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Reading across the Archipelago: Anglophone and Francophone
Caribbean Perspectives on Place and Ontology by Jamaica
Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau
Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado
PhD in English Literature
University of Edinburgh
2014
1
Declaration
This is to certify that the work within has been composed by me and is entirely my
own. No part of this thesis has been submitted for any other degree or professional
qualification.
Signed:
Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado
2
For loved ones lost
3
Contents
Acknowledgements
5
Abstract
7
Introduction
Methods, Texts and Contexts
Chapter I
Decolonising Caribbean Women’s Fiction: Womanist
9
24
Responses to Fanon, Walcott, Glissant and the Créolistes
Chapter II
Xuela’s Autothanatography: Genocide, Ecocide and the
85
Death of the Caribbean Motherland in Jamaica Kincaid’s
The Autobiography of My Mother
Chapter III
Cycles and Cyclones: Violence, Memory and
117
Displacement in Gisèle Pineau’s Macadam Dreams
Chapter IV
Postcoloniality and Postmemory: The Photographic
151
Spectre of Transgenerational Trauma in Jamaica
Kincaid’s Lucy and Gisèle Pineau’s The Drifting of
Spirits
Chapter V
‘Black’ Magic and Uncommon Realities in the
203
Caribbean: Obeah, Quimbois and Garden Space in
Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau’s Autofiction
Chapter VI
Postcolonial Pathologies: Labour Migration and
267
Disordered Subjectivities in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and
Gisèle Pineau’s Devil’s Dance
Conclusion
Re-orienting Dislocated Caribbean Ontopologies
344
Appendix
An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid
351
Bibliography
395
4
Acknowledgements
Firstly, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my beloved family and
friends for their unwavering love and encouragement throughout the course of my
academic career. Their loving presence and the joy it brings have been the greatest
blessings in my life. For those whom we have lost, this is dedicated to your
memory. I have felt the sustaining power of your love every day, and knowing that I
carry you with me has pushed me onward in my journey and helped me to look
toward the future.
I would especially like to thank my primary supervisor Michelle Keown for
her enduring commitment as both an advisor and a dear friend. I am truly beholden
to Michelle for seeing me through the challenges that arose during the process of
completing this programme. From our very first meeting Michelle has been a
devoted counsellor, and her steadfastness and graciousness have demonstrated to me
the true meaning of mentorship. Her remarkable intellect and insightful
commentary have infinitely enriched this project. I would also like to thank my
secondary supervisor David Farrier for his assistance in assuming the role of
primary supervisor while Michelle was on maternity leave during my first year of
the programme, and for his valuable guidance throughout the remainder of my time
at Edinburgh. I am extremely privileged to be able to say that I have had two such
talented scholars as my primary supervisors during my doctoral studies.
I wish to thank my external examiner John McLeod for his optimism and
generosity of spirit, which have been inspirational to me throughout the duration of
the doctoral programme. His warmth and congeniality have been greatly heartening
and I am incredibly honoured that he agreed to take part in the viva voce. I would
5
also like to give special thanks to my internal examiner Aaron Kelly for his
perspicacity and thought-provoking discussions, which were tremendously helpful
in opening up new lines of thought for this project. I am grateful for the kindness
and wisdom he has shared during my time at Edinburgh, and for his enthusiastic and
persistent support of this endeavour.
I am enormously indebted to Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau, the
exceptionally gifted authors whose writings are the enlivening force of this study.
Their creative abilities are truly extraordinary, and with each reading their works
continually unfold themselves, revealing a limitless depth of inspiration. I wish to
thank Jamaica Kincaid for welcoming me so warmly into her beautiful home in
Vermont for our interview in 2012 and for her continual encouragement and
assistance with this project. I am also immensely grateful to Gisèle Pineau for
participating in several long-distance interviews for this venture from her home in
Guadeloupe. The responses to my questions which I received from both writers
were poetical and fascinating, and provided a rich body of material to inform my
project.
Lastly, I would be remiss if I did not also thank my wonderful students from
the past several years of tutoring at Edinburgh, who have fuelled my love for
teaching and whose passion for literature and perceptive analyses were consistent
sources of motivation in my own work.
6
Abstract
This interdisciplinary study traces the relationship between place and
ontology in anglophone and francophone Caribbean contexts, respectively, in
selected fictional texts by contemporary Afro-Caribbean women writers Jamaica
Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau. In particular, the thesis considers the ways in which
notions of place are complicated by the fact that these authors are doubly diasporic.
Kincaid and Pineau are of the African diaspora, and they are also migrant writers
who travel back and forth between the Caribbean neocolonies and the neoimperia
(the United States for Kincaid and France for Pineau). The Antiguan-born Kincaid
relocated to the United States as an adolescent and continues to reside there today –
despite not having renounced her Antiguan citizenship. Pineau was born and raised
in Paris by Guadeloupean parents, who later transplanted the family to their
Caribbean homeland when Pineau was an adolescent. After moving between the
Caribbean and Paris throughout the ensuing decades, Guadeloupe is now her
primary place of residence. Kincaid and Pineau, who are of the same generation and
from neighbouring Caribbean islands, share fascinating points of intersection and
divergence with regard to their treatment of place and ontology in their oeuvres.
This project draws upon a number of theoretical paradigms and examines them in
conjunction with Kincaid and Pineau’s fiction in order to discern whether or not
these models are apposite to their work. Some examples are:
decolonisation/decolonial, postcolonial, womanist and feminist, gender, critical race,
psychoanalysis, trauma, ecocritical, spatial, semiotic, ethnographic, Marxian and
post-Marxist, poststructuralist, deconstructionist, postmodernist, aesthetic and antiaesthetic, and photographic theories. The thesis opens with an introductory chapter
7
that locates my research within larger, ongoing discussions of place and ontology in
the field of postcolonial studies. It also explains the methodological approaches of
the project, in addition to brief descriptions of subsequent chapters. The first
chapter of the investigative body of the thesis outlines the decolonising theoretical
axiomatics which underpin Kincaid and Pineau’s fictional writings. Next I provide
a chapter each on key works by Kincaid and Pineau in order to establish their
individual thematic and formal concerns before turning, in the ensuing chapters, to
connective readings of their texts within certain contextual frameworks. I also
examine Kincaid and Pineau’s imbricated treatment of connecting themes that
appear to ricochet throughout their corpora of writings. This linkage between
landscape and ontology is fundamental to understanding migration experience in
that multiple landscapes and cultures become rooted in individual and collective
identities as complex biographic phenomena. Kincaid and Pineau address this
relationship between the environment and (auto)fiction as a way of investigating the
constitutive relations between place, body, and ontology.
8
Introduction
Methods, Texts and Contexts
This thesis performs what I would like to call a connective, rather than a
comparative, reading of anglophone and francophone interpretations and
interrelations of place and ontology in texts by contemporary Caribbean women
writers Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau. Here I am adapting Marianne Hirsch’s
assertion that we need to perform ‘connective rather than comparative’ readings of
traumatic narratives in order to ‘[eschew] any implications that catastrophic histories
are comparable’ (2012: 62). Correspondingly, I believe that this approach can be
modified for application to the study of postcolonial literatures across different
linguistic, geographical and spatio-temporal contexts in order to ‘eschew any
implications’ that postcolonial narratives, which frequently grapple with the
specificities of various ‘catastrophic histories’ of colonialism, are somehow
inherently comparable. With this methodology I aim to circumvent, and ideally,
explode the minefield of entrapments embedded within the landscape of
comparative postcolonial literary studies – namely, those of hierarchization,
classification and synthesis. As Johannes Fabian argues, ‘There would be no raison
d’être for the comparative method if it was not the classification of entities or traits
which first have to be separate and distinct before their similarities can be used to
establish taxonomies and developmental sequences’ (26-7). In other words, when
examined under the glaring light of Michel Foucault’s ‘operating table’ in The
Order of Things (1970), Postcolonial Studies, the brainchild of its progenitor,
Comparative Literature, looks an awful lot like an imperialist episteme – a hideous
paradox that has evolved out of its institutionalisation by the academe. Comparative
9
postcolonial literary studies is therefore an analytic of dissection. In lieu of this
violent practice, which works to fragment (and thereby recolonise) its object, I
would like to transition toward forms of connective postcolonial literary studies.
Accordingly, this thesis represents the first step in what I intend to be a more
long-term, sustained project that draws eclectically on a range of different
imaginative and theoretical strands in order to explore postcolonial issues and
themes more interdisciplinarily rather than centring exclusively on postcolonial
literatures written in English. English and its dialectal variants serve as both a
resource and a problem in that they create opportunities for either connectivity or
division. The institution of Postcolonial Studies causes significant problems for
writers and critics working ‘elsewhere’ – outside of the hegemonic anglophone
realm.1 Where is there space for non-English-speaking or indigenous writers and
critics within the dominions of this academic (neo)imperium? Most often the
answer is ‘nowhere,’ since modes of scholarly production which do not filiate within
the Postcolonial Studies machine are inevitably, as Neil Lazarus states, ‘put through
its shredder’ (n.p.). How, then, do we move away from such modalities within our
own work as scholars of postcolonial literatures? I believe that the answer is to
work interlingually and thus interdisciplinarily.2 This will allow for working
interculturally – opening up postcolonial literary studies to transcultural and
1
See Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction (2003), Eds. Charles Forsdick and
David Murphy for a survey of francophone postcolonial scholarship. I have not yet found equivalent,
comprehensive collections of critical essays that engage with hispanophone, lusophone or other
postcolonial languages.
2
Graham Huggan’s essay collection Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of
Postcolonial Studies (2008) takes steps in the direction of a multidisciplinary methodology for
postcolonial studies, but he does not work multilingually – despite his statement that he ‘feel[s]
strongly that the future of postcolonial studies will be multilingual’ (14). For an essay collection of
interlingual research, see Postcolonial Studies across the Disciplines (2013), Eds. Jana Gohrisch and
Ellen Grunkemeier.
10
transnational connective paradigms whilst still respecting the localized
particularities of lived postcolonial experience within each distinct context.
In this study I attempt to do just that, starting on a smaller scale and working
with only two authors: Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau, who are of the same
generation and from neighbouring Caribbean islands (Antigua and Guadeloupe).
Given the constraints of time and space for a doctoral thesis, an investigation of the
work of two authors seemed manageable. Moreover, these particular writers are
notably prolific, and their substantial and diverse fictional and nonfictional oeuvres
provide a considerable amount of material to examine. Furthermore, Pineau is an
established author in the francophone academic sphere, but translation of her texts
into English and other languages began only very recently. It is my hope that by
putting her work alongside that of Kincaid, a longstanding member of the
(overwhelmingly anglophone) Postcolonial Literary Canon, Pineau might be
considered within a broader critical framework. Kincaid’s writings are inherently
diasporic and transnational in their scope, and in this respect Pineau aligns closely
with Kincaid’s methodologies. Additionally, Pineau composes her fiction in a
creolised form of French, which simultaneously indigenizes, diasporizes and
transnationalizes her work. For this project I read Pineau’s texts in their original
creolised French, in addition to the English translations, where available. Such an
approach to postcolonial literary studies forces the scholar to consider the important
aspect of translation, which is an inherently political operation. Whereas in the
original texts, Pineau does not offer a glossary for definitions of creolisms, the
English translations of these books often provide one for the anglophone reader.
Why is that? What it comes down to is of course, marketing, which illustrates the
11
fact that Postcolonial Studies is also a capitalist machine. Authors who write in
languages other than English tend to be subjected to even more profoundly incisive
acts of epistemic violence within this system. The branding and homogenization of
their work is intended to make it more palatable to the consumer and easier to digest,
like dairy milk.
The practice of postcolonial studies is therefore innately self-reflexive, and
the term ‘postcolonial’ is replete with its own anxieties, which are too abundant to
enumerate here.3 This thesis represents a concerted effort to identify lacunae in
extant postcolonial literary theory and criticism with relation to the issues at hand in
Kincaid and Pineau’s writings. Centring the focus of the project on the imbricated
themes of place and ontology at the micro-level of these texts, I endeavour to locate
and redress gaps in the scholarship on these areas at the macro-level of the
postcolonial studies field at large. This venture has reinforced my opinion that there
is still a lot of work to be done in order to remodel postcolonial studies within a
more inclusive framework. It is also for this reason that I have chosen to focus the
thesis on Kincaid and Pineau specifically. They are habitually misrepresented
within varying, and often conflictual, academic classifications. For instance,
Kincaid is co-opted as either a ‘Caribbean’ writer or an ‘African-American’ writer;
or as a ‘black’ writer or a ‘woman’ writer, as though she ‘must’ be one or the other
of these things, or any of them at all, for that matter. When I asked her about this
academic-consumerist urge to pin down her identity as a writer, she responded, ‘I’m
not a Jewish writer, I’m not a woman writer, I’m not an African-American writer,
3
See Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory (2008), Gayatri Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999),
or Stephen Slemon’s essay ‘The Scramble for Post-colonialism’ (1994) for interventions within the
discussion about postcolonial disciplinary anxieties.
12
you know; but I draw from all those people’ (2012: n.p.). Tellingly, ‘all those
people,’ as she infers, live within her unconscious, which she ‘draws from’ in order
to write. Similarly, Pineau is repeatedly categorized as a créoliste writer, when in
fact the only authors who technically fall under this sign are the triad of male writers
who invented the term in the first place: Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and
Raphaël Confiant.4 Naturally, Pineau has indicated her aversion to the appellation
créoliste in interviews due to its overtly masculinist connotations.5
As I explain in more depth in Chapter I, Kincaid and Pineau seemingly
follow Alice Walker6 in adopting a womanist writerly perspective, which is one of
inclusiveness across areas of difference, but which centres on the lived experiences
of women of colour. Moreover, they write from pluralized perspectives as migrant
Afro-Caribbean women whose viewpoints are always-already those of authors as
well as other ‘I’ positions. They inflect their writings with a sense of multiplicity
that defies conscription within given identitarian or epistemic categories. For
example, Kincaid emphasises the significance of her domestic roles as a mother and
a gardener to her overall sense of identity, whilst Pineau also works as a psychiatric
nurse. Both writers have insisted in interviews that they cannot ‘be’ one version of
themselves without the other, and that these ‘other’ roles (in)form their identities as
writers. Furthermore, they demonstrate the multiplicity of Caribbean ontologies by
layering issues of class over those of gender and race within their fiction. They
thereby elucidate the variegated levels of Caribbean experience which coexist within
the individual psyche due to the internal forces of pluralized ontologies, as well as
4
See Bernabé et al.: 1989.
I discuss this in more detail in Chapter I.
6
Here I concur with Belinda Edmondon’s assertion that the majority of Afro-Caribbean women
writers evidently utilise a womanist authorial approach (Edmondson: 1999, Walker: 1983).
5
13
intersecting external forces of oppression. As a result, Kincaid and Pineau’s
fictional texts are testaments to the complex, interlinked matrices of postcolonial
experience.7 Their narratives demonstrate that these matrices are also enmeshed in
postcolonial and neoimperial places, revealing the overdetermining structural forces
that continue to pervade daily existence on a global scale. This is due to residual
(neo)imperialist structures of exploitation that are concatenated within the system of
global capitalism. A resulting phenomenological effect is the dislocation of what
Jacques Derrida terms ‘ontopology’ – a discourse of place rendered synonymous
with being (1994: 82). Displaced ontopologies are therefore a theme which is
threaded throughout this thesis, as they are products of the multiple dislocations of
the female Afro-Caribbean subject.
David Scott contends in Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial
Enlightenment (2004) that postcolonial ‘stories about past, present, and future have
typically been emplotted in a distinct narrative form, one with a distinctive storypotential: that of Romance’ (7). He cites this as part of a larger problematic within
the institution of Postcolonial Studies which, he contends, privileges ‘narratives of
overcoming, often narratives of vindication’ that have ‘a distinctive direction’ and
tell stories of ‘redemption’ (8). Consequently, he argues, postcolonial texts ‘have
largely depended upon a certain (utopian) horizon toward which the emancipationist
history is imagined to be moving’ (ibid.). Scott expresses his ‘doubt about the
continued critical salience of this narrative form and its underlying mythos’ (ibid.).
Here he obviously addresses both the fictional postcolonial narratives within the
7
For a discussion of disciplinary ‘intersectionality’ as a paradigm for discussion of ‘intersectional
oppression,’ see the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw (2014, also forthcoming in 2015). See also The
Intersectional Approach (2010), Eds. Michele Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz, and
Intersectionality: A Foundations and Frontiers Reader (2014), Ed. Patrick R. Grzanka.
14
texts themselves and the encompassing (fictional) metanarrative of emplotment8
within Postcolonial Studies. However, whilst Scott raises an important point about
the romanticization of postcolonial experience, his argument quickly implodes as he
attempts to establish a binary analytic, opposing this problematic of postcolonial
Romance with his proposed alternative, ‘Tragedy’ (14). By founding his entire
hypothesis on the flawed assertion that the conscription of the colonial subject
within the order of Enlightenment was simply a ‘tragedy,’ Scott’s hypothesis is
immediately reductivistic and fails to offer any viable alternatives – either for
postcolonial writers or for scholars of their work. As he points out, ‘what is at stake
here, clearly, is the problem of narrative, because the relation between pasts,
presents, and futures is a relation constituted in narrative discourse’ (7). How can
postcolonial writers narrativize their experiences outwith such binaristic discursive
frameworks? I would argue that anticolonial writers such as Kincaid and Pineau
avoid narratological delimitation by baldly taking these discourses for what they are
– narrative tropes. They engage with these tropes by utilising destabilizing forms of
play that underscore their artificiality and constructedness. Moreover, rather than
prematurely directing their narratives toward a ‘utopian horizon,’ Kincaid and
Pineau focus on the here and now of the dystopic present, which must first be
wrestled with and worked through before one can plan realistically for the future.
This narrative strategy gestures forward toward an emancipationist futurity, rather
than backward toward the ‘emancipationist histories’ that Scott mentions; thus it has
valid liberatory potential.
8
‘Emplotment’ is a term coined by Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative: Volume I (1984) to denote
‘the organization of events’ into a narrative with a plot (31). Here he follows Aristotle’s notion of
muthos in his Poetics (see Ricoeur ibid.).
15
The political dimension is indisputably foundational to Kincaid and Pineau’s
writings and, in turn, it forms the basis for my exploration of their work. Chapter I,
‘Decolonising Caribbean Women’s Fiction: Womanist Responses to Fanon,
Walcott, Glissant and the Créolistes,’ outlines Kincaid and Pineau’s decolonising, or
‘decolonial’9 narratological methods, which enact a womanist alternative to the
masculinist theories of Caribbean decolonisation that Frantz Fanon and his
successors Derek Walcott, Édouard Glissant and the Créolistes present in their
work.10 In this chapter, I argue that theorizations by Fanon et al. function as
recolonising replications of imperialist, patriarchal discursive regimes. I analyse
Kincaid’s incredibly rich yet understudied short story ‘Ovando’ (1989), a parable
about the formation of the New World, and unpack the ways in which she uses this
form to counter-map (feminised) Caribbean cognitive and material cartographies. I
also examine Pineau’s novel The Drifting of Spirits (2000) in order to illustrate how
the techniques of auto- and counter-ethnography function as postcolonial practices.
In Chapter II, ‘Xuela’s Autothanatography: Genocide, Ecocide and the Death of the
Caribbean Motherland in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother,’ I
perform a close reading of Kincaid’s 1996 novel in order to substantiate my
contention that rather than being an ‘autobiography,’ as its title deceptively (and
deliberately) suggests, the text is in fact what Derrida would term an
‘autothanatography’ (Derrida: 1987). We can call this a kind of postcolonial ‘death
writing,’ as opposed to ‘life writing,’ which is a dominant form within postcolonial
literature. Xuela’s account is the recording of the protagonist’s own death, as well
as that of her people, the Caribs, who are a branch of the indigenous inhabitants of
9
See Mignolo: 2011a and 2011b.
See Walcott: 2005, Glissant: 1989 and Bernabé et al.: 1989.
10
16
the Caribbean. It also chronicles the death of the natural environment due to
ecocidal destruction and the allegorical death of the precolonial mother-island.
Kincaid’s book indicates that all of these deaths are caused by the violence of
colonial incursion.
Chapter III, ‘Cycles and Cyclones: Violence, Memory and Displacement in
Gisèle Pineau’s Macadam Dreams,’ features another close reading, this time of a
work by Pineau. Her 2003 novel portrays the ecological and psychosomatic effects
of postcolonial trauma among the impoverished black communities of Guadeloupe.
Pineau considers the imbricated relationship between the biotic and the
anthropocentric and plays natural and meteorological cycles against cycles of sexual
abuse and colonial hegemony. In this chapter I argue that a kind of Freudian
‘repetition compulsion’ impels the black Guadeloupean communities in the novel to
try to resolve their collective sense of displacement by repeating cycles of history
instead of reconciling themselves to the tragic events of the past and moving
forward (Freud: 2006). In Chapter IV, ‘Postcoloniality and Postmemory: The
Photographic Spectre of Transgenerational Trauma in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and
Gisèle Pineau’s The Drifting of Spirits,’ I employ Roland Barthes and Hal Foster’s
dialectical conceptualizations of aesthetics and anti-aesthetics11 with regard to
photography in order to posit that Kincaid and Pineau’s works perform liberatory
gestures of ekphrasis. Their depictions of the protagonists’ photographic acts
demonstrate modes of identification and disidentification which enable the
resignification of the self through artistic auto-representation as a ‘postmemorial’
practice. Here I engage with Hirsch’s theory of ‘postmemory,’ which she develops
11
See Barthes: 1980 and Foster: 1998.
17
in The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust
(2012), amending it for application within the context of post-slavery.
In Chapter V, ‘“Black” Magic and Uncommon Realities in the Caribbean:
Obeah, Quimbois and Garden Space in Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau’s
Autofiction,’ I examine the diasporic practices of folk magic/medicine and
gardening in Kincaid and Pineau’s autofictional novels. I discuss Kincaid’s Annie
John (1983) and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), as well as Pineau’s The
Drifting of Spirits (2000) and Exile according to Julia (2003) in order to
demonstrate that these diasporic practices represent forms of cultural resistance to
(neo)imperialist structures of oppression. Their oeuvres feature obeah and quimbois
prominently, portraying them as border epistemontologies12 which challenge
Western conceptions of lived reality. Kincaid and Pineau also link obeah and
quimbois inextricably to the space of the contemporary Creole garden, where their
characters cultivate plants and trees for use in these practices. Here I deploy
Foucault’s theory of heterotopic spaces from his essay ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1986) to
explicate the long history of the Creole garden as a space of diasporic opposition and
alterity. I argue that the Creole garden is the modern-day embodiment of the
African slave garden, which was also a historical site where many slave rebellions
were plotted.
Lastly, in Chapter VI, ‘Postcolonial Pathologies: Labour Migration and
Disordered Subjectivities in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Gisèle Pineau’s Devil’s
Dance,’ I examine the links between female Afro-Caribbean labour migration and
‘disordered subjectivities,’ a term I borrow from psychopathology, following
12
As in, ways of knowing and being-in-the-world.
18
Delvecchio Good et al.’s Postcolonial Disorders (2008). Delvechhio Good et al.
insist upon the need to address ‘the intertwined personal and social disorders
associated with rampant globalization, neoliberal economic policies, and
postcolonial politics’ (2). Correspondingly, in this chapter I highlight the
problematic undertheorization of the figure of the black female labour migrant
within postcolonial scholarship and within theories of migrant subjectivity more
broadly. These theorizations tend to espouse a euphemistic ‘poetics of travel’ that
romanticizes migrant ontology and disavows actual dislocation and forced
migration. Beginning with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conceptualization of
‘nomadology’ in their bipartite Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972, 1980), I trace
their influence on philosophies of migrant ontology by Glissant, Edward Said, Rosi
Braidotti, and Carole Boyce Davies.13 I assert that none of their theories are
applicable to the condition of the black female labour migrant, and posit that
Kincaid’s novella Lucy (1990) and Pineau’s novel Devil’s Dance (2006) offer
alternative, materialist methods of theorizing this figure. Their protagonists are
female Afro-Caribbean labour migrants, and their portrayals of these characters call
attention to the particular exigencies of unfree mobility within this distinct context.
Kincaid and Pineau’s envisioning of place and ontology within their oeuvres
is complicated by the myriad factors that shape their authorial existence. Like the
majority of postcolonial writers, they are doubly diasporic intellectual labourers who
migrate between the neocolonies and the neoimperia.14 Furthermore, similarly to
many of their counterparts, Kincaid and Pineau employ the narratological optic of
13
See Glissant: 1989 and 2003, Said: 1993, Braidotti: 1994 and Davies: 1995.
For an interdisciplinary essay collection on space and place in contemporary postcolonial
experience, see Postcolonial Spaces (2011), Eds. Andrew Teverson and Sara Upstone.
14
19
postmemory, which conceptualizes contemporary lived experience through the
prismatic (imaginative) perspective of traumatic ancestral experience. Hence they
also grapple with the existential crisis of a dislocated ontopology, which, as Derrida
maintains, is due to the dislodgement of forced migrancy (1993:102). However, this
decentred mode of being originated much earlier – during the violent conception of
the New World, the primal scene of dispossession for the Caribbean subject. A
dislocated ontopology symptomatizes the difficulty of actualizing the ‘spacing of a
displacement’ as a result of the imperialist fracturing of the globe (ibid. 103).
Curiously, a substantial number of critics and increasingly, writers of postcolonial
literature, insist upon tropologizing a kind of universal displacement which, they
assert, is a condition that affects ‘us all.’ This is, however, unfailingly symptomatic
of the postmodernist cosmopolitanism that infects their viewpoint – one which has
become endemic rather than academic.
A majority of postcolonial authors write from an anomic ontopology – a
position that is diverted by universalistic postmodernist-postcolonialist discourses,
which subsume and aestheticize what is for many people a very real condition.
However, this does not mean that the question of aesthetics is unimportant to
analysing postcolonial literature. Many critics working within postcolonial studies
attempt to construct a methodological binarism whereby textualist and materialist
analyses of postcolonial literature exist in strict oppositionality.15 This division is
not only artificial, but also counter-productive since, I would contend, the
interactivity between textualist and materialist concerns is in fact crucial to
understanding the work of anticolonial writers such as Kincaid and Pineau, who do
15
Benita Parry discusses this debate in her work – see Parry: 2002 and 2004.
20
not operate within a ‘post-aesthetic’ mode. This oxymoronic notion of a ‘postaesthetic’ theory of art has been adopted by a strand of leftist critics, most notable
among whom is the Marxist Theodor Adorno.16 Such proponents advocate a ‘postaestheticism’ that is to be a constituent part of their envisioned ‘post-theoretical’
phase. They call for a ‘post-aesthetic’ theory that is (ostensibly) as Selden et al.
explain, ‘more reflective, but in ways which will have wide implications for art and
culture’ (286). ‘Above all,’ they continue, ‘this entails maintaining a dialectical
view of works of art’ (ibid.). However, I must counter this statement by asking how,
exactly, can such a perception of art be ‘dialectical’ if it attempts to disengage
completely from the aesthetic? Such a claim bespeaks the self-contradictoriness of
the critic whom we might call the post-aesthete. For example, in her text Radical
Aesthetic (2000) Isobel Armstrong holds that ‘Art is inexplicably tied to the politics
of contemporary culture,’ and ‘the singularity of the work’s “art-ness” is not
determined by surrounding political, historical or ideological discourses’ (cited in
Selden et al. 286). Clearly, the connection between art and cultural politics is not
‘inexplicable,’ as Armstrong rather apathetically remarks. In fact, this could not be
any further from the truth, particularly in the case of certain contemporary writers
for whom, as Davies observes, there is no ‘writer/theorist split’ (35).17
Kincaid and Pineau are among that group and as this thesis illustrates, their
dialectical implementation of aesthetic and materialist narratological methods offers
ways of understanding historical and politico-economic processes, as well as those
within the (neo)colonial symbolic order. Their textual forms also serve materialist
functions as they feature potent representations of actual conditions under
16
17
See Adorno: 2013.
I elaborate on this point in Chapter VI.
21
(neo)colonialism. They demonstrate that the aesthetic and its anti-aesthetic obverse
can also be operative expressions of anticolonial politics, and as a result, the
aesthetic can also accommodate forms of resistance. Thus, artistic practice is not
incongruous with social practice, and critical discourse must attend to the aesthetic
components of materialist-representationalist postcolonial articulations. Moreover,
the bulk of Kincaid and Pineau’s fictional material is autofictional and thereby
centres on the experiential. This textual grounding in lived experience vitiates
against the often uncritical, dematerializing and unhistorical tendencies of many
contemporary scholars working within discourses that would otherwise mitigate the
radical potential of these texts. Furthermore, Kincaid and Pineau root their fiction
within the lived experience of place and they investigate the ways in which the
spatializing of (neo)imperialism affects ontology. Their narrativization of place,
both (neo)colonial and metropolitan, reveals the material inequalities that structure
ontopological (dis)locationality. Consequently, their spatial interests are
demonstrably anticolonial, as they work to countervail ‘imperialism in its
contemporary guise as globalization’ (Bartolovich 1).
