76).

The mulatta mother as simultaneously independent and tied to her child culminates in the last image of the poem.

The child that anchors the mother's existence is moved just to the side while the mother takes centre stage, tending to the drying of her hair in the sun in an image that suggests both the self-reliance and sensuality of the woman-mother- mulatta Penelope. In the end, the departure of Odysseus is

36 of little consequence. Baugh's reading of this last image confirms this co-existence of what he calls "maternal instincts and pleasures" and the mulatta's "claim to herself". His reading also suggests the importance of this coexistence of identities of mother as caregiver and as independent agent exercising care toward the self in a specifically West Indian or Afrisporic context as resistance to a stereotypical image of black woman and child:

We may seem to have here an example of the West Indian version of Penelope, of the "Brown Skin Gal," as depicted in the folk-song of that title, who will "stay home and mind the baby." True, the mulatta is not about to throw out her maternal instincts and pleasures along with the baby, nor will she deny that she grieves the departure of the man. But she does so on her own terms. She lays claim to herself. The final image of her drying her hair in the sun is one of self-delighting wholeness. ("Lorna Goodison in the Context of Feminist Criticism" 10).

The specifically mulatta maternal identity that is the core of "The Mulatta as Penelope" can be seen as expanded upon in the other poems that deal with mothers and what

Patricia Hill Collins calls "othermothers". In Black

Feminist Thought (1990), Patricia Hill Collins outlines the practice of othermothering within African and African-

American community-based childcare. Childcare, she affirms,

37 is not the responsibility of one single woman, but rather, it is shared within "women-centered networks of bloodmothers [biological mothers] and othermothers

[grandmothers, aunts, or "fictive kin" of the larger community]"(120). While "women-centered," these networks are not exclusive of men. The existence of these networks helps individuals and communities to cope with oppression and challenges the capitalist configuration of children as private property (122-123). Goodison's poetic explorations of an African maternal heritage can be seen as illustrative of many of the principles of mothering and othermothering that Hill-Collins outlines.

The poem "Guinea Woman" gives voice to the first

African mother of the poet/speaker's line. As such, the poem is deeply invested in the establishment of a distinct

African identity and heritage. It is Guinea Woman, great grandmother who is mother to the speaker's "blue-eyed grandmother / the first Mulatta" (24-25). The image of

Guinea Woman looking out to sea from where her bakra husband will come in some ways parallels the image of the

Mulatta as Penelope, gone down to quayside to meet

Odysseus. However, this poem begins with outlining great grandmother as African woman, whose existence precedes any encounter with the white sailor who, in this poem, is left

38 behind by his ship at Lucea harbour. Here is how Guinea

Woman is sketched in the very first stanza:

Great grandmother was a guinea woman wide eyes turning the corners of her face could see behind her, her cheeks dusted with a fine rash of jet-bead warts that itched when the rain set up. (1-8)

The eyes that turn round to see behind her, the "fine rash of jet-bead warts" that itch when it is about to rain connote an image of a woman interconnected with the earth and the animal realm. This connection is furthered in the following stanza where Guinea Woman's "antelope-quick walk" is described:

Great grandmother's waistline the span of a headman's hand slender and tall like a cane stalk with a guinea woman's antelope-quick walk and when she paused, her gaze would look to sea her profile fine like some obverse impression on a guinea coin from royal memory. (9-16)

In these first two stanzas of the poem where the living portrait of Guinea Woman is drawn, there is both an

39 assertion of a pre-colonial African identity and an appropriation of devices of colonial domination. Guinea woman is seen as alone, independent, but connected to the world around her. And her waist, described as "the span of a headman's hand" links her to the human community of her tribe. At the same time, the description of Guinea Woman's

"antelope-quick walk" and "wide eyes turning" lay claim to characteristics that have been relegated to a supposedly inferior animal realm by the house of the white sailor and the western European society he represents.13 The social

Darwinism and hierarchal Great Chain of Being of

Enlightenment thought which helped propel the African slave trade through notions of peoples who are supposedly less or more civilized (Loomba 63) is attacked at the very same time that an African identity is asserted and spiritual view of the animal realm as sacred presented (Amadiume

130). The duplicity of this assertion of pre-colonial

African identity and appropriation of devices of colonial domination is reinforced by the final image and simile of

Guinea Woman's profile: "obverse impression / on a guinea coin from royal memory". Here the coin is colonial token upon which the profile of African woman is minted, transformed into something older than itself.14

When Guinea Woman gives birth to her daughter, the

40 "first mulatta", and becomes part of the husband's household, these qualities and characteristics that have defined her in the first two stanzas, are actively extinguished. The process of "cover[ing] [the child] with his name", reflecting the project of colonization itself, entails an erasure of the African maternal presence, heritage, and history, and it is the outward markings of this history that are suppressed:

They forbade great grandmother's Guinea woman presence. They washed away her scent of cinnamon and scallions, controlled the child's antelope walk, and called her uprisings rebellions. (28-33)

At the moment of erasure, however, the speaker/poet re-asserts Guinea Woman's presence much in the manner of the beginning of the poem whereby a re-claiming and valorization of the characteristics deemed animalesque by the bakra is carried out. Guinea Woman's "breeding", word that Goodison boldly reclaims from colonialist violence perpetrated against black women and their communities,15 is now used by the speaker to unite four generations of her people in speech with one another. The speaker/poet is not merely relating a story at this point, but rather, she

41 serves as intermediary who conjures up great grandmother through recounting her full history and experiences so that she may stand full and present before her great great grandchildren. As in much of Goodison's poetry, there is an element of simultaneity in which past present and future are one. It is at this point of simultaneity that the speaker addresses Guinea Woman directly, telling her how she sees Guinea Woman's "features blood dark / appearing / in the children of each new / breeding" (35-38) . And it is at this same point that the speaker can turn to the children there gathered to tell them "Listen [...] it's great grandmother's turn" to speak (41-42).

A maternal African history is also delineated in the poems "Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry" and "Songs for my Son".

Domestic helper and othermother figure, Miss Mirry delivers the ritual bath to the child that will become the poet/speaker. True to Goodison's penchant for holding contradictory elements together in delicate tension, the depiction of othermother figure Miss Mirry is of a

''both/and' nature. Rooted in Miss Mirry is the whole history of the African slave trade and what it has inflicted on generations of black people and communities:

She was the repository of 400 years of resentment

42 for being uprooted and transplanted, condemned to being a stranger on this side of a world where most words would not obey her tongue. (9-12)

At the same time that Miss Mirry is "the repository of 400 years of resentment / for being uprooted and transplanted", she is also an important site of continual resistance against the "condemnation" with which she is faced. In terms of a maternal African genealogy for the poet/speaker, the othermother Miss Mirry's singularity lies in her engagement with the English language as a means by which she both holds onto and asserts her own identity:

She could not read or write a word in English but took every vowel and consonant of it and rung it around, like the articulated neck of our Sunday dinner sacrificial fowl. In her anger she stabbed at English, walked it out, abandoned it in favor of a long kiss teeth, a furious fanning of her shift tail, a series of hawks at the back of her throat, a long extended elastic sigh, a severing cut eye, or a melancholy wordless moaning as she squatted over her wooden washtub soaping our dirty clothes with a brown wedge of hard key soap. (13-25)

Miss Mirry wrings the English language, both stabbing- and

43 abandoning it to reflect her mood and needs. She subverts and invents, "calling Barbara, Baba; my father, Tata; who desiled her mind / that I was boofuttoo, a baffan and too rampify." (27-28). This creative resistance is also a healing one, and it is in the ritual bath Miss Mirry delivers to the child who is the eventual speaker/poet that the healing process is perhaps most manifest. "Sluic[ing] the astringent waters" (40) over the child, it is not only the water but the African "speak-singing" (41) that Miss

Mirry washes over the child's body, "tumbling cadences, ululations / in time with the swift sopping motion of her hands" (43-44); it is the African "speak-singing" that soothes and enters the child's skin. Indeed, the effect of the "emancipation tamarind" (36) strewn in the washtub-bath and the African speech-song of othermother Miss Mirry are one and the same: they heal both the bather and the bathed.16 While Miss Mirry's identity and history as African bush healing woman remains distinct from that of the more economically privileged speaker's family who employ her,17 the ritual bath unites them in a type of re-birth of the

"true self" whereby the resistance of Miss Mirry's wringing of the English language, and insisting on the African

"speak-singing" that is her own, reflects the eventual work and struggle of the poet.

44 The figure of the African healing woman reappears in

"Songs for ray Son", delivering the speaker of her own boy child and establishing a connection with the next generation. Here it is the African mid-wife, "fingers like healing roots" (40), who provides the necessary assistance with the physical birth and "summons the appropriate spirits" (43) for the baby's "crowning". Stanza II names the mother's family spirits and tells of their coming to help "part the birth waters with river-washed hands":

They gather from beyond through the trees they come gather on the banks of the family river one by one they raise the keening song great grandmother Rebecca of the healing hands Tata Edward, Bucky, and Brownman my father's lost mother Maria and now my father come to sing the birthsong and Hannah horsewoman to ride me through.(19-28)

The role of the African midwife as facilitator of an inter- generational gathering is reminiscent of the role of the poet herself in facilitating speech and communication of the different generations of her family in poems such as

"Guinea Woman".

The continual intermingling of the spiritual and the corporeal realm that characterizes this poem culminates in

45 the image where the umbilical cord is severed. The knife,

"keen with garlic" (45) recalls the "keening song" (22) of the ancestors and the "thyme-tea" (41) the mother drinks, the "roots" that are the mid-wife's fingers and the flesh and smell of the garlic all come together to bind body and spirit together in a common history and future of which the mother's body is the nexus.18 Herein lies the agency of the mother. And it is the "primal top notes" (48) of the odor of the flesh of the garlic, eventually to be mingled with the flesh of the cord, that will serve to remind and recall these connections, just as the simultaneous suck pull of nursing child and contracting womb reminds of the mother- child joining.

Poems like "My Mother's Sea Chanty" and "I Am Becoming

My Mother" focus on a specific mother-daughter inter- dependency and highlight the ability and agency of the maternal figure to "bear away [...] grief and anguish" (16) of her community ("My Mother's Sea Chanty"). The strength and self-reliance of the maternal figures in the seascape poems

"The Mulatta as Penelope" and "Guinea Woman" are taken further in "My Mother's Sea Chanty" where the daughter resuscitates her "dark mother" (13) from the birth waters of the sea itself. Like. Miss Mirry's ritual bath, the sea waters wash over the body, reviving until breath and life

46 is fully regained. Here it is the daughter who gives birth to the mother, and the elements of the sea, the "ambergris and foaming seaweed" (8) and the action of the daughter's hands, arms that massage the elements into the scalp and

"white hair" (7), all work together to bring her to life.

The "dark mother" rises from the ritual bath to act in the third stanza and the daughter sits back to watch her actions for the rest of the poem.

This dream-birth of the mother calls her into action.

Gathering pearls, scrubbing them free of nacre and

"string[ing] them on a lost fishing line" (12), the mother collects and recovers beauty, making use of materials already there or that have been tossed aside. In the following stanza the mother moves from the action of solitary collecting and transformation of the under-sea world around her to speech with its inhabitants. Engaging in "sea-speak" with the fish, the agency of the mother is increased and extended further as she informs and directs them in the carrying away of her people's grief:

I hear my dark mother speaking sea-speak with pilot fish, showing them how to direct barks that bear away our grief and anguish. (13-16)

47 The image here is one of a funeral procession, the long line of "barks" becoming biers where the anguish of slavery is placed, mourned and released back over water, all under the guidance of the mother.

After the depiction of a communal agency, the final stanza of the poem returns a solitary picture of the mother. This time she is not collecting, both recovering and making things from the ocean floor, but rather, she is tied to the quotidian "fish pots and marine chores" (18).

But just as the daughter has given the mother life at the beginning of the poem, she will give her life at the end.

The beginning phrase of each stanza "I dream", "I see", "I watch", "I hear", "I pray" forms a type of refrain whereby the mother is finally set free.

The final image of the poem whereby the mother rides alone her "wild white horse" serves to emphasize the mother leaving marine chores behind her, moving toward a path of self enjoyment and care that parallels the final image of

"The mulatta as Penelope" where the mother tends to the drying of her hair in the sun, son connected yet just off to the side.

The interdependent nature of the Afrisporic mother- daughter relationship in this poem as well as the concept of healing that is present here and elsewhere in Goodison's

48 work can be read in relation to broader theorizing about

Afrisporic identity and feminist practices. Dannabang

Kuwabong, for example, affirms the Afrisporic mother- daughter relationship as one of allies, participating in a

"collaborative feminist consciousness of struggle against multiple oppressions". ("The Mother as Archetype of Self: A

Poetics of Matrilineage in the Poetry of Claire Harris and

Lorna Goodison" 105-107).19 The mother as healer is also a concept outlined by Carol Boyce Davies through an examination of fiction by black women writers. In looking at writers hailing from Africa, the U.S., and the

Caribbean,20 Boyce Davies draws a common thread through the writing by outlining a process by which black women are called upon to heal each other. As she writes in the 1985

"Mothering and Healing in Recent Black Women's Fiction":

"Black women, at certain junctures in their lives, require healing and renewal and that Black women themselves have to become the healers/mothers for each other when there is such a need"(41). The importance of motherhood insofar as it is "linked to the regeneration of other Black women and one's self" as Boyce Davies says, can also be linked to the even broader theme or defining features of an African feminism as articulated by Filomina Chioma Steady. For

Steady, African feminism is the articulation of "that

49 ideology which encompasses freedom from oppression base on the political, economic, social, and cultural manifestations of racial, cultural, sexual, and class biases." It is, she goes on "largely a product of polarizations and conflicts that represent some of the worst and chronic forms of human suffering"(4) . Rosalyn

Teborg-Penn, as well, expresses how "African feminist values and imperatives can be applied to women of African descent cross-culturally - as female networking to assure the survival of human rights"(39). Without reducing

Goodison's work to any one of these theoretical concepts, it is important to note how her poems and their themes and articulations of the different experiences of differently- located black women are linked to them in various ways.

Goodison's poems are of healing and release within the context of black women's writing at the same time that they are characterized by elements of heterogeneity, multiplicity and what Baugh aptly calls an ability to

"interfuse the local/contemporary and the global/historical"("Goodison on the Road to Heartease" 18).

The reciprocity and interchange of birth-giving between the mother and daughter present in the poem "My

Mother's Sea Chanty" reaches an apex in the poem "I Am

Becoming My Mother". But unlike the turn-taking of "My

50 Mother's Sea Chanty", the mother and daughter of "I Am

Becoming My Mother" seem to directly and corporeally inhabit one another:

Yellow / brown woman fingers smelling always of onions

My mother raises rare blooms and waters them with tea her birth waters sang like rivers my mother is now me (1-6).

With the birth waters and tea recall the birthing of the poet/speaker's own son in "Songs for my Son", this poem, like many of Goodison's works, weaves generations together.

There is no separation from the mother here and, as in many of Goodison's poems, there is the element of the simultaneous past and present that binds one generation to another.

The weaving that the poet/speaker performs in these poems is part and parcel of the mother' s agency and power to effect change. It is important to note how Goodison's weaving both as poetic enterprise, and as a theme she takes up more directly, goes beyond notions of 'staving off violence. Unlike the U.S. 1980s feminist writings of

Elaine Showalter and Carolyn Heilbrun, Goodison's work moves more direcetly toward effecting and bringing about

51 change.

In the poem "Bedspread" for example, women weave toward the creation of a tangible and lived freedom.

Written from the point of view of Winnie Mandela, the poem focuses on the theme of weaving as connected to resistance and political change in South Africa. The bedspread is where the speaker lies, thinking and communicating with her imprisoned husband, Nelson Mandela. The bedspread beneath her body is the repository of the resistance and agency of entire communities that gives and transmits hope:

It was woven by women with slender capable hands accustomed to binding wounds hands that closed the eyes of dead children, that fought for the right to speak in their own tongues in their own land in their own schools. They wove the bedspread and knotted notes of hope in each strand and selvedged the edges with ancient blessings older than any white man's coming. (13-27)

Springing from experiences and knowledge that both pre-date and follow colonialism,21 the resistance of these weaving women parallels the work of the poet, who through weaving

52 the text, lays ground for the articulation of a past that is linked to future change.

This work of the poet continues in Goodison's most recent collection, Controlling the Silver (2005) . In this collection, the figure of great grandmother Guinea Woman is taken up again in the poem for which the collection itself is named. The long poem "Controlling the Silver" is interspersed with stanzas offering praise, creating a prayer-like quality that asks the reader to participate in the pastpresentfuture lived as one. In the tradition of an

African praise song,22 the following four stanzas serve as the bones of the poem:

Let us praise now market women: higglers, who maintain our solid, hidden economy in soft money banks between full breasts. Gold next; now these women control silver. (9-12)

Let us praise now artisans and craft workers, builders of Empire. Skilled ones who raised up temples of marble. Masons and carpenters constructing suffering into stone and fretwork. (21-24)

Praise to those gathered in common markets, redemption grounds where Africans swapped blood secrets, kept spirit, passed on information about insurrections, and bought and sold silver. (33-36)

Praise to the power of our Guinea woman great-

53 grandmother, higgler with pencil in her tiehead to cancel old debts, seamstress with the scissors in her right hand who will cut for us fit pattern.(81-84)

The prayer culminates in the figure of Guinea Woman, her figure now expanding beyond the personal African matrilineal heritage outlined in the poem "Guinea Woman" of the earlier collections I Am Becoming My Mother (1986) and

Guinea Woman: New and Selected Poems (2000) to encompass a broader West Indian heritage and future. She is now "our great grandmother" who, like Derek Walcott's West Indian subject embodied in Penelope, is "a rock, a rock, a rock­ steady woman" for whom "the waves clap their hands and the surf whisper[s] amen" (2.6.160). She both restores and offers redemption.

