Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad Jennifer Donahue

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2014 Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad Jennifer Donahue

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TAKING FLIGHT: CARIBBEAN WOMEN WRITING FROM ABROAD

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 experience, but instead I focus exclusively on female authors to more thoroughly examine the contradictions and difficulties of migration through the lens of gender and mobility. While migration clearly affects men as well as women, I am motivated to focus on female authors representing the female migratory experience because of the dualities their writing evidences. In fact, scholars such as Alison

Donnell note that “particularly in the post-1970 period with more women than men migrating at

2 present, the migration patterns of women are different from those of men” (89). While early

Caribbean literature by authors including Naipaul, Lovelace and McKay often features a male character leaving the islands for the metropole and presents a largely one-dimensional portrait of the exilic experience, contemporary Caribbean literature by authors such as Marshall and Cliff moves beyond a unidirectional flow. Works such as Abeng and The True History of Paradise depict migration as motivated by economic constraints, aspirations of upward mobility, and the need to escape political and personal violence. Thus, while earlier Caribbean writing often presents the exilic experience quite literally, this project considers psychological exile as part of the migratory experience. More specifically, I find that the narration of psychological exile is largely gendered in Caribbean writing. Although the exilic experience is quite literal in works such as Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom, female authors such as Cliff have offered a more inclusive view of exile that is not often articulated by their male counterparts. In response to

Emilia Ippolito’s celebration that “women can finally let their voices be heard,” I further an appreciation of the voices that complicate one-dimensional portraits of migration and exile (5).

In concerning itself with female migrant authors, this project directly engages with the field of migration studies, which, as Nikos Papastergiadis notes, is “no longer confined to the domain of sociology, demography politics and economics” (5). Likewise, he also notes that “the modern migrant no longer conforms to the stereotypical image of the male urban peasant”

(Papastergiadis 10). As the United Nations reports, there are over 232 million people living abroad today, a 33% increase from 2000. Of these 232 million, 48% are women (“Number”).

Viewing migration as a reflection of our increasingly interconnected society, this study moves beyond a sense of “belonging in terms of an allegiance to a nation-state” to reading the fluidity and flexibility migration offers (Papastergiadis 2). With more people living outside their

3 homeland than ever before, this project capitalizes on a growing field while remaining focused on a subset of migrants (Papastergiadis 10). Following Papastergiadis’s assertion that “migrants are often transformed by their journey, and their presence is a catalyst to new transformations in the spaces they enter,” I explore the transformative property of flight in a number of novels by

Caribbean women (10). Building upon Papastergiadis’s observation, I argue that migration affords a space of reflection and creative genesis for the authors under study. This reflection then enables them to craft their own tales of transformation. If, as Chancy claims, “in Caribbean fiction, dissatisfaction with oppressive gender roles finds its expression in the motif of flight as a result of social confinement,” then writing offers the authors of the works under study an opportunity to escape by “writing back” (Framing Silence 114). In this sense, this study is as much an examination of the motif of flight in Caribbean women’s literature as it is a celebration of women’s voices and a commentary on the positions that occasioned the need to find expression.

In its discussion of flight this study also sheds light on the practice of doubling. Calling upon psychological discussions of doubling, what I often refer to as figurative flight or a form of dissociation3, I apply Donette Francis’s understanding of doubling as “a physical and psychological protective mechanism that allows for a separation of the physical body from consciousness during traumatic occurrences” (72-73). In doing so, I grant validity to mystical or supernatural experiences as I investigate the reasons behind the search for flight in these particular novels. If, as Susan Friedman claims, “safety might reside neither in home nor homeland but only in flight,” this project examines the multi-faceted nature of flight in

Caribbean women’s writing (200). We often see figurative and literal flight combined in novels

3 In Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung defines dissociation as “a splitting in the psyche, causing a neurosis.” He notes R.L. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a literary text that offers a physical reminder of this state. 4 such as Breath, Eyes, Memory and Praisesong for the Widow. While figurative flight offers a form of resuscitation and healing for the protagonists, it is not until strength is built that literal flight is possible. Therefore, figurative flight is not an isolated psychological response but an essential part of the transformative process that functions as a rehearsal and preparation for literal flight. In reading these novels in this way, I seek not only to shed light on the practice of doubling or folkloric depictions of flight but also to validate the mystical and supernatural and its function in the Caribbean and in Caribbean literature.

As I focus on folkloric depictions of flight in works such as Krik? Krak!, I apply Donald

Hill’s understanding of folklore as the “traditional beliefs and behaviors that circulate within a group of people in different versions based on a perceived model” (9). While Hill notes that folklore is “learned and transmitted verbally or by example within a ‘face-to-face’ setting,” I expand this definition of folklore to include literary works such as de Lisser’s and Danticat’s that transform and transmit folklore for a wider audience (9). This form of recording and adaptation should not be dismissed; rather, I uphold the authors’ historicization and adaptation of folklore to be a natural expansion of the means of dissemination typically recognized. For several of the authors under study, folklore functions as “part of what anthropologists call ‘culture,’ the shared beliefs, activities, customs, behaviors, and traditions of a people that are handed down from one generation to the next and that constitute the major means by which a people adapt to their physical environment and to other people” (Hill 12-13). Yet, more than simply passing down the stories in themselves, Danticat, Melville and Cliff intertwine folklore and literary production as they include folkloric references in their fiction. They keep folklore alive while contributing to the “dynamic culture that continually adds new and revises old folk traditions” (Hill 11).

Unfortunately, as Hill notes, “folklorists have tended to focus on folklore in industrialized

5 countries such as Europe, the Americas, or Asia” (3). In focusing on the fusion of folklore and literature in several of the works under study, I implicitly support the validity of Caribbean folklore as I highlight the way in which folklore affords or heralds transformation.

As previously suggested, flight does not come without difficulty for the protagonists in these texts. Somewhat similarly, for the authors of these works, the process of writing offers a means of coming to terms with the past, as Caroline Rody suggests. Extending Rody’s assertion that “Caribbean women writers figure their creative relationships to the past by means of the unconventional, feminist story of a daughter’s return to repair a severed matrilineage,” I offer a reading of this negotiation as one involving flight (6). More specifically, I query why it is that these transnational writers frequently write and rewrite the transnational protagonist and how the process of writing functions as another form of flight for these authors. My purpose is to examine various iterations of flight and illustrate the centrality of flight to emotional transformation. In doing so, I point to flight as a recurring response to the condition of exile in

Caribbean women’s writing; for many of these protagonists, travel functions as a vehicle for escape, a way of coping with the condition of exile. By examining these characters’ turn towards flight as a means of negotiating their positions, I propose that we move beyond the default position of reading flight as escape and instead see flight as a form of resistance that offers

Caribbean women a way to come to terms with conflictions of place and identity. This project examines women in various states of exile. Often the women in these texts are physically as well as mentally displaced; for the protagonists, travel is central to achieving wholeness. In complicating a reading of flight as provoked by “the necessity of fleeting conditions that adversely affect the lives and their futures,” this study advances discussion of the function of flight in Caribbean women’s literature (Chancy 6). While I certainly agree that flight can exhibit

6 itself in response to “conditions that adversely affect their lives,” I proffer an alternate understanding of flight as a response to such conditions, for example the psychological exile

Clare Savage experiences in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (Chancy 6). While Chancy reads flight as motivated by external conditions, often in binary opposition, I open the discussion to include readings of flight as prompted by internal contradictions. Instead of reading flight as escaping

“something else,” this project often locates that “something else” within.

For the authors of the works under study, writing affords a means of liberation that is reflected in the way in which the process of migration offers transformation and wholeness to the individual protagonists in their works. Although the bildungsroman typically details a male subject coming of age, this project examines novels by female authors taking up and reinscribing this traditionalist genre. Since, as Edouard Glissant argues, the “conquered or visited have long undergone a search for identity,” it is understandable that Caribbean women writers would turn to this genre not only to write an identity for their characters but also to locate one for themselves

(17). While in the masculine or “traditional” bildungsroman the male character coming of age often achieves a more unified identity with relative ease, in the writing of Caribbean women writers this negotiation often leads to the migration of our female protagonists. This negotiation the female protagonists undergo is not simply one of coming of age but of coming to terms with one’s identity as a post-colonial subject, Caribbean resident, female and daughter, among a host of other identities. Thus, so much as I examine the function of flight in select novels published from 1959-2011, I also offer an expansion of boundaries of the bildungsroman and illustrate the power of the diasporic voice. In response to Carine Mardorossian’s statement that the exiled

(usually male) writer is “often seen as better equipped to provide an ‘objective view’ of the two worlds they are straddling by virtue of their alienation,” I offer a female-centric reading of the

Caribbean and the condition of migration through the lens of select novels by Caribbean women writers (16).

In reading transnational Caribbean women’s writing, this study examines characters in various states of exile. Although Chancy recognizes that exile “is the condition of consistent, continual displacement,” she also notes its function as a “mechanism for liberation” (1,14). It is out of exile that these authors depict characters undergoing transformation themselves, offering a counter narrative to the forced migration brought on by the slave trade. We see this rewriting most explicitly in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow as the authors position their protagonists as the recipients of historical knowledge. Rather, Clare and

Avey reconnect with ancestral figures to come to a fuller understanding of themselves and their culture. Even more explicitly, Marshall stages Avey’s purging aboard a vessel bound for

Carriacou to rewrite the triangular trade on a micro level. Illustrating exile from another angle, women in the novels under study are often forced to migrate to escape political or personal violence, as we see in Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise. In works such as this, exile offers an eventual reclamation and reconciliation towards a fuller self, a self that is not simply about returning home as in Caroline Rody’s The Daughter’s Return, but in building home for a self that recognizes and integrates all the contradictions within. In reading the flight of exiles, this study calls into question the agency of those in flight. By examining exile as a result of forces as disparate as violence and passion, this study delves into the range of coercion that necessitates flight for these authors and protagonists. In doing so, I use Nikos

Papastergiadis’s assertion in The Turbulence of Migration as a starting point. Papastergiadis notes that “the distinction between voluntary and involuntary need not be determined purely by the relative absence or presence of coercion. A broader understanding of displacement would

8 allow us to see a relationship between the people who have felt compelled to leave their homeland, and those who have been expelled” (57). This study moves beyond a simpler reading that champions female agency in migration to one that takes into consideration the darker forces behind the act of migration.

While on the surface flight may appear voluntary in works such as Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, hardship of various forms often functions as the force initiating migration.

Though Meredith Gadsby positions salt as a metaphor for hardship in Sucking Salt, this project views hardship as inertia. If flight comes as a result of hardship and offers an escape from a distressing situation, the act of flight itself functions as a haven for the protagonists under study.

In works such as The True History of Paradise, wherein Jean physically removes herself from a dangerous situation, the physical act of flying serves as a place or space of suspension. While this is certainly true of literal flight, the same rings true for figurative flight, or doubling. In

Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, for instance, we witness the way in which doubling functions as a protective space for Sophie. Rather, for the protagonists in these works, doubling often serves as a “safe space” during a traumatic event, a place in which the women can remove themselves from the present moment and transport themselves as they transform their individual realities. By reading home as both physical and metaphorical as Carole Boyce Davies suggests, we can see flight as offering a temporary “home” to the displaced, a means of comfort and escape in a time of desperation. Although literal and figurative flight engenders exile, it also offers a way “out” as not only a form of transit but also a home for those in flight. In considering home in this way, I begin with the premise that home is a contested and problematic space, one that Carole Boyce Davies asserts “is often portrayed as a place of alienation and displacement in autobiographical writing” (21). In fact, Davies finds that “migration and exile are fundamental to

9 human experience. And each movement demands another definition and redefinition of one’s identity” (128). While Davies discusses the figure of the displaced person in black women’s texts in the United States, I extend her reading of home to transnational Caribbean women’s writing by moving beyond a nostalgic view of home to an illustration of transnational women negotiating home. In understanding transnationalism as the result of “globalization whereby a group of people, with their own special culture and folklore, are spread out over several countries or continents and continue to act as a unit,” this study moves beyond more distanced definitions to illustrate the difficulties of migration and the connections that endure following the act of flight (Hill 8).4

As a region “marked by contemporary diasporas and out-migrations,” the Caribbean proves a rich space for negotiations of place and home (Braziel 22). In light of this, I explore the way in which authors such as Pauline Melville construct place and home in their writing in the face of migration, inflecting this experience in their novels and their characters. In an increasingly globalized society, this study speaks to the realities of the transnational experience reflected in contemporary literature. This project affords an investigation of relations between gender, location and literary production by examining writing by transnational Caribbean women. As a whole, this study moves beyond national and linguistic boundaries to complicate generic readings of transnationalism, rejecting geographical boundaries to establish cross- cultural dialogue between works. This project works against the tendency to see “the Caribbean experience as unidirectional and uniform across the geographical spaces of the region and its diaspora” (Page 1). In consciously including authors from nations as diverse as Haiti, Jamaica and Trinidad, I respond to Ruben Gowricharn’s assertion that “classifying all Caribbean migrants

4 Hill also understands transnational as referring to “people whose family members live in two or more countries. The major transnational Caribbean populations outside the region are in the North American northeastern cities (from Quebec to Washington, D.C.), Florida, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France” (7). 10 as belonging to one common diaspora (conceptualized as a homogeneous entity) is problematic as they are not a monolithic group” (46). Much like Gowricharn, I aim not to profess “a unity the region never had,” but to examine the transformative experience of flight in women’s writing across the region (3).

As Robin Cohen asserts in Global Diasporas, “although many diasporas are seen to be born of flight rather than choice, in practice migration scholars often find it difficult to separate voluntary from involuntary migration” (180). One of the larger goals of this study is to differentiate between states of migration and exile while examining the reasons behind the pull towards flight and the way in which it functions in these novels. Throughout, I draw distinctions based on an understanding of voluntary migration as a state “entered into as a free alternative available to the individual,” forced migration as involving “moves of necessity for the protection of life and liberty of individuals” and return migration as involving “a return and resettlement of a migrant population in their original country or area of residence” (Jackson 7-8). Likewise, I understand transnationalism as the “multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states” (Vertovec preface) and the way in which “populations that live in different geographic spaces, feel related in one way or another, and maintain social relations with each other” (Gowricharn 5). Given that “international migration has rapidly escalated over the last quarter century with the number of immigrants today twice that of 1980,” this work opens up a new space in the discussion of Caribbean writing (Braziel 37). Taking

Flight moves beyond seeing these women simply as hybrids to recognizing and appreciating the contradictions implicit in their work, contradictions that not merely indicative or reflective of the

Caribbean but of the impact of migration on Caribbean women (Braziel 37). Though scholars such as Papastergiadis and Gowricharn are concerned with the study of transnationalism as it

11 impacts contemporary society, this project applies a critical understanding of transnationalism to literature. So much as viewing folklore and flight in light of transnationalism suggests that migration cannot fully erase culture or cultural ties, it also points to the necessity of sharing the migratory experience through a creative medium. More specifically, the literary representation of transnationalism offers writers a means of catharsis and readers a way to experience the turbulence of migration through fiction. Crafting their own tales of migration provides the transnational Caribbean women writers under study a means of coming to terms with the duality inherent in their status and a way of pushing back against “fairytale” readings of migration that gloss over the struggles inherent in leaving one’s homeland.

In examining these texts, the title of this project self-consciously utilizes the term

“Caribbean women.” Applying this term in her own work, Emilia Ippolito asserts in Caribbean

Women Writers that “the umbrella term ‘Caribbean literature’…tends to cover up societal divisions” and that “Caribbean women and their voices tend to be distinct from each other as are their countries, and as their various racial, social, economic and cultural positions suggest” (7,9).

At the same time, Ippolito notes that “by using the term ‘Caribbean women writers,’ the critics implicitly or explicitly assume that something unifies them as a group” (9). This study assumes that the experience of flight unifies these authors and the protagonists they describe. However, like Pat Ellis, I also find that “although the lives of women in different parts of the region do not differ greatly, Caribbean women are not a homogeneous group” (1). I strive not to flatten individual journeys but to bring awareness to the shared experience of migration that these narratives write. At the same time, however, I do not mean to gloss over divisions; in no way is my discussion of psychological exile in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng, for instance, meant to imply that this form of exile is representative of Jamaican migration, but instead discusses flight as

12 represented in these texts. Instead of organizing this project around national divisions, this project is ordered around thematic discussions of flight as disparate as an examination of figurative flight in the work of Edwidge Danticat to a discussion of the transformative nature of disease in novels by Pauline Melville and Elizabeth Nunez. In doing so, this study both recognizes division and applauds unity, as Ippolito suggests.

As I move into a discussion of the works under study, I first turn to a reading of several accounts of the legend of Annie Palmer, the most famous of which, H.G. de Lisser’s, solidified the historical figure’s reputation as the “white witch of Rose Hall.” While subsequent chapters focus on female migrant authors, this chapter sheds light on the way in which folklore has transformed a woman into a legend. More specifically, I query what is at stake in imposing a number of legendary stories on an eighteenth century slaveholder. After offering a discussion of the folkloric vilification of Palmer, I examine physical and psychic fragmentation in Edwidge

Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak! Through a comparative lens, I discuss the intersections between folklore and flight in these works to highlight the way in which flight and transformation intertwine. My third chapter then turns to novels by Pauline Melville and

Elizabeth Nunez to explore the way in which disease and disorder offer transformation. As I detail, Melville and Nunez utilize their protagonists as vehicles for social critique and their works call into question the “success” of transformative flight. I next turn to an examination of psychological transnationalism in works by Michelle Cliff and Margaret Cezair-Thompson; this reading calls for a metaphorical understanding of transnationalism as I posit Clare and Jean’s internal migration as a form of transnationalism. My final chapter seeks to expand the boundaries of the term “transnational.” In focusing on Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow and Levy’s

Small Island, I detail the authors’ use of the historical novel to connect with Caribbean ancestry.

More specifically, this chapter expands boundaries of the term by considering Marshall and Levy to be transnational writers on the basis of their cultural heritage rather than physical location. As a whole, this project moves from folkloric flight, to a focus on the body and mind, and then to the benefits migration affords the authors and the characters in their works. In progressing in this fashion, I illustrate the complexity of flight and the strength of Caribbean women writers. With

Taking Flight, I respond to Avtah Brah’s reminder that “the question is not simply who travels, but when, how, and under what circumstances” (182).

CHAPTER ONE

THE GHOST OF ANNIE PALMER: GIVING VOICE TO JAMAICA’S “WHITE WITCH OF ROSE HALL”

“What if the ghosts of the past are spirits that are doomed to wander precisely because their stories have not been told?” - Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery

While many of the works under study detail the struggles of protagonists forced into exile, I begin with a reading of the way in which folklore has been used to demean the deceased historical figure Annie Palmer, also known as the “White Witch of Rose Hall.” In works such as

Breath, Eyes, Memory and Abeng we witness the evolution and integration of identity for a single protagonist; by contrast, literature has not been so kind to this Jamaican figure but rather has served to ostracize. Much like the works discussed in subsequent chapters, textual accounts of the legend play with the definition of exile, understood throughout as an “alienated consciousness as well as physical remove” (Chancy xiii). Since the publication of James

Castello’s pamphlet, “Legend of Rose Hall Estate in the Parish of St. James, Jamaica,” fact and fiction have melded in the tale of the eighteenth-century plantation owner. In fact, as Laura

Lomas notes, “the true character of Annie Palmer has been a subject of periodic debate in the

Gleaner [from] 1895 [on]” (73). Although the story has been retold countless times, this chapter explores five published versions of the legend as it considers the transference of oral literature into written form. In discussing the legend of Palmer, it must be remembered that she was once an estate owner on one of the island’s largest properties; this woman, who died in 1831, achieved legendary status as a result of her alleged practice of obeah, relations with men, and murder of her husbands. The accounts under study, most notably H.G. de Lisser’s, have solidified the historical figure’s reputation as the “white witch of Rose Hall” and transformed the woman into

15 a legend within four decades of her death. Ironically, in their attempts to condemn Annie

Palmer’s power, the authors have allowed her tale to take flight. In this chapter, I examine the relationship between storytelling, national identity and agency as I push back against the wholesale defamation of this historical figure. As such, I suggest that reading Palmer solely through the lens of violence fails to consider the complexities of her position.

This chapter examines the “exoticized” image of Annie Palmer as presented in James

Castello’s 1868 pamphlet, H.G. de Lisser’s novel (1929), Harold Underhill’s 1968 text, Mike

Henry’s 2006 adaptation, and Diane Browne’s version in a primary school reader. Along with reading the accounts as reflecting an ongoing preoccupation with all things supernatural, I posit folklore as an instrument available for manipulation. My analysis here centers upon the concept of folklore as the “traditional beliefs and behaviors that circulate within a group of people in different versions based on a perceived model” (Hill 8-9).5 In reading Annie Palmer as both a historical and folkloric figure, I push back against a view of oral materials as “exotic” elements sprinkled throughout the texts to an understanding that realizes the “dynamic overlapping and interaction of materials from both literature and folklore in the Caribbean” (Roldan-Santiago 2).

As scholars such as Leah Rosenberg note, the figure of Annie Palmer has become a monument in

Jamaican folklore;6 for the authors as well as Jamaican citizens, retelling stories serves as a means of keeping cultural ties intact, a means of maintaining history. For the transnational authors under study in the following chapters, though, folklore is but one of the ways of retaining

5 Hill also defines the folktale as such: “A folktale is a traditional oral story or narrative. In classic folklore studies, folktales are considered false, although in African and Caribbean setting, some folktales may be considered myth fragments and, therefore, some people may consider them true as well as exemplary and didactic” (18). For more on the subject of folktales, see Hill’s Caribbean Folklore, Roldan-Santiago’s “Thematic and Structural Functions of Folklore in Caribbean Literature or Chiji Akoma’s Folklore and the African-Caribbean Narrative Imagination.”

6 As Rosenberg notes in Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature, “the story of Annie Palmer has been reinscribed into Jamaican national arts in two of Jamaica’s national pantomimes...as well as in the work of the National Dance Theatre Company.” For more on the influence of de Lisser’s work, see Rosenberg 90.

16 connections to the homeland, as we see most explicitly in Danticat’s inclusion of Haitian folklore in Krik? Krak! Yet, as this discussion of the legend of Annie Palmer suggests, folktales can also be used to reinforce social and gender norms as well as class distinctions. This manipulation is not unique to Palmer’s tale, though, as later chapters argue; indeed, folklore often surpasses geographic barriers. As a later discussion of works such as Breath, Eyes, Memory illustrates, folklore proves central to the transnational experience persists across geographic boundaries. As my discussion of the legend of Annie Palmer suggests, the transference of oral literature into print culture not only historicizes folklore but also makes elements of oral culture available for a wider, very interested audience. Through print culture, folktales take flight.

With the belief that “to circumscribe the folkloric act within ‘face to face’ exchange would be to ignore the other levels of orality that are possible,” (Akoma 3) I work against the tendency to see folkloric references as embellishment to a vision of the texts as “written-oral phenomena” (Roldan-Santiago 3). Much like Serafin Roldan-Santiago, I view the inclusion of folklore in print culture as an equal partner with oral literature. Rather than holding one method up over another, I view all forms of folklore as part of the fabric of Caribbean literature, the

“vulcanizing agent [that results in] a literature which includes the ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ of a region and its people” (Roldan-Santiago 7). This is not to say that oral culture and print culture do not serve different purposes and audiences, but that perhaps those differences are beginning to diminish as more and more legends are transcribed. While some scholars may debunk the legitimacy of folklore in its written form, as Roldan-Santiago suggests, written retellings offer understanding and appreciation to those from other cultures; this diasporic dispersal of folklore should not be dismissed.

Though women often serve as “guardians of folk knowledge,” as we see in the other novels under study, men have largely propagated the tale of Annie Palmer, perhaps to counter the threat to power that Annie represents (Bush 764). While folklore affords the authors an opportunity to amend the legend, it offered Palmer a means of negotiating her position as mistress of Rose Hall. As such, for Palmer, flight is best viewed as a form of resistance; by embracing rather than rejecting the labels placed upon her (soucouyant, etc.), Palmer guaranteed a degree of power while pushing back against gender and social norms. More specifically, the view of Annie Palmer that the authors provide is one in which the woman dons masculine dress and gallivants around the plantation at night, deeply aware of her reputation and how her actions contribute to suspicion. Although Castello briefly references an association with obeah, de Lisser narrates Annie’s self-referential relationship with folkloric flight. In Castello’s text, and those by his literary successors, Annie utilizes obeah and folkloric flight in attempts to win Rutherford’s heart by taking her competitor, Millie, out of the picture. Most explicitly, the accounts term

Annie a soucouyant through the voice of Takoo, Millie’s grandfather, when Millie is found near death with curious bite marks on her neck7. Though Annie, according to the vision of her the authors provide, is ultimately unsuccessful in winning Rutherford’s heart (he returns to England following her death), folkloric flight offered the eighteenth-century slaveholder the possibility of transforming her situation.

Literary productions of the legend have achieved success by capitalizing on Annie’s folkloric flight, and in doing so render her an object of intrigue. Sadly, she is now viewed as a

“monstrous female” and her former home has become yet another tourist trap. So much as men have participated in transmitting his tale, as previously suggested, the accounts clearly associate

7 The character of Millie first emerges in de Lisser’s text. Thus, Castello’s pamphlet does not characterize Annie as a soucouyant as later accounts do. 18 the historical figure with folklore; more than simply transforming her into a legend, though, print culture evidences a layered folkloric experience by detailing Annie’s manipulation of tales such as the Old Hige and Three-footed Horse as she attempts to secure control. In this way, then, men emerge as participants in the dispersal of this legend but not as agents in the same way that

Annie is. While men such as de Lisser indeed manipulate folklore for their own purposes (i.e. de

Lisser’s use of literature as a political tool) their association largely remains at a textual level. By contrast, women’s use of this folktale has trended towards a more personal form of instruction.

Although men indeed join women as “guardians of folk knowledge guardians of folk knowledge” of this tale, their usurpation of the tale results in its replication for a wider audience while the only female-authored account, a retelling by Diane Browne, offers a pared-down version of the tale for Jamaican school children (Bush 764).

Collectively, the accounts detail one woman’s use of folklore. As I will discuss, it is

Annie’s status as plantation owner and her manipulation of obeah or “malignant magic” that cements her reputation as the “white witch” and places her as a threat to established order

(Newall 29, 46). Despite the power she wielded, the historical figure was “subjected to specifically colonial and male policing” and is ultimately “subdued by masculine force” at the hands of the obeah-man Takoo8 (Mackie 190, 206). According to rumor, this Montego Bay slave owner murdered three to five husbands who are now buried underneath the palm trees on the estate. Interest in the tale is stronger than ever. Tourists who have heard about the famous mistress from Ghost Hunters International or Johnny Cash’s “Ballad of Annie Palmer” flock to the estate in hopes of catching a glimpse of Annie’s ghost in her bedroom mirror. She has occasioned intrigue since her violent death in 1831. Now, though, “tourist fascination with Rose

Hall relies upon representations of the Legend which...transport the reader to a luxurious past.

8 Though an unnamed slave proves central in Castello’s pamphlet, de Lisser’s text introduces Takoo by name. 19

The refurbished Rose Hall draws on this fantasy, whereby the visitor can return to that smiling past without being implicated in slavery” (Lomas 77-78). As Lomas notes of de Lisser’s version, written accounts enable readers to “identify with an objective and innocent foreign observer

[Rutherford] rather than the repressive plantation mistress” (77-78). From a comparative standpoint, Castello’s brief text placed the folktale into print and de Lisser’s novel has forever associated the name of Annie Palmer with the sobriquet “white witch,” a term that represents a

“demonized figure from whom the post-Emancipation society can distinguish itself” (Lomas 77).

Though it would be intriguing to examine the oral history of the legend, it is beyond the purview of this project. Rather, a close reading of written versions of the tale interrogates the function of folklore across these works, with the aim of granting validity to the supernatural or mystical while highlighting the negative connotations that accompany supernatural flight.9 More than offering a discussion of the legend of Annie Palmer, though, this chapter sets up a reading of flight that will inform the rest of this project. Unlike the protagonists in subsequent chapters, the authors under study in this chapter attribute an identity and reputation to a historical figure as opposed to a fictional character. Yet, despite this difference, this reading of Annie Palmer sets the stage for my interpretation of representations of flight by Caribbean women authors. Though this chapter details the folkloric transformation of a historical figure, Caribbean women writers such as Michelle Cliff and Paule Marshall take up the genre of historical fiction to craft female protagonists in various states of migration and flight. So much as the written versions of the legend of Annie Palmer evidence strong nationalistic ties, the novels under study in subsequent chapters illustrate the enduring power of the diasporic voice in light of the transnational condition. By first discussing the folkloric vilification of Annie Palmer, this segment of the

9 This chapter applies Donald Hill’s understanding folklore as the “traditional beliefs and behaviors that circulate within a group of people in different versions based on a perceived model” (8-9).

20 larger project establishes an interpretation of a woman apart from legend, apart from superstition.

This reading of Palmer will greatly inform my analysis of folkloric flight and transformation in works such as Krik? Krak! and The Migration of Ghosts; a reading of Palmer in light of cultural and historic conditions positions the project as a whole as a work that lauds the female voice and strides towards agency.

Although this project as a whole is concerned with the multiplicity of flight, in this chapter I am interested in how the texts strip Annie of voice and authority while characterizing her as the terrifying folkloric figure of the soucouyant. Drawing on Gisele Anatol’s discussion of the soucouyant, or shape-shifter, as a “model for sensuality and female sexuality that runs counter to the early colonial pressures on women to be chaste and sexually submissive,” I suggest that we consider Annie as a “paragon of female agency” standing in contrast to her contemporaries (52).10 In doing so, I hope to move beyond a gendered portrayal to one that recognizes the influence Annie exerts. So much as Palmer’s legend is “intricately bound with the issue of the legitimacy of female power within the plantation system,” I resist the temptation to view her notoriety as solely attributable to her gender (Paravisini-Gebert 26). In tracing the evolution from a focus on the act of murder to an interest in Palmer as a sexual being, I am concerned with the way in which the variation inherent in oral tradition is reflected in this series of texts. As a whole, this chapter delves into the way in which the label “soucouyant” was applied to Palmer, and, in particular, how Annie’s “flight” contributed to her reputation; on a

10 In the legends of Annie Palmer three folkloric references dominate- that of the Old Hige, the Rolling Calf and the Three-Footed Horse. The Dictionary of Jamaican English defines an Old Hige as “a witch or old-witch; in popular stories and superstition she was said to take off her skin and fly at night to suck people (esp. babies' blood)” (329). Similarly, the Rolling Calf is “an imaginary monster taking the form (usually) of a calf with fiery eyes, and haunting the road and countryside at night” (385) and the Three-Foot Horse is defined as “a supposed demon in the form of a horse with one foreleg and two hind legs, which haunts the countryside by night” (442). 21 broader scale, this discussion lays the groundwork for the next chapter’s treatment of flight in works by Edwidge Danticat.

While scholars such as Lomas have investigated “how the myth developed and for what purposes it has been appropriated,” I focus on how the legend has been disseminated and the ways in which accounts continue to present a stereotypical image of the creole planter (72). My analysis here centers upon the often overlooked figure of the white female plantation owner; in turning attention to Palmer, I argue for a more comprehensive view of her than the one we receive in the print accounts of her deeds. In the context of plantation society, Hilary Beckles finds that while the white creole woman has been largely neglected, even less attention has been paid to the planter’s wife and far less to the female slave owner (659). Thus, this chapter turns an eye to a particular example of a seldom-discussed population. This investigation is, therefore, an attempt to shed light on an understudied region and scholastically-neglected texts. The consequence of reading Palmer solely through the lens of violence is the denigration of a historical figure without regard to context and the propagation of a perhaps inaccurate legend.

As a slave owner, and a female slave owner at that, Annie largely subverts gender, class, social and religious boundaries through her usurpation of masculine authority. Writing on the figure of the soucouyant, Anatol notes that the soucouyant “remains a suspicious figure in the community [and] occupies a space outside of the accepted boundaries” (50). Applying this assertion to the legend of Annie Palmer, I argue for an understanding of Annie as an early representative of female agency and “illegitimate power.” As a careful analysis reveals, folklore demeans Palmer despite a loosening of gender roles over time. Instead of taking exaggeration into consideration, the texts perpetuate her condemnation. This leads one to wonder what is at stake in maintaining the legend of the “white witch of Rose Hall.” Through an examination of

22 the intersection between violence, sexuality and folklore in these works, I call the vilification of

Annie Palmer into question. In response to Jenny Sharpe’s query, this chapter gives a voice to

Annie Palmer. Starting with James Castello’s nineteenth-century pamphlet and moving to Diane

Browne’s “retelling” in a Jamaican primary school reader, I offer a view of Palmer often absent from published accounts. Following Prime Minister Shearer’s lead in claiming the story of Annie

Palmer as a “treasure in [Jamaican] history,” I point to Palmer as an early symbol of resistance and subversion (qtd. in Lomas 71).

Transforming Oral Tradition into Print: Examining James Castello's Pamphlet

James Castello’s pamphlet, “Legend of Rose Hall Estate in the Parish of St. James”

(1868), transforms the legend of Palmer into print. Unlike subsequent versions, which focus on

Annie’s sexuality as opposed to the act that spurred her notoriety, Castello’s work emphasizes the act of murder. While later accounts focus on Palmer’s manipulation of her sexuality and folkloric flight, this text positions violence as a means of establishing and cementing authority.

Coming years after Annie’s demise in 1831, Castello’s 1868 text distills rumor as truth.

Although scholars such as Lomas have briefly referenced Castello's work, it has not been widely studied; thus, this chapter seeks to expand discussion of the tale beyond de Lisser’s popular novel. In this pamphlet, Castello places the reader as a recipient of folklore and “witness” to murder as he engenders a visceral reaction to a scene of extreme violence. In his account,

Castello reveals the death of Annie’s first husband by her own hands. He narrates the unnamed husband’s death “by poison given by her who at God's own Altar had solemnly promised to love and cherish him” (Castello 5). Though Annie’s tombstone paints her as a “Daughter dutiful; as a

Wife, affectionate and loving [and] as a parent kind and tender,” Castello employs religious reference to highlight sin as he offers a correction to the epithet on her tombstone (1). In this

23 way, he utilizes the craft of writing to call the truth of a very public form of transcription into question. This first mention of carnage places Annie as the principal agent with the inclusion of the phrase “by poison given by her” (Castello 5). Hence, Castello clearly identifies Palmer and casts blame as he details the husband’s demise. However, even more troubling is the reaction the author depicts. He writes that Annie “looked on his last agonies, with a calm brow and serene countenance” (Castello 5). In this pamphlet, Castello characterizes Annie as a sociopath as he describes a woman not only capable of murder but also largely unmoved by it; standing in contrast to the agony of a dying man, Annie remains oddly “serene.” In focusing on a single act this is omitting the backstory; as Geoffrey Yates notes, “once the legend was given currency…it stuck” (par. 38).

Along with advancing a portrait of Annie as a woman involved in, yet strangely unaffected by, her spouse’s death, Castello infers a sexual relationship between Annie and an unnamed slave, likely the obeah-man Takoo referenced in later accounts. Castello writes, “this affectionate wife was urging her accomplice and paramour to hasten the effect of the lingering potion, and put an end to the dying man's struggles by smothering him with pillows” (5). With terms such as “paramour,” the author furthers an image of Annie as subverting propriety and insinuates indiscretion on her part. As such, the male author employs folklore to comment upon one woman’s sexuality; by suggesting a “looseness,” Castello offers literary judgment based upon mere suspicion. On the whole, though, sanctions such as this serve as attempts to restrain female sexuality and warn readers of the result that such indiscretion engenders. From a textual standpoint, Castello grants Annie a degree of influence in that she solicits the help of an accomplice in killing her husband and that she set the process in motion by administering poison.

It is telling that she does not commit the act herself. Instead, her aide, per Castello, is urged to

24 quicken her husband’s expiry. Ironically, this serves as a subtle commentary on the location of power and power dynamics at the time. Try as she might, Annie’s use of poison must be supplemented by an even more violent, physical act, the smothering, or suffocation, of her husband.

According to Castello’s pamphlet, Annie lacks the conviction to carry out the act alone.

Instead, she aligns herself with an “old Negro” to kill her husband (Castello 5). In this way,

Annie’s power is diminished as she employs a man to carry out her directives. While we can in no way excuse her actions, the use of an accomplice in Castello’s construction presents quite the contradiction. For Annie, a woman bound by patriarchy and plantation economics, violence seems to yield a degree of mobility. In depicting Annie’s choice of a black slave as an ally,

Castello suggests a diminished racial hierarchy and a bit of progressiveness on her part yet also points to a manipulation of resources at her disposal. Although Annie exhibits agency by poisoning her husband, her desire to expedite his death highlights her discomfort with the situation. Ironically, this desire could be read as a form of compassion expressed as a wish to end her spouse’s suffering, or, alternately, as the frustration of a disinterested sociopath. Equally important, the call to hasten his passing via smothering transforms the homicide from a removed engagement to an intensely physical act, but again, one that she delegates to her “accomplice.”

Despite the inclusion of this call for assistance, Castello’s version of the legend largely denies

Annie a voice in terms of direct quotation; instead, his work suggests Annie’s influence through reactions to the historical figure and the consequences of her command.

While Castello’s narrative includes a view of Annie’s involvement in her first husband's death, she is depicted as incapable of independent action; it is her union with the local obeah- man that grants agency. Although Annie initially follows feminine mores by eschewing physical

25 confrontation, the turn towards rage in the murder of her second husband illustrates a shift in her attachment to social norms. In contrast to the passing of her first husband, Annie acts alone in dispatching her second as she poisons him and then stabs him to “stop his cries, to hide her guilt”

(Castello 7). Ergo, Palmer acts out of anger and selfishness to better her own situation; for

Castello, Annie’s violence appears to be the primary means through which he bestows agency.

As with the death of her first husband, Castello works to ease his character’s guilt, a fact that points to a sense of morality largely erased across this text.

In considering the lack of an accomplice in the second murder, perhaps the first, assisted murder served as a “gateway experience” for the second. Viewing the deaths side by side shows

Castello charting a violent progression for Annie, as she moves from observing the smothering of her first husband to stabbing her second. Though the murder of Annie’s second husband certainly supports a reading of her in terms of violence, Castello’s pamphlet emphasizes Annie’s guilt, which suggests that she is not without reproach but acts out of perceived necessity. Despite the growing influence that Castello implies though the murder of subsequent partners, it must not be forgotten that the very plantation economy and patriarchal system Annie was subject to also offered shelter. As Castello details, Annie’s status as a white slave owner allows her to initially escape with impunity while the inhospitable climate affords a degree of cover. Mr. Palmer is initially just a number, one of many claimed by the island. Much like the “lingering poison,”

Annie’s excuse betrays. As Castello writes: “death comes so suddenly and unexpectedly in this climate, that the decease of Mrs. Palmer’s husband, was easily accounted for” (6). While Annie’s status, as Castello paints her, momentarily silences and forestalls retribution, allowing “time [to wear] on and the deed [to be] forgotten,” it is the subsequent revenge and rebellion that propels the folktale today (Castello 6).

Castello concludes his pamphlet with the ultimate loss of agency. A rather graphic description of the deceased Annie Palmer “flung carelessly on the bed with staring eye balls, livid countenance, and twisted throat” illustrates the result of power gone mad (Castello 9).

Unlike the relatively distanced accounts of the expiration of Annie’s husbands, this description of the “white witch” clearly illustrates pent-up anger directed upon the body of Rose Hall’s mistress. Returning to a final depiction of our “white witch,” Castello notes: “this was the end of that Mrs. Ann Palmer, whose virtues are so conspicuously recorded in the Parish Church; this was the long and lingering illness which she bore with so much fortitude and resignation” (10)11.

By transforming a folk tale into written word, Castello’s pamphlet counters official record.

Within ten pages he adapts legend into print.

The Growth of the Legend: H.G. de Lisser’s Adaptation

Though de Lisser’s work has “arguably played the most influential role in popularizing a particular version of Annie Palmer’s story,” (Lomas 71) it has been criticized as being a

“sensationalist historical novel” written from an “anti-nationalist perspective” (Mackie 203).

De Lisser’s The White Witch of Rosehall, penned by a white, West-Indian creole, has also been termed a “formula-bound potboiler” (Angrosino 127). As Rosenberg notes, de Lisser was “the single most powerful man in the world of Jamaican print media, political debate, and national literature” (63). As the editor of the Daily Gleaner, the most influential paper in Jamaica, and

Planters’ Punch, an annual cultural magazine, de Lisser published his most widely read work,

The White Witch of Rose Hall, in 1929. First appearing in de Lisser’s annual, Planters’ Punch,

The White Witch of Rosehall came out the same year that William Seabrook published The

Magic Island, a novel which introduced United States mainstream culture to voodoo and zombie

11 As historians such as Yates and DuQuesnay have argued, Castello has mistakenly confused Annie Palmer’s tombstone with that of Mrs. Rosa Palmer, the “good Mrs. Palmer” who died in 1791 (Ward). 27 culture (Ward). While Castello’s pamphlet placed the tale of Annie Palmer in print, critics cite de

Lisser’s text as fictionalizing the legend. Humorously, Michael Angrosino terms de Lisser “a spiritual godfather of the Harlequin Romance school of fiction” (128) while Lomas points out de

Lisser’s own definition of legend as a “story with a sub-stratum of fact on which imagination has for a long time been at work” (70).

At the same time, de Lisser’s text “has arguably played the most influential role in popularizing a particular version of Annie Palmer’s story; although [his] novel is increasingly marginalized from the West Indian literary canon, his influence on Jamaican culture is indisputable” (Lomas 71). In response to Rosenberg’s assertion that “Caribbean literary studies have largely ignored the scope and significance of de Lisser’s work,” this chapter upholds his text as the work that solidified Annie Palmer’s reputation as the “white witch of Rose Hall.” I seek not to discredit his work but to draw connections between his most widely read novel and other written versions of the legend. So much as Castello’s pamphlet remains focused on the act of murder, de Lisser’s work complicates the crime to introduce the dynamic of a love triangle into the equation. In relying on these marginal figures to provide characterization of the protagonist, de Lisser, like his literary brethren, succeeds in reducing Palmer’s voice. As such, he emerges as a man “anxious to contain the threat of colonial contamination and keep it out of the colonial motherland, Britain” (Mackie 205). Indeed, de Lisser came to be seen as a “white, West-

Indian Creole writing from a typical perspective of his class, what Franz Fanon identified, and

Ramchand elaborated on, as the white minority’s ‘terrified consciousness” (Harkins 50). Perhaps even more problematic, as Rosenberg relates, is the fact that The White Witch of Rose Hall

“transforms Jamaica’s largest slave uprising, the Baptist War (1831-1832), into a love triangle...reducing complex and large-scale subaltern oppression” in the process (66). More

28 specifically, de Lisser “superimposed the story of Palmer onto the Baptist War,” with the murder of Annie Palmer set as the first act of the war (Rosenberg 83). The author replaces rebellion leaders with an obeah man (Takoo) and “reduces Jamaica’s largest slave rebellion to a torrid love story” (Rosenberg 84).

In de Lisser’s novel Annie is depicted as a woman who rules by terror yet is bewitching and enchanting. Unlike Castello’s pamphlet, de Lisser’s version introduces the characters of

Millicent (Millie), Takoo (obeah man and Millie’s grandfather), and Robert Rutherford (love interest for Annie and Millie). De Lisser takes the legend as introduced by Castello and expands upon it to produce a work of imaginative fiction. Though Castello’s text included an unnamed obeah man, de Lisser introduces the characters of Millie (or Millicent) and Rutherford, while attributing the name of Takoo to the obeah man. For Millicent, the “tragic mulatta” placed in opposition to Annie in the fight over Robert Rutherford, Annie is “de devil himself. She is the worse woman in Jamaica!” (de Lisser 85). As Rosenberg notes, this triangular relationship positions Annie opposite a white man (Rutherford) who rejects a white woman (her) “in favor of a brown (possibly black) woman” (Millie) (65). As such, de Lisser adapts the “colonial romance” to detail Palmer’s “outrageous crimes and sins” against a representation of elite womanhood

(Rosenberg 81). Supporting this is the fact that the work originally bore the title The Witch of

Rose Hall when it was published in Planters’ Punch; interestingly, subsequent editions feature the addition of “white” to further clarify Annie’s racial heritage to ensure her association with the white creole (Jamaican) woman (Rosenberg 84).

Though she is known for her exploits, Palmer is a “mystery” like the legend itself. In fact, much of the debate in de Lisser’s text surrounds Annie’s origins. Through the voice of Robert, the bookkeeper newly-arrived from England, de Lisser writes that “even the rector was puzzled

29 as to who she was and where she originally came from” (126-27). By surrounding Annie in mystery, de Lisser participates in the transformation of the historic figure into folkloric legend.

In corroborating and contradicting popular opinion of Annie, the novel implicitly calls the relationship between folklore and truth into question. In representing Palmer’s use of voodoo/obeah, de Lisser participates in attempts to “exorcise anxieties about power” while stripping her of social and economic influence (Mackie 173, 206). Indeed, de Lisser’s references to obeah are rather curious. While Castello’s pamphlet notes that Annie was associated with an unnamed obeah man, it does not directly implicate her in the practice. By contrast, de Lisser details Annie’s use of obeah to inspire fear and gain control as he paints the woman as a dangerous soucouyant. More specifically, de Lisser depicts Annie employing flight to ensure

Millie’s death as she “invokes the supernatural figure of the rolling calf and takes on the persona of the old hige” (Rosenberg 88). Coincidentally, though, de Lisser’s text emerges at the same time that Seabrook popularizes voodoo; as such, one can’t help but wonder if this association colors a historical figure in the name of capitalizing on a trend. Also intriguing is the fact that the tale was originally published alongside a “portrait of Duchess Atholl, [a British noblewoman and

Scottish Unionist Party politician], and her address of Jamaica’s ladies;” the two ran consecutively with The White Witch of Rose Hall interrupted by portraits of privileged women tending to their children (Rosenberg 82). With this, de Lisser arranges a contrast between the construct of Annie Palmer and images of well-to-do white women. With textual juxtaposition such as this, one cannot help but see Annie Palmer in a less than flattering light.

By manipulating the character of Annie and aligning her with the practice of obeah, de

Lisser simultaneously acknowledges and debunks oral literature. In de Lisser’s version Annie boasts that she is “a very dangerous person... and greatly to be feared” (167). As Mackie

30 explains, “her whiteness complicated by her mastery of voodoo, also functions as a scapegoat, in this case for all the excesses, crimes, and sins of pre-emancipation white domination. Annie

Palmer’s involvement in voodoo seems to make her more ‘black’ and savage” (192). Following this assertion, any agency or advances Annie makes are eclipsed by a reductive reputation. De

Lisser associates Annie with obeah, which “blackens” her and results in alienation and, later, denigration. In contrast to Castello’s pamphlet, de Lisser’s novel capitalizes on and emphasizes folklore as a form of characterization. Folkloric elements such as the Old Hige and Three-footed

Horse are directly aligned with Palmer, perhaps in an attempt to render the text more intriguing or “authentically” Caribbean. In de Lisser’s work, Annie’s leverage is often utilized to maintain position. For instance, Annie relates to Robert that she has “to rule these people by fear” (de

Lisser 168). While this line reveals feelings of superiority and an internalized hierarchy, it is evident from the term “these people” that folklore and folkloric flight functions as a means of control for this plantation owner. As de Lisser depicts, the manipulation of these elements allows

Annie to maintain her status in the plantation economy during a time that was hostile to powerful women. Corroborating this, Pat Ellis asserts that “the image of the strong, independent and dominant Caribbean woman is a familiar one. But what is less well known or understood are the factors that have made her this way and how her society uses them to discriminate against her in both overt and subtle ways” (1). Developing on Ellis’s claim, I offer the figure of Annie Palmer as an example of the discriminated woman she speaks of. Yet, it must also be noted that the independence Annie appears to possess has been obtained from others. While Annie is indeed a plantation owner, she usurped control by murdering her first husband. Although it is certainly true that “humans fear the supernatural,” the dominion Annie enjoys seems to be derived not from an innate ability but from a manipulation of local superstition (Anzaldúa 17). In turn, de

Lisser builds upon this fear as he terms Annie a “white witch.” Though the use of obeah, he positions the white slaveholder as the nexus of evil; more than simply a threat to male superiority, de Lisser’s work paints Annie as a threat to security, to feminine values, and to

“vulnerable” English men she might entrance. Thus, much like Castello, de Lisser’s “literary gaze” suppresses female agency by relying on superstition to demean and diminish.

As suggested, in de Lisser’s text knowledge is equated with power. Aside from utilizing obeah to control her slaves, Annie capitalizes on her sexuality to exert influence over men. As the author writes, “Annie Palmer knew much about the nature and the impulses of men” (de

Lisser 89). As such, de Lisser eschews the portrait of an oversexed Jezebel in favor of the image of a female manipulating authority and sexual knowledge to her advantage (89). Specifically, as de Lisser implies, Annie is well-versed in sexual impulses. Her power is, sadly, relegated to the bedroom as Annie is described as “dainty, bright, alluring, with an eye for a fine-looking man and a rage for the possession of anyone she fancied” (de Lisser 88). While de Lisser largely eclipses Annie's voice, his portrayal reveals a loosening in his critique; as much as his description of Annie paints her in terms of sexuality, it also speaks to the fact that sexual manipulation was one of the few means of eminence available to her. This leads one to wonder, why such contrast? What propels Annie to commit such acts? While on the one hand the depiction of Annie as dainty as well as intensely angry lends credence to the complexities of human emotion, it also furthers the stereotypical image of women as hysterical, irrational and unstable. So much as I would like to believe that one can be both, this image is anything but positive and instead points to Annie as more of a dangerous “man eater.”