In this thesis I address the ways in which Kincaid and Pineau’s texts are
singularly inflected by their unique narratological milieux whilst also belonging to a
larger body of archipelagic writing which examines coexisting, dislocated Caribbean
ontopologies. As the title of this study infers, I endeavour to read the work of
Kincaid and Pineau ‘across the archipelago’ – not only linguistically, but also
spatially and ontologically. This paradigm protracts outward, extending to the
metropoles in Britain, France and the United States. Additionally, it entails reading
Caribbean ontopology against the paper grain of not only History, but also
22
numerous other (re)colonising discourses and disciplinary imperialisms, including
those which operate within the field of literary criticism. This is so as to avoid
imbrication within such tentacular discursive systems, which grope and stretch in an
ongoing expansionism fuelled by the metropolitan consumption of counter- and nonhegemonic discourses. Thus, the protractility of this proposed archipelagic axiom is
finite – it is not an expansionist analytic, which only serves to obscure its object;
rather, it is an expandable optic which serves to illuminate the contexts with which it
engages.
23
Chapter I
Decolonising Caribbean Women’s Fiction: Womanist Responses to Fanon,
Walcott, Glissant and the Créolistes
I.
Introduction
In his treatise The Wretched of the Earth (1961) Martinican intellectual
Frantz Fanon argues that the anticolonial struggle does not end with the exit of the
oppressor from the occupied territory. He maintains that in order for a true
decolonisation to take effect, the formerly colonised must ‘unlearn’ the ideologies
and myths generated by the coloniser through hegemonic and epistemic violence
(2004: 233). He declares that the colonised subject must ‘ensure that all the untruths
planted within him by the oppressor are eliminated’ (ibid.). Decolonisation thus
requires a violent purging of colonial ideas from the mind and the imagination of the
colonised. Fanon locates the possibility for a new subjectivity in this form of
counter-violence, suggesting that violence does not merely entail exiling the colonial
master, but also ensuring agency and self-determination. It is only after the colonial
master’s implanted worldview has been completely effaced that a new self can
emerge for the colonised. Therefore, Fanon insists, ‘total liberation’ from
internalised colonialism ‘involves every facet of the personality’ (ibid). This notion
extends to literary praxis, as his fellow Afro-Caribbean writers Derek Walcott and
Édouard Glissant, in addition to the créolistes Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau
and Raphaël Confiant, indicate in their subsequent theoretical texts. These theorists
call for the creation of a liberatory poetics which is firmly grounded in Caribbean
soil but which is also rhizomatic and relational in nature. This is a poetics of
24
resistance which informs the thematic, stylistic and ideological aspects of a
distinctly Caribbean literature.
Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau implicitly engage with and contest these
male intellectuals within their fictional oeuvres and provide a womanist expansion
of their theoretical concepts, conceiving Afro-Caribbean identity as dialogical. Here
I am following the critical model posited by Belinda Edmondson which suggests
applying Alice Walker’s redefinition of feminism for black women as ‘womanist’ in
order to ‘apprehend the Caribbean female-authored text’ (Edmondson 101). Walker
defines a womanist as ‘a black feminist or a feminist of color,’ or a woman
‘committed to [the] survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a
separatist’ (xi). Accordingly, Kincaid and Pineau modify conspicuously masculinist
theories in order to present a more gender-inclusive model for decolonising
Caribbean fiction. The theories which Fanon and his successors posit appear to reencode colonial and patriarchal monolithic gender identities and hierarchal gender
systems. Kincaid and Pineau put the male and female Caribbean literary and
intellectual traditions in dialogue with each other, thus working to decolonise
Caribbean women’s fiction by rejecting residual patriarchal notions of female
subjectivity. This study contributes to the ongoing debate regarding prominent male
Caribbean theorists and their general lack of attention to gender relations and
women’s issues within their theories on the decolonisation of literature.
II.
Counter-Discourses
If imperialism is ‘a discursive field of knowledge’ and this knowledge is
‘situated,’ as Donna Haraway suggests, then authors of anti-imperialist literatures
must write from within a counter-discourse which resists imposed Western
25
‘knowledge’ of their identity, history and culture (L. Smith 21, Haraway 111). For
instance, Haraway states:
Situated knowledges are particularly powerful tools to produce maps of
consciousness for people who have been inscribed within the marked categories
of race and sex that have been so exuberantly produced in the histories of
masculinist, racist, and colonialist dominations. Situated knowledges are always
marked knowledges; they are re-markings, reorientatings, of the great maps that
globalized the heterogeneous body of the world in the history of masculinist
capitalism and colonialism. (111)
As Haraway indicates, these imperialist discourses of situated knowledges include
the discursive construction of subjectivity, which encodes a false ‘knowledge’ of
self for both the coloniser and colonised. In a postcolonial setting such as the
Caribbean, writers must grapple with how to avoid recapitulating colonialism’s
epistemic and ontological violence within their own work. However, their situation
is incredibly paradoxical and riddled with potential discursive traps in which they
can become ensnared all too easily. When you are on the receiving end of history,
what is your means of entry into discussion about historicity? How do you insert
yourself into a discourse when you are already an object in the episteme? Fanon
remarks that those who are ‘the subjects of history’ must ‘counter colonialism’s
endeavors to distort and depreciate’ their self-knowledge (2004: lx, 168). He asks in
Black Skin, White Masks (1952), ‘What does the black man want? Running the risk
of angering my black brothers, I shall say that a Black is not a man. There is a zone
of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of
26
every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge’ (2008: xii). This
ontological wasteland, which is a product of the ravages of colonialism, also
represents an internal refraction of the seemingly ruined Caribbean topography. The
archipelago is a marked territory which has been palimpsestically reinscribed by the
colonialists to the point of near total devastation, and in aligning the black man’s
consciousness with his despoiled environment Fanon illustrates the imbricative,
damaging effects of colonialism. Nevertheless, where Fanon perceives desolation,
he also observes that there is space for hope. St Lucian author Walcott seems to
concur with his predecessor, stating, ‘Colonials, we began with this malarial
enervation: that nothing could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted
back yards and moulting shingles [...] If there was nothing, there was everything to
be made’ (1998: 4).
The glaring counter-question when reading the work of these men is, what
about the black woman? What does she want? The cautious optimism shared by
Fanon and Walcott is all very well and good for them and for their fellow black
Caribbean men, but where is hope for the black female subject to be found? It is a
query that these prominent male theorists apparently cannot deign to ask. Naturally,
they would not be able to answer it, as only black women can do, yet it seems as
though the thought of posing this question to their readership never even enters their
minds. Fanon expresses concern at ‘running the risk of angering his black brothers’
with his assertion, without considering the fact that in making this statement he is
bound to infuriate and exclude the other half of the black population. The woman
subject is already discursively displaced in dominant Western theorizations of
subjectivity as she is defined by a lack or deficit – she is, simply, what man is not.
27
The socially constructed woman subject exists only in order to define the male
subject, which she does insofar as she is his obverse. Woman as a discursive subject
is ‘the feminine “Other” – a negative standard by contrast with which masculinity is
defined’ (Raphael-Leff 77). She is therefore an absent presence in much of critical
theory because she is an absent subject. Of course, the norm of subjectivity is not
neutral, it is gendered, and it is gendered as masculine. This putatively ‘universal’
subjectivity ‘has functioned as a veiled representation and projection of a masculine
which takes itself as the unquestioned norm, the ideal representative without any
idea of the violence that this representational positioning does to its others – women’
(Grosz: 1994: 188). This notion stems from Sigmund Freud’s theory of castration,
and Fanon applies Freudian psychoanalytic methods in his theoretical texts
regarding the colonial condition. By drawing on Freud’s notoriously phallocentric
model, Fanon fails to resolve this methodological problem inherent to
psychoanalysis. If the woman subject is displaced in Western and Westernized
discourses, the black woman subject is doubly discursively displaced in Caribbean
literatures of decolonisation as she is not even mentioned.
Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau take up the task of both asking and
attempting to answer this counter-question, ‘What does the black woman want?’
within their fiction. They survey the unique ontopology of the colonised feminine
mindscape within their narratives and chart potential paths for decolonisation of the
black female self. Nira Yuval-Davis maintains that ‘a central theme in this process
of cultural decolonization has been the redefinition and reconstruction of sexuality
and gender relations’ (60). She adduces Fanon’s ‘famous call for the black man to
“reclaim his manhood”’ in order to bolster this contention, stating:
28
The colonial man has been constructed as effeminate in the colonial
discourse and the way to emancipation and empowerment is seen as the
negation of this assertion. In many cultural systems potency and masculinity
seem to be synonymous. Such a perspective not only has legitimized the
extremely ‘macho’ style of many anti-colonialist and black power
movements. It has also legitimized the secondary position of women in
these national collectivities. (ibid.)
Consequently, the colonial black woman must extricate herself from this
circumscribed social position by relocating the source of her identificatory relation.
As Yuval-Davis points out, if knowledges can be situated, ‘the self is always
situated’ [my emphasis] (10). In other words, identity is constructed and can
therefore be contested. Prevailing discourses of subjectivity are ‘discourses for and
about men, discourses which have ignored or misunderstood the radical implications
of insisting on a recognition of sexual specificity’ (Grosz: 1994: 188). Thus in the
face of masculinist supremacy, Afro-Caribbean women writers such as Kincaid and
Pineau create an alternative discourse – one which neither inferiorizes blackness nor
negates the female presence, but instead dismantles imperial and patriarchal
identificatory power. Rather than continuing to textually perform prescribed gender
identities, Kincaid and Pineau disrupt them. Often their fictional characters assume
what Erik H. Erikson terms a ‘negative identity,’18 one that is adopted in direct
opposition to an assigned identity.
18
For more on this concept, see Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and
History (1993).
29
Hypermasculinist literatures of decolonisation ‘[equate] feminization with
emasculinization and disempowerment. This is a model in which the feminine is the
negative passive mirror image of the masculine’ (Yuval-Davis 53). In order to
unshackle herself from this passive position in the machinery of patriarchal
ideology, the Caribbean woman author must contest the hegemonization of gender
and sexuality within her writing in order to effectively decolonise not only herself,
but also her textual production. After all, ‘a history of colonisation is a history of
feminisation. Colonial powers identify their subject people as passive, in need of
guidance, incapable of self-government [...] all of those things for which [...] women
have been traditionally praised and scorned’ (Meaney 233). In such imagery,
Yuval-Davis declares, ‘feminization and disempowerment are being equated. No
wonder Fanon (and even more so many of his followers) have equated liberation
with machoism – and it is in this conjecture that paradoxically the “liberated”
women can become disempowered’ (53). However, it is not only the originators of
this ‘liberatory’ discourse who fail to consider how the woman subject fits into the
cultural decolonisation process. It seems that many leading (male) literary, cultural
and political critics of literatures of decolonisation neglect to do so as well. With
regard to Fanonian critics, I am thinking particularly of Ashis Nandy and Homi
Bhabha. For example, in The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under
Colonialism (1993) Nandy critiques ‘the hypermasculine world view of colonialism’
and Fanon’s collusive viewpoint; yet he hypocritically proclaims, ‘Colonialism is
first of all a matter of consciousness and needs to be defeated ultimately in the
minds of men’ [my emphasis] (48, 63). Furthermore, in his essay ‘Interrogating
Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative’ (1994), published a year
30
after Nandy’s text, Bhabha addresses Fanon’s question ‘What does the black man
want?’ and criticises his ‘metaphor of vision’ as being ‘complicit with a Western
metaphysic of Man’ [my emphasis] (42). Nonetheless, he disregards what the
potential implications of such a Westernized vision are for the black woman. The
repeated use of gender-exclusive pronouns on the part of Nandy and Bhabha within
their criticism solipsistically initiates a pattern of omission which reinforces Fanon’s
neocolonial subsumption of gender difference within racial difference in his
methodology. Bhabha remarks upon ‘this loaded question where cultural alienation
bears down on the ambivalence of psychic identification’ and ‘from which emerges
the displacement of the colonial relation,’ but he overlooks the black woman’s
exceptionally fraught psychic identification which occurs due to her double
displacement in colonialist discourse (ibid.). Therefore in failing to point out the
overwhelming silence regarding women and gender relations in literatures of
decolonisation, these and other critics inadvertently perpetuate masculinist colonial
ideologies. It is up to postcolonial women writers to articulate their subjectivity
within their work, refusing to reconcile themselves as secondary subjects and instead
asserting their social sovereignty as authors of their own identity.
These patriarchal colonial ideologies which were internalised by the
aforementioned theorists of decolonisation were originally encoded in various forms
of imperial epistemic violence, namely: history, cartography, geography and
ethnography, among others. Such discursive forms of imperial ‘knowledge’ were
situated from a proprietorial stance which legitimated the European domination of
captured overseas territories in a self-validating, self-perpetuating cycle of
hegemony. Stephen Greenblatt terms these imperial epistemologies ‘discursive
31
regimes’ and explains, ‘Each of the discursive regimes has its own characteristic
concerns [...] but each of these also touches and interacts with the others’ in a
‘powerful association [...] driven by certain mimetic assumptions, shared metaphors,
operational practices, root perceptions’ (23). It is through a matrix of these ‘systems
of representation,’ he argues, that the contents of the New World were ‘passed [...]
touched, catalogued, inventoried, [and] possessed’ (23, 22). This enabled the
imperialists to assimilate the New World ecology into their egoic desires,
exoticizing and fetishizing the lush panorama before them so that they could exploit
it in ways that suited their wishes. Greenblatt states that ‘the discursive strategies
that we have analyzed’ in the travel logs of explorers such as Christopher Columbus
include ‘articulations of the radical differences that make renaming, transformation,
and appropriation possible. The movement here must pass through identification to
complete estrangement: for a moment you see yourself confounded with the other,
but then you make the other become an alien object, a thing, that you can destroy or
incorporate at will’ (135). This othering of the New World landscape and its
peoples was figured through their feminisation – a pervasive trope in early imperial
literature and travel writing. The concurrent reification of the environment, of
native populations, and especially of women as ‘naturally’ passive objects
seemingly justified their dominion by European conquerors. Echoes of this practice
continue to reverberate within contemporary postcolonial societies due to ‘the
patriarchal rationalization of male domination in terms of the fragility, unreliability,
or biological closeness to nature attributed to’ the female subject (Grosz: 1994: xiv).
As a result, ‘women end up with an inferior symbolic position,’ which postcolonial
women writers such as Kincaid and Pineau endeavour to alter within their writings
32
by utilising fiction as a space of historical and political contestation wherein they
textually enact opposition to male control (Yuval-Davis 6).
III.
Counter-Histories
Unlike Fanon’s sexually and racially reductivist discourse, Kincaid’s work
does not envision the black Caribbean subject as a male of exclusively African
lineage. Rather, at times she depicts her predominantly female protagonists as
mixed-race, with indigenous Caribbean ancestry. She thereby underscores the
shared history of subjugation endured by the autochthonous peoples of the
archipelago as well as African diasporas under the hegemonic system of European
imperialism. However, her short story ‘Ovando’ (1989) is the sole example of her
fictional work in which she portrays a narrator who is of monocultural, native
Caribbean origin. This decision by Kincaid, herself a black Caribbean subject of
mixed heritage which includes indigenous Caribbean ancestry, textually aligns the
Afro-Caribbean subject with the native Caribbean subject. In Kincaid’s writing,
then, the colonised Caribbean subject represents a ‘plural, decentered’ collective
self, indicating that identity is ‘multiple and shifting,’ according to changes in
context (Josselson and Harway 6). Here ‘the self is the sum of a set of “I” positions
in relation to one another’ (ibid.). Indeed, Kincaid, who is a quarter Carib, selfidentifies as indigenous in an interview by Moira Ferguson. Ferguson asks, ‘There
are very few Caribs like your grandmother left in the world?’ and Kincaid responds,
‘They are mostly dead. There are some in Dominica still, on the Indian reservation,
and there are some in Trinidad’ (1994a: 173). Notably, when Ferguson remarks,
‘The Arawaks are dead,’ Kincaid replies, ‘Oh, they were dead mostly within fifty
33
years [of the imperial incursion]. Our population was wiped out’ [my emphasis]
(ibid.).
In ‘Ovando,’ Kincaid parabolises the moment of European intrusion upon
and conquest of the New World as a house visit, envisioning the threshold of the
home of the speaker, a Taíno indigene, as a sort of contact zone. The speaker hears
a knock at the door, and the unexpected visitor is none other than Fray Nicolás de
Ovando, notoriously the most violent conquistador in the history of the Caribbean.
The speaker graciously beckons him to ‘Come in,’ but not only is Ovando already
inside, he has also taken a seat and made himself quite at home in the speaker’s
abode (217). In her story Kincaid ‘represents the West Indies as a home that is
already domesticated – far from an “empty” landscape,’ and thereby ‘reverses the
accounts found in historical chronicles. Nevertheless, the visitor acts as if there
were no native host, but only a space waiting to be filled’ (Soto-Crespo 360).
Indeed, Ovando served as Governor of the Indies (Hispaniola) from 1502 to 1509
and his administration is infamous for its brutal treatment of the native population of
not only Hispaniola but also its neighbouring islands (Bethell 164). The Taíno are a
group of Arawakan indigenous peoples who inhabit the Antilles and who were
nearly extinguished due to the abuses endured under the Spanish encomienda19
system of rule and by ‘systematic massacres ordered by Governor Nicolás de
Ovando’ (Guitar et al. 47). Under Ovando’s command, ‘the continued abuse of the
Taíno [was] to such an extent that their numbers declined and they ceased to be a
recognizable cultural entity’ (Saunders xvii). Kincaid makes a deliberate choice to
19
The encomienda system “was, in theory, mutually beneficial, whereby the Spanish Crown
commended Taínos to an individual Spaniard who was to teach them to live like Christians - in
return, they worked for him” (Guitar et al. 41).
34
include this particular conquistador in her tale, as Ovando’s oppressive
administrative tactics during his regime were used as a model for subsequent
settlements in the Americas (Bethell 164). Thus by casting Ovando in a leading
role, she identifies the archetypal European autocrat as a principal player in the
absurdist New World historical drama.
She continues the historical allegory by figuring the European exodus to the
New World during the age of conquest through the many national origins of
Ovando’s ‘relatives,’ whom he invites to join him in his ‘new home’ in the
Americas (217). He informs the speaker: ‘I have sent for my relatives in Spain,
Portugal, France, England, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and The Netherlands. I know
that they will like it here as much as I do, for they are just like me, we have met the
same fate in the world’ (217). Ovando’s Eurocentric perspective engenders a
deterministic view of imperialism which, from his standpoint, seemingly justifies the
Western exertion of power over the indigenous peoples of their conquered
territories. However, Kincaid decentres this notion of the native as a ‘fixed, unified
object of [imperialist] knowledge’ by depicting the speaker as a politically situated,
unconsenting subject who resists imperial authority (Parry: 2004: 14). Her story is
consequently:
a pièce de résistance of anticolonial excavation in which the protagonist
takes on an unusual cultural stance […] Through fictionalizing the arrival of
Nicolás de Ovando [...] Kincaid refuses the imperial gaze on the ‘New
World’; at the moment of colonization, the narrator gazes on conquistadorian
genocide. She dissolves the perspective that privileges conquistadors and
their legacies. (Ferguson: 1994b: 5)
35
Her ‘colonial and postcolonial texts, then, are indelibly marked by opposition to the
hegemonic [colonial] project’ (ibid. 6). Kincaid expresses a contestatory narrative
response to the colonial enterprise from a decidedly female standpoint. Although
the gender of the speaker in ‘Ovando’ is not indicated, the speaker is nonetheless
implicitly gendered as female. In an interview, Ferguson asks Kincaid whether ‘the
sensibility’ of the speaker is female and the author assents, stating, ‘I suspect [it is]
because I am female. I am very pro-female. For some peculiar reason, I have never
had a male view. I don't have to say, make an effort to say, “she.” For me, [the
subject] is she, [that is] understood. I identify myself as my sex, not my sexuality,
my sex, I think that is the word’ (1994a: 186).
The speaker in ‘Ovando’ ultimately recovers the power of subjective
autonomy and proclaims, ‘I can prevent myself from entering the dungheap that is
history’ (220). Her refusal to submit to the conquistador for a second time upon
witnessing his initial treachery ‘constitutes a transhistorical ultimatum’ as she
‘finally rejects her role as mimic and placator, becomes someone who discerns dual
oppression, and claims an identity. By clarifying origins and historical process, she
symbolically reclaims the terrain. Most tellingly, she has assumed agency,
consciously at odds with imperial authority’ (Ferguson: 1994b: 5-6). The female
sensibility of the narrational voice and the tale’s domestic setting demonstrate
Kincaid’s gendered positionality of resistance to imperial and patriarchal epistemic
and ontological forces. In dominant Western discourses, women are frequently
located within the domestic sphere, which is considered part of the private domain
and as a consequence is ‘not seen as politically relevant’ (Yuval-Davis 2).
36
Colonialism consigned women and femininity to a limited cultural role as they were
deemed irrelevant to the political (and therefore public) sphere. However, in
Western political discourses the home is also paradoxically marked as both a
metaphor and metonym for the nation; thus the speaker’s individual act of
opposition narratologically repossesses the space of Hispaniola for the collective
Taíno nation. Since the home is discursively valorised as the generative core of the
nation, Kincaid co-opts this Western notion in order to subvert it, thereby
deconstructing colonial mythologies and their hegemonic gender, national and racial
narratives.
IV.
Counter-Mapping
Another pernicious form of imperialist discourse which Kincaid’s text
attempts to vitiate is the cartographic narrative, which articulates the space of the
New World using ‘key rhetorical strategies implemented in the production of the
map, such as the reinscription, enclosure and hierarchization of space,’ providing ‘an
analogue for the acquisition, management and reinforcement of colonial power’
(Huggan: 1989: 115). Her treatment of this motif in ‘Ovando’ exposes the
imperialists’ desire to fix their own self-privileging position as authors (and thus
proprietors) of colonial space, and the ways in which this desire permeates the
imperial cartographic imagination. For instance, the speaker recounts, ‘When
Ovando’s imagination brought forth the round earth and then the seas and then the
land and then the mountains and then the rivers, he acted with great calm. But in
imagining the treasures he grew agitated’ (218). Ironically, the desire for possession
and control of the New World and its riches takes hold of Ovando and possesses him
to the extent that his desire becomes completely uncontrolled and the vision of the
37
map which he yearns to create becomes a pathological introjection. Consequently,
when he gazes into the mirror his reflection gives birth to the material map, a
projection of his paternal, cartographic desire:
In that moment the mirror into which Ovando looked, the mirror which
reflected only Ovando, broke into thirteen pieces in some places, into six
hundred and sixty-six pieces in other places, and in still other places into
different numbers of pieces, and in all of these places the breaking of the
mirror signified woe. In that moment, I, my world, and everything in it
became Ovando’s thralls. (221)
Here Kincaid undermines the conquistador’s seemingly godlike creational power by
aligning him with Satan, thus revealing the malicious intent which undergirds the
violent act of cartographic reinscription. In addition to conceiving the ‘thirteen
pieces’ of the broken mirror image which constitute the original American colonies,
he also produces another ‘six hundred and sixty-six pieces’ – by using the number
666, the numerological indicator for the Antichrist, Kincaid deliberately invokes
satanic imagery, thereby performing a perverse retelling of the genesis of the New
World. She allegorises the voracious reproductive imperative of the imperialists
which compelled them to beget entirely new geographies through the defilement of
previously ‘uncharted’ (i.e., virgin) territories. Kincaid affirms her intention to
convey this sense of the geographic despoliation of the New World in ‘Ovando,’
stating of the tale, ‘There is a feeling of rape, I think’ (Ferguson: 1994a: 186). In
this scene she thereby implies the phallocentrism which is implicit to cartography as
a patriarchal representational model. Furthermore, she figures the map as a kind of
38
text which is written using cartographic discourse, thus illustrating that
‘logocentrism is inherently complicit with phallocentrism,’ particularly with regard
to mapmaking (Grosz: 1994: 94). Hence it could be argued that her story depicts
cartography as an intrinsically phallogocentric discourse.
Graham Huggan argues in his article ‘Decolonizing the Map: PostColonialism, Post-Structuralism and the Cartographic Connection’ (1989) that
‘cartographic discourse can be considered to resemble colonial discourse as “a
narrative in which the productivity and circulation of subjects and signs are bound in
a reformed and recognized totality”’ (117, citing Terdiman 156). Similarly, Edward
Said calls the imperialist envisioning of colonised space a ‘static system of
“synchronic essentialism”’ (1979: 240). In other words, ‘the imitative operations of
mimesis’ inherent in the cartographic act ‘can be seen to have stabilized (or
attempted to stabilize) a falsely essentialist view of the world’ (Huggan: 1989: 116).
Kincaid’s story therefore works to de-essentialize and denaturalize cartographic
discourse in order to allow for disidentification from the epistemologies inculcated
by the colonisers. She achieves this via oppositional discursive strategies, which are
evident in the scene when Ovando attempts to draft a rudimentary likeness of his
newborn map. The speaker states:
In his hands now he carried a large piece of paper, a piece of paper that was
as large as a front lawn, and on this piece of paper Ovando had rendered flat
the imagined contents of his world. Oh what an ugly thing to see, for the
lands and the seas were painted in the vile colors of precious stones just
ripped from their muddy home! It looked like the effort of schoolchildren.
(218-19)
39
In this passage Kincaid ironizes the map as an imperial construct, a crudely
composed sketch which, she suggests, is contoured by adumbrations of the anxious
desire for a totalizing cartographic narrative of colonised space. Huggan asserts that
the map is a visual paradigm which exemplifies a mimetic fallacy ‘through which an
approximate, subjectively reconstituted and historically contingent model of the
“real” world is passed off as an accurate, objectively presented and universally
applicable copy’ (1989: 117-18). Kincaid’s emphasis on the map’s haphazard
construction destabilizes its authoritative status and identifies it as a mere
simulacrum which reconstitutes New World space in order to fix itself as an
ostensibly universal mode of representation.
The speaker expresses her profound grief at this arrant violation of native
space, lamenting, ‘It looked like sadness itself, for it was a map. Ovando spread his
map out before him [...] At that moment the world broke’ (219). The brutal
cartographic naissance of the colonised New World topography ruptures the
indigenous Caribbean connection to the land, preventing nature and culture from
‘forming a dialectical whole that informs a people’s consciousness’ (Glissant: 1989:
63). Kincaid’s tale allegorically encodes the tremendous, self-replicating ecocidal
impact of this preliminary act of conquest. For example, upon drawing his map of
the New World, Ovando decides to record this newfound imperial geographic
‘knowledge’ in a book which he then presents to the speaker so that she can
‘relearn’ the layout of her environment. She observes, ‘The document that he had
prepared for me was only six inches long and six inches wide, but it was made from
the pulp of one hundred and ten trees and these trees had taken ten millennia to
40
reach the exquisite state of beauty in which Ovando found them’ (221). Although
Ovando envisages the Caribbean as an Edenic ‘paradise,’ he ‘writes his accounts of
empire by destroying’ the very landscape that he is ‘making into myth’ (Kincaid:
2002: 219, Soto-Crespo 361). He ‘deforests the islands into leaves of paper “six
inches long and six inches wide,” leaving behind only stumps, in order to write the
narrative of his conquests’ (Soto-Crespo ibid.). Ovando desecrates the outwardly
paradisiacal Caribbean ecology by turning it into History – inscribing himself, and
thus the Europeans, into the New World space in order to overwrite the anterior
existence of its native inhabitants and their histories.
In ‘Ovando’ Kincaid elucidates the negative ontological effects that are
concomitant with what David Punter calls the ‘violent geographics’ of the European
imperialists (29). Speaking to her own experience under the British colonial system
in Antigua, the author explains, ‘No natural disaster imaginable could equal the
harm they did. Actual death might have been better [...] no place could ever really
be England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be English,
so you can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that’ (2000:
24). Similarly, the speaker in the story remarks of Ovando’s book:
Holding it up to the light, he said, ‘Do you see?’ and I understood him to
mean not only that he could reduce these precious trees to something held
between the tips of two of his fingers but that he also held in his hands the
millennia in which the trees grew to maturity, their origins, their ancestry,
and everything that they had ever, ever been, and so too he held me. (222)
41
The speaker perceives that through the reductivistic praxes of imperial discursive
systems, Ovando is capable of diminishing a fully intact, pre-existing native
Caribbean landscape and transforming it into a two-dimensional, lifeless mimetic
representation. Huggan contends that ‘mimesis has consistently provided a means
of promoting and reinforcing the stability of Western culture’ and has ‘historically
served the colonial discourse which justifies the dispossession and subjugation of
so-called “non-Western” peoples’ (1989: 116). This scene in ‘Ovando’ indicates
that the European imperialists are able to discursively control not only history but
also time (‘millennia’), ‘origins’ and ‘ancestry’ for themselves and for the indigenes.
