Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad Jennifer Donahue
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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2014 Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad Jennifer Donahue Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES TAKING FLIGHT: CARIBBEAN WOMEN WRITING FROM ABROAD By JENNIFER DONAHUE A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2014 Jennifer Donahue defended this dissertation on April 2, 2014. The members of the supervisory committee were: Candace Ward Professor Directing Dissertation Martin Munro University Representative Maxine Montgomery Committee Member Jerrilyn McGregory Committee Member Virgil Suarez Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii This dissertation is dedicated to my husband, Thomas. Thank you for climbing this (and every) mountain with me. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I wish to thank Candace Ward for her feedback throughout this process. Her insightful comments have propelled my scholarship in innumerable ways. I couldn’t have finished this project without her support. I would also like to thank Jerrilyn McGregory, Maxine Montgomery, Martin Munro and Virgil Suarez for serving on my committee. Each of you has been an inspiration to me and has shaped who I am as a scholar and educator. To my family, I extend my gratitude for your love and support. Finally, I can never thank my husband, Thomas, enough for being my cheerleader. Thank you for being with me every step of the way. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... vi INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE The Ghost of Annie Palmer: Giving Voice to Jamaica’s “White Witch of Rose Hall” ............... 15 CHAPTER TWO The Costs of Migration: What is Left Behind .............................................................................. 52 CHAPTER THREE The Monstrous and the Beautiful: Physical and Emotional Transformation in the Works of Pauline Melville and Elizabeth Nunez .......................................................................................... 93 CHAPTER FOUR The Negotiation of Creolization and Transnational Identity in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise ..................................................... 131 CHAPTER FIVE Traversing the Triangular Road: Reconnecting with Heritage and Ancestry in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow and Andrea Levy’s Small Island ...................................................... 175 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 219 WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................... 230 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...................................................................................................... 246 v ABSTRACT Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad closely examines Caribbean women’s prose fiction published from 1959 to 2011. This project illustrates the power of the diasporic voice. This study explores how flight serves as a recurring response to exile in Caribbean women’s writing by transnational authors as diverse as Edwidge Danticat, Pauline Melville and Michelle Cliff. In the works under study, flight serves as a vehicle for coming to terms with conflictions of place and identity. While analyzing the transformative power of flight in novels such as Breath, Eyes, Memory and Abeng, I read women in various states of exile. Drawing distinctions between literal and figurative, or mental, flight, this project proffers figurative flight as a form of resuscitation and healing for the protagonists. Moving beyond traditional understandings of flight, Taking Flight asserts the centrality of figurative flight to the transformative process for authors as well as the protagonists they depict. Rather than operating in binary opposition, symbolic flight is facilitated by the most literal of flights, migration. In the works under consideration, figurative flight functions as a rehearsal and preparation for literal flight, offering a haven or temporary home to those displaced by the process of migration. Drawing on women’s studies, post-colonial studies, and sociological studies, I investigate the relation between gender, location and literary production in novels by or about Caribbean women. With over 232 million migrants worldwide, this research not only opens up a new space in the discussion of Caribbean women’s writing but also sheds light on a growing cultural reality. By discussing these connections within the scope of this study, I move beyond seeing these women simply as hybrid products of migration to appreciating the contradictions their works present as not merely indicative or reflective of the Caribbean but of the impact of migration on Caribbean women. vi INTRODUCTION In an interview with Sandy Alexandre and Ravi Howard, Edwidge Danticat remarks, “my favorite kind of butterfly is the monarch butterfly. It flies 3,000 miles each winter, from colder climates to warmer ones. The butterfly that leaves the cold climate is not the same one that returns the following spring. I often equate that to the immigrant experience” (113). Following Danticat’s assertion, this project examines processes of transformation in a number of works by or about Caribbean1 women and highlights the centrality of flight to emotional and physical transformation. By reading flight as a literal act as well as a figurative one, and incorporating sociological and psychological theories on migration, this project expands understandings of flight while offering new readings on its various iterations in the novels under study. Departing from an understanding of flight as “a symbol of transcendence, an escape from a disagreeable situation,” I argue that flight offers a means of physical and psychic reconciliation (Wilentz 21).2 For the authors and the characters they craft, flight is not simply a response but is at times a choice resulting in more than the act of “fleeing;” I interpret flight as affording the possibility for authors to transform their characters as well as Caribbean literature itself. While the Caribbean “has always had a romantic appeal to the imagination of the outsider” (Gowricharn 1), scholars such as Pamela Mordecai and Elizabeth Wilson assert that “if Caribbean writers have been generally neglected it is no exaggeration to say that Caribbean women writers have been virtually abandoned” (qtd. in Donnell 140). Because I am not sure if 1 In reading Caribbean literature, I apply Donald Hill’s understanding of the Caribbean cultural area as including “all the islands between the Bahamas and Trinidad in the Caribbean, together with certain mainland countries in the Americas where there reside minorities who share cultural features with the peoples of the Caribbean” (7). 2 Wilentz notes that Freud and Jung interpret flight as a “symbol of transcendence, an escape from a disagreeable situation.” She goes on to state that “Jung makes bold assertions of how these myths work on the collective unconscious, focusing primarily on the experience of the individual (which we know by now represents Western white male” (21). She then applies this understanding of flight to a reading of the myth of the Flying Africans. 1 Mordecai and Wilson’s claim holds true to the same extent today, especially with the recognition of authors such as Edwidge Danticat, this study works against a romanticization of the Caribbean experience. In revealing the darker reasons behind flight and exile, I offer a more comprehensive view of the transformative process in these texts. By shedding light on a subset of writers, I do not mean to suggest a “missing female perspective in postcolonial studies,” but rather strive to develop a more focused study that examines the trope of flight from multiple angles (Mardorossian 12). In doing so, I work off of Kezia Page’s observation of gender differences and publication which notes the split between pre-1970s primarily male-authored Anglophone Caribbean literature and publications of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century as being “predominantly female-authored, celebrating diaspora, open, direct and iconoclastic on subjects traditionally seen as taboo” (15). As such, my study celebrates the fact that “in the 50 years between Cesaire’s and Benitez-Rojo’s respective conceptualizations of the Caribbean, women writers of all different social backgrounds from across the region have emerged in growing numbers” (Adjarian 3). In response to Myriam Chancy’s assertion that Caribbean women writers “continue to be underpublished, as well as underrepresented in the general study of Caribbean literature,” this study illustrates the relevance and vibrancy of Caribbean women’s writing (108). By focusing on female “migrant authors” I do not mean to suggest that Afro-Caribbean males do not experience flight or to deny their migratory