54 iii. Silvana La Spina :Penelope

Like Lorna Goodison, Silvana La Spina tells the story of the figure of Penelope through a depiction of a community of women. As Kim Robinson notes of Goodison's work, citing poems that explore the lives of women such as

Winnie Mandela, Rosa Parks, great grandmother Guinea Woman, there is in Goodison's poetry the creation of a "community of women that cuts across corporeal, generational, national and cultural bounds" (76) . Much the same can be said for the community of women La Spina creates and of which the figure Penelope is a part. For La Spina, the network of relationships she depicts connects women of differing social classes, cultural backgrounds and generations through space and time. But while Goodison's work pivots on the sharp corners of colonial violence-healing, hope- despair, with those life-affirming aspects eventually weighting and grounding the writing, La Spina's narrative strands of the network of women characters in her poetic novel come together more tightly around a desire to articulate acts of violence committed against the bodies of young girls and women. Indeed, La Spina's Penelope is invested in uncovering acts of violence against women sanctioned by religion and law. The novel is invested in

55 recovering women's voices and stories. As Sharon Wood states in Italian Women's Writing 1860-1994, the concern in

Italy with issues of incest, violence and rape in the 1990s is part of a larger effort to name and recognize the acts of violence committed specifically against girls and women.

The Vienna Tribunal of 1993 attests to such efforts at the international level. Indeed, the story of Penelope and the communities of women to which she belongs over the course of her life is part of a larger story of violence against many women in many geographic locations and historical moments. La Spina's narrative of Penelope is propelled by idea of a collective trauma that can only be told in part, bits and pieces at a time, each woman's voice and part of the story acting as a catalyst, conferring agency and enabling another woman's story to be told.

In order to analyze how La Spina's poetic novel achieves this, it is useful to provide a brief synopsis of the story. La Spina's novel draws upon the genre of memoir.

Chronologically, the novel begins at a moment in time after

Odysseus slaughters the suitors and legitimately reclaims the island kingdom of Ithaca. The point of reference of the story, however, is Penelope, her first person narration rising up out of the marriage bed. Rooted, depressed and unable to get up as she listens to the background drone of

56 Odysseus' storytelling, the details of his adventures being spelled out to the drunken men gathered there on the floor below, the character Penelope - and the novel

Penelope itself - claims Homer's marriage bed, symbol of conjugal unity and narrative resolution, for her own. It is the site from which Penelope's entire life story of suffering and strength is told. In short, Penelope recounts her childhood in Sparta and the sexual abuse she there endured by her father Icarius, king of Sparta, her move/escape to Ithaca as wife of Odysseus, the forging of relationships there with Odysseus' mother and nurse, her affair with Cleon during Odysseus' absence. The book ends with Penelope's departure from the island of Ithaca with

Eurycleia before Odysseus, following the prophecy of

Tiresias, departs a second time. Penelope's tale, however, is not a linear one; her story is one that slips and slides between the past and the present, a movement that both enables the details of her and other womens' sexual abuse to be told and reinforces the inseparability of past events from the presently lived moment.

The backdrop for this narration of trauma is the cult of the earth mother goddess, La Dea or La Magnifica. As a cult specific to the Helots, Messenian people forced into serfdom by the Greeks, La Dea is invested with a political

57 dimension: the earth mother goddess represents hope for eventual freedom and liberation for an enslaved people.

Depicted as older than any of the Greek gods, la Dea is also described as the original divinity:

Questa dea e piu antica di tutti gli dei. Ella e la terra, la nascita, la morte. Ella e dappertutto, in ogni cosa, e la luna, la spiga, la zolla, la nuvola, il fuoco, il cielo azzurro di primavera [...] insomma, tutte le altre divinita non sono altro che sue successive derivazioni. (40-41). This goddess is older than all the gods. She is the Earth, birth, and death. She is everywhere, in everything; she is the moon, the grain, the mud, the clouds, fire, the blue sky of spring [...] in short, all other divinities are nothing other than derivations of her (all translations are mine).

In this sense, La Dea is both mother earth and political refuge. She is that from which those who worship her come and the liberation which they move toward. While this elaboration of the earth mother goddess hearkens back to a particular brand of 1970s and 1980s Western feminist thinking that valorized a pre-patriarchal period often seen as existing pre-ancient Greece23, it also reflects a fundamental component of Italian feminism whereby the symbolic order of the mother is elaborated by feminist groups like Diotima and writers such as Luisa Murano.24

58 Within this symbolic order of the mother, the mother- daughter relationship is a model for all relationships between women and across generations (Wood 233). The significance of adopting this model within the Italian cultural context is that it represents a strategy for challenging familial relationships and societal institutions structured by patriarchal hierarchies and authority. There is a desire to understand, as Wood notes, women's subjectivities in relation to one another rather than in relation to men and the institutions they have created (196). The concept of affidamento or "entrustment" whereby a younger or more inexperienced woman entrusts herself to the knowledge and experience of a usually older woman is an illustration of this effort. As a strategy of resistance, this desire of Italian women to understand the self in relation to other women's lives both past and present, in some ways parallels the women-centered networks of mothers and othermothers of the African diaspora and the work Goodison does via poetry to bring the voices of her own ancestors together across time and space.

In the first sections of La Spina's Penelope, the earth goddess figure, La Dea, is depicted as a maternal body itself. Her place of. worship rests between mountains,

59 in a series of caves and tunnels that are described in anthropomorphic terms:

Quasi si scendessero nelle viscere stesse della terra, sicche potremmo dire, ecco questo e il suo ventre, la i suoi polmoni, la ancora il fegato e il cuore, e la infine un onfalo che conduce al suo utero (23). It was almost as if they [Penelope and Melissa] were descending into the bowels of the earth, in such a way that we could say, here is her stomach, there her lungs, there too the liver and the heart, and there finally an umbilical cord leading to her womb.

The descent into the maternal body serves to ground the network of female relationships in the novel, providing a context or backdrop for their communal and individual stories at the same time that it serves to reinforce the connections between them. In the spirit of affidamento or entrustment, the complex web of relationships between the female characters in the novel appears as a coupling of two women who support and guide one another. For example, the young Penelope is paired with her half Helot, half Spartan servant Melissa, priestess to the cult of La Dea; Melissa's mother, Spartan noblewoman Deifora, is paired with her unnamed Helot slave;25 Penelope, after the birth of

Telemachus, is paired with Odysseus' mother Anticlea; and when Anticlea dies, Penelope becomes even more closely tied

60 to the woman who acted as Anticlea's servant and Odysseus' nurse, Eurycleia. In addition to these pairs of women, the novel draws parallels between Penelope's mother, daughter to Poseidon and the old women priestesses to La Dea operating out of the caves of the Naiads, also daughters to the male god of the sea. In a similar fashion, the narrative pairs Penelope's later reflections about her life with the descriptions of the early lives of her two cousins

Helen and Klytemnestra, and the Greek and Trojan women are seen as standing side by side insofar as both groups suffer equally from war as widows, rape victims, war prizes, mothers to dead sons.

By making the presence of La Dea or La Magnifica as she is also called, be felt so strongly in the beginning chapters, the novel constructs a safety-net in which the relationships of the women of differing ages, classes and cultures can exist, reflecting and echoing off one another.

For example, the relationship of the young Penelope and

Melissa can be seen as a reflection of the pair of women of the preceding generation - Deifora and her unnamed Helot servant. The relationships of the two pairs of women in turn find their reflection in Anticlea and Eurycleia's relationship; Penelope and Anticlea's relationship is reflected in that of Penelope and Eurycleia. The continual

61 movement of the novel between past and present facilitates the reflecting and echoing of women's experiences and relationships within the safety-net the presence of the earth goddess provides. Penelope's rape is also Helen's rape at the age of twelve by the prince Teseus, which is also Helen's mother's rape by Zeus, disguised as a swan.

An important effect of the novel's movement between past and present narration is the production of a space in which speech between characters of different times and places occurs. While Goodison conjures up her ancestors through a poetic recounting of their personal histories, an act which produces not only their living presence but confers upon them the power of speech and agency in the present moment, La Spina's oscillation between and fusion of past and present in the novel creates a space where those who have suffered acts of violence might be in some way restored and those who have committed acts of violence can be confronted. Chapters 6 and 7, for instance, are devoted to articulating and reclaiming the lives of

Penelope's cousins, Klytemnestra and Helen. The chapters describe past events in the present tense. Klytemnestra's wedding preparations, for example, are described in detail using the present tense, giving the impression that the event is actually occurring. The present tense description

62 of the past is interlaced with the past tense, indicating

Penelope's present position in the marriage bed, recollecting her life and the people in it:

Ricordo addesso la gran nube di vapore che invade la stanza. E poi pentole e giare di Creta. Le ancelle che si muovono agli ordini di Antea, la nutrice: presto ragazze, presto. Qua la veste, la il peplo, che nessuno entri, per favore, tranne le principesse. Al centre del viavai Clitenestra, nuda. E stata lavata con acqua dell'Eurota - di buon'augurio dicono - asciugano con teli caldi, e ora le sue membra saranno levigate con l'olio balsamico. Qualcuno porta un vaso con sopra i cibi rituali (30). I remember now the great cloud of steam invading the room. And the basins and earthenware jars from Crete. The servants that move according to the orders of Antea, the nurse: hurry girls, hurry. Here the vest, there the peplos, make sure no one enters, please, except the princesses. At the centre of the garden, Klytemnestra, nude. She had been washed with the water of Eurota - for good luck they say - dried with warm sheets, and now her limbs will be rubbed down with balsamic oil. Someone brings the tray with the ritual foods placed on top.

Conjuring up the past in this way gives a life to

Klytemnestra that goes beyond the single identity for which she is renowned in the Odyssey: unfaithful wife and murderer of Agamemnon. The narrative creates a context and

63 a personal history for her figure, and it is with this personal history that Penelope converses and makes comparisons with her own history. Helen, too, is conjured up using this narrative strategy.26 Conjuring up Helen through a present tense recounting of the past, Penelope directly addresses her cousin, becoming her interlocutor.

The chapter is characterized by a continued series of questions:

Ti ha maturato il tempo, Elena? E le esperienze? i tradimenti? Le peregrinazioni di reggia in reggia? - quanti viaggi per mare e per terra. E gli uomini, Elena, come sono stati gli uomini con te? Brutali o dolci, vangloriosi o timidi, ti hanno mai veramente amata? E tu, Elena, hai mai amato qualcuno di loro ? Amava veramente, intendo? Ma forse no. Forse tu hai semplicemente amato il potere che avevi su di loro - ma e cosi facile, poi, sono solo dei fanciulli avidi (35). Has time made you more mature, Helen? And the experiences? The betrayals? The wanderings from kingdom to kingdom? - so many voyages by sea and by land. And the men, Helen, how did the men treat you? Were they brutal or gentle, arrogant or timid, did they ever really love you? And you, Helen, did you ever love any one of them? Truly love, I mean? Maybe not. Maybe you simply loved the power you had over them - but that is such an easy thing to do; they are only eager children after all.

The creation of a space in these two chapters for the possible speech and viewpoints of her cousins in the

64 present of Penelope' s narration is reinforced by the direct dialogue of a past event that begins chapter eight:

- Sono tornata, Penelope. Una sagoma alta, nascosta da un peplo rustico. Una veste quasi lacera, da mendicante. La guardo senza sapere chi sia, penso: cosa vuole costei? Che vada via, subito. Penso: come le hanno permesso le guardie di arrivare a palazzo, di raggiungere il gineceo reale. Potrebbe essere una spia nemica - Melissa! Le membra tremano talmente dalla sorpresa che neanche la forza di abbracciarla. E le domande che vorrei farle ? Dove sono le domande ? Melissa, cara... - Non perdiamo tempo, Penelope. Andiamo. Andare? e dove? Dove vuoi portarmi Melissa? Sara una sorpresa (37). - I've returned, Penelope. A tall silhouette, hidden by a plain peplos. A vest almost a rag, of a beggar. I look at her without knowing who she is and I think: what does she want? I think: how is it that the guards have allowed her to arrive here at the palace, to reach the royal gynaeceum. She could be an enemy spy ... - Melissa! My limbs tremble so much from the surprise of seeing her that I don't even have the strength to embrace her. And the questions that I would like to ask her? Where are the questions? - Melissa, dear ... - Don't waste time, Penelope. Let's go. Go? Where? Where to you want to take me Melissa? It will be a surprise.

The direct dialogue between Penelope and Melissa, priestess

65 to the cult of La Magnifica and Penelope's spiritual guide, reinforces the resurrected Klytemnestra and the inner life of Helen at the same time that it makes the lived experience of the young Penelope and her relationship with her mentor tangible for the reader. The last two sentences of this passage hover in the place where the past and present are indistinguishable.

It is in this same chapter that the details of the first instance of rape of Penelope by her father Icarius of

Sparta are revealed. The fusion of past and present create a place for confrontation, with the figure of Melissa conjured up to stand at Penelope's side. Spurred on by the stories of the cousins, Penelope, 24 pages after the first mention of her sexual abuse, is able to further relate her own story of incest. Moving from the past tense that describes the event to the present tense in which she confronts the rapist/father and the crime he has committed against her, Penelope speaks both out and back. Through a series of questions and the use of direct address, Penelope interrogates the father. His crimes will no longer remain hidden, unspoken, or unchallenged. The section ends with the description of the monster-child Pan that the young

Penelope births into the sea, product of violence and incest. It is here that Penelope pronounces her father's

66 name - the naming of him, his crime, and the description of their monster-child somehow putting him in his place: "Come vedi, Icario di Sparta, talvolta gli dei sono giusti"

(39) ("As you can see, Icarius of Sparta, sometimes the gods are just").

This critique of the father's violence goes beyond what might be seen as a general critique of patriarchy as characterized by white Western feminism in the 1970s and

1980s. Instead, the focus on the incest and sexual abuse of young girls in the home is part of an effort in Italy in particular to denounce incest as a common practice in the home. The critique of sexual abuse and violence in the home is taken even further to illustrate: 1) how such crimes are supported and facilitated by societal institutions, and 2) how these societal institutions support other types of violence that help sustain unequal power relations between people and different groups of peoples.

Taking up a story strand that sees Penelope as a priestess of the cult of a goddess27, La Spina's novel depicts Penelope as serving the Spartan Temple of Artemis and, through her friendship with the half Spartan half

Helot servant Melissa, Penelope is shown as becoming increasingly bound to the Helot cult of the earth mother goddess, La Dea. It is within this outlaw cult of La Dea

67 that Penelope gains distance from the Spartan religion of the Greek gods that ultimately, is controlled by the father. Penelope's first pregnancy and experiences as a mother are controlled by the religion and societal institutions of the father: Icarius hides his incestuous crime and his daughter's pregnancy by calling on the help of Sparta's religious institutions. He consults the priest.

Contrasting Penelope's imaginings for a justice which will see her father publicly shamed for what he has done, the crime finally in the open for everyone to see with her pregnancy, the novel outlines the process by which the secret abuse of Penelope and young women like her is legitimately kept. Penelope will participate in the festival of Artemis where she will be raped yet again as part of a religious ritual. Any children produced from this ritual, the priest assures Icarius, are deemed legitimate offspring of the gods. The first person narration of

Penelope renders the sacred orgy of Artemis an act of rape committed by particular men against particular women rather than a religious or spiritual ritual:

Erano coperti in faccia con maschere di animali, di capro, di lince... Sicche mai nessuno un giorno avrebbe potuto dire fu quello, o quell' altro. Ma solo - un dio mi violento, sotto forma di uccello, di cane, o di toro (qualcuna

68 dira persino lo stesso padre Zeus). Cosi non riconobbi la faccia del moi stupratore. So solo che mi prese per le braccia e mi tiro in un angolo, e che sentii il suo fiato pungente d'aglio (13-14). They [men] had their faces covered by masks of animals, of rams, of lynx ... So that no one, one day, could ever say - it was that one, or that other one [who did it]. But only - a god raped me in the form of a bird, a dog, a bull (someone might even say the god Zeus himself). It is thus that I didn't recognize my rapist's face. I only know that he took me by the arms and pulled me into a corner, and that I could feel his breath, pungent and smelling of garlic.

The smell of garlic on a man's breath and the emphasis on the masks as devices that conceal rather than transform identities, pulls this experience down deep into the corporeal realm. The scene is of real bodies that smell, grab and violate young women. The pungent odor of garlic on a man's breath is not part of anything spiritual or ritualistic; it signifies only something lewd and debased.

This is a far cry from Goodison' s "top notes" of garlic which represent a spiritual and corporeal joining in the ritual depicted in the poem "Songs for my Son".

As a writer whose heritage is split between the North and South of Italy (her mother is Venetian, her father

Sicilian), La Spina's concern with the unequal distribution of power and wealth as well as with issues of racism is

69 apparent. The wealth of industrialized northern Italy and its history of exploitation of the more rural and impoverished south goes hand in hand with a racism perpetuated by the former against the latter. Penelope serves as a voice of critique for the exploitation of one group of people of another. She describes the Helot people's dire conditions for living under Spartan domination:

Camminando per via ho visto i villaggi degli Iloti. Capanne miserabili, la maggior parte grotte, in cui quelli vivono lavorano prolificano per rendere grandi i nuovi conquistatori, i re di Sparta, la stirpe di Tindareo. E davanti alle grotte ho visto gli uomini scuri e piccoli, le facce cascanti delle donne, i bambini nudi dai ventre gonfi di vermi (17). Travelling along the road I saw the Helots' villages. Miserable huts, the majority caves, in which they live work procreate to make the new conquistadors great, the kings of Sparta, Tindarus' line. And in front of the caves I saw the men, dark and small, the falling faces of women, the children nude with stomachs swollen with worms.