The result of this manipulation is the discursive construction of meaning through
colonising epistemic forces – forces which also have the insidious power to colonise
the ontology, and therefore subjectivity, of the native peoples. The speaker
recognises the overdeterministic effect of this reductivism and notes, ‘My world is
flat [...] Its borders are finite’ (220). The metaphorical image of Ovando holding the
speaker in his hands therefore symbolises the fixity of the colonised Other’s position
within imperialist discourse.
Fanon analyses the predetermined discursive boundaries of the colonised
black male subject and pronounces, ‘The black man [...] realizes that history
imposes on him a terrain already mapped out, that history sets him along a very
precise path’ (2004: 150). Once more, however, he fails to address the historical
predicament of the colonised woman subject. Kincaid responds to this issue within
her tale by depicting a colonised female Other in the metaphorical clutches of
patriarchal conquistadorian power, thereby illustrating the male European
construction of what Haraway calls ‘maps of consciousness’ through cartography
42
(111). Accordingly, she fictively navigates the ‘already mapped out’ terrain of
colonised female subjectivity within her narrative (Fanon ibid.). However, her
protagonist ultimately rejects this imposed psycho-spatial landscape and determines
that since Ovando’s ideas ‘held no meaning for me, he could not really rob me of
anything’ (222). Rather than developing a ‘feminist’ cartography, then, as Huggan
suggests of postcolonial women writers in his article, I would argue that Kincaid
maps out an alternative womanist cartography in her fiction by portraying a resisting
subject who is a woman of colour (in this case, a Caribbean indigene) and who
contests white male colonising power (1989: 125). Kathleen Kirby describes
cartography as ‘a science that developed (as a science)’ in Europe during ‘the
Renaissance and became standardized during the Enlightenment,’ and maintains that
it ‘is both an expression of the new form of subjectivity and a technology allowing
(or causing) the new subjectivity to coalesce. [It is] the form for subjectivity, space,
and the relation between them inspired by mapping’ (40). This Eurocentric
scientific praxis was designed to reinforce Western authoritarianism through
ideological imposition disguised as ‘standard knowledge,’ thereby performing a kind
of cognitive cartography.20 Kirby continues:
Mapping, then, comes onto the scene both to reflect and to reinforce a new
way of conceiving both the subject and space. What kind of space, what
kind of subject, does mapping (per)form? It organizes the landscape in such
a way that some aspects of ‘reality’ are privileged while others are silenced.
Cartography selectively emphasizes boundaries over sites [...] such an
emphasis indicates the primacy in European mapping of ownership. (42-3)
20
For more on the concept of ‘cognitive cartography’ see John Pickles’s A History of Spaces:
Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World pages 16 and 195-6.
43
There is, therefore, a kind of malignant ontological discourse which underwrites the
structuring of these spatialities. For instance, in describing the New World that
Ovando creates in his ‘mind’s eye,’ the speaker states, ‘At first this world was small
and bare and chalk-white, like a full moon in an early evening sky; it spun around
and around, growing into perfection and permanence’ (218). The conquistador
imagines the nascent space of the New World as ‘bare and chalk-white,’ much like
the blank sheets of paper onto which he will transpose his imperial epistemologies.
Additionally, the speaker compares the New World to ‘a full moon’ – the moon is,
of course, an astronomical body traditionally associated with women as their
menstrual cycles seemingly follow an approximate lunar cycle. This lunar metaphor
serves to further illustrate the imperial feminisation of the New World topography
by identifying it as a yielding surface which becomes a passive victim of
cartographic reinscription. The map’s ‘systematic inscription’ on a supposedly
‘uninscribed earth’ enables the cartographer to ‘consolidate the self of Europe’
through the reconstruction of an imagined space, which becomes calcified as
universal knowledge (Huggan: 1989: 120, Spivak: 1985: 253). By effacing
antecedent spatial configurations, the imperial mapmaker concurrently performs a
textual absencing of the native subject.
Kirby asserts that ‘the subject, imperialism, and science are three divisible
areas, but they are inextricably interrelated in one practice: cartography’ (40).
Correspondingly, Kincaid infers that the cartographic gaze is also a narcissistic gaze
which rewrites conquered space from an interested, subjective position. This is
evinced by the scene when Ovando engenders the New World colonies simply by
44
looking at his reflection – an act which implies the outrageous vainglory of the
imperialists in their reconceptualization of native spatialities. Huggan argues that
cartography is a kind of structuralist procedure, and points to Roland Barthes’s
explanation that the aim of structuralist activity is to ‘reconstruct an object in such a
way as to manifest the rules of its functioning [...] structure is therefore a
simulacrum of the object, but a direct interested simulacrum, since the imitated
object makes something appear which remained invisible or unintelligible in the
natural object’ (Huggan: 1989: 121, Barthes: 1972: 214-15). Consequently, Huggan
maintains that ‘what the “imitated object” (the map) “makes appear” in the “natural
object” it reconstructs (the world) is the anterior presence of the West’ (ibid.). In
her essay ‘In History’ (1999) Kincaid describes this praxis as it was carried out by
Christopher Columbus:
This world he saw before him had a blankness to it, the blankness of the
newly made, the newly born. It had no before. I could say it had no history
[...] This blankness, the one Columbus met, was more like the blankness of
paradise [...] Paradise, then, is an arrangement of the ordinary and the
extraordinary, but in such a way as to make it [...] seem as if it had fallen out
of the clear air [...] Paradise is the thing just met when all the troublesome
details have been vanquished, overcome; paradise is the place that does not
hold any of the difficulties you have known before; it holds nothing, only
happiness [...] Christopher Columbus met paradise. It would not have been
paradise for the people living there. (155)
45
By pointing out that the Western imaginary of a New World Paradise is composed
of a kind of spatial ‘arrangement,’ Kincaid highlights the structurality intrinsic to
this re-envisioning of space, which suggests that it is also what Barthes would call ‘a
direct interested simulacrum’ (Barthes ibid.). Imperialists such as Columbus and
Ovando figured the New World as Paradise through a coercive cartographic mimesis
which conveniently erased any ‘troublesome details’ such as a resistant indigenous
presence. Huggan argues that ‘the prevalence of the map topos in contemporary
post-colonial literary texts, and the frequency of its ironic and/or parodic usage in
these texts, suggests a link between a de/reconstructive reading of maps and a
revisioning of the history of European colonialism’ (1989: 123). However, Huggan
does not take the next logical step in his essay and apply his methodologies to a
postcolonial text via close reading. In this chapter I demonstrate the applicability of
his methods by implementing them in my analysis of Kincaid’s short story. She
employs what Huggan identifies as ‘a particular aspect of this [decolonising] praxis,
namely the ironic and/or parodic treatment of maps as metaphors in post-colonial
literary texts, the role played by these maps in the geographical and conceptual
de/reterritorialization of post-colonial cultures, and the relevance of this process to
the wider issue of cultural decolonization’ (ibid. 122).
Huggan advocates using post-structuralist theory to critique colonialist
discourse and pinpoints Derridean methodologies as particularly apposite to this
exercise. He cites Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences’ (1978) in which Derrida claims, ‘Structure, or
rather the structurality of structure [...] has always been neutralized or reduced [in
Western scientific discourse] by a process of giving it a centre or referring to a point
46
of presence, a fixed origin’ (279). ‘The function of this centre,’ Derrida contends,
‘was not only to orient, balance and organize the structure, but above all to make
sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the
play of the structure’ (ibid.). Huggan applies this postulation to imperial
cartography and reveals that ‘the exemplary structuralist activity involved in the
production of the map (the demarcation of boundaries, allocation of points and
connection of lines within an enclosed, self-sufficient unit) traces back to a “point of
presence” whose stability cannot be guaranteed’ (1989: 119). The reason its
stability ‘cannot be guaranteed’ is because this ‘point of presence’ is subjective – it
is the imposition of the Western cartographer’s rhetorical bias. Taking things one
step further, then, I would argue that the centre of the map’s structure is what
determines the subjective triangulation of both the mapmaker and the inhabitants of
the territory which is mapped. For instance, in his essay ‘Isla Incognita’ (1973)
Walcott denounces ‘the weird, raggedly inaccurate, infantile maps of the old
explorers’ which he was forced to study as part of his colonial education in St Lucia,
insisting that they ‘were more fearful than comic’ (51). He contemplates the
ontological effects of these frightful, grossly distorted images and supposes that ‘the
wrongly real outlines were perhaps more terrifying than their blank confession
“Terra Incognita”’ (ibid.). The result of this dread, he argues, is that the Caribbean
mother-island becomes an ‘isla incognita’ – an ‘unknown island’ – to its colonised
inhabitants. Walcott avows that he must therefore ‘have that humility that knows
that unless I triangulate my travels, my self as a poet, both I and the island are lost.
It was not originally my island, but I came upon it and had to claim it by necessity,
desperation even, and I’m webbed in its design’ (52). This notion of the Afro-
47
Caribbean poet being ‘webbed in [the island’s] design,’ however, implicitly evokes
the structural matrix embedded in the landscape as it is mapped by the imperial
cartographer [my emphasis].
Walcott indicates in this essay that he wishes to perform a kind of poetic
remapping of the island space by relocating its ‘point of presence’ away from the
metropole and toward the periphery. He therefore endeavours to recentre the
postcolonial text’s rhetorical bias so that it originates from a position of marginality
rather than from within Western discourse. He endorses a point of presence that is
perpetually in motion, much like the shifting sands of the island coastline. This
concept suggests that the postcolonial subject’s point of presence is transitory and
thus cannot be fixed by a homogenizing cartographic discourse. However, the
obvious problem here is twofold – firstly, as Punter affirms, ‘of all the major
Caribbean poets Walcott [...] is the most committed to the importation of a certain
repertoire (Shakespeare, Donne, Eliot) of English poets into the colonised scenario’
(56). Consequently, Walcott does not manage to evade the epistemic forces of the
English canon in his own writing. Secondly, he fervently espouses what he terms an
‘Adamic’ poetic imagination, which privileges an exclusively masculine power of
poetic articulacy. How, then, is the postcolonial woman writer to triangulate her
subjectivity? When faced with her given options, it can be assumed that she may
choose from one of two patriarchal models: either the original cognitive cartography
invented by the imperialists, or the postcolonial Adamic paradigm invented by
Walcott. Neither choice will permit her to self-triangulate, however – instead she
must submit to an invented masculine triangulation of female subjectivity. Notably,
Kincaid demonstrates a womanist alternative to this feminine inarticulacy within
48
‘Ovando’ via her ironic treatment of the map, displacing ‘the ontologically stable
relation between the “original”’ reality of the Caribbean space and its patriarchal
‘“copy”’ (Huggan: 1989: 122). In her tale, she makes the narratological ‘shift from
de- to reconstruction,’ or from what Huggan calls ‘mapbreaking’ to ‘map-making’
(1989: 126). She performs a womanist revision of dominant discursive
constructions of Caribbean space, unearthing a buried womanist cultural geography
which provides ground for new rhetorical spaces that are gender-inclusive.
J.B. Harley affirms that ‘a “literature” of maps [...] urges us to pursue
questions about [...] levels of carto-literacy, conditions of authorship, aspects of [...]
censorship, and also about the nature of the political statements which are made by
maps’ (1988: 278). If the map is ‘constructed as a political action’ then there is also
a concealed ‘cognitive infrastructure’ which undergirds its visible arrangement
(Deleuze and Guattari: 2000: 10, Harley: 2001: 99). Correspondingly, Kincaid
exhibits an authorial level of ‘carto-literacy’ which is remarkably sagacious and also
patently anticolonial, as ‘Ovando’ elucidates the hegemonic, racialized and gendered
nature of imperial cartographic discourse. Similarly, Huggan applies Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari’s poststructuralist methodologies to postcolonial women’s writing
and observes that these authors perform a literary remapping which ‘dissociates
itself from the “oversignifying” spaces of patriarchal representation’ and which,
‘through its ‘deterritorializing lines of flight,” produces an alternative kind of map
characterized not by the containment or regimentation of space but by a series of
centrifugal displacements’ (1989: 125-6). Huggan deduces that this is possible since
Deleuze and Guattari identify the map as a ‘“shifting ground”’ which allows space
for a ‘rhizomatic’ postcolonial counter-mapping (ibid. 125). In her story Kincaid
49
thus facilitates what Derrida would call the ‘play’ of the map’s structure by
revealing the semantic slippage between the illusion of its monologic authority and
the reality of its diverse metaphorical interpretations. Or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s
terms, Kincaid’s rhetorical strategies represent ‘an asignifying rupture against the
oversignifying breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure’
(2000: 7). She disrupts the linear-progressive narrative of the imperial map by
transecting it with a counter-narrative that interjects with an oppositional
postcolonial voice.
Huggan contends that postcolonial women writers carry out ‘the
desystematization of a narrowly defined and demarcated “cartographic” space
[which] allows for a culturally and historically located critique of colonial discourse’
(1989: 127). ‘At the same time,’ he argues, these authors also ‘[produce] the
momentum for a projection and exploration of “new territories” outlawed or
neglected by dominant discourses which previously operated in the colonial, but
continue to operate in modified or transposed forms in the post-colonial, culture’
(ibid.). In her tale, Kincaid demonstrates the ability of postcolonial women authors
to disrupt the ‘will to power’ which motivates ‘the procedures of cartographic
representation’ via the ‘crossing of physical and/or conceptual boundaries’ within
their writings (Huggan: 1989: 121, 127). In ‘Ovando’ she repudiates the conquering
white male gaze which fractures the New World space as well as the consciousness
of its native and diasporic inhabitants. For example, in her story the speaker gives
an account of ‘what was an invasion to me, a discovery to him’ [my emphasis] (21718). Her narrative therefore exists in direct opposition to that of Ovando, who, she
states, ‘assisted by people he had forcibly placed in various stages of social and
50
spiritual degradation [...] prepared a document, which, when read to me, would
reveal to me my real predicament’ (221). Since the speaker is untutored in the
‘science’ of cartography, Ovando infers that it is impossible for her to challenge his
iteration of Caribbean space. She recounts:
Then on this paper Ovando wrote that he dishonored me, that he had a right
to do so for I came from nothing, that since I came from nothing I could not
now exist in something, and so my existence was now rooted in nothing, and
though I seemed to live [...] I was dead; and so though I might seem present,
in reality I was absent. (222)
The speaker realizes that this systematised erasure not only negates her existence,
but also that of the entire Taíno race. She continues, ‘I became nothing to Ovando.
My relatives became nothing to Ovando. Everything that could trace its lineage
through me became nothing to Ovando’ (224). The elision of an authentic
indigenous presence within imperial epistemological meditations on the New World
and the replacement of that presence with (to use a Derridean concept) a privileged
white male ‘plenitude of presence,’ represents a hegemonic manoeuvre devised to
both spatially and ontologically manifest European patriarchal power.
The conquistador thus performs a double articulation of both the European
and the native subjects – only for the native, it is in fact a kind of disarticulation as
the original native subject is first erased so that he or she can then be discursively
reconstructed as the Other. Kincaid’s story rejects the imperialist notion of the
‘New World’ as a fabrication, and it serves as a rhetorical investigation which
identifies a larger problematic – that ‘all cartography is “an intricate, controlled
51
fiction”’ (Harley: 1988: 287, citing Muehrcke 295). For instance, the speaker
remarks of Ovando, ‘He sat at a desk and proceeded to fill countless volumes with
his meditations [...] his meditations were nothing more than explanations and
justifications for his future actions’ (218). Harley asserts that maps are ‘part of the
intellectual apparatus of power’ and ‘it is often on this symbolic level that political
power is most effectively reproduced, communicated, and experienced’ (282, 279).
When Ovando arrives in the New World, he brings an entire litany of the imperial
‘intellectual apparatus of power.’ The speaker notes that ‘he carried with him the
following things: bibles, cathedrals, museums (for he was already an established
collector), libraries (banks, really, in which he stored the contents of his diminishing
brain), the contents of a drawing room’ (216). Therefore not only does Ovando
bring his European ‘relatives’ with him, as the speaker marvels, ‘Whole countries of
people coming to visit me even though I had not invited them, whole countries of
people sitting down in my house without asking my permission!’ – he also brings
‘culture’ (217). Coincident with the imposition of European ‘culture’ is of course
the colonial enforcement of transculturation via compulsory assimilation. As a
result, these hegemonic colonial social systems ‘have become “embedded” in time
and space’ (Harley: 1988: 279). Consequently, Huggan argues that a
‘deconstruction of the social text of European colonialism is the prerequisite for a
reconstruction of post-colonial Caribbean culture’ (1989: 123). Accordingly, in
‘Ovando’ Kincaid disassembles the overdeterministic historical nexus21 which
delineates the parameters of Caribbean subjectivity, undertaking a postcolonial
21
For more on Søren Kirkegaard’s concept of the ‘historical nexus,’ see Rollo May’s The Meaning of
Anxiety (1996). Quoting Kirkegaard, May states, ‘“Every individual begins in a historical nexus,”
Kirkegaard writes […] but what is of crucial significance is how a person relates himself to his
historical nexus’ (42).
52
quarrel with enduring Western epistemes and recentring Caribbean ontology from a
position of alterity.
V.
Decolonial Epistemologies
This kind of ‘epistemic disobedience’ which Kincaid exercises within her
work is part of a larger project that Walter Mignolo calls ‘epistemic decolonization,’
or ‘decoloniality,’ a mode of thought that exhibits a ‘rethinking of the epistemic
matrix of Western modernity and coloniality from the position of border
epistemology’ (Mignolo: 2011b: 9, Mignolo and Escobar 19). Border epistemology,
he explains:
emerges from the exteriority (not the outside, but the outside invented in the
process of creating the identity of the inside, that is Christian Europe) of the
modern/colonial world, from bodies squeezed between imperial languages
and those languages and categories of thought negated by and expelled from
the house of imperial knowledge. (2011b: 20)
He contends that this method of border thinking is the key to ‘delinking from the
colonial matrix and opening up decolonial options – a vision of life and society that
requires decolonial subjects, decolonial knowledges, and decolonial institutions’
(ibid. 9). Mignolo defines the ‘colonial matrix of power’ as a ‘structure of [the]
control and management’ of ‘four interrelated domains’: ‘authority, economy,
subjectivity, gender and sexual norms’ (ibid. xv, 7-8). Postcolonial thinkers, he
contends, must disengage from this mechanism of power if they are to break the
Western epistemological hold over other, subordinated cultures. He indicates that
the decolonial project is also, therefore, a dewesternizing project.
53
Citing Carl Schmitt’s conceptualization, Mignolo asserts that Western
epistemic hegemony is reinforced by ‘global linear thinking,’ which denotes the
Westernized nature of the present world order that stems from a Western-centric
teleological narrative of geopolitical space (Schmitt 87). Mignolo maintains that
this mode of thought originated in ‘the history of the imperial partition of the world
in the sixteenth century’ (2011a: 159). He comments upon the psycho-spatial
implications of this perspective, stating, ‘Global linear thinking mapped not only the
land and waters of the planet but also the minds’ [my emphasis] (ibid. 159).
Concurrent with the birth of the imperial map is the establishment of a cognitive
system which operates by means of global linear thinking. The result is the
‘spatializing [of] the sites of knowledge,’ which privileges Western knowledge and
delegitimizes indigenous knowledges (ibid. 162). Mignolo ascertains the
structurality of this epistemological matrix and pronounces:
Now we have a system of sorts, an underlying structure that connects global
linear thinking with cartography and the world map, the idea of the human
and humanitas, and a zero point of observation (the invisible knower, God or
the transcendental secular subject), that not only observes but also divides
the land and organizes the known. (ibid. 167)
The ‘zero point’ in geography refers to the origin of a scale of measurement, or the
point from which lines of latitude and longitude are drawn. Therefore, in
poststructuralist terms, Mignolo’s particular use of the zero point could also be
viewed as synonymous to Derrida’s concept of a ‘point of presence.’ The point of
presence here is the location of the surveyor to whom Mignolo refers as ‘the
54
invisible knower.’ Mignolo employs Santiago Castro-Gómez’s notion of ‘the hubris
of the zero point’ (or what we can call the ‘point of presence’ of the imperial scribe)
and argues that ‘the zero point serves as the measuring stick to creating epistemic
colonial [...] [and] imperial difference’ (ibid. 160-1). He affirms that the
‘imperiality’ of the zero point ‘consists precisely in hiding its locality, its
geohistorical body location, thus pretending to be universal and therefore to the
universality to which everyone has to submit’ (ibid. 161). However, as Mignolo
remarks, ‘an unintended consequence of global linear thinking was the coming into
being of decolonial thinking’ (ibid. 159). Decolonial thinking generates a discursive
repositioning which allows for new, oppositional epistemic processes that diffract
universalizing Western discourses. Both Kincaid and Pineau enact a kind of
decolonial thinking in their literary texts, which challenge European discursive
dominance rather than adopt homologous writing practices.
VI.
Autoethnographies/Counter-Ethnographies
Mignolo contends that ‘land, people, and being became packaged by
imperial global linear thinking in what [...] Nishitani Osamu theorized as two
Western concepts of “Human Being”: humanitas and anthropos’22 (ibid. 164). He
explains that ‘anthropos’ ‘refers to every instance by which the actors and
institutions, languages and categories of thought that control knowledge define
humanitas and use the definition to describe the place they inhabit as the point of
arrival in time and the center of space’ (ibid.). ‘Humanitas,’ then, ‘is defined
through the epistemic privilege of hegemonic knowledge,’ whilst ‘anthropos’
‘represents difference, more specifically the epistemic colonial difference’ (ibid.
22
See Osamu’s essay “Anthropos and Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of ‘Human Being’” in
Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference (2006). Eds. Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon.
55
164-5). Osamu’s dual concepts prompt Mignolo to put forth the following
questions: ‘But who establishes criteria of classification, and who classifies? Those
who inhabited the epistemic zero point (humanitas). And who are classified without
participating in the classification? Those who are observed (anthropos). To
manage, and to be in a position to do so, means to be in control of knowledge – to be
in the zero point’ (ibid. 163). Some postcolonial writers such as Gisèle Pineau infer
that a possible way to reinhabit/reappropriate the epistemic zero point or point of
presence is through the dual practices of autoethnography and counter-ethnography.
Autoethnography is a concept developed by Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes:
Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), and it is an ethnography ‘in which
colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways which engage with the
colonizer’s own terms’ (Cory-Pearce 143). Counter-ethnography, on the other hand,
differs from autoethnography in that it is ‘a form of “writing back” in response to
colonial writers [who] observed and judged from positions of ignorance and
misunderstanding’ (ibid. 143-4). Pineau deploys both counter-discursive forms in
her novel The Drifting of Spirits (2000), originally published in French as La
Grande Drive des esprits (1993), breaking what Derrida calls ‘the law of genre’
(1980: 224). As soon as the word ‘genre’ is uttered, Derrida argues, ‘a limit is
drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind’
(ibid.). Resultantly, the law of genre is ‘a law of purity, a law against
miscegenation. Yet lodged at the heart of this law is another, “a law of impurity or a
principle of contamination” which registers the impossibility of not mixing genres’
(Frow 26, citing Derrida: 1980: 225). Similarly, Glissant states of Caribbean
writers, ‘As far as we are concerned, history as a consciousness at work and history
56
as lived experience are therefore not the business of historians exclusively.
Literature for us will not be divided into genres but will implicate all the
perspectives of the human sciences’ (1989: 65). In this novel, Pineau creolises the
genres of autoethnography, counter-ethnography and autofiction in order to tell a
distinctly Guadeloupean tale – a tactic which disrupts the totalizing unilinearity of
Western imperial narratives of colonised island space.
In The Drifting of Spirits, Pineau performs a fictionalized domestic
anthropology, examining ‘the Other at home’ among her ancestral community in
Guadeloupe. Born in Paris to Guadeloupean parents, Pineau experienced a profound
sense of psychosocial dislocation while living in metropolitan France and also upon
her return to the Caribbean. For diasporic writers such as Pineau who have, either
alone or with their families, ‘emigrated to a distant country,’ ‘writing an
ethnography of [their] home and people’ forms ‘a means of sustaining a relationship
or connection with people and places left behind’ (Cory-Pearce 138). Much of
Pineau’s fictional oeuvre represents a narrativized return to what, in an allusion to
Aimé Césaire’s opus, she wryly calls her ‘pays pas natal,’ or ‘non-native land’23
[my translation] (Pineau: 1996: 296). In an interview by Valérie Loichot, Pineau
states that she felt like a cultural misfit upon her arrival due to her ‘ignorance for the
natural realm’ of the Antilles and, more specifically, of Guadeloupe, and recalls, ‘I
had to learn all this, discover all this, listen to people, to stories, enter the land, like
the narrator of La Grande Drive des esprits’ (335). Here she knowingly adopts the
terminology of the outsider/ethnographer, conveying her desire to ‘discover’
Guadeloupe by ‘listen[ing] to people, to stories’ so that she can gain cultural ‘entry’
23
Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939), which translates as Notebook of a Return
to the Native Land.
57
into the land via an insider status. Elizabeth Cory-Pearce affirms of this type of
autoethnography:
An anthropology that begins at home, so to speak, appears to posit an
alternative claim to epistemological authority than that of the modernist
monograph: that of a ‘belonging to’ rather than the ‘owning of’ a people.
These different articulations suggest a useful point of departure from which
to evaluate conventional understandings of creativity in knowledge
production as an inventive capacity or [of] the genius of Western individuals.
(128)
Pineau attempts to remove herself and her people from the circumscribed category
of anthropos by turning the ethnographic gaze inward. As a diasporan who returns
home, she yearns for a sense of belonging among the Guadeloupean community.
Rather than blindly relying on patriarchal views of her colonial culture instilled by
her metropolitan upbringing, Pineau participates in a cultural exchange with
Guadeloupean women in order to acquire an understanding of their quotidian lives.
She confirms that this womanist methodology extends to her writing praxis, stating,
‘I consider myself a woman writer because of the nature of the themes that I
approach’ (Veldwachter and Pineau 183). Her novel therefore represents an
anticolonial critique that resists colonising representations of black female
subjectivity. Through ‘anamnesis, the recovery of memory,’ postcolonial women
writers such as Pineau ‘end up writing an autobiography of a culture,’ thereby
‘creating autoethnography’ (Boynton and Malin 366). By fictionalizing her lived
ethnographic experience, Pineau undertakes a womanist autoethnographic project
58
which articulates a previously occluded Guadeloupean cultural memory that is both
multigenerational and, significantly, matrilineal.
Pineau is frequently listed by literary critics as one of the few women writers
of the Créolité movement, a polemical French Caribbean identitarian movement
away from the pan-Africanism of the Négritude movement that preceded it, and
toward the establishment of a unique Caribbean identity. Créolité, translated as
either ‘Creoleness’ or ‘Creolity,’ was initiated in the 1980s by Martinican
intellectuals Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, later dubbed
the créolistes. Their manifesto, Éloge de la Créolité (1989), or In Praise of
Creoleness, propounds their conceptions of Caribbean literature and opens with the
bold proclamation, ‘Caribbean literature does not yet exist. We are still in a state of
preliterature: that of a written production without a home audience, ignorant of the
authors/readers interaction which is the primary condition of the development of a
literature’ (76). Bernabé et al. acknowledge the problematic nature of ‘writing for
the Other, a borrowed writing steeped in French values, or at least unrelated to this
land’ (ibid.). This kind of writing, they assert, does ‘nothing else but maintain in our
minds the domination of an elsewhere’ (ibid.). Créolité therefore ‘valorizes the
Creole language as a unifying force and a key element of popular identity. The
advocates of the créolité movement recognize the limitations of Creole as a
language for literature and therefore suggest overcoming this difficulty by creating a
new vocabulary through, for example, the creolization of French words or French
transformations of Creole’ (Marshall et al. 316-17).