Directly related to Annie’s command is her association with obeah. In drawing attention to Annie’s practice of obeah, de Lisser downplays sexual agency in favor of the image of

32 retribution enacted upon the body of the plantation owner. This comes most explicitly through the addition of the epithet “white witch,” a term that evidences a desire to restrain female sexuality by “blackening” Palmer through an association with witchcraft. Significantly, though,

“the irony of Palmer’s epithet, ‘white witch,’ depends on this distance between England and the

West Indies, between the lady and the Jamaican, between what is white and good, and what is black and diabolical” (Mackie 207). Thus, Annie’s reputation as the “white witch” is reliant upon folklore to create distance and difference. In perhaps one of the most explicit alignments, Takoo notes that “that dam' white woman, that witch, that Old Hige was here last night, an' that she was in dis room sucking me gran’child blood!” (de Lisser 151). As such, the mistress’ manipulation of obeah becomes intensely personal; with the terms “witch” and “Old Hige,” de Lisser aligns

Annie with the folkloric figure of the soucouyant. This accusation not only reveals Annie’s insecurity in the battle for Robert’s affection but also places her in opposition to the obeah man

Takoo, a character who largely escapes censure as “his practice of obeah is simultaneously distinguished morally from Palmer’s” (Mackie 206). Also interesting is the depiction of a plantation owner sucking the blood of the relative of an escaped slave (and obeah man). As such,

Annie appears parasitic and a bit pathetic; at the same time, though, we must remember that

Annie and Millie stand in competition over Rutherford. With this in mind, Annie’s actions can be seen as more of a competitive low blow than an unprovoked attack. While throughout the novel Annie is aligned with Takoo, her attack on Millie is misguided. As Millie is the grandchild of Takoo, a man who “represents the hidden strength of Jamaica’s black population,” Annie’s choice proves fatal (Harkins 51-52). At a time in which “obeah, even if practiced by a white woman, is against the law,” Palmer turns to obeah as her weapon of choice (de Lisser 212).

Though in many ways Annie subverts social norms, she is not above the law. Try as she might,

33 race and privilege prove ineffective in preventing her demise. For Annie as a historical figure as well as a construct in this version of the legend, folkloric flight results in her demise. Although flight granted a degree of agency and mobility for a period of time, this freedom was not to last.

One form of flight turns into another as Annie’s reputation as a witch guarantees her a place in

Jamaica’s history.

Indeed, in The White Witch of Rosehall, Annie’s position as mistress affords a degree of mobility almost unheard of at the time. De Lisser depicts the protagonist throughout as largely self-aware. As he writes, “she knew that the mere presence of a white woman riding through

Montego Bay at that hour of the night would awaken considerable curiosity” (de Lisser 133). In this manner, Annie appears as a woman transcending gender norms as she appropriates masculine dress to exert agency. Despite the moments of influence that pepper the text, the novel concludes with the “besetting of a white woman by her slaves” (de Lisser 245). As in Castello’s version, in de Lisser’s work, the culmination of rebellion results in Annie’s death, thrown out of her bedroom window, murdered “in the same way and by the same hand” that had taken her first husband (246). As a “Jamaican lady of Irish extraction brought up in post-revolutionary Haiti,”

Palmer comes to represent “illegitimate female power and African-Caribbean culture” (Mackie

203).

Change for the Sake of Change: Reading Harold Underhill’s Version

Coming nearly forty years after the publication of de Lisser’s seminal work, Harold

Underhill’s Jamaica White explicitly deviates from his most recent predecessor in omitting the loaded term “witch” from the title of the work. Rather, his novel implicitly points to Annie

Palmer as a, if not the, representative of the white creole in Jamaica. He strips the title, and the protagonist, of direct identification; in delaying the referent, the author fuels interest while

34 eventually positioning Annie Palmer as not simply a “white witch” but a representative of her race, all with the use of two simple words. In addition to the focus on violence seen in de

Lisser’s work, which is even more explicit in this text, Underhill’s novel introduces the possibility that Annie’s disavowal of femininity functions as a tool at her disposal. In adding in yet another character, the intermediary force of Annie’s attendant, Venus, Underhill portrays a preoccupation with sexual gratification and takes the implied relationships of earlier texts even further. With this discussion of Jamaica White, I move from a focus on Annie’s manipulation of others to considering the way in which she utilizes available forms of manipulation to negotiate her position as sole owner of Rose Hall.

So much as de Lisser furthers the legend of Palmer by expanding upon Castello’s pamphlet, Underhill’s adaptation offers nominal change. In Underhill’s Jamaica White the most noticeable change is the shift of names as Robert becomes Arthur and Millie becomes Mary Lou.

However, an explicit deviation also comes in the form of progeny. While de Lisser erases

Annie’s daughter from Castello’s version, Underhill’s text features an adopted son, an unnamed deaf-mute child. In moving from a “natural” daughter (in Castello’s pamphlet) to an adopted son,

Underhill’s novel attributes motherhood but curbs femininity. According to Castello and de

Lisser’s versions, Annie is aided in the murder of her first husband yet in Underhill’s account the act comes after the child rushes at Annie's husband as he berates her. During this scene of homicide, Annie “smashed [her husband] on the ear and then across the temple” after the child is flung off the bed (Underhill 123). Then, because she is not convinced of his expiration, Annie takes a letter opener and “jab[s] at him, kidney and lung then the back of his neck, tumbling off the other side of the bed, recovering herself, getting up to stab and stab at the back of his neck”

(Underhill 123-24). Although this passage clearly highlights Annie’s ferocity with the textual

35 repetition of “stab” and is certainly more physical than the smothering or poisoning of previous versions, the fact that Underhill substitutes a child in this scene suggests the possibility that

Annie acts out of maternal instinct instead of premeditation. The fact that the child was first flung off the bed and not the other way around implies that Annie may have turned to violence because her child was threatened. Thus, while de Lisser largely presents a hypersexualized femininity, Underhill constructs an equally essentialist maternal one. In Jamaica White,

Underhill presents a woman responding to abuse rather than the image of a cold-blooded murderer. Though this is not likely meant to excuse Annie’s actions, it offers an explanation absent from earlier adaptations.

In Underhill’s novel Annie is depicted as a woman of extremes. While she is painted as sadistic, she is also described as intensely passionate. For instance, Jamaica White describes scenes of intimacy between Annie and Arthur, the bookkeeper, quite explicitly, noting that “they made love with heat and energy, driving and driving at one another, testing one another's ferocity” (Underhill 119). As with the repetition of “stab,” Underhill’s use of “driving” points to an unharnessed sexual voracity. More than portraying intimacy between Annie and Arthur, this scene illustrates a manipulation of the plantation system for sexual gratification. In contrast to the model of chastity championed in the eighteenth century, Annie has no qualms fulfilling her sexual desires. She tells Venus (an attendant) to “ask for Jason. A big fellow. He cuts in one of your crews” (Underhill 100). Hence, agency is mediated through Venus as the attendant functions as a madam of sorts. Similar to the manner in which she is assisted in assassination,

Annie turns to another to procure an amorous experience, even if it means taking advantage of the master-slave dynamic. In yet another example, Annie tells Arthur, “you have your Mary Lou and I have my Jason,” as if indiscretion is somehow erased by comparison (Underhill 101).

While her relationship with her slave Jason is one of abuse and inequality, she moves beyond gendered expectations of sexuality to take charge, however illicitly. While I in no way condone

Annie’s actions, it must be remembered that this was common practice among men, which Annie calls attention to in this address. Therefore, rather than relying on an understanding of sexuality that views Palmer through the lens of morality, perhaps we should reconsider the tale of

Jamaica’s “white witch” to question not the veracity of the tale, but the gumption of the woman behind it.

In relation to earlier accounts, which often seek to restrain or downplay Annie’s sexuality, later versions swing to the other extreme, painting an over-sexed, desperate woman.

Similar to Mike Henry’s subsequent text, Underhill’s novel features a reductive understanding of female sexuality. While at times Annie calls upon Venus to provide her with a “preparation” for love, allowing her to stroke it on herself “like a sorceress,” Annie appears aware of social norms yet chooses to challenge them (Underhill 176). Illustrating this, Annie notes that she is the “only woman in Jamaica who rides in trousers” and that “either I am far ahead of my time or I should have made a good lady of the evening” (Underhill 182, 205). However, as much as Annie is depicted as progressive, or likes to fancy herself progressive, Underhill’s text extends a more intimate view of the “white witch.” Thus, Underhill’s Annie proudly announces her subversion of gender expectations; in contrast to de Lisser’s attempt to restrain female sexuality, the account turns to folklore to present a more relaxed vision of sexual agency. On the whole, the Annie that

Underhill describes does what she wants. Largely unafraid of social sanction, she forges her own path. However, more than simply characterizing Annie as a nexus of evil, Underhill’s work admits that “at night she might terrify the black men, but by day she was vulnerable” (187).

While Underhill’s text, like the others under study, offers a view of Annie that is shocking for

37 readers, this quote suggests that the cover of night provides a degree of secrecy and mobility unavailable during the day, a means of “resisting white colonialism” (Mackie 192).

Along with revealing a diminution of Annie’s command during the day, likely connected to her nightly practice of obeah, portrayals of intimacy between Annie and Arthur register a more feminine, vulnerable side. Underhill writes, “her face was controlled but he read the sadness in her eyes. She appeared almost ready to cry, but would not” (238). Thus, in Underhill’s work,

Annie’s humanity emerges through references to sexuality and obeah.12 In this instance the mistress is aligned with masculine energy in her constraint of emotion, yet Underhill works to contradict popular opinion by revealing “the sadness in her eyes” (238). Paradoxically, agency functions as an attempt at control; though Annie may attempt to fight effeminacy, this passage betrays the façade. Given this, as I have suggested, perhaps denying femininity to the extreme, denying any expression of emotion, was the only way for Underhill to convey the difficulty a white woman faced in maintaining control in a male-dominated plantation economy. Despite the efforts, though, Annie becomes a “scapegoat of England’s failure to retrieve her losses in the

West Indies and therefore the futility and peril of the efforts to forge circuits of exchange between England and the Caribbean” (Mackie 197). Thus, she stands in for larger colonial losses and, symbolically, represents the declining success that Jamaica offers its mother country.

Interestingly, Annie is a not all too different “other.”

Throughout Jamaica White Underhill offers an alternative to scathing depictions of the

“white witch.” As Annie tells Arthur, “I am, you see, infamous, the mad Mrs. Palmer... for the ladies, the embodiment of their hidden dreams. And so I am a strange sort of threat to them, thus hardly their friend... and the men. For them I am always a gossip. They demean me as a cold

12 For more on the subject of obeah see Mozella Mitchell’s Crucial Issues in Caribbean Religions (2006) or Margarite Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert’s Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and the Caribbean (1997). 38 trollop, but wonder what I am like in bed” (Underhill 167). Here yet again we see Annie as self- aware and unapologetic, a figure perhaps more appropriate in contemporary times. It is interesting that Underhill, through Annie, aligns oral tradition with men, positioning them as gossips furthering her notoriety. As Barbara Bush has proffered the female figure as a guardian of folk knowledge, the portrait of men propagating the legend of Annie Palmer moves beyond a gendering of folklore to illustrate pervasive interest in this bewitching woman and the legend surrounding her (764). As a “trollop,” Annie becomes the subject of gossip by men curious about her sexual voracity and by women who see her as a threat. As the text illustrates, it is through her manipulation of sexual agency, but agency nonetheless, that Annie guarantees the continuation of her legend and its solidification into written form.

Taking a Step Back: Mike Henry’s Rose Hall’s White Witch

Mike Henry’s 2006 adaptation of the legend of Annie Palmer, Rose Hall’s White Witch:

The Legend of Annie Palmer, purports to be a version of the well-known legend of the ‘White

Witch of Rosehall. Unlike earlier accounts, Henry’s novel admits that it offers a particular interpretation of the folktale as opposed to the “truth” of the life of Annie Palmer. In comparison to previous renditions, Henry’s text portrays Annie as oversexed, and stages a grossly simplified portrait of female sexuality. In Rose Hall’s White Witch Henry paints Annie as a “dominatrix of the highest order” (viii). Through an exaggerated attention to gender stereotypes, Henry’s version of the legend illustrates an inversion of power dynamics. For instance, Annie and

Rutherford are depicted as “claw[ing] at each other in wild abandonment” (Henry 61). While this passage evidences an apparent sexual equality, the relationship between Annie and Rutherford is likely imbalanced. As Henry writes, Palmer directs Rutherford to unhook her undergarment but then “move[s] to aid him in his- at times- masculine ineffectiveness, disrobe[ing] him also” (60).

While Rutherford appears to exert dominance in “conquering” Annie, Palmer maintains control.

Though previous versions highlight Annie’s assertiveness, in Henry’s work it comes at the cost of Rutherford’s emasculation, or, perhaps enjoyment, following a view of this encounter as a male dominatrix fantasy. In aligning Annie with dominant sexual energy, Henry strips the protagonist of the coquetry readers may expect as he adapts folklore to extend a vision of a sexually powerful female.

Like predecessors Castello, de Lisser, and Underhill, Henry emphasizes the unpredictability of Annie Palmer, a woman who “at the touch of a button, could shift from a gentle smiling creature to a haughty, cruel, sensual, cat-like woman, gracefully exuding both anger and sensuality” (vi). While other works present the mesmerizing influence Annie has on

Rutherford, Henry’s adaptation exaggerates this relationship by illustrating Rutherford as subjugated to Annie. Exemplifying Annie’s status as a plantation owner as well as the power she exudes, Rutherford refers to himself as “her slave” shortly after meeting her (Henry 18).

Although this depiction plays upon stereotypical notions of authority, it portrays a reversal of roles by revealing an empowered female having an immediate effect upon a man. Because

Annie’s sway is primarily derived from a combination of status, beauty and manipulation of obeah, her agency is not entirely positive but points the inequality gap women have been attempting to close for some time.

As with his predecessors’ texts, Henry’s work details a battle of wills between Annie and

Millie. Much in the same way that Underhill’s version builds upon stereotypical renderings of

Annie’s sexuality, this text heightens the tension between the two women as Annie tells

Rutherford to “check your valuables before you turn this little slut out of here” (Henry 76). So much as folklore characterizes Annie as jealous or critical of Millie, Henry capitalizes on the

40 tension between the two women as he utilizes an antagonistic association to add interest. In accentuating an inherently imbalanced relationship between a slave owner and free slave, the author complicates the definition of permissible authority. Though she wields power on her plantation, Annie’s influence is limited in that she is unable to inflict sanctioned punishment on

Millie. As a free woman, Millie stands in opposition to the localized form of authority Annie holds.

When Annie cannot exercise agency through the legitimized means of the plantation system, she turns to obeah. As Henry writes, “it was Annie who gave rise to the fabled ‘rolling calf’ of Jamaica's folklore. And many have attested to seeing this snorting bull with piercing eyes of ‘blood red’ which brought with it doom and destruction” (vii). With this line Henry positions

Annie as the genesis of this particular tale. While previous versions, most notably de Lisser’s, align Annie with supernatural figures, Henry’s novel points to the mistress as a form of soucouyant, or shape-shifter, who “creeps into homes through cracks and sucks the blood or

‘life-blood’ (human life essence, or soul) of unsuspecting neighbors” (Anatol 45). More than this, though, Henry’s account takes this one step further by positioning Annie as the source of the legend of the Rolling Calf. As such, this version of the legend of Annie Palmer combines folklore and flight in Henry’s own folktale; while previous accounts have detailed the consequences of flight for Palmer, this attribution lends a bit of celebrity and credibility to the historical figure. Thus, Henry’s text subtly counters purely negative readings of flight. So much as his novel describes the Rolling Calf as a figure of “doom and destruction,” his work takes liberties with folklore to morph one folktale with another.

More than indirectly attributing this legend to Palmer, though, Henry’s text includes a view of Annie Palmer recognizing this association. Speaking of her past, Annie tells Rutherford,

“the training robbed me of my inhibitions and prepared me for the life of this plantation and certainly taught me how to use my smattering of voodoo to replace the excessive use of the whip on the slaves” (Henry 54). Although numerous accounts vilify Annie, Henry’s text opens up the possibility that her behavior is not innate but causational. In doing so, he provides another view of Annie, one in which the “white witch” manipulates voodoo not for personal gain but as a form of benevolence. As seen in Henry’s novel, Annie turns to voodoo to engender compliance and avoid corporal punishment as she sidesteps the most egregious symbol of plantation violence.

While obeah and folklore offer Annie a means of negotiating the detractions of plantation life, the transmission of oral literature into print “legitimizes” this story of Jamaican history. In the Preface, Henry notes that “in 1820, John Rose Palmer married Annie May Patterson, who became the legend we know of today” (vi). In other words, it is the body of Palmer that becomes the legend; there is no mention of Palmer’s first wife or of the home itself. Rather, the figure of

Annie Palmer has coalesced into folklore and has taken on a life of its own. As with previous accounts, Henry’s version omits the date of Annie’s death, stating that it was around the time of the “Salt Spring Mutiny’ that happened shortly before Christmas” (ix). Much like the legend itself, the specifics of the tale are loosely defined and are more likely rooted in exaggeration than fact. Like the house itself, the tale of Annie Palmer has become “overshadowed by the cruelty of a woman schooled in black magic by a Haitian priestess” (Henry 101).

Dispersing the Legend: Diane Brown’s Retelling

Standing in contrast to the male-authored accounts previously discussed, Diane Browne

“tells” Palmer’s legend in a third year primary reader that includes other popular tales such as

“The Wooden Horse” and “John Henry.” The text, entitled Stories from Nowadays and Long

Ago, features a six page account under the title “The White Witch of Rose Hall.” Unlike the

42 other texts under study that were likely penned for a mature audience, Browne, an award- winning children’s author, adapts the tale for a much younger audience. Her tale is refreshingly honest in its portrayal, noting that this particular account is but “one of the stories” (Browne 38).

In contrast to authors such as Castello and de Lisser, Browne does not profess to share the legend of Annie Palmer, but one of many versions. Ironically, this approach follows de Lisser’s understanding of folklore as a “story with a sub-stratum of fact” (Lomas 70). In suggesting that she is retelling a version of the tale, and not fact itself, Browne recognizes the way in which the tale has morphed over the years. No longer can one deduce the story of Annie Palmer; Browne simply shares a version she has heard and notes that many others like it exist.

Moving now to an examination of Browne’s brief text, we begin with a discussion of the first line. Browne writes: “Annie Palmer was an English woman” (38). Interestingly, Browne is the only one of the authors discussed who refers to Annie as English. With the exception of

Browne, the authors highlight Annie’s Caribbean heritage and her association with obeah, to the effect of creating distance and difference. As such, Annie is more easily demeaned and dismissed as “foreign” or “exotic” while English values and English identity is maintained and upheld.

Browne writes that Annie “lived in the time of slavery on a big plantation called Rose Hall near

Montego Bay” (38). With this, the author initially omits a connection with slavery, instead placing the historical figure as living during “the time of slavery” as opposed to being implicated in the ill treatment of others. Though one could easily dismiss Browne’s explanation due to her target audience, it is telling that a connection with slavery is not immediately disclosed.

As suggested above, Browne admits that the legend of Annie Palmer she presents is one of the “many different stories” (38). She goes on to detail that “we do not know if all of them are true but they all tell us that she was a very wicked woman” (Browne 38). With this line, Browne

43 recognizes the variance inherent in folklore while falling prey to stereotypical depiction. Sadly, characterizations such as “very wicked woman” fail to consider the realities of Annie’s individual position, or, on a larger scale, do little to advance women’s rights (Browne 38).

Instead, Browne herself becomes complicit in the folkloric defamation of Palmer, in this case a defamation that falls along gender lines. As Browne goes on to explain, “a rich English planter named John Palmer took her for his wife and they went to live in his great house at Rose Hall”

(38). While Annie is a “wicked woman,” she is an imported, English “wicked woman,” but nonetheless, a woman who secures a place of station and privilege as a result of her great beauty.

If indeed “the soucouyant tale holds important reminders about the intertwining of gender and colonialism,” as Anatol claims, then here we see an inversion on the tale of a dangerous other

(51). Though the other authors under study have written about Palmer from outside of the

Caribbean, it is interesting that one of Jamaica’s own, Diane Browne, shifts nationalistic association to position the threat as an external force. In this way, Browne herself manipulates folkloric flight as a form of resistance as she positions Annie as a dangerous outsider instead of a

Jamaican national.

So much as Browne references Annie’s less-than-stellar reputation, she also subtly critiques John Palmer. Most notably, she relates that John “had a large plantation with many slaves” and that he “had a lot of money and he liked to spend it on nice things and on big parties and dances” (Browne 38). With this, Browne places John as a slaveholder without further elaboration. The Englishman is surrounded by a life of excess, the most dangerous of which is ultimately his demise. Though Browne generalizes Annie as a “wicked woman,” with no explanation as to why, John escapes with impunity; rather than decrying his extravagant

44 spending, the author glosses over realities, namely the fact that John enjoys the lifestyle he has because others toil on his plantation day in and day out.

Yet, Annie’s past does not remain ambiguous for long; Browne soon details the moments preceding John’s death. As the author writes, “Annie Palmer was beautiful, but she was a selfish and cruel woman. After a time she got tired of her life with John Palmer. She made up her mind to get rid of him” (Browne 39). As with previous accounts, Annie emerges as a complex figure, but at the same time, a woman whose beauty is a weapon. However, what is most troubling here is the laissez faire attitude Browne (or, at the very least, the version she is retelling) attributes to

Palmer. Quickly denying any other reason as to why Palmer might kill her husband, the tale paints Annie as a bored housewife, but at least a decisive housewife. Unfortunately, the only positive trait we see of Annie in any of these accounts, Browne’s included, is her commitment to murder and destruction. While I would agree that folklore has no responsibility to laud positive traits, or to emphasize qualities at the detriment of veracity, historians such as Geoffrey Yates have argued that the legend has been thoroughly fabricated. The result, sadly, is not a recognition of Annie’s resolution, but a sweeping denial of her achievements without regard to the conditions she faced.

Continuing with her description of Mr. Palmer’s death, as in previous accounts, Browne relates that Annie “put poison in [John’s] drink” (39). However, this is where many similarities end. Rather than placing an assistant at her side, Browne’s tale positions Annie as the only agent of murder, in this case the one who “watched him die and then she laughed” (39). Much like earlier depictions, Annie is rendered heartless and deranged; yet, in this case, significantly, she acts alone. Again glossing over any detractions on John’s part, Annie is described as unresponsive as “he called for his wife and begged for her to help him” (Browne 39).

Interestingly, though, this version adds in an interesting detail, an alcohol addiction. As Browne writes, “every night John Palmer had a drink after his dinner” (39). Although Browne fails to elaborate on this characteristic, and instead paints Annie as an opportunistic killer, the inclusion of this trait, as in previous versions, leaves open the possibility that John wasn’t quite as innocent as history may have us believe. Annie’s reasons for murdering her husband may indeed run deeper than boredom, as this tale suggests.

As Browne’s account continues, her description of Palmer grows darker. As with the explanation given for John’s murder, Annie emerges as a very restless, bored woman. In particular, Browne notes that “she used to bring different men to come and spend time with her.

Some of them were slaves. Others were Englishmen who came to work on the plantation. But she got tired of them all” (40). Thus, yet again, Annie’s sexuality is downplayed and reduced to euphemism. At the same time, though, for more mature readers, Browne’s account serves a dual purpose. Though children may not easily catch this reference, Browne subtly alludes to Annie’s rapacious sex drive and her turn to murder: “sometimes when she got tired of them she played cruel tricks on them. She even poisoned some of them. She always said they died of fever. The slaves, who knew the truth, could not do anything” (40). With this, Browne introduces a third dynamic, the slaves. While the other accounts leave the slaves in the margin until the narration of

Annie’s death, Browne’s version depict them as childlike and terrified, yet, ironically, in possession of a very important truth.

More specifically, Browne relates that the slaves “were afraid of Annie Palmer because she was so cruel to them. She had prisons under the house where she beat them. Sometimes she beat them till they died. No other slave master was as cruel as she was” (40). Here, Browne departs from the gendered description she initially introduced; instead of depicting Palmer as a

46 female slaveholder, she simply describes her as a “slave master.” Similarly, Annie is characterized by her actions alone as Browne details the use of scare tactics by the slave master.

With yet another interesting addition, Browne positions Annie as prison guard/captor. Indeed, this is a layered situation with the slaves’ imprisonment under Annie’s house serving as a miniature of their larger, socially-sanctioned, captivity. More specifically, as Browne details,

Annie exercises control over the slaves because “they believed that she could work magic and send duppies to frighten people” (40). In particular, “some slaves said they saw terrible things after she had been riding by. They say duppies and strange ugly devils” (Browne 40). While on the surface this might appear to be a simple explanation, it evidences changing racial attitudes in granting validity to the slaves’ testimony. Whereas the slaves are rendered silent and largely invisible in previous accounts, Browne places their fear of Annie’s flight as front and center in this narrative. Although they are still clearly subordinated to Annie’s power and influence, their view of her serves to color readers’ perception of the “white witch.” The slaves’ reference to

Annie’s association with obeah deepens a view of her; if indeed “they said she was dangerous and they called her a witch and a devil,” then who are readers to disagree (Browne 40)?

Further developing upon the slaves’ perception of Annie, Browne narrates the arrival of an unnamed gentleman (named Rutherford in other accounts) and his love of a slave girl (Millie).

Though Annie’s sexuality holds great sway in other accounts, here she is largely ineffective as

“she did everything she could to make him love her. But he loved a pretty young slave girl”

(Browne 41). In omitting the names of other parties, Browne maintains focus on Annie; while she is the first author to diminish identity in this way, it is telling that the omission of names applies to all characters. Browne’s tale employs omission, euphemism and generalization, likely because of the tale’s brevity; as the author writes, “then the pretty slave girl got sick. Nobody

47 knew what was wrong with her and nothing could make her better” (41). Here, yet again,

Browne reverts to physical description as she characterizes the unnamed slave girl as simply

“pretty.” While we can only fault Browne so much, given that she is “retelling” this tale as opposed to penning it, she is still complicit in the reduction of females to adjectives alone, adjectives which focus on physical appearance. As such, sadly, her portrait of Annie Palmer largely fails to further a comprehensive view of this historical figure and instead perpetuates an understanding of women as dangerous, irrational and sexually charged.

As with the accounts previously discussed, Annie’s obeah hits its mark and “soon

[Millie] was dead” (Browne 41). Following the expected course of events, this does not come without retribution. Browne narrates Annie’s death as follows: “then one morning Annie Palmer was found dead. She had not been poisoned. She had been strangled” (43). While this depiction omits an image of Palmer “flung across the bed,” as in other versions, it ends with Palmer strangled and buried on the plantation. Significantly, though, Browne’s retelling of the legend fails to point the finger at Takoo, as other accounts have. Instead, the author notes that “some people believed that it was one of the men who was spending time with her. Others said she was strangled by the slaves and the old obeah-man. Nobody ever found out” (Browne 43). In this way, Browne upholds the variation of the legend, as she notes at the start of the piece, while neglecting to implicate Takoo as the other authors have. Although this could in some part be seen as a bit biased, this approach falls more along the lines of “innocent until proven guilty.”

Ultimately, though, Browne’s retelling serves as an instruction to children, and especially to young girls, as to what not to do. As Anatol claims, “the soucouyant has simultaneously been used to socialize women according to patriarchal duties” (46). With this brief text, Browne furthers an image of a cruel but effectively-punished slave owner. Concluding with a thinly

48 veiled advertisement for Rose Hall, a place where “visitors can go and see it and hear the story of

Annie Palmer,” Browne secures Annie Palmer’s place in Jamaican history for yet another generation (43).

Moving on from Here: Furthering the Legend of Annie Palmer

As David Scott argues in Conscripts of Modernity, there are multiple ways of telling a story; “historical knowledge is constructed, which is to say made rather than simply given or found” (40). A reading of these versions of the tale registers the multiplicity and variation inherent in folklore. As Anatol claims, “folk legends, like other types of literature, can set out cultural behavioral rules and standards of acceptability; contemporary audiences must therefore consider the effects of these tales on the popular imaginary” (45). Hence, legends such as this are best viewed through a comparative lens, with careful consideration of historical events and social pressures. While questions surrounding Palmer herself are likely irresolvable, an examination of these works yields a view of her as a complex figure. As close analysis has revealed, folklore is always up for revision and reconsideration; through adaptation, each author calls the legend into question. With a focus on violence, sexuality and folklore, written accounts transform the folktale for consumption by a wider audience. By adapting an oral tale into print, the authors allow for a perhaps unfortunate reading of Palmer as an ambassador of her culture. If we take

Michael Angrosino to be correct in his assertion that “national identity [is] drawn from local tradition,” then, for better or worse, these texts contribute to an understanding of Jamaican culture (114). Without a comparative account of Palmer or an understanding of colonial history, casual readers may fall prey to generalization. As such, the works under study perpetuate a reading of Annie Palmer in terms of abuse and suspicion. Though scholars such as Lomas point to her as being “demonized,” I proffer a view of Annie relative to the “problem-space” she

49 occupied; more than simply informing my view of Annie Palmer alone, this understanding of women carries over into my readings in other chapters. Although some may argue that seeing

Annie in light of her “powerful potential for female agency- sexual, social and political” erases her crimes, it is my contention that the legend remains in need of amendment (Anatol 59). As

Patricia Nichols holds that “oral narratives have long been recognised as one of the major means by which important cultural traditions are kept alive,” I wonder if we are keeping alive the wrong version of the story (233).

Along with viewing storytelling as reflective of national identity, I point to the shift from a focus on murder to sexuality as reflective of larger socio-cultural tendencies. Although the authors manipulate violence, sexuality and folklore in their depictions of Palmer, these are the very same elements she utilizes to negotiate her position as mistress of Rose Hall estate. As I have discussed throughout, the written accounts of the legend of Annie Palmer ultimately

“render women as emotional and irrational, men as logical and action-oriented” (Dawes 33). So long as Castello’s pamphlet questions the truth behind the folktale and offers a correction to written record, subsequent versions increasingly exoticize the “white witch.” As society has become more comfortable discussing matters of sexuality, the legends move from subtle inferences to soap opera-like scenes. By contrast, Prime Minister Shearer identifies Annie

Palmer as an important figure in Jamaican history. While the works develop interesting tales at the cost of rectitude, the Prime Minister calls for a reconsideration of the “white witch.” In doing so, he suggests that storytelling can enrich national identity without resorting to denigration.

In “Transforming the Skin-Shedding Soucouyant” Anatol writes, “unfortunately, the time has not yet arrived when these women can display their wings- their inherent powers- before the rest of society” (55). Likewise, the time has not yet arrived for a woman to pen the story of

Annie Palmer. With the exception of Diane Browne’s “retelling” of the folktale in a Jamaican primary reader, published accounts are all, coincidentally, male-authored. Though the written forms of the tale of Annie Palmer present “manifestations of unbridled female power,” it is my hope that in the future a woman will rewrite the tale with a look not towards controlling or denying authority but championing it (Paravisini-Gebert 30). Thus, I seek not to reclaim Palmer as an exceptional figure, but as a particular female plantation owner. By recognizing the agency popular legend has denied her, we move beyond the epithet of “white witch” to an understanding of Palmer as “a good bit of both” fact and fiction (Underhill 166).

CHAPTER TWO

THE COSTS OF MIGRATION: WHAT IS LEFT BEHIND

“All these women were here for the same reason. They were said to have been seen at night rising from the ground like birds on fire. A loved one, a friend, or a neighbor had accused them of causing the death of a child. A few other people agreeing with these stories was all that was needed to have them arrested. And sometimes even killed”- Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

As Carl Jung writes in Man and His Symbols, “this capacity to isolate part of one’s mind, indeed, is a valuable characteristic. It enables us to concentrate upon one thing at a time, excluding everything else that may claim our attention.” Drawing upon her own Haitian-

American experience, Danticat writes of the very emotional dislocation Jung speaks of. Moving back and forth between Haiti and New York, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1998) evidences physical and psychic fragmentation while positioning dissociation as a form of figurative flight. By giving voice to “silences too horrific to disturb” Danticat offers liberation to her protagonist, Sophie, as well as those who are unable to speak their truth (Sanon 76). Whereas Breath, Eyes, Memory features literal and figurative flight, the short story “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” from Danticat’s

Krik? Krak! employs the figure of the soucouyant or “shape-shifter” as it offers a retelling of

Haitian history. In Krik? Krak! (1995) Danticat moves from depictions of figurative flight in

“Nineteen Thirty-Seven” to literal flight in “A Wall of Fire Rising” and “Caroline’s Wedding.”

In this short story cycle, the author utilizes the trope of flight to explore intersections between folklore, migration and dissociation. In response, this chapter reads scenes of literal and figurative flight to complicate understandings of transnationalism.

“As a representative of a Caribbean experience, specifically a Haitian experience,

Danticat focuses mostly on Haitians’ and Haitian Americans’ attempts to reconcile the effects of traumatic events” (Green 82). As a whole, her work grants validity to an amalgamation of

52 cultures and a multiplicity of experiences. As Wilson Chen states, “Danticat’s stories construct imaginative discourses of community by evoking, hybridizing, and reworking folklore and legends of the black Atlantic as well as twentieth-century retellings of these narratives” (36).

Specifically, Danticat’s work centers on the trope of flight. If the “essence of the power of flight is the retention of one’s African culture,” as Chen argues, then Danticat serves as a cultural advocate (45). Understanding flight as literal as well as figurative highlights the detriment of both physical and psychic transnationalism. Throughout this chapter I apply an understanding of transnational identity as a “creative, ongoing process of appropriation, revision, and survival that leads to the mutual transformation of two or more pre-existing cultures into a new one”

(Paravisini-Gebert 2). Considering figurative flight alongside literal flight highlights the costs of physical and psychic transnationalism and the fact that flight comes as a result of hardship.

Though we see flight more explicitly in Danticat’s short stories “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” and “A

Wall of Fire Rising,” this chapter also sheds light on the various iterations of flight in Breath,

Eyes, Memory as it explores Sophie’s negotiation of the transnational condition and turn to dissociation to cope with abuse and sexual intimacy. While it is the union of place and people that engenders the emergence of a more unified identity for Sophie, this transformation hinges upon the experience of literal and figurative flight. Similar to the function of flight in the other novels under study, this chapter considers figurative flight as a rehearsal and preparation for literal flight, offering momentary escape from a distressing situation. As such, figurative flight, or doubling, is an essential part of the transformative process throughout Danticat’s works.

In “Fictions of Displacement” Michael Dash observes, “Danticat’s characters are condemned to crossing and recrossing from one country to another, between the past and the present, dream and reality, without ever finding satisfactory answers” (40). Similarly, Myriam

Chancy asserts that “For Haitian women writers home is never ‘just one place’ but many places at once” (19). Though the location and context of her work varies, “Danticat presents characters who have roots in both Haiti and the United States, yet they are unable to readily traverse both locations. That is to say, theirs is a brand of transnationality marked by the condition of being across place, torn in stasis at the border rather than comfortably acclimated in any creative ‘third space’” (Page 51). Likewise, Haitian women’s literature is characterized by “the sense of history–and personal fate–as incomplete, unfinished” (Paravisini-Gebert and Webb 129).

Through the vehicle of prose, Danticat “dwells on the problematic identity of the Haitian diaspora” to highlight intersections between exile, escape, and folklore (Dash 40).

While in the legend of Annie Palmer folklore functions as an instrument available for manipulation, in Danticat’s works it serves as a means of maintaining cultural ties across geographic distance. For Danticat as a transnational author, though, folklore affords a means of retaining a connection to her homeland. On a larger scale, this chapter supports my larger investigation of the relationship between gender, location and literary production. Danticat’s works cross geographic boundaries as the folklore in her texts offers readers a connection to her birthplace as she adapts folklore for a new audience. Yet, much like the function of folklore in the tale of Jamaica’s “white witch,” folkloric references in Danticat’s works reinforce social and gender norms. For instance, folklore instructs Sophie on the dangers of physical intimacy in

Breath, Eyes, Memory and warns sisters Caroline and Grace of the incestual threat their deceased father poses in “Caroline’s Wedding.” More specifically, folklore operates as a tool of instruction and offers characters a bit of comfort during periods of escape and exile; while adjusting to a foreign land, folklore serves as a cultural referent, a touchstone for those of Haitian ancestry who are living outside the nation. Throughout, this chapter understands folklore as an

54 essential part of Haitian culture and a central part of the transnational experience. As in my discussion of the legend of Annie Palmer, this examination of Danticat’s works views the adaptation of folklore into print as part of the “dynamic culture that continually adds new and revises old folk traditions” (Hill 11). Beginning with a discussion of dissociation as figurative flight in Danticat’s perhaps most acclaimed work, Breath Eyes, Memory, this chapter then moves to a reading of flight in three short stories from Krik? Krak! In offering a discussion of flight as a result of trauma, followed by readings of flight in association with suspicion, flight as escape, and flight as mobility, this chapter highlights the multiplicity of flight and the rejects the singular reading of flight as a state of grief and vulnerability. Collectively, Danticat’s works highlight the way in which flight affords the possibility for emotional transformation.

Sophie Caco as a Transnational Figure

In Breath, Eyes, Memory Edwidge Danticat connects place, people and liberation. By showing us what it feels like to straddle two cultures, Danticat illustrates the effects of migration as Sophie comes to terms with her transnational identity. Despite Sophie’s attempts to assert agency and leave the ghosts of her past behind, the inherited trauma of her mother’s past follows.

It is only at the conclusion of the novel that Sophie is able to fully come into her identity by reconciling her cultural heritage with her past. In Breath, Eyes, Memory Danticat reunites

Martine Caco, raped as a young woman in Haiti, with her daughter Sophie (the product of the rape). While Martine left Sophie with her sister, Atie, in Haiti shortly after giving birth, she abruptly calls for her daughter’s return when Sophie is twelve years old. As such, Sophie leaves the only maternal figure she has ever known to live with her biological (and newly engaged) mother in New York City. As their reunion illustrates, the effects of abuse live on. On the whole,

Breath, Eyes, Memory brings Sophie to confront the faceless abuser of her mother and the legacy

55 of testing that her mother propagates. While Martine is haunted by her past and remains in a state of exile, Sophie comes to an understanding of herself as both a daughter of Haiti and a wife and mother in America, perhaps because, as Grandmè Ifé says, “the daughter is never fully a woman until her mother has passed on before her,” which, sadly, positions death as a necessary component to maturation and wholeness (Danticat Breath, Eyes, Memory 234).13

In this chapter I examine Sophie Caco as a transnational figure. As I detail, it is only after

Sophie physically unites her place of birth, and the location of her mother’s rape, with her relatives in Haiti, that she achieves liberation. In doing so, I extend the claim of Maria

Rodriguez, who finds that Haiti functions as a shared safe space, a “neutral’ territory [where]

Martine and Sophie can talk to each other again” (50). While the homeland for both “remains the place of ancestors,” (Rodriguez 51) it is largely constructed as a place of ghosts, a location

Martine notes is “still very painful” for her (Danticat BEM 78). Despite its painful associations,

Haiti serves as a space of reconciliation and reconnection, ultimately setting Sophie’s liberation in motion. In fact, dissociation or doubling, what I often refer to as figurative flight, partners with literal flight to transport Sophie to a space of psychic and physical reconciliation; indeed, figurative flight precedes migration and primes the protagonist for physical journey. Ergo, I interpret hardship as a form of inertia wherein the act of flight itself functions as a temporary haven. For example, while Martine attempts to forget and to “obliterate [her] island past,”

(Rodriguez 32) Sophie’s “need to remember” and her return to Haiti triggers memories that come to the forefront; in this way then, emotional hardship, while painful, propels emotional growth

(Danticat BEM 95). By confronting the ghosts of her mother’s past and the legacy of testing that

13 Subsequent references will refer to Breath, Eyes, Memory as BEM. 56 has traumatized generations of Haitian women, Sophie comes to terms with her history of sexual abuse and begins constructing her own identity.

In Breath, Eyes, Memory Martine and Sophie are two individuals “simultaneously incorporated in two or more societies” (Schiller and Fouron 144). Instead of being confined to

Haiti alone, Martine and Sophie “live in two places at once,” similar to the practice of doubling

(or dissociation) that allows Sophie to emotionally remove herself from trauma when she has yet to make that move physically (Samway 82). While Sophie initially begins “doubling” to cope with the practice of testing (a way for mothers to determine if their daughters have been sexually active), she again turns to this practice when intimate with her husband, Joseph. Sadly, talk therapy is largely ineffective in getting to the core of the issue. Ultimately, it is only by connecting the place (the physical location of Haiti) with people (her ancestors), that Sophie

Caco is able to come to terms with her transnational identity and legacy of abuse. With this, finally, comes a sense of liberation.

The Function of Place/Space

As a semi-autobiographical text, Danticat's novel is “doing recuperative work in ways that you can only do from exile” (Kaplan 130). In participating in the literary construction of

“home” (herself writing from outside the Caribbean), Danticat constructs a space for Sophie’s liberation. As Danticat’s work attests, it is the women who are willing to confront their own history of abuse and apply that knowledge of their pasts who are “in a position to liberate their bodies and minds from a dominative culture” (McGregory). However, rather than acting as a

“third space,” Bhabha’s concept of an abstract space located in-between national territories, this space of liberation is one that needs to be constructed by oneself. In this way, the space of liberation that Danticat constructs for Sophie is unlike Bhabha’s “third space” in that it is

57 individually constructed rather than the result of two colliding cultures. While it is in fact the collision of her life in Haiti and her existence in the United States that engenders this liminal space of “something new,” it is not so much “in-between” as it is within and is more of a reconciliation and joining of her Haitian and American identities than a negotiation of them.

Rather, Sophie’s migration to the United States and her induction into the “transnational citizens club” propels a mental shift that results in the discursive amalgamation of her cultural heritage and the nation she now calls home (though not by choice). At the same time, this space of liberation aligns with Bhabha’s “third space” in that a new cultural identity is formed. When

Sophie returns to Haiti and connects place and people, she moves from an individual experience to a collective one; Sophie’s “practice flights” via dissociation prepare her for literal flight.

Whereas earlier place and people were separate, preventing her from moving on and establishing an individual identity, Sophie’s return to Haiti creates a space of liberation that allows her to come to terms with the dualities of her transnational identity and the trauma that has haunted her.

In the novel, place functions as a means of oppression as well as liberation. For Sophie,

“removing [herself] is a first step in the healing process” (Green 90). After leaving her mother’s home (the place of abuse), the legacy of her mother’s rape and her own experience with abuse follows her to her home with Joseph. This legacy of trauma greatly complicates Sophie’s ability to perform her “wifely duties” and join her husband as an equal partner. Shortly after realizing her position as wife and mother as well as her own inadequacies, Sophie abruptly leaves for

Haiti, taking her daughter in tow. Therefore, Sophie again removes herself from a place of trauma and, ironically, returns to Haiti to begin the process of liberation and the construction of that space. In this way, returning to Haiti proves central in the confrontation process; however, it is not return alone that allows Sophie to confront her past. Rather, connecting cultural heritage

58 and trauma affords the development of her transnational identity. By reuniting mother and daughter, “Danticat demonstrates how healing can be achieved in the face of traumatic events”

(Green 84-85).

As suggested, in Breath, Eyes, Memory the nation of Haiti functions to ground identity.

For instance, when Grandmè Ifé is asked where Sophie come from, she responds, “here…she’s from right here” (Danticat BEM 116). This short yet significant statement connects Sophie as an individual and Haiti as a place in possessive terms and joins Sophie with the land, claiming her as a member of “a family with dirt under [their] fingernails” (Danticat BEM 20). For Sophie, what began as a “short vacation” turns into a transformative experience after which she refers to

Haiti as “home;” this replaces or supplements her earlier identification of “home” with her mother’s house (Danticat BEM 122). Whereas Sophie is rootless throughout most of the text, even when living in Haiti, it is upon her return to bury her mother, that she is identified as a member of the community, someone who is recognized and greeted on the way to her grandmother’s house. Accompanying her mother’s corpse on its journey from New York back

“home” to Haiti sets the emancipatory process in motion.

At the conclusion of the novel, Sophie realizes that Haiti is a place where “we are all daughters of this land,” as is explicitly evidenced by the fact that Martine wanted to return to

Haiti in death (Danticat BEM 230). Much in the same way that the Caco family is characterized with “dirt under [their] fingernails,” this depiction explicitly ties residents to the land (Danticat

BEM 20). Perhaps rooted in the language of slavery and the reality that early slaves did not know their birthplace, these statements illustrate nationalism through an ecological lens. Taking this one step further, it is interesting to consider this statement in terms of Martine’s rape/pregnancy.

Potentially serving as a euphemism of sorts, this line suggests an avoidance of the paternal figure

59 in favor of a more mystical or pastoral version. In fact, in Breath, Eyes, Memory stories that are passed down are often connected with the land, with the Haitian experience and cultural inheritance positioned as “essentially Haitian;” Sophie is connected with a place where “breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head”

(Danticat BEM 230, 234). Thus, though one may attempt to shed or escape the past, it is improbable. Sadly, the Caco women are “from” Haiti yet attempt to forget it; it is with Martine’s passing at the conclusion of the text that Sophie reconnects with her cultural past and comes to terms with the trauma that has shaped her into a young woman who is now ‘libéré” (Danticat

BEM 234). Ergo, Sophie’s return to Haiti affords an essential confrontation and healing as “only there can she ask and try to answer the question surrounding the lack of control that women have over their own bodies” (Green 94).

Whereas Haiti is a place of reconciliation for Sophie, New York is depicted as a place where “you can lose yourself easily” (Danticat BEM 103). Interestingly, this trait is not confined to the city. As Tante Atie, Martine’s sister and Sophie’s aunt, states: “Grand or not grand, I am losing myself here too” (Danticat BEM 104). This statement suggests that migration alone does not contribute to a loss of one’s identity; for Atie, she has lost herself by staying home. She has lost herself in service to her ill mother while her sister has spread her wings abroad. On the whole, Atie feels isolated. While her sister left Haiti for New York shortly after Sophie’s birth,

Atie remained, ever the steadfast daughter to Grandmè Ifé and stand-in maternal figure to

Sophie–at least until Sophie is sent to join Martine at the age of 12. Thus, the physical location of home in Breath, Eyes, Memory proves confounding instead of unifying. As Atie suggests, emotional clarity does not correlate with physical location; one does not have to migrate to “lose oneself;” this is perhaps most explicit in the use of doubling or dissociation in the text. As Atie

60 states, this incremental loss of self/soul can occur without regard to location. In response to the inability to feel at home in the United States, or the risk of losing herself in Haiti, the creation of a third-like space mediates, bringing Sophie to come to terms with her identity as a transnational citizen.

Building on Carine Mardorossian’s claim that “New York is where the lasting effects of oppressive cultural and social pressures that originated in Haiti become visible,” perhaps we can also consider the city as a space that opens up the need for the development of a unified transnational identity as much as it is a place where “abuse and death converge” (133). More specifically, New York is a place that illuminates the abuse that was repressed in Haiti. In this way, the city serves as a catalyst for change as it allows Sophie and Martine to confront the trauma of their past. While on the one hand this trauma engenders a split identity, the acknowledgment and recognition leads to the possibility of healing. It is upon returning to Haiti that Sophie, and to some extent, Martine, confront the community of oppression that contributed to devastating sexual abuse.

More along the lines of Bhabha’s “third space,” Sophie’s space of liberation is similar to how Guinea functions in the text in that it is not so much about physical location as an emotional one. As Heather Russell writes in Legba’s Crossing, “this lore of the flying Africans is attractive because it stands as a celebration of resistance to enslavement” (116). According to legend,

Guinea John “flew back to Africa from the New World to escape being hung for alleged insurrection” (Russell 116). While Sophie certainly isn’t escaping criminal sanctions, she is fleeing her mother’s disapproval and her own sense of inferiority as a wife and mother. For

Sophie, this space of liberation offers transition and peace. While the space of liberation, like

Guinea, is a liminal space of freedom, it is not a place of transcendence where one joins

61 ancestors in the afterlife. Guinea, like the space of liberation, is a place where the women hope to

“meet one another at the very end of [their] journeys,” similar to the manner in which liberation is figured in the novel with the questioning of “Ou libéré?” (Danticat BEM 174, 234).

The Importance of Relationships

Although place figures prominently in Breath, Eyes, Memory, the people who surround

Sophie are equally important to her efforts to recover her identity and “achieve closure as she learns to acknowledge and come to terms with the contradictions of her cultural heritage”

(Mardorossian 135). While scholars such as Rodriguez identify the impact of the movement of bodies across space, we should not discount the influence of people–as they become closer or farther away in physical proximity–on Sophie’s liberation. Evidencing the fact that Sophie’s identity is shaped by migration away from relatives is the conversation between Tante Atie and

Sophie when Sophie leaves Haiti for the first time. When Tante Atie asks Sophie, “Do you see what you are leaving?’ Sophie responds, “I know I am leaving you” (Danticat BEM 34). Thus, for Sophie, the experience of leaving people transcends that of leaving country; it is this separation from loved ones and home that engenders dislocation. However, even more significant in this line is the association between “Atie” and “Haiti” as the spelling and pronunciation suggests that Atie has become Haiti, or Ayiti, at least to Sophie. If indeed this novel develops the trope of particular people coming to embody particular places, then Sophie’s efforts to reunite place and people at the conclusion of the novel is even more symbolic of the relationship between influential individuals and psychic liberation.

Whereas Sophie’s migration to New York City establishes her as a young transnational citizen, Martine’s migration does not allow her to find the peace she hopes for. Instead, she remains haunted by the ghosts of her past and passes that legacy on to her daughter; ironically,

Sophie inherits a legacy of rape as well as a practice to cope with its emotional effects

(doubling). This shared sense of trauma, connected with Haiti, becomes even more embedded in

Sophie’s psyche when she moves to the United States, a place where Martine and Sophie’s

“struggle with their Haitian identity is enacted” (Mardorossian 135). Thus, reconciliation with

Martine at the conclusion of the text is equally important to Sophie’s liberation. In fact, Sophie notes that after this reunion she finally has her mother’s “approval’ and is now ‘safe” (Danticat

BEM 200). As this statement suggests, parental opinion ensures security. However, what is ambiguous is whether Sophie is physically or emotionally “safe,” or perhaps both. Reinforcing the role of the maternal in Haitian culture, Sophie must obtain her mother's approval (on her husband, her daughter, her life choices, etc.) before she can proceed. With two return trips to

Haiti, Sophie is able to reconnect with her cultural past and “gather [the] voices” (Rodriguez xvi) of her relatives, “ultimately culminat[ing] in [her] achieving self-understanding and full autonomous subjectivity” after feeling out of control in the aftermath of her mother’s death

(Mardorossian 127). Now that she has confronted her mother’s past and worked through the pain of sexual abuse that she had experienced at her mother’s hands, Sophie can unite her disparate selves into an identity that recognizes her heritage as well as her future.

Just as Sophie regains identity through a space of liberation, as an individual she also moves from a position as her “mother’s daughter and Tante Atie’s child” to a liberated young woman, which illustrates a movement in relationships along with place (Danticat BEM 49). With this, Danticat draws the distinction between the terms “daughter” and “child” with “daughter” indicating a less emotional, biological relation and “child” suggesting an emotional, familial connection. As this explanation of relations implies, Sophie is emotionally closer with her Aunt

Atie, who raised her for twelve years, than to the mother who left her shortly after giving birth.