When Icarius' guard instructs Penelope to look away from what she sees, calling the Helots nothing more than animals, beasts, the young Penelope, here pregnant with

Pan, subverts her anger into a kick to the mule she is riding and an internal dialogue of the things she would

70 like to say to the Spartan guard in the service of her father:

Ho dato un calcio al mio mulo e sono andata avanti. Non volevo dovergli ribattere: chi sei tu, che dici bestia a un uomo che lavora per te ? Tuo schiavo ? Non hai dunque visto le facce delle donne, dei bambini ?(18) I gave my mule a kick and went ahead. I didn't want to have to answer back: who are you to call the man who works for you a beast? Your slave? Haven't you seen the faces of the women, the children?

Foregrounding exploitation and racially marking bodies in this way can also be read as commentary on the often xenophobic political debates in Italy of the 1990s concerning the large influx of Albanians and Tunisians, for example, into the country. Such groups of people coming into Italy provide sources of cheap labour for the economy but are often unwelcome in the capacity of citizens.

(Faigal Daly and Rohit Barot; Gabriella Lazaridis). The critique the novel makes in terms of the so-called

'greatness' of the Spartan kings and of the civilization of

Sparta as dependent upon domination and oppression of those

"dark" bodies is not lost on the Italian political and cultural context of the day.

La Spina's commitment to issues of social justice and

71 equality is also evident in her other works. The novels La

Creata Antonia (Antonia Created, 2005), set in 18th century

Catania, and Morte a Palermo (Death in Palermo, 1999), for instance, take up themes of women's silence and oppression at the same time that they confront the corruption and violence perpetrated by societal institutions such as the

Catholic Church and the mafia. La Spina's work is in line with that of other Italian women writers of this period insofar as it searches to name and resist experiences of violence against women through engagement with historical fiction. The setting of La Creata Antonia, for example, and the situations of the young girls in Penelope as victims of incest all echo in some way Dacia Maraini's well-known La

Lunga vita di Marianna Ucria (The Silent Duchess, 1990) whose protagonist is a young girl who can neither hear nor speak and who is raped at the age of five by her uncle with the father's knowledge and complicity.

While La Spina's work is indeed in line with the writings of Italian women writers like Dacia Maraini, founder of the all women's theatre collective il teatro della Maddalena and proponent of the feminist movement in

Italy, her writing is invested in expressing a resistance that goes beyond what is often termed 'women's issues' (ie:

72 abortion, equal pay, divorce) toward affronting a logic of domination in its multiple forms. Recent books like La

Mafia spiegata ai miei figli (ed ai figli degli altri)(The

Mafia explained to my children (and to the children of others), 2006) search to go beyond a naming or uncovering of violence toward a goal of showing how people are not powerless or helpless in the face of such violence. Like authors such as Goodison and Walcott whose writing confronts colonial violence, La Spina's writing is driven by the desire and need for creative resistance and agency.

It may be tempting to read this novel, as Daniela

Cavallaro does in her recent "Penelope: Variations on a

Theme" (2002), as rejecting a male realm in favor of a female and projecting what she and others have deemed to be a potentially "annoying" feminist agenda, (annoying to whom and in what regard would be the question to pose in the face of Cavallaro's statement) the narrative structure and the emotional range of the novel moves it beyond a simple valorization of the female within a male-female oppressor- oppressed hierarchy. The often dismal scenes in the novel depicting oppression and violence against women in particular are delicately interlaced with observations and emotions that complicate a binary framework. For example,

Penelope rejects her first son Pan as spawn of incest and

73 yet, she seeks revenge upon her father in the name of this

"bambino monstruoso" ("monstrous child" 48). The child is included in the list of those people whom Penelope values most and for whom she also seeks revenge: Melissa, eventually murdered at Icarius' orders, Peribea, Penelope's mother who, years before, commits suicide, and finally,

Penelope herself (48). The vendetta against the father in the name of these people is signified by her departure for

Ithaca with Odysseus. At this point in time, Odysseus is both friend and foe much in the same way that the child Pan is both son and monster. As a man who comes to Sparta to participate and negotiate the exchange of women with other men, he is not to be trusted. Contemplated by the young

Penelope, the heroic figure of Odysseus is immediately undercut:

Niente di speciale, fu quello che pensai. Un furbetto dai capelli rossi e le gambe tozze, ancora troppo giovane per aver partecipato a tutte le imprese che di lui si raccontano (47- 48) . Nothing special, is what I thought. A trickster with red hair and short stocky legs, still much too young to have participated in all the exploits that everyone recounts about him.

At the same time, however, in the context of Penelope's experiences of sexual abuse, Odysseus becomes Penelope's

74 accomplice and ally. It is intimated that he understands the nature of Icarius' insistent opposition to Penelope's departure from Sparta; Odysseus understands the reason for

Icarius' paternal jealousy and he wastes no time in helping

Penelope carry out her escape:

Ed ecco, dietro di noi, un gruppo di armati, a cavallo; a guidarli e un uomo che riconosco, un uomo senza pace, che sferza i veloci detrieri di Sparta come dovesse inseguirmi fino al regno di Plutone. E subito la voce di Odisseo, ferma, senza dubbi o incertezze. Penelope, abbassa sul volto il velo di nozze. - Questo significa... - Che tu sei gia mia sposa. Oh, furbo Odisseo, quanto risi allora - mai piu forse come allora (49). And there, behind us, a group of armed men on horseback; guiding them a man that I know [Icarius], a man without peace, that spurs on the quick Spartan steeds as if he were going to follow me down to the kingdom of Pluto. And immediately, Odysseus' voice, firm, without doubts or uncertainties: - Penelope, lower the veil on your face. - That means ... - That you are already my wife. Oh, clever Odysseus, how I laughed then - maybe more than I ever have since.

Characterized by a desire for revenge and desperation,

Penelope's relationship with her father is also curiously tinged with a longing and claim to her paternal line.

Although it is an overstatement to say that the father is

75 somehow redeemed through this emotion of longing and attachment of the daughter to him, the emotion is nonetheless present, strangely glimmering as it threads its way through the story, knotting up at certain points to strangle the main narrative that denounces the father and his actions. Upon learning of Melissa's death and before understanding that her father is the one responsible for it, the wish for paternal comfort, in spite of everything, takes its hold:

Mi volto. Mio padre Icario mi sta davanti, fermo, immobile, nella sua tenuta di soldato. E per una volta, per una volta soltanto avrei voglia di gettarmi tral le sua braccia. Come facevo da bambina, quando uno spavento m'aveva fatto battere il cuore. Oh padre, padre, proteggimi dal male (43). I turned around. My father Icarius is in standing in front of me, still, immobile in his soldier-like stance. And for once, just for this one time only, I would have liked to throw myself into his arms. Like I used to do when I was a little girl, when a start had made my heart race in fear. Oh father, father, protect me from harm.

A claim to her paternal heritage is also present in her insistence on identifying herself as a Spartan princess in the face of the suitor Antinous (89) even though Sparta, as she states, was never a place to bring her happiness (49) .

76 In spite of everything that has transpired, Penelope does not renounce the place she comes from, and when she looks at her own son Telemachus, she recognizes him both as "un vero spartano" "a true Spartan" (87) and as a young man who resembles his grandfather, her father, Icarius (74).

Creating a network of female connections, pairing up the characters in a relationship of entrustment, and using the earth mother goddess as a backdrop for the narration of the individual and collective narration of these women's stories, the novel does not preclude the possibility of meaningful connections with men. However, unlike Goodison, whose maternal genealogy makes a certain space for the paternal presence in poems like "Songs for my Son", La

Spina's winding in and out of scenes of sexual abuse, suicide and desperation makes this search for how women and men might connect a troubling one that does not appear in the novel to have a positive outcome. The novel concludes with what can be read as a complete separation of men and women, with Penelope and Eurycleia leaving Ithaca and the kingdom of Odysseus and Telemachus that it represents.

Together, the two women travel together in an anonymity that strangely resembles the theme of women's silence throughout the novel. Indeed, Eurycleia, the last voice in the novel, makes the following commentary:

77 Da allora abbiamo viaggiato molto, io e Penelope, abbiamo visto molte genti, e nessuno ci ha mai chiesto niente. Mai, ripeto, chi siete, dove andate? - Come previsto, Odisseo ha mantenuto il silenzio sulla faccenda. Ma dappertutto ugualmente sentivamo parlare di lui, le bocche erano piene delle imprese di Odisseo; persino il suo nome era segno di liberta. E questo mi e parso ingiusto, tanto che una volta ho chiesto : E di noi ? di noi nulla? (137-38) Since then we have traveled much, Penelope and I; we have seen many peoples and no one ever asked us anything. Never, I repeat, who are you, where are you going? - As expected, Odysseus kept quiet about the whole thing [the women's departure]. But everywhere we heard people talk about him just the same, mouths were full of the feats of Odysseus, his name even signifying freedom. And this seemed unfair to me, so much so that I one time asked: And about us? About us, nothing?

The separation of the worlds of men and women that these final words of Eurycleia suggests, however, only comes after the struggle to claim spaces of agency, voice, and connection between not just women, but also between women and men. This struggle for agency and meaningful connection that runs through the novel is also present in the relationship of Penelope and her son, Telemachus. It is here that the mother struggles for agency for both herself and her son who faces initiation and induction into a model of masculinity that Odysseus, vaunting his military and

78 sexual exploits to the drunken men at the beginning of the novel, represents. The initiation into the world of men and particular model of masculinity is forced, and the mother is powerless to prevent it. Her son must go to the mountains to be the lover and student of the shepherd

Mentore, a play on the Homeric figure of Athena/Mentor. The departure of the adolescent Telemachus is a staged or symbolic kidnapping, an act that parallels in some way the institutionalized violence disguised as ritual to which the adolescent Penelope is forced to submit. The movement into the realm of men is not without its moments of return to the mother. For example, stealing up to her chambers one evening, the young Telemachus reveals something of the nature of the violence of this male order and its impact upon him:

- Dormi, madre? - No, Telemaco, dimmi. Un sospiro, un solo lungo sospiro e si getto tra le mie braccia, di nuovo singhiozzando come un fanciullo - Oh, madre, sapessi (102). - Are you sleeping mother? - No, Telemachus, what is it? A sigh, one long sigh and he threw himself in my arms, once again crying like a small boy. - Oh, mother, if you only knew.

79 While such moments are part of the struggle to negotiate a mother-son relationship where the entry into male adulthood is not predicated upon the separation and domination of women, the end result of this negotiation is not one that alters the status quo: when morning comes, Penelope hurries her son who has fallen asleep on her bed out of the chamber for fear of rumors.

The inability of Penelope to defend her son from this male order is coupled with her inability to save her lover

Cleon who, indigenous to the island Lesbos, is also a worshipper of the earth mother goddess La Dea. Cleon represents an alternate model of masculinity that is, as

Penelope affirms, less cruel than that of her husband

Odysseus. The novel contrasts these two models of masculinity in part through differentiating between two relationships with language. Cleon, like Melissa, priestess to La Dea, speaks with what are described as well-weighted and wise words. The emphasis on such speech and use of words can be read as a challenge to the reputation of

Odysseus as someone who is skilled with words. While

Cleon's skill with words is connected to La Dea, a life- giving force, Odysseus' skill is portrayed as lies. Cleon's integrity, justice, and love is contrasted with Odysseus' inability to ever really rise up out of lewd story-telling.

80 While Cleon's speech originates from the life-giving force of La Dea, the source of Odysseus' skill with words is fear and self-deception. Penelope's observations of Odysseus at the beginning of the novel when she is listening to him recount his adventures to the drunken men on the floor below her bed, serves to characterize how and why he uses words, stringing them together in a way that never rises up out of a type of impotent swaggering:

Bugiardo. Menzognero Odisseo. Sapresti ingannare la tua stessa ombra, se l'avessi incontrata con le alter nell'Ade. E io dico che tua madre non dovette esser Anticlea, ne tuo padre Laerte, ma Menzogna e Inganno ti procrearono. Piuttosto perche non dici a tutti che ti manco il coraggio, o per intero riferisci cosa disse l'oracolo. Di come hai detto a me quella notte stessa, quando piangevi e ti voltolavi tra le coltri per timore dei parenti dei principi, che nell'agora radunavano armati per vendicare i loro figli, da te cosi proditoriamente assassinati (9-10). Liar. You would know how to trick your own shadow if you'd met it with the others in Hades. And I say that your mother couldn't have been Anticlea, nor your father Laertes, but instead Falsehood and Deceit procreated you. Why don't you tell everyone that you were a coward, or to tell the whole story, tell them what the oracle said. Tell them what you told me that very night, when you were crying and you tossed and turned between the sheets because you were afraid of the suitor's families, armed and gathering in the agora to vindicate the death of their sons you so treacherously assassinated.

81 Here Odysseus is not portrayed as involved in the regenerative and transformative process of poetry or story, but rather, he, like the young men whose sacred animal masks fail to transform them into anything beyond rapists in the orgy of Artemis, remains in the realm of masquerade and lie.

La Spina's Penelope is engaged in confronting how such lies have been presented as truth and in articulating the disastrous effects of this masquerade on women and other marginalized peoples, here represented by the Helot population. It is through the network of women, diverse in age, social status and also culture that the stories suppressed by the dominant narrative can be finally told and the power operating under religious or ^lawful' truth unmasked. Penelope as mother tries to intervene and alter her son's entry into this system of power. However, these efforts do not prove fruitful; neither mother nor son can alter their relationship of separation and hierarchy within the patriarchal society the novel depicts. It is only within the female relationships that a significant shift is portrayed as possible. The novel concludes with a long section spoken by Eurycleia, words which move her into an idea of subjectivity with self-representation as the core.

While La Spina's Eurycleia is, like Walcott's Egyptian

82 nurse, the "house's foundation" (1.2.18), La Spina's

Eurycleia has, up until the end of the book, been the silent keeper of secrets, the most significant of which is that Odysseus is not Laertes' son. Once liberated from this role of repository for all that must be kept hidden from view, Eurycleia stepping into herself and alongside

Penelope, leaves the island of Ithaca. The physical departure of the women together signifies both an equality between them and a freedom from a logic of domination of which patriarchy is just one manifestation. It is in this sense that the last line of the novel "La vera liberta e silenziosa"(138)("True freedom is silent") has meaning beyond silence as equated with powerlessness and isolation.

83 iv. Juana Rosa Pita: Viajes de Penelope (Penelope's Voyages)

Prompted by the translation of Viajes de Penelope into

Italian in 2006, Juana Rosa Pita discusses with Brigidina

Gentile the impetus for this collection of poems that first appeared with the small press she co-founded and co- directed with the Argentinean poet David Lagmanovich,

Ediciones de Poesia Solar (1976-85). In an interview with

Gentile, one of the Italian translators of Viajes de

Penelope,28 Pita places the writing of this text within a particular moment in her personal history. Composed in a period when she was divorcing after eighteen years of marriage and moving with her three children to a new city within the US, the collection of poems with Penelope as protagonist is a personal journey where the voice of the

Penelope and the poet continually intermingle. While critics such as Jesus Barquet read this work as a metaphor for the return of Cubans to the island at the beginning of the 1960s motivated by the "triunfo de la revolucion de

1959"("triumph of the revolution of 1959") ("Funcion del mito el los Viajes de Penelope de Juana Rosa Pita", 1269;), and as a specific, example of the exilic condition as experienced by a woman (Poesia cubana del siglo XX, 33),

84 Pita affirms that a reading which links the collection to political concepts of Cuban exile is only one possible interpretation. In her 2006 reflection on the poems originally published in 1980, Pita gives a sense of something that drives not only this collection, but her entire poetic practice. In this interview with Gentile and elsewhere, Pita gives the sense that while poetry may be political, it cannot be reduced to politics. Indeed,

"politics", she affirms in another recent interview, "is the lowest level of reality".29 Pita sees her work as going beyond this first and lowest level of being and existing in the world.

What Pita chooses to emphasize in this reflection prompted by the 2006 Italian translation of Viajes de

Penelope, is a vision of the book that in some ways parallels what La Spina presents in her novel: a type of marked division between masculine and feminine as ways of being in the world. She states that there are "due visioni o modi di affrontare il mondo e la vita, due forze in gioco" ("two visions or ways of facing the world and life, two forces that are in play" 2). And yet, as Pita's investigation of the mother son relationship in Viajes de

Penelope and in the poem "Mayoria de Telemaco"

("Telemachus, Coming of Age") from her most recent

85 collection of poetry Pensamiento del tiempo (Thought of

Time, 2005) illustrates, these two forces are necessarily interconnected and bound up with one another. As with La

Spina, the impetus for Pita's focus on and portrayal of

Penelope and Telemachus is a renegotiation of the mother- son relationship. Unlike La Spina, however, Pita creates a more tangible vision of mother and son engaged or moving toward a reciprocal and non-hierarchical way of interacting with each other.