Whilst Créolité marks a significant advancement in French Antillean
thought, its (male) founders exclude francophone Caribbean women writers entirely
59
from this project. The Créolistes encourage writing against European political and
epistemic hegemony, yet their seemingly revolutionary discourse re-encodes a
sexist, colonialist viewpoint. In an interview by Nadège Veldwachter, Pineau
indicates that whilst she agrees with many of the central tenets of Créolité, she is
reluctant to be labelled a ‘créoliste’ due to the sexism that is intrinsic to the
movement. She recounts:
The first text of Creolity that I read was [Guadeloupean author] Simone
Schwartz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle [The Bridge of Beyond
(1972)], and there isn’t enough discussion about it. When you write a book
like Éloge de la Créolité, it’s a shame that the authors don’t cite SchwartzBart. Unfortunately, when that book – a magnificent one, which you can
open to any page whatsoever – came out, it was said to be written in ‘banana
French.’ As far as I’m concerned, writing in standard French places me too
far away from my characters. I claim Simone Schwartz-Bart and Toni
Morrison [as influences]. As if by chance, they are women, they say that
there is no men’s writing and no women’s writing but those are the two who
have moved me the most, touched me the most. (184)
Citing fellow Guadeloupean writer Schwartz-Bart as a literary foremother, Pineau
suggests that francophone Caribbean literary works should be written in a creolised
counter-language in order to be ‘closer’ to the characters and their environment – in
other words, the presence of the Creole language is essential to a text’s authenticity.
She states, ‘people around me were asking me why there were Creole words [in my
books], they didn’t understand why I wasn’t writing in “real French.” When I am
60
with my characters in Guadeloupe, I cannot write in standard French. That just
doesn’t capture the characters’ reality, what I perceive of them, what they give me’
(ibid.). Consequently, she draws on the Creole language in order to authenticate her
accounts of Guadeloupean subjectivity since it is the first language, and thus the
mother tongue, of the majority of French Antilleans.
Pineau infuses fictional works such as The Drifting of Spirits with a richness
of linguistic innovation that features neologisms and code-switching, utilising
Creole as a relational interlect which reflects the ongoing creolisation of Caribbean
subjectivity. For example, in a particularly heart-wrenching scene the old woman
Bernabé sings to the narrator in Creole:
Sé manman tou sèl
Kid an lanmizè
Pitit dodo
Papa pa la
Sé manman tou sèl (Pineau: 1993: 77).
This verse translates in English as:
Is Mamma all alone
In grief
Sleep little one
Daddy not there
Is Mamma all alone [my translation].
At the surface level, this scene addresses the tragic loss of Bernabé’s infant daughter
Mirna, who drowns in a bathtub. However, Pineau’s deliberate choice to portray
61
Bernabé as singing her lamentation in Creole rather than French – a language that
her character also speaks – is noteworthy. Here Pineau seems to suggest that the
Creole language is a more visceral form of womanly, and in this case, maternal,
expression. Furthermore, I would venture that the lines of this verse can be
interpreted as having multivalent meanings. Another, more covert meaning which is
traceable here employs a markedly subversive metaphorics and could be perceived
as a postcolonial Caribbean lament. It could be argued that the mother figure in the
song is the Caribbean mother-island, which, after having been raped by the colonial
Father, is forsaken by him and left to raise its (now colonised) children ‘all alone’
and ‘in grief’ for the loss of a pre-contact, prelapsarian existence. In this passage
Pineau deconstructs what Sharae Deckard terms the ‘paradise discourse’ of the
European imperialists whose depictions of the New World were ‘riven by the
contradictions of a utopian impulse’ (2). In much of postcolonial literature, tropings
of paradise make up ‘an ironic motif responding to neo-colonialism’ (ibid.).
Deckard contends that ‘the concept of paradise which developed after Columbus
was not mystical but rational, rooted in the pastoral vision of bountiful nature
ordered and working for Europeans, as opposed to the idea of the uncultivated,
unordered wasteland’ (8). In her novel, Pineau indicates that Guadeloupe is no
longer the ‘Eden of days gone by’ but a devastated cultural landscape in utter
ontopological disarray (Pineau: 2000: 140). Her narrator’s autoethnographic
account of her trek into the backwoods of Guadeloupe parodies what James Clifford
terms the ‘ethnographic pastoral’ – a ‘structure of retrospection’ that references ‘a
wider capitalist topography of Western/non-Western, city/country oppositions’
62
(110). Pineau thereby exposes the flawed nature of colonial ethnographic ‘realism’
and its romantic-idealist cultural misconceptions.
Her cultural insight ‘would inevitably be shaped by the stronger sense of a
local identity that exists in Guadeloupe as opposed to the much more assimilated
neighbouring island of Martinique,’ which is home to the original Créolistes (Dash:
2000: 241). Pineau alludes to Créolité’s ‘essentialist masculinism’ which undercuts
the ‘viability’ of the project: as Gordon Collier argues, this ‘hybridization of creole
language and [innovation] of creole narration has failed to emancipate literary
expression from the irresponsible machismo which, as the scar-tissue of slavery’s
cultural excoriation, is latent within folk culture and which, as a major pathologism
of New World history rooted in the very language, needs to be redressed’ (xliiixliv). Colonialism inscribed ‘pathological forms of social interaction’ within ‘the
cultural fabric of everyday life’ (Kozlarek 178). This permeated linguistic
development in the New World and the residual effects shaped the literary aesthetics
of contemporary Caribbean movements such as Négritude and Créolité, which are
marked by the conspicuous absence of women writers and intellectuals.
Perhaps as a subsequent response to this, Pineau brings to her writing ‘an
impressive sensitivity to the ironies of human behaviour, as well as a precise ear for
the speech, the beliefs, and the world view of her native Guadeloupe’ in addition to
an interest in, ‘most importantly,’ ‘the enigmatic lives of women’ (Dash: 2000: 242).
Her autoethnographic curiosity compels her to pursue in her writings the historical,
familial and romantic convolutions that shape the everyday lives of Guadeloupean
women. In this way, Pineau states, texts such as The Drifting of Spirits ‘also
[revolve] around [...] these secrets that I love, this mystery’ (Loichot and Pineau
63
335). As the novel’s translator Michael Dash remarks, ‘Female behaviour in this
story is often mysterious and unpredictable. Women do odd things with their lives’
(2000: 243). Pineau refrains from attempting to clarify or validate their actions –
conversely, she lends an added layer of ambiguity to the tale by relating it through
the eyes of the anonymous female narrator, a young Guadeloupean student who
returns home to photograph the local culture. Thus the story is told in a frame
narrative, as it is recounted to us by the narrator, who gives her own opinions while
collating various family histories from her native informants and providing an
additional imprint of their lives through a third mediating frame, that of the camera.
In this way, the novel is evocative of another frame narrative and ethnographic
literary text, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), as it depicts the narrator’s
expedition deep into the heart of a country in an attempt to penetrate the obscurity of
an unfamiliar culture. Like Conrad’s Marlow, Pineau’s anonymous narrator
ultimately learns more about herself on her journey as the ethnographic gaze
repeatedly turns inward, whilst the native culture remains shrouded in mystery.
Only, instead of portraying a white European male narrator who observes the native
black culture, Pineau subverts this Western, patriarchal tradition by describing a
black Caribbean female narrator who scrutinizes her own native culture. Aspects of
her novel are also reminiscent of Chinua Achebe’s fictionalized autoethnographic
text Things Fall Apart (1959), in which he examines Igbo (or Ibo) culture in Nigeria.
Eleni Coundouriatis argues that ‘unlike the “salvage ethnography” of European
ethnographers who sought to preserve what was already lost, Achebe’s
autoethnography aims at affirming the contemporaneity of native cultures with those
of the West’ (38). She continues, ‘Ibo culture is decidedly not a finished thing
64
looked at nostalgically at the moment of the novel’s composition but the very
perspective from which an Ibo writer of the late 1950s is looking at his own
continuous history’ (ibid.). Similar to Neil Lazarus’s contention that we need to
‘distinguish the thrust’ of Achebe’s novel ‘from that of colonialist (and neocolonialist) ethnography, whose disciplinary gaze is allochronic,’ we should make
the same distinction regarding the aim of Pineau’s text (2011: 117). Like Achebe’s
work, her novel features a black narrator’s diachronic analysis of her country’s
cultural history and a study of its synchronic development alongside the West. This
is a crucial dialogic strategy which synthesizes diachronic and synchronic
perspectives in order to illustrate Caribbean intersections with other histories and
traditions. Contrary to Achebe’s work, however, in which ‘“femininity”[...] is
marginalized,’ Pineau’s novel brings black male and female cultural perspectives
into dialogue with each other (Gikandi 45). This womanist literary methodology
includes a balancing feminine presence which moderates the distinctly masculinist
influence of Achebe’s paradigm for black autoethnography.
Despite the localized Guadeloupean focus of Pineau’s text, the West is still
an implicit referent since ‘from the earliest stages of European contact,’ nonWestern peoples ‘have both emulated European models of representation and, in the
process, creatively refashioned them’ (Cory-Pearce 147). In this way, The Drifting
of Spirits also evinces the counter-ethnographic discursive impulse found within
much of postcolonial literature. Glissant declares of French Antilleans: ‘We hate
ethnography [...] The distrust that we feel toward it is not caused by our displeasure
at being looked at, but rather by our obscure resentment at not having our turn at
seeing’ [my emphasis] (1969: 128). He therefore expresses a desire on the part of
65
the black Caribbean subject to ‘participate in the scopic exchange on equal terms’
(Britton 23). Ethnography was part of the imperialist West’s ‘progressive endeavor
to subjugate reality [...] and to make everything present to the inspection of an
imperial Gaze as resulting in the necessary production of a seductive illusion’
(Lalvani 2). A former student of ethnology at the Musée de l’Homme (‘Museum of
Man’) in Paris during the 1950s, Glissant recognizes the complexities faced by the
black ethnographer, who is the racialized object of imperial knowledge (Dash: 1995:
xi). In the face of these difficulties he defiantly proclaims, ‘Ainsi suis-je
l’ethnologue de moi-même’ (‘Thus I am the ethnologist of myself’) [my translation]
(Glissant: 1956: 15). However, the dual auto- and counter-ethnographic ventures
were even more challenging for the black female colonial subject due to the blatant
misogyny which characterized social anthropology until as recently as the 1980s
(Jones 23). The authority of the male colonial ethnographer was backed by an ‘a
priori patriarchal power structure’ which was ‘reproduced in the field’ (Behdad 98).
Today sexist and paternalistic attitudes still endure within the ethnographic field,
albeit more surreptitiously. Nevertheless, the black female ethnographer possesses a
counter-discursive advantage since the ‘scopic drive of the colonialist male gaze
desires to totalize but [...] is at the same time restricted by its inherent inability (its
partiality and its lack), because the other (in this case, the female) is ultimately
unrepresentable. She is that other which repeatedly resists signification’ (Sandiford
94). Accordingly, Pineau’s counter-ethnographic methods within The Drifting of
Spirits oppose the ‘fixating male scopic drive’ and destabilize patriarchal colonialist
logic through her diversified portrayals of Guadeloupean women (ibid. 95). She
undermines imperialist and colonialist (mis)representations of black female subjects
66
via her ironic depictions of Guadeloupean women as they are perceived through the
autoethnographic gaze of the anonymous female narrator.
The novel’s unnamed narrator is a young Guadeloupean woman who returns
home on two separate occasions during her summer breaks from school in Paris –
first, in 1960 upon graduating from high school at the age of seventeen, then again
in 1963 while a university student. Her tale is inspired by Pineau’s own return to
Guadeloupe from Paris as a young woman of fourteen, when she experienced acute
cultural alienation. A capricious and unmotivated student, the narrator switches
between classical literature, political science, history – and most significantly,
ethnology and photography – over a period of three years. Upon each visit to
Guadeloupe, she returns home hoping for an inspirational occurrence which will aid
her in solidifying a decision regarding her educational path. Ignorant of the rural,
ancestral black Guadeloupean culture which survives in parts of the remote
countryside, it is there that she seeks to obtain ‘real’ cultural edification. During her
initial return to the island in the summer of 1960, the narrator recalls that she
‘wandered aimlessly all over Guadeloupe, a Rolex camera slung over my shoulder’
with the intent of tackling ‘the major project of an original picture-book of Creole
houses’ (36). She continues, ‘I scoured town and country. I went on foot, by cart,
on bicycle. Snap! Snap! For posterity, I captured on film a number of cabins, the
beautiful and the ugly, the young and the old, the gutted, the roofless, those painted
the colours of the rainbow or scraped clean and grey, the abandoned ones’ (ibid.).
She catalogues the assorted incarnations of cabins inhabited by ‘country folk’ in
order to preserve images of their dwellings for future study. She recounts:
67
One morning, I decided to go even deeper into the countryside. There I
discovered – pure heaven for a budding photographer! – a cabin more than a
hundred years old clinging like a maddened bat to the side of a green hill.
Superb contrast! Powerful symbolism! Life and death united in a struggle to
the death. I adjusted my Rolex, set the shutter. Snap! Snap! I made this
uplifting yet depressing vision my own. (36)
Pineau recognizes that in this possessive act of aesthetic experience – ‘I made this
uplifting yet depressing vision my own’ – the narrator actually encrypts not only the
object of her gaze, but also herself, within a kind of image-tomb. As Barthes
conjectures regarding the inextricable relationship between Death and the
photograph, ‘Perhaps [it is] in this image which produces Death while trying to
preserve life [...] Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern
society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt
dive into literal Death. Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click’ (1980:
92). The sense of ‘disturbance’ elicited by this act, he points out, ‘is ultimately one
of ownership...to whom does the photograph belong?’ (ibid. 13). This query is
particularly relevant when considering the ethicopolitical issues surrounding
ethnographic photography since ‘photography became a concrete tool of empire’
(Landau 142). If photography ‘transformed subject into object, and even, one might
say, into a museum object,’ then when applied as a colonialist ethnographic method,
it presented images as empirical data, part of a ‘factual’ record of a conquered
people or place (Barthes: 1980: 13). Such is the nature of what Derrida calls
‘archival violence,’ which began as a form of colonial discursive violence
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concurrent with the advent of imperialism in the early modern period, and has
continued into neoimperialist contemporaneity (1998: 7). This museumizing power
of photographic capture fixes its subject/object according to the phallocentric logic
of representations of the exotic. As a result, ‘certain indexical and postindexical
modes of seeing have rendered the late modern subject a “homo photographicus.”’
(Geoffrey Batchen cited in Richter xxviii). The indexicality inherent to
ethnographic photography is a colonialist strategy designed to automatically
subsume its subject under the classification of anthropos. Pineau’s narrator
succumbs to colonialist visual regimes within her own autoethnographic
photography, thus reinscribing herself and her fellow Guadeloupeans in this
category.
Unbeknownst to her, as she is photographing the dilapidated cabins she is
being watched by an elderly woman who suddenly materializes and assails her with
a barrage of questions in an attempt to apprehend her identity: ‘Who are you?
Whose permission did you ask for, eh? You’ve got it in your head to imitate the
whites who come around to photograph the falls up there! You have no family!
Where are you from? Who is your mama?’ (36). The old woman regards the
narrator as a trespasser on her territory, and compares her to the white tourists who
only venture into the rural areas of the island so that they can photograph the
scenery. She insinuates that like the white day-trippers, the narrator is not interested
in having any kind of productive interaction with the locals themselves, only with
the natural landscape, which can neither dispute nor consent to her infringement.
The narrator is caught off-guard by this inquisition:
69
Startled, almost tripping, I immediately turned around. It was an old red
woman with wide hips. Her gums were studded with black stumps. On her
head, which had never seen a comb, two old-fashioned twists bristled with
sword-like pins. She sported a dirty dress, all torn and stained with banana
sap. She was holding a small machete and her eyes chopped me into tiny
pieces. (36-7)
Here the narrator conveys her ethnographic observations in the reportorial style of
field notes, describing the woman’s phenotypic characteristics in rapid-fire
sequence. The first and most salient feature the narrator notices is the woman’s
location on the racial continuum, a pervasive remnant of imperialism which is a
principal determiner of status in the Caribbean – ‘it was an old red woman’ [my
emphasis]. This comment immediately places the woman within a certain racial
hierarchy and, correspondingly, within a certain social stratum. The narrator then
proceeds to remark upon the woman’s body type, overall hygiene, style of dress and
general comportment, and she also notes that she is carrying a weapon. She
catalogues the woman’s visible features just as she does those of the cabins in a
systematic method of categorization.
This Western-educated young woman unconsciously uses the language of
empire to describe her own people and criticize them for what she perceives to be a
quaint cultural backwardness. Consequently, her authority as a narrator and
ethnographer is contested ‘in terms of her condescending attitude to the behaviour
and beliefs of those around her’ (Dash: 2000: 243). Yet at the same time, ‘the
progressive, liberated photographer herself’ confesses that she ‘is equally prone to
70
irrational behaviour and self-debasement’ (ibid.). In her novel Pineau thus employs
a mode of articulation that ironizes the Eurocentric worldview and its phallocentric
will to power. The European imperialist imaginary invented the justifications for
‘containing and controlling an exotic Other,’ and Pineau implies that the mimetic
drive of the Westernized narrator overdetermines her judgment of her
countrywomen (Ekotto 31). The narrator exoticises her fellow Afro-Caribbean
women in an effort to distance herself from what (following Paul Stuart Landau’s
concept of ‘the image-Africa’) I would call ‘the image-Guadeloupe’; yet this
distancing from it is ‘met again and again by a sense of slippage toward it, or even a
congruence with it’ (Landau 3). The narrator is, therefore, unknowingly autoexoticising in her discourse.24 While she exoticises her fellow countrywomen, she
also exoticises herself since her European education does not preclude the fact that
she is still one of them.
Pineau’s narrative approach is also evocative of Huggan’s conceptualization
of the ‘anthropological exotic,’ which, he remarks, is ‘like other contemporary forms
of exoticist discourse’ in that it ‘describes a mode of both perception and
consumption; it invokes the familiar aura of other, incommensurably “foreign”
cultures while appearing to provide a modicum of information that gives the
uninitiated reader access to the texts and, by extension, the “foreign culture” itself’
(2001: 37). Huggan applies this concept specifically to African literature; however,
I would argue that it can be applicable to other postcolonial literatures, such as that
of the African diaspora. The Drifting of Spirits is one such example as it features the
ironic deployment of (often pseudo-) anthropological metaphors. Pineau cunningly
24
Auto-exoticism is a concept developed by Joep Leerssen, who defines it as “an interiorized form of
exoticism,” “a mode of seeing, presenting and representing oneself in one’s otherness” (66, 37).
71
addresses forms of ‘cultural voyeurism’ in which not only the Western reader, but
also her Westernized narrator, become complicit (ibid. 45). Huggan’s commentary
on South African writer Bessie Head’s short story collection The Collector of
Treasures (1977), identifies a strategy also found in Pineau, who utilises ‘a tone
unsettlingly poised between anthropological specificity and storytelling axiomatics,
and a narrator simultaneously identified as authoritative insider (“informant”) and
speculative outsider (“participant-observer”)’ (ibid. 49). As Huggan explains, the
result of this technique is that “the story immediately puts us on our guard about the
cultural practices it claims to examine, and which its informed anthropological
perspective seems in the end to mystify in its turn’ (ibid.). This serves to reveal the
‘illusoriness of absolute cultural understanding’ and the ‘power-politics that underlie
contending claims to cultural knowledge’ (ibid. 50). As in Head’s collection, ‘the
relationship between these two primary knowledge-sources’ – that is,
communal/insider wisdom that is orally transmitted versus outsider explanatory
accounts – ‘is mutually subversive [...] [and] forms the basis for an anthropological
reading that is insistently ironised in the text’ (ibid. 47-8). Like Head’s, Pineau’s
‘ironically treated observer-figure’ is ‘neither fully involved in nor completely
disengaged from the social mores’ she ‘claim[s] to witness’ (ibid. 49). Huggan
points out ‘the retention of an “anthropological fallacy” in African literature,’ and I
would posit that this fallacy can be traced within Afro-Caribbean writing as well
(ibid. 50). The anthropological dimensions of Pineau’s novel demonstrate that the
neocolonialist interpretive gaze can be reappropriated in order to challenge exoticist
stereotypes of Guadeloupean women.
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When asked by Loichot whether her novels are ‘sometimes interpreted [or]
represented as exotic literature,’ Pineau replies, ‘Absolutely. All the time. I don’t
want to pick fights with people who think I write like that. I search for stories deep
in my belly. The stories I write are not exotic. They could happen to anyone on the
planet [...] No, I’m not at all an exotic writer, and I couldn’t care less about people
who think I am. I try to be completely honest in what I write’ (334). Pineau
explores this productive tension between the exotic and the authentic in The Drifting
of Spirits and narrativizes the confusion and conflation of the two that can frequently
occur in the minds of diasporans such as herself or of migrants such as the book’s
narrator. Nonetheless, she emphasises the diversity of her female Guadeloupean
characters in an effort to confirm their authenticity to Loichot, who posits, ‘This
diversity then is also a form of anti-exoticism’ – to which Pineau responds, ‘That’s
right [...] I want to give them [the characters] density and flesh. I want my readers
to feel them’ (335). She explains, ‘I write with my heart and I want to give my
readers a land to be seen, a land to be felt. When I write, I see everything. Images
pass by my eyes and I have to illustrate them with words. I’m not a perfectionist,
but I want to make beauty. I want to make art’ (ibid. 334). However, such a
declaration is inherently problematic – whilst Pineau indicates that she strives for
authenticity in her characterizations of Guadeloupe and its people, in the same
breath she also reveals the aesthetic drive which motivates their portrayal in her
fiction and thus unintentionally exoticizes them.
This desire to ‘make beauty’ and ‘art’ out of the island and its inhabitants
mimics the patriarchal reification and exoticization of the New World which was
inscribed in imperialist depictions of the region. This desire to aestheticize and
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objectify originates in the desire to possess. As a diasporic subject, Pineau longs to
possess a Guadeloupean culture which she feels has been ‘lost’ for her. She states:
La Grande Drive des esprits is a novel that tells Guadeloupeans: ‘See how
much of a Caribbean woman I am. See how well I know Guadeloupe, the
heart of Guadeloupeans. See how deep I go in the land. Accept me as a
Guadeloupean woman.’ This novel begs for love, begs for inclusion in a
community because, you know, when I was in France, people rejected me
because of my black skin; when I arrived in the Antilles I was also rejected
because I was a ‘Negropolitan’: This Guadeloupean woman is black, but she
speaks very bad Creole, rolling her ‘r’s. So, I was never at the right time,
never at the right place, a misfit. (ibid. 335)
The novel therefore represents an autoethnographic attempt to become a cultural
insider, to finally ‘fit in’ to her ancestral homeland. However, as Pineau suggests,
her artistic rendering of Guadeloupe in the text is composed of ‘images’ of the island
which she then ‘illustrate[s] with words’ (ibid. 334). She consequently limns an
image-Guadeloupe which, like the imperial map or ethnographic photograph, is
merely a simulacrum of island space. Yet her apparently ‘inauthentic’ portrait of
Guadeloupe in the novel still signifies an authentically postcolonial mode of selfexpression. As Pratt contends, autoethnographic texts have a ‘transcultural
character’ due to a ‘dialogic engagement with western modes of representation’
(100). The Drifting of Spirits effectively demonstrates the conundrum of articulating
a transcultural self, which is a challenge for both the diasporan and the migrant (in
this case, for the author and the narrator). Françoise Lionnet asserts that in
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autoethnography the ‘writing of culture [...] permeate[s] the writing of the self’ (99).
She furthers her argument by stating that autoethnography is a praxis of ‘delineating
the semiotics of spaces’ (105). Following her logic, then, to that I would add that it
is also a praxis of delineating the semiotics of the self.
While on summer break from university in 1963, three years after her first
encounter with the old woman Bernabé and her stories, the narrator has a sudden
urge to see her again, and this time, to photograph her. Barthes asserts that
photography ‘immediately yields up those “details” which constitute the very raw
material of ethnological knowledge’ (1980: 28). Like the colonialists, the narrator
utilises photographic ‘knowledge’ to reify Bernabé as an imagistic metonym for an
entire, elusive culture. The photograph encodes meaning through a kind of
photographic discourse, which, like the photographer’s point of presence, is
designed to render itself undetectable. When the photograph ostensibly ‘captures
authenticity then, having been taken at close quarters, it tends to erase authenticity
from whatever it pictures. Such an image is then relevant only because it shows
something that no longer exists. What happens when the meaning of an image is the
disappearance of its subject?’ (Landau 21-2). The photographed subject is
simultaneously effaced and replaced with the photographer’s plenitude of presence.
Correspondingly, Barthes remarks of aspiring photographers such as Pineau’s
narrator: ‘All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined
upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death. This is the
way in which our time assumes Death: with the denying alibi of the distractedly
“alive,” of which the Photographer is in a sense the professional’ (1980: 92).
Photography therefore becomes a kind of mortuary practice – in a paradoxical
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attempt at preservation, the photographer embalms the subject and herself in an
image which ‘is without future (this is its pathos, its melancholy); in it, no
protensity’ (ibid. 90). The ‘apparent realism’ of the photograph belies the fact that
is, in fact, the spectre of an arrested moment in time that is always-already ‘in the
process of becoming past, part of what has been’ (Landau 11, Dyer xvii). In this
sense, Robert Smith argues:
The death drive might start to be considered the aesthetic drive. In the face
of destruction, of inevitable transience and perdition – of death – the drive
will have directed itself at retaining something not subject to entropy, at
[something which is] tarrying on the edge of creation. This ‘instinct’ to take
life and freeze it, so to speak, to keep it ‘there’, to effect some arrest, might
be an aesthetic one, in the sense that any aesthetic drive would wish to posit
inorganic entity – an artwork [...] that, in the name of being created, takes on
a different, a resistant, relationship to death and the destructiveness by which
it operates. (20)
Correspondingly, the narrator ruminates upon Bernabé and states, ‘It has been said
often enough, curiosity sometimes takes you along the pathways of chance where
logic and reason get lost in the twists and turns of the hills and sprout at the edge of
crazy rivers. All my thoughts rushed towards her. I had to take a picture of her, to
remember her, before she was dead and her cabin demolished’ (69). The narrator’s
aesthetic or death drive impels her to preserve images which, in fact, represent only
supplementarity and artifice. Unlike the rapacious colonial ethnographer, however,
the narrator’s desire for photographic conservation stems from the combined
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traumatic forces of a doubly diasporic experience and a collective history of loss,
which engender an overwhelming sense of lack. She attempts to counteract this
feeling of dispossession by collecting images which inform her autoethnographic
account of a ‘lost’ ancestral culture and, correspondingly, a lost sense of self.
Pineau’s text indicates that in an anomic neocolonial space such as
Guadeloupe, its inhabitants ‘[end] up in a land with no memory’ (Pineau: 2000: 42).
During the summers of 1960 and 1963, the narrator experiences an ethnographic
confrontation with her own culture and its traumatized collective memory, both of
which are embodied by the figure of the ‘old red woman,’ Bernabé. The fact that
Bernabé is ‘une vieille femme rouge,’ a light-skinned Afro-Caribbean woman of
mixed racial heritage, suggests that she represents the creolised Guadeloupean
populace (Pineau: 1993: 42). Furthermore, Pineau’s decision to give Bernabé ‘a
man’s Christian name’ implies a certain level of androgyny, so that she represents an
archetypal ancestral figure who encompasses both male and female historical
experiences (Pineau: 2000: 38). She therefore functions as an allegorical sign for
the nation of Guadeloupe. With this characterization of the elderly storyteller,
Pineau’s novel resists strictly ‘masculine narratives of Caribbean history’
(Edmondson 117). The narrator recalls, ‘She began to speak. I listened to her, my
heart swept away in a wild swirl. She raised her eyebrows and it was as if she was
lifting the curtain behind which, trembling from having been caught, lay those three
accomplices: the past, oblivion and memory’ (37). Bernabé’s personal life narrative
thus becomes an allegory of the collective historical experience of the Guadeloupean
population. As Clifford argues, ‘ethnographic writing is allegorical at the level both
of its content (what it says about cultures and their histories) and of its form (what is
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implied by its mode of textualization)’ (98). The narrator continues, ‘Then she
related, spread out, right there, her entire life. As for me, my eyes were bound by
curiosity and my lips skewered by all the emotion that a young virgin with a
diploma is capable of feeling’ (37-8). Mary Gallagher affirms that there is:
the potential for reciprocal mirroring between a nascent collective identity on
the one hand and the narrative of an individual destiny on the other.
Moreover, it is an axiomatic that the literature of traumatized and recovering
cultures is first and foremost a memorial literature that, typically, abounds in
first-person récits de vie (‘life narratives’). The remembering of an
individual life thus seems to go some way towards suturing the torn and
alienated collective self-image. Francophone Caribbean writing is no
exception to this apparent rule; it is, indeed, particularly rich in [...]
narratives of recollection. (89-90)
Pineau offers an antiteleological view of Guadeloupean history that weaves together
traces of disparate pasts within the narrator’s autoethnographic present in order to
form a polysemic historical counter-discourse. She maps the visible lineaments of
the Guadeloupean cultural topography and hints at a subsurface spring of stories that
allows for the continual play of resistance to Eurocentric historical narratives. Thus
the Caribbean landscape ‘is not saturated with a single history but effervescent with
intermingled histories, spread around, rushing to fuse without destroying or reducing
each other’ (Glissant: 1989: 154). Pineau taps into this wellspring of repressed
historical memory within her novel and loosens a torrent of intergenerational life
narratives so that she can narratively reconstitute Guadeloupean identity.
