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Narratives of Return: the Contemporary Caribbean Woman Writer and the Quest for Home

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Narratives of Return: the Contemporary Caribbean Woman Writer and the Quest for Home 1 Narratives of Return: The Contemporary Caribbean Woman Writer and the Quest for Home Rachel Grace Thompson Goldsmiths College, University of London PhD English and Comparative Literature 2 I hereby declare that all of the work presented in this thesis is my own. Rachel Grace Thompson. August 2014. 3 Acknowledgements To Phill, who has been there every step of this process over the past four years. For your constancy, your support, and your hugs. For listening to me and encouraging me. And for your patience and understanding through frequent tears of frustration and despair. Thank you. To my parents, who first instilled, then encouraged and nurtured a life-long love of literature. For everything from those first bedtime stories to the weekly Saturday morning trips to Fairwater library. For lending me your library cards when I had filled up my own. For taking me to Pembroke Dock when I had spent the summer reading my way through the books in Tenby. For nurturing the bookworm in me, reading to me, and with me. For your unwavering belief in my academic potential, for pushing and challenging me. For taking so much pride in each and every one of my achievements, no matter how large or small. For everything you have taught me and for the endless opportunities you have given me. And for your continuing emotional and financial support, without which none of this would have been possible. Words will never fully express my gratitude. To mum and dad, thank you. 4 Abstract This thesis investigates how diasporic Caribbean women writers use the vehicle of the novel to effect a ‘writing back’ to the Caribbean home through what I propose to consider as a specific sub- genre of Caribbean literature: ‘narratives of return’. I argue that novels which constitute ‘narratives of return’ reveal how diasporic identity continues to be informed by a particularised connection to the Caribbean homeland. Firstly, I propose the region’s literary representation within these narratives as the home of cultural memories which fully inform the hybridised nature of diasporic subjectivity. Secondly, I investigate the narrative of return’s depiction of the Caribbean as the site of historical, collective, and personal trauma which continues to influence notions of identification and belonging to the region for Caribbean people. Whilst ‘return’ refers to the act of ‘writing back’ to the Caribbean by diasporic authors, I suggest that the ‘return’ represented within the narratives can also be literary, symbolic, metaphorical and physical. I investigate how the ‘return’ is negotiated within the text, exploring what ‘narratives of return’ reveal about Caribbean diasporic subjectivity and the relationship of protagonist and author with Caribbean history and the ancestral home. Theories of culture and identity acquisition will be crucial in addressing these questions, while my analysis explores how Caribbean diasporic identity is informed by an inherently traumatic and violent history of colonialism. I argue towards the healing, therapeutic function of the discourse of the ‘narrative of return’ in selected novels by diasporic authors from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean. My approach seeks to unveil links between islands, recognising similarities in diasporic and Caribbean experience across racial, cultural and linguistic differences. I propose the Caribbean as a space which is representative of traumatic experience for Caribbean people across racial and cultural boundaries, investigating the palliative nature of the ‘narrative of return’ in effecting a process of confronting and working through past traumas. 5 Contents Introduction 7 Terms and Terminology: African/Caribbean, Diaspora and Notions of ‘Home’ | Situating the ‘Narrative of Return’ and ‘Quest for Home’ within a Literary Tradition | Framing a Theoretical Approach | The Caribbean Novel and Women’s Writing | Theoretical Connections: Cultural Identity and Caribbean Women’s Writing | Theoretical Connections: Culture, History and the Past as Presence | Parameters of the Thesis Chapter One 44 The Physical Return and Complex Identities in Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow Diasporic Writers and the Return: Cultural Identity and the African/Caribbean Diasporic Self | The Caribbean in Motion: Migration, Diaspora, and Identity | The Return to Ancestral ‘Origins’ through the Rediscovery of Africa | Race, Knowledge and Diasporic Discontent | Diasporic Discontent: Racism in Fruit of the Lemon | Diasporic Discontent: Shifting Priorities and Forgetting Blackness in Praisesong | The Physical Return: To the Caribbean and Back Again Chapter Two 82 Metaphors of Return: Trauma and History