In line with her refusal to reduce poetry to politics,

Pita also emphasizes in this interview with Gentile a metaphysical reading of this collection of poems whereby

Ulysses represents time, Penelope eternity. Ulysses can also, she goes on, be seen to represent history, Penelope poetry (2). Quoting Octavio Paz, Pita outlines the affinity of her view of poetry with Paz' idea of poetry as the dream of history: "cuando la storia duerme habla en suenos"("when

History sleeps, it speaks in dreams"; 2) . While Pita may refer to Paz to affirm poetry's place and function as the dream of history, her project differs from the poetics of history that West Indian writers Lorna Goodison and Derek

Walcott are engaged in with their writing. Her poetry is not invested in what Glissant calls "poetic divination", the poet acting as a type of channel whereby experiences

86 and people's subjectivities denied under colonialism and/or characterized as tragic and dispossessed within the dominant narrative of History, find both expression and life in the present moment. Pita's project is not one of establishing a genealogy or of articulating a particular type of subjectivity and identity that is necessarily tied to the region of the Caribbean; instead her project suggests a spiritual quest which she sees as transcending any one particular social, political, or historical moment.

Viajes de Penelope is also part of the poet's larger engagement with myth. Within the context of Pita's work, myth and the taking up of female mythic figures like

Penelope or Eurydice, for example, occurs within an archetypal understanding of myth; the poetry explores and gives voice to the ^female' force within the universe.

Carlota Caufield, for example, affirms Pita's engagement with female mythic figures in the two collections Euridice en la fuente (Eurydice in the fountain, 1979) and Viajes de

Penelope (1980) as an important part of her work as a poet.

Caufield calls these figures in Pita's poetry "female heros". Pita's Eurydice escapes Hades and "through her risk taking manages to unite the fragments of her world"(1).

Similarly, Caufield states that Viajes de . Penelope represents a female quest whereby there is a "voyage

87 through the infinity of a woman's inner adventures.

Penelope's journey takes place inside herself" (1). Caufield continues: "Instead of confronting and battling monsters, the quester learns to embody mythic powers within herself and with love as her most powerful weapon, she conquers time"(l).

Reading the theme of exile, Caufield goes beyond the notion of political exile; she defines three stages of exile in Pita's oeuvre ("Ruptura, Irreverencia y memoria en la obra de Juana Rosa Pita", 155). She identifies the first as an exile from the island where there is a contrast between reality and dream in reflections on poetry. The second form of exile is, asserts Caufield, exile from being loved. This stage corresponds with the reinvention of female or feminine myths as well as with the identification with the female figure (Eurydice and Penelope) as a poet- chronicler. The last stage has to do with an exile from what Caufield identifies as Pita's own dreams. This stage is characterized by the poet investigating her own writing and reflecting on a spirituality connected to this endeavor. Regarding the subjects of myth and history,

Caufield points out that Pita's notion of poetry is as "the discovery of new dimensions in which different times and spaces are interrelated"(2). But once again, while this

88 inter-relational element of her work can be felt as an echo of the simultaneity of past and present and future that characterizes both Goodison and Walcott's work, it is not part of working out a complex cultural heritage where identities of colonizer and colonized are intertwined; it is not invested in establishing a model of subjectivity that can be seen as arising out of experiences that are particular to the region of the Caribbean.

One of the main reasons for this marked difference between Pita and the other two writers from the region of the Caribbean is Pita's attachment to a Spanish colonial literary and cultural heritage. The final section of Viajes de Penelope, for example, ties her to the writings of Sor

Juana Ines de la Cruz. Entitled "Razon de tejer" ("Reason for Weaving") , the last section of the book is prefaced by a quote from Sor Juana, writing in seventeenth-century

Mexico at the end of the Spanish Golden Age (Luciani 19) .

While a detailed account of the writings and history of Sor

Juana is beyond the scope of this study, there are two characteristic elements that could be proposed as linking

Pita's writing to that of Sor Juana: 1) the creation of the self that occurs within writing, and 2) a foregrounding of the act of writing in reference to the self. Frederick

Luciani's description of Sor Juana's "self-inscription",

89 defined by "the act of self-naming, the explicit placement of the self within traditions of writing, and the representation of the psychological and bodily self in the act of writing" (26), could just as also be applied to the process in which Pita is engaged, her personal interior voyage mingling with the experiences of the mythic

Penelope. Calling attention to the act of writing itself as the means by which subjectivity is established, Pita foregrounds the poem as a physical place, its verses and stanzas literally becoming rooms and spaces in which people search for one another and for themselves.

When Penelope as mother first appears in poem "31", located in the section entitled "Cancion de

Ulises"("Ulysses' Song"), of Viajes de Penelope, the poem is portrayed as meeting place and the writing as site of agency and production of subjectivity, both of the writer and the person addressed or described in the poem. 30

No conviene que tu hijo buscandote entre versos piense que ha sido sueho nuestro abrazo

Hazte tangible Ulises este fin de poema (1-6) It isn't right that your son searching for you among verses think that he had dreamt our embrace

90 Make yourself tangible Ulysses it is this, the aim of the poem

Put forth by Penelope to Ulysses on behalf of their son

Telemachus, the appeal here is for Ulysses to make himself known to his son; it is the work of writing of the poem to conjure up his presence and make this happen. While the work of the poem in creating a subjectivity for the poet and for the people she speaks of in the poem can be compared to the function of the poem as meeting place and site of agency for people of different times and places in the work of Lorna Goodison, Pita's poetry is not invested with the same type of purpose as Goodison's: an inscription of voice and agency intertwined with an element of healing in the face of a violent and dehumanizing colonial history.

Nevertheless, poetry is designated by both poets as a means by which the rifts between people are lessened.

For both Pita and Goodison, the poem as meeting place is characterized by a fluidity whereby chronological time is collapsed. For Pita, however, the poem and its stanzas can be likened to a type of edifice whose rooms are not only inter-generational meeting places as in the case of

Goodison, but are also places where different and possible

91 versions of people and their emotions criss-cross each other in a game of hide-and-seek. Poem 4 of the collection, for instance, depicts a Penelope that is much older than

Ulysses and whose untold stories and voyages precede his:

Quien cantara tus viajes infinitos Penelope: tu Ulises era apenas un chiquillo chapoteando en la fuente

y aventurera inmovil trascendias como rayo de luz sobre la tela confiscada a los dioses: tejida sueno a sueno (1-8) Who will sing of your infinite voyages Penelope: you, Ulysses, were only a child splashing in the fountain

and faithful adventuress, you would transcend like a ray of light above the tapestry stolen from the gods: woven dream by dream

The reconfiguration of relationships and the foregrounding of Penelope as mother who has the power to conjure up

Ulysses for her son occurs through the act of writing.

Almost recalling the tradition of Sor Juana Ines, Caufield identifies writing as the rite by which Pita establishes her subjectivity in full:

La escritura es precisamente para Pita un rito que recupera constantemente la posibilidad de

92 autoenunciacion de un "yo" poetico que exije su plena existencia. ("Ruptura, irreverencia y memoria en la obra de Juana Rosa Pita" 155) Writing, for Pita, is precisely a rite that continuously recuperates the possibility of the auto enunciation of a poetic "I" that demands her full existence.

The agency of the mother in this regard is explored in further detail in a poem from Pita's most recent collection, Pensamiento del Tiempo (Thought of Time, 2005).

The title of the poem is "Mayoria de Telemaco"

("Telemachus, Coming of Age"). In this poem the re- imagining of the mother-son-father unit begins by construing the father's absence not as an overwhelming ghostly presence determining each moment of the child's life, but rather, absence signifies only death. Unlike the shifting and blurred notions of identity of speaker/poet that characterize Viajes de Penelope, the speaker of

"Mayoria de Telemaco" is an omniscient narrator who can not only tell the story of Telemachus, a story which is in great part the story of Telemachus and Penelope, but who can also interpret the psychological and emotional processes of child become young man. The movement between past and present tenses in the poem reinforces the position of the speaker as all-knowing of the story of the son as it has, and will happen. One way of reading this knowledge of

93 the son and his inner life is as a maternal knowledge: the speaker's voice as all-knowing of the child alludes to the mother, which in turn, alludes to the position and subjectivity of Penelope.

The first section of the poem works to establish the mother Penelope as a pillar of strength that both creates and supports the child's world, and Penelope's patience is reconfigured by Pita as an act of resistance whose end result has nothing to do with wifely duties or remaining faithful to a husband and his household, but instead, has everything to do with the survival of her child.

While her repeated acts of resistance to the suitors ensure the child's physical survival, Penelope's words also work to create the child's reality, ensuring him of both a maternal and paternal genealogy. This act is similar to that performed in Goodison's poetry where a maternal genealogy also embraces a paternal one. Penelope's words establish the connection between child and father, here conjured up not as the husband Ulysses, but rather, as

Ulysses, the one Penelope has chosen to love:

1

No tuvo nombre tu desesperanza cuando la ausencia equivalia a muerte en tu mente de nifio

94 y tu adhesion al mundo dependia de que la resistencia de tu madre no se quebrara a fuerza de insolencias, embozadas en musica, de alguno de los torvos rivales de Odiseo.

Solamente tenias la palabra de ella para saber tu sombra semejante a la sombra de su amado. Pintiparado a el, te confirmo la diosa: tus ojos, tu cabeza abalanzada siempre - se diria - a una escondida estrella. (1-15) Your desperation did not have a name when absence equaled death in your child's mind Your adherence to the world depended on the strength of your mother not being broken by the insolences cloaked in music, of each of the fierce rivals of Odysseus.

You had only her word to know your shadow as resembling the shadow of her beloved. Exactly like him, confirmed for you by the goddess: your eyes, your face always thrust - it would be said - toward a hidden star.

The description of the father-son relationship as shadows that resemble one another renders the lineage as subtle and nuanced, having little to do with a particular name, household and properties, or heroic feats.

Similarly, the coming of age that characterizes part 2 of the poem "Mayoria de Telemaco", is described not as a departure into the world of men and their events of war,

95 travel and conquest, but rather, it is depicted as a joining with the principles of justice and prudence that are inherently part of the larger universe to which the mother is also connected:

De cara a tu destino pastoreando un deseo inextinguible, prudencia y equidad bebiste de los labios sin voz del universe

Tuya es la voluntad de no esquivarle el alma a la afliccion tan sofocante, en suehos o despierto. Tu enemiga mortal: la desconfianza.

Puesto que siempre avanzas pisando los talones a la diosa, o sentado a su diestra, tuyo es el porvenir de toda isla.

Cultivaras tu la leyenda de lo que fuera una ardua realidad. Y beberas la luz de la inclinada al mar, cuando amanezca.(16-31) Facing your destiny sheperding a desire, inextinguishable you drank caution and fairness from the voiceless lips of the universe.

It is yours, the will to not evade the soul's affliction so stifling, whether dreaming or awake. Your mortal enemy: fearful suspicion.

Given that you always advance on the heels of the goddess, or, seated on her right, .It is yours, the future of all the island.

It is you who will cultivate the legend

96 of what was an arduous truth. And you will drink the light from her leaning to the sea, when it rises.

The image of drinking "prudencia y equidad" ("caution and fairness") from the "los labios sin voz del universo"

("voiceless lips of the universe" 14) recalls a nourishment not unlike the one first provided by the mother, nourishing the child from her own breast. The image of Telemachus drinking "la luz / de la inclinada al mar, cuando amanezca"

("the light /from her [the goddess] leaning to the sea, when it rises") reinforces his connection to the universe as a source of nourishment. Further, the universe is connected with the divine as the goddess is not only

Telemachus' guide but also Penelope's ally in establishing the boy's link with the father and the universe where justice, caution and spiritual nourishment reign.

Telemachus, raised by his mother and nourished by the universe, indeed seems more knowledgeable and wise than any of the men from whom he eventually seeks knowledge of the war and of his father's whereabouts. Part 3 of the poem depicts Telemachus listening patiently to the stories told by the heroes of the Trojan war, an act which ultimately does not result in

97 any useful answers:

3

Ella sofio por ti hasta que cumpliste y con verbo abordaste tu decir. Te codeaste con heroes y eschuchaste, paciente, sus historias. Pero no te fue dada la videncia nocturna, tranquilazadora, de la secreta trama de la tela: te formaste callado en tu desvelo.

Mastil de abeto izado, buen viento, enorme vela: tu besaras la aurora por que vives y sembraras los campos con tu sueno.(32-43) She dreamt for you until you came of age And with speed you brought your opinion to port. You rubbed shoulders with heroes and listened, patient, to their stories. But the revelation was not given to you nocturn, soothing, of the secret weave of the tapestry: you grew up silent in your solitude.

Mast of hoisted fir, good wind, large sail you will kiss the dawn in order to live and you will sow fields with your dreams.

With the mother acting as a point of reference or compass that guides his course, Pita recasts the homeric premise that the story of Telemachus finding his father is more interesting or important than the one he has been living with his mother for the past twenty years.

98 The figure of Penelope as mother and the reconfiguration of the mother-son relationship is taken up in yet another collection of Pita's poems, Infancia del Pan nuestro (Childhood of Our Pan, 1995). Here the voice of

Penelope's illegitimate son is explored.31 While La Spina ambiguously depicts Pan as child/victim and child/monster, product of an incestuous rape, Pita looks at the figure of

Pan as both exile and saviour. The son of Penelope moves through time and space, traversing continents and millenniums. He learns to speak in ancient Egypt and is the son of the Father in medieval Italy and ancient Rome; his existence is characterized by a boundlessness manifest in the description he gives of himself: "cuidadano de otro reino / no valorado alii ni en otras tierras" ("citizen of another realm, not valorized here nor in other lands"(4-5 poem 30). The son's movement is similar to the movement through temporal and geographic boundaries characterizing the speaker/poet of Viajes de Penelope: different versions of the self and parallel lives intersect with each other.

Una fuga de salves a cinco voces tejera la musica donde el alma de cada ser humano podra reconquistar las vidas paralelas que la atanen desde su devenir mas pleno.

99 Una fuga de auroras remotas su cadencia encontrara en el perfecto unisono conmigo. (1-9 poem 21) A fugue of salves32 the music will weave in five voices where the soul of each human being will be able to reconquer the parallel lives that belong to it from its fuller future. A fugue of dawns remote, its cadence will meet in perfect unison with me.

The unity and harmony that this poem projects is infused with the Catholic religion at the same time that it seeks to transcend it. The configuration of the mother-son bond is clearly within the symbolic realm and representation of

Jesus and the mother Mary. The mother is simultaneously depicted as a Penelope figure and the Madonna, cradling her son. Poem 2 of the collection Infancia del Pan nuestro draws her as the weaving Penelope:

Mi Madre es bella y buena, teje aun sin agujas (hueso de codorniz) y me acaricia. Por el ojo del hacha hoy desfilan los pajaros marinos. Las abejas producen en silencio mis primeras palabras. My mother is beautiful and good, she weaves nevertheless without needles (made of quail) and caresses me. Through the eye of the axe, today sea birds pass. The bees produce in silence

100 my first words.

In poem 8, she is a Madonna figure who cradles her son with twin blue circles, halo-like, one held in the hand of Pan that encloses the sky, the other placed in the breast of the mother:

Antenoche sone que en esta mano de acariciar los brazos de mi Madre hay un circulo azul que encierra el cielo, y que en el corazon de ella un circulo gemelo hay tambien.

A ojos abiertos me lance en el sueho.(1-6 poem 8) The night before last I dreamt that in this caressing hand, the arms of my Mother there lies a blue circle that encloses the sky and in her heart a twin circle there is as well.

With open eyes I launched myself into the dream.

The interchange between son and mother in Pita's work is not one of hierarchy; instead, it is a relationship of mutual exchange and learning. The mother is not reduced to a symbol of sacrifice and humility before the male child as in the Catholic tradition;33 instead, she figures as a partner to the son and he to her in a cosmological spirituality from which nothing on earth is divorced.

101 The intersection of different versions of the self, parallel lives in Viajes de Penelope, and the fluid movement in and among a variety of cultures or moments in time as characterized in Infancia del Pan nuestro, is resonant with some of the ideas of the well-known twentieth-century Cuban poet Jose Lezama Lima. In particular, Lezama Lima's concept of "las eras imaginarias"

("imaginary eras") is applicable here. Imaginary eras, states Alan West in Tropics of History: Cuba Imagined

(1997), are not synonomous with a civilization or society, but rather, are tied to archetype insofar as they are constituted by a collection of archetypes brought under number of central metaphors which acquire specificity in a particular place and time:

[...] an archetype, which by definition is not historically bound, becomes an imaginary era when it acquires a historical specificity and is incorporated into the shifting constellation of a concrete historical formation. (115)

West continues to explain that Lima's imaginary eras are imbued with a certain "sacredness" that accords continuity to them; imaginary eras never really end. "Its hegemony may end," .as West states, "but certain of its elements are picked up by future societies or imaginary eras (eg:

102 certain images of the Egyptians are retrieved and transformed by Christianity)"(115). Christianity is for

Lima, one of the main imaginary eras. The continuity of imaginary eras, the idea that they never really end and that elements of them can be found in each other is somewhat reminiscent of the Guyanese writer/theorist Wilson

Harris' idea of "cross-cultural latencies".34

The Jesus-Pan figure of Pita's collection can be read in this light. Like Lima, Pita grounds her work in a

Catholicism that expands beyond the boundaries of any prescriptions of any single organized religion. The figure of the son is one of expansion and boundlessness within time and space, and this type of traveling is tied up with the identity of the Penelope/Madonna mother figure, as is evident in poem 11 of the collection:

El nido inalcanzable alia en lo alto El ave compadece a sus pequenos.

Hay un trono en el pecho de mi Madre Donde se sienta la misericordia.

Soy calor y ella es luz del mismo fuego : Mi casa es de esplendor.(1-6 poem 11) There on high, in the unreachable nest the bird is sorry for its sins.

There is a throne in my Mother's breast where compassion sits.

I am heat and she is light of the same fire:

103 my house is of radiance.