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VII.
Conclusion
As evinced by the textual examples herein, Kincaid and Pineau abrogate
masculinist imperial norms and influences in favour of a more comprehensive,
womanist literary praxis. This is part of the process that Madina Tlostanova and
Walter Mignolo describe as ‘learning to unlearn the imperial education, which is the
starting point [of decolonial thinking]’ (22). Kincaid and Pineau demonstrate that
for the black woman subject, ‘this unlearning will not come through benevolence or
good intentions; rather, its voyage must be meticulously plotted, point by agonizing
point, and then strategically used to make visible the previously invisible ways that
power has penetrated women’s experience’ (Donaldson 12). The dominant male
perspectival gaze which, as Kincaid illustrates in ‘Ovando,’ has held the Caribbean
in thrall since the time of the conquistadors, has continued to insidiously control
and inhibit the modern black Caribbean woman subject. This is due in no small part
to the interiorization of patriarchal ideologies by some of the colonised black male
population. Fanon’s texts of decolonisation display this effect as he noticeably
‘attempts to eject the woman of color from his discourse at several points’ in both
Black Skin, White Masks and the subsequent The Wretched of the Earth (Counihan
164-5). Although Fanon is considered by many to be ‘central to the early theorizing
of postcolonial’ and decolonising methodologies, the ‘gender-solipsistic language’
that he and many of his successors and critics employ indicates an exclusionary bias
(Dash: 2003: 231, Donaldson 1). In such cases, ‘the colonized other produces texts
of social practice imitating the colonizer’s ideas of Black essential difference [which
are] generated in this discursive regime’ (Tate 83). In his revision of Freudian
psychoanalysis, Fanon’s ‘rewriting of sexual into racial difference introduces a
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ghost in postcolonial theory: the figure of the woman’ (Counihan 162). ‘In this
process,’ Clare Counihan asserts, ‘the woman becomes a phantom, shimmering in
and out of presence and absence. It is this same spectral nonpresence that marks
Bhabha’s discourse’ – and I would add that it is the very same which marks Nandy’s
discourse (ibid.). Bhabha is one of the most widely cited Fanonian critics and, as
Tate observes, his contention that ‘Fanon’s use of the term “man” connotes a
phenomenological quality of humanness inclusive of man and woman’ proves to be
unequivocally false due to the fact that his ‘generic use of a sexist pronoun’ implies
the circumscribed ‘ontological status of the black woman’ (82). Furthermore, as
Counihan remarks, Bhabha’s own ‘elided translations of difference [...] cannot, in
any substantial way, accommodate the figure of woman as different’ (162). The
phantomic absent presence of the black woman in male-authored literatures of
decolonisation and critical analyses reveals a disjunction in postcolonial
theorizations of difference. Rather than regarding this gap as an endless chasm,
however, postcolonial women writers such as Kincaid and Pineau perceive it as an
opening onto an alternative, womanist consciousness that provides a positive,
gender-inclusive theoretical base to build upon.
As I and others have indicated, Fanon’s uneasiness in thinking about the
specificity of black women’s experiences of racism and colonialism is palpable. He
and later Caribbean theorists such as Walcott, Glissant and the Créolistes replicate a
discursive colonialism which unconsciously deploys epistemic violence to suppress
the black woman subject. Their literatures of decolonisation therefore affirm ‘the
interweaving of oppressions’ that afflict black women (Donaldson 8). As Counihan
points out, we need to think through ‘race, gender and sexuality as completely
80
intertwined manifestations’ (163). These theorists inscribe their texts of
decolonisation with an overtly masculine gender signature due to their displacement
of black women from discussion. Consequently, ‘liberating strategies must arise
from the concrete historical circumstances of each oppressed group,’ and
acknowledge the heterogeneity of black experience by also addressing black
women’s experience (Donaldson 9). Fanon declares that the decolonisation process
involves a ‘man-to-man struggle’ between the colonised black male and his white
(male) oppressor (2004: 52). Kincaid and Pineau illustrate that the black woman,
however, must struggle against myriad oppressors, both male and female, who
passively collude with racist and sexist neocolonialist views. In addition to
confronting black machismo, their womanist literary praxis also counters the ‘more
subtle “white solipsism”’ exhibited by those who ‘presuppose white feminism as the
standard for all women’s writing’ (Donaldson 1). Accordingly, as Edmondson
suggests, womanism is a more suitable alternative for theorizing Caribbean
women’s literature as it is a literature which explores the specificities of black
womanhood.
Raphael Dalleo notes that ‘anticolonial literature tends to figure colonial
domination and resistance as a confrontation between Caribbean and European men
for the feminized body of the island’ (3). In the work of Kincaid and Pineau the
land is indeed feminised, but in a recuperative way that reclaims the island terrain as
a fertile ground for defiant, womanist expression. As Pineau states with reference to
Guadeloupe in a personal interview I conducted in November 2012, ‘Cette île est
une femme solide qui ne s’en laisse pas imposer’ (‘This island is a strong woman
who does not allow herself to be imposed upon’) [my translation] (Pineau: 2012:
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n.p.). Unlike the earlier, imperialist vision of the Caribbean archipelago as a terrain
ripe for reinscription, Kincaid and Pineau portray island space as a locus for
womanist resistance. They enact a literary anticathexis25 from residual colonialist
ideologies, thereby liberating their writing from repressive masculinist influences.
Their dialogic response represents an attempt to break the patriarchal chain of
signification which discursively produces black Caribbean female identity. As
Judith Butler contends:
The rules that govern intelligible identity, i.e., that enable and restrict the
intelligible assertion of an ‘I,’ rules that are partially structured along matrices of
gender hierarchy [...] operate through repetition. Indeed, when the subject is
said to be constituted, that means simply that the subject is a consequence of
certain rule-governed discourses that govern the intelligible invocation of
identity. The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated
because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of
repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the
production of substantializing effects. (1990: 145)
Butler stresses that ‘agency,’ then, ‘is to be located within the possibility of a
variation on that repetition’ [my emphasis] (ibid.). Correspondingly, postcolonial
women writers must identify ‘repetitive gender hierarchies and/or binaries as
oppressive formulations within the postcolonial body politic,’ and reflexively disrupt
this repetition within their writing praxes (Paquet 227). The fictional works by
25
‘Anticathexis’ is a Freudian term which denotes the separation of the libido from the object to
which it has become attached. For more on this concept, see Paul Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy:
An Essay on Interpretation (1970).
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Kincaid and Pineau exemplify that black Caribbean female identity is, in fact, a site
of multiple subjective processes, and is therefore constitutively unstable as it is
constantly shifting. It does not therefore comply with normative, patriarchal
definitions of gendered blackness which prescribe fixed feminine subjective
positions. Such a refusal of political and psychical assimilation to neocolonialist
notions of subjecthood attends to ‘the multiple realities’ of postcolonial Caribbean
identity (Counihan 163). This approach facilitates the Caribbean writer’s exigent
task of achieving self-definition in a creolised, multicultural context.
In ‘Ovando’ and The Drifting of Spirits, respectively, Kincaid and Pineau
wield an arsenal of counter-, or decolonial, epistemologies which include counterhistories, counter-mapping and auto- and counter-ethnographies. These subversive
counter-discourses serve a positive function – to reconstruct black female Caribbean
identity from a position of counter-knowledge, or border epistemology. Since
Eurocentric histories of non-European peoples have ‘always reflected the
Europeans’ history of imagining themselves,’ Kincaid and Pineau present diverse
counter-histories of expressly female Caribbean experience [my emphasis] (Landau
2). They confront hegemonic Western ‘knowledges’ of the Caribbean which they
then contend with and refashion in order to bring them within a postcolonial,
womanist purview. In her short story, Kincaid contests imperial geographic and
cognitive cartographies which violently reshaped the Caribbean according to a
pattern of colonial design. She reveals ‘the cartographic overlay of cultural
practices [...] with territorialized space’ in colonised regions, which established a
kind of premeditated ‘spatial-identity production’ (Wainwright 245). Similarly,
ethnographical works were originally read ‘in colonial situations, for administrative
83
purposes’; however, in her novel Pineau rejects these strategic colonialist efforts to
anthropologize the Caribbean (Geertz 5). Her text elucidates the potential for
Caribbean women writers to spurn the patriarchal Eurocentric gaze and instead look
internally through the self-reflexive writing practices of auto-and counterethnography. The dialectical project of black Caribbean female self-constitution
thus engages with patriarchal Western and Caribbean theoretical paradigms as part
of a womanist ‘counterhegemonic ideological production’ (Spivak: 1999: 306). As
Michel Foucault remarks, ‘A whole history remains to be written of spaces – which
would at the same time be a history of powers (both these terms in the plural) – from
the great strategies of geo-politics to the little tactics of the habitat’ (1980: 149).
Kincaid and Pineau indicate that a whole history of Caribbean ‘lived milieux’ would
naturally include the variegated histories of black women’s experience which were
previously suppressed by dominant patriarchal Western and Caribbean historical
narratives (Clifford 114). Their contributions to the Caribbean womanist project
develop a poetics of decolonisation that opposes restrictive masculinist systems of
representation, thus bringing into fuller presence a distinctly feminine Caribbean
power of articulacy and unleashing its emancipatory force.
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Chapter II
Xuela’s Autothanatography: Genocide, Ecocide, and the Death of the
Caribbean Motherland in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother
I.
Introduction
In The Location of Culture (1994) Homi Bhabha asserts that ‘our existence
today is marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, living on the borderlines of the
“present”, for which there seems to be no proper name other than the current and
controversial shiftiness of the prefix “post”: postmodernism, postcolonialism,
postfeminism’ (1). Correspondingly, in her novel The Autobiography of My Mother
(1996) Jamaica Kincaid examines the displaced ontopology of those living at the
borderlines of the postcolonial Caribbean present through the lens of her protagonist
Xuela Claudette Richardson. Xuela is an allegorical figure whose genealogy reflects
that of the creolised population of her native Dominica, an island nation in the
Lesser Antilles that neighbours Guadeloupe. Born to an indigenous Caribbean
(Carib) mother and a Scottish-African father, Xuela’s lineage symbolizes the
historical convergence of three different peoples in the archipelago. Xuela’s account
therefore portrays a liminal existence at the interstices of racial and social
categorizations, as she states, ‘I had been living at the end of the world for my whole
life; it had been so when I was born’ (213). Following the tragic death of her Carib
mother during childbirth, Xuela ensures her own survival by crossing the racial,
gender, and social boundaries that delimit her existence. She furthers this tactical
approach to being-in-the-world by traversing the borderline between past and
present in her narrative in order to tell her life (and death) story as well as that of her
deceased mother.
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Bhabha contends that ‘the “beyond” is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving
behind of the past [...] For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of
direction, in the “beyond”: an exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the
French rendition of the words au-delà – here and there, on all sides, fort/da,26 hither
and thither, back and forth’ (1). Similarly, Xuela reflects on her mother’s passing in
the opening paragraph of the novel and remarks, ‘This realization of loss and gain
made me look backward and forward: at my beginning was this woman whose face I
had never seen, but at my end was nothing, no one between me and the black room
of the world. I came to feel that for my whole life I had been standing on a
precipice’ (3-4). The ‘black room of the world’ that Xuela describes here echoes
Bhabha’s vision of a ‘tenebrous’ contemporary existence – one that is obscured by
the shadow of uncertainty. Xuela attempts to step beyond the borderlines of the
present in her tale and consequently oscillates in her narrative movements,
continuously going to and fro because her life seems frozen in time at the moment of
the death-birth. This novelistic scene re-enacts the historical, primal scene of deathbirth that occurred at the very instant the New World was born. At the exact point in
time when the Caribbean experienced colonial incursion, a simultaneous death of
three cultural milieux (native, European, and African) occurred for its indigenous
and migrant populations. In her novel Kincaid thus uncovers the ways in which
death and life imbricate each other, since for Xuela, birth into the present is death
due to resonant historical forces in the Caribbean. The Autobiography of My Mother
26
According to Jacques Derrida, fort:da (or fort und da) means ‘always here and there
simultaneously.’ (A Derrida Reader 513).
86
is therefore an autothanatography,27 as it is a transcription of Xuela’s own death, as
well as that of her mother, her mother’s people, and her Caribbean motherland. The
novel is an interpretive conundrum for critics, who tend to either ignore the work
completely or dismiss it facilely as an ‘unremittingly bleak and bitter’ ‘narrative of
emotional vacuity’ in which Kincaid disparages her mother’s Dominican homeland
(Beaulieu 30, Paravisini-Gebert 38). However, during an interview I conducted with
Kincaid at her home in North Bennington, Vermont in July 2012, the author deftly
unravelled the complex politico-psychological nuances of her text. Drawing upon
this interview and upon relevant theoretical models, this chapter seeks to explicate
these underlying elements in order to produce a new intervention into scholarship on
this particular novel.
II.
Separation as Death
The event of the death-birth becomes a point of fixation for Xuela, and
resultantly, it also becomes the locus of her narrative. For example, the very first
words that Xuela utters in the novel are: ‘My mother died at the moment I was born’
(3). Various iterations of this phrase appear throughout the text so that it functions
structurally as a kind of refrain, illustrating the vacillating movements of Xuela’s
thought process as she records her memories. Kincaid elucidates the allegory of
Xuela’s genesis in an interview by Charlie Rose, stating:
In her, three people meet: the African people, the European people, and the
native people who had lived in these islands, and […] For one of them, for
instance, the African people, when they were born into this part of the world,
27
‘Autothanatography’ is the practice of writing an account of one’s own death; a notion developed
by and dealt with extensively by Jacques Derrida. See Derrida’s The Post Card: from Socrates to
Freud and Beyond (1987).
87
Africa died for them. For the native people, when the Europeans were born into
this part of the world, their country, their land, died for them. And for the
Europeans, Europe, in a way, died for them. The part of Europe and themselves
as belonging to this [part died] […] certainly [for] the English people she’s
talking about, England, in a way, dies for them.
She goes on to explain, ‘The death of all those things was irrevocable and changed
history for people, changed the lives of people, changed everything for these three
groups of people. When one [of them] was born, their progenitors died.’ Likewise,
in The Autobiography of My Mother, when Xuela is born, her progenitor dies. Her
account is therefore a matrifocal narrative that conveys an underlying search for a
Caribbean motherland, as represented by her Carib mother, a native of Dominica
and a figure who is always-already dead and absent. Kincaid’s ‘doubled
articulation’ of the mother ‘as biological and political (as representative of the
motherland)’ emerges palpably in her rendering of Dominica (Ferguson: 1994b: 1,
Renk 35). Infected by colonialism, the Dominican mother-island is perpetually dead
and decaying, capable of engendering nothing but what Xuela perceives to be a
blighted cultural landscape. Xuela matter-of-factly describes Dominica as ‘an island
of villages and rivers and mountains and people who began and ended with murder
and theft and not very much love’ (89). In telling her story through the use of
strategic essentialism,28 the indigenous subaltern29 Xuela attempts to speak for and
28
In defining ‘strategic essentialism,’ Gayatri Spivak argues for a ‘transactional reading’ that sees the
subaltern collective as ‘strategically adhering to an essentialist notion of consciousness’ in order to
‘write the subaltern as the subject of history’ (In Other Worlds 205). For more on strategic
essentialism, see Spivak’s In Other WorlDS: Essays in Cultural Politics (2006).
29
The ‘subaltern’ is a term originally used by Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci to define a person
who is socially, politically, and geographically outside the hegemonic power structure of the colony
88
represent the disenfranchised population of Dominica. She maintains, ‘I am not a
people, I am not a nation. I only wish from time to time to make my actions be the
actions of a people, to make my actions be the actions of a nation’ (216). Xuela opts
to align herself with her Carib ancestors, the indigenous people of Dominica,
declaring, ‘I am of the vanquished, I am of the defeated’ (215). This choice allows
her to establish some semblance of a connection to her late mother and to her
matrilineal heritage, despite the devastating effects of colonial genocide upon the
Carib population.
Xuela is not only living at the edges of the present within the text – she is
also hovering at the threshold between life and death. At the advanced age of
seventy, she is dying while she retrospectively examines the story of her life.
Accordingly, the novel ends when her story ends – with her death. In her narrative
Xuela is at once recording her own death as well as chronicling the demise of her
mother’s race and of their ancestral line, as evidenced by her claiming of her given
name. She affirms, ‘This was my mother’s name [...] My own name is her name,
Xuela Claudette [...] For the name of any one person is at once her history
recapitulated and abbreviated’ (79). In claiming her mother’s name, Xuela chooses
to embody her history in order to tell her story and that of her mother and her
people. At the close of the novel she avers:
This account of my life has been an account of my mother’s life as much as
it has been an account of mine, and even so, again it is an account of the life
of the children I did not have, as it is their account of me. In me is the voice
and of the metropole. For more on Gramsci’s theorizations of subaltern culture and consciousness,
see Antonio Gramsci: Selected Cultural Writings (1991). For Spivak’s use of the term, see her essay
‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader (1994).
89
I never heard, the face I never saw, the being I came from. In me are the
voices that should have come out of me, the faces I never allowed to form,
the eyes I never allowed to see me. This account is an account of the person
who was never allowed to be and an account of the person I did not allow
myself to become. (228)
I would argue that in order to effectively illustrate Xuela’s split consciousness in the
novel, Kincaid depicts her within a narrative frame typical of a mise-en-abyme.30
This structural motif enables the reader to envision Xuela metaphorically as standing
between two mirrors, regarding the reflected image of her likeness (and thus that of
her mother and foremothers) in a seemingly infinite replication. However, Xuela is
herself cognisant that this effect of filial continuance is merely an optical illusion,
since she feels that there is in fact no futurity for her Carib ancestral line.
Ultimately, the view that she observes only represents herself and her foremothers
(who are reflected in her image), but no future descendants because she intentionally
does not produce any living offspring. She refuses to deliver children into the
bleakness of her always-already dead motherland as she cannot perceive a possible
future for them in this environment. Xuela’s tale is therefore one of failed biological
and social reproduction, as symbolized by the falsity of the mise-en-abyme, which is
merely a reproduction of an image, and not a true rendering. When translated
literally from the French, mise-en-abyme means ‘placed into the abyss,’ and Xuela’s
self-image consists of an abyss that she fills with an imagined copy of her mother,
30
Mise-en-abyme is a formal technique in art in which an image contains a smaller copy of itself, the
sequence appearing to recur endlessly. For more, see Gregory Minissale’s Framing Consciousness in
Art: Transcultural Perspectives, page 50.
90
whom she envisages as a copy of her grandmother, and so on [my translation]. As a
result of her mother’s death during childbirth, Xuela is never permitted to enter the
mirror stage in her psychological development. In this phase of subjective
formation, the infant ego identifies with its spectral image, reflected in a (literal or
symbolic) mirror – an occurrence that induces apperception.31 Typically during the
mirror stage, ‘a certain type of identification begins to take shape against a
background of alienation specific to the mother’ (Dor 95). Since Xuela does not
meet her mother, she is incapable of gazing into the ‘mirror’ of her eyes and seeing
herself reflected in them, which would have allowed her to form a separate identity.
In Xuela’s case, then, an imagined copy of her mother’s identity replaces an
individualised identity. Therefore, in this sense, the novel is also a kind of antibildungsroman as the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist is stunted
and she is unable to mature fully. Kincaid also challenges the traditional
bildungsroman’s deeply entrenched gender bias by exploring a female-centred space
and illustrating the ways in which an internally colonised subaltern woman
negotiates her personal, cultural and racial experiences. In Kincaid’s novel, the
impact of historical trauma also reverses the directionality of the bildungsroman’s
forward progress, resulting in a regression into nostalgia and longing for a reunion
with the mother (land).
Xuela replaces the true, unknown image of her mother with her imago32 – an
apotheosis of her mother that she formulates within her psyche as a child and retains
unaltered in her adult life. Since her mother is dead from the time of her very birth,
31
In psychoanalysis, ‘apperception’ is ‘the action or fact of becoming conscious by a subsequent
reflection of a perception already experienced’ (OED Online).
32
In psychoanalysis, an imago is an idealized concept of a loved one that is formed during childhood
and preserved throughout adulthood.
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Xuela comes to regard her as the phallic mother.33 This Freudian term ‘represents a
physical impossibility captured on the level of rhetorical description alone, a useful
gesture toward a utopic fantasy of completeness for a child’ that serves as ‘the
“maternal ideal”’ (Dever 45). The phallic mother exists within ‘the framework of
ideal-in-absence’ that characterizes Xuela’s matrophilic narrative (ibid.). Julia
Kristeva locates the cause of this idealisation of the mother in the diremption that
occurs during childbirth. She contends that:
The mother’s body is the place of a splitting, which [...] remains a constant
factor of social reality. Through a body, destined to ensure reproduction of
the species, the woman-subject, although under the sway of the paternal
function [...] [is] more of a filter than anyone else – a thoroughfare, a
threshold where ‘nature’ confronts ‘culture.’ To imagine that there is
someone in that filter [...] [is] the fantasy of the so-called ‘Phallic’ Mother.
(1980: 238)
The process of individuation from the mother is a source of trauma for Xuela, who
observes, ‘This fact of my mother dying at the moment I was born became a central
motif of my life’ (225). Accordingly, it also becomes a central motif of the novel.
Xuela obsesses over this separation, stating, ‘I realized that there were so many
things I did not know, not including the very big thing I did not know – my mother’
(28). Kristeva explains the ontological implications of motherlessness and remarks,
‘If, on the contrary, there were no one on this threshold [...] then every speaker
33
In psychoanalysis, the ‘phallic mother’ is a phantasm, a mother-imago imagined as possessing a
phallus, or object of desire. The phallic mother is ‘the archetypal object of desire’; ‘at once the
object of every psyche’s secret fear and its deep desire’ (Ian 1, 8).
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would be led to conceive of its Being in relation to some void, a nothingness
asymmetrically opposed to this Being, a permanent threat against, first, its mastery,
and ultimately, its stability’ (1980: 238). Similarly, since Xuela’s mother is
deceased, she conceives of her Being in relation to a treacherous void, stating, ‘I can
hear the sound of much emptiness now. A shift of my head this way to the right,
that way to the left; I hear it, a soft rushing sound, waiting to grow bigger, waiting to
envelop me’ (226).
Her narrative therefore represents a desire for return to the maternal body,
which is itself a metonym for the landscape of the precolonial mother-island.
However, as Stuart Hall points out, such a return is impossible since the Caribbean
relationship with the past is ‘like the child’s relation to the mother [...] alwaysalready “after the break”’ (395). This fissure also manifests itself in Xuela’s
topographical surroundings, as illustrated by the scene when she surveys the
Dominican landscape and observes ‘a place where the land had split in two, a
precipice, an abyss’ (218). Like the mother-child split that occurs within the
maternal body due to the violent trauma of giving birth, the body of land, that is, the
island of Dominica itself, has been cleft in two by the violence of colonialism. This
metaphorical image of a permanent bisection indicates the untenability of a child’s
return to a state of fusion with his or her mother (island). Nonetheless, Xuela
attempts a symbolic return to the womb when she journeys to the motherland – the
land of her mother’s people, the island’s Carib Territory – at two important junctures
in the novel. The Carib Territory is a 3,700-acre district that was established in
1903 by British colonial authorities on a remote and mountainous area of
Dominica’s eastern coast (Crask 137). There the Carib minority have largely lived
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in isolation from the rest of the island’s population due to the inhospitable nature of
the mountain terrain, and today ‘approximately 2,200 Caribs inhabit this enclave’
(www.dominica.dm). Thus the region has become the last remaining refuge for the
Caribs, a womblike enclosure that has enabled them to preserve the remnants of
their originary culture.
When Xuela becomes pregnant for the first time, she travels to the Carib
Territory to seek out an obeahwoman34 who gives her an herbal tincture designed to
abort the foetus. In a personal interview, Kincaid told me how the women in her
community in Antigua, her mother included, followed obeah practices to induce
abortions with similar botanical mixtures. She stated, ‘They would gather these
bushes, and one of them was also a bush that you would use to sweep the yard’
(Kincaid: 2012: n.p.). She remembered that after ingesting a concoction made from
these plants the women ‘would hunker down’ over a hole in the ground and ‘it
would make their wombs just shed [...] it was as if their wombs were just swept
clean’ like the yards they swept using a broom made from the very same bush
(ibid.). Xuela endures a similarly harrowing experience in the novel during her first
abortion. She recalls of the obeahwoman:
I did not know her real name, she was called ‘Sange-Sange,’ but that was not her
real name. She gave me a cupful of a thick black syrup to drink and then led me
to a small hole in a dirt floor to lie down. For four days I lay there, my body a
volcano of pain; nothing happened, and for four days after that blood flowed
from between my legs slowly and steadily like an eternal spring. And then it
34
‘Obeah’ is a general term for the syncretized set of beliefs and practices of West African origins
that are practised in the Caribbean. Obeah includes medicinal and religious practices, as well as both
benign and malignant magic.
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stopped. The pain was like nothing I had ever imagined before, it was as if it
defined pain itself; all other pain was only a reference to it, an imitation of it, an
aspiration to it. (82-3)
The excruciating pain of her abortion mimics the physical pain of being in labour, as
well as the emotional pain caused by the agonistic psychosomatic experience of the
separation of mother and child. However, Xuela describes the abortion as a kind of
rebirth, and following this transformative event, she emerges metamorphosed from
the womb of the Carib motherland. She states, ‘I was a new person then, I knew
things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have
been through what I had just been through’ (83). Through another kind of deathbirth, then, different from the one that occurs at the beginning of her life, Xuela’s
child perishes so that its mother can be reborn.
III.
Death and Life Drives
The death-birth that occurs during the scene when Xuela aborts her first child
and is subsequently reborn represents a rhetorical inversion of the death-birth scene
at the outset of the novel when Xuela’s mother dies while giving birth to her. With
this reversal of positions, Kincaid illuminates the imbrication of the death and life
drives within the human psyche. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Sigmund
Freud posits his ontological theories regarding the dualistic death and life drives,
two sets of instincts which have come to be known in the field of psychoanalysis as
thanatos and eros, respectively. The death drive, or thanatos, compels the subject to
engage in risky and self-destructive behaviours that are potentially life-threatening.
In contrast, the life drive is the urge toward self-preservation and desire. Therefore
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the life drive, or eros, ‘is not the opposite of the death drive, as thesis is to
antithesis’; rather, it is fuelled by desire and ‘the detour, the deferral, of death’
(Dufresne 140). The names for these psychoanalytical terms derive from Greek
mythology: Thanatos was the daemon personification of death, and Eros was the
god of love and desire. Carolyn Dever argues that due to ‘the chiasmus of pleasure
and pain that constitutes desire,’ the subject, ‘oriented teleologically toward thanatos
or death, ironically seeks an ideal object of eros located firmly in the past’ (43). For
Xuela, her deceased mother becomes a mother-object, as in the object of her eros or
life drive, and thus she also becomes the fantasy that is the phallic mother. Xuela
therefore seeks an ideal mother-object as the object of her life drive – the imago of a
mother who is, paradoxically, dead. Xuela’s conception of her departed mother as
the object of her life drive encourages this survival instinct, as the memory of her
mother’s death is a cogent reminder of the inevitability of her own extermination.
Xuela struggles with her conflicting impulses continually throughout the
novel. The survival instincts of the life drive impel her to perform multiple
abortions during her lifetime. In the scene that most effectively illustrates the
imbrication of the life and death drives, Xuela, aided by the Carib obeahwoman
Sange-Sange, aborts her first child and marvels, ‘I had carried my own life in my
hands’ (83). Ironically, Xuela is willing to risk autodestruction35 during these
procedures in order to survive in a sociocultural environment that is inhospitable to
the subaltern mother, as allegorised by her mother’s death during childbirth. In
death, Xuela’s mother abandons her – an act which repeats her grandmother’s
abandonment of Xuela’s mother when she was only an infant. Xuela recounts the
35
‘Autodestruction’ in psychoanalysis refers to self-destruction, as in the destruction of one’s life;
often via suicide.
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moment when her grandmother discarded her newborn, stating, ‘My mother was
placed outside the gates of a convent when she was perhaps a day old by a woman
believed to be her own mother’ (79). Xuela’s mother and grandmother therefore
function simultaneously as signifiers of the subaltern mother and as allegorical signs
for postcolonial Dominica, a mother-island which has abandoned its children.
Through her deft rhetorical interplay of metalepsis and double-voicing within the
novel, Kincaid portrays the subaltern mother as an allegorical sign for the nation.36
This tropological motif inflects The Autobiography of My Mother with a politically
subversive undertone by defamiliarizing and undermining dominant national
narratives and repeating them with a subaltern valence.