Much like the saying “anyone can be a father, but not everyone can be a Dad,” Danticat, interestingly, assigns a stronger emotional connection to the term “child” than to “daughter” with the former carrying much more weight than the latter. This binary construction of Sophie’s identity as daughter/child reads much like a resistance to transnationalism. As her mother’s daughter in New York, Sophie is largely sheltered and confined to a microcosm that seeks to replicate Haiti; in this way, she does not develop a true transnational identity while living in her mother’s home as she has been supplanted to a new location yet does not truly experience another culture. For instance, when she first arrives in New York, Sophie remarks that “it was as though I had disappeared” (Danticat BEM 40) and later in the text Martine and Sophie are seen living as part of a marginalized community where they live “in-between,’ living the intersection of histories and memories” (Rodriguez 11). Considering Emilia Ippolito’s claim that Caribbean women writers see home as a “site of conflict and multiple identities,” as well as “multiple locations,” it is clear that for this identity conflict to be resolved, identity and place must be reconciled (Ippolito 38).

While Sophie’s transnational identity begins to surface after she connects place and people, her relationship with Joseph also assists in developing her transnational identity. It is when Sophie meets Joseph that she begins to question her beliefs. During one of their initial discussions, Joseph asks Sophie what she is going to study in college. After Sophie describes that she thinks she is going to become a doctor, Joseph presses her: “what would Sophie like to do?”

(Danticat BEM 72). As a result of this questioning, Sophie realizes that she had “never really dared to dream on [her] own” (Danticat BEM 72). This realization is an initial step in her first act of liberation, an act which exiles her from her mother’s home and begins the development of her individual transnational identity. Sophie tears her hymen with a mortar and pestle in the effort to

64 stop the practice of testing that her mother subjects her to. As J. Brooks Bouson claims,

“experiencing her virginity testing as a kind of rape, Sophie becomes a direct inheritor of her mother’s shame”; through that experience, Sophie internalizes a deep-rooted sense of shame about her body (10). However, if “shame about the body is a cultural inheritance of women,”

Danticat’s novel suggests that the cycle can be broken (Bouson 1). As an embodiment of shame, and a representative of the effects of sexual abuse, Sophie transforms shame into power as she translates the “traumatic unspeakable past of her mother into a story with meaning that honors the suffering and shame of the Caco women” (Bouson 85). Thus, while Sophie “speaks” the truth largely via action as she runs though the cane field at the conclusion of the text, Danticat gives voice to trauma and shame.

Perhaps because of the reach this novel has had, the flight it has experienced, Danticat includes an afterward in the more recent edition. In this, Danticat pens a letter to Sophie, stating,

“I felt blessed to have shared your secrets, your mother’s, your aunt’s, your grandmother’s secrets, mysteries deeply embedded in you, in them, much like the wiry vetiver clinging to the side of these hills” (235). Although this line suggests a sense of connected shame, as Bouson alludes to, Danticat quickly heads off the tendency to take Sophie’s story of abuse as representative of Haitian women. She writes: “Of course, not all Haitian mothers are like your mother. Not all Haitian daughters are tested, as you have been” (236). Concluding this afterword is the simple wish–“May these words bring wings to your feet” (Danticat 236). Thus, while

Sophie’s story may have honored her relatives’ shame and suffering, sadly, Danticat’s novel has not been fully successful in that pursuit. Rather, as the need to amend the text implies, a fictional character has, for some readers, characterized a collective. As the final line suggests, literature

65 can emancipate and uplift; in this case, a corrected version of the truth offers a second chance at flight for Sophie Caco.

Much in the same way that flight occasions a reconsideration of identity and propels transformation, the character of Joseph introduces Sophie to the concept of hybrid identity. In perhaps the most explicit communication of this, Joseph relates that he is “not American’ but rather ‘African-American,” which shows Sophie that she can incorporate these two cultures in one identity (Danticat BEM 72). While after leaving her mother’s home Sophie does not exhibit a transnational identity in the fully-developed sense, her rejection of the Haitian side of her identity leads to a “theoretical homelessness” that affords the eventual reclamation of Haitian identity and its fusion into a more integrated sense of self (Ippolito 38). Illustrating the impact of the connection of place and people on one’s identity is the fact that when Sophie returns to her home with Joseph after “clearing her head” in Haiti, she nonchalantly calls Haiti “home”

(Danticat BEM 184). This evidences her emotional development because at this point she is

“simultaneously incorporated in two societies” (Schiller and Fouron 144). Sophie recognizes her identity as wife and mother in Providence and her home with Joseph at the same time that she considers Haiti “home.” As her movements back and forth from the United States to the

Caribbean suggest, Sophie easily crosses between these culturally-distinct realities, these distinct identities. Yet, more than remaining separate but equal, the two homes blend together, as evidenced by the use of the referent “home” to describe the other location that she holds near and dear.

Perhaps because of her travels between the United States and Haiti, Sophie comes to better understand her place in the world. She notes that “it suddenly occurred to me that I was surrounded by my own life, my own four walls, my own husband and child” and it is with this

66 epiphany that Sophie begins to see herself as an independent adult rather than a progeny who has inherited her mother’s anxiety (Danticat BEM 196). Finally owning a place in the world, she recognizes that she is “not a guest or visiting daughter” as she first felt in America but is now

“the mother and sometimes, more painfully, the wife” (Danticat BEM 196). As a result of bi- lateral migration, Sophie has come to see her place of habitation as home just as much as she views Haiti as a space of cultural origin. At the same time, this statement stresses the lingering effects of Sophie’s self/mutilation, and, more specifically, the pain that accompanies physical intimacy. Also significant is that this realization is confined to her roles of mother and wife, without consideration to her identity as a daughter, woman, or immigrant. Because of this, the novel suggests that this attainment of self-hood comes as a result of this normative arrangement; rather, it is an African-American man, Joseph, who propels Sophie’s growth. Quite the opposite of the notion that “only sadness can come from mixture,” as seen in Cliff’s Abeng, the centrality of Joseph to Sophie’s reconsideration of identity highlights the importance of an outside perspective (164). It takes someone outside of Sophie’s own culture, and, sadly, a man, to bring her to a space of reflection. Indeed, it is the character of Joseph, whose name is likely a Biblical allusion, who offers an example of what is means to be “African-American” as opposed to simply “American” (Danticat BEM 72).

As Tara Green states, in Breath, Eyes, Memory, Danticat “focuses mostly on Haitian

Americans’ attempts to reconcile the effects of traumatic events” and it is clear that the influence of place on identity contributes to this process of healing and liberation (Green 82). However, it is not until the conclusion of the text with Martine’s passing that Sophie fully develops a more unified identity. While Joseph sets the process of growth in motion, Sophie does not fully come into her own until her mother’s death forces her to come to terms with her legacy of abuse. This

67 cathartic experience, finally, brings peace. Supporting Martine’s role in this process of growth,

Dana Williams argues that it is through the re-established mother-daughter relationship that

Martine teaches Sophie that liberation can be achieved by reconciling the people and place of her past (4). While moving to the United States certainly set the process in motion, it is through two trips home and through the (re)connection of place and people that Sophie’s transnational identity develops. In reconciling what were before two disparate identities, Sophie achieves a space of liberation, not one of physicality, but of interiority, which brings her to a space of belonging both to the land and to the people she has spent so much of her adult life being troubled by. This observation isn’t meant to suggest that the development of a transnational identity is necessarily a desirable goal for immigrant-exiles. Instead, a more integrated sense of culture and self offers brings a measure of peace to protagonist Sophie. Much in the same way that Danticat addresses the theoretical tension between lived experience and fictional representation in her afterward, we must be careful not to assume that the result for a singular protagonist is the ideal situation for those in a similar position. In the case of Sophie Caco, it is the physical return and the reunion with her mother in the shared space of trauma, Haiti, that allows Sophie to negotiate her transnational identity and liberate herself the inherited trauma of rape.

For Green, this “liberation” demonstrates that “ultimately, Sophie learns from her mother’s example that removing oneself from the trauma is only a first step in the healing process. In order to heal,” Green continues, “one must choose to move beyond mental, physical, and psychological scars. Voice–speaking one’s own story–is essential in achieving this” (90).

Unfortunately, Danticat’s novel concludes just as Sophie begins this next step in the healing process. While the majority of the text details the use of dissociation or doubling as a coping

68 mechanism, Sophie rarely vocalizes her story. Thus, the Sophie we witness at the conclusion of the novel is beginning to emerge from a PTSD-like state. If, as Judith Herman observes, “post- traumatic stress disorder manifests as three propensities: hyperarousal, re-experiencing and numbing of dissociation,” then Breath, Eyes, Memory evidences the lingering effects of abuse

(qtd. in Morgan and Youssef 8). More specifically, as a coping mechanism, the practice of doubling, a form of dissociation, allows “women to detach themselves from incidents that inflict bodily pain” (Francis 87). In this way, then, Marine’s doubling functions as a “survival strategy of disconnection” (Francis 87). Flight–both as dissociation and as migration–serves as a means of emotional protection, a state of limbo until one is ready give voice to one’s own story. In a similar fashion, Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory takes its own flight, crossing national borders to give voice to the secrets that are suppressed. With this novel, Danticat “makes public the social history of sexual abuses committed against Haitian females relegated to ‘silences too horrific to disturb” (Francis 77-78).

Folklore and Flight in Danticat’s Krik? Krak!

Whereas figurative flight enters Breath, Eyes, Memory in the form of dissociation,

Danticat employs the figure of the soucouyant or “shape-shifter” in Krik? Krak! as she offers a retelling of Haitian history. In this collection of ten short stories featuring interconnected characters, Danticat explores themes such as exile, migration, and violence; overall, this text evidences the contradictions and difficulties inherent in migration. Drawing on oral tradition, she serves as a storyteller recounting tales to a contemporary audience. Though scholars such as

Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo have explored more broadly the use of traditional beliefs in

Danticat’s Krik? Krak!, I examine the role of flight and the folkloric figure of the soucouyant in three of Krik? Krak!’s stories: “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” “A Wall of Fire Rising” and “Caroline’s

Wedding.” As a Haitian-American writer, Danticat’s short stories reflect her own experience as a

Haitian migrant; however, it is misguided to think of them as purely autobiographical.

Nevertheless, Danticat’s application of the Haitian custom of storytelling positions her as someone connected with that tradition and more globally with the “long groit tradition that people of African descent have used to give alternative accounts of the world” (Brazile,

“Défilée’s Diasporic Daughters” 88). As Ifeona Fulani states, “there is ample evidence that

Caribbean women are loosening their tongues and demanding to be heard” (65). In Krik? Krak! we see Danticat translating the folkloric and oral into the written word, utilizing folklore to proffer her own reading of Haitian history.

As a unified text, “the stories in Krik? Krak! are interwoven narratives of suffering and violence but also of survival and endurance” (Braziel, “Défilée’s Diasporic Daughters” 77).

Danticat explores themes such as loss and dreams in her other works, but in this text she connects characters through the common ancestor of Défilée, and in doing so connects the personal and national. In fact, one of the ways that these stories illustrate resistance is through the use of flight, understood here both literally and figuratively as “the action of fleeing or running away,” “a way of escape” and/or “the action or manner of flying or moving through the air as with wings” (OED). In Krik? Krak! Danticat moves from depictions of figurative flight in

“Nineteen Thirty-Seven” to literal flight in “A Wall of Fire Rising” and “Caroline’s Wedding,” utilizing the trope of flight to complicate notions of migration. Through the figure of Défilée,

Danticat gives voice to “unspoken women’s experiences” (N’Zengou-Tayo par. 11). Rather than simply working to reclaim and reconfigure the figure of the soucouyant, Danticat leaves it up to readers to render judgment. More specifically, Krik? Krak! depicts the blending of cultural traditions through the lens of folklore. Although many of the characters under study are a

70 distance from home, their ties with folklore persist. Similarly, Danticat’s own use of folklore in her works speaks to enduring cultural traditions and the need to recreate or remember home. On a broader scale, as Rocio Davis observes, “The title of Danticat’s short story cycle sets it clearly within the oral narrative. She invites the reader not merely to read the book but to participate in a traditional Haitian storytelling ritual” (67). Thus, Danticat’s words move “through the air as with wings” as they reach a worldwide audience (OED).

In Danticat’s Krik? Krak! the figure of the soucouyant, or an old witch rumored to “shed her skin by night and suck the blood of her victims,” appears most explicitly in “Nineteen Fifty-

Seven” while “A Wall of Fire Rising” and “Caroline’s Wedding” offer alternative representations of flight (OED). Though it would certainly be intriguing to investigate how the myth of the soucouyant has developed, I am instead interested in how Danticat utilizes the figure of the soucouyant in her writing. To that end, I call for a greater understanding of the soucouyant, one that moves beyond a surface understanding of oral materials as “exotic” elements sprinkled throughout the text to an understanding that realizes the “dynamic overlapping and interaction of materials from both literature and folklore in the Caribbean”

(Roldan-Santiago 2). Because in the Anglophone Caribbean soucouyants are exclusively female,

I query the gendering of folklore in Danticat’s work. So much as folklore propagates social mores, it has also been used to condemn power and “socialize women according to patriarchal dictates” (Anatol 46). This chapter examines the continuity between the oral and written, viewing Danticat’s text to be a written account largely shaped by folklore. As Donald Hill states that “anthropologists see myth as the keystone of folk belief,” in Danticat’s Krik? Krak! folklore serves as a cornerstone as she adapts oral legend into print (15). Despite the admittedly formulaic nature of folktales, Danticat offers a modern twist as she pens a complex and connected

71 collection of short stories. Through characters such as Défilée Azile, Danticat propagates oral tradition and legend as she rewrites “traditional beliefs and behaviors” to reconfigure and proffer an alternative understanding of the figure of the soucouyant and the nature of flight itself (Hill

8). In this way, Danticat engages with the tradition of Caribbean literature as a “literature of symbolic escape as well as of literal departure” (Angrosino 116).

The Woman with Wings of Flame

In focusing on literal and figurative flight in the short story “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,”

Danticat utilizes the figure of Défilée, “a national heroine whose meanings are suffused with political resistance, anti-imperialism, and patriotic reclamation” (Braziel “Re-membering

Défilée” 60). In this way, Danticat calls upon historical narrative to ground “diasporic genealogies within national historical frames” (Braziel, “Re-membering Défilée” 61).

Interestingly, Danticat combines the figure of the soucouyant with the “feminist figure of resistance” of Dédée Bazile in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven;” as Jana Evans Braziel observes, the similarities between the historical figure of Dédée Bazile and Défilée are rather striking (“Re- membering Défilée 63). However, rather than focusing on the figure of Défilée as Braziel has, I am more interested in the role of the soucouyant or lougarou in Danticat’s text. In “Nineteen

Thirty-Seven” Danticat pushes back against the concept of the lougarou by “re-appropriating the figure of the flying woman and reconceptualising the magic of her flight” (Chen 50). As a folkloric figure, lougarous are “monstrous figure[s] who fail to stay within certain boundaries of convention” (Chen 49). Turning superstition on its head, Danticat places prison guards as enforcers of propriety and agents of paranoia. Though authorities attempt to strip the women of the power of flight, Danticat’s work suggests the resilience of Caribbean women and the enduring power of flight.

Danticat's “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” is set in a “yellow prison building...like a fort” (Krik?

Krak! 35).14 In this text, Manman, an elderly woman, joins the collective accused−“bone-thin women with shorn heads, carrying clumps of their hair with their bare hands, as they sought the few rays of sunshine that they were allowed each day” (Danticat KK 35). In this way, nearly every aspect of the prisoners’ lives is censored−their femininity, their conversations, their exposure to daylight. From a psychological standpoint, this is clearly an effective tool of dehumanization. In particular, the narrator’s mother, Manman, appears with “her skin barely clung to her bones, falling in layers, flaps, on her face and neck” (Danticat KK 36). Interestingly, this graphic description stands alone. Omitted is the fact that Manman is literally starving to death. Instead, the text, like the prison guards, questions and accuses, positioning her as a threat instead of a victim.

In “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” Danticat draws upon the myth and legend of Défilée and the folkloric figure of the soucouyant. While Braziel argues that Défilée “embodies the too-often maddening experiences of cultural fragmentation and historical circumstance for women of

Haitian descent,” it is my assertion that the connection to the figure of the soucouyant affords a narrative of the costs and consequences of flight (Braziel, “Défilée’s Diasporic Daughters” 89).

In this text Défilée is accused of being a witch or lougarou. Like Défilée, the figure of the lougarou, “derived from the French term loupgarous,” is often associated with resistance and transgression (Braziel, “Re-membering Défilée” n. 61). However, while the term is “often translated ‘werewolf,’ Haitian stories concerning lougarous have nothing to do with the

European werewolf” (N’Zengou-Tayo par. 15). Rather, the term is known in the “English

Eastern Caribbean as ‘sukuyan’ or ‘soucouyant’… an old woman who removes her skin at night

14 Subsequent references will refer to Krik? Krak! as KK. 73 to fly like a ball of fire…drink[ing] young children's blood or eat[ing] human flesh” (N’Zengou-

Tayo par. 15). In fact, in the Prologue, Danticat references folklore and the continuing legacy she is engaging with. Similar to the definition of folklore that Hill posits, Danticat notes that “our stories are kept in our hearts,” which suggests an oral transmission that spans generations

(Prologue). In the Prologue to this text, Danticat alerts readers to the call and response format as her epigraph states: “they ask Krik? we say Krak!” In transforming the oral into the written,

Danticat works to preserve a sense of Haitian cultural past. As the epigraph states, “we tell the stories so that the young ones will know what came before them” (Prologue).

While Danticat’s work draws heavily from folklore, the short story “Nineteen Thirty-

Seven” combines folklore and flight and “offers a re-writing of the lougarou myth” as the narrator Josephine reclaims her mother’s history (N’Zengou-Tayo par. 16). Indeed, this brief text draws its significance from the Parsley Massacre of 1937, which resulted in the persecution and death of thousands of Haitians.15 As a whole, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” explores the gendering of folkloric references and the use of folklore as a form of political control. Erin Mackie notes that often “charges of witchcraft, whether of the European or African-Caribbean variety, are brought against these women in efforts to explain and counteract their charms” (190). In other words, much like the folkloric vilification of Annie Palmer discussed in the previous chapter, the character of Défilée and the figure of the soucouyant emerge as victims of scapegoating. In

“Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” gossip and folklore converge as Défilée is accused of being a

“lougarou, witch, criminal” after a colicky baby dies in her care (Danticat KK 39). This

15 “It earned the name the Parsley Massacre because Dominican soldiers carried a sprig of parsley and would ask people suspected of being Haitian to pronounce the Spanish word for it: ‘perejil’... Historians estimate that anywhere between 9,000 and 20,000 Haitians were killed in the Dominican Republic on the orders of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo” (Davis “The Massacre that Marked”). 74 accusation results in her with her face “bleeding from the pounding blows of rocks and sticks and the fists of strangers” (Danticat KK 39).

In “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” Danticat moves back and forth between the present

(Manman’s captivity) and the past (the horrors of Trujillo’s regime). As a young woman,

Manman flees violence in the Dominican Republic and crosses back over into Haiti; as

Josephine, Manman’s daughter, notes, “on that day so long ago, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly” (Danticat KK 49). With this description,

Danticat turns to mysticism as euphemism to explain the logistics of escape. Whether Manman indeed flew in the mystical sense, or moved swiftly, is left up to the reader to determine. In either case, Manman “escaped El Generalissimo's soldiers, leaving her own mother behind. From the

Haitian side of the river,16 she could still see the soldiers chopping up her mother's body and throwing it into the river along with many others” (Danticat KK 40).17 Somewhat paralleling the present situation (Manman’s imprisonment and impending death) is the death of her own mother.

Despite the years between, both fall to dictatorial regimes–Manman to Duvalier and her mother to Trujillo. Nevertheless, both cases illustrate blatant disrespect for human life and for the human body.

Although readers learn of personal loss, a larger discussion of the tensions between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is largely omitted from Danticat’s text. While readers are likely aware that the two nations share an island, few may recall that Haiti occupied the Dominican

Republic until 1844 (Ward). More than responding to an isolated incident, Manman’s flight comes as a result of long-standing tensions. These two countries, with distinct languages and

16 Here, Danticat refers to the Massacre river. “Bodies were dumped in the Massacre River, ominously named after an earlier colonial struggle between the Spanish and French” (Davis “The Massacre that Marked”).

17 Emphasis original. 75 cultures, had historically feuded over borders; however, tensions escalated with Trujillo’s plan to

“whiten” his nation’s population. This came to head when Trujillo “ordered his military to exterminate the Haitian population in order to cleanse the Dominican population of ‘foreigners’”

(“The Parsley Massacre”). While certainly an attempt to flee a dangerous situation, Manman’s flight also serves as a form of political resistance that rejects a legacy of violence. In much the same way, Danticat stages her own resistance, years later, by writing of a genocide that is largely silenced to this day. In this way, then, flight serves as a means of resistance, one that offers

Caribbean women such as Danticat a means of coming to terms with conflictions of place and identity.

As a whole, though, this is not Danticat’s tale to tell, but a story passed on to her that she is now passing on to us. While Défilée escapes the violence that took her mother through literal travel or flight, figurative flight dominates Danticat’s “Nineteen Thirty-Seven.” We learn at the beginning of the story that Défilée is charged with being a lougarou. In this way, Danticat’s text calls issues of authority and legitimacy into question. Although the rebellious figure of Défilée is ultimately subdued by masculine power when prison officials execute her based upon suspicion, her power lives on in the form of folklore. As recipients of the very kind of folkloric education and inculcation discussed in the previous chapter, Manman’s neighbors are quick to point the finger of suspicion at the woman. Because a medical explanation for sudden infant death syndrome did not exist at the time, the community condemns Manman and holds the caregiver at fault. Sadly, this suspicion is reinforced, and replicated in, governmental and political forces.

While the community is representative of the patriarchal and political forces that seek to suppress in the name of power, because they themselves feel helpless to fight the dictatorial regime,

Défilée’s spirit endures. Helping to explain this, Gisele Anatol’s work on the soucouyant depicts

76 a figure who “disobeys social mores… remain[ing] a suspicious figure in the community [and] occup[ying] a space outside of accepted boundaries” (50). Thus, in this way, we can see Défilée as an early figure of female agency and “illegitimate power.” Applying Anatol’s call for the reclamation of the folkloric figure of the soucouyant as a “paragon of female agency,” Danticat’s

Défilée emerges as a woman contesting the violence and oppression around her in subtle ways, creating a community of sorts with her fellow prisoners (52). Because political forces could not legitimately charge her, folklore and suspicion was applied to justify her fall. Perhaps reacting to this, Danticat’s text provides a powerful “re-telling [which] empowers Défilée and denies the power of her oppressors, revitalizing Josephine as well” (Putnam 122).

In “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” Manman/Défilée is “accused of having wings of flame”

(Danticat KK 35). These wings directly relate the notion of the soucouyant as the imprisoned women were forced to throw cups of cold water at each other so that “their bodies would not be able to muster up enough heat to grow those wings made of flames, fly away in the middle of the night, slip into the slumber of innocent children and steal their breath” (Danticat KK 37-8). Much like the spirit of suspicion that landed the women in prison, the women here are united as recipients of accusation, no doubt encouraged by their jailors. As such, hysteria dominates local society as “a few other people agreeing with these stories was all that was needed to have them arrested. And sometimes even killed” (Danticat KK 38). Somewhat similarly, this spirit of hysteria transfers to a concern with the inmates’ skin, a concern rooted in folklore as the figure of the soucouyant is said to leave its skin in nightly flight. Illustrating this, Danticat writes that “the prison guards watched [Défilée] more closely because they thought that the wrinkles resulted from her taking off her skin at night and then putting it back on in a hurry, before sunrise. This was why Manman’s sentence had been extended to life” (Danticat KK 36). In this short story,

Danticat highlights the manipulation of folklore and also the degree to which superstition impacts Haitian culture. True to her role as storyteller, though, Danticat removes herself from the equation and relates Défilée’s demise rather matter-of-factly. As Danticat writes, Défilée’s remains were destroyed to “prevent her spirit from wandering into any young innocent bodies”

(Danticat KK 36). More specifically, Manman’s daughter is told that “she will be ready for burning this afternoon [because] prison could not cure her” (Danticat KK 46). Thus, rather than recounting Manman’s death with an effusion of emotion or dismissing the tale as superstition,

Danticat presents the results as they are and allows readers to draw conclusions as they will.

In “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” Danticat explores the use and abuse of folklore through

Défilée as she transforms the myth of the soucouyant into a contemporary tale of resistance. In writing Défilée as a woman incarcerated by but not emotionally destroyed as a result of accusation, Danticat paints a strong female character who resists by remaining strong of spirit. In aligning the personal with the collective, Danticat depicts the height of terror and abuse through the lens of an individual woman and her daughter. Connecting with the larger legacy of loss, it is suggested that Défilée’s flight across the Massacre River “gave her those wings of flames”

(Danticat KK 41). While for Défilée and “all the women who came with us to the river” loss engenders this ability of mystical flight, it also establishes a community for the women incarcerated together despite a regime that attempted to deny that (Danticat KK 43). Sadly,

Défilée’s initial flight is successful but her mother’s is not. As Danticat narrates the present circumstances, though, Défilée’s flight transforms from an act of migration/escape to a metaphorical flight as the woman mentally transcends the abuse of prison guards. Although

Défilée cannot fly again to escape her confinement, suspicion brings a folkloric flight; when prison guards become increasingly suspicious of Manman’s loose skin, which they see as a sign

78 that she is indeed a soucouyant, they slate for her execution via fire. As a result, Défilée’s reputation becomes associated with the folkloric figure and her story takes flight via a work of fiction. Through the vehicle of literature, Danticat works to reclaim the figure of the soucouyant, offering a more positive view of the folkloric figure. In turning to flight to align mysticism and folklore with Haiti’s historical past, Danticat transforms loss into legend.

In this short story, Danticat joins a larger community as she invokes African customs through references to Guinea and a belief in the Kongo Cosmogram, or the notion of the circularity of life. For instance, Défilée’s directive to Josephine, Manman’s daughter, “let your flight be joyful… and mine too,” is suggestive of the African belief of an afterlife flight/return to the homeland (Danticat KK 42). In subordinating Défilée’s accusation of figurative flight to her literal flight in 1937, Danticat plays with the meaning of flight. Through the voice of Josephine,

Danticat concludes “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” with a return to the story of flight told to her by her mother; hence, much like the distribution of folklore seen in Danticat’s other works, folklore is largely distributed by women to women/young girls. Like Danticat’s own migratory experience, this tale speaks to a politically-motivated flight as Défilée “leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river” (Danticat KK 49). In narrating the tale of a character who crosses borders out of necessity, Danticat draws attention to this horrendous genocide while complicating traditional understandings of migration and the reasons behind geographic “leaps.” Perhaps Danticat’s own flight from Haiti to the United States affords the retelling of this tale, allowing her to propagate and adapt folklore into written legend. Thus, for

Danticat, border crossing likely acts as a literary muse that eschews national identification in favor of a more fluid understanding of cultural influences. This geographic fluidity is then reflected in works that are inspired by and champion connections across borders.

The Implausibility of Escape

Unlike the use of metaphoric flight in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” literal flight figures prominently in “A Wall of Fire Rising;” this short story features the tale of a father, Guy, who falls to his death after taking his employer’s hot air balloon out for a ride. Through the character of Guy and his turn to flight to escape what he views as hopeless economic circumstances18,

Danticat offers a critique of the persistence of the plantocratic power structure. In this way, she sheds light on the realities of plantation economics for Haitian laborers. With “A Wall of Fire

Rising,” Danticat illustrates the downfalls of Haiti’s economic situation for one man and the vast disparity that the plantation economy has promoted. For instance, while the plantation owner in this text can afford luxuries such as a hot air balloon, Guy only works periodically and has been unemployed for a number of months. Yet, instead of focusing on the theme of loss or struggle, as

Caribbean literature often has, this short story applauds Guy’s determination and utilization of resources at hand to engineer his own escape. While certainly this form of flight is vastly different from that seen in the other works under study in this chapter, together, they expose the difficulties of migration. In Breath, Eyes, Memory Sophie wrestled with adjusting to a new country and a new maternal figure at the age of twelve; in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” migration meant survival; in “Caroline’s Wedding” migration comes at a great cost. Unlike the protagonists in other works, “A Wall of Fire Rising” is distinguished by the centrality of a male figure, Guy, who is preoccupied with escape. Sadly, Guy’s literal flight is ultimately unsuccessful as he

“climb[s] over the side of the basket” of the hot air balloon he masquerades off with, swiftly falling to his death (Danticat KK 77). While in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” supernatural flight is associated with the feminine, Guy’s flight in “A Wall of Fire Rising” suggests the implausibility

18 According the United Nations, Haiti is “currently the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with 80% of the population living under the poverty line and 54% in abject poverty” (“The World”). 80 of escape and a lack of supernatural connection and ability for men, an absence which perhaps impacts his ability to more successfully take flight. On the other hand, “Guy’s flight, even if it leads to a violent, tragic conclusion, does evoke New World tales of flying Africans and a whole set of twentieth-century literary reworkings of these narratives” (Chen 41). Thus, depending upon one’s interpretation, Guy may have indeed carried out his goal. Perhaps a fall to the death, no doubt provoked by his son’s role as Boukman in a school play, was the only way he saw of escaping his status as a chronically unemployed man unable to support his family.

In “A Wall of Fire Rising” Danticat continues to explore the multiple meanings of flight.

While Guy is unsuccessful in that he does not escape physically, his flight affords a means of transformation in terms of figurative escape. Through the use of flight, Guy escapes the banal life he lives; when he comes to the realization that he cannot “just be something new,” he makes the choice to end his own life via flight (Danticat KK 73). More specifically, Guy sees little opportunity for progress; as a man who is unemployed and without a well-paying job in sight,

Guy feels utterly hopeless. To elaborate, “it was almost six months since the last time Guy had gotten work there. The jobs at the sugar mill were few and far between. The people who had them never left, or when they did they would pass the job on to another family member who was already waiting in line” (Danticat KK 65). With this situation, Danticat draws parallels with slavery and indentured labor. Not all that different from the work of slaves on the plantations, this neocolonial setup ensures that workers are trapped in a state of dependence. Ironically, present-day employees toil in the very location where their ancestors were enslaved and the positions become an “inheritance” for the lucky. Likely inspired by his son’s role as Dutty

Boukman, a Jamaican-born Haitian slave who was an early leader in the Haitian Revolution, Guy recognizes the realities of his position and takes matters into his own hands to ensure the only

81 form of escape possible. In this way, Danticat, through Guy, critiques the lack of progress following Emancipation. Sadly, for workers like Guy, little hope remains. Instead, what predominates is an economic wasteland and a resulting sense of attachment to the provider, which is, ironically in this case, one of the primary industries that propelled the slave trade.

As suggested, it is when Guy’s son lands the role of Boukman that he begins to contemplate his status in life; sadly, Guy’s reflections on his position and lack of opportunities serves as a commentary of the post-slavery period writ large.19 In particular, Guy is inspired by his son’s speech: “I call on everyone and anyone so that we shall all let out one piercing cry that we may either live freely or we should die” (Danticat KK 71). In this short story, Guy’s son stands in for Boukman as a force of change. Clearly, Guy takes Boukman’s directive to heart and sacrifices himself in the name of freedom. However, rather than making this decision rashly,

Guy appears to contemplate his course of action. As he tells his wife, Lili, “I just want to take that big balloon and ride it up in the air. I’d like to sail off somewhere and keep floating until I got to a really nice place with a nice plot of land where I could be something new. I’d build my own house, keep my own garden. Just be something new” (Danticat KK 73). This response is interesting from a couple of angles. For one, it should be remembered that the balloon belongs to the plantation owner. Thus, flight, leisure and escape are associated with the wealthy and those in power while the rest of the population is relegated to dead-end jobs or unemployment.20 At the same time, Guy recognizes the state of land ownership in Haiti, certainly understanding that not

19 We see this theme reflected throughout Caribbean literature, for instance in works such as Earl Lovelace’s Salt.

20 As Mimi Sheller finds, “the patterns of highly uneven distribution of human suffering, poverty, and violence found in many parts of the Caribbean and the wider Americas are closely related to the histories of colonialism, slavery, and exclusion that formed the contemporary world” (1).

82 much has changed.21 As an unemployed black man, the only option available to him is to go

“somewhere else.”22 From a larger standpoint, Guy’s desire to own land speaks to questions of land and labor, a distinguishing figure of Caribbean literature; much like George Lamming and

Jacques Roumain, Danticat celebrates the role of the Haitian peasant in Caribbean literature23 as she offers up a character rejecting the options available, instead electing to “be something new” via flight.

Guy is trapped in terms of his occupation and his identity. Because there is no opportunity for upward mobility at work, he sees his employer’s balloon as affording an alternate form of liftoff. Also propelling Guy is the legacy he will leave his son. Guy remarks to Lili:

“You know that question I asked you before,’ he said, ‘how a man is remembered after he's gone? I know the answer now. I know because I remember my father, who was a very poor struggling man all his life. I remember him as a man that I would never want to be” (Danticat KK

75). With this in mind, it is clear that Guy recognizes that he is doing no better than his father. In contrast to this, Guy repudiates the notion that his son would ever see him as a figure to avoid replicating. For Guy, his impending death offers a pronouncement of its own. While he cannot

21 “Small plots and a relatively low concentration of land-holdings have characterized Haitian agriculture since the early nineteenth century, when the newly-independent government broke up the large plantations of the former colonial masters and distributed land to ex-slaves and those who had served as soldiers during the war for independence” (Zuvekas 1).

22 “The crushing rural and urban poverty of the Caribbean nation of Haiti...is the most devastating in Latin America. Long associated with insecurity, malnutrition, preventable disease, high rates of infant and maternal mortality, illiteracy, and social and economic exclusion, Haiti's misery is a perennial focus of both Haitian and international policy makers. A complex interaction of many factors is said to be responsible for Haiti's rank of 146 (out of 177 countries) on the United Nations Development Programme's 2007–2008 World Human Development Index (HDI). Poor governance, inequitable and inefficient provision of government services, corruption, a dysfunctional judicial system, discriminatory tax collection, environmental degradation, and abusive security forces are cited as contributing factors. Public sector hiring and promotion are often based on political loyalty rather than competence. Cycles of political and human rights crises alternating with brief periods of great hope for change have stifled the healing from trauma, and contributed to demoralization, internal displacement, and migration from Haiti” (Haiti).

23 Writing on Lamming’s work, A.J. Simones da Silva notes that “remembering is the only way the dispossessed, the ‘large illiterate peasantry,’ will recover their own sense of identity” (145).

83 offer grand speeches as Boukman did, this is his way of rejecting the status quo, of critiquing the life that those in his community lead–lives of little hope and endless toil.24 At the same time, his action ensures that he will be remembered for his bravery and refusal to condone a hopeless situation. For Guy, this is the legacy he is leaving his son, far different from the image of a “poor struggling man” (Danticat KK 75).

In the final scene Guy is seen “in the air hurtling down towards the crowd. Lili held her breath as she watched him fall. He crashed not far from where Lili and the boy were standing, his blood immediately soaking the landing spot. The balloon kept floating free, drifting on its way to brighter shores” (Danticat KK 78). In this instance, Guy’s body serves as a reminder of the impossibility of flight/escape as it is literally drawn to the ground. While Guy’s fall reifies the function of gravity, it also suggests the infeasibility of migration for Haitians as Guy’s body is swiftly “reclaimed” into the Haitian soil. Taking this even further is the fact that Guy’s blood soaks the landing spot. In his own way, Guy is memorialized, at least for the time being. Until the ground is reworked, the fact that Guy died there is indisputable. On an even more symbolic note, the last lines of the text feature an exchange between Lili and the foreman: “do you want to close the eyes?’ the foreman repeated impatiently?’ ‘No, leave them open,’ Lili said. ‘My husband, he likes to look at the sky” (Danticat KK 80). With this, it is clear that Guy will not be remembered for his strife but rather for his bravery. For both Défilée and Guy, flight comes from the desire for escape. Guy’s death in “A Wall of Fire Rising” calls the possibility of escape and rebirth into question. For Défilée, flight is a tool to be utilized and controlled; for Guy, his only true flight concludes in death. Just as Josephine reclaims the story of Défilée in “Nineteen

Thirty-Seven,” “A Wall of Fire Rising” ends with the depiction of “the balloon floating free,

24 As Mats Lundahl notes of class division in Haiti: “the elite do not perform manual labor, are educated, speak French, live in towns, are formally married...The peasants, on the other hand, are manual workers, illiterate, speak nothing but Creole, live in the countryside, practice common-law marriage and voodoo, and are black” (109). 84 drifting on its way to brighter shores,” suggesting an alternative reading of Guy’s death and flight itself (Danticat KK 78).

Folklore as Subversion

Building upon “A Wall of Fire Rising,” “Caroline’s Wedding” explores the consequences of flight. Whereas Guy’s flight in “A Wall of Fire Rising” culminates in his death and figurative flight, in “Caroline’s Wedding” flight is figured in literal terms with the family’s migration to

New York City twenty-five years prior to the start of the story. Like the other short stories examined, flight in “Caroline’s Wedding” comes at the cost of cultural connection. For Caroline and Grace, like Défilée in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” folklore serves as a means of individual subversion. For example, the girls insist on wearing black panties to induce supernatural visitations from their deceased father. This small rebellion, wearing black panties instead of the red ones given to them by their mother to ward off his beyond-the-grave visits, evidences a desire for familial and otherworldly connection. More, specifically, the sisters detail that they

“had never worn the red panties that Ma had bought for us over the years to keep our dead father's spirit away. We had always worn our black panties instead, to tell him that he would be welcome to visit us. Even though we no longer wore black outer clothes, we continued to wear black underpants as a sign of lingering grief” (Danticat KK 172)25. While Haitian traditions survive to some extent in “Caroline’s Wedding” in the form of bone soup and the tightening of the belt during Mass, the family’s migration to the United States comes at a cost. Most explicitly,

Caroline, one of the two daughters and the only one born in America, is born missing a forearm, which physically illustrates the severing of the immigrant family from the “mother” country.

While Ma and Papa attempted to retain elements of Haitian culture through traditions and proverbs, the family is in a state of exile from most of the relatives still living in Haiti.

25 Emphasis original. 85

In “Caroline’s Wedding” folklore is utilized in an attempt to control destiny. For instance, Ma’s bone soup is said to “cure all kinds of ills. She even hoped it would perform the miracle of detaching Caroline from Eric, her Bahamian fiancé” (Danticat KK 159). For Ma, a woman more Haitian than Haitian-American, this intense desire on her part stems from the fact that “no one in our family has ever married outside” the Haitian community (Danticat KK 161).

As such, Ma turns to folklore and culinary concoctions to ensure the maintenance of Haitian ideals and the assurance that her daughter will retain a Haitian name, actions which, ultimately, prove unsuccessful. Similarly, in an attempt to influence fate, Pa “tried to stuff red hot peppers into his mother’s nose because he was convinced that if the old woman sneezed three times, she would live” (Danticat KK 178). While folklore offers first-generation immigrants Ma and Pa a means of retaining a degree of Haitian culture, it also serves as a means of subversion. Much like

Défilée in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” Ma’s mother “belonged to a secret women’s society in Ville

Rose, where the women had to question each other before entering one another’s house… Ma would fall asleep listening to the women’s voices” (Danticat KK 165). Here, folklore is not only a form of indoctrination but also as a means of security and community which is diametrically opposed to the manipulation of folklore we see in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven.”

As much as folklore is used to exert or strip agency, it is also a means of connection as

Caroline exasperates to Grace, “is she ever going to get tired of telling that story?” (Danticat KK

164). In “Caroline’s Wedding” Ma and Papa utilize folklore in the attempt to retain elements of

Haitian culture. The family’s migration has resulted in a lack of connection with their roots for daughters Caroline and Grace, girls who are “so American” they attempt to assimilate by chemically straightening their hair. Despite their transculturation, Caroline and Grace are recipients of these stories just as Danticat positions the reader as consumer of these tales. For the

86 daughters of Ma and Papa, “these were [their] bedtime stories. Tales that haunted [their] parents and made them laugh at the same time… they became [their] sole inheritance” (Danticat KK

180). In “Caroline’s Wedding” Danticat suggests that oral culture deserves to be passed on, that it is something to be treasured. While it may have the ability to provoke fear as well as delight, folklore grounds and connects, surpassing both temporal and geographic boundaries.

Although second-generation immigrants Caroline and Grace are “Americanized,” they turn to folklore in the attempt to hold onto a connection with their deceased father. In “Caroline’s

Wedding,” figurative flight appears in the form of dreams. For example, Ma tells Papa that “in dreams we travel the years” (Danticat KK 189). Danticat, through Ma, connects mystical escape with the nightly occurrence of dreams. In this tale, dreams mystically give voice to their father, a man who indeed had “the same scratchy voice he had when he was alive” (Danticat KK 188).

Most explicitly, Caroline and Grace utilize folklore when they eschew the wearing of the red panties that are believed to serve as a form of protection from “Papa and all the other dead men who might desire [them]” (Danticat KK 170). Just prior to this line, Danticat writes: “In Ma’s family, the widows often wore blood-red panties so that their dead husbands would not come back and lie down next to them at night. Daughters who looked a lot like the widowed mother might wear red panties too so that if they were mistaken for her, they would be safe” (KK 170).

Together, these lines offer a suggestive allusion to incest; while there was no mention of incestual propensities when Papa was alive, these lines combine folklore and euphemism to paint the sisters as rebelliously rejecting attempts to keep them “safe.” More specifically, Grace and

Caroline largely ignore their mother’s attempts to keep them well protected by the red panties and instead don black underwear in the hopes of receiving visits from their father. In opposition to popular suspicion, the sisters either do not think their father would ever harm them, or,

87 alternately, are too naive to realize the motivation behind the use of the red panties. On a larger scale, though, their choice upholds the mystical flight of the deceased to be a benefit, a means of staying connected despite death. Further connecting folklore and dreams/figurative travel,

Danticat writes that “Caroline and [Grace] dreamt of him every other night. It was as though he were taking turns visiting [them] in [their] sleep” (Danticat KK 170). Making the deliberate choice to ensure visits from their father, Caroline and Grace “always wore [their] black panties instead, to tell him that he would be welcome to visit” (Danticat KK 172). While Danticat details testing as a form of sexual abuse in Breath, Eyes, Memory, this association is absent in Krik?

Krak!; “Caroline’s Wedding” sidesteps accusations of incest in favor of a view of flight transforming relationships.

While Pa’s death is the most explicit form of loss in “Caroline’s Wedding,” loss and attempts to remedy loss enter the text in a number of ways, most notably the issuance of Grace’s passport and the addition of a prosthetic arm for Caroline. For unknown reasons, Grace obtains an American passport. Her mother directs, “Go ahead and get the passport. I can see it when you get it back,’ she said. ‘A passport is truly what’s American. May it serve you well’” (Danticat

KK 158). In this short story Grace gains a form of social currency, a paper document that conveys all the powers and privileges inherent in its possession. As Ma suggests, this passport will afford mobility, and thus the potential for flight, for Grace while also admitting her to “the club.” While her father gained entry to the United States through rather dubious means (by participating in a sham marriage), Grace can now travel anywhere she desires. In thinking about this further, I wonder what makes a passport “truly American.” Rather than citizenship, a driver’s license, or owning a home, this small blue document carries power. In contrast to the many who are unable to acquire passports for a variety of reasons, Grace can literally go

88 anywhere. When considered alongside Guy’s position in “A Wall of Fire Rising,” the contrast is alarming; Guy died in the attempt to go “someplace else” while Grace easily attains a document that affords politically-sanctioned mobility. Yet, this document, like Caroline’s prosthetic arm, comes at a price. As Grace notes, “without the certificate, I suddenly felt like unclaimed property” (Danticat KK 158). With this line, Grace equates herself with “unclaimed property” as if the issuance of a passport somehow “claims” her as American, bringing her into the fold in ways that citizenship has not done. This single document affords a sense of belongingness and, more subtly, a degree of ownership. Even more significantly, Grace notes that “we had all paid dearly for this piece of paper, this final assurance that I belonged in the club. It had cost my parent’s marriage, my mother’s spirit, my sister’s arm” (Danticat KK 214). As such, Danticat calls the benefits of migration into question. Far from the image of the white picket fence, she presents a family who is coping with the consequences of migration, each in their own way.

Somewhat similar is the situation with Caroline’s arm. In a very different way, she attempts to mitigate loss yet is not fully successful in doing so. As previously mentioned,

“Caroline had been born without her left forearm. The round end of her stub felt like a stuffed dumpling” (Danticat KK 159). This defect comes as a result of a series of unfortunate events. As

Caroline herself explains, “my mother was arrested in the sweatshop immigration raid, a prison doctor had given her a shot of a drug to keep her calm overnight. That shot, my mother believed, caused [my] condition” (Danticat KK 159). Though she has lived with this condition for her entire life, the impending wedding draws Caroline to make herself “whole” as she knows all eyes will be on her and on her deformity. With that in mind, she purchases “a robotic arm with two shoulder straps that controlled the motion of the plastic fingers” (Danticat KK 198). Illustrating the permanence of loss is the fact that her doctor proclaims that she has phantom limb pain, the

“kind of pain that people feel after they’ve had their arms or legs amputated” (Danticat KK 198-

99). Oddly, Caroline was born with this condition, which suggests that another form of loss, perhaps close familial relationships, are being projected onto the forearm. Even more troubling is the fact that the doctor suggested that Caroline purchase a prosthetic to “make it go away”

(Danticat KK 199).

While in “Caroline’s Wedding” physical migration/literal flight engenders feelings of loss, separation and insecurity, metaphorical or figurative flight serves as a means of claiming an inheritance. Although men believe in and share folklore in Danticat’s text, it is most frequently the women who exhibit and utilize the folkloric and mystical, and unfortunately are at times persecuted for it. In this collection of short stories, Danticat reclaims folklore, perpetuating and furthering these “bedtime stories” for a broader audience to appreciate. While some may critique this adaptation and popularization, as well as point to Danticat’s presentation of stereotypical portraits rather than corrective measures, by largely restraining judgment Danticat instead passes on the inheritance and leaves it up to the reader to decide. In this concluding tale of Krik? Krak!,

Pa questions Grace in a dream: “what kind of legends will your daughters be told? What kinds of charms will you give them to ward off evil?” (Danticat KK 211). Through the role of dreams, for

Caroline and Grace, the place of folklore is stressed. While for Grace this stress is connected with both literal and folkloric reproduction, for Danticat it is perhaps the act of writing which wards off evil as she passes these legends on to her readers. As a woman and herself a “bearer of folklore,” Danticat’s travels inform and propel the transformation of oral literature into print culture, the weaving folklore into fiction.

As a woman writing tales from a woman’s perspective, Danticat connects with the gendered tradition of storytelling as she writes history in her own way. Through this format,

Danticat confronts painful histories to present a “work of historical remembrance, though clearly about the wounds of the past, also about the present and the future” (Braziel, “Re-membering

Défilée” 72). While characters such as Défilée are largely stripped of agency, Danticat serves as a “guardian of folk knowledge” as she furthers the legends that were passed down to her (Bush

764). By situating readers as recipients of folklore, Danticat explores the tension between the written and oral as she examines the use of the supernatural as both a tool of control as well as a means of escape. As David Scott argues in Conscripts of Modernity, there are multiple ways of telling a story; Danticat’s Krik? Krak! recognizes the multiplicity and variation inherent in legend and the multi-faceted nature of flight as she crafts a collection of interconnected short stories. If we take Michael Angrosino’s assertion that “national identity [is] drawn from local tradition,” Danticat’s work collects parables and folkloric references, painting a picture of

Haitian culture (114). However, at the same time, her texts also engage with the larger, diasporic tradition drawn from African culture. While in her work folklore is passed down through reproduction, Danticat employs literary reproduction to adapt folklore for a larger audience.

Like Défilée’s use of folklore and mysticism, for Danticat writing serves as an act of rebellion, as “an act of indolence, something to be done in a corner when you could have been learning to cook” (Danticat KK 219). While in Haiti, “writers are tortured and killed if they are men. Called lying whores, then raped and killed, if they are women,” it is Danticat’s own flight to the United States at the age of twelve that makes her writing possible (Danticat KK 221). More specifically, it is through writing, and folklore, that Danticat comes to terms with her own flight, using storytelling to quell the “old spirits that live in [her] blood” and to “have something to leave behind” (Danticat KK 223, 140). Through prose, Danticat turns to “roots- family, community, and ethnicity−as a source of personal identity and creative expression” (Davis 80).

In its concern for the “place of the individual within the collective,” Danticat’s work points to a larger negotiation of transnational identity (Brown-Rose 78). Throughout her work, Edwidge

Danticat renders the “lives of Haitian women visible” with tales of what it means to straddle two cultures (Chancy Framing 109). As Murdoch finds, “Danticat probes the parameters of what it means to be Haitian and affirms the valency of the hybridized, exilic Haitian subject who asserts her attachment to her homeland even as she interrogates the pros and cons of her own experience of migrancy” (140). In drawing on the motif of flight, Danticat illustrates that flight offers the hope of escape, but often comes at a price. Ultimately, her work stresses the effects of traumatic events left buried as Danticat is “firm in her belief that traumas must be confronted in order to be disarmed of their power to hurt” (Morgan and Youssef 221).

CHAPTER THREE

THE MONSTROUS AND THE BEAUTIFUL: PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL TRANSFORMTION IN THE WORKS OF PAULINE MELVILLE AND ELIZABETH NUNEZ

“As she spoke I could feel the richness of whatever was beginning to take place inside her…But most of all, she felt deeply alive, as if something were opening up inside her” - Pauline Melville, The Migration of Ghosts

In Pauline Melville’s short stories “Lucifer’s Shank” and “The Sparkling Bitch” from her collection The Migration of Ghosts (1998) and Elizabeth Nunez’s Anna In-Between (2009) and

Boundaries (2011), female protagonists Ellie, Susan and Beatrice are transformed by disease and disorder. While the bodies of the female protagonists are ravaged by forces beyond their control, the women emerge physically and emotionally transformed; although anorexia and breast cancer certainly cause physical discomfort and emotional distress, suffering brings a reconsideration of identity and increased comfort with the female body. In Melville’s “The Sparkling Bitch” anorexia nervosa26 serves to alienate Susan and express neocolonial critique; in “Lucifer’s

Shank,” breast cancer does not exclude Ellie, who is ill, but her healthy best friend. Similarly, in

Nunez’s novels, Beatrice’s battle with breast cancer unites her family in temporary migration as she pursues effective medical treatment. Together, the texts attest to the pull of illness and the changes that ensue. More than solely detailing the impact of disease, Melville and Nunez highlight the emotional side effects that accompany physical maladies. In doing so, the authors illustrate that disease offers the possibility for renewal through physical and emotional transformation.