In addition to the notions of harmony and universality that Pita's poetry promotes, her writing, like that of

Lezama Lima, seeks to transcend any specific Spanish literary tradition in order to engage with a larger

European one. Like Lima who, as Cesar Salgado points out, sought to dialogue not "with any insular or peninsular

Hispanic tradition but with the totality of European and

American writing"(17), Pita sees her writing as a voice in a literary, philosophic, and spiritual conversation that extends beyond defined geographic borders at the same time that it springs from a European tradition. For instance,

Pita both composes in Italian and actively collaborates in the translation of her poetry into Italian. Her 1992

Florencia Nuestra (Our Florence) takes the point of view of two characters living in Renaissance Florence and Grumo d'Alba (1984) places Italian translations by the author and

Renata Giambene beside the original poems composed in

Spanish.

Pita differs from the other Caribbean writers of this study, Lorna Goodison and Derek Walcott, insofar as she does not have to deal with the experience or history of slavery as part of her cultural heritage. Nevertheless,

104 Pita's writing is similar to the poetic enterprise of these two authors insofar as it presents love as a force that is both healing and generative, creating the possibility of inter-subjectivity based in equality. The love that the mother has for her son and he for her which is explored throughout Pita's poetic oeuvre, is an example of how this force can be used as a means of active resistence to oppression, whatever the particular manifestation. Indeed, in his introduction to Viajes de Penelope, Reinaldo Arenas cites love as Penelope's real weapon (11).

105 Chapter 2: Penelope as Storyteller, wife-lover in the works of Derek Walcott and Luigi Malerba

i. cultural contexts

Derek Walcott's play The Odyssey and Luigi Malerba's novel Itaca per sempre converge in their depiction of

Penelope as storyteller and wife-lover. While the works by the women authors of the study have the figure of the mother as their focal point, these two works written by men give Penelope a strong voice and attempt to renegotiate the relationship of husband and wife on equal terms. Like the mother figure in the works of Lorna Goodison, Silvana La

Spina, and Juana Rosa Pita is a site of agency where the past, present, and future coincide, Penelope as storyteller in the works of Derek Walcott and Luigi Malerba marks a generative point from which re-evaluation of the past and change in the present/future can occur.

Although hailing from very different cultural contexts, both Walcott and Malerba are preoccupied with the role of the artist in society and with imagination as a force of expansion through which the world can be changed.

Coming out of a particular moment in the Caribbean in the

1950s-1960s characterized by struggles to conceptualize the

106 political and social relationships between the Caribbean islands and to conceive of a possible Caribbean identity,

Walcott has always argued for the importance of the artist within the social sphere (Breslin, 23) . Similarly, as a writer receiving his intellectual formation in the aftermath of World War II in Italy, Malerba comes out of a socio-political context where the question of the role of the artist and intellectual in society is central (Cannon

Post Modern Italian Fiction, 21). But while the formation of both writers grounds them in the confluence of art and politics, their writing is always guided by the power of imagination as a creative force. Recalling the work of the

Cuban-born poet Juana Rosa Pita, poetry/art is indeed political, but it cannot be reduced to politics. As Walcott insists, the imagination is the only nation to which he belongs35. Malerba, too, sees the role of literature as posing "new forms of experience, new prospects or Utopias" rather than providing definitive answers or models to follow (Canon, "Intervista con Luigi Malerba" 236) . This relationship between art and politics is perhaps most eloquently expressed by Malerba's contemporary Italo

Calvino in the essay "Right and Wrong Political Uses of

Literature". It is here that Calvino calls literature "the ear that can hear things beyond the understanding of

107 politics" and "the eye that can see beyond the color spectrum perceived by politics" (98) . And yet, it remains inter-connected to politics insofar as it "impose[s] patterns of language, of vision, of imagination"(99).

Walcott's play establishes the figure of Penelope as part of the story-telling process itself. The play carefully connects the motion of Penelope's loom, the bowstring's movement across the poet's lyre, and the tidal push and pull of the sea. Recalling Kamau Brathwaite's concept of "tidalectics" this tidal motion both grounds the story in the Caribbean at the same time that it signals an expansion outward.36 The continual expansion outward and return and then outward again can be read as a metaphor for story and its generative powers. The figure of Penelope as poet/storyteller is perhaps most explicit in the original opening of the play. Cut between the first preview night and the official opening night of the production of the

Royal Shakespeare Company for whom the play was commissioned, the original opening featured Penelope and the sound of her loom alongside the song of the narrator,

Blind Billy Blue. In this version, the sound of the loom along with Penelope's bodily presence on stage begins the story and, together with the strong presence of Penelope in the final scenes, acts as a frame for the play. As Billy

108 Blue delivers his prologue in West-Indian inflected speech,

Penelope works and weaves alongside him, eventually getting up and walking across the stage to him to signal that it is time to go. Their duet firmly establishes her part not only as character but as narrator shaping the story that will be told.

The story that Penelope tells in spite of the deletion of the original opening, is one of inter-connection and mutuality. Through the use of metaphor, Walcott superimposes animal, human, and plant realms to create a reality that might be compared to what Guyanese writer and critic Wilson Harris, in The Radical Imagination (1992), calls "quantum immediacy" where all things are interconnected and present in one another. Spoken through the bodies on stage, the reality created by the metaphors becomes tangible, rooted in the flesh and participated in through emotional responses by the bodies in the audience.

The reality of quantum immediacy thus becomes something that people are able to feel and participate in.

Like Walcott, Malerba is intent on establishing

Penelope as a story-teller. The novel accords her a space to speak that is equal to that of Ulysses and is invested in developing, a picture of Penelope as self-reliant, independent, and a match for Ulysses' renowned wit as

109 inventor of tales. The novel is careful, however, to illustrate Penelope's subjectivity as something she carves out in Ulysses' absence as well as in his presence.

Penelope does not sit and wait; she is active in Ithacan life and her words are seen as being carried beyond the geographical space of the island. Upon Ulysses' return,

Penelope decides to play his story-telling game and her participation in the narrative causes shifts, slides, and even crumbling in the story's construction and its pattern.

True to the postmodern vein of writing in which Malerba participates, the novel, through the juxtaposition of

Ulysses and Penelope's narratives, questions the grand narrative of the hero and his adventures. By giving

Penelope equal voice and time in the novel, Ulysses is forced to shift his part in the story that has happened, is happening, and that is to come. In some sense, the postmodern becomes, to use another term of Wilson Harris,

"regenerative".

110 ii: Derek Walcott: The Odyssey: A Stage Version

In "A Sail on the Horizon", address given at the conference and art exhibit, Ulisse: mito e memoria, organized by Piero Boitani in Rome, Walcott reminds his audience of the freedom from uni-directional and hierarchical concepts of inheritance that his poetry provides. This freedom, he says, is something people often neglect (48) . The Odyssey: A Stage Version, complicates notions of hierarchy, promotes a sense of simultaneity where things exist as both/and instead of either/or, and similar to the poems of Lorna Goodison, collapses past, present, and future to exist as one. While The Odyssey: A

Stage Version is considered an adaptation of Homer's the

Odyssey, through its promotion of a sense of both/and, simultaneity, and complication of the idea of linearity, the play, like the coin upon which the profile of African woman is minted in Goodison's poem "Guinea Woman", becomes a story older than itself.

In the opening of her 2005 article "Playing with

Europe: Derek Walcott's Retelling of Homer's Odyssey",

Irene Martyniuk provides a summary of the critical terrain surrounding this play. Nodding to the variety of ways in

111 which critical writings have engaged with the play,

Martyniuk states that on the whole, most criticism sees the play as illustrating ideas about identity and heritage that

Walcott has expressed in critical essays like "The Muse of

History" (1974) and "What the Twilight Says" (1970) .

Martyniuk summarizes:

In short, most agree that Walcott's play, while openly retelling a Western master narrative, moves beyond typical European binaries. In the play there are no clear heroes, or monsters, or even colonizers or colonized (188) .

While criticism points to how the play moves beyond binaries to create a place where culture and identity cannot be understood simply in terms of self and other, much textual analysis still focuses on the relationship with Walcott's play and Homer's Odyssey to either highlight what Robert Hamner calls the "Caribbean inflection" of the work, or to understand how Walcott's play interacts with the classical Greek epic within a postcolonial framework.

It is the goal of the present analysis, however, to examine in detail how the play creates a place where the chiaroscuro of self/other, past present future blend and the interdependent nature of people, culture and their

112 environment is actualized; it is an analysis which proposes the figure of Penelope as central to these processes.

The play strives to depict Penelope as narrator.

Looking at draft 4 of the play where a copy of the original prologue can be found,37 it is apparent how Penelope is conceived of as a figure that both roots the play and acts as a frame for the story it tells. The sound of the loom begins the drama and the first movement the audience sees on stage is weaving. Penelope's figure in the form of a silhouette grounds the narrative; she is seen "weaving by torchlight". Melantho lies at her side on the floor, sleeping, and Blind Billy Blue sits on a chair at a distance. The hum of the loom "whirring" is what the audience hears and feels first, along with the sound of the surf, "softly", both as a prelude and accompaniment to the song Billy Blue sings. When Billy Blue's song is finished,

Penelope crosses the stage, touches him on the shoulder to signal that it is time to go, then accompanies him offstage. One of the effects of this series of movements and gestures carried out by Penelope is to make her presence seen and felt and establish that, indeed, it is she who helps guide the narration. Penelope's maid Melantho follows her, "wheeling" the shuttle, symbol of .her narrative device, offstage. The physical presence of the

113 shuttle, the movement of weaving and unraveling that comes through Penelope's body, coupled with the song of Billy

Blue - "blue song [that] drifts from the fire of the war"(draft 4); "blues [that] drifts like smoke from the fire of that war" (final version) - works to unite the concept of story and weaving in a continual sea-like motion of doing and undoing. The falling of the moon and stars and the rising of the sun as the prologue of draft 4 unfolds, visually reinforces this tidal motion. The use of the simile of story as rising smoke also serves to weave together three cultural and historical contexts in a subtle, drifting manner, blending and intertwining them so that they become almost inseparable: the black American experience that the blues evokes, the Caribbean summoned by the island and the sea, and ancient Greece. His blues song/story mingles with the "smoke blue" of the Caribbean islands and with the smoke of the destruction of Troy. In this way, cultural contexts, histories, identities, as well as life and death itself, turn and curl into one another, wafting and rising both outward and up.

At once Caribbean and Mediterranean, at once old and new, the story Penelope weaves and Blind Billy Blue sings is characterized by the intermingling, blending, and diffusion that the blue smoke rising in the prologue

114 signals. The sense of delicate intermingling is cultivated and developed throughout the play. One of the major ways in which this cultivation and development is achieved is through the use of metaphor. Via metaphor, the play creates what might be fruitfully compared to Wilson Harris' idea of

"quantum immediacy", and what I here refer to as the superimposition of realms. Animal, plant, and human realms mix through metaphor and simile which then, through the particular emotions and sensations they evoke in the audience, become embodied to create a place where the interconnectedness of all things is experienced, and at least for the duration of the play, lived.

While Walcott's combined land and sea imagery has been duly recognized as a means by which boundaries and demarcations are blurred (Burnett 39-40), The Odyssey: A

Stage Version goes beyond this intermingling of land and sea to unite and superimpose different realms upon each other. For example, the realm of animals is not separate from that of humans, and the realm of objects is never separate from either of them since objects are created out of the inspiration of both. The "tangled rigging of roots"

(1.14.95) up through which Odysseus, directed by his mother

Anticlea's words, is able to obtain a glimpse of Penelope, is an instance of the rigging of ships made by men for

115 voyage recalling the tangled shape of roots growing downward upward and sideways within the confines of that which provides comfort, shade and sustenance: a tree. As such, Walcott's particular use of blended imagery accomplished through metaphor and simile is not so much about blurring boundaries as it is about understanding how the ship is the tree.

Other metaphors and similes which superimpose realms - to remind of, rather than create or impose connections - work by invoking a corporeal and visceral response in the audience. Similes and metaphors such as "grey age will creep through your body like the grey sea", "his [Nestor's] mind's a sea-mist now"(1.3.27) , or "fh]er [Penelope's] smile is like the sunlight edging a window"(1.1.12) require that the sea be felt, either the cold of its depths slowly moving through to the bone or the fine spray of mist on skin, the density making it difficult to see. The sunlight edging a window that is Penelope's smile similarly depends on warmth and light being felt. The body physically reacts to the heat of the sun, slowly warming the skin, to the light brightening, heightening vision as it comes through clear glass onto the open sill, at the same time as it envisions and has an emotional response to the smile crossing, slowly opening up over a another body's face - in

116 this case the face of the woman, Penelope. It is thus that realms become fused in the body of the reader/listener in a physical and emotional way that works to create a new reality and vision of the world of which he or she is a part.

Other metaphors and similes rely more heavily on movements to bring two realms together. For example: the horses heads, bridled and pulling chariots across the plain, xxplung[e] like porpoises" (1. 3 . 29) ; "Odysseus' prow dolphin[s] over black combers"(1.3.26); and his ship, says

Nestor, "[..]crawled like a fly up the wall of the sea"(1.3.27). Similarly, "I hear wind like surf swaying the sails of poplars" (2.2.109) and "I watched the snail's silver of his diminished sail"(1.3.26) function through the use of a motion that brings two different realms - trees growing and man-made sails, and the wake of a ship with the path of a snail - to sit both within and on top of one another. In doing so, Walcott emphasizes how all realms of existence are present and living in one another. The delivery of these metaphors and similes via living bodies in the theatre serves to further embody them as the emergent designs of the continual superimposition of realms are stitched with the human body and breath.

117 Discussing his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, Walcott reveals how the body of "an old man who looked like an ape, and above his shoulder, a round white full moon" acted as metaphor for the concept of dream itself (Baer 38;

Baugh Derek Walcott 2). In the case of The Odyssey: A Stage

Version, the body can be read as metaphor for the realms of existence always present and living in each other. In addition to reading the body as metaphor, it is important to understand how the use of metaphor spoken through the bodies on stage produces an experience of quantum immediacy in the body of the audience member. Metaphors like "this raft of veins" (1.7.57) or "the palm's rivers" (1.12.85) both show the body of the speaker as interconnected with things beyond itself and through an emotional and physical response, ask the audience to participate in necessary and inevitable extension beyond the self. The experience is cathartic - recalling severed connections - at the same time that it visionary - teaching a new/old way of living in the world.

The soundscape of the play, as well as the repetition of words in different contexts, also contributes to a sense of intermingling and simultaneity. The play's soundscape insists on presenting aural moments in which individual sounds are indistinguishable. Act 1, scene 1, for instance,

118 presents a sound which is "the long cry of a bird or woman"(1.1.6) in the midst of a relation by Blind Billy

Blue and later, in the same act, scene vi opens with cries that are of "gulls or girls playing"(1.6.45) . Repetition of words and images, although not as condensed and immediately powerful as the tightly woven metaphors and similes, serve to further unhinge any fixed and determinate meaning. The use of pine as noun and as verb is a good example of how the myth of determinate meaning is dispelled. Picking up on the expression often used in Homer to describe Penelope's state of waiting for her husband's return, the word in

Walcott's play becomes a prism through which light shines to glint and reflect a sense of simultaneous multiplicity.

Penelope is a "pine on a hill that never sways"(2.4.123) ,

Odysseus pines for home, both Penelope and Odysseus pine for each other, and Antinous, too, states Penelope in her confrontation with him, is "the great pine above those suppliant princes" (1.2.18) . The multiplicity of the word connects the characters together at the same time that it projects a sense of multiplicity upon them. It is thus that

Antinous, in the midst of his confrontation with Penelope, becomes humanized and released from any finite characterization of suitor-enemy.

119 The metonymic use of linen throughout the play also contributes the sense of things existing as both/and. Both shroud and caul, linen is to be understood simultaneously as symbol of death and of life. It is referred to twice in the context of death, first in a conversation between

Eurycleia and Penelope regarding Odysseus' absence, and then in a conversation between the beggar-Odysseus and

Penelope when he refers to her suitors: "Me know how linen keep still when somebody die"(1.2.21) responds Eurycleia to

Penelope's statement "Our bed is white and quiet. It's smooth with silence"(1.2.21). Similarly, the disguised

Odysseus says to Penelope: "He'd [Odysseus] pile the dead like linen for your servants"(2.5.134).

Linen is also the tangle of sheets that joins

Odysseus first with Calypso and then with Circe in what can be understood as the potentially life-producing and life- affirming act of sex. Odysseus and Calypso are "Two bodies tangled in linen as white as surf"(1.7.56); Odysseus and

Circe's encounter is described thus: "After rough seas, rest. From this tangled linen, calm"(1.12.83). Similarly, when the Phaecians beg Odysseus to tell his stories to them and Odysseus warns them of the monstrous content, King

Alcinous says: "Tonight you'll [Odysseus] curl in linen, the clean shell of sleep" (1.7.58), recalling a fetal

120 position that Odysseus will once again curl into when he passes through the straight of Scylla and Charybdis as his nurse Eurycleia and the seer Blind Billy Blue " [...] launch

[his] lickle cradle into dreaming seas"(2.1.106). It is in this way that linen comes to signify both shroud and caul.

This use of linen in Walcott's play as metonym for birth, death and perhaps love, can be paralleled with J. Edward

Chamberlin' s comment in If This is Your Land, Where Are

Your Stories about Penelope's tapestry, metaphor for home, as "both his [Odysseus'] winding sheet and his welcome, whichever was required"(76-77).

The sense of both/and the play creates though metaphor also operates via the relationships and interactions of the racially marked bodies on stage.

Martyniuk, for example, outlines how the relationships between the black and white characters and the poles of colonized and colonizer to which they are traditionally attached are "continually played with and challenged"(192).