IV.
Death and the Caribbean Subaltern
Kincaid investigates the negative psychological effects of colonisation on the
subaltern collectivity through her figuration of Xuela as allegorical sign. She cites
The Autobiography of My Mother as ‘the most explicitly political’ of her novels, an
example of ‘political thinking and feeling about the individual in the world, plucking
out one person’ in order to examine ‘how these great events’ of History not only
‘modify one person’s consciousness’ but also ‘modify […] and inhibit their progress
in the world’ (Kincaid: 2012: n.p.). She continues, ‘And by progress I mean their
development as a human being, the way they would understand the world in all its
complications’ (ibid.). Thus the impossible task of autothanatography becomes an
allegory of the historiographical subaltern project, which is an endeavour to
36
‘Metalepsis’ is ‘the rhetorical figure consisting in the metonymical substitution of one word for
another which is itself a metonym; (more generally) any metaphorical usage resulting from a series or
succession of figurative substitutions’ (OED Online). ‘Double-voicing’ is a theoretical concept
developed by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe ‘the effect on the utterance of a plurality of often
competing languages, discourses, and voices’ (Rampton 304).
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‘excavate’ the subaltern’s ‘suppressed agency’ (Birla 92). Kincaid ‘reaches beyond
the grave to determine the truth about’ women like Xuela in an attempt to
discursively recover the subaltern consciousness (Kincaid: 2012). As she is
‘always-already interpreted,’ the subaltern ‘must always be caught in translation,
never truly expressing herself’ (Sharp 111). In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
(1999) Gayatri Spivak argues that if ‘the subaltern has no history and cannot speak,’
then the female subaltern remains ‘even more deeply in shadow’ (274). Therefore,
Xuela’s life is an extreme example of what Bhabha terms a ‘tenebrous’ postcolonial
existence, one that is ‘even more deeply in shadow,’ as she fumbles through the
darkness of forgotten history in order to tell her story (Bhabha: 1994: 1).
With this text, Kincaid subverts the individual subject of autobiography, as
Xuela’s narrative represents an imagining of a lost voice and a missing history. In
Xuela, Kincaid creates ‘an existential protagonist who seats herself at the center of
her world’ in order to explore the position of subalternity (West 146). Kincaid
explains, ‘Who says, “From the moment I was born, I had death facing me because
my mother was dead?” Her mother is dead, so she is always facing annihilation’
(2012: n.p.). Thus despite Xuela’s apparent introversion, hers is a concerted effort
to connect to an occluded history. Her inheritance is therefore a disinheritance, not a
continuity but a discontinuity, because it engages a lost, defeated history. Hers is
very much a subaltern history in that it is fragmentary rather than linear or
teleological. Consequently, Kincaid undertakes the complicated narratological
reconstruction and reimagining of a history that will never be organically inherited
or passed on directly. This anglophone Caribbean text stands in resistance to the
norm of the traditional realist British novel, established in the metropole and
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epitomised by the works of Jane Austen, which prioritize issues of lineage, property
and inheritance. In contrast to Austen’s heroines, Xuela is dispossessed of all these
things, and as a result she declares, ‘I chose to possess myself’ (174).
Xuela’s dual sense of self-possession and cultural dispossession motivates
her desire to record her life and death stories, as well as those of the Caribs, whom
she describes as ‘the remnants of a vanishing people’ (80). Kincaid explains the
exigency of Xuela’s writerly activity and remarks that Xuela seeks the ability to
‘from beyond the grave, say this is who I am, I was, will be’ (2012: n.p.). Xuela
therefore performs the demiurgic task of reaching beyond the grave to limn an
accurate depiction of herself and the dwindling Carib population in her account.
Following Derridean thought, Eleana Deanda points out that ‘for any writing about
life […] writing about death is needed. […] “bios” intrinsically implies a “thanatos”
as counterbalance. Therefore, if there is a biography, there must be a thanatography;
if there is an autobiography, there must be an autothanatography” (7). In
formulating The Autobiography of My Mother, then, Kincaid contrives a form of life
writing that subsumes its converse form, thanatography, or what we can term ‘death
writing.’ Jacques Derrida argues in his essay ‘To Speculate – on Freud’ (1980) that
‘in its “overlapping” the fort:da leads autobiographical specularity into an
autothanatography that is in advance expropriated into heterography’ (561).
‘Heterography’ is a linguistic term often employed theoretically to describe the use
of a written language as opposed to the oral language of an ethnic group or tribe
belonging to a given cultural community. Therefore, Xuela eschews the traditional
Carib practice of the oral transference of cultural history and genealogy in favour of
a written chronicle, with the understanding that her compendium will in all
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likelihood outlast its subjects, the Carib people. In an interview by Ray Suarez,
Kincaid responds to a question regarding the Caribs and their absent presence within
contemporary Caribbean culture and pronounces, ‘they survive in the way of relics
and we needn’t pretend [otherwise]’ (‘Round Table of Caribbean Writers’).
Accordingly, the story of Xuela, herself a vestige of the disappearing Carib
population, will endure as a cultural relic which preserves her memory, itself
representative of the collective memory of her people.
Through the ‘fractured’ lens of Xuela’s subaltern consciousness, Kincaid
demonstrates the postcolonial intersubjectivity that overdetermines the existence of
the remaining Carib descendants in Dominica (Kincaid: 2012: n.p.). She utilises the
trope of prosopopoeia37 as a way of presencing the dead in the novel and illustrating
the ways in which their Carib ancestors also comprise part of this postcolonial
intersubjectivity. Hence, just as Xuela insists that her mother and her unborn
children speak through her, the voices of her forebears can also be heard in her
utterances. In this case, Kincaid’s use of prosopopoeia also functions as a haunting
device in the text, following Derrida’s theory of hauntology, which ‘supplants its
near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure
of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive’ (C.
Davis 373). Derrida’s axiom holds that the present exists only with respect to the
past; accordingly, Kincaid alludes to the spectre of colonialism which continues to
haunt the Caribbean. In the novel, this postcolonial intersubjectivity generates a
space of resistance in which Xuela is able to commune with her ancestors. The
37
‘Prosopopoeia’ is ‘a rhetorical device by which an imaginary, dead, or absent person is represented
as speaking or acting’ (OED Online).
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creation of this counter-hegemonic psychological space is necessitated by the
deleterious effects of colonial genocide. For instance, Xuela ponders:
Who are the Carib people? Or, more accurately, who were the Carib people?
For they were no more, they were extinct, a few hundred of them still living,
my mother had been one of them, they were the last survivors. They were
like living fossils, they belonged in a museum, on a shelf, enclosed in a glass
case. That these people, my mother’s people, were balanced precariously on
the edge of eternity, waiting to be swallowed up in the great yawn of
nothingness, was without doubt, but the most bitter part was that it was
through no fault of their own that they had lost, and lost in the most extreme
way; they had lost not just the right to be themselves, they had lost
themselves. This was my mother. (197-8)
Just as Xuela straddles the borderline of past and present in her postcolonial
narrative, her mother’s people, an entire race of Caribs, are ‘balanced precariously
at the edge of eternity.’ As one of their last remaining progeny, Kincaid depicts
Xuela as having one foot in each world – this one and the next. This allegorical
image portrays Xuela as the spectral figure of the indigenous subaltern, an
allegorical sign for the vanishing race of Caribs, ‘a people regarded as not real – the
shadow people, the forever humiliated, the forever low’ (Kincaid: 1996: 31).
V.
Colonial Genocide and the Extinction of Indigenous Caribbean Cultures
Although she is of mixed race, Xuela self-identifies as a Carib from a young
age and as a result, she experiences a lifelong sense of isolation and racial
difference. Her physical resemblance to her Carib mother also alienates her from
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the rest of the Afro-Caribbean community in Dominica. She feels the psychological
effects of a double consciousness early in life, starting in childhood when she enters
school and begins to perceive herself as her fellow schoolchildren and even her
Afro-Caribbean teacher view her. She recalls, ‘the Carib people had been defeated
and then exterminated, thrown away like the weeds in a garden; the African people
had been defeated but had survived. When they looked at me, they saw only the
Carib people. They were wrong but I did not tell them so’ (16). This revelatory
occurrence during her formative years imbues the young Xuela with an
overwhelming sensation of cultural estrangement. She laments, ‘I was lonely and
wished to see people in whose faces I could recognize something of myself.
Because who was I? My mother was dead’ (16). Xuela’s ontological confusion is a
byproduct of her detachment from her indigenous mother-culture, the connection to
which is severed at the very moment when her mother dies during childbirth.
Caroline Rody discusses the preoccupation with lost origins in Caribbean literature
and contends that ‘its fusion of rage and longing in this figure of an inadequate,
unremembering origin also illustrates the dilemma of Caribbean historiographic
desire’ (109). Rody asks, ‘Born of such a mother, what child could know or tell his
or her own history?’ (ibid.). Kincaid dramatises the ruinous effects of colonial
genocide and deculturation in her novel and indicates that for the Caribbean
indigene, ‘life, from its very beginning, is a mystery’ (Kincaid: 1996: 202). As
Xuela furiously exclaims, ‘Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even
you. And why not, why not!’ (ibid.)
Xuela undertakes the task of self-narration through an imaginative retelling
of her mother’s unstoried life. Like Xuela, her mother suffers the dual traumas of
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maternal and ancestral loss, and as Xuela contemplates the few known facts about
her mother’s tale, she feels ‘sad to know that such a life had to exist’ (201). Kincaid
declares that The Autobiography of My Mother is ‘about a woman who could be my
mother and so therefore could be me’ (Brady n.p.). This statement encapsulates the
intersubjectivity that characterises the colonised Caribbean psyche in the novel.
Xuela’s genealogy precisely mirrors Kincaid’s own lineage, and her character
therefore provides a conduit through which the author is able to articulate her own
anxiety of origins. In an interview by Selwyn Cudjoe, Kincaid marvels, ‘I can never
believe that the history of the West Indies happened the way it did [...] [in terms of]
the wreck and the ruin and the greed. It's almost on a monumental scale. It's worse
than Africa, really. The truth about it is that it erased actual groups of people –
groups of people vanished, just vanished’ (403-4). Kincaid cites the event of the
Columbian encounter as the moment of catalysis which led to the rapid decimation
of entire autochthonous populations. She asserts, ‘Twelve years after Christopher
Columbus landed in this part of the world, over a million of the people he found
living here were dead’ (Foreword to Babouk vii-viii). Indeed, John Bellamy Foster
further elucidates the staggering statistics:
At the time of Columbus’s first voyage in 1492 the Americas were the home
[...] of some 100 million people – compared to a European population of
only about 70 million (in 1500). Epidemics and the violence of the conquest
led to the rapid decimation of the indigenous Amerindian populations and to
the ‘demographic takeover’ of their land by peoples of European origin [...]
Within a century after 1492, the indigenous population had dropped by 90
percent. (14)
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In other words, due to this substantial demographic change, ‘the Caribs had joined
the ranks of the endangered species’ (DeLoughrey and Handley 106). Charles
Darwin discerns a more global historical pattern of colonial extermination in The
Voyage of the Beagle (1909), stating, ‘Wherever the European has trod, death seams
to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of
Good Hope, and Australia, and we see the same result’ (388). Kincaid portrays
Dominica as a colonial microcosm as a way of textually restaging the colonial and
historical processes that occurred across the world, and in Xuela she creates a
protagonist who embodies both the histories of ‘the victor and vanquished, who
meet in her very person’ (Braziel: 2009: 119).
The island of Dominica is not only a location with personal significance to
Kincaid, whose mother was born there, but it is also an important site with regard to
the history of colonialism. During Christopher Columbus’s second voyage to the
Caribbean in 1493, he ‘made landfall on the northern end of Dominica, and the
Lesser Antilles entered recorded history for the first time’ (Dyde 8). Additionally,
this voyage marked his first encounter with the Kalinago tribespeople, who later
became known more generally as the Caribs. Lennox Honychurch remarks:
It was the Europeans who first called these people the Caribs, for that is not
what they called themselves. While Christopher Columbus was still on his
first voyage he picked up the word, or something like it, from the Taínos of
the Greater Antilles. The earliest mention of the Caribs is that made by
Columbus in his journal on 26 November 1492. (20)
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Honychurch also observes the epistemological effects of this exertion of dominance
over the New World through the process of Adamic naming. He observes, ‘Once
the word [Carib] hit the printing presses of Europe and became common parlance,
the name “Carib,” like “Indian” and “West Indies,” even if based on a mistake, was
to remain forevermore’ (20). Similarly, Kincaid argues in her essay ‘To Name is to
Possess’ (1999) that ‘The naming of things is so crucial to possession – a spiritual
padlock with the key thrown irretrievably away – that it is a murder, an erasing’
(122). She goes on to explain that Columbus ‘discovers this new world. That it is
new only to him, that it had a substantial existence, physical and spiritual, before he
became aware of it, does not occur to him’ (146). The particular challenge for
writers from the archipelago, then, is to resist the silencing effects of colonial
legacies on the self-expression of native Caribbean peoples and cultures – a feat
which Kincaid achieves by positioning the Carib indigene Xuela as the narrator of
her own story.
Xuela asserts her autonomy through performative speech acts – in
discovering her own voice, she transfers agency from the hegemonic colonial power
to the domain of the colonised individual. Throughout much of post-Columbian
history, general knowledge of the Caribs was ‘based almost entirely on the written
reports of European observers’ (Honychurch 21). Similarly, Kelvin Smith contends,
‘Certainly, the literary and historic analysis of the [Caribbean] region’s indigeneity
shows the “Carib Indian” to have been a colonial construct, feeding into European
discourses of a monstrous Other’ and legitimating the genocidal actions ‘taken
against a supposed uncivilized savage’ (75). Xuela endeavours to speak in response
to colonialist acts of ‘racial genocide and racial vilification’ in an effort to enunciate
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her own subjectivity (Huggan and Tiffin 136). She acknowledges, ‘I had, through
the use of some words, changed my situation; I had perhaps even saved my life. To
speak of my own situation, to myself or to others, is something I would always do
thereafter’ (22). Xuela inhabits the space of marginality as a site of resistance to
cultural erasure and comprehends that by claiming her subaltern status, she can
attempt to speak not only for herself but also for the indigenous collectivity. She
witnesses ‘the crumbling of ancestral lines’ as a direct result of colonialist
annihilation of the Carib population and she recuperatively embraces the
marginalized identity of the Caribbean indigene in order to initiate a counterhegemonic discourse (Kincaid: 1996: 200).
VI.
Ecocide and Ecocentric-Anthropocentric Imbrication in the Caribbean
In her novel, Kincaid also addresses the ecological imperialism that was
exercised throughout the Caribbean region by European conquerors who subscribed
to theories of biological determinism.38 During the colonial period, Westerners
widely believed that practices such as colonial rule, the expropriation of land and
other resources, slavery and genocide were justified by biological determinism – the
notion that groups of people varied in their customs and beliefs, as well as in their
intelligence, due to innate biological differences. In the centuries following
Columbian contact, ‘environmental – and hence cultural – derangement’ occurred
‘on a vast scale,’ and such destructive changes were ‘premised on ontological and
epistemological differences’ between European and aboriginal ‘ideas of human and
animal being-in-the-world’ (Huggan and Tiffin 11). A pattern of hegemonic control
developed which involved ‘the coevolution of dominating nature and human beings
38
For more on biological determinism and colonialism see The Oxford Handbook of the History of
Eugenics (2010).
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through racially hierarchized “Natural Histories” of the colonial era’ (Braziel: 2005:
111). The radical changes wrought by empire resulted in a violent relandscaping of
the region as the peoples and ecosystems of the Caribbean periphery were treated as
appendages to the imperial centres. Consequently, Jana Evans Braziel argues that
Caribbean writers such as Kincaid ‘position the violence of genocide and ecocide as
intertwined,’ stating, ‘they thus unravel the interwoven genres of marked bodies and
marked territories, rethinking the conquest of land as imbricated in the colonization
of people and refiguring new genres, subjectivities, and conceptions of nature as
rhizomic’ (2005: 112). Accordingly, Kincaid demonstrates in her novel that ‘Carib
identity is tied to the relationship the community has to the land and space, as much
as to its perception of history’ (K. Smith 76). Xuela tells the story of the mutual
plight of Dominica, ‘a small island,’ and its indigenous peoples who, as the result of
a dual colonisation, ‘do not have a history’ and who are but ‘a small event in
someone else’s history’ (Kincaid: 1996: 167). The parallel inscription of human
bodies and bodies of land at the hands of the colonisers served to eradicate much of
their shared, precolonial history, which Xuela attempts to reclaim in her narrative.
Kincaid destabilizes the ecocentric/anthropocentric binary which structures
the contemporary political debate raging among ecocritics through her discussion of
human and ecological colonisation in the text (DeLoughrey and Handley 146). Her
novel reveals that the ecocentric and anthropocentric are in fact deeply imbricated
within the indigenous community of Dominica. For example, Xuela describes her
mother’s skin colour as that of ‘the Carib people’ – ‘brown, the deep orange of an
old sunset’ – an image which not only alludes to the ancient indigeneity of the Carib
people, but the brownness of her mother’s pigmentation also suggests a primordial
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bond with the earth (197). Xuela also notes the ‘purity’ of her mother’s complexion,
and the fact that it ‘was not the result of a fateful meeting between conqueror and
vanquished, sorrow and despair, vanity and humiliation; it was only itself, an
untroubled fact: she was of the Carib people’ (ibid.). From Xuela’s perspective, her
mother’s skin serves as evidence of her racial purity and an unadulterated
connection to the land, unlike her own skin, which is the product of miscegenation –
which she deems an ‘impure’ mixture of races. Following the colonial subjugation
of Dominica and its residents, the island no longer ‘officially’ belonged to the
vanquished native race, and their offspring lost the indigenous Carib claim to the
land. Braziel cites the Glissantian notion that ‘the “sacred” relation between nature
and “natives,” or territory and indigenous people, was abruptly severed by violent
and devastating, if not total, decimation’ (2005: 112). She goes on to posit that ‘the
first act of ecocide in the Caribbean archipelago was genocide, and the first victims
were the Taínos, Aruacs, and Caribs. The entangled histories of genocide and
ecocide destroy the possibility for genealogical and arboreal continuity of roots and
absolute rootedness’ (ibid.). Consequently, Xuela works to counter the effects of
deracination by reasserting the Carib claim to the Dominican land which is their
birthright.
In her tale, Xuela envisages restoring the Carib claim to the land – a feat
which appears to her in a nightly reverie. She recollects, ‘In a dream [...] I walked
through my inheritance, an island’ (89). She rejects her colonial disinheritance,
stating, ‘I dreamed of all the things that were mine’; thus consumed by a desire for
her lost mother-island of Dominica, she declares, ‘I claimed it in a dream’ (ibid.).
Nonetheless, she awakens ‘in the false paradise into which I was born, the false
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paradise in which I will die, the same landscape that I had always known, each
aspect of it beyond reproach, at once beautiful, ugly, humble, and proud; full of life,
full of death’ (32). The cruel reality of Xuela’s dispossession is a jarring departure
from the intrinsic connection to the island that she experiences in her dreams.
Kincaid employs this juxtaposition as a way of reading the unconscious desire for a
Caribbean motherland that afflicts the displaced indigenous populations. Her novel
thus represents an exercise in the cognitive remapping of Dominica as a postcolonial
space, as she charts the ontopology of the autochthonous people in addition to the
topography of their surroundings. In an interview entitled ‘The Landscape of
Dreams,’ (1991) Guyanese author Wilson Harris maintains:
The landscape is alive, it is a text in itself, it is a living text. And the
question is, how can one find, as an imaginative writer, another kind of
living text which corresponds to that living text. There is a dialogue there
between one’s internal being, one’s psyche, and the nature of place, the
landscape. There has to be some sort of bridge, which allows one to see all
sorts of relationships which one tends to eclipse, which one tends not to see
at all. (33)
Indeed, Kincaid affirms her interest in the relationship between the ontopological
and the natural landscape in a personal interview, stating, ‘The landscape in my
books […] is internal’ (2012: n.p.). In The Autobiography of My Mother, she aligns
the Caribs with their natural environment by depicting them as a people who were
‘thrown away like the weeds in a garden’ during the imperial relandscaping of the
archipelago (Kincaid: 1996: 16). In her novel Kincaid thus attempts to discursively
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replant the Caribs in their native Dominican soil in order to draw attention to their
originary culture, which has wilted under the harsh glare of colonialism that has
shone on the Caribbean region for centuries.
As Kincaid tracks Xuela’s physical and spiritual journey across the island
terrain within her text, each location is suffused with complex biographic
phenomena and the natural environment becomes an integral part of Xuela’s
remembrance of significant events. Christopher Tilley contends, ‘Human activities
become inscribed within a landscape such that every cliff, large tree, stream,
swampy area becomes a familiar place. Daily passages through the landscape
become biographic encounters for individuals […] All locales and landscapes are
therefore embedded in the social and individual times of memory’ (27). The novel’s
botanical trope serves to reinforce this connection between the natural world and
cultural memory, reappearing in Xuela’s reminiscences about her childhood as she
recalls that her ‘world then’ was ‘silent, soft, and vegetable-like in its vulnerability’
(17). She also emphasises that this world was ‘diurnal,’ as each day for the young
girl begins:
with the pale opening of light on the horizon each morning and end[s] with
the sudden onset of dark at the beginning of each night […] the harsh heat
that eventually became a part of me, like my blood; the overbearing trees
[…] I could tell them all apart by closing my eyes and listening to the sound
the leaves made when they rubbed together; and I loved that moment when
the white flowers form the cedar tree started to fall to the ground with a
silence that I could hear. (ibid.)
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In this passage Kincaid reaffirms the existence of a ‘formidable power latent in
Caribbean peoples’ connection to the natural world of their home’ (Rody 116).
However, her protagonist also recognises the urgency of grasping this power in
order to ensure the survival of her race. It is significant that Xuela likens her
mother’s appearance to an ‘old sunset,’ as she perceives that the sun is setting on the
time of the Carib people, whose presence in Dominica is rapidly waning as a
residual outcome of colonial violence (197). Consequently, she regards her mother
and her mother’s people ‘within this historical frame, even as she realizes that [it
equals] genocide’ (Braziel: 2009: 124).
VII.
The Dominican Mother (Island) and the Colonial Father
The Autobiography of My Mother is a text firmly rooted in Kincaid’s
Dominican motherland - like Xuela, her own mother was born there to a Carib
woman. Kincaid avers of the novel, ‘The spirit of it, the voice of it, is very much
my mother’s. And some of the incidents [such as] the father leaving, my mother
feeling orphaned by her own mother, very much influence the book’ (2012: n.p.). In
Xuela she depicts a protagonist who is orphaned by her mother’s passing and her
father’s subsequent abandonment, and spends much of her life wondering, ‘Who
was I? My mother was dead; I had not seen my father for a long time’ (1996: 16).
Xuela’s existential crisis in the novel represents ‘the psychocultural dislocations’ of
a postcolonial Caribbean existence as her Dominican mother-island dies while
giving birth to a lapsarian colonial landscape after being inseminated by the colonial
Father (Rody 108). Much of the narrative takes place during the early twentieth
century, when Dominica was still a British Crown Colony, which entailed rule by
proxy in the form of a governor who was appointed by the British monarchy.
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Therefore, the historical mother-island is always-already dead and absent while the
colonial Father, British patriarchal power, is also an absent presence through
absentee rule. Correspondingly, Xuela’s father remains an enigma throughout her
entire life – she often ponders, ‘Who was he? I ask myself this all the time, to this
day. Who was he?’ (39). She continues her lament, stating, ‘And so my mother and
father then were a mystery to me: one through death, the other through the maze of
living’ (41). A tall, Afro-Scottish man with red hair and grey eyes, Xuela’s father is
an imposing figure. Adding to this effect is his occupation as a policeman who
subtly abuses his power and causes the community undue suffering, making him
‘part of a whole way of life on the island which perpetuated pain’ (39). His
duplicitous manner of administering the law aligns him with the British colonisers:
‘A smiling man who appears trustworthy, he wears the mask of benign colonial
power that covers his pleasure in robbing and humiliating others to bolster his own
sense of importance’ (Bouson 126). Xuela also notes that her father ‘had inherited
the ghostly paleness’ of his Scottish father, and he therefore represents another
spectral form of colonialism that haunts the text, in addition to haunting Xuela’s life
(39). However, Xuela resists this (re)colonising patriarchal force, of which her
father is an embodiment, and instead looks to her late mother as a model for selfdefinition.
The matrifocality of the novel demonstrates Xuela’s introjection39 of an
imagined motherly identity within her unconscious. For instance, Dever argues that
the mother, who is the ‘site of ambivalence for the child in the convergence of
plenitude and the power to devastate, is not the only “split subject” of the
39
‘Introjection’ involves ‘the unconscious psychic process by which an individual incorporates the
characteristics of another person or group by whom one is anxious to be accepted’ (OED Online).
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developmental psychodrama; the child itself, split between future and past, mother
and father, introjects the division initially projected outward onto the mother figure’
(43). Nevertheless, ‘the primacy of the lost mother-daughter relationship’ is
discernible within the ‘narrative psyche’ as Xuela spends her entire lifetime
mourning this loss (Bouson 118). She often ruminates upon her grief, particularly at
twilight since it is ‘that time of day when all you have lost is heaviest in your mind:
your mother, if you have lost her; your home, if you have lost it’ (69). This
statement reveals the conflation of mother and mother-island in Xuela’s unconscious
due to her daughterly desire for reunion with her deceased (and consequently
phallic) mother and with an idealised precolonial Dominica. Citing Derek Walcott’s
poem ‘Lavantille,’ Rody conjectures: ‘If every child of the colonial and neocolonial
Caribbean is raised by a “mother country,” each is [also] a colonized child” whose
true parentage has been “disremembered” under the “amnesiac blow” of Caribbean
history’ (108). The phallic mother thus represents ‘the phantastic figure of
“completeness” in the mind of the child’ and ‘is the all-powerful, all-giving source
of life that embodies both mother and father’ (Dever 43). Xuela, a ‘colonised child’
of Dominica, attempts to narratively reconstruct her origins by centring her life
around the phallic mother or mother-object, which ‘produces retrospectively the
spectral phantasy of anterior fulfillment’ (ibid.). When Xuela grows into adulthood,
she moves ‘far away into the mountains, into the land where my mother and the
people she was of were born’ (206). It is there that she lives out the remainder of
her days in a failed attempt to return to an amniotic state of cohesion with her
ancestral motherland – until, at last, she is able to rejoin her biological mother in
death.
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VIII.
Conclusion
In The Autobiography of My Mother Kincaid penetrates the ontopological
tenebrity of the ‘border lives’ lived by the indigenous subaltern women of the
Caribbean (Bhabha: 1994: 1). She examines this group whom Xuela calls ‘the
shadow people’ – a historically decimated and disempowered population who linger
at the fringes of contemporary Caribbean society – and illuminates their existence
via her perspicacious multigenerational narrative (31). Through her depiction of
Xuela as allegorical sign for the nation of Dominica, Kincaid attempts cultural
regeneration through her exploration of generative matrilineal connections that
relate to both biological reproduction and socially productive capabilities. Her novel
reinforces Bhabha’s contention that, ‘It is in the emergence of the interstices – the
overlap and displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and
collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are
negotiated’ (1994: 2). Xuela reappropriates her colonially devalued maternal culture
and attempts to speak for the female subaltern collective of Dominica by recreating
her maternal past within her narrative. In inventing the tale of Xuela, a woman who
loses the connection to her mother (island) at birth, Kincaid actively participates in a
‘pan-ethnic contemporary project to recover a female past’ (Rody 127). For
example, Rody asserts:
When Caribbean women writers revise history, then, they tend to do so in
intimate plots that stress less the violated mother than the daughter’s violated
relationship with her mother, especially the separation of a mother and her
baby. By contrast, historical recovery tends to be figured in plots of reunion
with the mother; birthing and gestation metaphors predominate […] [Female
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protagonists] seek to repair inadequate experiences of mothering through
mythic union with the mother-island. (124)
Similarly, Martinican writer Édouard Glissant insists that Caribbean writers must
‘struggle in order to take root in our rightful land’ (1989: 161). However, he also
identifies the paradox inherent in such an endeavour, noting that, ‘The motherland is
also for us the inaccessible land’ (ibid.). The Caribbean motherland is inaccessible
to her children due to their ‘traumatic condition’ of ‘nonhistory’ which, Glissant
maintains, is a result of a strikethrough of ‘the collective memory’ (Rody 109,
Glissant: 1989: 61). He affirms that the history of the post-contact Caribbean ‘began
with a brutal dislocation’ and its ‘historical consciousness [...] came together in the
context of shock, contraction, painful negation, and explosive forces’ (Glissant: ibid:
62). Similarly to his female counterparts such as Kincaid, Glissant employs birthing
metaphors in order to describe the violent naissance of the New World and to
convey the primal rupture that begat its splintered post-traumatic historical
consciousness.