26 As Kathleen Fitzpatrick and James Lock find, anorexia nervosa is “characterized by a low body mass index (BMI), fear of gaining weight, denial of current low weight and its impact on health, and amenorrhoea. Estimated prevalence is highest in teenage girls, and up to 0.7% of this age group may be affected...Most people with anorexia nervosa recover completely or partially, but about 5% die from the condition and 20% develop a chronic eating disorder.” 93

In the works under study, physical illness is directly related to changes in locale, with

Susan’s eating disorder manifesting after a trip to Nigeria and breast cancer patients Ellie and

Beatrice changing location to secure medical treatment. While flight offers a means of negotiating a legacy of abuse in novels such as Breath, Eyes, Memory, the women in these works turn not to dissociation, the form of figurative flight that prepares Sophie for her return home, but instead engage in travel shortly after their diagnoses. Though characters such as Sophie battle emotional demons, the severity of the protagonists’ physical conditions demands an immediate, and equally physical response. Through flight, the women return home−in a literal as well as metaphorical sense; although Ellie loses her battle with cancer, and Susan’s health is rapidly deteriorating, Beatrice’s prognosis is optimistic. Thus, in these works, disease functions as the force of inertia that propels temporary migration and a reconsideration of identity. While in many of the texts under study we witness characters seeking escape or migrating away from home, this chapter shifts focus to the connection between disease, migration and familial reconnection. When viewed in light of the other works this project considers, this chapter supports a reading of flight as multi-faceted; in focusing on the relationship between migration and material condition, I illustrate that flight comes as a result of physical, as well as emotional, distress. Ultimately, though, because the characters’ flights are motivated by the need to share their condition or seek medical treatment, as opposed to escape violence or abuse, migration is ephemeral and works instead as a form of treatment in its own right. For Beatrice Sinclair, especially, the need to return home is ever-pressing.

In examining the intersection between illness, flight and transformation, I discuss the way in which exile often accompanies ill health as well as the revitalized relationships that emerge as a result of serious medical treatment. In exploring the way in which these characters

94 are initially exiled by friends and family following their diagnoses, I understand exile as a condition of displacement that functions as a “mechanism for liberation” (Chancy 14). In each of these works, and most particularly in Nunez’s novels exile appears as an initial, knee-jerk reaction to a loved one’s news. In reality, though, exile functions as a cover for a much deeper emotion–fear. Although the protagonists are vastly transformed by illness, their relationships undergo a similar transformation. Because disease complicates relationships by introducing the threat of death, the resulting ties emerge strengthened. In the texts under study, good health, or lack of it, impacts feelings of citizenship and belonging. As in many of the other works under study, transnational migration27 proves central; read as a consequence of globalization, it functions as a seed of transformation and a means of healing. While in Melville’s works migration engenders physical decline for Susan and Ellie, in Nunez’s texts travel calls Beatrice to reconsider her status as a citizen, wife and mother. Therefore, this chapter seeks to examine the transformative property of disease in these works; though disease denies the afflicted status as capable citizens, it also offers an alternative sense of inclusion to protagonists. Collectively, these works call into question the “success” of transformative flight and illustrate the function of the body and disease as a form of exile.

As anthropologist Mary Douglas argues, the body is “a powerful symbolic form, a surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed and thus reinforced through the concrete language of the body. The body may also operate as a metaphor for culture” (qtd. in Jaggar and Bordo 13). Building on this, Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo assert, “at the farthest extremes, the practices of femininity may lead us to utter demoralization, debilitation, and death” (14). This chapter studies the transformation of such

27 Throughout, I understand transnationalism as the result of “globalization whereby a group of people, with their own special culture and folklore, are spread out over several countries or continents and continue to act as a unit” (Hill 8). 95

“docile bodies” into images of rebellion and depravity. I read these works with an eye towards the operation of body politics, understood throughout as the societal regulation of the human body as well as the struggle for individual and social control of the body. In viewing the body as a site of struggle, I highlight connections between the larger sociopolitical condition and the lives of the women in these texts. Through a focus on this attention to and policing of the female form which is magnified in light of medical treatment, we can see the practices of femininity as transformative as well as destructive. While eating disorders and breast cancer certainly affect men, they are largely viewed as “female diseases” that necessitate discretion and euphemism. As a result, the ill suffer through a period of socially-sanctioned ostracism before their loved ones come to terms with the consequences of the protagonists’ illnesses; perhaps more important than the physical transformation that accompanies disease is the emotional growth that the journey offers.

Manipulating Monstrosity

In The Migration of Ghosts Guyanese-born Pauline Melville explores issues such as migration and exile as she infuses her collection of twelve short stories with her own brand of mysticism. Throughout The Migration of Ghosts, Melville connects with oral tradition, infusing her writing with a folkloric quality as she “emphasiz[es] the shape-shifter, the trickster, the indeterminacy of gender, race, sexuality and nationality” (DeLoughrey 67). Beginning with the epigraph, an allusion to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Melville lets the voices of the “goste thee lede” as she calls upon mysticism and personal experience to present the transformation of Ellie in “Lucifer's Shank” and Susan in “The Sparkling Bitch.” While Ellie and Susan literally and figuratively disappear at times, their respective conditions bring issues such as colonization into

96 magnification; with the transformation of these two women, Melville points towards the corruption and exploitation that lies in the background.

In these two short stories, Melville queries the possibility of transformation and explores the multiple meanings of the term as she “transfigures marvelous realism” (Renk 101).28

Through the combination of the fantastical or supernatural and the ordinary, Melville presents her critique; in turning to mysticism to call the operations of corporations into question, the author offers condemnation under the cover of symbolism. Instead of overtly pointing a figure at neocolonial practices, she utilizes Susan’s mystical transformation to suggest that large-scale abuses, such as the attempted cover up of the oil spill in Nigeria, cannot remain under wraps. By emphasizing Susan’s monstrosity, or the potential to be “abnormally developed or grossly malformed” by anorexia, Melville calls traditional understandings of beauty into question

(OED). In “The Sparkling Bitch,” particularly, Melville constructs the character of Susan as a vehicle for social critique, most notably of the environmental disaster that her husband has no qualms covering up. While Ellie’s fight against breast cancer offers commentary on the definition of attractive appearance, disease offers Susan a means of resistance. Her flight, or travel, from her place of relative exile in the countryside, to the London banquet hall, allows her to strike a blow to her husband’s professional reputation. By turning herself into an object of curiosity and one open for scrutiny by those with power and privilege, Susan, symbolically, pushes back against the greed, corruption and abuse that her husband and Hay Oil stand for.

28 As Kathleen Renk details, “while some critics conflate magical and marvellous realism, it is important to distinguish the terms from one another. An international style found in literature and film, magical realism combines realism and the fantastic so that the marvellous seems to grow organically within the ordinary...It was Alejo Carpentier who ﬁrst referred to ‘lo real maravilloso americano.’ In the 1940s, after spending time among the Surrealists in Europe, Carpentier reacted to their style, particularly noting the ‘melting clocks’ in Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” and ﬁnding the strangeness and mystery of the Surrealists to be ‘premeditated’ and ‘manufactured’ rather than authentic” (103). 97

Born of a British mother and a Guyanese father, Melville describes herself as the “whitey in the woodpile” (Robinson-Walcott 101). As a champion of mixtures, Melville’s work emphasizes the “shape-shifter, the trickster, the indeterminacy of gender, race, sexuality and nationality” (DeLoughrey 67). As Robert Ness observes, Melville “brings to Caribbean writing voices that need to be heard in the full narrative of Caribbean culture” (65). In bringing in a variety of influences and voices into her writing, such as the use of Haitian Voodoo in “Erzulie” and the humorous voice of a well-traveled parrot in “The Parrot and Descartes,” Melville “takes on many voices, in many settings crossing boundaries of geography, race and culture in ways that few other writers do” (Robinson-Walcott 104). Her writing largely surpasses concerns of time and space to cross racial, cultural and geographic boundaries. While feminism “has long conceived of the body as a prison for women,” “Lucifer’s Shank” and “The Sparkling Bitch,” among her other works, depict women breaking free (Savory 55). While, sadly, the women are unable to fully break free of their bodily prisons, their outlook suggests a separation between emotional and physical captivity. Although their bodies have been taken over by disease, their hearts and minds have not. Though breast cancer ultimately claims Ellie’s life, she certainly makes the most of her situation. Instead of shrinking in despair, Ellie embraces the more youthful appearance that her mastectomy brings. Likewise, and perhaps even more explicitly,

Susan in “The Sparkling Bitch” manipulates her physical degeneration to embarrass her husband at an important event. Overtly aware of the shock and disgust that her physical transformation will occasion, Susan turns her “six stone”29 body into a walking accusation (Melville 132).

Expecting to greet his lovely wife, who he has not seen in over six months, in a green silk gown,

Charles, the ultimate “sparkling bitch” with his manicured nails and Rolex watch, goes pale and

“betray[s] his wife by refusing to stand and show her where he was” (Melville 133). Whereas

29 Approximately 85 lbs. 98

Susan suffers the exile of what we can only assume is a loveless marriage, as Charles refuses to divorce on the basis of reputation alone, his disavowal of his clearly ill wife solidifies the portrait of Charles as a greedy, self-obsessed man.

A Woman Transformed

As Susan Bordo writes in Unbearable Weight, “the physical body can be an instrument and medium of power” (143). The relation between the body and agency plays out in Melville’s

“Lucifer's Shank,” a short story that draws on allusions from Dante’s Inferno. Most explicitly, the protagonist, Ellie, reads about “following the pilgrim's journey through the circles of Hell”

(Melville 63). Melville engages with African and Caribbean culture as Dante’s guide, Virgil, is reminiscent of the Voodoo figure Papa Legba, or god of the crossroads. More specifically, in

“Lucifer’s Shank,” an early hospital scene places Ellie as a pilgrim-like figure, “look[ing] like a different person, blind and not knowing where to go” as her best friend, the unnamed narrator, takes her arm and serves as her guide (Melville 67). Here, Ellie’s figurative blindness evidences the beginnings of her physical transformation; by “blinding” Ellie, Melville suggests a larger cultural blindness. Although the narrator does not know where she is leading Ellie, Ellie’s blindness engenders a reliance that amplifies the friendship between the two women. While the friend is initially overwhelmed at Ellie’s news, and even avoids her calls at one point, she soon realizes that her actions are selfish and hurtful. Much like the restored familial connections that are more prominent in Nunez’s works, disease prompts the revitalization of a long-standing friendship; whereas the women were certainly close prior to Ellie’s illness, the unnamed friend becomes a near-permanent fixture at Ellie’s side following her diagnosis.

In “Lucifer’s Shank,” magnification and disappearance directly relate to sight. Falling in line with the binaries Melville constructs and dismantles throughout her story, Ellie’s lack of

99 sight attributes an ultimately fallible “second sight” to the narrator. In this early instance of mysticism, the narrator notes that she had a premonition that “something terrible was going to happen” (Melville 67). Although the premonition is later revealed to be misplaced, Melville moves from the general or global to the personal or specific through second sight; rather than serving as a “warning about the holocaust,” as the narrator thought, the premonition relates to

Ellie’s personal and transformative holocaust, her battle with cancer (67). In connecting one woman’s illness with a cornerstone of post-colonial history, the author suggests that though transformation can certainly be global, it can also be personal. While the Holocaust the narrator initially refers to resulted in widespread destruction, this short story follows the very personal destruction of an individual.

In “Lucifer’s Shank” Ellie is physically and emotionally transformed. While on the one hand she embraces the liberation cancer offers, she lashes out in anger; although the disease ravages her body, her physical form is transformed into something majestic. Through the figure of Ellie, Melville calls into question what we consider to be monstrous or grotesque along with what is considered beautiful. With the voice of the unnamed narrator, Melville proffers the transformed Ellie as a sight of beauty, a “strikingly beautiful empress” in her hospital bed (83).

Ellie’s beauty at the conclusion of the short story does not come without marks along the way.

As Ellie battles cancer, her body is transformed and deformed in the fight against the invader threatening her life. As the narrator remarks, “this was another self come true, the self that could have been. She lay there with a magnificence that I had never seen or understood before”

(Melville 83).

For Ellie, the most noticeable physical transformation comes when she undergoes her mastectomy, an operation that threatens to strip her femininity and render her a deformed and

100 incomplete female, at least according to contemporary perceptions or constructions of women.

Ironically, the surgery works to reverse time as it transforms Ellie into a Peter Pan-like figure with the “strange androgynous look of youth” (Melville 70). Through the progression of Ellie’s breast, and later bone cancer, Melville highlights the transformative power of surgery and disease as forces marking and molding the body and spirit. Notwithstanding the obvious physical markers of Ellie’s cancer, the disease is at times largely invisible as the narrator notes that despite the re-occurrance of cancer “there was no sign of anything wrong” (Melville 76-77). Like

Ellie’s own transformation, the disease itself retracts and re-emerges into view as Melville shifts the focus in this text. Given that “culture’s grip on the body is a constant, intimate fact of everyday life,” as Bordo asserts, it is interesting that Ellie’s mastectomy does not immediately occasion discussions of reconstruction, but rather the championing of her new look (17). If indeed “the body−what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend to the body−is a medium of culture,” we can see Melville presenting an alternative model of femininity through Ellie (Jaggar and Bordo 13). In painting this image of survival rather than vanity, the author directly connects disease and transformation with Ellie’s surgery leaving a visible marker of her battle with cancer.

Like the unnamed boy in “The Sparkling Bitch,” Ellie’s body is marked as a result of external factors; aside from the obvious shrinking (as a result of weight loss), perhaps the most salient reminder of cancer in the text is Ellie’s mastectomy scar. Despite the emotional and physical changes cancer brings, Ellie tries to embrace these changes, even stating that she quite likes the scar that serves as a physical reminder and magnification of her disease (Melville 70).

In fact, the most explicit evidence of Ellie’s personal growth is her changing opinion of her mastectomy scar. While at first she sought to minimize or hide it and “retract herself from view,”

101 which points to a connection with flight in terms of disappearance, as the story progresses “she walked the length of a shopping centre and triumphantly bought a scarlet cotton dress with a low neck and tiny black pattern” (Melville 72, 77-78). Thus, the protagonist moves from a sense of vulnerability related to the potential observance of the scar and a desire to take on an alternate persona to a healthier acceptance of the transformation her disease offers. This becomes clear when Ellie dons a low-cut dress that highlights the most explicit physical reminder of her battle with cancer. Hence, Melville proffers an alternative understanding of transformation, and in particular, the transformation that life-threatening illnesses enact upon the psyche and body.

Through the character of Ellie, Melville models a way of coming to terms with the forces that intervene and disrupt our lives, which ultimately suggests that the success or outcome of transformation is not directly tied to living through it but rather the growth one achieves as a result. Therefore, as I have suggested, disease affords the possibility for emotional as well as physical transformation; sadly, Ellie’s ultimate transformation, death, takes her all too soon.

At the conclusion of her text Melville incorporates mysticism and alternative belief systems as she writes, in the narrator’s voice, “according to some groups of South American

Indians, it is the manner of death, the way that you die, that determines your after-life... The real self is revealed only in death” (83). Hence, it is only in the process of transformation, and ironically cancer, that Ellie’s true self is revealed, a self which then can only be seen and not heard, a self that emerges in death. As Elaine Savory notes, “in Melville’s stories the body is essentially a misleading disguise and there is often an ironic relation between the façade of a personality and its actual nature” (50). If the body is a disguise, then as Ellie’s body begins to fail, the disguise strips away, revealing a truer self. Ellie emerges as a “strikingly beautiful empress…a magnificence that [she] never seen or understood before,” which suggests that

102 transformation is more about beauty than monstrosity (Melville 83). For the narrator, and for the reader, Ellie offers a new way of thinking about beauty and the transformation that is death as the narrator begins to view Ellie, and death, in a new way. While Ellie certainly takes flight in death, her battle with cancer serves as a flight in its own right. In understanding flight not as escape, but as affording the possibility for transformation, it is clear that disease is the catalyst that brings

Ellie to a place of peace. Hence, cancer serves as the inertia that occasions a spiritual awakening through literature. In reading and discussing works such as Dante’s Inferno and Rushdie’s Is

Nothing Sacred?, Ellie ponders the destructive power of popular religion and her political views.

As a result of this exploration, Ellie “felt deeply alive, as if something was opening up inside her” (Melville 65). This awakening, of course, emphasizes the transformative power of a particular kind of cancer upon one individual. At the same time though, Ellie’s movement towards acceptance serves as a reminder that that living with disease, and especially an incurable one, is indeed a process.

Writing specifically on the bodily changes that take place during the ultimate transformation, Melville proclaims that “life is the mask that drops off and death protrudes from underneath as the reality” (83). In “Lucifer’s Shank” Melville highlights the monstrosity of life as she offers a warning and cultural critique. If the body can become an avenue of escape, as

Savory claims, then Melville’s story brings us to a place of confrontation. This story suggests that “the bod[y] is a misleading disguise and there is often an ironic relation between the façade of a personality and its actual nature” (Savory 50). In “Lucifer’s Shank,” cancer, ironically, strips

Ellie of the ability to hide. In depicting life as a mask, Melville points to the disappearance and retraction of the true self that only emerges in death. Despite the potential for a monstrous transformation, Ellie’s beauty emerges and is magnified as she is observed immobile and

103 incoherent on her deathbed. In “Lucifer's Shank” Ellie’s disappearance is incremental, but nonetheless serves as a warning against being one in the “silent crowd drained of life” (Melville

66). So much as Paula Morgan and Valerie Youssef assert that “the body shelters, masks, reflects, expresses, shields the self from the gaze of the other,” Melville’s work attests to the equalizing, and penetrating, power of cancer (171).

The Shrinking Violet

Like Melville’s “Lucifer’s Shank,” “The Sparkling Bitch” explores female transformation; just as cancer performs a transformative operation in “Lucifer’s Shank,” “The

Sparkling Bitch” employs anorexia nervosa to deform the body of Susan Hay, wife of oil executive Charles Hay, (the head of Hay Oil Incorporated). Featuring a journey to Nigeria, a country Charles characterizes as having “too much heat and too much oppressive emptiness,” the short story addresses issues of poverty and corruption alongside Susan’s metamorphosis

(Melville 119). While for a period of time Ellie’s battle with cancer was largely invisible,

Susan’s transformation in “Lucifer’s Shank” is quite noticeable. If “anorexia is not a philosophical attitude; it is a debilitating affliction,” as Bordo asserts, then Melville presents

Susan’s eating disorder as a condition that marks and exiles (147). With “anorexia nervosa and bulimia… reaching epidemic proportions today,” Melville fuses disorder and mysticism to draw parallels between the shrinking female form and the corrupt postcolonial state (Bordo 139).

It is a chance encounter in Nigeria that brings change for Susan. While accompanying her husband, Charles, on a trip to tidy up “business” in a nation that his company has left

“stinking of oil spillages,” she has a brief, wordless exchange and is never the same (Melville

119). More specifically, Susan embarks on a journey of transformation after she observes a “boy of about thirteen…. clearly the victim of starvation: his thin black limbs were crossed and

104 sharply folded like those of a spider playing dead” (Melville 120). As with “Lucifer’s Shank,”

Melville explores issues of the gaze as she positions Susan as a colonizing figure. Eschewing issues of gender, Melville presents a rich, white body gazing at an impoverished African body, one that is starving yet could easily prosper with the intervention of Western power. Utilizing the figure of the Nigerian boy, Melville calls upon the costs of colonialism as she depicts a victim of starvation “playing dead” at a rural gas station.

While in “Lucifer’s Shank” disappearance is figured in terms of Ellie’s desire to mask her scar and retract from view, in “The Sparkling Bitch” disappearance is introduced as Susan fails to recognize the figure as human but rather notices the “angularity of the black body outlined against the pale concrete forecourt and the faded red gasoline pump made her freeze with shock when she realised. Despite skeletal thinness, the boy’s figure resonated with a sort of violent power” (Melville 120). Thus, the boy’s malformed or monstrous appearance captures Susan’s attention; as a victim of colonization, he stands in for those who cannot speak, the multitude of subalterns that comprise his country. Interestingly, he never speaks, yet an exchange occurs. This points to a mystical influence that surpasses words. As with “Lucifer’s Shank,” Melville infuses the political in the background in constructing an African body through Susan’s gaze. In placing readers observing an emaciated African boy with what, ostensibly, is well-meaning pity, the author furthers an image of an exoticized, captivating “other.” At the same time, it is problematic that Melville engages in mysticism through the African body; in collapsing her construction of the African boy with Susan’s observation, through the voice of an unnamed omniscient narrator, we are only left with the white, colonialist perspective. As a result, the image of the African boy remains shrouded in mystery, approachable only through the lens of mysticism.

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Like the wasteland that is his country, the faded gasoline pump stands in direct contrast to the immense wealth of Hay Oil, represented by the figure of Susan Hay. Though the boy is not inherently violent, he appears to possess, or is possessed by, a “violent power” that will later reign over Susan. Although he does not possess political or physical power, the striking physique of the figure reflects a power within. Hence, Melville subtly presents a “brand of magical realism

[that is the] art of the unseen within the visible” (Francois 39). With this, the author calls readers to look beyond physical description, to ponder the other forces at work in characters’ physical transformation. While the unnamed boy is clearly emaciated due to malnutrition, in a similar, but very different way, Susan’s body shrinks as she denies herself sustenance. Through magical realism, Melville suggests that Susan’s bodily changes/eating disorder stem not from a dissatisfaction with her body, but from a “spell” that, ironically, transforms a white, wealthy body into a reflection of the “skeletal thinness” of the boy she met in Nigeria (120). As the story continues, Melville develops the suggestion that Susan is influenced by a supernatural force.

Most explicitly, Melville writes: “a strange and powerful god gradually emerged to stalk the clearings...He began to rule her with a rod of iron until there was no distinguishing between her and himself. She welcomed this implacable god of starvation, who opposed all fertility, excess and fecundity” (130).

As Jim Hannan notes, in “acknowledge[ing] the efficacy of obeah,”30 Melville lends credence to the mystical while leaving much up for interpretation (101). In specifying the force of change as ruling with a “rod of iron,” but not directly naming the influence, Melville weaves an often invisible level of knowledge within the visible, as Pierre Francois suggests. In providing

30 “A highly charged and ambiguous term, Obeah (sometimes spelled obia) refers to various forms of spiritual power. Occurring primarily in the Anglophone Caribbean...it is one of the most widespread words of African origin to be found in the region. Like vodou (or voodoo) in the Francophone Caribbean, its varying meanings, its shifting significance, and its differing valuation over time mirror unresolved tensions between colonialist and indigenist (or other anticolonialist) viewpoints” (Bilby). 106 these signifying characteristics, the author implies that Ogun, the god or loa of iron in the Yoruba religion, is the force that holds renders Susan a “living accusation” (Melville 132). Illustrating an influence that grows in relation to Susan’s acquiescence, Melville writes: “An iron will had her in thrall. She moved one leg after the other as if she were fitted with false limbs” (132). Thus, through an unnamed force that is likely Ogun, Susan learns that the answer to “everything” is simply not to eat. As a result of her dedication she is transformed into a “blazing witness,” in this case a witness, and physical representation of, the unique brand of neglect and exploitation that corporation such as Hay Oil exact on less advantaged peoples (133).

It is during the brief encounter with the Nigerian boy that Susan first feels the violent power that transforms her into the “murderous ghost” who horrifies guests at the London gala

(Melville 132). In this moment of contact, neither party speaks “but an exchange had taken place.

The brief contact enabled her to break free” (Melville 121). While on the one hand this notion of breaking free could be read as referring to the intense, wordless interaction, it also forecasts the sense of purpose and freedom Susan feels in surrendering to “the god she honoured” (Melville

133). Melville’s trickster-like writing style makes one ponder what exactly is exchanged in this moment. If indeed the boy was possessed by the same power that takes hold of Susan, then perhaps this moment is ground zero, so to speak, for the beginning of Susan’s transformation.

With the figure of Susan, Melville critiques Western action and reaction as “Susan Hay squatted down and pulled a US fifty-dollar note from her purse” (120). Placing Susan in the position of colonizer, Melville suggests that money can’t make it right; what the boy clearly needs is food, yet Susan offers him money−money which, even more ironically, is not legal tender and which would require a transformation of its own to yield sustenance. Although it is initially guilt that influences Susan to offer money to the boy, it is “an irrational empathy [that] kept her there”

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(Melville 120). Through the voice of the narrator, the author critiques Western views that would hold Susan’s empathy to be “irrational.” While Susan is initially aligned with Hay Oil and

Western influence as seen in her default reaction, her subsequent response exemplifies the beginnings of her transformation as well as the power the boy holds over her. Most notably,

Melville writes that Susan “needed some response from the figure at her side in order to be released from the spell…It was not gratitude that she needed exactly. She was not sure what it was. Perhaps just an acknowledgment of her existence” (121). With this, Melville suggests that

Susan’s captivation comes as a result of her own feeling of disappearance. Perhaps because she feels insignificant to Charles, Susan has never fully developed, emotionally or physically, and instead remains in a liminal, stunted and easily-impressionable state.

In employing the figure of the unnamed boy, and more explicitly the character of Susan

Hay, Melville again plays with monstrosity; the boy’s eyes are captivating because they are equally disgusting and compelling. The author writes, “his eyelids had been bitten by insects but the eyes beneath were huge and dark and compelling” (Melville 121). Clearly, the boy represents the costs of colonialism and the neglect that often accompanies the post-colonial state. On a different, yet also malformed level, after twenty-two years of marriage, Susan’s “appearance was still slender and girlish” and from an emotional standpoint, “her abilities, for some reason, never developed” (Melville 125-26). In constructing Susan and the boy in this manner, as physically compelling in very different ways, Melville invites comparison. By painting two characters in stages of halted development, and who are normally worlds apart, the author highlights their parallel exploitation through the language of monstrosity. Ironically, the two characters are both in a subordinate position of power in relation to Charles and Hay Oil Incorporated. While the levels of exploitation certainly vary, with Susan’s neglect mirroring that of the larger disregard

108 for Nigerian citizens, her treatment falls far short of the destruction that comes as a result of the oil spill that left villages devastated following a “cursory clean-up” (Melville 119). More specifically, Susan has the latent possibility for monstrosity as she is both physically malformed and emotionally underdeveloped, a monstrosity which fully emerges in the final scene of the story. Writing on female slenderness, Bordo notes the contradictory images of the “slender body suggesting powerlessness and contraction of female social space in one context, autonomy and freedom in the next” (26). In light of this, we see Susan as powerless yet powerful; through her changing body she offers a rebuttal to her husband’s actions.

Much like “Lucifer’s Shank,” in “The Sparkling Bitch” the most explicit illustration of

Susan’s transformation comes in the final scene as she joins Charles at an important social event.

Again referencing issues of disappearance and invisibility, Susan is not noticed upon entering, yet her physical deterioration soon attracts attention as the guests are shocked at seeing the way in which a mystical force has magnified her monstrosity. Susan’s illness or possession

(depending on one’s interpretation) has turned the once girl-like woman into a rail-thin figure.

By honoring Ogun in refusing food, “the god she honoured reciprocated by turning her into a blazing witness,” Susan has become a witness of the effects of colonialism, big business and extreme poverty (Melville 133). While “these disorders…reflect and call our attention to some of the central ills of our culture−from our historical heritage of disdain for the body,” in “The

Sparkling Bitch” disease functions to highlight corporate corruption and the economic disparity between the first and third worlds (Bordo 139-40). Moreover, as Bordo notes, “the steadily shrinking space permitted the female body see[s] expressive of discomfort with greater female power and presence” (xxi). This is particularly true in terms of Susan and Charles’ relationship.

Despite his attempts to lock his rebellious wife away in a cottage, Susan’s ironic rebuttal, a play

109 on shrinking space and form, magnifies his discomfort while taking power back in perhaps the only means possible.

In terms of Susan’s implication with the oil industry and capitalism/imperialism, the final scene of the story transforms her into a witness of the costs of colonialism and infuses an element of monstrosity and disgust into an elegant affair. In the last lines of the story Melville writes, “when Susan rose shakily to her feet, uncontrollable diarrhoea had stained her dress and dripped from the chair. White with fury, Charles Hay took her by the arm and led her slowly from the hall” (134). It is interesting here that Charles turns white rather than darkening to a shade of red; he seeks to disappear so as not to call attention to himself. Unlike the narrator in

“Lucifer’s Shank,” Charles is not a supportive, Legba-like guide but is more similar to Susan’s neighbors who pretend they don’t see her. Useful here are J. Brooks Bouson’s writings on shame, which emphasize the way “shame, and its related feeling states- chagrin, embarrassment, mortification, lowered self-esteem, disgrace, and humiliation−can lead to withdrawl or avoidant behaviors, which reflect the desire of shamed individuals to conceal or hide themselves in an attempt to protect against feelings of exposure” (6). In “The Sparkling Bitch,” Susan, who according to Charles, is “clearly dying,” causes him to “burn with rage” when her foul breath and emaciated appearance engender great embarrassment for him (Melville 133).

In Embodied Shame, J. Brooks Bouson writes on the connection between shame and bodily fluids. She notes that “associated with body substances and waste products–such as tears, saliva, feces, urine, vomit, and mucus–the abject is defiling and disgusting, but because it is part of the self and body, it cannot be totally expelled or rejected” (4). This is especially true in the case of Susan’s diarrhoea, a symptom of her eating disorder that mirrors the oil spill her husband attempted to cover up. To a man obsessed with appearances, Susan’s accident transforms her into

110 a living accusation, making the unspoken or dismissed visible. This magnifies and renders personal the larger corruption and damage that Hay Oil has caused. In this scene, Susan and her diarrhoea mark a place of wealth and a symbol of Western materialism with a stain, a physical reminder of a common symptom that residents of Nigeria and other “third world” countries suffer and even expire from.

While Ellie in “Lucifer’s Shank” dies as a beautiful empress, Susan shrinks from view, transformed by the event into a “murderous ghost.” In this way, Susan’s disappearance is magnified yet Ellie’s presence is highlighted and venerated. If anorexia offers “an entry into the privileged male world” as Jaggar and Bordo claim, then the eating disorder brings Susan to a greater understanding of business dealings (23). Instead of affording Susan “a way to become what is valued in our culture,” anorexia transforms her into a horrific, accusatory sight (Jaggar and Bordo 23). Through the trope of transformation, Melville takes two women on similar yet disparate journeys as she offers cultural critique and warning to readers. By manipulating cancer as well as the Voodoo figure Ogun, Melville celebrates transformation in very different ways.

While Ellie’s body is physically and emotionally scarred from her battle with cancer, Susan’s corporeality serves as a “living accusation.” Her ravaged frame stands in contrast to the opulence and waste surrounding her, engendering in observers the same guilt she initially felt gazing at the

Nigerian boy. In opposition to Foucault’s concept of the “docile body,’ bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation [and] ‘improvement,”

Susan’s figure points to a less common form of regulation (Jaggar and Bordo 14). More specifically, it is not the “practices of femininity [that] lead [her] to utter demoralization, debilitation and death,” but a mystically-induced disorder that leaves her rail-thin (Jaggar and

Bordo 14). While the influence of Ogun is indeed a form of external regulation, one also

111 wonders what role Susan plays in this shift. Rather than shrinking under the pressure to lose weight for aesthetic purposes, Susan’s illness serves a far more subversive purpose. Though she may operate “under the influence,” I see her as far from the docile body that Foucault paints.

Although at first glance the political in “Lucifer’s Shank” and “The Sparkling Bitch” appears to lie in the background, Melville utilizes the process of transformation to magnify what lies beneath. While “Lucifer’s Shank” transforms Ellie into a beautiful yet tragic figure in death,

“The Sparkling Bitch” offers an enhanced opportunity for critique as Melville turns Susan Hay into a walking accusation of the evils of colonialism and Western influence. Whereas Ellie is actively engaged with education reform, Susan is more passively transformed and is mystically taken over as her body becomes an argument of its own. The approaches in each story are quite different. In “bring[ing] to Caribbean writing voices that need to be heard in the full narrative of

Caribbean culture,” Melville explores the meaning of transformation as she offers up two female

“sacrifices” who emerge emotionally and physically transformed (Ness 65). While Bordo asserts,

“we may be obsessed with our bodies, but we are hardly accepting of them,” Susan stands in opposition to this (15). Throughout “The Sparkling Bitch” Melville moves Susan from being “in the hands of [one] definer” to another, using Susan to comment upon the status of the postcolonial, neocolonial state (Robinson-Walcott 15). In writing on the physical diminution of the protagonist and utilizing the body as “an instrument and medium of power” Melville indirectly comments upon the disorders “reaching epidemic proportions today” (Bordo 139, 143).

Ultimately, though, these two short stories evidence the transformation that flight and disease offer; while Ellie takes flight in death, Susan’s journey to Nigeria sets off a chain of events that exact her own metamorphosis. Through the use of mysticism, Melville grants validity to the supernatural and turns two female bodies into vehicles for social commentary. With these works,

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Melville manipulates the flight of protagonists Ellie and Susan to offer her own resistance to problematic social ills; in this way, fiction allows Melville to explore the contradictions that are implicit in living as a Caribbean woman in London.

The Body as an Instrument of Power

In an interview with Barbara Lewis, Elizabeth Nunez notes that she is “very interested in this tension between our private desires and our public responsibilities” (204). This is especially true of her works Anna-In-Between and Boundaries; in this pair of novels, Nunez examines the way in which late-stage breast cancer transforms one woman’s physical appearance and outlook on life. Through a focus on reactions to this disease, the author highlights the strengthened relationships that come from caretaking. Similar to the way in which Ellie’s best friend in

“Lucifer’s Shank” remains by her side, Beatrice’s daughter and husband express a sense of responsibility or duty to render care. While Anna, Beatrice’s daughter, ultimately serves as the primary caregiver, largely because her gender ostensibly makes her better equipped to handle this “women’s disease,” she must repress feelings of revulsion in favor of the very public face of strength and acceptance. As a Caribbean, African-American woman living in the United States,

Nunez often speaks about “life as an exercise in denial and ‘voluntary exclusion;’” interestingly, this sense of exclusion enters in these works with respect to the way in which Beatrice initially avoids medical care and shields her family from her illness (Lewis 202). Much like the figure of

Anna Sinclair in her novels Anna In-Between and Boundaries, Nunez migrated to the United

States at a young age after “arriv[ing] here from Trinidad, for the first time, in 1963, on a student visa” (Nunez “How I Came” 373). This migration at the early age of nineteen serves as fodder for writing that explores the intersection between disease and migration.

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In Nunez’s Anna In-Between and Boundaries Anna is stuck “in the middle between her mother and father” (Anna-In-Between 110).31 As an immigrant, she is positioned as neither “fully at home on the island of their birth, neither fully at home in America” (Nunez AIB 314). Through a focus on physicality, Nunez paints Anna as phenotypically and ideologically exiled; her physiognomy as light-skinned marks her as different while her insistence on the quality of her mother’s medical treatment brings the relationship between parent and child to a head. In

“Mathematical Limbs and Other Eventualities,” Elaine Savory discusses Shape-Shifter,

Melville’s first collection of short stories; Savory maintains that “feminism has long conceived of the body as a prison for women, at least a means whereby women are defined and limited”

(55). This is especially true in the pair of novels under study as Anna and Beatrice emerge as disparately imprisoned; while Beatrice self-isolates as a result of her illness, avoiding treatment for the lump in her breast for over two years, Anna’s geographic distance spurs emotional disconnection. As a “visible immigrant,” Anna is trapped in a state of limbo and it is only through the return “home” to care for her mother that Anna comes to a fuller understanding of herself. For Anna, as well as her mother, disease offers escape from confinement, a means of breaking free from the bodily prison. Whether freeing oneself in the service of others, or coming to terms of oneself as a woman, breast cancer in Nunez’s works serves as a force of transformation for patient and caregiver alike.

In discussing Anna-In-Between and Boundaries, I am concerned about the way in which breast cancer affords Beatrice physical and emotional transformation and rebirth. Though early in the novel Beatrice is depicted with “dull” skin and “lackluster” eyes, Anna In-Between concludes with an image of Anna’s parents as “two bodies … glued together as one…The man, her father, is holding the woman, her mother, close to his chest, folded in his arms. He presses

31 Subsequent references will refer to Anna In-Between as AIB. 114 her head into the well of his shoulder. Light bounces off her mother’s bare scalp, the skin stretched taut across hard bone. Her head glitters; it shines. Her father draws her mother closer to his heart” (Nunez AIB 20, 312). This scene of Anna’s parents dancing to Nat King Cole incorporates imagery to illustrate the revitalization of a marriage. Ironically, and perhaps understandably, disease strengthens marital bonds for this couple. In particular, Nunez juxtaposes harsh elements (bare scalp, hard bone) with tenderness (glued together, folded in his arms) to illustrate the duality of disease and the complexity of human relationships in response to personal crises.

In Anna In-Between and Boundaries the admission of disease is deferred as it is revealed that Beatrice had “felt it for two years” (Nunez AIB 110). In terming the tumor “it,” Nunez parallels the physical distance between mother and daughter, a distance so vast that it is termed a

“safe distance,” in that “in their household, they do not expose their bodies, not to each other.

Husbands and wives may have to bare their naked bodies to each other, but not mothers and daughters” (Nunez AIB 41). Hence, for Beatrice’s mother, and many women of her culture, distance is “safe;” propriety and fear give way to the necessity of medical treatment. Perhaps strange to those from Western culture, intimate relationships bring husbands and wives to “have to” bear their naked bodies, as if intimacy or stripping down is sanctioned or prescribed. As the text continues, Nunez gives readers a glimpse of the “lump pushing out beneath the skin on her mother’s left breast [with a] thin trail of partially dried blood beneath it” (AIB 42). Despite the fact that Beatrice waited three days to show her daughter, Anna, her tumor, she is depicted as

“calm” as she lifts her arm to reveal “another large lump, her lymph nodes swollen, pushing against her skin” (Nunez AIB 43). In what many may regard as grotesque description, with the

115 tumor literally expanding towards the viewer, this scene depicts Beatrice’s demeanor as one of acceptance in the face of battle.

Though it is perplexing as to why Beatrice would delay medical treatment, one reason why she hesitates to reveal her condition to her husband and daughter is because “in her parent’s social circles, any weakness is a character flaw…Sickness and death are the ultimate evidence of weakness and failure” (Nunez AIB 67). Rather, “self-control is the holy grail of the upper middle class. To lose control over one’s self is to be humiliated” (Nunez AIB 67). In Unbearable Weight

Susan Bordo discusses culture’s grip on the body. In particular, Bordo finds that our bodies learn, through routine, “which gestures are forbidden and which required, how violable or inviolable are the boundaries of our bodies, how much space around the body may be claimed, and so on” (16). This is especially true when considering Beatrice’s reaction to the insidious lump in her breast. Because in her social circles serious illness equates weakness, she retains knowledge of her breast lump as “to talk of cancer is to stir memories of shame and defeat. To talk of cancer is to conjure pictures of rotting flesh, women reduced to stinking carcasses, raw meat leaking onto ulcerous sores” (Nunez AIB 228). Most shockingly, these women, Beatrice’s friends, “are afraid to talk about cancer. Cancer has no regard for class or good breeding. Cancer does not care if the blouse you are wearing was bought in New York, if the label was a designer’s” (Nunez AIB 228-29). As this statement suggests, cancer evokes aversion because of the fear it inspires; for those of means, cancer is one of the few situations they cannot buy themselves out of. While wealth certainly affords access to medical treatment, it cannot fully prevent the conversion of healthy cells into malignant ones.

This sense of socially-sanctioned propriety extends to Beatrice’s relationship with her husband, John. Perhaps reflecting the notion that to share the news of her discovery (the lump)

116 would means that it is real, and could even kill her, Beatrice waits over two years to tell her husband about the lump. As Anna’s father relates, “your mother and I respect each other’s privacy. That is the way we have always lived our lives…I knew she would tell me when she was ready” (Nunez AIB 53). With this, Nunez implies that Anna’s father was cognizant of

Beatrice’s illness; he had felt the lump yet elected to remain silent on the matter. In favoring respect over responsibility, Mr. Sinclair inherently participates in the silence around his wife’s disease. In remaining silent, Beatrice and John, participate in the “cultural practices that objectify and sexualize us;” treatment is delayed and illness denied in favor of control and cover (Bordo

28). If the body is a text of culture as well as a “direct locus of social control,” as Michael

Foucault, among others, claim, then Beatrice, unfortunately, emerges as a pawn in a fight she doesn’t even have a voice in (Jaggar and Bordo 13).

In Anna In-Between the “insidious” cancer is an inherited trauma as Beatrice’s “mother died at fifty-six of breast cancer. In those colonial days on the island there was no chemotherapy, not for those without money, not for locals without connections. The tumor on her grandmother’s breast just grew larger until it broke through her skin. It was bloody and ugly” (Nunez AIB 114,

44). Hence, in a twisted sense, money affords life, or at least the possibility of it. Not only is

Beatrice up against a system that precludes effective treatment, but also a legacy or family history with the disease. Beatrice has seen the emotional and physical damage that breast cancer causes as her own mother passed away due to breast cancer; her mother’s death truly sheds light on the avoidance tactics she employs. Much like the cancer invading her body, Beatrice’s mother’s tumor looms as a vilified demon, the personification of petulance. As a result of this tumor, a “demon...eating away her [mother’s] healthy flesh,” Beatrice “fears that the seed for the same disease may be lying dormant in her breasts, biding its time” (Nunez AIB 153, 68). With

117 the seed metaphor, Beatrice blames genetics or a higher power for placing an embryonic form of disease within her. In true pessimistic fashion, she terms cancer as something of a “boogey man” waiting to attack. In stark contrast, and clinical fashion, Anna proclaims, “the lump on her mother’s breast will not be benign. One in five women will be diagnosed each year. For a woman whose mother had breast cancer, the odds increase” (Nunez AIB 66). However harsh,

Anna represents a more accepting and realistic view of disease and life expectancy, which is far from the false optimism some may expect.

In this pair of novels, Nunez writes of the polarization treatment can bring. Debate over

Beatrice’s medical care divides the family as Anna advocates for treatment in the United States while Beatrice “won’t go anywhere else” (AIB 60). In respect to this, Anna is advised: “don’t oppose her. She has made up her mind. She will be treated here, in our country, in our homeland.

She is proud of our doctors” (Nunez AIB 62). In Anna In-Between, medical treatment becomes aligned with nationalism as Beatrice vehemently resists outside care. Despite the realities of conditions so bleak that “they use newspapers instead of sheets,” Beatrice is insistent upon obtaining care at ‘home” (Nunez AIB 60). While Drs. Pak and Ramdoolal examine Beatrice, she is bluntly advised, “if you want to die, Mrs. Sinclair… stay here” (Nunez AIB 115). Writing on various forms of violence in the Caribbean, Paula Morgan and Valerie Youssef find that the body

“marks the boundary between the self and other [which] shelters, masks, reflects, expresses, shields the self from the gaze of the other” (171). Given this, it is interesting that Beatrice hesitates to expose her body to further (foreign) examination. While Beatrice and John remain silent and shelter Beatrice’s body from the gaze of medical professionals, the lump can no longer be ignored. When the lump pushes out from underneath the skin, and conditions become truly desperate, Beatrice breaks her silence and formally shares the news with her husband. This news

118 soon reaches her daughter, Anna, who insists that her mother seek medical treatment in the

United States. This insistence by her transnational daughter, along with her doctor’s advice, eventually brings Beatrice to obtain treatment outside her unnamed Caribbean nation. While

Beatrice’s refusal to seek treatment abroad speaks to a sense of nationalism, her reluctance also betrays a concern with foreign observation and intervention. Ironically, though, only those from

“outside” can effectively treat her; it is that eventual decision to seek medical care abroad that saves her life.

Following the theme of silence and distancing, even Beatrice’s medical care is relatively

“hands off.” For instance, Beatrice “allows Dr. Lee Pak to press his thumb against the vein in her wrist or to check her pulse at her neck, but he is never allowed to examine her under her clothes, or, God forbid, without her clothes” (Nunez AIB 73). In yet another instance “Dr. Ramdoolal takes barely a minute to examine Mrs. Sinclair. He asks her to unbutton her blouse. He sees the tumor, the size of a lemon, pushing out of her bra. He grimaces. He does not need her to take off her bra, he says. He has seen all he needs to see. He asks if there is also a lump under her arm.

Beatrice nods” (Nunez AIB 109). Together, these passages illustrate the downfall of propriety, the avoidance of fear, and ineffective medical treatment. In a society in which women “allow” their doctors to check their vital signs, it is no wonder that treatment is delayed. Even in this scene of “diagnosis,” Beatrice remains fully clothed; the most vital part of her (with regard to this disease) remains covered. The tumor, ironically described a fruit, visually protrudes, undeniably announcing its presence. Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that Dr. Ramdoolal elects not to perform a manual examination. Instead, he relies upon visual inspection (and not even a full one that that) along with patient testimony to come to conclusions about Beatrice’s health and medical treatment. Present, too, is Anna; her reaction is equally reflective of the

119 sociocultural dynamics that govern the island, its inhabitants, and their medical treatment. At this moment Anna “wants to hug her mother, put her arms around her shoulders and comfort her. But they do not hug in her house. Stiff upper lip. Self-control. Discipline over the emotions. These are the values they believe in. Yet the trembling has increased on her mother’s lips” (Nunez AIB

106). If the body is a “direct locus of special control” as Jaggar and Bordo assert, then Beatrice’s body is not only the field on which this battle is fought but also an agent in this battle (13). More specifically, this is the first instance in which Beatrice has betrayed the iron-clad sense of control she has internalized. Her trembling lips point to fear yet also suggest a willingness to comply. In seeking treatment, Beatrice takes the first step in exerting control over her disease, ironically by giving up a bit of control over her emotions and privacy.

While this text affords readers a glimpse inside the doctor’s office, a view of more intensive treatment is eschewed. In the only reference to medical treatment in Anna In-Between,

Nunez writes, “it is almost teatime when her parents return. Her mother’s face is drained, her skin gray, her eyes dull. She feels weak, say says. She wants to rest…The procedure, he said, as if the methodically timed invasion of her mother’s body with poisonous drugs is no more than the steps to be taken to solve a management problem” (157). As with previous discussions of the disease, direct confrontation is avoided in favor of genteelism. Instead of terming treatment as what it is, likely chemotherapy, Anna’s father turns to euphemisms to quell his own discomfort and grief. It is simply safer to refer to cancer treatments as “procedures.” In much the same way, a later description of Beatrice’s status depicts a state of limbo. As Nunez writes, “the tumor can lie there insidious, waiting, but it is hidden; it is out of sight. For now, they will have breakfast.

…For now all is normal” (AIB 196). In this way, a sense of relief emerges; much like the previous description, the tumor is anthropomorphized and painted as a stalker in wait.

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In terms of physical transformation, Beatrice is described as “skin and bones” near the conclusion of the text (Nunez AIB 221). However, the scene that speaks most to her emotional transformation is the cutting of her hair. While at first Beatrice is afraid of looking “old” and

“terrible,” she takes agency in cutting her own hair with orange-handled scissors (Nunez AIB

230). Within a few pages Beatrice’s attitude shifts as she declares that she “want[s] to be a funky white-haired lady now. I don’t want to go to the hairdresser. I want you to do it” (Nunez AIB

232). Much like the physical transformation of Ellie following her mastectomy, Anna notes that

“in the absence of hair, the structure of her mother’s face is more pronounced and Anna is struck again by how beautiful she is, how stunning she must have been when she was young” (Nunez

AIB 250). While Bordo notes that “we may be obsessed with our bodies, but we are hardly accepting of them,” with this scene we see a shift in a positive direction, a movement towards acceptance (15). Interestingly, breast cancer brings a comfort with the body and a reconsideration of identity. Collectively, these works point to disease as a means of reversing time or accessing the past. Despite the peril these women face, the physical battles they fight afford a reconsideration of their femininity along with the possibility of renewal. As Nunez’s

Anna In-Between and Boundaries illustrate, the body is indeed “an instrument and medium of power” (Bordo 143).

By and large, Anna In-Between shields readers from the physical effects of Beatrice’s medical treatment. Instead, Nunez paints side effects in a positive light as Beatrice’s chin “is smooth. Silk smooth…’The chemo has destroyed the follicles!’ Her mother is still laughing when her husband returns” (AIB 275). As the text concludes, we are left with the image of

Beatrice’s head “wrapped in a blue silk scarf that matches the blue flowers on her dress... she has recovered a bit from her chemo session and her complexion is bright Her face is not drawn; her

121 eyes are not dull” (Nunez AIB 301). In contrast to opening scenes of visual and emotional deferral, Beatrice lightheartedly relates, “I’ll have one breast. Is that so? One breast? I’ll be deformed.’ She swings her body toward her husband. ‘Deformed, John’” (Nunez AIB 308).

The Connection between Disease and Migration

Picking up where Anna In-Between left off, in the follow-up work, Boundaries, Nunez writes, “everything has changed now that John Sinclair has breached the code of privacy they share. Her secret is out. She will need a mastectomy. It is the only way to save her life” (17).

While Nunez relates that “this is the natural duty of a daughter whose mother is ill,” it is John

Sinclair rather than his daughter who tends to Beatrice. Offering this dramatic shift, Nunez notes,

“a man’s man remains outside, waiting for the results. A man’s man leaves matters of a woman’s bodily functions to the business of women. But it is her father who does this woman’s business; it is Anna who stands outside in the waiting room” (Boundaries 157). It is John’s involvement in

Beatrice’s treatment that propels drastic, life-saving surgery. Yet, as the text details, the diagnosis wasn’t willingly shared, but a fact that he “breached.” Interestingly, gender roles and expectations paint the male figure as relatively “hands off,” detached from such intimacies. In light of this, what does it say that John shirks social retribution to care for his wife, to change her bandages when a female “ought” to be doing that? In constructing a male character who breaches the bounds of propriety and takes an active role in his wife’s recovery, Nunez offers up an alternative model for what caregiving, at least in the islands, looks like. This reversal of roles, with father in the inner sanctum, and daughter in the distanced, “male” role, drastically shifts and calls into question societal norms when it comes to the medical treatment of “female issues.”