in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath Eyes Memory Introducing Haiti’s Traumas: Death in the Cane Fields | The Female Body and the Cane Fields: Martine’s Rape | The Presence of History: Politics and Power in Contemporary Haiti | Before Colonialism: The Prevalence of Africa and Representations of Guinea | Skin Colour and the Colonial Myth in the Diaspora | Diasporic Discontent and Narratives of Return in Breath, Eyes, Memory | Returning Home to Trauma: Confronting Haiti’s History Chapter Three 118 Where to (Re)Turn? Language, Trauma and Belonging in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost their Accents and Something to Declare Introducing the García Girls | The Traumas of Exile: Diasporic Discontent and Cultural Assimilation in García Girls | An Identity Suspended between Languages | Voicing the Self: The Struggle for Linguistic Control | Traumas of Breakdown: The Divided Self | The Return to Self: Healing through Words | The Structural Return and the Chronology of Storytelling in García Girls 6 Chapter Four 156 Returning Home through Historical Fiction: Writing the Traumatic Past in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies and Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones The Twentieth-Century Text and Cultural Memory: Creolising History in The Farming of Bones and In the Time of the Butterflies | ‘The Need to Tell’: Stories of Survival in Bones | Historical Fiction as Testimonio: Creating a Written Testimony in Butterflies | Fictional Testimonios: Dedé’s Account and Mate’s Diary | Relating Trauma: Censored Histories, Partial Testimonies | Returning to the Past, Looking to the Future Conclusion 196 Returning Home: History, Trauma, and the Narrative of Return Migratory History and the Diasporic Voice | Traumatic History and the Contemporary Caribbean | Looking Backwards, Moving Forwards Bibliography 208 7 Introduction [C]oming always closer to the island of my birth, but never actually going back to it, never making the final journey, the dream of our years of exile. Between language and borders, identities and colors, however, I have grieved for this. I am still grieving for it.1 You were not born here my child not here.2 Where I came from I do not know– 3 How do you play knowing that at every moment in time your identity is in question How do you win when at every moment in time your identity is in question4 Questions of exile and return, issues of belonging, and related notions of identity are central to works by Caribbean writers. For those of African heritage born and raised in the Caribbean region, answers to these questions have often been sought by looking back to the homeland of their African ancestors. Yet for those Caribbean writers born or raised in North America or Britain, questions pertaining to issues of identity, belonging and return are further complicated; these writers’ displacement from the archipelago causes them to look back to both the familial island home and that of their African ancestors to seek answers to questions pertaining to the nature of their complex and multifaceted diasporic identities. Reading novels by diasporic Caribbean women writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it is clear that displacement from the familial, cultural and linguistic home, the ensuing sense of loss and dislocation, and subsequent questions of return are of particular thematic importance. This observation forms the starting point for my exploration into the ways in which contemporary diasporic Caribbean women writers address the nature of the ‘return’ to the Caribbean and the ‘quest for home’ within their work. This thesis will argue that Caribbean diasporic identity as represented in contemporary literature is inextricably linked to the Caribbean in specific, particularised ways. Firstly, I propose to consider the region’s literary representation within these narratives as the home of cultural memories which fully inform the hybridised nature of diasporic subjectivity. Secondly, I investigate the ways in 1 Marie-Hélène Laforest, ‘Homelands’, in The Butterfly’s Way, ed. by Edwidge Danticat (New York: Soho Press, 2001), pp.23- 30 (p.30). 2 John La Rose, ‘Not From Here’, in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, ed. by Stewart Brown and Mark McWatt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.102. 3 Cyril Dabydeen, ‘Returning’, in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, ed. by Stewart Brown and Mark McWatt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.215. 4 Gina Ulysse, ‘A Poem About Why I Can’t Wait: Going Home Again and Again and Again’, in The Butterfly’s Way, ed. by Edwidge Danticat (New York: Soho Press, 2001), p.219. 8 which ‘narratives of return’ depict the Caribbean as the site of historical, collective, and personal trauma which continues to influence notions of identification and belonging to the region for Caribbean people.5 I examine the preoccupation
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