In her novel Kincaid mourns the irrevocable loss of the prelapsarian
Caribbean mother-island which perishes in the act of bearing its children into a
fallen imperial world. As Xuela discerns, ‘My mother had died when I was born,
unable to protect herself in a world cruel beyond ordinary imagining, unable to
protect me’ (210). Conflating mother and mother-island, Kincaid formulates a
complex maternal matrix as the violated, feminised landscape itself becomes a
mother figure in the text. Rody observes of Caribbean women writers in particular,
‘one finds in their literature very little impulse to denaturalize the mother, to
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separate land and woman’ (123). Kincaid’s text therefore represents a contribution
to ‘the literature of Caribbean women’s history, and of their historically traumatized
maternity’ (ibid. 127). She foregrounds maternity throughout her fictional oeuvre,
and in this particular book she includes the island environment as a motherized
figure whose death haunts Carib cultural memory. Xuela explains the reason for the
Caribs’ cultural retention of their lost mother-island, stating: ‘For history was not
only the past: it was the past and it was also the present’ (138-9). From Xuela’s
viewpoint, ‘there are many wrongs that nothing can ever make right’ for the people
of Dominica, and she thus perceives that ‘the past in the world as I know it is
irreversible’ (209). The ‘traumatic disruptions of the mother-daughter relationship’
in Kincaid’s text therefore ‘carry the emotional weight of a psychologically difficult
inheritance’ (Rody 121). Accordingly, ‘in her first venture into the historical
imagination, The Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid returns to the island and to
the mother’s life, reuniting daughter and mother in the tightest knit yet – as
suggested by her paradoxical title – and giving the progress of her oeuvre a
remarkably circular aspect’ (ibid. 127). Kincaid explores a complicated Caribbean
matrilineage in her novel, portraying the conquered mother-island as a central
character whose death is the source of her daughter’s agonistic relationship to her
maternal past. Xuela commemorates this death in her autothanatography, along with
the death of her biological mother and her mother’s people, recording their legacies
in order to preserve them in the face of annihilative History.
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Chapter III
Cycles and Cyclones: Violence, Memory and Displacement in Gisèle Pineau’s
Macadam Dreams
I.
Introduction
In her novel L’espérance-macadam (1995), translated into English as
Macadam Dreams (2003), Guadeloupean writer Gisèle Pineau investigates the AfroCaribbean diasporic condition and its overdetermining sense of ontopological
displacement. Pineau’s imaging of the Caribbean in this text indicates that it is a
problematical region to delineate culturally because, in the words of C. L. R. James,
it is ‘“in but not of the West”’ (cited in Hall: 1996: 246). This (dis)locationality of
the archipelago renders it what Martinican writer Édouard Glissant calls ‘the other
America’ – a space of alterity that exists in juxtaposition to the hegemonic
neoimperial landscape of the United States and its totalising sameness (1989:4).
Jacques Derrida defines ‘ontopology’ as ‘an axiomatics linking indissociably the
ontological value of present-being [on] to its situation, to the stable and presentable
determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general’ –
in other words, it is a form of consciousness that is shaped by place (1994: 82). His
neoterism is especially pertinent to a discussion of African diasporic experience, as
it is a condition marked by an unstable and unpresentable determination of locality –
a displaced ontopology. Correspondingly, in her narrative Pineau investigates the
interlinked psychological phenomena of dislocated ontopology and repetition
compulsion within the Afro-Caribbean context. Pineau’s novel seems to suggest
that the majority of Guadeloupeans respond to their collective sense of
ontopological displacement by yielding to a repetition compulsion which impels
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them to repeat destructive historical cycles rather than reconcile themselves to their
history of dislocation, which prevents them from moving forward and finding new,
restorative modes of belonging.
Macadam Dreams is set on the island of Guadeloupe, a former French
colony in the Lesser Antilles that, in 1946, became a D.O.M., or département
d’outre-mer, which translates as ‘overseas department.’ This political status means
that Guadeloupeans are officially recognised as French citizens and are therefore
subject to the same laws and regulations as the inhabitants of the metropole.
However, as the novel’s protagonist Eliette ponders, ‘even if Papa De Gaulle had
eradicated the word colony from the maps of the world, elevated Guadeloupe and its
dependencies to the rank of a French overseas département, she understood quite
clearly that this gratification alone could not fill one’s belly’ (101). Despite an
administrative change that supposedly ameliorated Guadeloupe’s political standing,
France retained sovereignty by instituting a neocolonial extension of governmental
dependency and exteriorization. Eliette locates this governmental insufficiency on a
physiological level – ‘this gratification alone could not fill one’s belly’ – and she
alludes to the widespread poverty and hunger in Guadeloupe due to mass
unemployment and socioeconomic decline. She and her fellow Guadeloupeans no
longer feel ‘France’s maternal affection’ while they find themselves surrounded by
‘ruin and sorrow,’ ‘starvation’ and ‘disease’ (ibid. 90).
II.
Hurricanes and Humanity
The advent of colonialism marked a rupture in the linear historiographical
narratives which constitute national representation, creating what Homi Bhabha
terms ‘disjunctive temporalities’ within national culture (1994: 299). Bhabha asserts
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that national culture is articulated ‘as a dialectic of various temporalities – modern,
colonial, postcolonial, “native” – that cannot be a knowledge that is stabilized in its
enunciation’ (ibid. 303). In Macadam Dreams Pineau seems to suggest that this
rupture also engendered within Guadeloupe an ostensibly interminable cycle of
violence that is evident of a kind of repetition compulsion. This Freudian concept
denotes a psychological phenomenon in which a subject continually replicates a
traumatic event from earlier life, or its surrounding circumstances.40 Such behaviour
can include re-enacting the event or placing oneself in situations where the event is
likely to recur. This ‘reliving’ of the past can also take the form of dreams and
hallucinations in which repressed memories and emotions associated with the event
are experienced again. The term ‘repetition compulsion’ can apply to either specific
repetitive behaviours or, more broadly, to general life patterns. The subject will
continue to repeat these actions or situations in an effort to either somehow ‘fix’
them or find pleasure in them. As a result of the repeated violent colonial
encounters that occurred throughout Guadeloupe’s history,41 Pineau indicates that its
people yield to the compulsion to repeat this pattern of violence, which supplants the
compulsion to work through the complex legacy of historical violence in order to
learn from it. She therefore uses the circular image of a hurricane as a structuring
motif in her novel in order to replicate the cyclical behaviour that is demonstrative
of the repetition compulsion. Pineau states, ‘I wanted to bring to life the forces of
nature, their violence, and the violence of human beings. I wanted to evoke the
40
See Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’ (1914).
Guadeloupe was ‘discovered’ by Christopher Columbus in 1493 and settled by the French in 1635.
The island was originally occupied by Caribs, whose population was swiftly decimated by the French
colonisers. Guadeloupe was annexed to the kingdom of France in 1674 and, over the next several
centuries, was seized multiple times by Great Britain. From 1810-1816, the island was occupied by
the British, who ceded it to Sweden in 1813 for a brief period of fifteen months. Sweden ultimately
ceded Guadeloupe to France, which has retained control of the island since 1815.
41
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whirling winds of the cyclones through a circular construction that grows denser and
denser until you see the father commit this act of violence’ (Veldwachter and Pineau
181). Here she refers to the brutal act of incest, which repeats itself in the text
among two separate families, suggesting that displaced violence has become
endemic in the shantytown community. The novel therefore plays cycles of
interpersonal and intimate violence against larger, meteorological and politicohistorical cycles in order to illustrate their interconnectedness within the island
space, as well as their contribution to an overriding sense of ontopological
displacement within psychological space.
The modern Caribbean was born out of violence, and the collective memory
of the Caribbean people serves as a repository of repressed ancestral memories of
atrocities experienced throughout history. More specifically, with regard to the
black Caribbean communities, Pineau demonstrates the ways in which her
characters dually repress memories of the iniquities of colonialism and slavery, and
consequently succumb to the violent urge of a repetition compulsion. Macadam
Dreams centres on the story of Eliette, an aging widow who lives in the fictional
Guadeloupean shantytown of Savane. From the perceived shelter of her cabin, she
passively observes the daily rituals of violence that take place within her
community. She seeks only peace, and tells herself to:
Not get her life mixed up in the turmoil of Savane. Not let her mind color
the sounds, build cathedrals of pain in her heart. Eyes and ears shut, she
struggled to keep the sorrow of others at bay. Life outside was a clatter of
hard luck and ‘God have pity on us brothers!’ Sorrow always tried to catch
up with her [...] So much suffering all around. (2)
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From the safety of her porch, Eliette beholds the propensity for violence that
overcomes the people of Savane and causes their persistent state of crisis. She
witnesses their ceaseless machinations and the subsequent ruthless murders, rapes,
and instances of physical and sexual abuse, without ever mentioning a word of it to
anyone. Her refusal to speak about these violent acts stems from a traumatic
childhood experience, when her family’s cabin was destroyed by the San Felipe II
Hurricane of 1928, also known as the Okeechobee Hurricane. The Category 4
storm, simply referred to in the novel as the ‘Cyclone of ‘28,’ made a near-direct hit
on Guadeloupe with little warning to its residents, killing at least six hundred people
and causing extensive damage.42 As the storm is receding in the novel, the tail of
the cyclone loosens a rafter beam that slices through eight-year-old Eliette’s
abdomen, nearly rending her in two. The belly wound injures her reproductive
organs irreparably, leaving her incapable of bearing children in the future. As a
result of related psychological trauma, she is also stricken dumb and is unable to
speak for three full years.
Eliette’s speech is not the only faculty affected by her psychological distress
– she also loses memory of the events that took place surrounding the cyclone. She
reluctantly acknowledges this fact: ‘No, the truth is, Eliette didn’t remember a thing.
It was her mama who had always told her about the night when Guadeloupe had
capsized in the cyclone and been smashed to bits. She called that nightmare the
Passage of the Beast. And to better burn the story into Eliette’s mind, she was
constantly rehashing the memory’ (88). Eliette represses her own traumatic
42
See David Longshore’s Encyclopedia of Hurricanes, Typhoons, and Cyclones (2008).
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memories of that night; thus her ‘recollections’ surrounding the hurricane are in fact
those belonging to her mother, Séraphine. Her perception of reality is utterly
distorted by the insistent words of her ‘poor mama’ who is driven mad ‘from having
endlessly gone over those same sequences of the night Cyclone passed’ (154, 89).
Séraphine talks about the cyclone of 1928 every day for the remainder of her short
life before dying of dementia, ‘lost to madness at such a young age, barely forty’
(102). Her mother’s frantic tales serve a didactic function for Eliette: ‘From these
terrifying stories, Eliette knew of all the hardships and indignities endured by
Guadeloupe, its dependencies, its neighboring and distant islands: Haiti, Puerto
Rico, the Bahamas’ (88). In this novel Pineau depicts the history of the Caribbean
archipelago as one which is marked by instances of violence, disaster and collective
suffering.
Following the devastating 1928 hurricane, Eliette spends the next sixty years
of her life as a recluse, maintaining that ‘the cyclone had made her like this,
cowardly, indifferent, weak, and inactive’ (88). During this entire period, she
befriends only one person – her next-door neighbour Rosette, whom she refers to as
‘my fine neighbor friend’ (21). Eliette strives to keep her neighbours at arm’s length
throughout the novel since she does not want to know the intimate details of the
secret lives she that she sees them living from her rocking chair. However, Rosette
is persistent in her efforts to socialize with Eliette because ‘it ruffle[s] her to hear the
silence coming from [her] cabin’ (21). She makes frequent visits to check in on the
elderly woman, coming over to sit with Eliette in her cabin and ‘dust off the
loneliness’ (22). Like Eliette, Rosette deplores the current state of Savane, and
laments that it is a place where ‘people kill dreams’ (22). Both women claim that
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they must ‘force themselves to live there’ since they have inherited cabins from
deceased relatives who helped to found the shantytown (ibid.). Rather than
physically fleeing their situation, the women attempt to ‘escape’ by fantasizing
about the return to a better way of life in Savane. Thus, Pineau writes that they fall
prey to ‘the apathy that pervade[s] everything’ in the shantytown ‘like in a
conquered land’ (164). The colonial resonance in her description of Savane is
palpable here, and exposes the long-term socio-historical effects of colonialism
which have proven to be trenchant within the Caribbean. Eliette and Rosette,
women a generation apart, both experience a sense of ontopological displacement
and yearn for an imaginary, prelapsarian Guadeloupe that they believe existed
before the onset of colonialism. As a way of coping with the traumatic ancestral
memory of colonial violence, they submit to the repetition compulsion and
obstinately remain in Savane, where they relive the effects of colonialism on a daily
basis with the hope that they can in some way ‘fix’ their situation.
The narrative takes place during the year 1989, when yet another
cataclysmic hurricane crashes ashore and into Eliette’s life, churning up buried
fragments of her memory. In September of that year, Category 4 Hurricane Hugo
made a direct landfall on Guadeloupe, where it devastated crops and levelled entire
cities, killing at least twelve people and leaving another twelve thousand homeless.
The total damage was estimated to be an astounding 4 billion francs or $880 million
(1989 USD) (Longshore 227). The approach of the hurricane in the novel portends
the horrific revelation that Rosette’s husband, Rosan, has been carrying out an
incestuous relationship with their teenage daughter Angela for several years. Eliette
recognizes a terrible, faraway look in Rosette’s eyes when she goes to call on her
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after learning of the news. Like Eliette’s crazed mother, Séraphine, who ‘sat staring
out at some other world beyond the horizon’ following the events surrounding the
cyclone of 1928, Rosette’s wild eyes ‘drifted far away, far beyond Savane, far from
the black people and their accursement’ (89, 175). Looking upon her, Eliette feels a
dreadful sense of foreboding as she perceives that Rosette is overcome by a familiar
madness. She takes Angela into her care and the two flee the ramshackle shanties of
Savane for the protection of Eliette’s godmother Anoncia’s concrete house in the
town of La Pointe. Once there, the rampaging storm terrorizes Eliette, threatening to
tear loose ‘all of the fears she’d stored up inside’ that had ‘kept her a prisoner in the
dark corridors of her childhood’ (165). In the face of Hugo’s apocalyptic fury, she
confronts her godmother, demanding that she reveal the truth about obscured
memories of the events surrounding the San Felipe II Hurricane. Eliette wants to
hear ‘what she already kn[ows]. Everything, she wanted to hear it all from the lips
of a living being. She was entitled to that much. Relive it all, so she might finally
get out from under that rafter that had crushed her life’ (195). After much
pressuring, Anoncia finally discloses that her brother, Eliette’s father, whom
Anoncia’s mother nicknamed ‘Ti-Cyclone,’ or ‘Little Cyclone,’ when they were
children, is the ‘face of the Beast’ which Eliette sees carved into the rafter that
penetrates her belly at the age of eight (212). In recounting the story of the 1928
hurricane to Eliette, a traumatized Séraphine conflates the distressing events of the
cyclone and her husband’s rape of their daughter so that the two become a combined
destructive force that severely damages Eliette’s body and mind.
Pineau portrays Eliette’s elusive father as the scourge of Savane, a shadowy
figure who haunts the town and ‘dirtie[s] God knows how many women’ (193).
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Dennis Altman posits that in postcolonial settings, it can sometimes be the case that
‘young men who feel powerless and marginalized in a world of rapid change will
turn to violence,’ and rape ‘becomes a way of symbolically reasserting their
masculine identity’ (cited in DeLoughrey and Handley 280-1). Eliette’s father
represents this type of hypermasculine young man who resorts to inflicting acts of
sexual violence, even upon his own family members. Rosette describes him as ‘a
heap of things to be reproached for, a load of accursement that he stuck under his
floppy felt hat’ (192). Pineau conceptualizes the character of Eliette’s father as an
embodiment of the rapacious desire for violence that consumes the community of
Savane. This desire replaces the impulse to remember earlier instances of violence –
this phenomenon is evinced by the fact that Eliette’s father represses the memory of
his treachery after an enraged Séraphine drives him away from their home. Pineau
writes, ‘When his sister Anoncia had spat in his face, he hadn’t understood. No he
didn’t think of himself as all that bad. And he’d even forgotten Séraphine and her
little Eliette as he grew older’ (208). Eliette’s father also remains nameless
throughout the book, as does the ‘cyclone of ’28,’ or ‘the Beast,’ which ‘[gets] into
him’ as the repetition compulsion possesses Eliette’s father and he forcibly takes his
own daughter in the night (168). Pineau evokes an atmosphere of anonymity which
envelops the harsh environment of the shantytown, where rape and incest are
nameless crimes committed daily against countless women, often going unreported.
Like Eliette’s father, the perpetrators rarely see the inside of a jail cell as many of
them are relatives or close acquaintances of the victims, who are hesitant to accuse
them publicly for fear of retaliation or bringing shame upon themselves or their
families.
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In an interview with Pineau, Valérie Loichot asks the author whether ‘the
devastation caused by forces of nature’ across the Guadeloupean landscape is also
‘linked to individual trauma’ within Macadam Dreams (331). Pineau responds,
‘Absolutely. For me, the hurricane jump[s] on the island like someone who rapes,
who wants to annihilate everything’ (ibid.). Through Séraphine’s conflation of the
San Felipe II Hurricane and her husband’s rape of their young child, Pineau
illustrates the connection between the ways that the recurring cycles of hurricanes in
Guadeloupe ravage not only the environment but also the lives and psychology of its
people. For instance, Séraphine tells Eliette:
The foul Beast wanted it all. Cursed Cyclone! Wanted it all: the tall trees,
the fruit, the flowers, the young saplings, the buds, and even the seeds that
had just been put in the ground. Everything, the voracious killer! Wanted to
destroy it all. Crush, trample, tear everything up. We never seen a cyclone
like that since. Came just for you. (169)
The images in this passage underscore the hurricane’s destruction of the
reproductive elements that exist within nature – ‘fruit,’ ‘flowers,’ and ‘seeds’ – in
addition to the visible examples of fecundity – ‘tall trees,’ ‘young saplings,’ and
‘buds.’ Pineau thereby conveys the ways in which the relentless hurricanes
continually raze the natural landscape, eliminating any growth that may occur. This
imagery also metaphorizes the inhibitive effect that the Caribbean meteorological
cycle has on the socioeconomic and psychological development of the people within
the region. Although Séraphine refers to the 1928 storm in this excerpt, this type of
environmental damage is typical of every severe hurricane that hits the Lesser
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Antilles – particularly Guadeloupe. The island’s position between latitudes 16 and
17 degrees North makes it ‘greatly susceptible to those mid- to late-season tropical
cyclones that, after travelling west with the North Atlantic trade winds, arrive on the
shores of the eastern Caribbean Sea as major Category 3 or 4 systems capable of
causing enormous damage and loss of life’ (Longshore 227). For example, Pineau
was in Guadeloupe during Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and she recalls that ‘the entire
landscape was devastated – all the trees were broken’ (Loichot and Pineau 331).
The novel’s depiction of trees that have lost their limbs reflects the San Felipe II
Hurricane’s ‘dismembering’ of Guadeloupe, as well as its maiming of the tale’s
protagonist (Pineau: 2003: 3). Moreover, the 1928 cyclone also renders Eliette
infertile, and ‘all her life’ she is ‘nothing better than a stale flower bearing no
promise of fruit’ (59). The novel therefore draws attention to the different
reproductive cycles – both sexual and social – that are impaired by the unrelenting,
violent cycles of hurricanes and rape in Guadeloupe.
Pineau’s comment likening tropical hurricanes to rapists serves to
problematize issues of human agency as well as structures of dominance within
Macadam Dreams. She complicates its stories of misfortune by considering the
ways in which calamitous cycles are embedded in the actions of individuals and not
solely in meteorological phenomena. This perspicacious vision of life in
Guadeloupe reveals its deeply imbricated positive and negative human and
meteorological cycles. For example, the conflation of the 1928 cyclone and Eliette’s
rape within the narrative produces the intentional effect of gendering hurricanes, and
depicts them as masculinised forces of destruction. The two major storms that
Pineau chooses to feature in the novel both have male appellations – first the San
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Felipe Hurricane of 1928, so called because it made landfall on the Christian feast
day of Saint Philip, and Hurricane Hugo in 1989. As a counterpoint, she limns the
island as a feminised space – the lexeme is feminine in her native French – ‘La
Guadeloupe.’ The text superimposes the violated black female body onto the
Guadeloupean landscape, which also experiences a figurative cycle of rape by
means of the repeated onslaught of devastating cyclones. Pineau explains her
objective in utilising this metaphorical technique:
L'espérance -macadam relates the violence that is done to women and girls.
I have met many people who were victims of incest and it is an injury about
which, as a woman, I couldn't keep silent. I wrote L'espérance to show the
human being in this violence, bounced around like a canoe at sea, wounded
by the hurricanes, like an island, like Guadeloupe. (Veldwachter and Pineau
181)
Pineau uses the trope of corporeal rape as an authorial compass which enables her to
map the ontopology of ‘this devastated-trampled land’ within her narrative (Pineau:
2003: 90). She aligns the female characters in the novel with the feminised
environment in order to elucidate this complex and inextricable connection.
Through the cyclone parallel Pineau also addresses the imperial despoliation
of Guadeloupe that occurred throughout several centuries of its history. She
tropologizes the ‘rape’ of an occupied land by the imperium as a way of reinforcing
the rhetorical image of the island landscape as a violated, feminised space. Due to
repeated incursions on the part of the French and British Empires, as well as the
Swedish Empire for a brief interlude, the Guadeloupean landscape was continually
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reinscribed, which drastically altered its topography, history and demography.
Acting on the terra nullius principle of the era, the European imperialists invaded
and warred over the ‘empty land’ of the Caribbean islands that would produce their
lucrative crops, and performed a palimpsestic revision of the environment. The
imperial world powers exercised extensive geopolitical hegemony, aggressively
defacing the Caribbean terrain and rendering it completely unrecognizable in
comparison to its precolonial state. The modern Caribbean is therefore ‘a fractured
space in which the “natural” relationship between people and their environment [has
been] wrenched apart, not only by the brutalities of the plantation system, but also
by the moment of “Discovery” and the sickening violence it brought in its wake’
(Huggan and Tiffin 116). In her novel, Pineau negotiates the residual effects of this
violent ‘double fracture’ that are embedded within the collective psyche of
Guadeloupeans, particularly among the black communities (ibid.). For instance,
Rosette reflects on this issue and concludes, ‘No, nothing had changed since the first
blacks from Africa had been unloaded in this land that breeds nothing but cyclones,
this violent land where so much malediction weighs upon the men and women of all
nations’ (172). Here Pineau suggests that the recurring, cyclonic effect of
colonialism exists in Guadeloupe in a Bhabhaesque ‘double and split time’43 in that
the island’s inhabitants were repeatedly subjugated by different imperial authorities
throughout history and this colonial past engendered destructive patterns of violence
that continue to plague the population today.
Pineau depicts the contemporary Caribbean shantytown as the space of the
dispossessed peoples whose ancestors were a by-product of imperial capitalist
43
See Bhabha’s ‘DissemiNation’ (1990), page 295.
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expansionism. Throughout history ‘the Antillean relationship to the land, to the
Caribbean soil, has always been one of dispossession. Transported to the Antilles in
order to work the land, that land has never been theirs, it has always been “à
l’autre”’44 (Haigh 110). Members of the black communities in Guadeloupe inhabit
a land ‘seeded with nasty memories’ of their forebears labouring under the yoke of
slavery, ceaselessly tilling the earth and harvesting crops that were subsequently
consumed by the white metropolitans (Pineau: 2003: 94). As a result of this
conflictual relationship with the land, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin contend in
Postcolonial Ecocriticism (2010) that:
Modern Caribbean writing involves a history of ecological reclamation –
less a history that seeks to compensate for irrecoverable loss and
dispossession than a history re-won. As the term ‘ecology’ suggests, this is
a history of place as much as it is a history of people, and Caribbean writers
have played a major role in re-establishing it, both for their kinsfolk and
themselves. (111)
In her text Pineau examines the complicated relationship that has emerged between
the Guadeloupean landscape and the national psyche following its colonisation.
Rather than resignedly dwelling on the negative ecological impact of the island’s
colonial past, she taps into the cultural richness of her contemporary surroundings as
a source of creative sustenance. Once again connecting the topological to the
psychosomatic she acknowledges, ‘True, the environment is different [as a result of
its history] but I feed on that environment, on Creole culture, to nourish my texts’
44
Meaning, it has always ‘belonged to the Other.’
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(Loichot and Pineau 334). The creolisation of the environment that transpired as a
corollary of colonisation provides a means for Caribbean authors such as Pineau to
promote the communal repossession of history within their writings.
III.
Rastas and Recovering History
In Macadam Dreams, Pineau indicates that efforts by black Guadeloupeans
to recover their history are often fraught with difficulties due to a psychological
impasse that occurs when they attempt to replicate history rather than re-establish it.
The novel speaks to this predicament through the focalizing characters Eliette and
Rosette, who linger in Savane in a state of perpetual reverie. They obsessively
reinvent the past, imaginatively altering their history in order to obscure the truth.
Pineau explains the psychology behind their behaviour, asserting, ‘Our ancestors
lived that past of slavery that cannot be changed. We have inherited many of their
sorrows and sufferings that do not disappear. Today still, we are haunted by that
violence because our ancestors were denied their humanity’ (Veldwachter and
Pineau 182-3). Nevertheless, she also points out that ‘as living human beings […]
we cannot live in the past’ (ibid. 183). Eliette and Rosette represent impoverished
women who live in the immiserated conditions of the Caribbean shantytown space
and long to escape the ingrained cultural memory of slavery. Such behaviour proves
to be paradoxical, however, as they remain enslaved by not only their past but also
by the obsessional effects of the repetition compulsion.
Eliette and Rosette wish to return to an idyllic, imaginary homeland within
Guadeloupe that is nowhere to be found in their neocolonial reality. In her
daydreams Eliette revisits the Savane of her childhood, which she remembers as a
pastoral idyll of open countryside uncorrupted by ‘civilisation.’ Her stepfather Joab
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leads their family to this spot where they settle and build its first cabin, which is the
very same one that Eliette inherits after his passing. Séraphine tries to dispel the
myth of early Savane’s putatively Edenic nature and tells Eliette, ‘Joab was a decent
man, but his paradise was really a sort of hell. Wasn’t a single cabin anywhere
around. Savane had been abandoned’ (95). Nonetheless, Eliette wilfully adheres to
her quixotic impression of Savane despite her mother’s persistent dismissal of the
idea. It is only much later in life, following the ruination caused by Hurricane Hugo,
when an elderly Eliette admits to herself that ‘Joab’s paradise was nothing but
desolation now’ (23). Similarly, at first ‘Savane seem[s] like a Garden of Eden’ to
the new arrival Rosette, who also inherits ownership of a cabin following the death
of a relative (Pineau: 2003: 85). She finds the settlement paradisiacal ‘even if the
cabins [are] crowded around a potholed road that fray[s] out, farther down, into a
multitude of thin corridors snaking through the chaos of sheet metal and boards’
(ibid.). Contemplating the fate of blacks in the Caribbean, Rosette subsequently
‘understands that the paradise they had presumably inherited was nowhere near
Savane’ (132). Both women come to realize that an earthly Paradise is unattainable
and that in becoming heirs to a cabin in Savane they have not avoided the
burdensome sense of dislocation that is also the inheritance of the black population
in the Caribbean.
Eliette and Rosette initially subscribe to the notion of a Caribbean paradise –
a myth that was originated by early Western explorers in order to justify imperialist
discourse and praxis. In The Other America (1998) J. Michael Dash examines ‘this
susceptibility of the New World and the Caribbean in particular to mythmaking’ and
observes the ways in which the troping of paradise serves as a controlling metaphor
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designed to conceal reality (24). He applies the principle that ‘objective truth is
always subject to discursive practice’ and determines that ‘a tropicalist discourse’
evolved during the Age of Exploration (22, 17). This discourse, propagated by the
imperialists, ‘generated stereotypes of pristine, premodern worlds’ and resulted in
‘the idealization of landscape’ in the New World (22). Accordingly, Dash
interrogates their conceptualization of ‘the New World as a fictive space’ and argues
that ‘what Columbus did on encountering the New World is “invent” it in terms of
his geographical knowledge, the travel writing he had read, and, perhaps more
importantly, his own fantasy, to which he tenaciously clung despite all evidence to
the contrary’ (ibid.). Dash adduces Edmundo O’ Gorman’s study The Invention of
America (1961), which alleges that the Americas were ‘“the result of an inspired
invention of Western thought,”’ and concurs that the meaning ascribed to place is
culturally generated (cited in Dash: 1998: 21). The invocation of this cultural
significance of place became a fundamental aspect of the indoctrination of the
colonial subject, who was forced to submit to imperial ideologies as part of the
process of subjugation.