While the central action is played out by white characters, those who surround, describe and question them are

"postcolonial characters", marked as "different".

Martyniuk asserts that the "postcolonial characters"

"occupy. multiple positions in the narrative, acting simultaneously as slaves and family members, Others and

121 prophets, Egyptians and seers" (192). Similarly, Odysseus' encounter with the Cyclops confuses the "imperial/native dichotomy" as Odysseus the invader is put into "the role of servitude"(194) . Martyniuk also notes the slides between standard English, West Indian Creole and the American black accent that Odysseus takes on in this Cyclops scene as contributing to the creation of "a space that cannot be defined as either colonial or European"(195).

Scene ii of the first Act projects a continual shifting of power and momentary loss of hierarchy via language, register, and the physical movement between the people on stage. The conversation between Eurycleia,

Penelope, and Eumeaus vividly puts forth one of the play's many moments where hierarchies collapse.38 While Eurycleia and Eumeaus are both servants in Odysseus' house and thus to Penelope, the interaction between the three show how the emotional and psychological relationships between them do not correspond to the slave-master hierarchy under which they are socially called upon to operate. Penelope and

Eurycleia appear as equals with Penelope making the claim that Eurycleia is the foundation of the house (1.2.18), and when Telemachus leaves for news of Odysseus without informing Penelope, it is to Eumeaus that Penelope looks for reassurance of his safety. However, the interaction

122 goes beyond this surface level of declaration to create a continual shifting and emotional push-pull between the three that has the effect of no one coming out on top, of no one being the boss. The portrayal of this triad begins with a virtuous vision of Penelope kneeling and praying by the olive-tree bed. Penelope, addressing Eurycleia, describes this vision of herself, to which the nurse reassuring replies: "Him [Odysseus] knew you would last"

(1.2.16). This image of piety, while recounted by Penelope, recalls her first appearance on the stage in the final version where she comes forth from the light of an open door, veiled: "They [suitors] part like hills for a sail entering harbour"(1.2.11), states Captain Mentes/Athena.

The piety of Penelope that is evoked in this moment can be read as a vestige of earlier drafts of the play whereby a virgin-whore dichotomy was sketched out, Penelope representing the former and Helen, in the guise of a type of table dancer, performing for the suitors, embodied the latter. But the vision of a faithful and virtuous Penelope carried over from the earlier, more pronounced, dichotomy is disrupted in this final version of the play by her own words when she speaks with Eurycleia and later with

Eumeaus. "How in hell could he know?"(1.2.16) responds

Penelope to the nurse's reassurance, breaking her own image

123 of piety and virtue with a colloquial and profane register.

Penelope further destabilizes any fixed image of herself when she answers Eurycleia's affirmation "Mistress, is strong-timbered virtues uphold this house" with "Till my patience cracks and it plunges in chaos"(1.2.16}. This patience for Odysseus' return cracking is reinforced by

Penelope's affirmation to Antinous that the wall recalling Troy - outside which he lays siege has "cracks in its face"(1.2.18).

The back and forth banter of Penelope and Eurycleia where Penelope talks back and counters Eurycleia's statements about her own nature and situation is compounded by the physical interaction of the two characters on the stage. One minute white Penelope is the definite mistress/master, hand perhaps held high, demanding information from Eurycleia about Telemachus' whereabouts -

"Swallow? Old woman, you want my palm on your face?"(1.2.15)", and the next she embraces the nurse, pleading with her gently - "Why not tell me he was leaving?"(1.2.16).

Eumaeus' subsequent entry on the scene increases the loss of prescribed hierarchy and heightens the sense of both/and. Eurycleia insists on sending him back to the kitchen as a servant merely delivering his order while he

124 insists that he be included in the conversation regarding

Telemachus:

EURICLEIA. Not now, Eumaeus, a family crisis

here.

EUMAEUS. Since when am I excluded from this

family?

EURCLEIA. Back to the kitchen, old man. (1.2.16)

It is Eurycleia and Eumaeus who now begin to bicker, disrupting a sense of hierarchy or fixed chain of command:

EURYCLEIA. Why don't you mind your own business?

EUMAEUS. It's her [Penelope's] business, fifty

hogs and fifty prime sows. (1.2.17)

The back-talk and bodily interactions between and amongst

Eurycleia, Eumaeus, and Penelope produces an image of three children arguing amongst themselves, each trying to assert authority over the other at the same time that they seek comfort from each other or recognize their solidarity with one another as children. Penelope's final plea to Eumeaus, both servant and family member, can be read as an example of the simultaneous and often contradictory existence. In

125 the lines "Eumaeus, you believe the Master's safe, don't you?" [...] "Say he's safe, Eumaeus. Now my son's gone too."(1.2.17), Penelope is both a young child, unsure, asking her older sibling for reassurance, and an older adolescent demanding and procuring the proper answer of what she wants to hear from someone deemed as beneath her.

The both/and culminates in the doubling of characters themselves: the mermaids Odysseus encounters on his raft reappear as scullery maids in the palace, Nausicaa reappears as Melantho, the Cyclops reappears as Arnaeus the swineherd, Blind Billy Blue appears also as Demodocus the bard, and the suitors, once slaughtered by Odysseus, rise as those men he once fought with at Troy - the suitor

Antinous and the hero Ajax are one and the same. The scene in Draft 4 where the sparing of Melantho' s life is negotiated will take this doubling effect even further in the very powerful moment when Penelope' s body speaks out in

Melantho's voice to Odysseus: "You're God sir. So deal out your justice"(2.68) .

Doubling, the existence of contradiction and the re- connection between seemingly separate and disparate realms via metaphor all serve as a means to resist the process of objectification. Like Goodison who creates through imagery a Penelope to be understood on her own terms as subject,

126 Walcott creates superimpositions and connections through metaphor as a strategy for rehumanizing and re-membering people, their creations, and the places they live in and with. With the eye of a visual artist, Walcott skillfully uses shapes and silhouettes of the human body, of things found in nature, of objects produced by human hands, and blending shading them into one another through a language felt on the skin and in the bone, he generates a reality where no thing and no one can be disconnected and objectified.

The act of re-membering and re-connecting which occurs through metaphor is also used in the play to diffuse a rhetoric of war. Readings such as Peter Burian's "You Can

Build a Heavy-Beamed Poem Out of This: Derek Walcott's

Odyssey" (1999) note an anti-war element running throughout the play. However, the critique of war, violence, and the heroic code that legitimizes it is more than an oppositional stance, it is instead an act of re-membering the connections between all things. The exchange between

Eumaeus and Odysseus at the conclusion of scene. 2, Act 2 is a good example of how such re-membering functions:

ODYSSEUS. Cities crumble like clouds. Troy's

towers are no more.

127 EUMAEUS. Aye. The lances of wild grass march

across its plain.

ODYSSEUS. The beetle climbs over its stones in

its armour.

EUMAEUS. Aye.

ODYSSEUS. And crickets sing in helmets before the

rain. (2.2.112)

This diffusion of the rhetoric of war brings back the links and ties between what I have called realms rather than merely postulating an anti-war stance. The soldier's lance is a blade of grass on the plain/battlefield and we are the beetle climbing over rocks in our armour, splendent green blue reflecting in the sun.

The opening scene of the play as it appears in the final version provides another example of how an image of war is complicated and, in some way, dismantled. In this final version, the presence of Penelope and her weaving does not frame and anchor the play in the manner of draft

4; the Penelope Prologue was cut between preview and opening night. But while Penelope is no longer on the stage, her presence and sounds of her loom "whirring" filling the theatre as in earlier versions, there is still something left of her that floats, reverberates on stage,

128 in the air. Scene 1 of Act 1 opens at dusk on the plain of

Troy where the kings are gathered, piling weapons on

Achille's funeral pyre. Without consideration of the connections of the altered prologue to what follows, readings tend to see the first scene as rooted in the figure of Odysseus and the other men of battle. Edward

Baugh, for instance, affirms that the scene achieves the effect of grounding the story squarely in the figure of

Odysseus (197). Peter Burian's reading insists on the scene's importance for establishing a direct tie with the

Iliad, and Paula Burnett notes that the scene fashions

Odysseus' delay/voyage into something propelled by an earthly reason rather than one ordained by the gods (289)/ it is the curse of Ajax rather than of Poseidon that the scene foregrounds: "Bear it [Achilles' shield], you turtle!" shouts Ajax to Odysseus, "Take ten years to reach your coast" (1.1.4) . But the scene of the men gathered together, "every blood-grimed king" as Nestor later says relating the fall of Troy to Telemachus (1.3.26), reverberates with the duplicitous and revisionary presence of Penelope in the sounds and images that make warriors something other than just men. The sound of the lance rattling against heaven's gate echoes that of a boy's stick being dragged along the fence beside him and the kites

129 ascending upwards, tails following behind, up off the ashen plain of Troy echoes childhood and play, a moment of longing that can be heard in the line Odysseus speaks to

Thersites: "Our ribbed bodies long for their original shore"(1.1.5). Much like the duplicity and simultaneity incorporated into the sheet of linen and characterizing the passage through the canal of death and rebirth that Scylla and Charbydis represent for Odysseus, the scene of the kings gathered around the weapons and funeral pyre gently kaleidoscopes into an image of children and fragility. It is a group of young boys grouped together in a circle on the ashen plain, their palms tightly clasped around the rough bumps and edges of their wooden sticks, eyes turned upward toward their kites, watching the motion of their tails in flight. "What are men?" Menelaus too will say, but "[c]hildren who doubt"(1.4.35) . With the figures, colours, and shapes kaleidescoping into eachother, the blood of their battle is also the blood of their birth. And it is on this motion, reverberation, and feeling that the audience is launched into the story of Odysseus/Penelope.

The idea that things are never either/or which the

play cultivates, and the sense of continual inter­ connection between people, people and the earth, people and the things they create born of both, is characterized by an

130 element of forgiveness. Sharing in many ways the same cultural heritage as Lorna Goodison, forgiveness becomes an essential element of working out a complex colonial heritage which guides movement and gives direction for the future. This element of forgiveness to which the elements of self-love and the power of story to both recover and create is linked, sets Goodison and Walcott in particular apart from Malerba and his struggle with the nature and power of story to create a tangible lived reality. While

Malerba's struggle with story and reality in the renegotiation of Penelope and Ulysses relationship ends in the Vichian affirmation of Penelope who claims that the only truth that counts is the one they have made (160; 168-

9), Walcott's work goes further to posit a way of being in the world that addresses events of the past, giving voice and also healing to suffering.

131 iii. Luigi Malerba: Itaca per sempre

The opening pages of this novel paint a picture of a

Ulysses alone and disoriented with the ground on which he stands literally crumbling under his feet. He is in some way, like Walcott's Odysseus who, prepared by the Shango priest, descends into the "crack in the heart-broken earth" in search of answers (1.13.88). Malerba's Odysseus, like

Walcott's in the scene of descent into the Underworld, tries to understand both where he has been and where he is going. Standing at the edge of both water and land,

Malerba's Odysseus doesn't recognize the coast, the soil, the trees, the mountains' horizon, or the sky, colour of the sea. He is unable to reconcile the reality of the landscape he sees in front of him, surrounding him, with the image of Ithaca held in his memory for the past twenty years. Narratively speaking, this sense of disorientation is achieved through a series of guestions. Why is the sea water salted and that of the rivers not? Where do the red, sponge-like rocks that lie here, abundant along the coast come from? Did the Phaeacians leave me on the coast of

Ithaca or in some other land? Where am I? The purpose of these questions is not necessarily to find definitive and inalterable answers. Rather, it is to create spaces where

132 interrogation and transformation can exist. The idea of

'where am I?' will become the existentially-tinged question of 'who am I?' It is a question which pervades the entire novel and which can only be addressed in relation to

Penelope and her story as she, herself, relates it. The process of transformation from the solitary unified subject to some notion of inter-subjectivity is signaled by the crumbling of the ground on which the solitary hero Ulysses stands. The transformation of mountains and seas into plains - a transformation which, incidentally, illustrates the "revisionary principle" of the land discussed in the work of Wilson Harris - acts as a metaphor for the interrogation and transformation processes of the characters:

E mi domando ancora da dove vengano questi frammenti di pietra rossa e porosa portati qui dalle piogge che scendono a precipizio lungo la montagna. A ogni temporale c'e un pezzetto di mondo che se ne va portato in mare dall'acqua che trascina giu terra e sassi, che scava fossi e mette a nudo le radici degli alberi. A un certo punto scompariranno le isole e le montagne e, colmato di terra, il mare diventera una grande pianura ? (7) And I ask myself still where these fragments of red and porous rock, brought here by the rains that come down the mountain, come from. With each storm there is a piece of the world that gets taken into the sea by the water that pulls down earth and rocks, that carves out ditches and exposes the roots of the trees. At some point

133 will the island and the mountains disappear, and full of earth, the sea become a great plain?

Like the plain that emerges out of the sea through the falling of the crumbling of the mountains and the action of the rain, a new story emerges out of the side-by-side voices of Penelope and of Ulysses; the solitary hero and traveler is no more.

Structurally speaking, the novel does away with the conventional organization method of chapters. Instead, it alternates sections of first-person narration entitled

"Ulysses" and "Penelope". One of the main purposes of this side-by-side narration - something Malerba continues to use in his latest book Fantasmi romani (Roman Ghosts 2006) which explores the inner workings of the relationship of a contemporary couple living in Rome - is to allot each character equal opportunity to speak. The fact that a section entitled "Ulysses" opens the book, and that one entitled "Penelope" closes it, reinforces this sense of balance and equal speaking-time. The alternating sections also work to produce a back-and-forth motion that simulates the turn-taking of a dialogue between two people. The introspective monologues that each character delivers in first-person are also interlaced with reported direct dialogue, and together with the back-and-forth feel their

134 placement produces, achieve the effect of "a "deep psychology" of the characters and their relationship.(Rocco

Capozzi "Luigi Malerba: Itaca per sempre, 218). Indeed, the reader can peer into each section for the speaker's innermost thoughts and feelings as well as stand back to see the two speakers' thoughts, feelings, and descriptions of events in relation to each another. Penelope and Ulysses are presented in equal measure, their feelings and stories a type of balancing act where the scales are continuously adjusted, words, thoughts added to, altered, taken back until things finally come out level. The sections are reminiscent of Walcott's image of husband and wife as two eyes that "make one pair"(1.9.68).

Looking at Penelope's side of the balance, we see a woman who demonstrates herself as a confident ruling Queen of Ithaca. This particular description of Penelope as

"Queen of Ithaca" appears repeatedly throughout the text and is used both by her character as well as by others. As

Queen of Ithaca, Penelope is an active participant in the day to day life unfolding throughout the island, traveling to its different areas to establish her presence, cultivate relationships with the people, and to have her words heard and remembered. This important aspect of Penelope whereby her figure is depicted as active and as extending beyond

135 the city walls and beyond the island itself serves as a counterpoint to the idea that Penelope's dilemma is, in part, tied to the realization that most of her life has passed in solitude and in waiting as suggested by Capozzi

(217) . Penelope walks along the seaside, and puts foot in the orchards and vineyards that lie outside the city. In one way these voyages are in part motivated by a desire to carry on the duties of Ulysses - indeed she goes so far as to imagine "the shadow of Ulysses" as her companion along with her actual companion of the nurse Eurycleia. In another way, these voyages are part of an inscription of

Penelope onto the landscape. The corporeality of Penelope is emphasized in the descriptions of these voyages and the words issuing from Penelope's mouth, lips, become the means by which her presence is inscribed in the bodies of inhabitants of the island as they work, live, and perhaps travel, thus bringing her presence with them beyond the confines of the island. Trips to the countryside signal

Penelope's duty in Ulysses name - she gives the people of

Ithaca encouragement and praise for their labours as

Ulysses would have done - at the same time that they establish a living and breathing sense of the Ithacan

Queen, Penelope:

136 I contadini sono felici di queste visite e poi ne parlano fra loro per lunghi giorni. Osservano i miei vestiti, contano le rughe sul moi volto e ricordano e ripetono le mie parole. Sono la loro regina e non posso rimanere perennemente rinchiusa nell mie stanze, devo farmi vedere dai miei sudditi, scambiare qualche parola con loro, offrire dei piccoli doni.(43) The farmers are pleased by these visits and speak of them amongst themselves for many days. They observe my clothes, they count the wrinkles of my face, and they remember and repeat my words. I am their queen and I can't remain perennially locked up in my rooms; I must be seen among the people, exchange words with them, give them some small gift.

It is through the repetition and remembering of her words that Penelope's presence becomes diffused throughout the island, remaining present and alive in the day-to-day thoughts and acts of its inhabitants. Her presence is infused in their contact and interaction with one another as well as with their contact with the land, orchards and vineyards that they work and that in turn, sustain them.

The depiction of Penelope as Queen with responsibilities to the communities of people living on and connected to the island is present in the first interactions with the beggar-king Ulysses. Penelope puts her own personal sadness and sense of isolation aside to tend to the duties that a newly-arrived guest in her home requires of her. The following passage describes her

137 struggle to lift herself out of her own suffering to perform the duties of queen toward a new visitor. Much like the voyages into the vineyards and orchards beyond the city walls, the meeting with the stranger provides an opportunity for her presence and words to be carried and disseminated into the lives of others, in this case, into those residing in other lands:

Per quanto oppressa dalla malinconia, sono pur sempre la regina di Itaca e devo conservare il decoro che mi impone il moi rango in ogni occasione, ma soprattutto di fronte a uno straniero. Non voglio che quando costui ripartira dall'isola e andra di nuovo in giro per il mondo, dica che la regina di Itaca non si presenta ai suoi ospiti con le dignitose apparenze richieste dal solenne dovere dell'ospitalita.(52) For however oppressed by melancholy, I am still the Queen of Ithaca and I must maintain the decorum that my rank assigns me in all occasions, and above all, in front of a stranger. When he leaves the island and goes once again traveling throughout the world, I wouldn't want him to say that the Queen of Ithaca doesn^t present herself with the dignified behaviour that the solemn duty of hospitality requires.