Though Anna In-Between largely eschews depictions of the physical body, and even more so restricts a view of Beatrice’s breast cancer, the disease is given an explicit physical

122 presence in the sequel, Boundaries. While readers may expect to see an image of a depraved, diminishing woman, Beatrice appears “in remarkably good health” (Nunez Boundaries 83). In fact, the seventy-two year old woman could “pass for a woman of sixty or younger” (Nunez

Boundaries 83-84). As this description continues, Nunez at last provides a view of Beatrice’s physical transformation. Nunez depicts Beatrice with “her head, bald from weeks of chemo… covered with a soft navy-blue fleece hat. In the absence of hair, her deepset eyes and prominent cheekbones are more pronounced. Around her neck she has loosely tied a silk Hermès scarf”

(Boundaries 83-84). With this description, the reader is sheltered from a full view of the effects of cancer; the inclusion of the Hermès scarf sets Beatrice as an exception and highlights her social status and the medical treatment that it affords. Though readers likely realize the devastation cancer can bring, her treatment brings out inherent traits such as fabulous bone structure. In this way, much like in “Lucifer’s Shank,” treatment offers a means of reflection and appraisal. With what chemo robs, it calls attention to; with the absence of hair, Beatrice’s features become more pronounced.

As this scene suggests, clothing offers Beatrice a means of covering up or diminishing the effects of cancer; this attempt is ultimately unsuccessful. Though, or perhaps because,

Beatrice dresses in such a vibrant color, “Anna is reminded of her [mother’s] illness” (Nunez

Boundaries 150). While “not a hint of pallor mars her brown skin,” Beatrice’s overcompensation ultimately betrays (Nunez Boundaries 150). In this instance, everything about her outfit is awkward. As Nunez narrates, Beatrice is “wearing a festive fuchsia-pink cotton dress, the fabric too light and too bright for the fall weather” (Boundaries 150). Clothing covers and offers momentary escape or forgetting as the dress “drapes over her body and hides the bandaged wound on her chest” (Nunez Boundaries 150). Just three days post-op, the “deliberate” choice of

123 clothing was nearly successful in deluding Anna into forgetting what her mother has been through. Though “the color warms her mother’s face so convincingly,” Anna sees through the façade (Nunez Boundaries 150). Writing on the social function of clothing, Savory asserts that

“clothes are, for most human beings, the semiotics of being, the codes by which they position themselves to be understood in the world” (54). Though Beatrice’s clothing was hardly mentioned prior to her surgery, the brands she wears and her choice of apparel becomes essential following her surgically-induced transformation. Following her surgery, Beatrice attempts to manipulate the codes/clothes to shift attention away from what is obviously different. In the hopes that high-end items such as the Hermès scarf or the bright dress will somehow remind those around her of her socio-economic status, and thus downplay the enormity of the moment,

Beatrice attempts to emphasize her position in the world as opposed to her medical condition.

Ultimately, though, this attempt at misdirection falls flat.

In a similar fashion, prayer offers Beatrice a retreat or escape from her cancer. For instance, relatively early in the text, Paul, her mother’s doctor but also Anna’s love interest, proclaims, “my patients who pray recover faster. Prayer gives them hope, a positive attitude that helps them heal. The one’s who don’t pray often sink into despair” (Nunez Boundaries 81).

While on the one hand “her prayers had not stopped the relentless march of the malignant cells multiplying under her arm and in her breast,” near the conclusion of the text Paul again offers commentary, telling Anna that “your mother knows better than I do how to heal herself” (Nunez

Boundaries 107, 208). In this way we see a practitioner of Western medicine giving credence to prayer–quite the rare occurrence. In doing so, Nunez, through Paul, recognizes the power of the supernatural or mystical in the process of recovery. After the success of Beatrice’s medical treatment, Paul notes that he has “never had a patient “recover so quickly after major surgery”

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(Nunez Boundaries 245). As such, he acknowledges that “the mind is a powerful instrument”

(Nunez Boundaries 246).

While at the conclusion of “Lucifer’s Shank” Ellie literally disintegrates into a former version of her self, Beatrice’s physiognomy “sags, but it does not crease” (Nunez Boundaries

156). Rather, Beatrice’s body is termed “exquisite” regardless of the fact that she “has not denied herself her passion for mangoes or coconut ice cream” (Nunez Boundaries 157). Despite

Beatrice’s age, “there are no wrinkles on her back. The skin is smooth, fluid, butterscotch-brown flowing from fleshy shoulders down to a certain defined, if thick, waistline, flaring out to voluptuous hips” (Nunez Boundaries 156). In perhaps a hyper-attention to the “voluptuous hips” and a heightened sense of propriety, Beatrice “had strict rules regarding the extent to which a doctor was allowed to examine her” (Nunez Boundaries 227). Specifically, her “breasts and the triangle between her thighs were private, off-limits to [doctor] Neil Lee Pak” (Nunez Boundaries

227). It is only when “the size of her tumor finally terrified her” that Beatrice breaks the culture of cover and propriety to seek medical treatment (Nunez Boundaries 227). Even then, there are rules that govern her medical care. In these descriptions Nunez focuses on what is, instead of what was. She does not focus on the mastectomy scar, as Melville does, but rather considers the woman as a whole. Through descriptions of the cordoned-off female body, and Beatrice’s reluctance to bare her body, even for medical professionals, Nunez comments on the compartmentalization of the female body. As Nunez’s works attest, physicians as well as the public at large are more comfortable with viewing only what needs to be seen. In respecting the wishes of more modest patients such as Beatrice, her physicians reinforce social mores and favor moral codes over through medical exams. Beatrice’s tumor must become oppressively large and

125 intrusive before it is treated; this delay in treatment reflects a larger sociocultural rejection and refusal to confront and treat deadly illnesses.

Whereas Anna In-Between details Beatrice’s pervasive omission of her symptoms, even to her husband, Boundaries expands upon this elision. For instance, it is noted that “Beatrice

Sinclair did not tell her husband that tumors were growing in her breast and under her arm, and even when they bled on her husband’s vest that she wore to bed, she kept her silence−though by them she knew he knew” (Nunez Boundaries 93). More than Beatrice’s literal silence, John too is silent on the subject: “her husband too would wait until she gave him permission before admitting what he knew” (Nunez Boundaries 93-94). Because Beatrice “belongs to the old school…sucking it up is their badge of courage,” John elects not to confront or question Beatrice but rather wait until she is ready to share her concerns with him (Nunez Boundaries 112). In this way he is rendered complicit in the progression of her disease. More specifically, it this “learned restraint that allowed [Beatrice] to endure a tumor blooming in her breast” (Nunez Boundaries

146). Though this restraint is reinforced by the society of women afraid to even speak of cancer, it is further reinforced by the fact that Beatrice’s mother died from breast cancer herself. As

Nunez writes, “Beatrice Sinclair could not bear to be in the same room with her mother when she was dying of breast cancer. The stench of rotting meat put on her mother’s leaking tumor revolted her. For it was the prevailing wisdom then among the women on the island that since cancer eats flesh, it will be satisfied by any flesh, even cow’s flesh” (Boundaries 147). In contrast to Anna’s hesitation to enter the bathroom door when her mother wants to show her the tumor for the first time, Beatrice’s repugnance is increasingly visceral. Though clearly ineffective, the old wives’ tale of putting meat on the site speaks to the hungry, ravenous nature of the disease, a disease so relentless that it pursues human flesh.

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As discussed, Beatrice’s breast cancer is surrounded by a sense of shame. Interestingly, we also see this expressed by Anna. This psychological reaction is evident. Anna’s reaction is to

“[stand] there, minutes passing by as she tried to build a wall around herself, a barrier that would shield her from longing, or perhaps rejection, and would not leave her exposed, vulnerable. It is shame now that seals her lips, shame for the relief she felt” (Nunez Boundaries 160). Hence,

Anna erects physical structures in her mind to block her from what she already knows. Though she has left the island for formal education in the United States, this cultural experience proves ineffective in combating entrenched mores. While we might expect to hear these thoughts of avoidance from Beatrice, interestingly, we hear them from her daughter. In the aftermath, recalling this moment of limbo, she feels shame. Much in the same way that Anna attempts to freeze time, following her mother’s surgery she is “glad for the domestic chatter, glad to put a bandage on the sore that had begun to bleed moments ago” (Nunez Boundaries 154).

Likely as a result of her travel to the United States, Beatrice’s surgery is termed a

“success.” The first image of Beatrice post-op is one in which she is “surrounded by all that white, her mother’s brown face shines as if bathed in a sort of celestial light. She is bald, there is not a trace of makeup on her face, her skin is slack, the muscles still loose after hours of sedation, but to Anna her mother seems more beautiful than she can remember” (Nunez

Boundaries 99). Similar to Ellie’s physical transformation at the conclusion of “Lucifer’s

Shank,” Beatrice is framed in a very feminine, heavenly light as the contrast of the harsh white hospital linens breathes life into her “brown face.” Though she may be bald, somehow, she has become more beautiful. In this case, surgery provides relief and this catharsis is evident on a physical level. Similarly, Beatrice and John’s relationship evolves following her surgery. So much as Beatrice claimed deformity to be her “most personal fear” and worried that the physical

127 reminder of her surgery, her scar, would be repulsive, John proclaims, “from now on, Beatrice, you and I will have our showers together” (Nunez Boundaries 100).

Ultimately, though, the care for her mother following surgery lies with Anna as she is advised to change Beatrice’s dressing twice daily. In detail, Anna, and thus the reader, is informed that “there is an intricate web of blood vessels lying beneath the breast. He has sutured them, but fluid and blood sometimes collect beneath the stitches. He has put a drain at the end of the incision. It looks like a straw for drinking soda, and it will drain the excess fluid and blood onto the dressing. So she must change the dressing to prevent infection” (Nunez Boundaries

144). While this pair of novels clearly lays out the “hands off” relationship between mother and daughter, with the advent of Beatrice’s mastectomy the pair immediately becomes intensely personal. Indeed, as in Melville’s works, disease and caretaking in particular, serves to revitalize and strengthen bonds. Much like Ellie and her best friend, Beatrice and Anna were close in a distanced, respectfully-intimate way; before her mother’s mastectomy Anna would certainly never have gazed at her mother’s breasts, much less touched them. By contrast, Beatrice’s surgery forces her to become more comfortable with another form of intimacy, one that is more comfortable with the human form. Within a short period of time the relationship is taken from one in which a mother shielded her daughter and husband from her disease to a place where her daughter must now “remove the drain the surgeon has inserted at the end of the sutures to release the blood and fluids that have collected there. Her mother must expose her body to her. She must touch her naked skin” (Nunez Boundaries 154-55). It is physical connection, the laying on of hands, that will determine Beatrice’s recovery. Those hands are not just anyone’s but her daughter’s, the very daughter she withheld this news from. While on the one hand Anna “is not repelled by blood, or by a leaking wound,” she winces at the vision of her mother’s bandage, a

128 covering which cannot fully erase the sutures that close “the skin left gaping apart after Dr.

Bishop removed her mother’s left breast” (Nunez Boundaries 147,127).

Much like the last view of Ellie, Beatrice is “regal.” In an ironic way, Beatrice’s medical treatment leaves her with “no hair on her head, the follicles deadened by the toxins” and ushers in a baldness that becomes “essential to the symmetry of the curves, lines, and planes of her body” (Nunez Boundaries 157). This image is so arresting that it leaves Anna “breathless”

(Nunez Boundaries 157). With this the similarities end. While cancer ultimately takes Ellie’s life, Beatrice’s mastectomy completely eradicates the “insidious” cancer. In fact, as Beatrice’s physician states, “she has had her miracle. The tumors are gone. She does not think of a future beyond this” (Nunez Boundaries 200-01). In this way, one comes to understand cancer as fully transformative. While on the one hand it leaves Beatrice with years in front of her, it has also shaken her to the core and turned her world upside down. Though she comes to be seen as

“regal,” she now has no sense of where to go from here. Beatrice is extremely lucky; she will now “live a normal life” (Nunez Boundaries 245).

Following Beatrice’s medical treatment “she declares she wants to go home. This time she means back to her island, to her own people, her own doctors in her own country” (Nunez

Boundaries 207). Thus, Boundaries presents medical treatment as a matter of convenience and ties migration directly to the prolonging of life. By placing Paul as her primary doctor, Nunez utilizes someone “familiar” or from “back home” in treatment abroad. Therefore, Beatrice’s medical treatment, while secured by migration, is eased by Paul’s presence. If we take agency as the “faculty of action,” then to what degree does Beatrice exert agency with regard to her health

(Jaggar and Bordo 68)? On the whole, Boundaries is guilty of giving false hope. So much as

Melville’s “The Sparkling Bitch” and “Lucifer’s Shank” illustrate the destruction of physical

129 bodies, Nunez’s Anna In-Between and Boundaries give a second chance to a woman who

“ignored” the signals her own body sent her and deferred medical treatment for two years. In this way Nunez presents an overly or perhaps falsely optimistic portrayal of the treatment of breast cancer. While approximately 458,000 women die from breast cancer each year, Beatrice Sinclair is spared.

With these works, Melville and Nunez employ disease to transform protagonists in various ways. Though these works differ significantly, flight affords an opportunity to assert or reconsider identity. While for Ellie it meant strengthening her bond with her best friend and developing an interest in spirituality prior to her death, for Susan disease served as a vehicle for visually refuting neocolonialism and neglect. Somewhat similarly, the decision to take flight gives Beatrice a second chance at life and propels the deepening of familial bonds as well as a reinvention of self. More than simply depicting the physical changes that anorexia nervosa and breast cancer bring, these texts call attention to the emotional changes that accompany physical ailments. While in works under study in other chapters emotional disease precedes migration, in works by Melville and Nunez, disease serves as the form of hardship that propels flight.

Together, the authors highlight seldom-discussed side effects such as revenge and tenderness.

Much like exile, disease functions as a mechanism for liberation.

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CHAPTER FOUR

THE NEGOTIATION OF CREOLIZATION AND TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY IN MICHELLE CLIFF’S ABENG AND MARGARET CEZAIR- THOMPSON’S THE TRUE HISTORY OF PARADISE

“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted”- Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

As Emilia Ippolito writes in Caribbean Women Writers, “nation favours a language of collectivity and exile is narrated through individual experiences. While nation allows for consensus, exile thrives on dissonance” (38). In considering the “individual experiences” presented in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1984) and Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise (1999), I discuss the psychological turmoil the respective protagonists undergo prior to migration and explore the way in which the authors reveal the darker history of Jamaica through fiction. Although the works reify the dissonance Ippolito references, together, they illustrate a collective rewriting of history. While the exilic condition can be productive in that “in exile, Caribbean women can ironically politicize their discourse [and] resist assimilation,” these works reveal the negative side of exile that is sometimes glossed over (Chancy 93). In applying an understanding of exile as a process of forced migration provoked by circumstances that “make remaining in one’s homeland unbearable or untenable,” this chapter reads the resultant emotional conflict as a form of transnationalism and examines the difficulties of migration (Chancy 2). As I will discuss, hardship functions as a form of inertia for the protagonists in these novels; as the works illustrate, psychological exile is an essential part of the migratory and transformative experiences. In Abeng and The True History of Paradise, hardship brings on an emotional paralysis that is then negotiated via psychological flight. More specifically, Clare and Jean’s

131 divided allegiances function as a form of transnationalism that sets this chain of events in motion; in considering the emotional limbo occasioned by growing up in two separate worlds as a form of transnationalism, this chapter broadens understandings of the term and views emotional transnationalism as the initial step towards migration. Growing up with divided allegiances, each cognizant of their difference at every turn, Jean and Clare are primed for flight.

Together, these works detail the very personal forms of violence that push the protagonists toward flight; throughout their novels, Cliff and Cezair-Thompson highlight the emotional and physical consequences of exile.

As transnational writers with multiple ties and interactions linking them across borders,

Cliff and Cezair-Thompson are afforded a unique perspective that allows them to blend past and present, to offer up alternative histories that have been lost in contemporary Jamaica (Vertovec preface). As a result of their own flight, their own migration from Jamaica to the United States,

Cliff and Cezair-Thompson are well-positioned to construct characters in various states of migration and to parallel psychological and physical flight. In writing of their homelands from outside the nation, the authors are perhaps better able to offer supplements to historical record.

Through fiction, Cliff and Cezair-Thompson retain a connection with their birthplace; by experiencing the pain of flight, in distancing themselves from paradise, the authors likely came to more fully realize the deficiency in historical record. In positioning psychological exile as central to the migratory experience, Cliff and Cezair-Thompson complicate readings of transnationalism by illustrating how emotional exile influences or engenders transnationalism. In doing so, the authors focus not on national or cultural boundaries but instead on the preparatory function that psychological exile provides.

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The works under study in this chapter feature a sense of polarization. Whereas in Cezair-

Thompson’s work Jean Landing negotiates her sister’s death and the political chaos of her country, Cliff’s Abeng traces the development of Clare Savage as she reconciles her opposing cultural identities. From a historical perspective, Cliff’s novel explores the connection between colonial history and slavery and sheds light on the buried history of the Maroons, a group of escaped slaves who have since “come to represent rebelliousness” (Sharpe 43).32 Similarly, in

The True History of Paradise, Cezair-Thompson reveals conditions in early 1980s Jamaica that are so desperate that the novel concludes with the line “panic and history are mine” (346). While

Clare and Jean are not transnational citizens in the “traditional” context as they have remained in their country of birth, I posit their internal migration to be the very form of negotiation that transnationalism speaks of. With Abeng and The True History of Paradise, Cliff and Cezair-

Thompson push back against the paradise myth as they utilize the figures of Clare and Jean to parallel the country’s inability to define itself. If, as Angeletta Gourdine asserts in The Difference

Place Makes, “‘Caribbean’ denotes a specific geographic locale and connotes paradise, relaxation and adventure. Herein the myth of the Caribbean, presented through various media, is born,” then Cliff and Cezair-Thompson offer a refutation or correction to that myth (81). As

Wendy Walters asserts, “through the medium of ink,” the authors offer a “counterhegemonic story about identity” (x).

In Abeng and The True History of Paradise, “the present is always linked to the past”

(Glave 3). Specifically, the “‘paradise’ in the minds of their characters bears little resemblance to

32 As Jenny Sharpe notes in Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives, “the term maroon is believed to be derived from cimarrón, a Spanish term for ‘wild’ or ‘untamed’ originally used for domestic cattle that had escaped into the bush...The original maroons were Spanish-owned slaves who escaped to the inaccessible recesses of Jamaica when England captured the island from Spain in 1655. They inhabited two regions that were separated from each other by a strip of white settlements: the Cockpit Country on the leeward side of the island and the Blue Mountains on the windward side” (4-5).

133 those articulated by the early narrators of Caribbean life” (Gillespie 148).33 By overtly naming their texts, with Cliff playing upon the term “abeng” and Cezair-Thompson destabilizing the term “paradise,” the authors call romanticized portraits of the Jamaican landscape into question.

Through fragmented texts and fragmented protagonists, Cliff and Cezair-Thompson give voice to the “polyvocality of the Jamaican past;” most explicitly, this polyvocality is reflected in the ancestral voices that enter Cezair-Thompson’s text and the competing parental influences that pull Clare in opposite directions (Gillespie 149). While scholars such as Carmen Gillespie have focused on the inversion of use of the doppelganger in these works, I explore the narratives of

Clare and Jean exclusively. Though I certainly agree that Jean and Clare “reach toward reclamation of their black and female bodies,” I question the extent to which they ultimately

“become agents of their own histories” (Gillespie 158). Although each exercises agency in their own, measurable ways, I think it is too easy to link recuperation with departure. Instead, I would argue that migration is only the first step in taking charge of one’s history. As Cezair-Thompson leaves readers with an image of Jean’s flight, and Cliff presents a rather dark portrait of Clare’s life following migration, concluding that the protagonists are now “agents of their own histories” rushes towards resolution.

So much as No Telephone to Heaven details the departure and subsequent return of Clare

Savage, The True History of Paradise concludes with a departure in progress and omits the act itself. The works call into question the degree to which one can fully “depart” one’s homeland.

In fact, No Telephone to Heaven, the follow-up to Abeng, details Clare’s return to Jamaica and her work as a revolutionary there. Although Cezair-Thompson concludes with Jean’s assumed departure, there is no assurance that this indeed took place, or that the protagonist remained away

33 Gillespie cites Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of Barbados (1657), an early text that describes the enslaved African population. 134 from the island. In leaving much unanswered, the authors present fragmented narratives that complicate categorization of their novels as bildungsromans. Their works counteract the vision of paradise as a nexus of tranquility by sharing a vision of Jamaica as a land that inhabitants are so desperate to leave. Building on my discussions of flight in previous chapters, this chapter considers internal flight, particularly as experienced by Clare in Abeng, to be a form of transnationalism. In these works, flight, both in its literal and figurative forms, offers the possibility for transformation.

Locating Personal Identity

Michelle Cliff’s Abeng traces the development of Jamaican youth Clare Savage as she comes to terms with disparate identities and allegiances. While her mother, Kitty, often described as “red,”34 comes from the country and has a lineage associated with the Maroons, her lighter- skinned father, Boy, hails from slaveholders. As a mixed-race adolescent growing up in Jamaica,

Clare faces the struggle of negotiating her place in binaries such as black/white, English/Maroon and city/country. Through Clare, a young girl largely unaware of her own history, and the history of her nation, the author connects colonial history and slavery with the present situation of cultural loss. In this semi-autobiographical novel, Cliff presents Clare Savage in the midst of an identity crisis. Writing on the relationship between migration and Caribbean writing, Simon

Gikandi finds that Caribbean writers compose from an exiled position abroad, “between the people on the one hand and the colonizer on the other” and are thus in a state of theoretical limbo

(52). As Gikandi details, Caribbean writers rewrite history because they are unable to accept the history propagated by the colonizing structure; they seek to ameliorate their own historical

34 Red is a term that, in Jamaica, signifies a degree of whiteness. Someone as light as Michelle Cliff, for instance, is considered “local white” (Palmer 275). 135 anxieties through writing. Perhaps because of her position of “limbo” between the people and the colonizer, Cliff exorcizes these anxieties through literary production.

In Abeng Cliff blends historical past with present as she highlights an alternative history that has largely been lost in contemporary Jamaica.35 As a trained historian, Cliff “sees literature as a form that serves the needs of historical recovery” (Adjarian 17). For Cliff, “Jamaicans move about their landscape with little knowledge of what lies beneath their feet” (Stracharn 233). Yet, as we, as well as Cliff should remember, her ability to rewrite history, but first to access her own history, is due to the survival of folk knowledge. While authors such as Danticat and Melville honor the way in which folklore and oral history have shaped African Caribbean identity, Cliff’s remarks smack of a removed elitism.36 In her efforts to address what she feels is a lack of knowledge for Jamaicans, Cliff presents a “rewriting [of] Caribbean landscape as the site of history” by interspersing flashbacks and historical information throughout the novel (Rody 172).

While on a larger scale this project examines writing by transnational Caribbean women with attention to the relationship between gender, location and literary production, this chapter illustrates the productive genesis that distance provides. For Cliff and Cezair-Thompson, leaving

Jamaica propelled tales of fictional flight. So much as flight offers Clare and Jean a means of coming to terms with conflictions of place and identity, it also offers Cliff and Cezair-Thompson a means of literary resistance.

35 In penning a novel that offers a supplement to historical record, Cliff joins efforts that reach at least as far back as 1930s with the Negritude movement. As Denis Ekpo notes on Negritude, “African emotion or African participatory cosmology were seen as the intellectual foundation” (178). Also influential was work of scholars such as CLR James and historians including Eric Williams. Also influential are scholars such as Sylvia Wynter and Kamau Brathwaite, who started the journal Savacou in 1970. Savacou ran until 1979 and came out of the Caribbean Artist Movement, a force that which was concerned with “Caribbean artistic production and with consolidating a broad alliance between all ‘Third World’ peoples” (Savacou).

36 While documentaries such as Flagstaff: Kojo’s Palace certainly appeared after the publication of Abeng, work such as this shares Jamaica’s history in new, more accessible ways and illustrates that Jamaicans are not nearly as unaware of their past as Cliff suggests. 136

Instead of discussing Abeng as a bildungsroman or in the context of gender as scholars have tended to do over the years, I take up the issues of creolization and transnational identity to make the claim that the identity struggle and reconciliation Clare undergoes falls along the lines of that of a transnational citizen. Beginning with a discussion of racial, linguistic and social creolization, I then move to an investigation of transnational identity followed by an examination of the development of Clare’s identity in the text. This chapter applies an understanding of creolization as an “ongoing and ever-changing process” and transculturation as the “ceaseless creation of new cultures” (Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 3-6). Joining these terms, I hold that

Clare’s status as a racial creole along with her parents’ polarized identities occasion an identity struggle followed by the subsequent negotiation and development of a more unified transnational identity at the conclusion of the text. Understanding transnational identity to be the fusion or

“transformation of two or more cultures into one,” Clare’s negotiation of English and Maroon identities into a self that can incorporate both instead of choosing one casts her in terms of transnationalism (Paravisini-Gebert 2). While Clare is not a transnational citizen in the traditional context, as she does not physically leave Jamaica, I posit her migration back and forth between city and country, moving both spatially and between disparate cultures, to be the very form of negotiation that transnationalism speaks of. Viewing Clare as an individual

“simultaneously incorporated in two or more societies” (Schiller and Fouron 144) provides us the context for understanding the development of an identity that is in a process of becoming. As a young woman caught in the middle of parents from very different backgrounds, her father descending from European slaveholders and her mother from Maroons, Clare undergoes a migration of sorts from within the nation.

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Not Quite/Not White

As a light-skinned Jamaican young woman, Clare is what Homi Bhabha terms “not quite/not white,” a position that places her as a familiar, though different, Other (86). As this dynamic produces both resemblance and difference, Clare identifies with each of her parents’ pasts, and each of their racial identities, yet each places her apart from the other. For instance,

Clare manipulates her racial superiority by “passing” as white in the city but when she is in the country with Zoe, her darker-skinned best friend, this privilege establishes difference. Clare’s status as her father’s daughter, and thus a Savage, allows her to claim racial and linguistic authority yet comes at the cost of a connection with her country roots and relationships with Zoe and her maternal grandmother. Specifically, “Clare’s development takes the form of a movement away from the white, imperial, patriarchal authority her father represents and toward an embrace of the black matrilineal legacy of her mother” (Moynagh 117). This flight from one allegiance to another is perhaps best represented when Clare accidentally kills Old Joe, her grandmother’s prize bull, when imitating an uber-masculine act. As Farrah Griffin points out, Clare is the “fair skinned, mixed blood, middle class great-great granddaughter of white slave owners and black slaves” (531). As such, she represents the complex subjectivity that often accompanies growing up in a colonized country, as well as the position of growing up a mixed-race child in two very different locations. More than depicting Clare as an adolescent girl coming of age in Jamaica,

Cliff “also inscribes Jamaica within Clare’s body” (Adjarian 40). In doing so, she establishes the connection between Clare’s body and the figurative body of Jamaica as she presents an alternative history of Jamaica through discursive resistance.

In her efforts to recover history, Cliff calls upon the concept of creolization to present the side of Jamaican history often absent from history books. While the term “creole” was first used

138 to refer to slaves born in the Americas and later to refer to any colonial subject born in the New

World regardless of racial ancestry, in Abeng I understand creolization to be both a literal mixture and the process of negotiation and assimilation that Clare navigates. It is when Clare appropriates the Maroon ritual of hunting wild pig that she really begins to accept her African

Caribbean past; an intensely violent act, and one often associated with men, is what brings her back into the fold, so to speak.37 Ironically, Clare believes that appropriating an English weapon to complete a Maroon task, the killing of Massa Cudjoe, occasions a sense of self. Massa Cudjoe, whose name is symbolic of the Maroon leader, and Nanny’s brother, has proven elusive; “no one had ever been able to kill him, although once someone caught him sidewise with a bullet, so he could be recognized by a small scar on his snout, in the shape of a teardrop” (Cliff 112). More than “usurp[ing] a traditional masculine role,” as M. Keith Booker and Dubravka Juraga claim, I also see Clare taking on a Maroon role, reclaiming that part of her inheritance (120). More than exploring the reasons why she took on this task or how it transformed her as an individual, it is also fruitful to consider her identity at this time. Through the action of taking her grandmother's gun and “feel[ing] dangerous,” Clare is not rejecting but refiguring her identity (Cliff 111).

In arming herself with a loaded rifle, Clare strays from the tradition of the Maroons, which “turned the hunting of the wild pig into a ritual, searching for the animal only at certain times of the year and arming themselves with nothing but machetes and spears. It was a man’s ritual–the women took part when the pig was brought back to the settlement” (Cliff 112). In

“borrowing” her uncle’s rifle, instead of arming herself with a machete as Zoe does, Clare

37 As O. Nigel Bolland notes, violence is very much a part of creolization. Per Bolland, “by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this creative process of adaptation, transformation, and synthesis had laid the groundwork of a Caribbean culture that was neither African nor European, though it had developed out of the interaction between African, European, and Amerindian peoples. In the Caribbean most people who participated in this process were of African descent and it was largely through their struggle against the double domination of enslavement and colonialism that an Afro-Creole culture developed” (10). Bolland concludes by proclaiming that “when we think of the creole civilization of the Caribbean we should be considering it in all its diversity, with its various peoples ‘constantly producing themselves anew’ in ‘an incredible explosion of cultures” (“Reconsidering Creolization” 12). 139 bolsters herself with an object symbolic of dominance and exploitation instead of trusting the weapons her ancestors have used for centuries. By going against the gendered nature of the ritual, and sneaking out in the wee hours of the morning to perform this imitation of ritual, Clare indeed negotiates tradition. Her use of the gun as opposed to a machete suggests that she is not yet able to fully claim the ritual, and therefore must operate under a mediated experience, unlike

Zoe, who as a child of the bush, wields a machete with ease. Clare’s revision of the ritual’s weaponry, the substitution of gun for machete, parallels her own hybridity. With this ritual and throughout the text, Cliff develops the possibility of a hybridized, or creolized identity for Clare, rather than an either/or situation. However, because the process of creolization “insists on the transmutation and transformation of the colonial subject,” Clare is at risk of losing part of herself in the process of assimilation (Gikandi 17). With Abeng, Cliff writes back against cultural loss and presents Clare’s efforts to liberate herself from dominative culture and fractured identity.

In Abeng one of the primary ways that Clare pushes back against dominative culture is through the rejection of gender norms. While her appropriation of what is typically a masculine act calls gender norms into question, it also points to her more fluid understanding of gender roles. Interestingly, as we learn in the accompanying work, No Telephone to Heaven, Clare is a lesbian. Though she is not yet fully aware of her sexuality at this point, Cliff suggests that the process of awareness has been set in motion. Understanding creolization as an ongoing, adaptive process allows for a reading of Clare’s burgeoning sexuality as a form of negotiation and transformation. In Abeng readers witness what could be interpreted as scenes of intimacy between Clare and her friend Zoe; if one reads No Telephone to Heaven, this scene certainly alludes to a budding sexual interest in women. Yet, even more importantly, is the fact that Cliff leaves that question unanswered in Abeng, which brings readers to question whether two

140 adolescent girls bathing together is a sexual act or not. Most explicitly, Cliff arranges the girls with “touched hands. Brown and gold beside each other. Damp and warm. Hair curled from the heat and the wet. The warmth of the sunlight on their bodies–salty-damp” and leaves the rest up for interpretation (120).

In addition to navigating gender roles, Clare must come to terms with her own racial identity. For Clare, racial creolization is a topic that is often held at arm’s length. Largely sidestepping his daughter’s questions regarding her racial make-up, Clare’s father insists that she is white yet “she knew that her mother was not” (Cliff 36). Because of this contradiction, Clare contemplates her racial heritage, hoping that she can fuse her allegiances instead of being forced to choose between them. Just as Clare is both “pale and deeply colored,” she is also caught between the binaries of colonizer/colonized, loyal/rebellious, and city/country (Cliff 36). It isn’t until Clare accidentally kills Old Joe, her grandmother’s bull, that she begins to reconcile her racial identities. This act, an accident imbedded in an attitude of defiance and independence, occasions a negotiation of identity. More specifically, it is during Clare and Zoe’s hunt to kill

Massa Cudjoe, the infamous boar, that Zoe shoots Old Joe. When Zoe aims her uncle’s loaded rifle at the cane-cutter who finds the girls bathing, she “began to squeeze the trigger–and at the last second before firing, jerked the gun upward and shot over the man’s head...before either girl could say anything, there was a scream, a bellow, and then a huge thumping of hooves toward them” (Cliff 122). With this action, albeit an accidental one, Zoe unknowingly positions herself as a “dangerous” young woman in need of remediation. Her own understanding of her African heritage is largely confined to the country until this seminal act places her outside the bounds of what is considered “appropriate,” “ladylike” or “desirable.” This decisive moment and its consequences, most explicitly Clare’s exilic move to live with Mrs. Phillips, a white lady from

141 one of the oldest families in Jamaica, force her to come to terms with the black side of her identity and reconcile it with the privileged white identity she has been living, or rather, performing. As a result, Clare begins joining the multitude of conflicting identities and desires that shape her as a person as she develops a hybrid identity as a result of historical and cultural negotiation as well as a more literal movement, or migration, from city to country. From a symbolic standpoint, it is significant that Clare kills Old Joe as opposed to Massa Cudjoe; as we see in No Telephone to Heaven, Clare’s allegiance to Maroon culture is anything but dead.

While Cliff relates that “gradations of shading reach[ed] into the top strata of the society,” in the novel racial creolization is largely a source of misery (5). Not only is racial creolization depicted violently in terms of rape in the colonial past, but in the more recent present it is painted as a choice that can lead to nothing good. Taking us back to the island’s past, the unnamed historical voice of the novel describes the rape of black women by white colonists as a matter of necessity for men whose wives remained in England. Immediately after relating this situation, the narrative voice states that this would have occurred “with or without the presence of white women” (Cliff 19). Though this voice claims that “all was in the open,” that is clearly not the case (Cliff 19). While the term “creole” is now understood as indicating a “black’ person or a person of mixed racial heritage,” in Abeng, racial creolization carries connotations that run deeper than many definitions suggest (Bauer 40). More than simply referring to race, the term

“creole” generally refers to people or cultures “derived from the Old World but developed in the

New” (Bolland “Creolisation” 1). More specifically, as O. Nigel Bolland notes, “in common

Caribbean usage, ‘Creole’ refers to a local product which is the result of a mixture or blending”

(“Creolisation” 1). What this loaded term doesn’t fully convey is the fact that racial intermixture, at least as early depictions in Cliff’s text illustrate, was a cruel and brutish process. As a mixed-

142 race adolescent attempting to locate her place in the world, she must confront the legacy of her white slaveholding grandfather alongside her Maroon ancestry. At the same time though, creolization affords Clare a reconnection with African Caribbean traditions. In “Creolisation and

Creole Societies,” Bolland finds that “the concept of creole society, as it has been used in the

Caribbean, stresses the active role of Caribbean peoples and the importance of African cultural traditions” (3). In working to uncover her own history, Clare becomes an agent in the larger historical process, one that resists a view of Caribbean culture as the result of synthesis rather than unilateral imposition.

From a racial standpoint, as someone of mixed-race, Clare is literally a creole. Her mother is “both Black and white,” and she notes that her mother’s people are called “red” (Cliff

54). Unlike the indiscretions in Boy’s familial past that he takes all measures to hide, Kitty’s family is not ashamed of their status. Just as much as the Savage family sought to perpetuate their whiteness, the Freemans are “preserving their redness” and represent the very cultural reclamation that Cliff upholds in the text (Cliff 54). As a creole, Clare is seen as her father’s child and is “lucky” to have his green eyes. Clare is depicted as “the best of both sides,” which attests to the duality of her physicality as well as her personality (Cliff 61). For Clare, this duality comes at a cost and is a source of anxiety rather than a blessing. This privilege sets her apart; she does not “fit in” in the black world or the white world but rather is in-between and confused. As a whole, Cliff’s work reifies the consequences of exile. Ultimately, Clare’s green eyes are a responsibility and an inheritance; she is expected to pass them on by marrying “light” and has a

“duty to try to turn the green eyes blue” (Cliff 127).

As the novel progresses Clare begins to accept her creole status. Although her face “gives her away completely” as a mixed-race child, she becomes more accepting of her hybridity and

143 begins to think about characterizations more critically (Cliff 158). Closely aligned with the concept of creolization, I understand cultural hybridity as referring to the result of interactions between colonized and colonizers. With regard to race, hybridity indicates “the integration of two races which are assumed to be distinct and separate entities” (Yazdiha 32). Writing on racial creolization specifically, Haj Yazdiha notes that the “freedom to move between identities carries its own power in defying the claims of essentialized racial identity” (33). With a view that hybridity affords the ability to deconstruct labels, Cliff constructs a character who, rather than despising her own darkness and “impure” status, sees competing allegiances as an opportunity for refined sight. Coming to a greater understanding of the racial discourse surrounding her,

Clare begins to prefer her mixed status to the hateful ways of “narrow-mindedness” (Cliff 158).

While some individuals such as Miss Winifred profess that “only sadness comes from mixture,” by the end of the text Clare is able to articulate her heritage and see the racial landscape around her with more clarity (Cliff 164). Most notably, Clare tells Miss Winifred that “there’s all kinds of mixture in Jamaica,” which points to a more global understanding of creolization as opposed to a focus on racial creolization alone (Cliff 164). With this line, Cliff suggests an awakening on

Clare’s part to the oppressive constrictions society has imposed (Cliff 164). As this rather symbolic line attests, Clare’s exile and internal flight is key to her emotional transformation and more critical perspective.

While in Cliff’s Abeng racial creolization is central, linguistic creolization is also prominent; through an examination of Clare’s use of language we can trace the integration of what were previously her rather disparate selves. As suggested, this development falls along the lines of the cultural integration that transnational citizens undergo following migration. Largely halting Clare’s acceptance of the country dialect are the implicit signals received from those in

144 authority. Most notably, Clare’s teacher, Mr. Powell is directed by the British-based education board to downplay his accent. While early in the text we learn that the use of “country” language is discouraged; the most explicit directive to privilege English comes in the form of Mr. Powell’s instruction manuals, which specify that the poem “Daffodils” is to be “spoken with as little accent as possible” (Cliff 84). Through directives such as this, we can see the “mother country” resisting creolization and subjugating the localized language to the hegemonic one. Not only do the manuals seek to erase linguistic variation, but their lack of adaptation and revision over the years suggests a fear of change as Mr. Powell receives the same directions year after year with no acknowledgment of change. At the same time, though, Mr. Powell's acquiescence to the demand to largely strip cultural reference out of his instruction speaks to the realities of the postcolonial state. Sadly, as the British-based instruction implies, colonial ties persist in nuanced, and equally destructive, ways.

Just as the use of patois is discouraged in the Jamaican school system, Clare receives similar messages from societal influences such as the Hollywood movies that “[teach] her to drop her patois and to speak ‘properly” (Cliff 99). Her relationship with language comes to a head when she addresses her friend Zoe and the unnamed cane-cutter at the conclusion of the novel. When the cane-cutter finds Clare and Zoe at the baths, Clare speaks to him using “buckra language,” telling him to “Get away, you hear. This is my grandmother’s land” (Cliff 122).

Through this utilization of “the Queen’s” English, Clare “reclaim[s] her material history” and it is interesting how she appropriates the “white language” to give instructions on her grandmother’s country land (Rody 151). With this short statement, land and language are separated; in this instance Clare accepts and utilizes “proper English” to her advantage while her actions align her more closely with her Maroon heritage. Clare comes to realize that “the pursuit

145 of whiteness places her in exile from herself” (Wiley and Barnes 298). By speaking in “buckra tongue,” Clare creates distance between herself and the cane-cutter, and ultimately with Zoe; distance gives her a sense of authority and privilege in the “wild” environment of the parish country. Yet, “since Clare is apparently white, however, her situation is much more problematic.

To become a true daughter of Jamaica, Clare must move down the socioeconomic hierarchy and perform blackness through political engagement with the social causes of the poor” (Adjarian

42).

Though Cliff positions Clare “inching toward wholeness,” her entire life is made up of a series of negotiations with the contradictions of class, color and sexual orientation in her own lineage and life (Palmer 276). In illustrating the claiming of an identity, Cliff presents the reclamation of a heritage Clare has been taught to despise. Though Clare may indeed be a

“fragmented character,” as Cliff notes, her cultural reclamation flies in the face of social norms

(Schwartz 600-01). In making sense of her disparate lineages, Clare struggles “to locate herself amidst competing discourses about color, class, gender, and sexuality” (Walker 168). According to Wendy Walters, Abeng can be read as an antibildungsroman as her education does not move her towards wholeness but rather encourages a fragmented sense of self (28). Yet, as with many of the other characters this larger project discusses, perhaps this “undoing” is central to a reshaping and is thus an essential part of the maturation process. Much like Sophie’s use of dissociation in Breath, Eyes, Memory, Clare’s struggle with disjunction provides the strength needed to one day reclaim her maternal heritage in the face of the immense pressure her father represents. In this way then, Clare’s movement towards wholeness is contingent upon the confrontation of social and self division.

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Linguistic Nuances

Taking creolization more literally, in Abeng, two examples of linguistic creolization occur with the title and term of “abeng” and the name of the protagonist, Clare. While “abeng” is the “African word for ‘conch shell,” its more subversive meaning and use is an instrument of rebellion (Gikandi 237). Similar to the manner in which the meaning of “maroon” has changed from its original reference to wild cattle to one of human resistance and rebellion, “abeng” has conflicting meanings. On one level an abeng is a conch shell, but on the other it connotes a means of communication, both to call slaves in the fields, but also, more darkly, to send messages among troops of Maroons as they defied the plantation system. Just as the meaning of creole has changed over time, the term “abeng” has undergone a process of change. In similar fashion, Clare’s name also reflects this duality. While Clare’s father thought he was naming her in an English context, her name has a second, and more subversive meaning that is associated with her mother’s “second memory” of her friend Clary, a woman who once nursed Kitty back to health. Similar to how the Maroons appropriated an instrument of colonialism in an act of resistance, Kitty’s acceptance of the name Clare for her daughter serves as a subtle push-back to the colonizing influence of her husband.

Taking the discussion of creolization one step further, in Abeng creolization also functions in a social and environmental context. Similar to eighteenth-century theories of cultural and physical degeneration, in the novel, persons, plants and objects are described as undergoing change upon moving to this “torrid region.” For instance, at John Knox Memorial Church the emigrant school-teacher plays a harpsichord that has “never adjusted to the climate” (Cliff 6). By setting up the difficulties of adjustment and acculturation early on, Cliff establishes the binaries she explores throughout the text. In this case, the instrument is even disassembled and

147 reconstructed yet fails to maintain the correct tune. Interestingly, for the church members, the harpsichord serves as a symbol demonstrating their climatic and cultural difference from

England. The climate in Jamaica too warm and humid for the instrument and the voices of the congregation are too loud. To correct this, the schoolteacher suggests that the congregation “tone down their singing,” to sing more like the Englishmen the harpsichord is suited for (Cliff 6).

On a more literal level, the juxtaposition of the churches the Savages visit leads to a religious creolization for Clare. According to Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “the duality of these churches represents Clare’s duality of backgrounds” as she is a member of both her father’s more

“colonial” church and her mother’s church which has roots to African religions of the past (43).

Although Clare is never explicitly asked to choose between the very different religions, Boy and

Kitty implicitly occasion confusion for their daughter by exposing her to cultural elements in a

“separate but equal” fashion. From an early age, Clare learns from her family that differences are not to be discussed, but suppressed. Instead of educating Clare on the ideological and cultural distinctions between their religions, Clare’s parents perpetuate their opposition by bringing the entire family to two places of worship each Sunday (John Knox for Boy and the Tabernacle for

Kitty), places that reflect the “separate needs and desires of the two parents” (Cliff 49).

In addition to growing up the child of parents with two very different religious ideologies, Clare negotiates the differences between city and country and English and Maroon.

In reconciling these disparate parts of herself, Clare crosses, and even dismantles, borders that traditionally stand between these binaries as she joins transmigrants who “develop and maintain multiple relations” (Mahler 76). In this way then, through a flight of sorts, Clare comes to a fuller understanding of herself as inheritor of these differences. If, as Emilia Ippolito argues, travel

“entails expansive steps away from traditional ties,” we can see a negotiation of transnational

148 identity occurring in the text (36). Ippolito recognizes that “travel is much more than moving across space;” by extending Ippolito’s claims, we can understand Clare as both partaking in a literal and figurative transnationalism (36). If travel is movement away from traditional ties, then, for Clare, developing a transnational identity is just that. In reconciling her English and

Maroon history along with her racial creolization, Clare steps outside traditional boundaries and carves a space of identity for herself much like Homi Bhabha’s concept of the abstract space “in- between national territories” termed “third space” (Guarnizo and Smith 11). Through literal and figurative travel as well as an individual creolization, Clare constructs a space of liberation for herself as she takes advantage of the opportunity to “choose [a] new subject position” (Rodriguez

20).

Further evidencing the role of social creolization in solidifying privilege, near the end of the novel Kitty tells Clare that she has “to learn once and for all who you are in this world” and relates that Mrs. Phillips, as a “lady,” can teach her things she cannot, thus bringing her closer to her white heritage (Cliff 150). In fact, Kitty encourages Clare to one day leave Jamaica and take on a transnational identity in the traditional sense. In this discussion, emigration is figured as opportunity and it is Clare’s light-skinned complexion that would allow her to make this move and to “someday leave Jamaica behind” (Cliff 150). At the same time, this opportunity comes at a cost as this identity is proscribed and Clare must “learn the rules” and grasp how to perform this identity in order to take advantage of what it offers (Cliff 150). This is directly opposed to the Maroon history Clare has explored; being a lady does not mean taking up a gun and going into the hills, but rather “tak[ing] advantage of who you are” (Cliff 150). Even more interesting is the fact that it is the maternal grandmother, Miss Mattie, who insists on appropriate gender roles. Following Clare’s accidental shooting of Old Joe, Miss Mattie “made a judgment–that

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Clare was only what she appeared to be; not of Miss Mattie at all, but of Boy’s side of the family. The child had no sense of country” (Cliff 145). As a result of this matriarchal influence,

Clare’s parents “merely chanted their disappointment at her, taking up Miss Mattie’s litany and speaking it at their daughter in their own words” (Cliff 147).

Yet, in reprimanding their daughter, neither parent was able to “recognize the simplicity of her actions...A girl of twelve was feeling her way into something. A girl of twelve thought that by taking a gun she acquired some power, some independence” (Cliff 149). Clare’s parents also do not understand that this act is motivated in part by exclusion and denial. More specifically,

Miss Mattie denied Clare’s request to watch the slaughter of a hog; instead, Clare “had taken her place in the kitchen and watched only partly” (Cliff 56). In a somewhat related event, her cousins, Ben and Joshua, exclude her, making her feel “invisible to the boys” (Cliff 57).

Therefore, Clare’s desire to find and kill Massa Cudjoe is very much rooted in this early sense of exclusion, none of which her parents understand when they amplify her exclusion is only amplified when she is sent to live with Mrs. Phillips. For Clare, her hybrid racial identity places her “outside” as Kitty notes that “there are no opportunities” for Clare in Jamaica (Cliff 150).

Hence, learning to utilize her racial heritage and act the part is equated with medicine; Kitty sees her daughter’s stay with Mrs. Phillips as something that at first may be bitter but will ultimately fortify her daughter. In viewing medicine as affording transformation, Clare’s stay with Mrs.

Phillips is figured as an artificial means of drawing out an inherent nature.

As discussed thus far, it is on the “sad little island” of Jamaica that Clare Savage faces an identity crisis that has roots in binaries such as England/Jamaica, English/patois, and city/country

(Cliff 150). As a result of these forces, Clare feels a “split within herself,” which I understand to be the beginning of a hybrid identity (Cliff 96). This split identity comes not only as a result of

150 opposing ideological constraints but also because of differences between her parents and the racial creolization that sets her apart socially. While Clare’s mother “came alive only in the bush,” the country is a source of anxiety for Boy (Cliff 49). Clare is caught between her parents and their disparate identities that make “resistance very difficult” (Cliff 49). Perhaps because the very island she lives on “does not know its own history,” Clare is largely unaware of her past and connections with the countryside, as well as her darker slaveholding inheritance (Cliff 96). When

Clare begins to come to terms with these contradictions and carve out a place for her own identity, she is perceived as “stepp[ing] out of line... in a society in which the lines were unerringly drawn” (Cliff 149-50). By eschewing her identity as a Savage and appropriating elements of Maroon culture, Clare acts defiantly. Interestingly, her parents’ religious separation is mirrored in her relationship with Zoe.

Sadly, it is only in the “wild countryside” that Clare and Zoe’s friendship is expressed.

Thus, friendship is contingent upon place, which further illustrates the divide between city and country, as well as class, that we see throughout the text. As Cliff writes, “To Clare's mind a lady was someone who dressed and spoke well. A lady was a town creature” (Cliff 98). As this comment suggests, class is a crucial component of the girls’ relationship. In Clare’s thinking, there is no middle ground between these two worlds. In the country she speaks patois and runs about with Zoe but while in the city she must speak “proper” English. Never between shall the two mix. As the daughter of one of the women living on her grandmother’s land, Zoe is an acceptable playmate in countryside but, unfortunately, would not be accepted as an appropriate companion for “city Clare.” Instead, her relationship with Zoe, a very poor country girl, can only exist in the “wild countryside”; for Clare and Zoe's friendship to be exposed in the city would be a mark of embarrassment on the light-skinned protagonist.

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Calling the Past into Question

In striving to reconcile her very different historical pasts, Clare hopes not to have to choose between black or white, but rather embody both. While previously this “mulatto girl” did as she was told and was oblivious to “herself or her past,” Cliff’s novel awakens the reader to the alternative history that is often untold (71). It is first through the figure of Anne Frank that Clare begins to question societal expectations and locate boundaries. Where before she accepted her father’s stories without question, Clare now begins to see through Boy’s logical fallacies. Unlike her largely silent mother, Clare takes steps to claim her own identity by reclaiming her cultural past. In Abeng, cultural past is largely figured through references to Maroons as Cliff first introduces resistance through the figure of Nanny;38 like Nanny, Clare negotiates “contending forms of knowledge” (Sharpe 3). Ironically, however, Clare is largely unaware of the “true” history of the Maroons who opposed slavery and the plantation economy, the people who resisted the very hegemony she descends from. Along with her parents’ conflicting identities,

Clare’s “failure to learn the truth of her family’s history” delays the development of her own independent identity (Sharpe 36). Taking this independent creolization and identity from an individual context to a collective one, Cliff utilizes Clare’s struggles to speak to the larger cultural loss and erasure of history that has results in a Jamaica largely unaware of its past.

Reflecting on the subject of the Maroons in Ghosts of Slavery, Jenny Sharpe states, “even as the maroon has come to represent rebelliousness and an African belief system, the mulatto signifies assimilation into European culture” (43). Although Sharpe’s assessment is persuasive in

38 In Ghosts of Slavery, Jenny Sharpe discusses Nanny, the legendary Maroon leader. She writes of an oral story that “presents Nanny as an originary ancestress of the maroon people. The story tells of two sisters, Nanny and Sekesu, who were captured and brought to the New World as slaves. Although there are several versions to the story, they all speak of how Nanny, unlike her sister, decided to fight for her freedom. The maroons are Nanny’s yoyo or children, while the rest of Jamaicans are the descendants of Sekesu, who remained a slave until backra (the white man) decided to free her” (6). 152 the context of her study, I resist applying this generalization to Cliff’s protagonist. As a mixed- race progeny with connections to Maroon culture, Clare moves from a place of assimilation to one of integration. Because Clare cannot establish “a fundamental relationship” with either her

English or Maroon history or her status as both black and white, city citizen and country visitor,

Cliff’s text “raises the possibility of a third discourse” that aligns with the concept of Bhabha’s

“third space” that I referred to earlier (Gikandi 245). In other words, through the figure of Clare,

Cliff resists the more traditional thinking that Sharpe references; in Abeng, Clare Savage is not forced to choose or assimilate but rather integrates her identities in a liminal space similar to the way in which transnational citizens negotiate identity. With an eye towards Clare’s revolutionary nature that emerges in No Telephone to Heaven, it would be especially misguided to state that, as a mulatto, she signifies assimilation. Sadly, doing so would completely disregard her Maroon heritage and would categorize the protagonist on the basis of racial identity alone.

Expanding on the notion of Clare’s hybrid identity, it is also interesting that she is depicted as “wanting to fill out the shadow she had seen yesterday,” a desire which suggests a coalescence of identities (Cliff 160). This statement also indicates that the process of Clare's maturation is not yet complete, if that process ever really is; instead, she is still “not ready to understand her dream” (Cliff 166). Leaving the reader with the notion of the complexity of identity, Cliff relates that Clare “had no idea that everyone we dream about we are,” which again references the multiplicity of identity. Clare can be both black and white, Freeman and Savage, city and country−and in fact she is (166). Reacting to the identity struggle Clare undergoes,

Simon Gikandi claims that “Clare is entrapped in the very modes of knowledge which have entrapped her” (249). What Gikandi means to say is that as an adolescent girl who has not yet left the island, Clare remains implicated in the colonial mindset and has not yet been able to

153 move beyond the lines of thinking that maintains that she is white, cultured and feminine based on her father’s lineage. This mindset implies that the rejection of her Maroon heritage is desirable and will lead to social mobility and all the advantages that brings. Relating this to my discussion of creolization, I maintain that in the beginning of the text Clare’s subscription to white values and history shunts the growth of her identity and blinds her to alternative forms of history. In becoming herself and forming her own identity, Clare introduces a contestatory form of history and “develop[s] from ‘colonized child’ to revolutionary” (Rody 151). Through claiming her creole identity, Clare portrays, on an individual level, what is at stake for

Jamaicans. While in Cliff’s text Clare does not have to remove at a great distance to occasion the splitting of her identity and its subsequent reunion, the separation between city and country,

English and Maroon, acts in the transnational sense as worlds apart and allows Clare to become aware of the various contradictions which have defined her in the past. Armed with the knowledge and awareness of the role the Maroons plays in shaping Jamaican history and in resisting colonial power,39 Clare Savage takes creolization from a repressive form to one of emancipation, shaping her own liberation as she constructs her own transnational identity.

A History of Violence

Much like Cliff’s Abeng, Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise

“sees alternative histories as the antidote to paradise discourse and to a full understanding of the challenges Jamaica faces” (Stracharn 267). In blurring the lines between history and fiction,

Cezair-Thompson employs a first-person account that presents another view of the island by de- romanticizing paradise. Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas and Laura Gillman note that “when we think

39 As Cliff writes: “In 1733, Nanny, the sorceress, the obeah-woman, was killed by a quashee—a slave faithful to the white planters—at the height of the War of the Maroons...Her Nanny Town, hidden in the crevices of the Blue Mountains, was the headquarters of the Windward Maroons—who held out against the forces of the white men longer than any rebel troops. They waged war from 1655-1740” (14).

154 about violence, we primarily focus on control and domination from an outside force (whether it be economic, social or political) over a particular group by a superior organization of power and domination” (536). By contrast, Cezair-Thompson’s work illustrates the effects of internal violence.40 Rather than decrying the results of neocolonialism, this historical novel presents the events leading up to protagonist Jean Landing’s departure from her homeland. In The True

History of Paradise readers are hit with violence with the first line: “It’s Easter, and Jamaica is in a state of emergency” (Cezair-Thompson 3). Specifically, in the novel “the city has been divided into war zones marked out by graffiti” (Cezair-Thompson 4). As Cezair-Thompson narrates, this

41 political violence, with division marked by the political parties PNP and JLP, and respectively

Michael Manley42 and Edward Seaga,43 renders the country divided. Cezair-Thompson’s work of fiction “settles its focus on the tragic unwinding of a very special decade in Jamaica’s history” as she plays with paradise in an ironic way (Manley 203). The author calls the term “history” into question while turning the notion of the Caribbean as paradise on its head.

40 Set in 1981, The True History of Paradise focuses on the violence following Edward Seaga’s election. At play in this turmoil was the international oil crisis, food shortages, and the “announcement of the intended construction of a Democratic Socialist State in October 1974...Later in 1980, the Michael Manley government cancelled the IMF agreement after an all-night meeting of the PNP National Executive Council” (Burke).

41 Norman Washington Manley “founded the moderately socialist People's National party in 1938, and, with his cousin, Alexander Bustamante, dominated Jamaican politics for several decades. He served as chief minister of Jamaica (1955–59) before being designated prime minister (1959-62). He pushed land reform and encouraged economic growth, especially in the bauxite and tourist industries” (Norman Washington Manley).

42 Michael Norman Manley, “prime minister of Jamaica (1972–80, 1989–92); son of Norman Manley. A leader of the socialist People's National party, he was first elected to parliament in 1967. Winning a landslide victory in 1972, he shifted Jamaican politics to the left, establishing close relations to Cuba, nationalizing industry, and denouncing U.S. imperialism. He was reelected in 1976, but in 1980 lost to conservative Edward Seaga. Manley was returned to power in 1989, this time leading a more moderate government and encouraging foreign investment. Following serious illness, he resigned in 1992” (Michael Norman Manley).

43 Edward Seaga “became leader of the conservative Jamaican Labor party (JLP) in 1974, and in 1980 the JLP won the elections and he became prime minister. Seaga severed relations with Cuba, promoted close ties with the United States, and emphasized free-market policies. In 1989 the JLP lost to the People's National party in a landslide and Michael Manley became prime minister. Seaga retired from parliament and as JLP leader in 2005. Served as Prime Minister from 1980-89” (Edward Seaga).

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Cezair-Thompson’s novel brings up the process of decolonization as “it was the 1950s,” a period when Jamaicans were “talking about seeking independence from Britain” (30). This directly connects with the more local political situation in that “in 1962, Bustamante’s party, the

JLP,44 won the general election, and Jamaica was granted independence from Britain. It was to be official on August 6” (Cezair-Thompson 45). Independence comes with a cost as Monica,

Jean’s mother, remarks: “everything,” she says, “gone from bad to wus since Independence”

(Cezair-Thompson 120). In giving voice to the lingering effects of colonialism and the struggles inherent in separation, Cezair-Thompson implicitly acknowledges that the retelling of Caribbean history is incomplete. Rather, the novel relies on the stories of Jean’s ancestors to unfold “almost all the disparate pieces of Jamaica’s composite profile” (Manley 206). As such, Cezair-

Thompson presents a layered, polyvocal approach to national history; as a writer deeply touched by the violence in her home country, she presents a personal struggle that “mirrors the painful and unsteady advancement of postcolonial Jamaica” (Stracharn 265). While Clare’s flight in

Abeng comes as a result of divided allegiances, Jean can only be free in leaving her homeland; in very different ways, the vehicle of flight offers the possibility of transformation for these young women.

In presenting Jamaica’s political strife following independence, Cezair-Thompson illustrates a country segregated by violence. For instance, as Jean and Paul reach Linstead, a smaller city outside of Spanish Town, while on the way to the airport, they observe that “the violence has not touched them here. No soldiers, roadblock, curfew, graffiti. There is no

44 Sir Alexander Bustamante was Prime Minister of Jamaica from 1962-67. “He became active in the labor movement, gaining prominence with his flaming oratory, and founded the country's largest trade union. After being jailed (1941–42) as a rabble-rouser, he formed (1943) the Jamaica Labour party, a relatively conservative group that attracted right-wing support. A flamboyant leader, he maintained close relations with the United States and launched an ambitious five-year program of public works and land reform. Illness caused him to retire from politics in 1967. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1955” (Sir Alexander Bustamante). 156 vigilance or fear in people’s faces. In Kingston everyone lives behind iron bars…Here the open verandas and unwalled gardens of croton and hibiscus make Kingston seem like some lunatic’s idea of reality” (Cezair-Thompson 103). While this more global look at Jamaica puts the localized violence in perspective, it is also a reminder of how chaos has become almost normalized in Kingston.45 As the text continues, the reality of violence becomes more apparent as political assassinations occur. What was once a national issue becomes international news.

After receiving a news clipping recounting a shoot-out between the PNP and JLP from her lover in New York, Jean realizes that “with her own eyes, she had seen the bloody aftermath; that had been upsetting enough. But to see her city under siege in a foreign newspaper–the newspaper there, she here–and in a photograph as true as the ones she’d seen of Cambodia and El Salvador, locked her inside her horror” (Cezair-Thompson 294). Sadly, political strife has now reached the level that remarks such as this are common: “if this country splits in two, there won’t be anywhere to hide” (Cezair-Thompson 294).46

Along with political issues, racial politics also comes into play. Jamaica is fiercely identified as a “Black man country” (125) and scrawlings such as “GO BACK HOME WHITE

MAN” offer a warm welcome to tourists and citizens alike (Cezair-Thompson 137). As Cezair-

Thompson depicts, racial tensions are so high that “in this country, a poor white man is worse

45 As Colin Clarke notes, in 1980 the CIA “allegedly supported Seaga’s JLP, which confronted the Cuban-backed PNP government of Michael Manley in an essentially Cold War election...about 500 people were killed in Kingston during these elections and the violence and mayhem almost destroyed the democratic process” (430-31). From a historical standpoint, Clarke reminds us that “party-political violence in Kingston clearly dates back to the colonial period...The use of violence was ratcheted up after independence in the 1960s...Party-political violence was ‘professionalised’ by the recruitment of gangs to become electoral enforcers for the politicians during the 1960s and 1970s, and dons emerged as community leaders and drug dealers” (436).

46 At the same time, though, it must be remembered that, “historically, the Jamaican people have a tradition of rebellion and resistance to oppression dating back to the Maroons in the 1600s...by the 1960s a new phenomenon had emerged, a pattern on internal violence which stemmed from a number of conditions. Economic and social frustrations had developed in the 1950s...we find in Kingston in the mid-1960s the development of open political warfare” (Kitson 171). 157 than a stray dog” (145). Set in 1981, The True History of Paradise follows Jean Landing leaving her country during a state of emergency as well as a state of family confusion. Moving back and forth between the present and the 17th century, this novel mingles “African, German, Jewish,

Scotts, Chinese, English and Irish ancestry together in the head and the body of Jean Landing”

(Kenan 54). Jean articulates the consequences generated by this violent confluence of cultures in

Jamaica: “there is nowhere else I want to be; but I can’t stay here” (188).

Sadly, this reaction is not specific to Jean alone; for Faye, Jean’s closest friend, Jamaica has become unreal and alienating. She remarks that she “never thought Jamaicans could be so cruel…I feel like it’s becoming another country” (Cezair-Thompson 220). As the novel concludes, personal violence comes to a head when Faye’s lover, Pat, is murdered after Jean and her friend Ines are attacked in a separate incident. Offering a narrative of the attack on Jean and

Ines, Cezair-Thompson writes: “he brought the knife down to her face and slashed [Jean], cutting her hands which she held up protectively before her. He slashed her again” (Cezair-Thompson

244). This results in a minor injury for Ines while Jean is rushed into surgery with “her left hand…nearly severed at the wrist” (Cezair-Thompson 244). Following this attack by bandits in search of valuables, Jean becomes more attuned to the reality of flight as offering the potential to escape a situation in which “no woman in this country is safe” (Cezair-Thompson 280).

This violence is even more explicit in Pat’s murder; Cezair-Thompson writes: “She’s dead. The gunmen came through a window while they were asleep. Beat them [Pat and Faye].

Police said blood was everywhere. All over the house they draggin’ them an’ beatin’ them...They beat her in the face. Dislodged her eye” (311). What began as a state of emergency following the murder of two diplomats has become intensely personal. With the understanding that “rape had become so prevalent on the island…it was beginning to seem like a war against women; rape of

158 the nation’s women, rich and poor, had become a casual and ubiquitous weapon, like stones in the hands of bad boys” it is no surprise that Jean contemplates migration (Cezair-Thompson

245). In a country that is sometimes referred to as homophobic,47 it is curious that such extreme violence is enacted on two female bodies. Especially in light of the fact that a robbery did not take place, one is left to wonder if Fay and Pat were made to suffer for their “unacceptable” relationship. In an article on violence in The True History of Paradise and The Book of Night

Women, Marlon James’s neoslave narrative, Sam Vásquez asserts that “contemporary violence and the ways violence is worked out on the body are rooted in the barbarities of colonial slavery”

(44). Although Cezair-Thompson yokes Jamaican slavery and the present state of dissent on the island throughout her text, this particular attack on a lesbian couple moves from more generalized violence to an attack that was potentially motivated by prejudice “enact[s] yet another level of violence against historically marginalized bodies” (Vásquez 48). Sadly, these particular bodies are marked by violence; Pat is found shot and tied up while Faye is shot in the back while running away. Cezair-Thompson details the physical results of the attack: “Faye’s surgery lasted till late afternoon. The surgeon told them that he has managed to save her eye. Her jaw had also been badly broken and part of her ear torn away...she might be left partially paralyzed” (311).

If a personal attack and the murder of a close friend isn’t enough to push Jean toward migration, her implication in the killing of an innocent man ensures her that she is making the right decision. While driving home from visiting Faye at the hospital, Jean’s car is stopped in a road block. Cezair-Thompson writes, “[Jean] didn’t see the roadblock ahead, or the car that had

47 As Sam Vásquez writes, “Jamaica is the most violent country. Jamaica is a homophobic place. Jamaica is an underdeveloped space. Jamaica is the ideal locale for hedonistic fun. Jamaica is a paradise. Variations of these stereotypes appear continually in the foreign media” (43). Vásquez also notes that “in Jamaica, a country generally understood as being virulently opposed to same-sex relationships, homosexuality has fallen under the problematic rubric of hypersexuality, enacting yet another level of violence against historically marginalized bodies” (48). 159 stopped in front of her. She rammed into the back of it, hitting her brakes too late. It lurched forward on the impact and knocked down the soldier who had been standing in front of it” (316).

When Jean begins laughing at the absurdity of the whole situation, but most particularly the soldiers standing idly by with no idea of what they are even looking for, a violent string of events is set in motion. After Jean is handcuffed and ushered toward an army truck, an unnamed man shouts: “Hey! Wait! Soldier what are you doing to that girl?” (Cezair-Thompson 317). When the man inquires about the soldier’s approach and treatment of Jean, “the soldier shoved the man with his rifle, pushing him back against Jean’s car; then he raised the rifle and shot him in the chest” (Cezair-Thompson 317). This verbal altercation leaves a man dead and “Jean gaz[ing] at the man in the white shirt, who had done nothing more than come to her aid in a situation that had gotten out of hand. He lay dead with blood seeping from the bullet wound in his chest, his eyes open, his arms flung wide in alarm” (317-18). Jean is rendered relatively helpless, only gazing, but not reacting, to this tragedy. Much like the violence on the island, the blood cannot be contained. Serving as a martyr and witness, the sacrifice in white lays with eyes open, his arms outstretched like Christ. As suggested earlier, hardship functions as a force of inertia; in

The True History of Paradise the act of flight offers a haven to Jean as she departs Jamaica. This event is the last in a string of hardships that bring Jean to realize that she must leave a land that is at war with itself in order to protect her own health and her own sanity. In constructing a character who leaves because if she “stay[s] any longer, [she will] have to accept it,” Cezair-

Thompson rejects the normalization of violence (326). What began as a state of emergency after the murder of two diplomats has turned pandemic.

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Family Dynamics

In an interview with Randall Kenan, Cezair-Thompson characterizes Jean as “poised between her mother and sister, a woman struggling to find herself” (54). Much like Clare in

Cliff’s Abeng, Jean is “mixed-up progeny”; while Clare is mixed-up in many ways, most explicitly in her racial heritage, Jean is mixed-up as a result of ancestral influences and a dysfunctional family (Cezair-Thompson 9). As in Cliff’s novel, the theme of racial prejudice looms large. Early in The True History of Paradise, Monica notes that “her good looks came from centuries of washing Black people out of the family’s blood” (Cezair-Thompson 31). While in Abeng the father figure, Boy, is the voice of racial prejudice, here we see this coming from

Jean’s mother, Monica. In contrast to Monica’s eldest daughter, Lana, Jean comes as a

“disappointment, the baby girl was not, in Monica’s opinion, beautiful. She was scrawny and dark, darker than anyone in Monica’s family, and she had a deformity: a strange flap of skin on the side of her head that looked like a third ear” (Cezair-Thompson 32). Although Jean may not be phenotypically attractive to Monica, she is believed to possess an otherworldly, intuitive

“hearing,” a gift that Monica instructed the doctor to remove (Cezair-Thompson 32). This gift, is later referenced much more explicitly in the novel as Jean emerges as a young woman

“peculiarly attuned to the voices of her ancestors” (Stracharn 264). As Monica remarks, “She

‘ave sharpenin’ powers. I know dis ‘bout Jean, from she was a likkle girl. She ‘ave–wha’ dem call it–six’ sense” (Cezair-Thompson 245). By integrating disparate voices, Cezair-Thompson illustrates “the complexity of the human drama that is Jamaica’s past and the complicated issues of identity in postcolonial Jamaica” (Stracharn 265).

Also paralleling the close relationship between Clare and Boy in Cliff’s novel, Jean expresses a closeness with her father. Cezair-Thompson depicts this as follows: “from the first

161 moment he saw her, Jean was the joy of her father’s life. His feeling for her surprised him because he had not especially cared about having children” (33). In Roy we see an understanding that moves beyond race and thus a contrast emerges between mother and father. This closeness between father and daughter is perhaps best illustrated in by a family portrait that Roy painted.

With this, Jean’s identity, or lack of, is highlighted. As Cezair-Thompson writes, “Jean found the unfinished painting years later, and placed it on her bedroom wall. The only one Roy had finished painting was Lana. Monica was half-finished. Jean was just an outline; so was he” (50).

In this we see an association between Roy and Jean while Lana stands in contrast. In painting

Lana in this manner, Cezair-Thompson, through Roy, reflects and comments upon societal expectations and privileging of lighter-skinned, more attractive individuals and the erasure of those who fail to measure up to societal ideals. When reading this scene one might wonder why

Jean would choose to display this “unfinished” painting. However, what if the painting isn’t truly unfinished? In leaving himself and Jean as outlines in stark contrast to the completed figure of

Lana and the hybrid figure of Monica, Roy utilizes art to comment on race and how it plays out on an individual level.

While in Abeng we witness a distancing of mother and daughter, in The True History of

Paradise, Jean loses her father; “she had said good night to him as usual; the next day he was gone” (Cezair-Thompson 51). Following her father’s sudden death, Jean “became a solitary, independent little girl, never expecting anyone to pay as much attention to her as her father had”

(Cezair-Thompson 51). One might expect Monica to step in at this point; however, this does not happen. Rather, Monica tells Jean that she “must try to be a big girl now and take care of

[herself]” (Cezair-Thompson 51). While certainly harsh, this distancing is not specific to Jean.

Following Lana’s pregnancy out of wedlock, Monica casts her daughter out of the house and “for

162 eight years [Jean] did not see her sister. The women of the family spoke about Lana among themselves but never directly to her” (Cezair-Thompson 104). Hence, the family (namely

Monica) emerges as preoccupied with appearances and shamed by any aberration of social norms. In a country in which violence has become normalized, we see the same sense of

“shutting down” applied to Monica’s own daughter. In a slightly different fashion, Jean’s psychological exile and the distance that her mother creates prepares her for her flight at the conclusion of the novel.

Somewhat similarly, an attention to the body and sexuality creates distance for Jean. As in Abeng, we witness the physical maturation of our protagonist. It is noted that “Jean had filled out; her breasts and hips were large and womanly, and the new dress showed her body to advantage. Men sought her out, wanting to be introduced. She felt like a beautiful foreigner who had only just arrived in the country” (Cezair-Thompson 148). While Clare’s sexual maturity marks a greater consciousness, Jean’s reads more like a delayed appreciation or inclusion.

However, it is one that, interestingly, sets her apart and somehow characterizes her as “foreign.”

This “foreign” look later attracts the attention of Alan, a married white businessman from New

York–the man she ultimately chooses over Paul, “a true son of the land” (Cezair-Thompson

320). This long-standing feeling of difference, along with escalating violence on the island, makes “flee[ing] the island for the symbolic North and her white, English lover” the more realistic choice (Vásquez 53). In this way, then, an internalized, and perhaps external, sense of difference serves as a seed for migration as Jean’s relationship with Alan functions as the vehicle for escape.

The connection between flight and romantic relationships is not a new one for Jean. In fact, an earlier interracial relationship offers the ability for escape and rebellion. Cezair-

163

Thompson writes: “Mark knew that his parents did not approve of Jean; she was too dark- skinned. He took pleasure in disappointing them” (157). With the inclusion of Mark, one of

Jean’s love interests, Cezair-Thompson takes the earlier scene of Monica’s disappointment further and highlights the racial prejudice and hierarchy that pervades the island. Race is used here as a form of rebellion and protest, but one that places Jean as an object rather than a subject.

For Mark, Jean is an object he manipulates in resistance to his more traditional parents. Jean also has alternative motives, though; “Jean became Mark’s girlfriend to get out of the house and escape her mother’s supervision” (Cezair-Thompson 157-58). While Mark utilizes Jean to “act out,” for Jean this relationship smacks of conformity–conformity to patriarchy and submission to male dominance and desires.

At the same time that Jean is described as a “mixed-up progeny,” Lana remarks “what a mix-up family we have” to which Jean replies, “is a mix-up country. But everything have a way a working out” (Cezair-Thompson 254). Perhaps the most explicit way in which Jean is “mixed- up” is through the multitude of voices she hears, the influence of her ancestors speaking to her.

Illustrating this influence, Cezair-Thompson writes, “she is the descendant, not of runaway

Africans, but of African slaves. And not only of Africans but of English, Irish, Spanish, Jewish,

Germans, and Chinese. Does this motley ancestry make her spirit a less able traveler? Does confusion of the blood cause the spirits to flounder and lose their sense of direction?” (297).

Much like Clare in Abeng, Jean is a young woman with a rich heritage. While we witness Clare beginning to come to terms with contradictions, Jean, sadly, must leave her homeland before this

“confusion of the blood” destroys her. Thinking of the two works together, perhaps Jean’s disparate ancestry is just too much for one individual to bear. Cezair-Thompson details the departure of a protagonist who has the financial wherewithal to depart her homeland, the ability

164 to secure a passport “with her photograph and someone else’s name” (6). Unlike millions who cannot leave the country via private plane, Jean has a connection, Alan, who can “get [her] a visa, passport...in a matter of days” (Cezair-Thompson 293). For Jean, time is of the essence.

Early emigrants had left early “to escape the violence and rising inflation” and now, as Paul remarks, “if anybody’s getting in and out of the island safely it’s the tourists and the ganja traders” (Cezair-Thompson 209, 295).

Too Much People/Too Much Story

In her novel, Cezair-Thompson utilizes the figure of Jean Landing to comment upon the heritage of the former colony of Jamaica. She writes, “because of all the tourist brochures’ claims about harmonious mixing, a White, Indian, or Chinese face among the Black people is incongruous. Too much people. Too much story” (Cezair-Thompson 91). Through the character of Jean Landing, Cezair-Thompson reveals the largely suppressed history of Jamaica and connects colonial and contemporary violence. With her characters, Cezair-Thompson calls for a return to culture as Jean is “attuned to her ancestors, but she has not discovered from them how to live in the land they all call home” (Stracharn 267). In The True History of Paradise some of the more obvious references to history come through the voices of Jean’s ancestors. In the first

“interruption” to the text, Cezair-Thompson writes in the voice of Jean’s ancestor Rebecca

Landing (1682-1751), “we eventually reached Spanish Town. The destruction was not so great there, though fires had broken out in many places and the inhabitants were running in great alarm through the streets” (Cezair-Thompson 20). Jean’s own chapter, the last in the text, concludes with the line “panic and history are mine” (Cezair-Thompson 331). By constructing parallel depictions of panic, Cezair-Thompson points to a shift, as opposed to eradication, of violence. While Rebecca’s account speaks to the chaos that colonials felt following an

165 earthquake, likely the 1692 event that devastated Port Royal and killed 3,000,48 Jean references ever-increasing incidents. Most explicitly, Cezair-Thompson concludes with a description of a woman who is only referred to as “she panic” (331). The author writes: “The woman with a hundred devils in her, or ‘panic’ as we say here, staggers toward the car. The driver shouts something obscene, swerves around her, and drives on. The soldiers, hearing the commotion, look across the road and see the half-naked woman waving her arms and cursing. The shout and move as a group toward her” (Cezair-Thompson 331). In beginning and concluding with scenes of panic, Cezair-Thompson suggests that while panic has become more individual, it has become pandemic. In writing on political turmoil in 1980s Jamaica, Cezair-Thompson very clearly links contemporary violence with the violence of enslavement and the incertitude of the colonial period. At the conclusion of this historical novel, Jean takes flight in the attempt to escape a legacy of panic and an island characterized by both beauty and violence.

From a textual standpoint, these accounts, set in italics, stand in contrast to the primary text. Working with the text, and within Jean, these voices add to our understanding of Jamaica’s past and enrich the text. This account, in particular, highlights Jean’s colonial connections, which are not unlike those of the Savages in Abeng. In the account referenced above, Rebecca Landing remarks that “the history of our island is a history of hell” (Cezair-Thompson 25). This same line is later repeated just before Jean encounters the roadblock that results in the death of an unnamed man who came to her assistance. At the same time, an unnamed ancestor affirms that “Jamaica is our country,” which suggests that Jean’s decision to leave the island is made exponentially more difficult as a result of these ancestral voices. A later account by Moses Landing (1838-1865)

48 “On the main island, Spanish Town was also demolished. Even the north side of the island experienced great tragedy. Fifty people were killed in a landslide. In all, about 3,000 people lost their lives on June 7. There was little respite in the aftermath--widespread looting began that evening and thousands more died in the following weeks due to sickness and injury. Aftershocks discouraged the survivors from rebuilding Port Royal. Instead, the city of Kingston was built and remains to this day the largest city in Jamaica” (“Earthquake”). 166 notes that he “cannot tell you the history of [his] people, but [he] can tell you the history of a soul,” which plays off the title regarding a true(r) history (Cezair-Thompson 55). Similar to the way in which the primary narrative recounts life following independence, Moses’s section details the aftermath of Emancipation. Following an earlier discussion of race, he states that “Jamaica was still a White man’s country. Slavery had ended, but there were still men who were owners and men who were slaves” (Cezair-Thompson 58). Throughout her text, Cezair-Thompson works to expose the lingering effects of colonialism and the continued inequality that is not easily dissolved or forgotten. Making this connection explicitly, Moses’s chapter states, “now one hundred years later, another state of emergency; this time Black against Black” (Cezair-

Thompson 60). As the novel progresses and the voices of ancestors intensify, Jean “can’t help thinking that some inscrutable meanness of their history–her history, Lana’s, Paul’s, missionaries’, conquistadores’, and slaves’–lies in this fallen notion of love, in some error that can be traced back to those first untranslatable hours in the New World” (Cezair-Thompson

241).

Escape

In “Thoughts on Writing from Exile,” Rachel Manley argues that “Jean is trying to get a flight out, and whether it is to the United States or anywhere else in the First World, her flight becomes a metaphor for the Caribbean instinct of survival through escape, an instinct that will forever perpetuate the condition of diaspora” (204). On a more personal level, Ian Stracharn asserts that “Jean’s inability to consummate her love for her lifelong friend Paul, a son of the soil, and her retreat into the arms of an older Englishman correspond directly with her inability to feel safe and fulfilled in Jamaica and her flight to North America” (266). Ironically, it is her talks with Paul that reassure Jean of her decision to leave. For instance, Jean relates, “you know, I

167 never thought I’d be sitting here like this, turning my back on my country” to which Paul replies,

“don’t be so hard on yourself. People leave places. They come back. You would be foolish to stay here right now” (Cezair-Thompson 282). From a textual standpoint, Jean’s departure does not come as a surprise. We learn of her intention to leave Jamaica within the first few pages of the text as Jean notes that “tomorrow, God willing and nothing standing in her way, she will leave this house, this garden, this city” (Cezair-Thompson 5). This brief reference to flight utilizes the repetition of “this” to highlight an aversion to the conditions she wants to leave behind. Again, on the next page, another reference: “upstairs in her bedroom drawer is a U.S. passport with her photograph and someone else’s name. She’s leaving. She’s made up her mind.

There’s nothing more to think about, she tells herself” (Cezair-Thompson 6). Thus, early on we see a justification of this decision, almost as if she is talking herself into making the leap. The fact that the passport is stored away stresses the importance of “official documents” to flight, in this case a forged or illegal flight.

Although Cezair-Thompson announces Jean’s intentions upfront, the novel centers on the vacillation of our protagonist and the difficulty she has in leaving her homeland. Following the attack on her lesbian friend Faye and the murder of Faye’s lover, Pat, Jean decides that “she would not leave. This was her country. Rage had replaced fear” (Cezair-Thompson 316). An interjection from an unnamed ancestor enters the text, advising, “Don’t forget that you have the key, not them on the outside” followed by Jean’s conclusion that “Jamaica was at war with itself.

But there were many people like Jean who wanted no part of this war, who wanted life here”

(Cezair-Thompson 316). Despite this, Jean comes to the conclusion that she must leave. She explains this to her mother, “I’m not thriving. I’m dying here…The brutality is killing me. If I stay any longer, I’ll have to accept it, and I can’t accept it. I find the acceptance brutal” (Cezair-

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Thompson 326). While on the one hand Jean’s migration can be seen as escape, her statement suggests a repudiation of the widespread violence on the island. Although readers are left with little indication of Jean’s plans once she leaves the island, her intentions to continue a romantic relationship with Alan will hopefully allow her to thrive in a way that has not yet been possible.

Like her ancestor, Rebecca Landing, who relates that “my soul, too, was divided by a sword.

That day we left for England the ship whistled so loudly it drowned out my cries,” Jean’s decision to leave her homeland does not come without debate (Cezair-Thompson 26). Like her forbearers, Jean has the luxury of leaving violence to the “sufferers.”

While throughout the text a polyvocality emerges through Jean’s ancestral voices, near the end of the text we hear Jean’s (deceased) father urging her to leave. In Roy Landing’s (1918-

1963) section, he states, “I came to warn you: terrible things spinning around you, a wheel that isn’t stopping. I sat on your bed and watched you sleeping. You opened your eyes. ‘Daddy?’

‘Leave this place” (Cezair-Thompson 285). While this account illustrates a supernatural connection or perception, the directive to “leave this place” rather than to leave “home” strips the impending decision of personality. Much like Avey Johnson in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, our protagonist hears and heeds the warnings of ancestors. Evidencing this, later in the text, Jean narrates, “she felt someone sit on the bed beside her. Leave this place” (Cezair-

Thompson 319). Rather than terming Jean’s extrasensory perception as superstition or a mental illness, Cezair-Thompson lends validity to these types of experiences. As the text concludes,

Jean asserts that “She didn’t dream them: Roy, Monica, Paul, Deepa, Moses, Daphne, Lana,

Rebecca…they are here” (Cezair-Thompson 328).

By combining deceased and living in this list of influences, Cezair-Thompson suggests an understanding of life that moves beyond this world and instead resonates more with African

169 beliefs such as the Kongo Cosmogram referenced in Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.

Though Jean’s understanding of enduring ties speaks to African belief systems, it is important to remember that several of these influences have European ties, most notably Moses and Rebecca; as such, Jean’s decision is complicated by voices that urge her to fight for her nation and ones who advise her to run far away. Nevertheless, Jean’s acceptance of Monica’s advice alongside

Rebecca’s points to a view of ancestral ties similar to Caroline and Grace’s relationship with their deceased father in Danticat’s “Caroline’s Wedding.” In The True History of Paradise the

“voices” direct Jean to “escape, live, and be silent among the migratory” and to “mek dem know we is here” (Cezair-Thompson 328). While this directive follows an exchange with Monica, perhaps “dem” refers to the reader. So much as warnings have come from long-passed ancestors, they also come from those around her as Jean is advised to “leave the country for awhile”

(Cezair-Thompson 293). Although this discussion of The True History of Paradise has largely focused on Jean’s decision to leave the country, collective flight herein enters the text.

Though the novel decidedly traces the flight of Jean Landing from the violence of her homeland, there is an identification to be found in leaving. This desperate nature of flight is highlighted throughout the text. As Cezair-Thompson writes: “American expatriates and

Jamaicans filled the American embassy and stood in waiting crowds outside its gates” (302). For

Jean, “born in British Jamaica just as the colony was drawing its last breath, she had entered a place of waiting. It was not an exceptional place- the waiting rooms of history were full of people like her- but it was a place of wonder” (Cezair-Thompson 303). In constructing this portrait of those awaiting collective flight, Cezair-Thompson utilizes a term popularized by

Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe. In his analysis of nineteenth-century “rude peoples” such as Africans and Indians, Chakrabarty pushes back against a reading of Africans

170 and Indians as populations “not yet civilized enough to rule themselves” (8).49 Chakrabarty concludes that such a reading “consign[s] Indians, Africans, and other ‘rude’ nations into an imaginary waiting room of history. In doing so, it converted history itself into a version of this waiting room” (8).

While Chakrabarty’s understanding of the phrase critiques a paternalistic view of postcolonial nations and their peoples, Cezair-Thompson’s portrait of the waiting room falls short of furthering an image of Jamaicans united against such attitudes, but depicts a temporary “waiting room” full of individuals soon to disperse to multiple locations. The real waiting room, as

Cezair-Thompson suggests, is Jean’s birth into this particular time in history, the period just before independence in 1962. In employing this term, the author coyly disputes the notion that post-independence Jamaica is incapable of ruling itself. At the same time, Jean’s departure, as someone born into this “place of waiting,” suggests that one can only wait so long. As the metaphor suggests, early 1980s Jamaica remains in a state of limbo, one that citizens such as

Jean endure another period of waiting to escape from. As this scene continues, Jean relates that

“she couldn’t picture herself anywhere else. It was not love of country that she felt, so much as simple inseparableness” (Cezair-Thompson 138). Hence, migration is fraught with emotion and anxiety. Reading much more like how one would refer to a jilted lover, this description paints the relation between self and country in very familiar terms. At the same time, the process of leaving, of obtaining “approval,” is more like purgatory, and a shared purgatory at that.

Instead of leaving purely for personal reasons, Jean’s eventual flight is influenced by the death of her sister, Lana. After viewing the tombstone of ancestor Susannah Crawford, Jean remarks that “her sister’s death saturates everything. It is crucial that she go now. It is terrible now to go. Should she let herself be run out of her own country, her sister unquiet and confused

49 Emphasis original 171 in the grave?” (Cezair-Thompson 16). Much like Edward Said’s statement in the epigraph, the condition of exile, here psychological, offers relief as well as grief. Again connecting the personal and political, Jean notes, “how fitting, she thinks, to leave the country in mourning clothes” (Cezair-Thompson 10). A sense of disillusionment grows as Jean remarks, “either I’m a duppy or this is another country” (Cezair-Thompson 295). Again, the division of the country is highlighted when Paul tells Jean, “it’s the north coast. If anybody’s getting in and out of the island safely it’s the tourists and the ganja traders” (Cezair-Thompson 295). Clearly, as Paul’s remark suggests, money or influence assures mobility; ironically, as Cezair-Thompson’s discussion of the “waiting room” indicates, the unemployed or degenerate are not at the gate, but instead American expatriates and well-to-do Jamaicans. Despite the division Paul references, we see a strong attachment to country with the line “she looks at her city, pressing its image to her mind to last a lifetime…in spite of everything, she loves it, the way one might love a dangerous, delinquent brother” (Cezair-Thompson 13). Here, Jean’s departure conveys a sense of permanence with the image of her “pressing its image to her mind,” which highlights the relationship between the visual and memory (Cezair-Thompson 13). Interestingly, this bond is figured in filial terms, not the parent-child relationship we typically see but that of a “delinquent brother” (Cezair-Thomspon 13).

Somewhat similarly, Jean’s departure largely focuses on the landscape rather than the individuals she is leaving, which stresses her longstanding exile and strong attachment to the land. Jean observes that “it was the greenest place Jean had ever seen, the apogee of green. For the rest of her life she would compare all green places to this part of the country. It wasn’t as wild and teeming as the rest of Jamaica; it was lush, but orderly” (Cezair-Thompson 67). In describing this pocket of Jamaican landscape, Cezair-Thompson contrasts the wild with the

172 tamed; ironically, the majority of the country is depicted in varying degrees of chaos while this location evokes a sublime image of paradise. Again, we hear Jean admitting that all future homelands must somehow compare to the one she is leaving. At the same time, Jean’s love for

Jamaica and attachment with the land is qualified here; it is on this childhood drive to her boarding school that this awareness surfaces. Prior to her physical migration we witness Jean’s figurative migration and escape through the medium of literature. Specifically, for the protagonist, “novels became Jean’s only escape. She read constantly, pressing her ear close to the world of fictional characters, like a vagrant at a windowpane” (Cezair-Thompson 205). Near the conclusion of the novel, Jean admits that “she knows now why she is taking this journey”

(Cezair-Thompson 301). Perhaps this is because “if [refuge] is to be had at all, [it] lies in the destination, not the journey” (Cezair-Thompson 86). Despite this resolve, we see our protagonist trapped in a state of fear. Musing on the process of her own migration, Jean relates that “to leave one’s country. It is not a complete sentence, a complete anything. Its infinite possibilities leap from loss to promise and back again from promise to loss” (Cezair-Thompson 328).

As Margaret Cezair-Thompson herself notes, “the fact that Jean doesn’t speak in her own voice, that she doesn’t become a first-person narrator until the very end is very deliberate. She really has to carry and hear all these voices through her first” (Kenan 59). In presenting heartbreak as inheritance, Cezair-Thompson ruminates on “the preoccupation with the consequences of exile on the Caribbean voice” (Manley 206). In this novel, as well as Cliff’s, violence is made personal. Through less than harmonious parental relations, Cliff and Cezair-

Thompson detail the flight of protagonists who feel cut off from society, each keenly aware of their own difference. As these novels attest, psychological exile is an essential part of the migratory experience, one that propels flight for protagonists Clare and Jean. In examining the

173 contradictions and difficulties of migration through the lens of race, gender and mobility, I highlight the multi-faceted nature of flight. So much as Jean “at times felt strangled by the roots on the island,” Clare feels the weight of her own suffocation (Cezair-Thompson 277). While The

True History of Paradise proclaims that “Jamaica was too young to die,” contemporary

Caribbean authors such as Cliff and Cezair-Thompson push back against an early death (139). In moving beyond national and cultural boundaries, Cliff and Cezair-Thompson complicate readings of transnationalism and illustrate the productive link between location and literary production.

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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

“Immigration offers the chance to reinvent one’s identity- to be reborn, in a sense” -Sharrón Sarthou, “Unsilencing Défilée’s Daughters: Overcoming Silence in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!”

In Triangular Road, Paule Marshall’s 2009 memoir, the author reflects on her ancestry:

“perhaps living in their birthplace might help me to better understand them” (99). In connecting her parents’ birthplace (the West Indies) with a deeper appreciation for personal and cultural heritage, Marshall suggests that cultural connection is paramount for second-generation immigrants such as herself, individuals who experience the pain of transnationalism through their parents. For children of immigrants, the “homeland” is a force and location that looms large yet often remains unknown; their country of birth, the new homeland, occasions a series of negotiations for children of immigrants and their parents. For Paule Marshall and Andrea Levy, this need for connection manifests itself in a very visceral and physical experience that is reflected in writing. As Marshall’s memoir details, it was travel to Barbados, and later to Africa, that afforded her a greater understanding of her “tripartite self,” or rather, an understanding of her Caribbean, African, and American identities (Triangular 163).

While the previous chapters explored figurative flight and multiple forms of transformation, with the most recent chapter expanding understandings of the term transnational,

I now turn to an examination of the intersection between the transnational narrative and historical fiction in Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and Levy’s Small Island (2004). As second-generation immigrants born of Caribbean parents, Marshall to Barbadian parents and

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Levy to Jamaican, their works query the function of nationalism, or the feeling of “belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage” and the location of home (Said 176). Applying Edward

Said’s understanding of nationalism as “affirm[ing] the home created by a community of language, culture and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights to prevent its ravages,” this chapter discusses how the narrative reflection of transnationalism is a commentary on feelings of acceptance and incorporation (176). Collectively, these texts undercut Said’s interpretation of exile and nationalism as dialectic opposites; although “all nationalism in their early stages develop from a condition of estrangement,” the works under discussion suggest that a similar sense of individual estrangement can propel transnationalism (176). Viewing nationalism as “a set of beliefs about the nation,” I discuss the way in which nationalism50 eclipses cultural identification in Praisesong for the Widow and the way that it establishes distance and intensifies feelings of exile for transmigrants in Small Island (Grosby 5). Extending

Myriam Chancy’s assertion that “home, then, paradoxically becomes both the site of self- recovery and the point of no return,” this chapter argues that it is the departure from home that occasions self-recovery or self-discovery (xi). In both works, it is only when characters leave home that they are forced to reconsider their personal and cultural identities; after enduring a period of struggle, the protagonists emerge renewed.51 Therefore, it is not the United States, for

Avey, or Jamaica, for Hortense, that spurs emotional or cultural regeneration, but instead it is travel outside the home that propels change.

50 Steven Grosby argues that “many wrongly use the term ‘nationalism’ as a synonym for ‘nation.’ Nationalism refers to a set of beliefs about the nation” (5).

51 Carole Boyce Davies finds that “this construction of home as problematic space calls into question the notion of stable, continuous identities. For home is often situated as the site of calm security and comfort...The figure of the displaced, homeless person is the most poignant, tragic representation of the transnational, capitalist, post-modern condition” (65, 113).

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Praisesong for the Widow and Small Island detail the emotional development of female protagonists (Avey Johnson in Marshall’s novel and Queenie Bligh in Levy’s). While Marshall’s work traces Avey’s reconciliation of cultural identity and repressed grief, Levy turns to historical fiction to connect with her Caribbean ancestry and explore the history of West Indians in

England. In very different ways, the authors illustrate the transformative effect of physical location upon mental clarity and ancestral connection. Similar to the struggles that Clare Savage in Abeng and Jean Landing in The True History of Paradise undergo prior to migration, these works suggest that psychological exile is a component of physical migration. Together, the works illustrate the need for reconnection, particularly for immigrants; in this way, figurative and literal flight offer psychic and physical reconciliation. As Marshall’s and Levy’s novels illustrate, migration is often a fraught state; this chapter examines the difficulties of migration through the lens of location. Much in the same way that Cliff and Cezair-Thompson feel a sense of freedom in critiquing colonialism from outside the Caribbean, Marshall and Levy write of transnationalism from personal experience. Yet, for the authors under study in this chapter, literary production is not dependent upon location; the authors incorporate travel experiences in their writing but, interestingly, Levy supplements English historical record from inside the country. While Cliff and Cezair-Thompson are both children of Caribbean-born migrants,

Marshall and Levy experienced transnationalism by way of inheritance. Born in the United

States and England, respectively, the authors detail the hardship of migration from another perspective. In reliving their parents’ migratory experience through literature, the authors advocate for a broader understanding of the term “transnational.” Avey in Marshall’s novel gains a transnational perspective by reconnecting with her African roots and Levy’s text illustrates the discrimination colonial subjects faced in England following World War II.

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Much in the same way that Gay Wilentz asserts that “the concept of diaspora literature calls into question imposed literary boundaries such as ‘national’ and ‘continental’ literature,”

Marshall and Levy present characters who defy categorization by geographic affiliation (386).

Similar to how hardship functions as inertia in Elizabeth Nunez’s Anna In-Between and

Boundaries and the act of flight serves as a temporary haven in Breath, Eyes, Memory, the migratory experience in Praisesong for the Widow and Small Island emphasizes the prejudice and disappointment occasioned by it, as opposed to peace. Rather than migrating to secure medical treatment or to escape violence, migration in these works comes as a result of indirect hardship. For instance, Avey in Marshall’s novel travels to Carriacou by somewhat of an accident after her dream of Aunt Cuney calls her to leave her Caribbean cruise in search of cultural reconnection. Somewhat similarly, the characters in Levy’s text migrate to assist the

English war effort or to escape dismal economic conditions in the colony.

With Praisesong for the Widow and Small Island, Marshall and Levy meld fiction and personal experience as they highlight the destruction that assimilation causes for immigrants and their children. In detailing the struggles that accompany distance from home, Marshall’s and

Levy’s texts support Carole Boyce Davies’s assertion that the “construction of home as problematic space calls into question the notion of stable, continuous identities” (65). Depicting the homeland as a space of disconnection, the novels position home not as a space of security and comfort, but a force of propulsion that brings the protagonists to a reconsideration of identity. While initially Marshall and Levy position Avey and Hortense as symbolic of the

“displaced...tragic representation of the transnational, capitalist, post-modern condition,”

Praisesong for the Widow and Small Island illustrate the centrality of flight to the reclamation of heritage and the amendment of historical record (Davies 113).

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Much like the previous chapter, which discusses the way in which Clare Savage and Jean

Landing’s negotiation of competing allegiances serves as a precursor to migration, this chapter understands transnationalism as the “multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states” (Vertovec preface). Though Cliff and Cezair-Thompson join

Marshall and Levy under the umbrella of transnational authors, their protagonists, Clare and

Jean, are on the brink of migration. By contrast, the characters under study in this chapter are in various states of limbo; for them, immigration offers renewal, as Sharrón Sarthou finds. Yet, before Avey and Hortense can be reborn, they must suffer a period of personal and social disconnection before they are more comfortable at home and with themselves. They are aided along the way. In Praisesong for the Widow, Avey is supported by a host of supernatural or mystical forces,52 most notably her Aunt Cuney and the practice of doubling, or dissociation53 while in Small Island Hortense’s landlord and friend, Queenie, assists in her adjustment to the motherland. Beginning with a discussion of cultural loss and reclamation in Marshall’s

Praisesong for the Widow, I move to an examination of racial relations following WWII in

Levy’s Small Island. Marshall’s novel illustrates that individuals can indeed transform multiple cultures into one and Levy’s work offers inclusion to colonial citizens and highlights the difficulties of colony-metropole relations on a micro level. The authors connect with their own ancestry and recreate, through the process of writing, the struggles that their parents underwent.

Collectively, their works position cultural connection as an essential component to feelings of belongingness, especially for second-generation immigrants such as themselves.

52 The Oxford English Dictionary defines mystical as “having a spiritual character or significance by virtue of a connection or union with God which transcends human understanding.”

53 Like my second chapter, this chapter understands doubling to be a form of dissociation that allows “women to detach themselves from incidents that inflict bodily pain” (Francis 87). Additionally, dissociation functions as a “survival strategy of disconnection” (Francis 87). 179

Retrieving the Past

In Praisesong for the Widow Avey Johnson, “attempts to retrieve the past in order to make sense of her middle-class and middle-aged widowhood” (Richards 21). More specifically,

Avey, an African-American woman of Caribbean ancestry living in New York, realizes that she has lost herself over the years. In buying into the notion of the American Dream, Avey has moved away from her cultural roots and has instead assimilated into white culture. By forgoing cultural connection for a sense of nationalistic belonging, Avey denies an essential part of herself. It takes the more than death of her husband to bring Avey to this conclusion. Ironically,

Avey embarks on an odyssey of personal and cultural discovery when she takes a Caribbean cruise with friends. In using a “strong, sacrificing, ‘no-nonsense’ grandmother figure,” Marshall employs and subsequently challenges the postmenopausal archetype as she highlights the importance of cultural connection (Kemp and Liddell 32). Moving away from the trope of the juvenile bildungsroman, Marshall follows a pattern of “departure, initiation, and return” as she fuses Caribbean and African American cultures. Instead of illustrating a young woman coming of age, Marshall presents one woman’s journey toward an integrated identity as she nears retirement (Kemp and Liddell 33). In presenting this later-in-life transition, Marshall

“demonstrates how we, as readers and writers alike, may locate and reclaim our respective traditions, myths, and rituals to recall that which we have forgotten” (Benjamin 64). Through

Avey, Marshall proves that it is never too late to “get your groove back.”

As a child of Barbadian immigrants, Marshall’s “project is one of reconnection and reconciliation” (Brown-Hinds 107). Though Marshall herself is American-born, her parents joined over 50,000 West Indians who entered the United States by 1980 (Crowder 82). Perhaps inspired by her parents’ cultural disjunction, Marshall crafts the tale of Avey Johnson in

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Praisesong for the Widow, a novel that illustrates that cultural roots can travel. Through Avey,

Marshall suggests that there is a middle ground between assimilation and extreme devotion to a foreign culture. Like the character she constructs, Marshall “embraces a dual identity as an

African American and as a West Indian” and her writing illustrates an intimacy with both cultures (Stracharn 226). Much like Marshall’s own journey growing up in a Caribbean home in the United States, Avey “comes to understand her own identity through a series of journeys…that help her piece together the elements which contribute to herself as an African

American in the late twentieth century” (Rogers 91). Unlike the psychic migration in Breath,

Eyes, Memory, or the cultural negotiations that take place in Abeng, geographic removal is essential in Praisesong for the Widow. Whereas Jean Landing in Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s

The True History of Paradise is a “mixed up progeny” in a mixed-up country, and must leave her homeland in order to attain peace, Avey’s rather comfortable life becomes challenged once she leaves the mainland. It is the departure from the comfort of home that propels the protagonist’s cultural resurrection; in constructing a character who travels away from the tidy itinerary that her cruise offers, Marshall pushes back against assimilation and links hardship and growth.