Ulysses, for his part, finds capable Penelope disconcerting. Like the landscape in which he finds himself, its rocks, mountains, horizon and colour of the sea unrecognizable, the capable Queen of Ithaca adeptly

138 managing the affairs of the island does not correspond to the image of a Penelope struggling to hold Ithaca on her

"fragile shoulders" that he has been imagining for many years (17) . He reflects on his current situation in the following manner:

Dovrei rallegrarmi di avere trovato Penelope cosi sicura di se, cosi altera. E invece ne soffro e mi lie dubbi mi tormentano. (53) I should be happy to have found Penelope so sure of herself, so stately. Instead I suffer from it, a thousand doubts tormenting me.

The fact that he finds a Penelope who is well and taking care of herself and the household they share unsettles

Ulysses because it forces him to reinvent himself in relation to a woman grounded in her own life and identity.

Penelope is not something he can return to in this case, but rather, she is something that provokes a return to and interrogation of himself. "Qui Ulisse non e piu Ulisse"

("Here Ulysses is no longer Ulysses" 40), he affirms. The existential crisis Ulysses finds himself in can also be read as connected to a particular model of masculinity.

Ulysses' self-doubts are not, like in Homer, limited to questions of Penelope's fidelity, but rather they are linked to doubts about whether or not Penelope even wants

139 him. What woman wouldn't be flattered at having a group of young suitors, says Malerba's Ulysses to Telemachus.

Walcott's Ulysses is also preoccupied by this fear of rejection. Walcott's Ulysses foregrounds this self doubt in a type of self-reproach for his infidelities to his wife.

In an early character sketch entitled "Homecoming",39

Walcott's Ulysses states that "one smell turns [men] into swine", a line that will be rendered in the final version of the play as "At the back of all men's minds is a rented room" (1.11.77). The self doubt the articulation of

Penelope's subjectivity requires a re-articulation of the subjectivity of Ulysses.

The novel continues to add weights to Penelope's side of the balance in a variety of manners. One way is through the form and centrality of Penelope's dream in Malerba's text. Instead of the single dream coming at the end of

Homer's Odyssey that signals the demise of the suitors and the return of the King, Malerba's novel puts forth two dreams of Penelope: one coming very early in the novel and, in the tradition of Homer, one coming late, just before

Ulysses and his son Telemachus take revenge in the form of murder of the suitors. One of the effects of having two dreams instead of one is that the latter sits in the shadow of the former. And it is in this former dream that Penelope

140 takes centre stage. Unlike the eagle that symbolizes

Ulysses in Homer's dream and in Malerba' s latter dream, the first dream of Penelope early in the novel puts forth a

Penelope appearing as herself, directly confronting the suitors:

La notte scorsa ho sognato di indossare una corazza di ferro brunito e di impugnare una spada cosi grande e pesante che mi trascinava il braccio a terra. Cosi armata mi sono presentata nel salone dove i Proci banchettavano fra strepiti e canti sguaiti. ALla mia apparizione sono ammutoliti per il terrore e appena ho alzato la spada con un gesto minaccioso si sono dati all fuga e in breve la reggia e rimasta deserta.(20- 21) Last night I dreamt of putting on a breastplate of burnished iron and of seizing a sword so large and heavy that it dragged my arm to the ground. Armed in this way I presented myself in the great hall where the suitors were feasting among their loud and vulgar songs. Upon my appearance, they were struck dumb with terror and as soon as I raised the sword in a threatening gesture they all took flight, and soon the palace was empty.

While Penelope's dream of herself confronting the suitors does, not have the tangible results of revenge in the way that her dream of the eagle/Ulysses does, it nevertheless serves to present very early in the novel - thereby setting a precedent - the character of Penelope as engaged in attempts to both assert and to take care of herself.

141 Penelope's encounter with Ctesippo, the wealthiest of the suitors, is another example of this. Instead of sitting idly by, she confronts him directly with an inquiry regarding payment for the animals that the suitors consume daily. While this inquiry is brushed off with the response

"un giorno faremo i conti" ("one day we will settle accounts", Penelope insists on pursuing the matter with her counter "Un giorno quando?" ("One day when?"; 43) . The inquiry, although not successful in the immediate, later yields partial results in the form of a necklace of lapislazuli that Ctesippo offers for partial payment of the suitors' debts.

The novel also offers other instances of this image of

Penelope as seeking confrontation and brandishing sword on her own behalf. The image of Penelope shovel raised, ready to strike her own husband Ulysses in order to prevent his departure for Troy begins her section of the novel and works to reinforce the one of her taking up arms that occurs slightly later in the first of her dreams:

Sarebbe bastato rompergli un braccio o una gamba con il manico di una scure. Non sarebbe stata una tragedia, mentre e stata una tragedia la sua partenza. (13) It would have been enough to break his arm or his leg with the handle of a shovel. It wouldn't have been a tragedy, while his departure was one.

142 In addition, her ruminations about the plight of her household in the face of the suitors leads to violent thoughts that bolster the violence of the dream. Reflecting on her situation as a woman without a man and unable to brandish arms but who must nevertheless survive and protect her son, Penelope contemplates the act of killing one' s enemy with a sword, imagining the feeling of satisfaction it gives, the sensation of "un piacere inaudito" ("an unprecedented pleasure"; 29) . The other significant image of Penelope's engagement with physical violence comes in her death-threat against the maid Melantho for her collaboration with Antinous. Although the threat comes as one where the act of violence will be carried out by

Ulysses upon his return, it nevertheless echoes the image of Penelope in her dream, poised and ready for confrontation:

"Ricordati che molto fragile e la vita umana e un solo colpo di spada potrebbe fare rotolare nella polvere la tua testa piena di malizia. Tieni bene a mente che non ti bastera la protezione di Antinoo per salvarti." (51) "Remember [Melantho] that human life is fragile and one swing of the sword could make your head full of malice roll in the dust. You'd do well to remember that the protection of Antinous won't be enough to save you."

143 But Penelope's forays into violence are also characterized by the recognition of her impotence to actually commit the acts she envisions. The dream shows her confronting the suitors by taking up arms and frightening them off, but it also shows how Penelope the warrior's arm is dragged to the ground by the weight of the sword she holds. Penelope knows that her access to violence is limited because of her status as a woman. "So bene che la spada non si addice alle mie braccia" ("I know well that the sword is not suited for my arms"; 29) she states, an observation that, like the dream, is coupled with a desire and will to brandish arms in her own defense and in the defense of her son, Telemachus. The duplicity of Penelope's relationship to violence - her desire for it and her limited access to it - works to reinforce the image of

Queen Penelope, capable and independent, at the same time that it highlights the societal constraints that limit her possible courses of action. She is, as she says, "una donna debole e sola" ("a woman weak and alone"); nevertheless, in the strain of the Penelope readying herself for battle, she transform her bed into "una fortezza inespugnabile" ("an impregnable fortress"; 14).

144 Penelope's relationship to violence is further complicated by her critique of it later in the novel. Like

Derek Walcott's Penelope who insists on the humanity of the men who harangued her for years, and La Spina's attempt to make tangible the suffering of Greek and Trojan women by compiling a list of their first names (83-86), so the

Penelope of Malerba's novel emphasizes the individuality of each man, citing each one by name: Agelao, Demoptolemo,

Euriade, Pisandro, Ctesippo, Leode. This individual identification of the men that occurs in the section entitled "Penelope" where the suitors' slaughter is related stands in stark contrast to the section of "Ulysses" where they are referred to as a type of anonymous group that is the enemy. The description of the slaughter that Penelope's character gives shows it as just that: a slaughter. The brutality of the killings and bloodshed is made tangible through vivid description and comparisons to animals being slaughtered for consumption. Unlike Homer's Penelope,

Malerba's Penelope acts as witness to the scene, hiding behind a curtain. In addition to referring to the suitors by name, Penelope's account further highlights the suitors' humanity through a juxtaposition of the moment of death and moments of life. One minute Antinous is an arrogant, powerful man, the next he is "ridotto ad un povero corpo

145 senza vita" ("reduced to a poor lifeless body"; 115). The moments of the men on the floor moaning are coupled with

Penelope's memories of trying to talk to them, to dissuade them from consuming the goods that belonged to Ulysses

(116). This type of juxtaposition is most strongly felt and seen in the image of the suitor Leode's death: his head, severed by Ulysses' sword, rolls across the floor as its lips still move, pronouncing words that beg for mercy. The description Malerba's Penelope provides of the slaughter as brutal murder where men - victim and murderer alike - lose their humanity rings of the words and disposition of Derek

Walcott's Penelope who accuses her husband of turning their home into a second Troy as well as into a bloody "abattoir"

(2.6.153). Looking on the scene of so-called revenge,

Malerba's Penelope asks plainly: "Questo e l'eroe che ha occupato i miei pensieri per venti lunghi anni?" ("This is the hero that has filled my thoughts for twenty long years?"; 118). Her interrogation continues in this section as she contemplates the definition of the concept itself of

"hero": "Che cos'e 1'eroismo se non 1'esaltazione della violenza?" ("What is heroism if not the exaltation of violence?"; 117). Her introspection continues in the following lines:

146 Io so che gli uomini in Guerra sono crudeli e quando nominiarao un eroe da tutti temuto e aramirato, intendiamo un uomo senza pieta che toglie la via ad altri uomini facendo schizzare il loro sangue da ogni parte. Questo e un eroe? E Ulisse e forse diverso dagli altri?(117) I know that men are cruel in war and when we name a hero who is feared and admired by all, what we mean is a pitiless man who takes the lives of other men and makes their blood spurt in all directions. This is a hero? And Ulysses, he is somehow different from others?

Penelope's interrogations lead her to affirm man as "il piu crudele e violento fra tutti gli esseri viventi" ("the most cruel and violent of all living creatures"; 117).

The quick wit that Penelope displays in relation to

Eurycleia also stands out as similar to that of Walcott's

Penelope. Like the continual back and forth banter of the two stage characters, the Penelope of the novel talks back to Eurycleia, challenging her words of wisdom. When

Eurycleia advises Penelope to avoid meeting with the newly- arrived beggar because he may very well be the kind that lies, roaming here and there to be supported by one person and then another, Penelope immediately counters: " XA differnza dei Proci [...] che si fanno mantenere soltanto da

Penelope'"("^unlike the suitors [...] who are supported only by Penelope'"; 44). Eurycleia insists too, on the inappropriateness of a meeting with the beggar in

Penelope's chambers and although Penelope finally agrees

147 with this bit of advice, the concession has nothing to do with the perceived appropriateness or inappropriateness of the behaviour. For whom is it appropriate or not? asks

Penelope. Antinous? "Gia considero Antinoo come il padrone nella mia casa?" ("Do I already consider Antinous to be the master in my house?"; 45) Penelope's internal debate ends in the affirmation that this is not and never will be the house of Antinous and that if she takes the advice of

Eurycleia to meet the "vagabond" in the great hall instead of in her chambers, she will do so in the absence of the suitors: "Se ha qualche notizia, che sia per me e non per loro" ("[i]f he has some news, let it be for me and not for them"; 45).

The articulation of the subjectivity of Penelope, as in the work of Goodison, La Spina, and Pita lays claim to a maternal genealogy. Malerba's Penelope both protects her son and makes sure that her place as mother is recognized, acknowledged, and not eclipsed by paternal authority. The definition of the mother-line and the assertion of this mother-child relationship are particularly felt in the following three instances. The first comes following

Eumaeus' affirmation regarding the celebration of the return of Ulysses son from Pylos and Sparta. Penelope promptly responds to Eumaeus, correcting him: " 'Telemaco e

148 anche figlio mio' gli ho risposto" ("^Telemachus is also my son'" I told him"; 35) . This maternal genealogy is reinforced by Ulysses himself when upon seeing Telemachus for the first time, he says that his son resembles his mother (31). Lastly, the assertion of a maternal-line and authority comes in the interaction between mother and son themselves. Following the slaughter of the suitors,

Telemachus tries to convince Penelope that the beggar is indeed Ulysses, his father. Penelope, in her refusal to recognize the beggar as Ulysses, chastises her son by telling him that he was just an infant when Ulysses departed while she, Penelope, was a full grown woman. If anyone would remember and recognize Ulysses, it is she and not he:

"Ricordati, Telemaco, che eri bambino piccolissimo quando tuo padre e partito per la guerra di Troia e percio facilmente sei caduto nell'inganno ordito da questo sconosciuto. Ma io ero una donna e non una bambina il giorno della partenza e quindi lascia a me il compito di riconoscerlo e non farmi inutili rimproveri"(130- 31) "Remember, Telemachus, that you were a very small child when your father left for the Trojan War and it is thus that you have so easily fallen into this stranger's web of deceit. But I was a woman and not a child the day of his departure, so leave the task to me to recognize him and don't give me useless scoldings".

149 Penelope can be seen as both chastising Telemachus for the arrogance he has shown her with his secret departure and collaboration with Ulysses against her in keeping his identity hidden as well as asserting a particularly maternal authority over him.

The assertion of Penelope' s authority over her son is coupled with her engagement in a matching of wits against

Ulysses. The decision to pit herself against him and beat himself at his own game occurs upon Penelope's recognition of the beggar-king as her husband. Her recognition of the beggar as Ulysses occurs immediately upon hearing him speak: "Quando ho sentito per la prima volta la voce di questo vagabondo e l'ho guardato negli occhi un solo istante, ho capito" ("When I heard for the first time the voice of this vagabond and I looked him in the eye for only an instant, I understood"; 59). From this point on,

Penelope resolves to engage in the "fiction" Ulysses has started. Like the actor-narrator Penelope of Walcott's play, Malerba's Penelope becomes a type of story-teller, inventing and re-inventing herself in the face of Ulysses and of what she considers to be the unpardonable act of hiding himself from her, examining her "come un oggetto senza anima" ("like an object without a soul"; 67). Indeed, the game has its theatrical dimensions and Penelope sees

150 Ulysses' performance and recitation in the role of beggar and teller of tales as a comedy that would provoke her laughter if it weren't for her anger and the very real danger of the violence the suitors can, at any given moment, commit against them (68-69).

The danger of the suitors' violence is felt throughout the text, and like Juana Rosa Pita's Penelope, the Penelope of Malerba engages in a peacekeeping effort that is linked to the survival of her son, Telemachus. The threat against his life is portrayed as having been continuous and not confined, as it is in Homer, to the moment of Telemachus' return to Ithaca from Pylos and Sparta where he has sought news of his father's whereabouts. The scar that Telemachus bears on his throat, the mark of an attempt on his life made by Antinous during a hunt, is proof of the danger

Penelope, Telemachus, and Ulysses face, a danger that

Penelope describes upon the return of her son from Pylos, as "una tension che finira per esplodere come un grande fuoco" ("a tension that could end up exploding like a great fire"; 69) . Penelope's words and actions are shaped and influenced by the impending threat of violence from the suitors and her response to the insult she feels to suffer from Ulysses toward her personhood; the novel is invested in demonstrating a vision of Penelope speaking and acting

151 in a way that is grounded in a sense of self-reliance and confidence.

While the development of the figure of Penelope and the articulation of her part of the story happens in a back and forth movement which I have likened to a balancing of the scales, the novel also uses the narrative points of views to swing around, so to speak, particular points of reference. In so doing, the nature of what is seemingly a fixed point of reference, changes. Some of the observations made by Ruth Glynn in her article "Fiction as Imprisonment in Luigi Malerba's II fuoco greco" are applicable here.

Glynn sees this novel as engaging in some of the debates around "postmodernist historiography" as articulated by

Hayden White in Metahistory (1973), and by others such as

Gianni Vattimo. In particular, Glynn focuses in on how the novel, especially through the character of Lippas, parallels ideas expressed by White, de Certeau, and

Hutcheon regarding the nature of events as having no inherent meaning. It is only through their transformation into narrative [historical] discourse that they become imbued with meaning and invested with a discourse of truth

(76) . Although Itaca per sempre is not part of what Glynn terms "the metanarrative strand of Italian historical fiction" per se (73), I would propose that this idea of the

152 event having no inherent meaning is also addressed in Itaca per sempre via the 'swing round' motion of the novel that I have identified as key to the narrative. The event of

Ulysses' recognition or the contest of the bow is only given meaning and 'truth' through the narration of Penelope or through the narration of Ulysses. The fact that these narrations or points of view contrast so sharply and that the first person narration pulls the reader in to each point of view so deeply, results an understanding of the event as a 'non-event' given a different truth and meaning by each character's story. This device is important to the concept of change and revision in the novel whereby an event narrated by Ulysses, for example, begins to crumble,

its pieces washed down into the sea where they become the plain of Penelope and her narration.