Indirectly, Avey’s extension of her travels comes as a result of loss, most notably the death of her husband and her assimilation into white American culture. By detailing the cultural reclamation that comes from flight, Marshall highlights the negative effects of assimilation and the emotional destruction that more narrow understandings of nationalism can cause. In staging physical and emotional turmoil as an essential component of Avey’s rebirth, Marshall paints cultural reconnection as a process that entails a period of struggle before reconnection.

As the title of the text implies, Avey is carrying a great deal of grief that she had yet to fully process. In revealing the consequences of repressed grief, Marshall’s novel plays upon

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Freud’s notion of diasporic melancholia, a “failure of mourning that originates in a loss that cannot be fully known or articulated” (Kaplan 513). More than mourning the death of her husband, Avey is called to grieve, and subsequently reclaim, her cultural legacy. As Freud’s assertion suggests, though, Avey was not fully aware of the extent of her loss or its impact upon her present circumstances; it takes the mystical intervention of her Aunt Cuney to bring her to a place where she can more fully understand the way in which her own mourning has been incomplete and has left her in a state of suspended grief. Praisesong for the Widow details cultural loss on a personal level. In the pursuit of happiness (AKA wealth), Avey and her husband lost touch with their racial and cultural heritage. As a result, Avey must rediscover “her true name, her true place, obscured for years by her and her husband’s pursuit for material security” (Christian 75). In Praisesong for the Widow, Marshall presents Avey as moving towards a positive double-consciousness, an alteration of African American remembering that

“focus[es] on positive ways of constructing new identity, even out of the painful experiences of the past” (Singh 7). In this novel, Marshall illustrates the “struggle between two worlds, the real and the supernatural, the mother country and the motherlands, orality versus written” (Alexander

137). Ultimately, her text suggests that these elements can not only coexist but can also afford a more comprehensive understanding of our place in the world.

Marshall positions Avey as transnationally and transculturally dislocated; travel initially complicates Avey’s psyche, which leads to psychological and emotional liberation at the end of the text. While it is first Avey’s embarkation aboard a Caribbean cruise that provides the opportunity for transformation, the role of the mystical54 is essential in Avey’s growth. In fact, it

54 The Oxford English Dictionary defines mystical as “having a spiritual character or significance by virtue of a connection or union with God which transcends human understanding.”

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is Avey’s doubling,55 or “imagined travel” that affords the emotional healing that allows her to grow and even promulgate the complex identity she embraces at the conclusion of the novel. So much as scholars such as Roberta Rubenstein discuss Avey’s transformation at the conclusion of the novel as being a religious initiation involving purging and cleansing, a connection has yet to have been made to the use of doubling (103). While a range of criticism exists on Marshall’s work, scholars have not yet examined the role of mysticism in depth. Although the figure of Papa

Legba, the loa in Haitian Voodoo who stands as the intermediary between the other loa and humanity, is often discussed in criticism on the text, I examine the role of doubling in the fusion of Avey’s previously fractured identity. In reading Marshall’s text in this way, I understand mysticism as a “belief system based on the assumption of occult forces [such as] mysterious supernatural agencies” as I discuss literal and figurative transportation and transformation

(OED).

I understand doubling to be literal as well as figurative. Drawing from DuBois’s concepts of the veil and double-consciousness, which Marshall appears to be in conversation with, doubling is often taken figuratively to indicate a separation of body and soul as well as a feeling of “twoness.” In crafting Praisesong for the Widow, it seems that Marshall is writing back to

DuBois’s notion of double-consciousness, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (3). Perhaps because of this, Marshall endows Avey with second sight and, through her, explores psychological duality, the legacy of African-Americans that DuBois speaks of. With the character of Avey Johnson, Marshall lifts the veil to unite Avey’s “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” into a “better and truer self” at the conclusion of the text

55 Like my second chapter, this chapter understands doubling to be a form of dissociation that allows “women to detach themselves from incidents that inflict bodily pain” (Francis 87). Additionally, dissociation functions as a “survival strategy of disconnection” (Francis 87).

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(DuBois 3). Whereas DuBois envisions the uniting of two disparate selves, Marshall evidences it.

The Road Less Traveled

While Marshall utilizes the vehicle of the Caribbean cruise to position Avey in the liminal space of Carriacou, a small island off the coast of Grenada, it is the medium of travel that allows Avey to begin to feel the grief she has yet to confront. This view complicates

Rubenstein’s assertion that it is the appearance of Aunt Cuney “provokes Avey to recall and imaginatively revisit Tatem Island” (97). While I certainly agree with Rubenstein that Aunt

Cuney’s appearance in Avey’s dreams is a force of change, her aunt’s supernatural appearance can only take root and affect change in this space of something new. It is in the protective, in- between space of international waters that Avey’s ancestor enters her consciousness; in this space without cultural signifiers Avey is free to explore her own cultural influences and allegiances. Physical removal from the space of Western decadence is an essential component to

Avey’s cultural reclamation. In reading Marshall’s text in this way, I draw upon the pre-

Enlightenment definition of travel meaning “to labor” instead of the post-Enlightenment understanding as leisure (OED). Travel for Avey initially begins as a form of leisure, but her trip quickly occasions emotional and physical discomfort. More specifically, Avey experiences a vague “clogged and swollen feeling” and becomes ill aboard the cruise ship and the Bianca

Pride that takes her from Grenada to Carriacou (Marshall 52). While Praisesong for the Widow at first follows post-Enlightenment understandings of travel in terms of leisure, Avey’s emotional break and presence on the island of Grenada, and later Carriacou, brings the widow to a place of emotional labor, one that ultimately affords transformation, or change in “form, shape, or appearance; metamorphosis” (OED). Travel in Praisesong for the Widow is very much

184 associated with labor. Far from the idyllic vacation images splashed across travel brochures,

Avey engages with individual and collective loss before emerging renewed.

Applying George Robertson’s understanding of travel as a “quest for the acquisition of knowledge and a desire to return to a utopian space of freedom,” (qtd. in Siegel 195) allows us to see Avey’s journey in terms of Bracha Ettinger’s concept of the matrixial borderspace. Also responding to Du Bois, Ettinger defines the matrixial borderspace as a “transforming borderspace of encounter of the co-emerging I and the neither fused nor rejected uncognized non-I”56 (64). In light of this, I suggest that Avey’s emotional transformation is a complex collusion of transportation and mysticism that results in a more culturally-aware subject, a woman who emerges as a result of the combination of place and people that results in a liminal space, a “linked space of a primary psychic relation” (Butler x). Drawing from recent scholarship on transnationalism and applying Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert’s understanding of transnational identity as the “transformation of two or more cultures into one,” (2) I contend that a mystical connection pushes Avey toward a cultural reconnection that incorporates the African in African-

American. The practice of doubling paves the way for the development of Avey’s unified identity at the conclusion of the novel. Somewhat similar to the function of doubling in

Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, dissociation prepares the protagonist for change. While Sophie utilizes doubling as a coping mechanism to partially escape the pain of abuse, dissociation enters

Marshall’s text as a result of loss. In this way, then, Marshall’s novel expands understandings of dissociation to include emotional, as opposed to bodily, grief.

In discussing Marshall’s text in terms of transportation and transformation, I place the novel within discussions of travel writing. Extending Kristi Siegel’s claim that travel writing by women is often “less goal-oriented, less imperialistic, and more concerned with people than

56 Emphasis original 185 place,” I find that travel in Marshall’s text functions to awaken Avey from the daze she has been living in (5). Given that Marshall readily admits that her writing is influenced by her travels, I consider Praisesong for the Widow as an example of the writing Siegel speaks of. Rather than detailing Marshall’s personal travels, as the novelist does in Triangular Road, Praisesong traces the movement and development of a fictional, though representative, character. Travel renders

Avey more receptive to cognizant of messages from her spiritual guides, Aunt Cuney and Lebert

Joseph/Papa Legba. In particular, the dream in which she sees her Aunt Cuney serves as the precursor to Avey’s reconnection with African folklore57 and ritual. Though transportation aboard the cruise ship moves Avey from American to Caribbean culture, and thus places her within the region, people are even more essential to her emotional transformation. In addition to the undeniable influence that Aunt Cuney’s supernatural appearance has on Avey’s decision to disembark the cruise and follow her instincts where they lead her, the people of Carriacou assist

Avey in shedding her assimilated skin. While on the one hand “it was the place…drawing the words from her, forcing them out one by one,” in Marshall’s text the mystical serves as a bridge between transportation and transformation and through a melding of these elements we witness both physical and emotional transformation (170).

Avey begins the process of travel, first as a form of leisure, when she embarks on a

Caribbean cruise with friends. It is after her decision to abandon the cruise and extend her travels in the region that Avey begins her own transformation. Evidencing the role of transportation on her own evolution, she wonders if the place, Grenada, is making her speak so freely. She notes:

“it was the place: the special light that filled it and the silence, as well as the bowed figure across the table who didn't appear to be listening. They were drawing the words from her, forcing them

57 As with previous chapters, I understand folklore throughout as the “traditional beliefs and behaviors that circulate within a group of people in different versions based on a perceived model” (Hill 9). 186 out one by one” (Marshall 170). Here it is the mystical effect of the islands, and more particularly Carriacou, that affects Avey's transformation. Further connecting literal transportation and Avey’s transformation, the figure of Lebert Joseph, a guide-like figure similar to Aunt Cuney and a double for the Voodoo figure Papa Legba, “saw how far she had come since leaving the ship and the distance she had yet to go” (Marshall 172). Helping to explain this,

Elizabeth McNeil notes that the “Papa Legba figure, Lebert, replaces Aunt Cuney in leading

Avey through a process of initiation, in this manner serving as a double of sorts” (191). While it is at first a familiar figure who initiates Avey’s process of transformation, a more omnipresent one takes over, a figurative and mystical double, which suggests that it is not so much about a particular place or a particular person as it is a process of awakening and rebirth initiated by the intersection of a familiar yet unfamiliar place with an ancestral figure.

Mind apart from Body

Although transportation certainly figures literally in Marshall’s text, I am more intrigued by the role of figurative transportation, or doubling. Throughout, I understand doubling to be a separation of soul from body that allows the soul to wander. Early in the text we witness Avey’s figurative transportation as “her mind in a way wasn't even in her body, or for that matter in the room” but was rather “down at the embarkation door near the waterline five decks below”

(Marshall 10). This complicates Rubenstein’s assertion that it is the dream with Aunt Cuney that provokes Avey to imaginatively visit Tatem. Rather, it is first the act of travel and subsequently the mystical appearance of Aunt Cuney that brings Avey to a figurative doubling as she begins to confront issues of cultural assimilation and repressed grief over the loss of her husband. This newfound sense of estrangement from her own culture calls Avey to imaginatively connect with her ancestors via a romanticized return home.

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Considering DuBois’s notion of double-consciousness as a “twoness,” we can also consider Avey in terms of a genealogical doubling. Avey, formally named Avatara, is tasked with carrying on the legacy of her grandmother, also named Avatara. Applying an understanding of an avatar as a “manifestation in human form [or] incarnation” allows us to see Avey positioned as a physical double undergoing emotional doubling (OED). Writing on fragmentation, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory suggests that “the women are fragmented because of a disconnection to their spiritual source: Africa. They must return to Africa, literally or figuratively, as part of their journey to selfhood” (9). In Praisesong for the Widow, guides such as Aunt Cuney and Lebert Joseph assist Avey in doing just that. As Avey joins in an annual trip from Grenada to Carriacou, she symbolically experiences the Middle Passage; as nausea overcomes her she purges inherited as well as individual trauma. In this way, Avey’s brief journey aboard the Bianca Pride brings Avey a fuller understanding of her identity as an

African-American woman and a deeper knowledge of her ancestral past.

Along with serving as a way to emotionally remove herself, doubling functions in

Marshall’s text as a means of returning to moments of the past. Perhaps more explicitly, Avey engages in doubling as she travels back to a childhood Easter service. As she allows her mind to drift, she recalls that it was after hearing Patois in Martinique that Aunt Cuney visited her in a dream two days later. As mentioned earlier, it is first travel that triggers the opening of “a closed- off corner” of Avey’s mind, allowing her to regress and reconnect with her cultural past

(Marshall 196). While travel outside the United States primes Avey for this psychological experience, the practice of doubling prepares Avey for further travel. In this way, an “aural memory reawakens her condensed cultural memory” (Couser 12) and in Praisesong for the

Widow the locations of Grenada and Carriacou and the language of Patois stand in for and trigger

188 a remembrance and reunion with “the sound of voices in Tatem” (Marshall 196). In Marshall’s text, doubling allows Avey to feel as if she is “dwelling in any number of places at once and in a score of different time frames,” which suggests a multiplicity that extends beyond temporality

(Marshall 232). This connection and liminal existence connects to a crossing over as near the conclusion of the text Avey notes that she has “finally after all these decades made it across”

(Marshall 248). As Avey travels to Grenada and Carriacou, connecting place and people, she moves from an individual experience to a collective one.

As illustrated thus far, literal and figurative transportation impacts Avey’s transformation throughout the text. Evidencing the impact of travel on initiating this change is the description of

Avey “moving like a woman half her age, her shadow on the walls and ceiling hurrying to keep up” (Marshall 10). Interestingly, in this early passage, just the thought of leaving the cruise lightens her burden. Again suggesting a mystical separation of the soul from the body, Avey’s shadow lags behind her body; it acts as its own entity and struggles to keep up with her newly- energized self. Similar to the manner in which figurative transportation is reflected in the body, most specifically in the eyes, Avey “no longer recogniz[es] herself” (77) and “for the first time in months actually looked at herself” (Marshall 99). Together, these statements illustrate physical and emotional transformation. Whereas Avey once avoided confronting herself in the mirror, now she not only looks but recognizes vast change, a change so drastic that she fails to recognize herself. Along with a physical recognition of similarity and difference, Avey experiences a

“mysterious clogged and swollen feeling,” a “vaguely bloated” sensation that begins shortly after the start of the cruise (Marshall 52). Avey begins to reconnect with her body, listening to the messages it sends her alongside mystical influences. Following the literal and figurative expulsion of her previous identity, one detached from her cultural past, Avey begins to construct

189 a new identity that incorporates her cultural heritage. While the overhearing of Patois on

Martinique and Aunt Cuney’s appearance in a dream sets the process of transformation in motion, Avey’s sickness aboard the Bianca Pride, Marshall’s critique on “white pride,” recalls the experiences of her ancestors crossing the Middle Passage (Smith 724). With this, Marshall reaches into the past as she presents an opportunity for Avey to perform and experience a catharsis symbolic of her ancestors’ suffering.

Before Avey can achieve cultural reconnection and a more unified identity, she must undergo a process of testing or challenging. As she begins to experience emotional dissonance aboard the Bianca Pride, she feels that “something in her suddenly felt as exposed and vulnerable” (Marshall 56). Emotions are turned upside down and her eyes begin playing

“frightening tricks” on her, which suggests the fallibility of sight and the importance of feeling or sensing (Marshall 171). While in Marshall’s text sight is often associated with “knowing” through the figure of Lebert Joseph, the man who “had known all her objections before they were even born in her thoughts,” Avey remains in a state of hazy vision until the conclusion of the novel (Marshall 184). This is directly attributable to her cultural disconnect and assimilation into white culture. While at the beginning of the text Avey’s sight is fallible, after disembarking the cruise “a change came over her” on a Grenada beach as “she felt the caul over her mind lifting and she began looking around her” (Marshall 154). Here the reference to a caul suggests

“a person born with a veil of inner fetal membrane, or ‘caul,’ over his/her face, [one] gifted with the power of second sight; such a person can see duppies (ghosts) and is insightful spiritually in other ways” (McNeil 191). As cauls are typically associated with sight into the spirit world, this points to an underlying perception that has yet to surface. After the caul is lifted, not unlike

DuBois’s lifting of the veil, Avey begins looking around her with a “child’s curiosity” that

190 harkens back to Judith Butler’s assertion that the matrixial borderspace prompts us to see “the space in which we are not one, cannot be, and yet we are not without the capacity to see” with the eyes of a child (xii). While previously her eyes were deceiving her, now she looks about her surroundings with a new vision, much like her new outlook on life at the conclusion of the text.

Returning to DuBois’s emphasis on the eyes, Avey begins to see though her own eyes rather than seeing herself through the eyes of others. This evidences a reification of DuBois’s concept and the beginnings of individual transformation.

In addition to Avey’s change in vision reflecting a figurative transformation, she notes that everything around her appeared “fleeting and ephemeral. The island more a mirage rather than an actual place. Something conjured up perhaps to satisfy a longing and need” (Marshall

254). As I have asserted, it is place, whether real or imagined, that works alongside Avey’s spiritual guides, Aunt Cuney and Lebert Joseph, to lead Avey to a space of cultural reconnection.

While the island of Carriacou and its people are largely static instruments that facilitate Avey’s awakening, the same is not true to the same extent for Lebert Joseph or Aunt Cuney, who act as more dynamic forces in the text. Instead, it is Avey’s presence in Grenada, and later in

Carriacou, that allows her to connect with these instruments of change. At the same time, we would be remiss to discount the effect of class on this individual’s experience. Because of her socioeconomic status, Avey is able to participate in this kind of heritage tourism that offers up the island of Carriacou as a romanticized image that Avey can locate herself in. It goes without saying that this kind of flight is not available to all, and likely not to those in developing nations.

Thus, it is only as a result of her wealth that Avey is able to access that static location of change,

Carriacou, and its inhabitants, to experience a simpler, purer Caribbean that “heals” her. While this is indeed problematic, it is not necessarily the people of Carriacou that push Avey toward

191 wholeness, but the experience of being in a particular place at the same time that mystical forces call her to remember her cultural past.

In bringing Avey to recall her culture, Marshall downplays geographic location in favor of a Pan-Caribbean association that collapses boundaries and distinctions and instead celebrates commonalities. Avey does not claim a Caribbean heritage on the basis of nationalism, but on the basis of shared feeling. Avey’s participation in the nation dance on Carriacou speaks to a different kind of nationalism. In understanding connection based on a shared past or a shared pain, instead of a connection based solely on citizenship, Marshall plays with definitions of nationalism. Although Avey was born in the United States, it is her African heritage that connects her with the residents of Carriacou. Instead of questioning her national ties, the residents accept Avey on the basis of shared connection, allowing her to feel a sense of belongingness that she has not yet found in American culture. In Praisesong for the Widow,

Marshall presents the tale of one woman’s very individual journey. Far from suggesting Avey’s experience as accessible or even applicable to all, Marshall illustrates the way that travel and cultural engagement result in the fusion of cultural ties for one woman. In moving Avey outside her literal and figurative comfort zones, Marshall highlights the role of travel in negotiations of cultural estrangement.

Turning now to the role of the mystical, one of the most explicit references comes in the way of Ibos walking on water.58 It is the figure of Aunt Cuney, the woman who insisted on

58 As James Hall notes, “Stories about Africans who could fly have been recorded throughout the Americas for the past 200 years...The tales of flying Africans, whether or not they focus on injustice, are always closely connected to the history of slavery. Sometimes these tales involve an individual or a group of slaves resisting forced work or feeling homesick for a homeland. On other occasions, they are just forceful and disruptive acts carried out by extraordinary people. In all versions, the main theme is one of ‘escape’...Many historians suspect that this particular version of the story is related to a real event. In 1803, a group of Igbo slaves arrived in the United States from the western coast of Africa (in the area of present-day Nigeria). Immediately upon delivery to Saint Simons Island in Georgia, they fled their owners and captors and ran to certain death in Dunbar Creek. To commemorate the incident, this area of Saint Simons is called Ebos Landing--after the Igbo people who bravely resisted their fate.” 192 calling Avey Avatara and “sent word months before her birth that it would be a girl” who passed on the story to Avey on the Tatem dock (Marshall 42). In keeping with the significance of dreams in the text, Aunt Cuney, a seer like Lebert Joseph, claims that it is in a dream that her mother, also named Avatara, sent word that Avey would be a girl. Taking the figure of Aunt Cuney one step further, there is the suggestion that she is pursuing Avey, calling her to reconnect with her cultural heritage and come to a greater awakening. The woman born with a caul is being “called.” Further evidencing the role of the mystical and ancestral in Avey’s transformation, she notes that it is this “rebel figure [who] put her up to abandoning the cruise”

(Marshall 83). The interference of a deceased relative pushes Avey towards the eventual union of place and people and leads to a significant personal evolution.

Similar to the manner in which place plays into Avey’s evolution, location is figured as mystical when Tatem is described as a “place filled with every kind of ha’nt there was”

(Marshall 33). In fact, Avey notes that “the vaguely familiar sound of the Patois might have resurrected Tatem and the old woman” (Marshall 67). This connects the power of language with place and person while suggesting an otherworldly connection reflected in the Kongo

Cosmogram,59 a “map of the crossroad between the spiritual and material worlds” (Windwalker).

In Praisesong for the Widow, Avey moves from a place of doubting to accepting and even championing mystical and otherworldly connections. Suggesting this connection even more explicitly, after the Big Drum festival,60 Avey comments that “for the first time since she was a

59 The Kongo Cosmogram is a “cross’ inscribed in a circle or reclining oval, with the horizontal east-west line representing the kalunga interface and the vertical north-south line connecting the high noon (masculine power) of this life, above, with the midnight (feminine power) of the other world, below. In this symbol of the cosmos, the outer circle or oval described the counterclockwise movement of the sun, when seen from the southern hemisphere. Ritual kick fighters, within their moving circle, purposely adopted inverted positions—supporting their weight on their hands, with their feet in the air—thereby symbolically mirroring kalunga to draw on its power” (Slenes).

60 As a Smithsonian Institution article notes, “the Big Drum Dance is one of the most significant musical rituals on 193 girl, she felt the threads...streaming out from the old people around her in Lebert Joseph’s yard.

From their seared eyes. From their navels and their cast-iron hearts. And their brightness as they entered her spoke of possibilities and becoming” (Marshall 249). In referencing these threads,

Avey speaks to the bonds that have always been there but she hasn’t known; in this passage we see a transmission that goes beyond the physical, and interestingly, one that is reflected in the eyes. Applying an understanding of “seared” as “dried up, parched, withered” suggests that perhaps the eyes of the people of Carriacou are seared because they have seen so much, because they have been able to lift the veil and see with their own eyes rather than seeing themselves through others’ (OED). Nevertheless, the connection Avey feels with the people in Carriacou is an essential component to her evolution. In Marshall’s text the strangers in Carriacou “become one and the same with people in Tatem” and work alongside place to bring Avey to an awakening and evolution (250).

The Shedding of Self

Before Avey can reclaim her Caribbean heritage at the conclusion of the text, she must shed her old self, one associated with materialism and assimilation. In this way, I see her aligned with the figure of the soucouyant, a type of shape-shifter that scholars such as Gisele Anatol have reclaimed as a folkloric “paragon of female agency” (52). While Avey’s process towards transformation is at guided by Aunt Cuney, and, later, Lebert Joseph, she emerges with the achievement of “self-understanding and full autonomous subjectivity” (Mardorossian 127). This is most explicitly illustrated when Avey relates that she is excited to share her experiences with her grandchildren. As Elizabeth McNeil argues, Avey undergoes a “metaphysical transformation the island of Carriacou in the Grenadines. Really a long series of dances, the Big Drum Dance is prepared for special festivals such as marriage ceremonies, tombstone raisings, fishing boat launchings and in the case of ill-health or ill- fortune. In each occasion, the main focus is twofold: remembering lineage and respecting ancestors. The music consists of singing and chanting typically joined by three drums, shakers and maracas” (“The Big Drum”).

194 from a state of deadened, materialistic individualism to a mature self realized in dynamic relation to community” (186-87). Although Avey utilizes doubling to imaginatively travel to far-away destinations, this practice is not realized and reclaimed until she comes to terms with her cultural past. Therefore, while the role of the community is essential in Avey’s transformation, transportation figures quite prominently. Transportation fuels the realization of Avey’s “mature self,” as McNeil recognizes, but also furthers knowledge of Caribbean culture vis-à-vis the materialist individual turned ambassador (186-87).

In Praisesong for the Widow, Avey’s transportation paves the way for a reconnection with her past. More specifically, as Simone Alexander asserts, “this claiming, epitomized in

Avatara Johnson…is symptomatic of an unwavering acceptance and celebration of the spiritual mothers and the homeland, a celebration of cultural unity within the diaspora61 among diasporic peoples” (27). Indeed, this inheritance comes by way of Aunt Cuney, a woman who “always usta say might be in Tatem [Georgia] but her mind, her mind was long gone with the Ibos” (39). In this way, Marshall subtly connects ancestral heritage with a legacy of doubling. More than this, though, Aunt Cuney’s dissociation speaks to a deeply internalized identification with her African heritage, an appreciation gained through imaginative travel. While at the beginning of the text we see Avey in a state of assimilation and blindness, by the end of the novel she has “slipped without being conscious of it into a step that was something more than just walking” (Marshall

248). As a result of uniting place and people, Avey comes to terms with repressed grief and emerges “centered and sustained...restored to her proper axis,” able and willing to “speak of the excursion to others elsewhere” (Marshall 254-55). Through the process of travel and

61 In Diaspora and Transnationalism, Rainer Bauböck and Thomas Faist define diaspora as “religious or national groups living outside an (imagined) homeland, whereas transnationalism is often used both more narrowly- to refer to migrants’ durable ties across countries” (9).

195 transformation, Avey moves from a place of cultural ignorance and disconnection, unable to tell her story, to one of incorporation and acceptance. In uniting mysticism with transportation and transformation, Praisesong positions Avey as an inheritor of this legacy of doubling, a process that allows her to transport herself emotionally and cope with the loss her husband, her culture and her self. While scholars such as DuBois and Ettinger appear to be in conversation with each other, Marshall joins this dialogue in Praisesong for the Widow, offering up a character who is in conversation with her ancestors. Much in the same way that Marshall unites mysticism with transportation and transformation, she also “fuses myth, legend and storytelling to formulate a new conception of self born out of the collective consciousness of the African diaspora, integrating African, African American and Caribbean influences and belief systems” (Gallego

68).

Returning to DuBois’s notion of double-consciousness, in Marshall’s novel Avey evidences the successful integration of her African past and African American culture in a liminal space suggestive of the matrixial borderspace that Ettinger proffers. Given this, transportation works alongside people and the mystical to engender this space of “something new” that is reflected in the joining of Avey’s identities. It is not simply travel that allows Avey to confront her past, but also a reconnection with her cultural heritage and repressed grief. More specifically, “Avey’s personal odyssey culminates not only in her own psychic return to Africa, but in the symbolic return home of all African Americans” (Kemp and Liddell 37). Though place figures prominently, the people who surround Avey are equally important to her efforts to

“recover her identity” (Green 83) and “achieve closure as she learns to acknowledge and come to terms with the contradictions of her cultural heritage” (Mardorossian 135). While the novel is certainly a tale of connection, “it is even more a conscious and womanist examination of the

196 liberation process” (Kemp and Liddell 38). On a larger level, Marshall’s work calls readers to heed the warning and to pay attention to the ways we are all disconnected.

In moving Avey to a space of psychological liberation, Marshall’s text participates in the

“literary construction of home,” not one so much of physicality but of liminality (Kaplan 130).

Understanding the matrix as a “womb outside as well as inside,” this “home” allows Avey to be

“literally transported away from her home while she is brought emotionally closer to the culture of her birthplace” (Macpherson 204). In this way, Marshall complicates fixed notions of home and sketches a multiplicity of homes in her text. If we understand migration as engendering the

“desire for home,” which Carole Boyce-Davies argues, we see the role of travel in effecting

Avey’s desire for home, a desire made more intense when the figure of Aunt Cuney “evokes a very specific identification and redefinition of the meaning of home” (Marshall 113, 127). As I have argued throughout, it is first transportation that generates this desire for reconnection, a desire for home. While Avey returns home to the United States at the conclusion of the novel,

Marshall’s text celebrates a “new consciousness” which allows Avey to understand “home” outside of the physical context (Bracks 118). Ultimately, though, Avey’s journey demonstrates

“how we, as readers and writers alike, may locate and reclaim our respective traditions, myths, and rituals to recall that which we have forgotten” (Benjamin 64). As a product of her own journey to rediscover her “tripartite self,” Marshall reminds us that the “Middle Passage, buried and pathless it may seem in the Atlantic, can never be forgotten, indeed must be remembered by all who are its ‘heirs and descendants,’ and perhaps in that retelling its pain may be brought to the surface and the nine million recognized” (Diedrich 267).

197

Making Home “Somewhere Else”

Similar to the way in which Marshall views the need to symbolically return to cultural roots as essential to remembering and rewriting history, Andrea Levy notes that the creation of

Small Island allowed her to connect with her parents’ migratory struggles. In this novel, Levy queries the relationship between colonial subjects and the motherland; in Small Island Levy recreates, on an individual level, the ostracism West Indians faced in England in the late 1940s.62

Whereas Marshall positions the “mother(’s)land, the Caribbean…as an extension of the

Motherland, Africa” (Alexander 4), Levy decries the ill treatment of Jamaican citizens in an

“other-land,” or a “site where each character experiences alienation and Othering” (Barnwell

451). During the time following World War II, the West Indies was “somewhere else”: not

Europe, not Africa, not India. In Making Men, Belinda Edmondson argues that this “somewhere elseness” has become a central trope of West Indian discourse, with its attendant notion that “the space of the West Indies is more metaphorical than it is material” (20). While indeed the West

Indies in Small Island is more metaphorical for English citizens, who understand the region through adjectives such as torrid, languid and tropical, Levy’s work highlights the way in which a metaphorical understanding of the Caribbean works against immigrants Hortense and Gilbert.

At the same time, though, for immigrants and writers living in exile, and even the literary critics who perpetuate this conception of the Caribbean, the West Indies is more easily accessed through the trope. Although Hortense and Gilbert retain a connection with their homeland through metaphor, their interactions with English citizens make the space of “somewhere else”

62 In her article on Black British fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, Roxy Harris notes that Britain became a multicultural society in the 1950 but that this development did not extend to black authors. As Harris states, “the ‘colour problem’ was debated in parliament, on television, in newspapers, magazines, on the radio. It was the big story of the 50s” (484). From a historical standpoint, Harris reminds readers that “the end of World War II marked a distinctive moment for black and brown people in the British empire. Having, for the most part supported Britain during the war, they were no longer willing to return to pre-war subjugations and humiliations” (486). While Levy situates her text in the years following World War II, her discussion of race comments upon the “deeply felt sense of incompatibility between Englishness/Britishness and being black or brown skinned” (Harris 488). 198 more concrete; in disabusing misconceptions about the West Indies, the immigrants in this work render their homeland more material.

As the daughter of Jamaican parents who immigrated following World War II, Levy toys with somewhat hazy definitions of the West Indian space. Throughout Small Island, Levy examines the internal exile that alienated West Indian subjects living in the metropole feel. As a prominent Black British author, Levy “openly acknowledges the fact that she writes about the experiences of part of the British population that has been silenced” (Fernandez 146). By tracing the journey of Gilbert Joseph on the MV Empire Windrush,63 the vessel that carried the first large group of West Indian immigrants to Britain following World War II, and in fact the very same vessel her father journeyed in, Levy presents a contradictory view of the center as she connects with ancestral struggle through fiction. As someone who feels like a bit of an outsider herself,

Levy is well positioned to highlight the collective “cold shoulder” that well-intentioned

Caribbean subjects received in England. With Small Island, Levy “focuses on the consequences of the Empire [and] reiterates the fact that all members of British society are forced to make adjustments and redefine their sense of belonging” following WWII (Fernandez 150). In detailing the way in which migrants Hortense and Gilbert locate home in Britain, Levy draws attention to how feelings of estrangement intensify exile. The form of nationalism that Levy constructs reinforces its own culture and customs by rejecting colonial subjects. As such, the sense of home for the majority is maintained while migrants such as Hortense and Gilbert are denied incorporation under the umbrella of the colonial empire. However, as Levy’s novel illustrates, once immigrants endue a period of adjustment, they gradually gain acceptance as

63 As the British Library Board notes, “when the Empire Windrush passenger ship docked at Tilbury from Jamaica on 22 June 1948, it marked the start of the postwar immigration boom which was to change British society...After WWII, Britain encouraged immigration from Commonwealth countries. To a large extent this was to help rebuild the country as there was a shortage of labour at the time. Windrush carried 492 migrants who were coming to a country promising prosperity and employment” (Windrush). 199 members of their new nation. In leaving Jamaica for England, the characters are forced to assimilate to a degree; this departure engenders change for the couple in a way that leaving the nation can only provide.

As suggested, Levy’s novel “serves as a necessary reminder that before Caribbean workers came to rebuild the UK in the late 1940s, they had participated in the war effort”

(Munoz-Valdivieso 159). In the fourth novel by this self-defined English author (of Jamaican ancestry), Levy “explore[s] issues of identity and belonging for contemporary characters who participate in a complex double heritage” (Munoz-Valdivieso 162). The novel serves as a

“pointed critique at the racist elements of British society in the decades around the Second World

War” (Lang 124). With Small Island, Levy queries the term “immigrant,” which emerges as a

“code word among the English for the large number of nonwhites who were now living in their midst”64 as she offers an alternate view of Britain and complicates a singular reading of British history and British identity (Foner 177). The novel begins with a revealing repartee between two young girls in Jamaica, Hortense Roberts and Celia Langley. As Celia asserts, “when I am older,

Hortense, I will be leaving Jamaica and I will be going to live in England” (Levy 11). With this,

Levy sets the tone (and characters) up for disappointment. As her text suggests, the migratory condition is often defined by misinformation and ill treatment. Seldom do migrants find their new homelands welcoming; seldom do migrants meet the ideal image of citizens in their new nations. As the protagonist, Hortense, soon learns, conditions are not always what they seem. In the effort to ensure her migration away from Jamaica, Hortense agrees to marry a man she doesn’t love. The wedding takes place within weeks of Hortense and Gilbert’s meeting; after a

64 As Roxy Harris notes, immigrants from the Caribbean and South Asia numbered less than 80,000 in 1951. “By 1961 it had reached 500,000 or about 1 per cent of the population; by 1971 it was about 1,500,000 (3 per cent) and by 1981 it was 2,200,000 or 4.1 per cent. The 1991 Census figure puts the ethnic minority population at just over 3,000,000 or 5.5 per cent of the total population” (488). 200 six-month separation, with Gilbert departing for England prior to Hortense, the young bride is met disappointment. Instead of a beaming husband greeting her upon arrival, Hortense arrives to a “shabby” house and a room that is “just this” (Levy 12, 21).

Whereas in Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow Avey Johnson fights a war with materialism, Small Island details life for Jamaican immigrants in England after World War II. In contrast to Avey’s life of excess, with a large house and the ability to enjoy luxurious vacations,

Hortense and Gilbert’s bare-bones apartment attests to the economic and material conditions in

England following the war. As Gilbert relates, “Everyone lives like this. There has been a war.

Houses bombed. I know plenty people live worse than this” (Levy 21). With the genre of the historical novel, Levy connects two couples, Hortense and Gilbert and Queenie and Bernard, in the aftermath of war. In portraying the friendship of a West Indian couple and their white,

English landlords, Levy’s novel suggests that prejudice is not the default position for all

Londoners. In Small Island, Andrea Levy illustrates the difficulties of migration and complicates portraits of the West Indies as well as England. By revealing what life was like for immigrants such as her parents, the author depicts a less appealing, less enlightened England. In doing so, she presents a fuller picture of the “mother country” and the process of migration.

As Levy’s text evidences, along with disappointment comes misrecognition. Most explicitly, Hortense is taken for a woman named Sugar immediately upon disembarking her ship from Jamaica. An unnamed Englishwoman asks, “Are you Sugar?” to which Hortense replies,

“No, I am Hortense.” The woman promptly responds, “She’s one of you. She’s coming to be my nanny and I am a little later than I thought. You must know her” (Levy 15). With this, Levy establishes a sense of alienation and prevalent use of stereotypes early in the text. By using reductive phrases such as “one of you” and placing Sugar in an assumed position of service,

201

Levy comments upon the continuance of colonial attitudes and feelings of Western superiority.

While Hortense may be “fresh off the boat,” she smiles in the face of such treatment and attitudes (Levy 31). Closely related to Hortense’s difficulty assimilating or adjusting to life in

London is the issue of language. Though her “accent had taken [her] to the top of the class in

Miss Stuart’s pronunciation competition,” she is frequently misunderstood and told to “speak

English” (Levy 16). As the text moves on, it is mentioned that “they [the West Indians] speak it just like us, only funnier” (Levy 138). In the attempt to ameliorate her own discomfort, and to escape such mockery, Hortense is “determined to speak in an English manner,” so much so that she “resolved to listen to the language at its finest” by listening to BBC radio (Levy 449).

Whether pushing herself to change the way she speaks or how she dresses, Hortense feels the collective pull to revise the very fundamentals about herself. In more ways than one, Hortense finds England to be a “very cold country” (Levy 466). Hortense’s migration, no doubt influenced by long-standing attitudes of English superiority, and the accompanying sense of colonial inferiority, “engenders ambivalence and fuels feelings of alienation, loss, and separation”

(Brown-Guillory 3).

Similar to how Hortense adjusts her speech to avoid persecution, Small Island presents marriages of convenience as a means of escape or elevation. In the case of Hortense as well as

Queenie, Hortense’s landlord and the white English woman she befriends, women are forced, or rather “elect” to marry these particular men to escape less desirable circumstances. With this,

Levy comments upon the reality of life after war or life in a developing nation. For instance,

Hortense “steals” Gilbert from her friend Celia Langley and then proceeds to wed him “three weeks and five days” from their first meeting (Levy 98). Hortense sees Gilbert as a means of escape; she recognizes his ambition to return to England and the significance he attaches to his

202 return to England, where he had served during the war. She then capitalizes on his ambition to secure her own flight from Jamaica. The return, for Gilbert, “was a mission, a calling, even a duty” that Hortense piggybacks on (Levy 98). Although we could read Hortense as a woman trapped in her conditions, lacking options, the fact that she uses Gilbert to leave life in Jamaica behind points to a kind of agency on her part. Hortense and Gilbert’s union, for example, is a transaction, an agreement that Hortense initiates. Setting the terms, she offers: “I will lend you the money, we will be married and you can send for me to come to England when you have a place for me to live” (Levy 100). Because Hortense is aware that social convention dictates that

“a single woman cannot travel on her own...but a married woman might go anywhere she pleased,” she views this transaction as a means of securing mobility (Levy 100). While on the one hand Hortense inverts power dynamics in a way, her mobility is still contingent on a male figure and the institution of marriage. With this, Levy retains historical accuracy instead of constructing a feminist figure who surpasses relational and social dependency. While not initially a love match, Levy’s text presents the transformation of a marriage sealed “like a business deal” into a relationship that survives in spite of dismal economic and personal conditions (100). Far from home, West Indians Hortense and Gilbert serve as a support system for each other; over a period of time this reliance brings a closeness that neither anticipated.

Like Hortense, the young Queenie dreams of something more than the life that is laid out for her; coincidentally, Queenie also migrates to spur personal growth. Much like the function of

Aunt Cuney in Praisesong for the Widow, it is only after Queenie’s Aunt Dorothy comes from

London to “take [her] away and better [her]” that Queenie escapes from rural farm life (Levy

247). In these works, interestingly, the aunts are more powerful forces than the maternal influence. In a way that the mothers cannot, Aunt Cuney and Aunt Dorothy sweep in as surrogate

203 mother figures who, perhaps because of their removed perspective, are better positioned to assess what their nieces need. Like the mystical figure of Aunt Cuney in Marshall’s work, Aunt

Dorothy utilizes her relative privilege to completely change Queenie’s life. With this physical remove comes a change in name (from Queenie to Victoria) as well as lessons in walking and speech. Though Queenie attempts to break off her courtship with Bernard, her aunt’s passing solidifies their relationship. This is all done without the interference or opinion from Bernard as this turn of events spurs Queenie into resistance. When her mother informs her that she “can come back home now. There’s plenty for you to do around the farm” Queenie replies, “I’ve some good news for you. I’m getting married, Mother, to Bernard Bligh” (Levy 258). In Praisesong for the Widow and Small Island death offers the chance for escape; while Avey’s status as a widow frees her, Queenie’s impending marriage to Bernard allows her to remain in London, far from life on the farm. Queenie seizes this opportunity to alter her course in life. In Small Island

Levy moves beyond a discussion of female mobility and agency focused on race or nationalism to illustrate the sacrifices that women, regardless of color or location, were forced to make at this time.

Facing Ill Treatment

Like Hortense, Gilbert also experiences prejudice upon arrival in England. Illustrating the strong sense of nationalism and duty to England inculcated in its colonies, including Jamaica,

Levy describes the sentiment among colonial subjects during the early years of World War II.

She writes: “There is a war over there. The Mother Country is calling men like my son to be heroes whose families will be proud of them” (Levy 59). Though Gilbert is told by recruiters that he “will mix with white service personnel,” he faces rampant discrimination and estrangement from fellow servicemen (Levy 129). With Gilbert’s experiences Levy highlights racial hierarchy

204 at the time. As Gilbert relates, “we were allowed to live with white soldiers, while the inferior

American negro was not”; thus, interestingly, Levy details a socially-reinforced hierarchy that suggests an inherent nationalist bend (131). The exchanges between English and American soldiers illustrate the way in which these different forms of racism came into contact in England.

Gilbert, a “guest” in an American camp in England, is regarded as a more acceptable other, one who is “lucky...not to be treated [as a] negro” (Levy 129).

Due to his Jamaican heritage, and therefore his colonial association, Gilbert is tolerated not on the basis of race but of nationalism. The use of the term “allowed” connotes a begrudging acceptance. Falling far short of a breakdown of prejudice, this arrangement only serves to shift prejudice onto another population. In Small Island Levy introduces the American servicemen stationed in England as deeply prejudiced; while in England at a training camp before being stationed in Yorkshire the question is asked: “How coloured is he” the response is “enough sir,” enough to make him “offensive” to American soldiers and therefore unacceptable company

(150). In a well-stated rebuttal Gilbert exclaims: “You know what your trouble is, man? Your white skin. You think it makes you better than me. You think it give you the right to lord it over a black man...You wan’ know what your white skin make you, man? It make you white. That is all, man. White. No better, no worse than me- just white” (Levy 525). Through Gilbert, Levy calls prejudice in question as she highlights the ill treatment of “foreign” servicemen who engaged in flight to assist their mother country. Instead of illustrating how nationalism developed from a sense of estrangement, the author calls attention to the prejudice immigrants face upon their arrival in England. In detailing the hardship of migration through their characters, Levy and

Marshall employ textual flight to reconnect with their own cultural heritage. In the process, the authors reify the struggle inherent in migration.

205

After a short time in England, Gilbert comes to realize the ill treatment that West Indians face in England and how the British regard those who have dutifully served their country. After he is asked “why would you leave a nice sunny place to come here if you didn’t have to” he launches into a diatribe (Levy 138). Gilbert states: “Let me ask you to imagine this. Living far from you is a beloved relation whom you have never met...Then on one day you hear Mother calling–she is troubled, she need your help” (Levy 139). Continuing this metaphor, Gilbert relates, “the filthy tramp that eventually greets you is she. Ragged, old and dusty as the long dead. Mother has a blackened eye, bad breath and one lone tooth that waves in her head when she speaks. Can this be the troubled relation you heard so much of?” (Levy 139). Much like the treatment of Hortense and Gilbert upon their arrival, “she offers you no comfort after your journey. No smile. No welcome. Yet she looks down at you through lordly eyes and says, ‘Who the bloody hell are you?’” (Levy 139). Through extended metaphor, Levy complicates the term

“mother country” and brings the racial discrimination of Commonwealth citizens to light. As in

Praisesong for the Widow, flight comes as a result of indirect hardship, with Gilbert’s desire to join the war effort and to return to the nation where he served. It is the larger sense of strife and loss that brings Gilbert, and later Hortense, to the mother country.

In this ironic evocation of the literal mother figure, Gilbert employs physical description to paint England as a Mother but also a tramp. By utilizing imperialist discourse to evoke the maternal, he critiques the way in which the mother country fails to fulfill the parental duty to protect colonial citizens. In terming England a “filthy tramp,” Gilbert inverts the maternal/paternal power structure to satirize colonial relations. In taking on the parental right to chastise, he rejects the idealized image of the mother country; through extended metaphor his description details his treatment as a West Indian in England. Gilbert subtly makes the case for a

206 consideration of West Indian nationals as “relatives” rather than those to be disparaged; ironically, it is England that is in need. With this, Levy evidences enduring colonial ties and the ironic turn of events that positions citizens from the colony as the ones offering aid. Viewing these passages side by side affords a view of the cognitive shift that Gilbert and his fellow servicemen underwent. Initially answering the call for help with the hopes that their contributions would be appreciated, he is soon disappointed. He soon comes to realize that

England falls far short of his expectations, but also, he of theirs.

More than expressing the ill treatment of “outsiders,” Levy’s novel evidences a cultural blindness and ignorance on the part of “superior” white Britons. For instance, on several occasions Englishmen assume Jamaica is located in Africa. In true sardonic fashion, Gilbert’s response is: “Give me a map, let me see if Tommy Atkins or Lady Havealot can point to

Jamaica...But give me that map, blindfold me, spin me round three times and I, dizzy and dazed, would still place my finger squarely on the Mother Country” (Levy 142). With this, Levy makes the point that geographical awareness is not related to socioeconomic status; ironically, these

“superior” Englishmen are found wanting. Levy employs irony with the surname “Havealot.”

Despite obvious economic advantage, the English have difficulty locating their colony, now supplier of the servicemen who volunteer to assist their “mother country.” In doing so, Levy highlights the lack of dialogue between the two locales; while Jamaicans can clearly pinpoint the location of England, the reverse does not hold true. The author subtly critiques colonial relations as she paints the colony as rather insignificant (and unidentifiable) to the English. Instead, the two English citizens here fall prey to racial generalization as they mistakenly associate Jamaica with Africa. While certainly significant on an individual level, on a larger scale this speaks to a cultural blindness and ignorance on the part of those with privilege and power. In expressing an

207 ironic sense of nationalism, Gilbert does what Hortense is not yet able to. As a result of flight, and in particular his time in the service, Gilbert is able to see England in a fuller light. Because of his transnational experience, Gilbert comes to see the metropole as a tramp instead of a welcoming ancestor; his critique of the mother country supplements Hortense’s story. Levy, through Gilbert, condenses relations between Jamaica and England as such: “Jamaica is a colony. Britain is our Mother Country. We are British but we live in Jamaica” (Levy 157).

Refuting Racism

Levy writes back to and contests racism in Small Island. For instance, comments such as

“how can you think of being a woman alone in a house with coloreds” abound (Levy 116).

Though “those people” are fine elsewhere, Queenie is often told, “these darkies bring down a neighborhood” (Levy 117). In Levy’s novel, Queenie, the white English landlord, represents understanding and open-mindedness in the face of misconception and alienation. Aside from the obviously significant affair and resulting child with serviceman Michael Roberts, Queenie frequently fights injustice. For instance, while seeing a movie with Hortense and Arthur (her father), a disgruntled moviegoer refers to Hortense by a racial slur. Quick to jump to Hortense’s defense, Queenie responds: “shut up with your nigger...I prefer them to you any day” (Levy

186). This is but one example of how Queenie questions the logic of racism and segregation in her everyday actions. In Small Island violence quickly becomes personal. Paralleling, or perhaps eclipsing the larger war taking place, this scene ends with Arthur “shot in the jaw, his head burst an obscene inside-out by the bullet” (Levy 193). More than illustrating the senselessness of violence to deal with personal matters, or even the consequences of “mouthing off,” this scene offers yet another reminder of rampant prejudice in England. While Arthur’s death in Small

Island clearly illustrates the racial divide plaguing the country, Levy highlights the migration of

208 prejudice and the role that war played in this volatility. Ironically, prejudice enters England as a result of war and the intermixing that comes along with the influx of the American servicemen who bring their own prejudices with them. Possibly influencing the expression of a latent prejudice, the sentiments of American servicemen quickly spread, coloring the way in which migrants from the colonies are regarded in the text. Given that “until the mid-twentieth century, the black presence in Britain remained well below 20,000,” Levy’s novel suggests that the

English servicemen picked up on their American comrades’ prejudice, which then trickled down into the community (Haynes).65 Despite the passing of the Nationality Act in 1948, which

“extended British citizenship to all subjects in the empire,” migrants such as Gilbert and

Hortense face ill treatment and suspicion (Haynes). In Small Island, Arthur’s death is indirectly attributable to segregation and the insistence of American servicemen on following this standard.

The imposition of the most inhumane ill-treatment results in yet another casualty of war.

Despite small successes, when Queenie offers her home to boarders and works with a community project to resettle exiles, she is met with resistance. Although Bernard, her husband, was away for years, trolling around Europe following the end of the war, he has no qualms expressing disgust and displeasure at her acceptance of Jamaicans Gilbert and Hortense. When

Queenie asserts that the exiles do not have anywhere to go, Bernard’s response is “They're not our sort...There are places that will take care of them” (Levy 277). Though Bernard has seen firsthand, and been an agent of, the effects of war, he has no pity for others. Instead, he regards

West Indians as pests to be dealt with by others and would return the couple to a space of

65 Migrants such as Gilbert and Hortense were ahead of the curve in terms of migration. As Douglas Haynes notes, “some 230,000 migrants entered Britain during the eighteen-month period before the Commonwealth Immigration Act (1962) went into effect. By 1965, some 50,000 a year arrived.” Also writing on the immigration of colonial citizens, Venetia Newall states: “in 1968 there were an estimated 1 million Commonwealth immigrants resident in Britain; half of these were West Indian and 60 per cent of the same number originated from Jamaica...their position as an ethnic minority is somewhat unusual in that they tend, initially, to identify culturally with Britain” (25). 209 physical exile. Interestingly, Bernard shares this elitist commentary shortly after returning home, which suggests that this disregard for colonial subjects is not a recent phenomenon but rather functioned as a dormant ideology that emerged after colonial subjects arrived en masse. Instead of viewing West Indians as capable, independent individuals, Bernard’s remarks further an understanding of colonial subjects as always in need, always beholden to the “mother country.”