The scene of Ulysses' recognition is an example of this. As noted earlier, the scene comes early in the novel, and unlike the Homeric story, it is Penelope who recognizes him first, and not Eurycleia. Penelope understands who the beggar is the moment she hears his voice and looks him in the eyes (59) . The narration Penelope gives of this event is detailed in the length to which Ulysses actively participates in his disguise. It focuses on his bodily movements, on how he seeks to act out the part, thus going

153 beyond the idea that he has simply dressed up or in a beggar disguise. The following passage illustrates the detail and bodily participation of the disguise:

Nonstante gli stracci che indossa, le spalle curve ad arte, le mani tremanti per simulare la vecchiezza, nonostante che le sue unghie andassero a grattare volta a volta il corpo sotto quegli stracci e i capelli unti di grasso e di fango per far credere che le pulci e i pidocchi vi avessero preso dimora, non ho faticato a capire che avevo davanti ai miei occhi, seduto su quello sgabello vicino al camino acceso, il mio sposo [...] (59) Despite the rags he wears, the artfully curved shoulders, the hands trembling to simulate old age, despite the fact that his nails would, from time to time, go under those rags to scratch his body and up to his hair, greasy with oil and mud to make it seem as if lice and fleas had taken up residence there, it didn't take much to understand that I had my husband [...] seated on that stool near the lit fire (59)

But this event of Penelope's recognition of Ulysses, which is also a narration of Ulysses' active participation in a disguise that fails miserably before its intended audience, becomes a ^non-event' in the section narrated by Ulysses.

The contrast is indeed striking as we move from understanding the transparency of Ulysses' disguise and the comic futility with which he tries to carry it out, to the matter-of-fact statement proclaiming success: "Penelope non mi ha riconosciuto" ("Penelope didn't recognize me"; 60)

154 are the first words Ulysses utters in his section, not suspecting even in the slightest that he may have been recognized. Here then, the novel swings around sharply and with force to make the reader re-consider the nature of the event. What exactly did happen in this first meeting of

Penelope and Ulysses?

The novel continually works to put the reference point in a sense of doubt and question through a focus on the emotions and thoughts of the characters. The description of the announcement of the contest of the bow as narrated by

Ulysses focuses on his growing recognition of Penelope's anger at the twenty-year absence and on his reactions to her words as she announces the contest as a result of

Ulysses' absence of desire to return home. The narration zeros in on physiological-emotional response that the words have on Ulysses, the listener:

[...] le sue parole mi hanno gettato nello sconforto e mi hanno gonfiato il petto di una amarezza che non mi giovera quando dovro piegare l'arco per la gara e poi affrontare con le armi la turba dei Proci (97). [...] her words threw me into a feeling of discomfort and they swelled my chest with a bitterness that won't help me when I bend the bow for the contest and, with weapons, face the mob of suitors.

The emotions Ulysses feels and which incite him to violence

155 however, don't exist in the following section narrated by

Penelope where the reaction of Ulysses in the face of this news is described:

Erano dirette a lui, ma Ulisse, avvolto nei suoi stracci, non ha battuto ciglio o piegato le labbra o corrugato la fronte. Duro come una pietra e impassibile e Ulisse di frone a un evento come la gara dell'arco che immaginavo dovesse eccitare i suoi ricordi lontani e felici. (106-7) They [Penelope's words] were directed to him, but Ulysses, wrapped in his rags, didn't bat an eyelash, turn up his lips or wrinkle his brow. Ulysses is hard as stone and unmoved in the face of an event like the contest of the bow, an event that I thought would have aroused his happy memories of long ago.

In the case of Ulysses, this sense of uncertainty or unknowability of the referent that the novel produces via its xswing round' momentum - a momentum working in tandem with novel's balancing motion of the scales and the tension of dramatic irony - is closely tied to profound feelings of displacement. Shipwrecked on his own island, stranger in his "patria" and house, Ulysses states that his disguise brings him closer to the truth of what he really is: a homeless beggar (106). Like the sailor holding the sextant, looking through its telescope, lining up its mirrors and their shades and swaying the instrument gently back and forth so that the refracted heavenly body just brushes the

156 horizon, so Ulysses tries to gain his bearings. But the bearings of one person do not exist in one position or single set of co-ordinates; they only have meaning in insofar as they are connected to other things such as the sun, the moon, the stars, Penelope.

The intersubjectivity that this suggests is, in part, an answer to the isolation and crisis that the novel presents. Penelope, too, suffers from this crisis. Unlike

Walcott's work where a duplicitous nature of things and people is cultivated, and Goodison's work where contradiction is held in delicate tension, uncertainty and ambiguity is often held down here by a sense of isolation and despair in Malerba's text. At a certain point in the novel, Penelope's solitude is reflected in the absence of the gods and of their abandonment of her: "II cielo e muto e gli dei sono lontani. Ma no, il cielo e lontano e gli dei son muti" (The sky is silent and the gods far away. But no, the sky is far away and the gods silent"; 21) she insists.

The cries of gulls throughout the interior monologues and descriptions of emotions and events that Penelope delivers also serve to reflect a sense of her isolation. The cries of the seagulls coming down from the sky as they circle above the palace are on the one hand, like her dreams: both are to be interpreted according to her mood and inclination

157 (21). While the shifting meaning of the sign ascribes agency to Penelope (she makes it mean what she wants it to mean), it simultaneously signals her loneliness which is in part due to a failure of communication. She seeks to understand the birds of the sea and the potential messages they bear, but ultimately shuns them because "non conosc[e] la loro lingua" ("[she] doesn't know their language"; 36).

They are at once "padroni della luce" (masters of the light"; 36) and "stupidi uccelli del mare" ("stupid birds of the sea"; 21).40 The sense of failed communication present here also reinforces and is reinforced by that which occurs between Penelope and the beggar-king who insists and persists in his disguise. The moon, too, occupying a place in the sky where gods reign and gulls fly, abandons Penelope, remaining "fredda e muta, a tratti si nasconde dietro le nuvole e ignora le mie pene" ("cold and silent, little by little hiding itself behind the clouds and ignoring [her] pain"; 109). In the face of such solitude, Penelope nevertheless gathers herself inward, creating and cultivating her personhood and standing her ground, hoping in a way, like Ulysses, that the ground crumbling underfoot, giving way, will transform into something else, some other shape and form within which life will be sustained.

158 Afterward: Penelope into the new millenium

In the writings of the five authors examined, the

figure of Penelope is clearly at the centre of discussions about violence, creative resistance, transformation, and the power of story and human imagination to create different ways of being in the world and of being with eachother. This afterward seeks to suggest some of the ways

in which the culturally-specific importance of Penelope in the 1970s, 80s and 90s can be seen as continuing into the new millennium.

The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiade

(2005) is perhaps the most recent high-profile rendering of the figure of Penelope. Published with the Scottish publishing house Canongate, The Penelopiade inaugurates a project reflecting the current transnational moment insofar as it aims to solicit authors worldwide to rewrite 100 myths coming from a variety of different cultures. In this sense, Atwood's engagement with Penelope is no longer the type of 1980s Western feminist engagement with myth in terms of its attack on what was perceived as the foundation of Western patriarchial society - the Greek polis. The

Penelopiade in fact, goes further than a 1980s Western feminist agenda focused on patriarchy to examine the

159 operation of a logic of domination in various forms. The maids, for instance, whose voices comprise the majority of the tale, are specifically referred to throughout as

"slaves". But like La Spina, Atwood portrays an enslaved people (there are female slaves and male slaves) whose labour benefits those with more power. The issue of violence against women leans, as it does in La Spina's

Penelope, toward a structural approach to the issue of violence, characterized by an intersectional analysis of things such as race and class.

Atwood's engagement with Penelope can be seen as picking up on another trend insofar as Penelope and the maids/slaves are voices that speak from the dead. And it is here that the past intrudes or is shown to be a part of the present. While this is not the same thing as the work of a poet like Lorna Goodison that acts as a channel through which her African ancestors may speak, there is a connection insofar as the physical death of those who have been oppressed under a logic of domination - in whatever form - does not guarantee their silence. The past is not detached from the present, it is part of the everyday, and because it is part of the everyday, it is the future.

The healing aspect of Penelope that occurs in

Walcott's work has an interesting manifestation in recent

160 Western culture. Penelope has become, for example, the literal stitcher of wounds as "Penelope, the robotic surgical arm" that acts as a scrub technician for surgeons.

"Penelope Tries Her Steady Hand at Surgery" is the title of an article in the Department of Surgery's Newsletter at

Columbia University chronicling Penelope's debut in the OR in March of 2005. http://www.columbiasurgery.orq/news/si/2005 penelope.html)

Similarly, the figure of Penelope as healer, re­ memberer, can be identified in the current PENELOPE project involving environmental law within the European Union. The

PENELOPE project (Pan European Network of Environmental

Legislation Observations for Planning Education and

Research) aims to "sensitize decision-makers to the environmental implications of many types of project development from road schemes to factories to agricultural intensification" http://www- penelope.drec.unilim.fr/Penelope/about/info.htm)

The ideas of joining, healing, and speaking from the dead that manifest themselves in these various forms are connected to the ongoing power of story to create, shape and reshape the way in which people live in the world, relating to one another.and to the earth itself. Writer

Jeanette Winterson's contribution to the Canongate series

161 expresses this idea in a helpful way. Weight (2006), her rendering of the myth of Atlas and Heracles, is also to be read as a metaphor for how story shapes or holds up the world: "Science is a story. History is a story. These are stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves come true"

(145). Winterson's novel is about letting the weight of the stories that have shaped the world go - those stories that have shaped the world we presently live in, a world marked by things like colonialism, violence against women and the logic of domination that makes both of these possible. It is time to re-imagine ourselves, affirms Winterson. Like

Atlas who lets go of his burden, stretching out his limbs, hands now flat on the floor of the universe, as Winterson pictures him, nothing will happen, we will not fall apart.

The affirmation that frames and guides this book is, in a sense, the same that propels the weaving, unweaving, and re-weaving the Penelope figure symbolizes; and in a manner echoing the Molly of James Joyce, it reaffirms itself in a positive sense of self-acceptance and renewal:

"I want to tell the story again";

"Yes, I want to tell the story again" (147;xvi)

162 NOTES

1 There has, however, since the 1980s, been a trend in re-examining Homer's Penelope for traces of this voice and desire. Classicists Marilyn A. Katz and Nancy Felson-Rubin are both examples of this trend. Katz makes the case for the existence of "if-plots" whereby the ambiguity of Penelope's character is emphasized. Nancy Felson-Rubin's work also emphasizes the existence of this ambiguity as strength.

1 Cixous' doctoral research focused on the work of Joyce, culminating in the L'Exil de James Joyce ou 1'art du remplacement (1969), translated as The Exile of James Joyce (1972).

3 See for example, Women and Fiction (1978).

Patricia Joplin's "The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours", also included in New Feminist Criticism, discusses the mythic figure of Philomela and the activity of weaving. Joplin sees Philomela's weaving as an act that transforms revenge into resistance.

Volevo i pantaloni is Lara Cardella's first novel. Hailing from Sicily, Cardella is part of a younger generation of Italian women writers. Written half in Italian and half in Sicilian dialect, the novel is transgressive also for its critical portrayal of contemporary Sicilian values and mores.

6 For an account of the theatre group Maddalena, see Le Isabelle: dal Teatro della Maddalena alia Isabella Andreini, edited by Maricla Boggio, Besa Editrice, 2004.

7 For de Lauretis' engagement with Calvino's If On a Winter's Night A Traveller and Eco's The Name of the Rose can be found in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. o "Ulisse: il mito e la memoria" was held in Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Roma from February 22 to September 2, 1996 and was curated by Bernard Andreae e Claudio Parisi Presicce. The catalogue title is Ulisse: il mito e la memoria.

9 See Bernard Andreae's essay on the process of putting together the Exhibit in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. The essay includes a description of the physical space whereby the cupola, positioned at the very centre of the architectural space, houses "il gruppo di Scilla", a sculpture recently restored and exhibited in Rome for the first time. The monster-woman, I would argue, is both the physical and symbolic centre of the Exhibition and the conference with which it is allied.

See Carole Boyce Davies Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994) for a discussion of how the term postcolonial has

163 been criticized for its Eurocentrism and for its masking of current neo-colonial economic and cultural relationships.

11 Boyce Davies is referring to Susan Sulieman's article "On Maternal Splitting. A Propos of Mary Gordon's Men and Angels," Signs, 14,1, Autumn, 1988, 25-41; Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking. Toward a Politics of Peace, Boston, Mass., Beacon, 1989; Nancy Chodorow and Susan Contratto, "The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother," in Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom, eds, Rethinking the Family, New York, Longman, 1982, 54-73.

12 The verb "souvenir" derives from the Latin "subvenire" (come up). The first documentation in Old French is in 1775 as a noun signifying "a remembrance, a memory". In 1782, the meaning shifts more specifically to indicate something that is taken away from a place that one visits. It comes to mean "token of remembrance, a memento". Online Etymological Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=souvenir

13 The 'inferior' animal realm can be linked to the Enlightenment's hierarchical "Great Chain of Being" where plants figured at the bottom of the chain and white Western man at the top. Darwin's ideas about the evolution of the species also served to reinforce ideas of hierarchy where "primitive/less developed" and "civilized/developed" stood at opposite ends. It is in this way, as Ania Loomba states, that so- called "Nature" both "bolster[ed] ideas of racial supremacy" and "'explained' and linked black skin, a small brain, and savagery"(63). Also, see Mason for a discussion of how European "others" are constructed as belonging to the animal world (210-241) and Munk (186- 192) .

14 An interesting parallel can be drawn with the scene of the coins in George Lamming's In the Castle of my Skin. The extended description of pennies with the head of King George on them being distributed to the school boys shows the coins as an instrument of punishment and reward. The debate among the boys can be read as countering this colonial system of domination that the coins represent in this context.

15 See Collins for a discussion of how "slavery's breeder woman image"(76) is transformed and perpetuated into the twentieth century (70-78).

Hanna Chukwu and Susan Gingell's article "Our Mothers' Kitchens and the Domestic Creative Continuum: A Reading of Lorna Goodison's Turn Thanks" also provides some analysis of how the resistance of Miss Mirry and the endeavors of the poet parallel one another.

17 Olive Senior's collection of short stories. Discerning Hearts, is a Jamaican context revolve around class, speech, and variations in skin colour rather than 'race'. For a more theoretical discussion, see Bost, 90 and Barbara Christian's article "A Rough Terrain".

Dannabang Kuwabong, in "Restoring the Memories of Joining Between Mother and Son: A Reading of Lorna Goodison's Maternal Poems" explains that "the spiritual and communal act of birthing practices is traceable

164 to Africa" and cites as her source the work of Sobonfu E. Some, Welcoming Spirit Home: Ancient African Teachings to Celebrate Children and Community, Novato, California: New World Literacy, 1999.

19 Also, see Collins 123-129.

20 Boyce Davies examines the fiction of Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and Paule Marshall.

1 See Dannabang Kuwabong's discussion of how the "dynamic Afrisporic mother image" is both part of a consequence of slavery and a legacy from Africa in "The Mother as Archetype of Self: A Poetics of Matrilineage in the Poetry of Claire Harris and Lorna Goodison". Ariel Vol 30, No 1, 1999 105-129.

22 The praise poem or song, as Jack Mapanje and Landeg White state in Oral Poetry from Africa: An Anthology, is "concerned with character, with the huge variety of human beings and with the place of the individual in society and history" (7).

23 See for example Monica Sj66 and Barbara Mor's The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (Harper & Row, 1987) as well as Evelyn Reed's Woman's Evolution: From matriarchal clan to patriarchal family (New York: Pathfinder, 1974). 24 See Diotima's II cielo stellato dentro di noi: L'ordine simbolico della madre and Luisa Murano's 1/ ordine simbolico della madre (1990).

25 The term "slave" and "servant" are used interchangeably in La Spina's text.

26 Drawing on the work of Gerard Genette in Figures III (1972), translated in English as Narrative Discourse (1980), Shlomith Rimmon- Kenan notes how movement in time between past and present motivated by the characters' memories and emotions is different from the analepses and prolepses that create disjunctions in the narration between the story-order and text-order of the piece (4 6-51). These "character- motivated anachronies" as Rimmon-Kenan calls them, serve to give voice and agency to the female characters in La Spina's novel rather than create a sense of suspense in the narration as Rimmon-Kenan's narratological discussion seems to suggest.

27 Margaret Atwood's very recent The Penelopiade (2005) also takes up this story strand, relying on the work of Robert Graves.

28 The other translator is the Italian poet Alessio Brandolini. 29 Unpublished interview with the author, Miami 2005.

30 See "Las Estancias del ser en la poesia de Juana Rosa Pita" by Alexander Perez Heredia. (forthcoming)

165 31 In the writings of antiquity on the Odyssey, there is a strong tradition of viewing Pan as born from Penelope and all her suitors. See Katz, 77.

The word "salves" refers to the songs of prayer in Santeria and other religions of African origin in the Hispanic Caribbean.

33 Warner 183-184; de Beauvoir, 160.

See "The Absent Presence: The Caribbean, Central and South America" in The Radical Imagination. 81-92.

35 • This line comes from Walcott's poem "The Schooner Flight" and is in the voice of the character Shabine. It is, however, a statement that has within critical writings been used to characterize the poetic voice and philosophy of Walcott himself. 36Brathwaite quoted in Torres-Saillant's An Intellectual History of the Caribbean, 42.

37 Draft 4 is part of the Walcott papers housed in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. The collection contains papers relating to Walcott's literary writings - poetic, prose, and theatrical - from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s.

38 For a discussion of how meaning is created through the stichomythic half-lines of dialogue see Peter Burian's "You Can Build a Heavy-Beamed Poem Out of This". The shared creation of meaning can be read as contributing to the collapse of hierarchies the play promotes.

39 "Homecoming" is part of the Walcott papers. Boxes 25.26, and 63 deal with the Odyssey-related material. 40 Penelope's relationship with the gulls illustrates what Glynn, in her discussion of II fuoco qreco's link to "postmodernist historiography", articulates regarding the "duplicitous nature of appearances". If, "the real world is a series of signs to be interpreted", "the duplicitous nature of appearances in the real world" often result in the impenetrability of these signs (77).

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