On the whole, the West Indian migrants are seen as “population, not people” (Levy 278).

Standing alone, Queenie is the exception to the notion that “this is a respectable street. Those kind of people do not belong here” (Levy 286).

Yet another example of Queenie’s rather progressive nature is her friendship with

Hortense. Though the women are at first rather inimical, Queenie soon tells Hortense that she doesn’t “mind being seen in the street with you. You’ll find I’m not like most. It doesn't worry me to be seen out with darkies” (Levy 231). While on the one hand this statement illustrates

Queenie’s willingness to flaunt social convention, it also reads as slightly condescending. The inclusion of the word “darkie” alone reminds us that Queenie is still a product of her nation and her time. Although she did indeed stand up for Hortense and accompanies her outside of the house, this comment undercuts her later-revealed relationship with serviceman Michael Roberts.

In the first physical description of Michael, Queenie notes that he is “the colour of a conker−not ruddy and new from the shell but after it had dulled in your pocket for a bit” (Levy 297). She proceeds to view him as an object of curiosity, wondering what the texture of his hair feels like and whether he looks like “tanned leather” all over. Ironically, however, Levy constructs a character who expresses ignorance in this first encounter. For instance, when Michael tells her he is from Jamaica, Queenie asks if that is in Africa. This is then followed up by the statement, “you must miss being among your own kind” (Levy 299). Though this exchange certainly works

210 against the view of Queenie as accepting and open-minded, it also shows her fallibility. As such,

Levy illustrates the permeability of cultural attitudes and the prevalence of a lack of knowledge; what this offers is, therefore, a more believable character.

A Woman Transformed

Queenie’s sexual relationship with Michael offers physical and emotional transformation.

She relates, “it wasn’t me. Mrs. Queenie Bligh, she wasn't even there. This woman was a beauty- he couldn't get enough of her...This woman was as sexy as any starlet on a silver screen” (Levy

301). In this instance Queenie isn’t dissociating, as seen in Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, but rather is opening up a new identity as a woman comfortable in her own body and with her sexuality. Problematically, though, it is a sexual relationship with a black man that facilitates

Queenie’s transformation; as such, Michael runs the risk of being read as the “magical black man” who spus a white woman’s sexual awakening. In constructing this relationship, Levy inverts the historical colonial reality of the West Indies where white men exerted sexual dominance over black and brown women. In this case, it is a lonely white woman who benefits from a fling with a young black man. In playing upon these historical anxieties, Levy largely sidesteps the scandalization of an interracial relationship in mid-20th century Britain and instead highlights the tenderness of their sexual union against the backdrop of a racist white patriarchy.

On an individual level, Queenie’s relationship with Michael counters deep anxiety on the part of the patriarchy who would deem Queenie’s body to be off-limits to a black man. In positioning

Queenie as an equal partner in the relationship, if not the instigator of their intimacy, Levy assuages fears of abuse and exploitation on this individual level. In depicting the physical expression of Queenie’s lack of prejudice, Levy subtly comments on the intersection between interracial relations and the abuse of power in the West Indies. In Small Island the author utilizes

211 the sexual encounters between a white English woman and a black West Indian man to expose and subsequently diminish anxiety surrounding interracial relations and suspicion of West

Indians.

Despite the brevity of their relationship, Queenie’s relationship with Michael offers rejuvenation and rebirth, and subsequently, an actual birth. As the text comes to a close, Levy offers the shocking birth of Michael, the mixed-race child of a white English woman and a West

Indian serviceman on leave. Termed an “ample secret,” the newborn Michael emerges as a

“lovely, perfect boy” (Levy 477, 481). While Hortense marvels at the emergence of life, it is also

“the ugliest sight [she] had ever beheld” (Levy 479). So much as others may be offended by the birth of a “half-caste” child, Hortense relates that “every tissue in [her] body was tingling with repulsion,” not at what the product implied but at the act of birth (Levy 480). For Queenie, this child offers a connection with a man she loved briefly. Hortense observes the way in which her eyes “alighted on this grumpy-faced child and saw it as someone she could love” (Levy 481).

Following the birth, Hortense reminds Queenie several times that she has “a coloured child” yet offers a vision of her “serene as a Madonna on the messy bed” (Levy 483). For characters

Hortense and Gilbert it is travel outside the nation that propels change, but it is a relationship with someone from another land that offers a similar change for Queenie.

While obviously the birth of Michael’s child brings physical changes for Queenie, three days with him offered a sexual awakening. As Levy writes, “we kept inside, living like mice...We’s eat it [bread and jam] like newly-weds. Feeding it to each other, before licking the sticky cones from each other's mouth and wriggling about to get rid of the crumbs” (495). This long weekend results in a lovechild/proof of their union. As Queenie’s pregnancy starts to show, she wraps her midsection “tight as a mummy, round and round,” not because she was ashamed

212 but because she “didn't want prying eyes making it sordid” (Levy 496). With this statement Levy points to the rather officious nature of English society; because her community is well aware of

Arthur’s absence, Queenie’s burgeoning belly would likely occasion neighborhood gossip. To avoid this, Queenie takes measures to keep her pregnancy a secret as she is a married woman who is expected to remain chaste until her husband returns. The fear of social estrangement pressures Queenie to shield her body from scrutiny. By shrinking back into herself and withdrawing from society, Queenie enters a temporary form of exile brought on by the growing

“other” within her belly. On a smaller scale, Queenie’s desire to hide her pregnancy from view of those who would comment on her position speaks to the bounds of propriety that separated the races. This culturally-ingrained pressure to adhere to the racial norms that precluded sexual intimacy inspires Queenie to deny her less progressive neighbors the knowledge of her impending motherhood.

In Small Island Levy quickly moves from a glimpse of Queenie’s pregnancy to the narration of her son’s birth. In this way, Levy textually recreates the way in which the serviceman came into and quickly changed Queenie’s life. Their relation results in a son who

“looked so like Queenie. Her son, no doubt- despite his skin” (Levy 510). As this line suggests, the relationship between Queenie and her son is about more than physiognomy; instead, the connection between the mother and child here is concerned with the biology that binds them, not skin color. In a time during which prejudice against blacks in Britain ran high, Queenie’s sentiments suggest that feelings of affiliation and belongingness have little to do with race but instead with relationships. Narrating the birth itself, Levy writes: “all at once, Mrs. Bligh's private parts let forth a burp then spat out on to the lap of my best white wedding dress a bloody- soaked lump of her insides” (482). Thus, in disgusting detail, Levy comments upon the

213 aftereffects of birth. Much like the loss of life the war has occasioned, the afterbirth here marks

Hortense. This literal marking invites a deeper reading and is suggestive of the expelled colony in relation to the mother country; the afterbirth is not unlike the discarded colony of Jamaica.

Much like the West Indians who arrive on English soil, the afterbirth brashly announces its presence, marking those it comes into contact with.

Feeling “Othered”

As Kattian Barnwell finds in “Motherlands and Other Lands,” “Motherland may be variously defined as place of birth, land or home of the mother, the site, of the self…Conversely, the other-land refers to the site where each character experiences alienation and Othering, the place of exile” (451). Much in the way in which that Queenie’s pregnancy occasions exclusion, in this text Levy plays with the notion of isolation. As Queenie expresses, “We live on an island, for God’s sake, everywhere is blinking overseas” (Levy 288). In Small Island Levy takes

Hortense and Gilbert from the moment they are told “we don’t want you. There's no job for you here” to the day that a white woman (Queenie) begs for the couple to take her baby (313). This novel attests to the fallibility of assumptions, initial impressions, and cultural stereotypes. While for Hortense and Gilbert the motherland initially proved to be a site of alienation and ill treatment, as evidenced by Gilbert’s ironic portrait of the motherland as a “filthy tramp,” it is, interestingly, a citizen of the “motherland” who transforms the couple into parents.

Applying Barnwell’s discussion of the motherland and otherland, it is the motherland in

Levy’s novel that functions as a place of literal birth for Michael and the site of rebirth for

Gilbert and Hortense. Although the pair was initially socially excluded on the basis of their race, their adoption of a mixed-race child takes England from a place of exile to a space of inclusion.

In becoming an instant family, the West Indian couple offers the cultural homeland to Michael

214 that Queenie is unable to. Though at first they are told to “go back to the jungle,” Hortense and

Gilbert make a home for themselves in England (Levy 317). With this novel, Levy illustrates that change is incremental. Hortense and Gilbert accomplish progress in their own right. Ultimately, though, the couple’s adoption of Michael at the conclusion of the texts reveals the prevailing attitudes towards race at the time. Queenie’s desire to have a black couple raise her child suggests an internalized understanding of race that determines that a West Indian couple is somehow better prepared to raise a mixed-race child. At the same time, though, the fact that

Queenie immediately thinks of Gilbert and Hortense as the adoptive parents speaks to their character and the close relationship they have built. In this way, Levy both addresses and disregards the importance of race. Though Queenie does not express any concern in handing her child over to the couple, the fact that she selects a West Indian couple to raise Michael evidences a concern with race that falls not along the lines of prejudice but of ensuring the best possible life for her child. In England, at that time, that means that a white woman is wholly unprepared to raise a mixed-race child.

With this novel Levy illustrates education for various “islanders” and highlights commonality as opposed to difference. For instance, Hortense’s educational experience developed her assumption that all English people looked like her tutors; it is only after arriving in

England that she realizes the “surprising colours in the countenance of all the English people”

(Levy 330). In this post-war society in which “Britain required a new backbone,” Hortense and

Gilbert become part of the nation (Levy 365). By having Queenie and Bernard experience their own forms of dissonance, Levy makes the case for a leveling of sorts following the war. For instance, Bernard expresses that “England had shrunk. It was smaller than the place I’d left...I had to stare out at the sea just to catch a breath. And behind every face I saw were trapped the

215 rememberings of war” (Levy 424). Though the war succeeded in making “death a reasonable thing” for Bernard, by the end of the text we see him advocating for Queenie to keep the child of her indiscretion, which is quite a change from the man Levy introduces at the beginning of the text (Levy 429).

Alternately terming the infant Michael “an imposter child” and a “dear little thing,”

Bernard evidences the contradictory feelings that come with the situation he returns to–his wife pregnant with a black soldier’s child (Levy 508-09). While on the one hand Bernard asserts, “the war was fought so people might live amongst their own,” Levy’s text presents the exact opposite, a negotiation and incorporation of colonial “others” (469). As such, her text offers ironic connections across the empire, so much so that only the reader is made aware that the very

Michael Roberts Queenie sleeps with is Hortense’s missing cousin. The man who “got shot down over France...[whose] black skin saved him” is the very man Gilbert is mistaken for as he is assumed by Bernard as well as Hortense to have fathered Queenie’s child (Levy 493). Similar to the way in which Avey Johnson is a physical double or avatar, a “manifestation in human form [or] incarnation,” Michael, at least to the reader, plays two very distinct roles (OED).

Michael does not double in the psychological understanding of the term, but instead serves as a double in that he coincidentally reappears in the text. For readers, this textual incarnation ties up loose ends and serves to further connect these characters from very different worlds.

As the text concludes, Queenie asks Hortense to “take [Michael] and bring him up as if he was your son. Would you, would you, please?” (Levy 519). According to Queenie's logic,

“we can’t look after him...I don't know how to comb his hair” (Levy 520). Though a simple task,

Queenie’s comment speaks to small, yet significant, cultural differences. Although Bernard proposes telling Michael he was adopted, Queenie refuses to budge, asking “And what will we

216 tell him when he asks? That we left him too long in the sun one day and he went black?” (Levy

520). In many ways the more rational of the two, Queenie fears that “one day he’ll do something naughty and you’ll look at him and think, The little black bastard, because you’ll be angry. And he’ll see it in your eyes” (Levy 521). Ultimately, Queenie wants what is best for Michael, and in this case she believes that it is best for him to be with “people who’ll understand...His own kind”

(Levy 522). Ironically, the woman who treated Hortense with suspicion ends up begging: “That's what I'm on my knees for- my darling little baby's life” (Levy 522). As Hortense reflects, “I never dreamed England would be like this. Come, in what crazed reverie would a white

Englishwoman be kneeling before me yearning for me to take her black child?” (Levy 523).

Here, again, Levy turns certain colonial stereotypes on their head by fleshing out her characters.

In placing a black woman as the caretaker of a white woman’s child, Levy plays upon, and rejects, the stereotypical depiction of Hortense as a mammy figure. While perhaps unrealistic for the time, Levy’s staged adoption of a mixed-race baby from a white, English birth mother to a

West Indian speaks volumes about changing racial attitudes, or perhaps even more realistically, serves as an idealistic portrait of what could have been. In bringing characters together in unexpected ways, Levy makes “the history of Caribbean people [in England] more visible and show[s] that their story is an important part of British history” (Munoz-Valdivieso 163).

As discussed throughout, with Praisesong for the Widow and Small Island Marshall and

Levy supplement history to “write against the historical evidence as documented by Europeans”

(Alexander 37). Together, Marshall and Levy show that the Middle Passage and its resulting effects as well as the role of West Indians in England following the war, cannot and should not be forgotten and “indeed must be remembered by all of us who are its ‘heirs and descendants’”

(Diedrich 267). As Ian Stracharn asserts, the authors “suggest that Caribbeans must wrest control

217 of their lives from the hands of neocolonial forces and reenter time. By doing so they will reenter history” (236). While increasing attention has been paid to Caribbean literature, and Caribbean culture more broadly, little attention has been paid to the role and treatment of immigrants and those who have left the region. Through the genre of historical fiction, Marshall and Levy appropriate a form that has traditionally been used to promote nationalistic identity to trace the development of characters who thrive after they leave home.

As the works discussed argue, “home cannot be defined simply in opposition to a place or land of exile. Home is experienced by the post-colonial individual as both Motherland and

Other-land” (Barnwell 451-52). In delving into these topics and taking flight via fiction,

Marshall and Levy present the awakenings of their female characters alongside a burgeoning cultural awareness. By illustrating the struggles associated with travel away from home, the authors highlight the way that nationalism impacts feelings of acceptance. As children of immigrants, Marshall and Levy pen works that cross geographic boundaries. In detailing the way in which migration results in a loosening of prejudice and increased personal insight in these fictional situations, the authors call for a more fluid understanding of the feeling of “belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage” (Said 176). Though Avey and Hortense are humbled in the process, their respective awakenings attest to the influence of heritage and ancestry in one’s personal journey. Collectively, these works highlight the psychic and physical reconciliation that flight offers; while hardship initially propels the migratory experience, the characters’ lives are transformed once they arrive in unfamiliar lands. Thus, as Sarthou claims, immigration indeed occasions a reinvention of identity.

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CONCLUSION

In Homemaking, Catherine Wiley and Fiona Barnes assert that “women write in order to negotiate the tensions between definitions of home as a material space and home as an ideal place” (xix). As the works discussed illustrate, the writing and rewriting of home is often a journey in itself, a way of making sense of personal and inherited histories. In texts such as The

True History of Paradise and Breath, Eyes, Memory, home can be far from ideal and escape can offer the opportunity to place oneself in a new material reality. In the writings by and about

Caribbean women that this project examines, the authors write in order to carve out more ideal places for their protagonists; these works of fiction evidence that migration is often an essential component in the process that negotiates physical reality and idealized portraits of home.

Through fiction, contemporary Caribbean women authors such as Levy and Marshall complicate notions of paradise and what it means to leave one’s homeland. If “we know people by their stories,” as Danticat asserts in Krik? Krak!, then literature forges the connection that allows readers to more fully understand the difficulties of migration and exile through these protagonists

(185). In the process, the authors bring their audiences to a more comprehensive understanding of the Caribbean and the multi-faceted nature of flight.

In examining characters in various states of migration and exile, this project responds to

Avtah Brah’s reminder that “The question is not simply who travels, but when, how, and under what circumstances” (182). By expanding boundaries of the term transnational and upholding dissociation, or figurative flight, to be a form of flight as well as a key component to migration, I highlight the forces underlying migration, the situations that pull individuals to manifest new realities via physical removal from internal or external stressors. In attending to the motivations behind flight, I point to the ways in which figurative flight offers protagonists an escape from the

219 reality of violence, abuse or ostracism. In doing so, I illustrate the complexities of flight and the strength of Caribbean women. Overall, this focus moves away from a reading of migration as simply a physical movement from one location to another, very different one, but suggests that that there is a very real, psychic component inherent in migration that cannot and should not be dismissed. In response to Brah’s assertion, Taking Flight reveals the emotional component that underlies, and often precedes, migration. As discussions of works such as Abeng illustrate, migration for Caribbean peoples is not a new concept, “having begun five centuries ago when the region was absorbed into the orbit of global capital accumulation,” but is instead connected to a long-standing legacy of movement (Ho 112).

As Edwidge Danticat stated in an interview, “there is a lot of flight imagery in the myths of people who have been enslaved. As soon as you try to put limits on people, their imagination takes flight. Even madness, psychosis, is a kind of flight” (Alexandre and Howard 162). In delving into folkloric, emotional and physical flight, this study has shown that flight is indeed a process, that characters often enter an imago state prior to migration that is propelled by figurative flight. At the same time, though, as the legend of Annie Palmer suggests, migration is not always a realistic or desirable end goal; in discussing flight in terms of emotional transformation, and even in terms of death, I resist a view of immigration as a magic pill that erases the pain of exile. Much like Catherine Wiley and Fiona Barnes, I view home not as an endpoint but as a psychic as well as physical location. By negotiating states of emotional and/or physical exile, the characters in these works constantly reconfigure and reinvent themselves, often in ways that incorporate a multitude of historic and cultural influences. Most notably seen in texts such as Paule Marshall’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Elizabeth Nunez’s Boundaries, the

220 ways in which characters reimagine and reconstruct home “incorporates connection, relocation, and community” (Wiley and Barnes xvi).

In discussing the flight of Caribbean women, I complicate the notion that “if exile is to be in flight from, then home is to move towards” (Wiley and Barnes xvi). As my readings of works such as Krik? Krak! and Small Island demonstrate, the state of flight can be a home in and of itself, a brief respite or haven in between one painful location and another new and potentially frightening one. In terming dissociation, or doubling, in Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, for example, to be a form of preparation for migration, and in discussing the way in which folkloric flight offers the construct of Annie Palmer the ability to transgress social mores, my work asserts that exile and home are not mutually exclusive. In opposition to Wiley and Barnes’s view of exile and home as opposite constructs or concepts, my larger argument views home as much more than a physical location. In understanding home as an internal space as much as a physical one, I complicate binaries such as home and exile. While I agree that home is not an endpoint, and that strivings toward home can indeed be motivated by a search for self, I question the extent to which the two terms exist on a continuum; in placing them in relation to one another, I fear that we cheapen the experience and struggles of those who manage to construct a home for themselves in the midst of exclusion, violence or abuse. Though home can certainly incorporate feelings of belongingness, this is by no means a guarantee. Conversely, there is no assurance that the physical construct of home that those in flight arrive to will be a substantial improvement over the conditions that one is in flight from. Instead, I rail against a view of exile as necessarily equating “dislocation, exile, and individualism” (Wiley and Barnes xvi). As careful analysis throughout reveals, the state of exile can offer its own benefits such as increased productivity and the opportunity for renewal.

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Similar to the manner in which exile offers these protagonists the ability to reinvent themselves, it also affords authors a means of creative genesis. In examining the link between migration and literary production, I reify exile or displacement as a “productive contraction,” as

Myriam Chancy terms it (Searching 14). Themselves in various states of exile, the authors discussed in this study capitalize on the strength that exile provides, the ability to write back against alienation and oppression; as such, fiction functions as a vehicle for personal and textual liberation. As my analyses collectively argue, flight is a recurring response to the condition of exile in Caribbean women’s writing but it also offers authors a means of escape, a way to negotiate their own sense of displacement. By taking flight themselves, writers such as Cliff and

Danticat are perhaps better able to critique their homelands from a distance and to construct their own homelands through literary creation. Whether discussing the way in which the historical figure Annie Palmer manipulates folklore to secure a position of authority for herself or Avey

Johnson’s state of limbo in Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, this study celebrates the larger sense of homemaking that Caribbean women participate in and the ability to make a space for themselves regardless of the location they find themselves in. So much as exile can be understood as “embittering, frustrating, and morbid,” as Elazar Barkan and Marie Shelton observe, the texts that this larger project takes up counter that view with a rich portrait of the

“challenge of fusing or living between different worlds” (11).

In reading the work of Caribbean women writers, many of which the authors reference as semi-autobiographical projects, I eschew generalization about nations or peoples in favor of an argument specific to this body of work. For instance, my reading of testing in Danticat’s Breath,

Eyes, Memory or the Avey Johnson’s cultural awakening in Praisesong for the Widow, is not meant to suggest that all Haitian women experience exile or that African-American women,

222 collectively, are out of touch with their culture, but instead examines the iterations of flight in these novels with an eye towards the connection between flight and transformation. By exploring how Caribbean women, at least as represented in these works, have adopted figurative flight as a coping mechanism, I highlight the way in which the turn to flight is a shared experience that often results in invigoration and peace. In examining the transformative experience of flight across borders, I highlight the importance of figurative flight to the migratory experience. On a larger scale, then, this project positions flight itself as transnational, a state that transcends borders; by mobilizing flight, Caribbean women can resist disempowerment. Thus, flight in and of itself functions as a site of resistance and affirmation. In Twentieth-Century Caribbean

Literature Alison Donnell notes that “whereas [Caribbean] women writers, although well attended to, tend to be designated...under a collective gendered identity” (4). While I can certainly see how Donnell might assert this, especially in light of the work of male writers such as Naipaul and Brathwaite, my work moves beyond a gendered identification to one that celebrates this exciting moment in the history of Caribbean women’s writing without regard to gender but to the vitality of the works produced and the engaging topics they discuss. In celebration of the fact that “over the last ten years there has been a sharp increase in the amount written about Caribbean women,” this project examines the struggles of the migratory process through the lens of gender and mobility (Ellis ix).

In turning to literature to explore the complexity of migration, I respond to Nikos

Papastergiadis’s assertion that “migration is a process which is not completed by the arrival of an individual in a foreign place. Arrival rarely means assimilation. Migrants are often transformed by their journey, and their presence is a catalyst to new transformations in the spaces they enter...

Departure seldom entails forgetting and rejection” (205). This is true of the works under study,

223 but perhaps most explicitly Praisesong for the Widow and Krik? Krak!, novels that showcase the maintenance rather than destruction of culture and the way in which ties persist despite distance and even death. From a more global standpoint, the analysis of these works in light of sociological theories on migration illustrates the extent to which “real life” is reflected in literature. Ultimately, this projects positions writing by transnational Caribbean women as an important resource, a way for migrants to prepare for what is to come and for others to experience the pains of migration through its reflection in literature.

In Allegories of Desire, M.M. Adjarian focuses on Caribbean women’s resistance to oppression and exploitation. In particular, she argues that women “become (re)producers of historical truths that transcend the genetic and biological to include the national” (11). Focusing in even more, I would suggest that the writings of transnational Caribbean women often reproduce the truth of migration, and in doing so counter romanticized portraits of what it means to leave one’s homeland for opportunities in a foreign land. Taking Adjarian’s claim further is the function of Caribbean women’s fiction as a tool for critique. In the writing of historical truths, authors such as Cezair-Thompson offer commentary on their homelands from a “safe” distance. As such, writing allows women to escape the censure or violence they might face back

“home” and instead to reproduce the nation as they see it for a larger audience. Collectively, these works evidence the fact that many contemporary struggles in the Caribbean can be traced back to the turbulence of colonialism; these truths, individual as well as collective, are anything but new. In the works discussed, language is a vehicle for power that upholds Caribbean women as the daughters of the hills who “suck salt” and the hardships that propel their flight as bumps in the road instead of roadblocks. Through literature, the authors recover parts of themselves as they figuratively return home to rewrite or revise history. Writing on migration more generally,

224

Michel Bruneau finds that “through migration, diaspora members have lost their material relationship to the territory of origin, but they can still preserve their cultural or spiritual relationship through memory” (48). Though I certainly agree with Bruneau, it is clear that the works discussed, many of which are authored by transnational Caribbean women writers, are forms of literary memory. By remembering and reminiscing, the Caribbean authors under study turn to fiction to extend the process of reliving personal or collective histories. In this way, they reproduce and extend ties with Caribbean territories for a wider audience; through literary production, they transform individual memories and histories for a collective readership.

In writing and rewriting history, the authors discussed employ various iterations of flight to bring their protagonists to a space of change. In Searching for Safe Spaces, Myriam Chancy concludes that “in Caribbean fiction, dissatisfaction with oppressive gender roles finds its expression in the motif of flight as a result of social confinement” (114). Though this is certainly true in Cliff’s Abeng and Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, for instance, my analysis of the works under study unsettles this somewhat narrow understanding of flight. On a larger scale, my discussion of Melville’s short stories and Levy’s Small Island, in particular, attest to the fact that flight is propelled by a multitude of factors. While flight can often be traced back to issues of confinement, and indeed may be influenced by rigid gender roles, Chancy’s statement glosses over the effects that race and post-colonialism, for instance, have on flight as well. If indeed the

“nation-state creates an arbitrary limit between the networks inside it and those that are outside,” as Bruneau claims, then literature, and in particular literature by or about those in flight, counteracts this claim and instead illustrates that individuals can maintain multiple ties of influence (48). In complicating more narrow understandings of the root causes of flight, I extend

Donnell’s claim that “one of the major factors that has led to these writers being exiled from

225 literary history is their apparent attempts to escape from their own historical moment” (66).

While Donnell speaks to Caribbean women’s writing more broadly and way in which the canon of Caribbean literature has been constructed, I question the extent to which we can characterize

Caribbean women’s writing as “exiled from history” today. With the popularity of works such as

Breath, Eyes, Memory and from what I can only attest to anecdotally as a marked increase in the number of positions teaching Caribbean literature, I can’t help but think that a view of Caribbean literature as somehow excluded or exiled is a bit outdated.

In crafting tales of loss but also of growth, the writers under study illustrate that generalizations about the struggle of Caribbean women are often inaccurate. In Paradise and

Plantation Ian Strachan observes that “for a great many Caribbean women writers, the struggle to be free is twofold: they desire freedom from the strictures of a male-dominated society, and they long for autonomy and self-determination for all colonized Caribbean people” (225). Again, as with Chancy’s characterization of flight, summarizing the motivations of Caribbean women writers seems quite the surmountable task. Although works like Danticat’s “Nineteen Thirty-

Seven” evidence a desire to be free from the ingrained gender expectations reinforced by a male- dominated society, that very same work points to oral culture as a controlling force. So much as

Stracharn is correct in that the folklore that imprisons Manman is manipulated by larger patriarchal forces, novels such as Abeng in no way suggest that the well-being of fellow countrymen is even a consideration. Instead, Cliff’s novel, which details the coming-of-age for

Clare Savage, illustrates a desire to break free of repressive gender norms, which many would argue are propagated by patriarchy. What I mean to say is that it seems like a bit of a stretch to condense the motivations of many women into two universal goals. Though I would gather that many Caribbean women writers, and indeed many people in general, support the “autonomy and

226 self-determination for all colonized Caribbean people,” I hesitate to put forth that assumption based on a select group of novels (Stracharn 225). To my mind, painting the majority of

Caribbean women writers as humanitarians falls prey to the romanticism that Ruben Gowricharn observes. As Gowricharn notes in Caribbean Transnationalism, “the Caribbean has always had a romantic appeal to the imagination of the outsider...These notions are then attributed to the whole region, thus creating the image that the Caribbean constitutes a unity” (1). Indeed, the authors of the novels under study are master weavers; their tales initially capitalize on this stereotype, with Marshall’s text beginning aboard a Caribbean cruise, for example. However, after capturing readers’ attention, the texts quickly shift to dispute this romanticized view of the region. In speaking to cultural loss, violence, neocolonialism, disease and abuse, the texts under discussion dismantle the popular reputation of the Caribbean as a paradise available for the consumption and joy of Westerners.

In reconstructing the Caribbean for a wider audience, Caribbean women’s writing, and in particular the works examined, amend the definition of homeland. In the introduction to

Imagined Transnationalism, Kevin Concannon notes that “the increasing permeability of boundaries between nation-states has threatened the traditional deﬁnition of an identiﬁable

‘homeland’ from which to migrate and points instead toward a burgeoning transnational spaciousness” (2). Indeed, the texts threaten a stable definition of the homeland in illustrating that home can be psychically as well as materially constructed. Even more, as the works in this project suggest, homeland is more of a fluid concept; no longer are individuals confined to one homeland or a singular identity. Instead, as illustrated by my discussion of novels including Anna

In-Between and Small lsland, the surge in transnationalism enriches and supplements, rather than threatens, the nation. Even more troubling, though, is the view that “Caribbean migrants living in

227 the metropolis create a ‘home’ there, but these ‘homes’ are ethnic rather than national”

(Concannon 3). Although the “ethnic” ties remain strong in works such as Danticat’s “Caroline’s

Wedding,” we would be remiss to discount this settling in as a rejection of nationalism. Instead, as a close reading of the short story reveals, immigrants such as Grace long for belonging in their new nations. To relegate immigrants, including those who have spent years in their new homes, to the phrase “ethnic” is troubling and offensive. As I hope my analysis throughout has supported, transnationalism comes with extreme difficulty and the decision to immigrate is intensely personal. More than creating ethnic homes in their new locales, it is through flight that transnational citizens join an imagined community; this community can then be partially accessed through literature. Far from a homogeneous group, though, as my project illustrates,

Caribbean women writers reformulate the meaning of flight and employ language, “one of the most important sites of resistance to different forms of oppression” (Ippolito 29).

The novels discussed throughout both support and contradict the assertion that the

“modern use for the world ‘homeland’ is predicated on the existence of a nation-state”

(Papastergiadis 54). While this study doesn’t specifically discount this understanding of homeland, my larger examination furthers a view of home as a liminal as well as physical space.

Although I agree with Papastergiadis that this view of homeland assumes a level of comfort and acceptance on the part of the resident, and that this is problematic, I push back against the belief that those who have taken flight are “homeless,” as Papastergiadis terms them. As a whole, this project positions flight as a middle ground between home and homeland and champions the internal construction of home that characters such as Sophie and Clare undertake. As such, a view of these young women as homeless not only undercuts their struggles and progress toward wholeness but also completely dismisses the ties they have in their new nations. In constructing

228 characters that create spaces for themselves, the authors discussed herein reject the need for a physical homeland; although women such as Jean take flight to escape desperate circumstances, the emotional trauma they have endured ensures that they are capable of living outside the comfort of the very homeland that Papastergiadis references. Instead, “this absence of an ideal homeland intensiﬁes the imagining and the inventing of home spaces or homelands,” which leads to the psychic, as well as fictional, construction of imagined homelands in these works

(Alexander 10).

In an interview with Judith Raiskin, Michelle Cliff remarks that “everybody comes from someplace else, and that’s the feeling of the Caribbean” (63). Although Cliff is absolutely correct about the realities of the diaspora, this project, with a focus on migration, supports a more universal reading of this condition. More specifically, in discussing psychological exile as a form of transnationalism, I proffer an understanding of “somewhere else” that also locates the destination within. In writing of exile from a female perspective, the authors are not merely

“native wom[en] [who] must write about and express those marginal positions in her own voice through a language of power,” but offer a more inclusive view of exile that is not often referenced by their male counterparts (Edwards 105). While they, sadly, articulate these positions in a “language of power,” we would be remiss to discount the agency and authority gained in doing so. Although, linguistically, their tales are understood through this mediating influence, the tales of flight they present, collectively, resist the larger power structure. Rather than seeing the authors detailing “marginal positions,” I view writing by transnational Caribbean women as reflective of the trends in migration that affect us all. This “well-meaning academic” seeks not to render others visible, but to complicate readings of flight in works that have already spoken for themselves (Chancy Framing 29).

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Chapter Two: The Costs of Migration: What Is Left Behind

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Bouson, J. Brooks. Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. Print.

Braziel, Jana Evans. “Défilée’s Diasporic Daughters: Revolutionary Narratives of Ayiti (Haiti), Nanchon (Nation), and Dyaspora (Diaspora) in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” Studies in the Literary Imagination 37.2 (2004): 77-96. Print. Défilée

---. “Re-membering Défilée: Dédée Bazile as Revolutionary Lieu de Mémoire.” Small Axe 18 (2005): 57-85. Print.

Chancy, Myriam J.A. Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Print.

Chen, Wilson. “Figures of Flight and Entrapment in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” Rocky Mountain Review (Spring 2011): 36-55. Print.

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---. Krik? Krak! New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1995. Print.

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233

Da Silva, A.J. Simones. The Luxury of Nationalist Despair: George Lamming’s Fiction as Decolonizing Project. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Print.

Davis, Nick. “The Massacre that Marked Haitian-Dominican Republic Ties.” BBC News, Oct. 12, 2012. Web. 2 Feb. 2014.

Davis, Rocio G. “Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!” MELUS 26.2 (Summer 2001): 65-81. Print.

Francis, Donette A. “Silences Too Horrific to Disturb’: Writing Sexual Histories in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Research in African Literatures 35.2 (2004): 75-90. Print.

Fulani, Ifeona. “Caribbean Women Writers and the Politics of Style: A Case for Literary Anancyism.” Small Axe 17 (2005): 64-79. Print.

Green, Tara T. “When Women Tell Stories” in Contemporary African American Fiction. Ed. Dana A. Williams. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009. Print.

Guarnizo, Luis E. and Michael P. Smith. “The Locations of Transnationalism” in Transnationalism From Below. Ed. Luis E. Guarnizo and Michael P. Smith. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998. Print.

“Haiti.” Encyclopedia of Human Rights. 2009. Web. 3 Feb. 2014.

Hill, Donald R. Caribbean Folklore: A Handbook. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007. Print.

Ippolito, Emilia. Caribbean Women Writers: Identity and Gender. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. Print.

Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. Google Books, n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2014.

Kaplan, Caren. “Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects,” in De/Colonizing the Subject, Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Print.

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Mackie, Erin. “Jamaican Ladies and Tropical Charms.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 37.2 (2006): 189-220. Print.

Mardorossian, Carine M. Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Print.

McGregory, Jerrilyn. Classroom lecture. Tallahassee, FL. October 22, 2009.

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Morgan, Paula and Valerie Youssef. Writing Rage: Unmasking Violence through the Caribbean Discourse. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006. Print.

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Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth and Barbara Webb. “On the Threshold of Becoming: Contemporary Caribbean Women Writers.” Cimarrón 1:3 (1988): 106-132. Print.

Putnam, Amanda. “Mothering the Motherless: Portrayals of Alternative Mothering.” Canadian Woman Studies 23.2 (2004): 118-123. Print.

Rodriguez, Maria C. What Women Lose: Exile and Construction of Imaginary Homelands in Novels by Caribbean Writers. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005. Print.

Russell, Heather. Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2009. Print.

Samway, Patrick. “A Homeward Journey: Edwidge Danticat’s Fictional Landscapes, Mindscapes, Genescapes, and Signscapes in Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Mississippi Quarterly 57.1 (Winter 2003): 75-83. Print.

Sanon, Barbara. “Black Crows and Zombie Girls.” The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora. Ed. Edwidge Danticat. New York: Soho Press, 2001. 43-50. Print.

Schiller, Nina G. and Georges Fouron. “Transnational Lives and National Identities: The Identity Politics of Haitian Immigrants” in Transnationalism From Below. Ed. Luis E. Guarnizo and Michael P. Smith. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998. Print.

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235

Sheller, Mimi. Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Print.

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Chapter Three: The Monstrous and the Beautiful: Physical and Emotional Transformation in the Works of Pauline Melville and Elizabeth Nunez

Bilby, Kenneth M. “Obeah.” Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History. Ed. Colin A. Palmer. 2nd ed. Vol. 4. Detroit Macmillan Reference USA, 2006. 1672-1674. U.S. History in Context. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.

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Bouson, J. Brooks. Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. Print.

Chancy, Myriam J.A. Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Print.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Quantum Landscapes: A ‘Ventriloquism of Spirit.” Interventions 9.1 (2007): 62-82. Print.

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Francois, Pierre. “Incest and the Ontology of Memory in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 21.2 (1999): 37-48. Print.

Hannan, Jim. “A Champion of Mixtures: Difference and Global Literature in Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter.” Contemporary Literature 51.1 (2010): 87-123. Print.

Hill, Donald R. Caribbean Folklore: A Handbook. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007. Print.

Jaggar, Alison M. and Susan R. Bordo. Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Print.

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Lewis, Barbara. “Negotiating Multiple Worlds: A Public Interview with Elizabeth Nunez.” Black Renaissance 4.2/3 (2002): 202-213. Print.

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Morgan, Paula and Valerie Youssef. Writing Rage: Unmasking Violence through the Caribbean Discourse. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006. Print.

Ness, Robert. “Not His Sort of Story: Evelyn Waugh and Pauline Melville in Guyana.” Ariel 38.4 (2007): 51-68. Print.

Nunez, Elizabeth. Anna In-Between. Akashic Books, 2009. Print.

---. Boundaries. New York: Akashic Books, 2011. Print.

---. “How I Came to America.” Changing English 12.3 (2005): 373-76. Print.

Renk, Kathleen W. “Magic that Battles Death: Pauline Melville’s Marvelous Realism.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.1 (2009): 101-115. Print.

Robinson-Walcott, Kim. “Claiming an Identity We Thought They Despised: Contemporary White West Indian Writers and Their Negotiation of Race.” Small Axe 14.7 (2003): 93- 110. Print.

Savory, Elaine. “Mathematical Limbs and Other Eventualities: Translocation of the Body in Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter.” New Literatures Review 30 (2005): 47-57. Print.

Chapter Four: The Negotiation of Creolization and Transnational Identity in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise

Adjarian, M.M. Allegories of Desire: Body, Nation, and Empire in Modern Caribbean Literature by Women. Westport: Praeger, 2004. Print.

Bauer, Ralph. “The Hemispheric Genealogies of ‘Race’: Creolization and the Cultural Geography of Colonial Difference across the Eighteenth-Century Americas.” Hemispheric American Studies. Ed. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008. 36-56. Print.

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Bolland, O. Nigel. “Creolisation and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History.” Caribbean Quarterly 44.½ (1998): 1-32. Print.

---. “Reconsidering Creolization and Creole Societies.” Shibboleths: Journal of Comparative Theory 1.1 (2006): 1-14.

Booker, M. Keith and Dubravka Juraga. The Caribbean Novel in English: An Introduction. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2001. Print. 237

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Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Print.

Chancy, Myriam J.A. Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Print.

Cezair-Thompson, Margaret. The True History of Paradise. New York: Random House, 1999. Print.

Clarke, Colin. “Politics, Violence and Drugs in Kingston, Jamaica.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 25.3 (2006): 420-440. Print.

Cliff, Michelle. Abeng. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Print.

“Earthquake Destroys Jamaican Pirate Haven.” This Day in History. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

“Edward Seaga.” Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sep. 2013. Web. 10 Feb. 2014.

Ekpo, Denis. “Introduction: From Negritude to Post-Africanism.” Third Text 24.2 (2010): 177- 87. Print.

Floyd-Thomas, Stacey M. and Laura Gillman. “Subverting Forced Identities, Violent Acts, and the Narrativity of Race: A Diasporic Analysis of Black Women’s Radical Subjectivity in Three Novel Acts.” Journal of Black Studies 32.5 (2002): 528-56. Print.

Gikandi, Simon. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Print.

Gillespie, Carmen. “Past as Prologue: Rewriting and Reclaiming the Marked Body in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise.” Color, Hair, and Bone: Race in the Twenty-First Century. Eds. Linden Lewis and Glyne Griffith. Cranbury: Associated UP, 2008. 147-60. Print.

Glave, Thomas. Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Print.

Gourdine, Angeletta K.M. The Difference Place Makes: Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. Print.

Griffin, Farah J. “Textual Healing: Claiming Black Women’s Bodies, the Erotic and Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Slavery.” Callaloo 19.2 (1996): 519-36. Print.

238

Guarnizo, Luis E. and Michael P. Smith. “The Locations of Transnationalism.” Transnationalism From Below. Ed. Michael P. Smith and Luis E. Guarnizo. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998. 3-34. Print.

Ippolito, Emilia. Caribbean Women Writers: Identity and Gender. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. Print.

Kenan, Randall, and Margaret Cezair-Thompson. “Margaret Cezair-Thompson.” BOMB 69 (1999): 54-59. Print.

Kitson, Doris. “Jamaica and the Electoral Coup of 1980.” Race Class 24 (1982): 169-178. Print.

Mahler, Sarah J. “Theoretical and Empirical Contributions Toward a Research Agenda for Transnationalism.” Transnationalism From Below. Ed. Michael P. Smith and Luis E. Guarnizo. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998. 64-100. Print.

Manley, Rachel. “Thoughts on Writing from Exile.” Small Axe 12.6 (2002): 201-208. Print.

Mardorossian, Carine. Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Print.

“Michael Norman Manley.” Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sep. 2013. Web. 10 Feb. 2014.

Moynagh, Maureen. “The Ethical Turn in Postcolonial Theory and Narrative: Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 30.4 (1999): 109-33. Print.

“Norman Washington Manley.” Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sep. 2013. Web. 10 Feb. 2014.

Olmos, Margarite F., and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Voudou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Print.

Palmer Adisa, O. “Journey into Speech– A Writer Between Two Worlds: An Interview with Michelle Cliff.” African American Review 28.2 (1994): 273-81. Print.

Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. Literature of the Caribbean. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2008. Print.

Rodríguez, María C. What Women Lose: Exile and the Construction of Imaginary Homelands in Novels by Caribbean Writers. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Print.

Rody, Caroline. The Daughter’s Return: African-American and Caribbean Women’s Fictions of History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Print.

239

Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.

“Savacou.” Chimurenga Library, 2008. Web. 20 Feb. 2014.

Schiller, Nina G. and Georges Fouron. “Transnational Lives and National Identities: The Identity Politics of Haitian Immigrants.” Transnationalism From Below. Ed. Michael P. Smith and Luis E. Guarnizo. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998. 130-161. Print.

Schwartz, Meryl F. and Michelle Cliff. “An Interview With Michelle Cliff.” Contemporary Literature 34.4 (1993): 595-619. Print.

Sharpe, Jenny. Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Print.

“Sir Alexander Bustamante.” Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sep. 2013. Web. 10 Feb. 2014.

Strachan, Ian G. Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Print.

Vásquez, Sam. “Violent Liaisons: Historical Crossings and the Negotiation of Sex, Sexuality, and Race in The Book of Night Women and The True History of Paradise.” Small Axe 16.2 (2012): 43-59. Print.

Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print

Walker, Lisa. Looking Like What You Are : Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Print.

Walters, Wendy W. At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Print.

Wiley, Catherine and Barnes, Fiona R. Homemaking : Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home. New York: Garland Pub., 1996. Print.

Windwalker, Djenra. “The Orb of Djenra: The Kongo Cosmogram.” Web. 2005. 25 April 2010.

Yazdiha, Haj. “Conceptualizing Hybridity: Deconstructing Boundaries through the Hybrid.” Formations 1.1 (2010): 31-38. Print.

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

Alexander, Simone A. Mother Imagery in the novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Print.

240

Anatol, Gisele. “Transforming the Skin-Shedding Soucouyant: Using Folklore to Reclaim Female Agency in Caribbean Literature.” Small Axe 7 (2000): 44-59. Print.

Barnwell, Kattian. “Motherlands and Other Lands: Home and Exile in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.” Caribbean Studies 27. ¾ (Jul. - Dec., 1994): 451-454. Print.

Bauböck, Rainer and Thomas Faist. “Introduction.” Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, Theories and Methods. Ed. Rainer Bauböck and Thomas Faist. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Print.

Benjamin, Shanna G. “Weaving the Web of Reintegration: Locating Aunt Nancy in Praisesong for the Widow.” MELUS 30.1 (Spring, 2005): 49-67. Print.

Bracks, Lean'tin L. Writings on Black Women of the Diaspora: History, Language and Identity. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998. Print.

Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Middle Passages and the Healing Place of History: Migration and Identity in Black Women’s Literature. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006. Print.

Brown-Hinds, Paulette. “In the Spirit: Dance as Healing Ritual in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.” Religion & Literature 27.1 (Spring, 1995): 107-117. Print.

Butler, Judith. “Forward: Bracha's Eurydice.” In The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. vi-xii. Print.

Chancy, Myriam J.A. Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. Print.

Christian, Barbara T. “Ritualistic Process and the Structure of Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.” Callaloo 18 (Spring-Summer 1983): 74-84. Print.

Couser, G. Thomas, “Oppression and Repression: Personal and Collective Memory in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. Ed. Amritji Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr. and Robert E. Hogan. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. 106-120. Print.

Crowder, Kyle D. “Residential Segregation of West Indians in the New York/New Jersey Metropolitan Area: The Roles of Race and Ethnicity.” International Migration Review 33.1 (Spring, 1999): 79-113. Print.

Davies, Carole Boyce. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Diedrich, Maria, et. al. Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print.

241

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Edmondson, Belinda. Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Print.

Ettinger, Bracha L. The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Print.

Fernandez, Irene P. “Representing Third Spaces, Fluid Identities and Contested Spaces in Contemporary British Literature.” Atlantis 31.2 (2009): 143-60. Print.

Foner, Nancy. “West Indian Identity in the Diaspora: Comparative and Historical Perspectives.” Latin American Perspectives 25.3 (1998): 173-188. Print.

Francis, Donette A. “Silences Too Horrific to Disturb’: Writing Sexual Histories in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Research in African Literatures 35.2 (2004): 75-90. Print.

Gallego, Maria D.M. “Going Back Home: Homelands and Futurelands in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow.” Evolving Origins, Transplanting Cultures: Literary Legacies of the New Americans (2002): 67-75. Print.

Green, Tara T. “When Women Tell Stories,” in Contemporary African American Fiction, Ed. Dana A. Williams. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2009. Print.

Grosby, Steven. Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.

Hall, James C. “Flying Africans.” Footsteps May-June 2006: 14+. General OneFile. Web. 17 Feb. 2014.

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Haynes, Douglas M. “Teaching Twentieth-Century Black Britain.” Radical History Review 87 (2003): 139-145. Print.

Hill, Donald R. Caribbean Folklore: A Handbook. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007. Print.

Kemp, Yakini B. and Janice Liddell. Arms Akimbo: Africana Women in Contemporary Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Print.

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Lang, Anouk. “Enthralling but at the Same Time Disturbing’: Challenging the Readers of Small Island.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.2 (2009): 123-40. Print.

Levy, Andrea. Small Island. New York: Picador, 2004. Print.

Macpherson, Heidi S. Women’s Travel Writing and the Politics of Location. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Print.

Mardorossian, Carine. Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Print.

Marshall, Paule. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Plume, 1983. Print.

---. Triangular Road. New York: Basic Cevitas Books, 2009. Print.

McNeil, Elizabeth. “The Gullah Seeker's Journey in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow.” MELUS 34.1 (2009): 185-209.

Munoz-Valdivieso, Sofia. “Africa in Europe: Narrating Black British History in Contemporary Fiction.” Journal of European Studies 40.2 (2010): 159-74. Print.

Newall, Venetia. “Black Britain: The Jamaicans and Their Folklore.” Folklore 86.1 (1975): 25- 41. Print.

Richards, Constance S. “Nationalism and the Development of Identity in Postcolonial Fiction: Zoe Wicomb and Michelle Cliff.” Research in African Literatures 36.1 (2005): 20-33. Print.

Rogers, Susan. “Embodying Cultural Memory in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.” African American Review 34.1 (Spring, 2000): 77-93. Print.

Rubenstein, Roberta. Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Print.

Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.

Sarthou, Sharrón E. “Unsilencing Défilée’s Daughters: Overcoming Silence in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!” The Global South 4.2 (2010): 99-123. Print.

Siegel, Kristi. Gender, Genre and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2004. Print.

243

Singh, Amritjit, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr. and Robert E. Hogan, “Introduction.” Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Ed. Amritji Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr. and Robert E. Hogan. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. 3-18. Print.

Slenes, Robert W. “Central African Religions and Culture in the Americas.” Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History. Ed. Colin A. Palmer. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2006. 435-438. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 17 Feb. 2014.

Strachan, Ian G. Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.

“The Big Drum Dance of Carriacou.” Smithsonian Folkways. Web. 17 Feb. 2014.

Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.

Wilentz, Gay. “If You Surrender to the Air: Folk Legends of Flight and Resistance in African American Literature.” MELUS 16. 1 (Spring, 1989 - Spring, 1990): 21-32. Print.

“Windrush: Post-war Immigration 1948.” The British Library Board. Web. 26 February 2014.

Conclusion

Adjarian, M.M. Allegories of Desire: Body, Nation and Empire in Modern Caribbean Literature by Women. Westport: Praeger, 2004. Print.

Alexander, Simone. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Print.

Alexandre, Sandy and Ravi Y. Howard. “My Turn in the Fire: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” Transition 93 (2002): 110-128. Print.

Barkan, Elazar and Marie D. Shelton. Borders, Exiles, Diasporas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.

Bruneau, Michel. “Diasporas, Transnational Spaces and Communities.” Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, Theories and Methods. Ed. Rainer Bauböck and Thomas Faist. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. 35-50. Print.

Brah, Avtah. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.

Chancy, Myriam. Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Print.

244

---. Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. Print.

Concannon, Kevin. Imagined Transnationalism: U.S. Latino/a Literature, Culture, and Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.

Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak! New York: Soho Press, 1995. Print.

Donnell, Alison. Twentieth-century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Edwards, Justin. Postcolonial Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.

Ellis, Pat. Women of the Caribbean. Atlantic Highlands: Zed Books, 1986. Print.

Gowricharn, Ruben S. Caribbean Transnationalism: Migration, Pluralism, and Social Cohesion. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006. Print.

Ho, Christine G.T. “Caribbean Transnationalism as a Gendered Process.” Latin American Perspectives 26.5 (1999): 34-54. Print.

Ippolito, Emilia. Caribbean Women Writers: Identity and Gender. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. Print.

Papastergiadis, Nikos. The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000. Print.

Raiskin, Judith L. “The Art of History: An Interview with Michelle Cliff.” The Kenyon Review 15.1 (1993): 57-71. Print.

Stracharn, Ian G. Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Print.

Wiley, Catherine and Barnes, Fiona R. Homemaking : Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home. New York: Garland Pub., 1996. Print.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Before attending Florida State University for her Ph.D. in Literature, Jennifer Donahue received a Bachelor’s degree in English from Salisbury University and a Master’s degree in Literature from the University of Maryland. She has published or has work forthcoming in The Journal of

Commonwealth Literature, Studies in Gothic Fiction, and Restoration and Eighteenth-Century

Theatre Research.

246