Pursuant to the ‘discovery’ of Guadeloupe by Columbus and its subsequent
settlement by the French, the European imperia systematically inculcated imperialist
discourse within the island territory. Pineau indicates that this discourse includes
imaging the Caribbean as an underdetermined space which allows for the imperial
construction of ‘paradise.’ Such imperialist rhetoric functions as a controlling
mechanism by obfuscating the violent reality of not only the region’s colonial past
but also that of its current socioeconomic crisis. Séraphine cautions Eliette against
believing such a fallacy, proclaiming, ‘No, the Good Lord don’t love black people,
133
would never do them the slightest good turn in heaven or on earth, and all those
stories of Paradise [...] are just so much nonsense dished out by white possessors,
who’re only trying to pull the wool over black folks eyes’ (90). Thus, in the novel
the troping of paradise operates as an ironic motif which responds to the
circumstances of neocolonialism in Guadeloupe. Pineau and other Caribbean
writers work to reclaim their history by:
rejecting the terms that had previously been imposed on them, or by adapting
them in such a way as to discard their assumptions of superiority [...] One
form this has taken is the rejection of the Caribbean ‘island paradise’, that
tiresome trope that has historically over-determined European aesthetic
appreciation of the Caribbean. (Huggan and Tiffin 111)
Pineau deconstructs the Western imaginary of tropical paradise in order to challenge
France’s continued subjugation of its Caribbean territories. Toward the novel’s
conclusion, Eliette and Rosette eventually become disillusioned with the ideological
oppression that is enforced by the Hexagon and recognize its hegemonic cycle of
mystification, which continually reproduces conditions of dispossession within its
Caribbean departments.
Earlier in the tale, Rosette attempts to break free from the emotional fetters
of her situation in Savane by traversing Nèfles Bridge to join the Rastafarians who
have established a colony of their own on Morne Caraïbe, a mountain on the
outskirts of the shantytown. Guided by their leader, a woman named Sister Beloved,
they relocate to the mountains ‘in quest of paradise on earth’ and Rosette goes to
meet them, believing that she too will find paradise there (Pineau 7). Once outside
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Savane, Rosette recalls, ‘I felt free. Liberated from the life that wasn’t going
according to my dreams’ (123). She joins the Rasta tribe who congregate on the
mornes in order to practice their religion and its lifestyle freely, away from the
condemnatory gaze of the townspeople. The Rastafari religious movement is of
Jamaican origin and holds that the displaced black population are God’s chosen
people mentioned within the Bible, and they are awaiting deliverance from exile and
oppression via the return to a divinely promised African homeland. Rosette’s
journey over the bridge is therefore symbolic of a kind of spiritual crossing, from the
violent darkness of Savane into the peaceful light of ‘Jah’ (the Rastafarian term for
God) that seemingly dwells among the Rasta commune. She partakes in their use of
ganja (marijuana) as a religious ritual, believing as they do that it provides spiritual
illumination. The Rastas in the novel ‘seek neither bread nor job because they feed
on an herb that gives them light, opens the gates to paradise, and beats the drums of
love and the dream country in Africa that had been founded across the seas’ (7).
Rosette experiences a moment of genuine clarity when she returns home
after spending significant time in the company of the Rastas and comprehends that
they are in fact creating an illusory paradise out on the mornes. After the
hallucinatory effect of the ganja subsides, she discerns the precariousness of the
tribe’s position as they are living in exile at the perimeters of civilisation in an
induced state of delusion. Regarding them anew, she easily identifies:
the mouthful of recited psalms that barely masked vast zones of ignorance.
Sobered, suddenly seeing the shoddy imitation of paradise that was thrown
up each day on the other side of the bridge, Rosette gradually shied away,
believing she’d been put under a spell, bewitched by the long string of
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citations from the Gospel, the rancid coconut oil, and the infusions of ganja
tea. (132)
She senses that ‘the mirage of the alleged wisdom’ of Rastafari ‘suddenly [leads] to
a vast emptiness’ and discerns that the Rastas are ‘as lost as she [is], hiding behind
the prophetic sermons of the grand shepherdess’ (131). Sister Beloved’s followers
are unable to subsist on their meagre diet of ganja tea, breadfruit and falsehoods and
they are slowly dying of starvation. Rosette observes that ‘Beloved’s raw bones
[are] a pitiful sight’ and ‘her flaccid breasts [hang] down pathetically on her
stomach’ (126). The striking image of Sister Beloved’s emaciated upper body with
its wilted breasts emerges in this passage like a grotesquely distorted figurehead on a
ship that has been long lost at sea. This is a particularly apposite metaphor for the
ontopologically adrift people of Guadeloupe, a ‘land of disillusions where, on a
whim of chance, life’s mast is broken, the Beast wreaks havoc, the river floods, and
the earth opens under a body’s feet’ (Pineau: 2003: 91). The metonymic image of
Sister Beloved’s withered torso thus arguably represents the fruitlessness of
searching for a ‘mother country’ outside of Guadeloupe, whether it is thought to be
in Africa as the Rastafarians believe, or in France, as the local Francophiles
maintain. In the novel Rastafarianism does not, therefore, represent a way for blacks
living on the margins of Caribbean society to escape their liminal existence or solve
their feelings of ontopological displacement. The haze produced by Rastafarian
ganja and mysticism is merely another temporary form of escape that creates a veil
of existential confusion which masks reality; much like Rosette and Eliette’s
daydreaming about a pre-contact Guadeloupe.
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Rosette envisions the return to a lost Edenic past in wild flights of the
imagination that are often prompted by listening to reggae music – specifically,
songs by Bob Marley. In particular, the song ‘No Woman No Cry’ stirs something
inside of her and she regularly listens to the track on repeat. At times she does
nothing but slump idly in her cabin ‘waiting for better days, sitting and listening’ to
the record ‘all day long’ (Pineau: 2003: 22). Reggae as a musical form is ‘a cultic
expression’ that is:
revolutionary and filled with Rastafarian symbolism. The symbols are fully
understood in the Jamaican society but the real cultic dimension of reggae
was unknown until the Rastafarian song-prophet, Bob Marley, made his
debut [...] Marley stamped his personality on reggae until the sound became
identified with the Rastafarian movement. (Barrett viii)
The production of reggae music developed as a transatlantic enterprise as performers
such as Marley looked across the Atlantic to Africa for inspiration. In the
Caribbean, reggae thus ‘became closely linked to Rasta, most visibly in the image of
Marley, and the two movements thrived together, preaching spiritual renovation,
lamenting the domination of Babylon, and predicting its fall’ (Manuel et al. 196). In
the novel, the Rastas reject the shantytown of Savane ‘as part of Babylon, the place
of exile announced by Jehovah when he prophesied that Abraham’s descendants
would be strangers and oppressed in a land not their own’ (Ormerod 219). Sister
Beloved notifies Rosette that by choosing to linger in Savane rather than join the
Rasta community on the mornes she chooses to dwell in Babylon, thereby forsaking
Jah. She warns, ‘You walk through the valley of the shadow of death in Babylon,
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the very place where sin thrives’ (124). Rosette ponders Sister Beloved’s
admonition and considers joining the Rasta tribe, telling herself that ‘life [is] reggae,
a long forced march, a road to Calvary’ (127). She yearns to escape the confines of
‘her narrow little life’ in Savane but rather than deciding on a course of action she
simply returns home from the mountain and listens to Marley’s record on repeat
(ibid.). The song’s refrain ‘No woman no cry’ functions as an incantation that
‘throws her into a trance’ and allows her to avoid ‘facing her life in the hell of
Savane’ (201). The image of a broken record which indefinitely circulates the same
song on repeat metaphorizes life in the shantytown, where ‘life outside [...] roar[s]
with violence. And every day [is] a cyclone. Every single day that God [brings] for
the sorrow of women and men in Savane’ (171). Pineau’s circular structural motifs
serve to emphasise the cyclical nature of life in Guadeloupe – a pattern that proves
to be extremely difficult to break out of for many characters in the text.
In Macadam Dreams the Rastafarians follow in the footsteps of their
predecessors, the maroons who fled the plantations as fugitive slaves and settled in
the mornes during the three hundred years of slavery in the Caribbean from the
sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Like the maroons before them, today
Rastas ‘mostly live off squatted lands’ in ‘rural areas’ throughout the islands
(Murrell 309). The Rastas heed the example of the maroons and live off of the earth
in a communal lifestyle that is patterned after African concepts of community. In
the novel the Rastas venture into the mountains with the intention of staying there
and forming a commune in an effort to ‘find their homeland, rediscover their roots
going all the way back to the beginnings of time’ (Pineau: 2003: 129). Inherent
within Rastafarianism is thus an atavistic reproduction of history as a result of the
138
tribe’s shared desire for a return to Africa and the ancient ways of their ancestors. In
fact, the Rastafarian ideology represents a double replication of the cycles of history
in that they emulate the lifestyle of the maroons, who previously simulated the
habits of their African forebears.
The maroons are popular symbols of cultural resistance in the Caribbean,
celebrated for their defiance of the European plantocracy and for their ability to
survive in remote and inhospitable regions. Although the maroon is a
‘fundamentally dispossessed figure,’ he or she ‘has of necessity had a relationship
with the land quite unlike that of the slave. For the maroon, the connection with the
land has always been intimate, for s/he was forced to know its every contour in order
to survive – not only in terms of food but, more, in order to escape and remain
fugitive’ (Haigh 110). The Rastafarians ‘often praise the Maroons’ for their
opposition to imperial dominance and their capacity to survive in the hostile
mountain landscape, and the ‘Maroon experience lingers in their memory’ (Barrett
37). Conversely, Pineau opposes the general tendency to lionize the maroons and
criticises them for running away from their predicament rather than challenging their
oppressors directly. She avows, ‘I do not need to console myself with heroes. I am
proud to be the descendant of a woman who won her freedom’ (Veldwachter and
Pineau 183). She valorises the slaves who remained on the plantations and fought to
earn independence for themselves and their children in favour of the maroons who
chose to abscond rather than stay to help others. Echoes of this historical scenario
appear within the novel when the Rastas try to evade the problems of the oppressed
black population by fleeing Savane for refuge among the mornes. Unlike the
maroons, however, they are unsuccessful in their attempts to navigate the harsh
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environment and as a consequence they gradually waste away. In Macadam
Dreams it is the people who remain in Savane and are able to navigate its difficult
psychogeographic terrain who are ultimately rewarded. After Hurricane Hugo
passes, Eliette chooses to return to Savane and restore her life there while raising the
abandoned Angela as her own daughter. Driven to madness by Angela’s admission
of her incestuous relationship with her father, Rosette staunchly refuses to leave her
cabin and perishes in the storm.
Like Rosette and Séraphine, the Rastas do not possess the fortitude to endure
the difficulties of life in Savane and toward the end of the novel they too descend
into madness. The Rastas begin to practice dirt-eating, a form of geophagy45 that is
a universal sign of extreme self-abasement which can also be attributed to madness.
Dirt-eating was common practice among slaves in the Caribbean as a form of
resistance to European dominance. They ate the soil in order to disable themselves
from performing effective labour, but the practice often devolved into the lethal
medical disorder pica, which caused them to ‘develop a craving’ for dirt and
compulsively eat the earth (Kiple 99). In the text the Rastas exhibit telltale signs of
madness when they prepare themselves to fulfil the prophecy of ‘the Great Return’
to ‘Mother Africa’ (Pineau: 2003: 176). They decide that they ‘must eat the earth
itself, the earth whence they came. They all [eat] earth, for seven days, all of them –
Ras,46 princes, brothers, and sisters – [feed] on the earth, wearing their teeth down
on the rocks of creation’ (ibid. 136). Just as some of their slave ancestors did before
them, the Rastas in Pineau’s novel develop a pathological hunger for dirt. By
portraying the Rastas’ imitation of the self-destructive actions of their slave
45
46
Geophagy is ‘the practice of eating earth’ for either ritualistic or nutritional purposes. (OED).
Ras is an Amharic name given as a title to Ethiopian royalties (Barrett 82).
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forebears, Pineau illustrates the longstanding and hideously distorted relationship
between the diasporic peoples of the Caribbean and their imposed, non-native
landscape. Their physical hunger for the soil is symbolic of an ontopological desire
for terra nostra47 – a land of their own and a ‘known geography’ (DeLoughrey and
Handley 121). This intrinsic need for a homeland provokes a repetition compulsion
that impels the Rastas to replicate the cycles of history and they deliberately commit
self-harm by eating dirt like their slave ancestors.
Near the conclusion of the novel, the Rastas embark on their expedition to
the summit of Morne Caraïbe in anticipation of the Great Return to a paradisiacal
African motherland. They ascend the mountain believing that it will bring them
closer to Jah, who will then fulfil His promise to deliver them out of their exile in
Guadeloupe. Unfortunately, nearly everyone from the Rasta tribe perishes on this
‘catastrophic pilgrimage undertaken in the hopes of finding a paradise in the hills’
(Ormerod 219). Most of them die early on from the effects of starvation, pica, or
illness brought on by eating poisonous plants. Others drown after falling into the
swollen river and are swept away by the floodwaters that signal the rapidly
approaching Hurricane Hugo. A fortunate few of the younger tribe members
manage to escape, realizing the imminent danger of their situation and scurrying
back down the mountain. Soon Sister Beloved is the only one left and she hastens to
the mountaintop and stands in the face of Hurricane Hugo shouting, ‘Jah, I have
returned to the Garden of Eden! Take me!’ (136-7). Hugo strikes swiftly and
Beloved is suddenly ‘lifted from the earth and flung into a pool of furious waters’
that carry her away to the afterlife (137). The Rastas trek up the mountainside to
47
Terra nostra literally means ‘our land.’
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seek out their professed homeland in Africa, which they believe is the Edenic
‘Cradle of Humanity’ (129). However, what they actually find is ‘sheer hell up
there in the mountains’ (135). With this ironic turn of events Pineau exposes the
‘mockery of Beloved’s paradise’ that misleads so many of the Rasta tribe throughout
the novel (133). She employs the trope of the ruined or parodic Garden of Eden to
express the impossibility of a return to Africa for its various diasporic peoples and to
infer that they must therefore seek alternatives which allow for a communal
regrounding within Caribbean soil.
IV.
Breaking Out of the Cycles
Pineau further develops this point by indicating that the existence of an
earthly paradise in the lapsarian, neocolonial Caribbean is also untenable. Fittingly,
the idyllic name of the novel’s fictional setting, ‘Savane,’ belies the violent nature of
its environment. In Guadeloupean Creole French savane means ‘savannah,’ a
grassland or meadow typical of tropical regions. The shantytown’s name thus
implies tranquillity, but the narrative quickly unveils that in actuality, life in Savane
is hell. The novel demonstrates that ‘what seemed a paradise to the first squatters is
now a place of greed and frustration, where wife-beating and criminal assault are the
norm’ (Ormerod 220). Savane’s wistful residents such as Rosette seek a
paradisiacal retreat for the disenfranchised black people of the Caribbean so that
those who are ‘the color of the earth’ can inherit a peaceful homeland (Pineau: 2003:
123). Rosette envisions the shantytown of Savane becoming ‘a savanna where the
descendants of slaves’ could ‘[tend] to their wounds. Their blood mingl[ing] with
the open sores of the earth’ (118). In this scene Pineau references the inadvertent
connection between the displaced black population and the Caribbean landscape that
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was initiated at the moment the first African slaves set foot in the area. She
highlights the mutual suffering incurred by blacks in the Caribbean and their
surrounding environment at the hands of the colonisers in order to underscore their
cultural claim to a Guadeloupean homeland. At the instant when the first African
slaves were translocated to the Caribbean, certain ties with their homeland were
fractured irrecoverably by this act of forced migration. The relations with land that
they developed in the New World were indisputably different than those they had
established in their native countries. For the African slaves, these relations were
marked by an ineluctable, agonistic connection to the land that they were forced to
work within their adopted place. Pineau suggests that for the contemporary AfroCaribbean exilic population, the notion of landscape comprises the re-formation of
connections to the land within their current place by reclaiming it as their own.
The tenuous Afro-Caribbean relationship to the land within the narrative
indicates that the recuperation of the environment is a complicated psychosocial
process. In the novel Pineau ‘elaborates an alternative Caribbean landscape
aesthetics that reimagines identity as conditioned by a dynamic interaction between
place and displacement’ (Casteel 133). Similarly, Glissant proclaims in Caribbean
Discourse (1989) that the notion of ‘dispossession is camouflaged and no one is
aware of its corrosive presence’ in the archipelago (38). In her text Pineau
actualizes Glissant’s assertion via her portrayal of the more intangible, insidious
effects of dispossession upon the people of Savane. Their condition reflects the fact
that in the Caribbean, ‘all present-day populations are to some degree in ancestral
exile [...] Thus almost all modern West Indian peoples have had to adjust (or are still
adjusting) to radical transplantation; and the “landscapes” they thus apprehend are
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different’ from those of the indigenes (Tiffin 199-200). As Pineau exemplifies via
her characterization of Séraphine, Rosette, and the Rastafarians, those who are
unable to adjust to this radical transplantation often fall prey to madness. As Njerie
Githire observes, the concept of ‘la folie antillaise, or “Antillean madness,”’ is ‘a
recurrent motif largely represented in the literature of the French Antilles,’ and
Pineau links this madness to a debilitating sense of dislocation in her writing (84).
She infers that for the Caribbean exile, a complete adjustment to transplantation
necessitates a kind of ontopological re-location within the current environment that
can only result from an acceptance of the tragic past which is shared with the
landscape.
Furthermore, Pineau suggests that in order for the modern Caribbean subject
to accept the inherited colonial past, he or she must first acknowledge repressed
ethnohistorical memory. The recurrence of intra-communal conflict in Caribbean
shantytowns such as the fictive Savane seems to suggest that violence itself has
become rampant in the area ‘owing to the brutal enforcement of power in past
centuries’ (Ormerod 225). Therefore in Macadam Dreams, ‘the ability to confront
trauma – Eliette’s in the past, Angela’s in the present’ makes self-empowerment
possible by uncovering ‘a more realistic form of hope, a feeling of release and
control over one’s life’ (ibid. 220). Eliette and Angela’s experiences demonstrate
the importance of reconciling oneself to repressed traumatic memory rather than
repeating its circumstances. Pineau identifies this as an effectual way of achieving
release from the suffocating grasp of History. Sigmund Freud argues in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920) that the repetition compulsion ‘also reproduces past
experiences that include no possibility of pleasure, and which at no time can have
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been gratifications even of subsequently repressed drive impulses’ (62). In a similar
vein, I would argue that in the novel the repetition compulsion drives the people of
Savane to repeat trauma as a contemporary experience instead of reconciling it as
something belonging to the past (ibid. 75). Freud contends that ‘a drive is an urge
inherent in living [beings] for the restoration of an earlier state – one that a living
being has had to give up under the influence of external disturbing forces’ (75-6).
Pineau suggests that the Afro-Caribbean exile yearns to retrieve a pre-contact
ecology that was surrendered under the coercion of external disturbing forces –
namely, those of colonialism and then neocolonialism. According to Freud, this
urge to return to a former state which characterizes the repetition compulsion is an
‘expression of inertia’ (76). This sense of inertia is evident in the apathetic attitudes
of the majority of the townspeople in Savane, who replicate history in an endless
cycle of violence, never progressing socially or otherwise.
The effects of this overriding repetition compulsion are visible among
communities throughout the contemporary Caribbean due to the fact that the
archipelago ‘witnessed the extremes of the New World experience’ (Dash: 1998: 5).
Correspondingly, Pineau’s deployment of hurricane imagery ‘symbolizes ecological
devastation and displacement’ within the narrative – particularly at the outset, ‘as
when Eliette describes the damage done to Savane by Cyclone Hugo. The ghetto
has been scattered in all directions, strewn with household debris, decomposing
animals, and the wreckage of trees and shacks’ (Ormerod 224). The dispersal of the
shantytown’s makeshift homes and sundry household objects metaphorizes the
disruption of domestic life for the black Caribbean community, who experience a
double displacement – first ancestrally, and then again as a result of meteorological
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cycles. The cyclone trope also functions on an even more complex structural level
due to the fact that the Caribbean archipelago is located in the Northern Hemisphere,
where the winds of tropical cyclones rotate counter-clockwise.48 The cyclonic
phenomenon of winds turning in a counter-clockwise motion symbolizes the
reversal of the winds of progress in the Caribbean region. This reversal manifests
itself in a kind of Freudian inertia within the novel, as Caribbean society experiences
a paralyzing stasis. The resultant static effect is due to coexisting patterns of
replication, namely: hurricane cycles, the repetition compulsion and neocolonialism.
Furthermore, the hurricane metaphor represents reversed temporality in the novel –
for example, Beverly Ormerod notes that:
Part of the dynamic effect of this narrative is achieved by its chronological
shifts, these surprising displacements in time that compel the reader to
exercise constant hindsight. The central motif of incest involves a reversal
of time-schemes, as Angela’s revelation about the present incest leads to
Eliette’s re-living of the past. More often, there is an irresistible forward
movement through repeated structures. (224)
The circular organisation of the novel mimics the cyclical nature of time in
Guadeloupe, which encourages this ‘reliving’ of the past by its inhabitants. For
instance, as Hurricane Hugo is ending, Eliette attempts to reassure a visibly
distraught Anoncia by telling her, ‘Godmother, Cyclone has passed,’ to which she
replies, ‘I know, child, I know. Horrific like its brother of ’28. But maybe it’s
always the same one that comes back, Liette’ (214-5). The notion that it is in fact
48
See Paul V. Kislow’s Hurricanes: Background, History, and Bibliography (2008) page 43 for
more information on the Coriolis Effect, which causes this meteorological phenomenon.
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the very same cyclone that revisits Guadeloupe time and again alludes to the spectre
of colonialism that continues to haunt the region, to devastating effect.
Despite the many impediments engendered by colonialism, Pineau conceives
of a promising alternative for the people of Guadeloupe, which is that the near total
demolishment of the island by Hurricane Hugo can also provide an opportunity for
them to remake their lives and break out of this collective inertia. She
acknowledges that the Guadeloupean landscape can never be restored to a
precolonial tabula rasa, however, in the novel ‘the prospect of redemption works to
counterbalance the negative implications of displacement’ (Ormerod 225). She
refers to this possibility when Angela welcomes the arrival of Hurricane Hugo and
wishes fervently, ‘May it turn time around!’ (203). Anoncia addresses the need for
recovery, pointing out, ‘There’ll be other cyclones, lots of them. And no one can do
nothing about that, even the greatest scientists in France. No one can stop them.
Just predict them. And a body will just have to lie low and then stand back up again,
rebuild, dress the wounds, try and look forward to tomorrow’s dreams, and keep
replanting’ (213). Again, Pineau draws a correlation between the ecological and the
corporeal, calling attention to the need for ‘a body’ to ‘stand back up again’ after it
is racked with suffering and ‘keep replanting,’ just as the Guadeloupean body of
land must do. She affirms the desire for renewal that shapes the novel’s conclusion,
stating:
I didn't want it to be only ruin, rape, desolation. I wanted there to be hope,
with this young woman, Angela, able to rebuild herself, because that's what
matters, showing that we can rebuild ourselves. Never forget, but rebuild.
What gave me comfort in the idea that I could incorporate the violence of
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nature into my story was that some time later nature reclaimed her rights, the
leaves grew on the tree branches once more, people planted again, cleaned
up [...] It is impossible to make the internal wound disappear, but we can
stand up again. (Veldwachter and Pineau 181)
The potential for regeneration in the novel lies within Angela, the youngest of the
four generations of women Pineau portrays in the text – the eldest of whom is
Séraphine, followed by Eliette, then Rosette. Through Angela, Pineau seeks to
reverse the commonly held conviction in Savane that ‘a woman’s life is an
accursement’ by making her a positive example in a world where girls grow up
‘afraid of men and cyclones, their evil eyes’ (Pineau: 2003: 78, 155).
In Macadam Dreams Pineau performs a cognitive mapping of the shared
experiences that link the diverse peoples of the African diaspora who find
themselves thrust together in the cramped shantytowns of Guadeloupe. Echoing
Glissant’s notion of ‘the other America,’ she limns this newfound place that had
‘suddenly loomed on the horizon of the Old World’ as a ‘variegated mishmash, that
macadam of dreams’ (ibid. 68). The word ‘macadam’ in English is of course a
synonym for ‘tarmac,’ and thus denotes a road surface made from a blend of broken
stones and asphalt or, correspondingly, a kind of pathway. The equivalent French
lexeme ‘macadam’ features the same definition; however, it also has an alternate
meaning in Lesser Antillean Creole French, which is the local patois in the
Francophone Caribbean. The Creole dish macadam is a staple meal of the poor in
the French Antilles that includes a medley of ‘rice, codfish, tomato sauce, and
onions,’ slow-cooked so that ‘the rice triples in volume’ and ‘will give a good
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quantity of food’ (Loichot and Pineau 331). Thus it appears that in her novel Pineau
simultaneously writes about the life path trod by the poor in the Caribbean, in
addition to the Creole admixture that nourishes their culture as well as their bodies.
This authorial approach works to ‘unveil the striations of contemporary experience’
in the creolised space of the archipelago that is the modern-day product of
colonialism (DeLoughrey and Handley 286).
If the original French title of the work, L’espérance-macadam, were
translated literally, the English title would actually be Macadam Hope rather than
Macadam Dreams. The word ‘hope’ conveys a more tangible concept than
‘dreams,’ which implies gossamer webs spun of fantasies that can be blown away by
the slightest breeze – much like the delicate dreams of Rosette and the Rastas, which
are obliterated by the powerful winds of Hurricane Hugo. In her conversation with
Nadège Veldwachter, Pineau again anthropomorphizes the landscape when
describing the shock she experienced upon seeing ‘this land with its devastated
features’ in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo (181). She recollects that after
witnessing the ruination of the island, she thought to herself that ‘Guadeloupe had
been raped’ (ibid.). However, she also recalls her discovery that the potential for
hope lay among the wreckage, stating:
Shortly after the hurricane, tree branches started burgeoning again, nature
reclaimed its rights, a vivified nature, determined to go on and not give up.
So, the word ‘hope’ [in the title of the novel] is important because a woman,
a child, can have an injured, a harmed childhood, but that doesn’t prevent her
from being an upright woman. So this explains ‘hope.’ (Loichot and Pineau
331)
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She goes on to clarify that therefore, ‘the title L’espérance-macadam refers to the
hope of the poor,’ and more specifically, that of poor women (ibid. 332). Hope is
essential in order for impoverished women to survive everyday life in Guadeloupe,
where they are continually battered by violence, oppression and natural disasters.
As Séraphine advises Eliette, ‘You might have feather-light mornings [...] but when
the evening dampness falls, a right angry cyclone might decide to cart off your little
cabin and wreak havoc in the garden of your dreams’ (4). With this oblique allusion
to the lost Garden of Eden dreamt of by so many in Guadeloupe, Pineau seems to
suggest that ‘the diasporic nostalgia for origins is bound by the [...] self-defeating
lapse into remorse’ (Huggan and Tiffin 117). The ancestral trauma of forced
migration contributes to the contemporary sense of exile and ontopological
displacement among the black Caribbean community, which in turn induces a
repetition compulsion. In her novel, Pineau presents alternate modes of thinking
about cultural and natural histories that are decidedly syncretistic, combining
multiple historical processes and advocating the communal recovery of Caribbean
history and landscape. Through Eliette and Angela’s courage, Pineau demonstrates
a way for the dispossessed black Caribbean population to achieve self-empowerment
and reclaim that which is rightfully theirs. Indeed, while contemplating the damage
to Savane following Hurricane Hugo, Eliette affirms, ‘She’d probably have to
rebuild. Yes, there was still a way to get it back on its feet’ (215).
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Chapter IV
Caribbean Postcoloniality and Postmemory: The Photographic Spectre of
Transgenerational Trauma in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Gisèle Pineau’s The
Drifting of Spirits
I.
Introduction
Just as the term ‘postcolonial’ ‘does not mean the end of the colonial but its
troubling continuity,’ as Marianne Hirsch remarks, her neologism ‘postmemory’
also ‘reflects an uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture’ (2012: 5, 6).
She indicates in The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After
the Holocaust (2012) that it ‘shares the layering and belatedness of these other
“posts,” aligning itself with the practices of citation and supplementarity that
characterize them’ (5). Echoing Homi Bhabha’s 1994 proclamation,49 Hirsch
observes that at the present moment, twenty years after Bhabha’s text, ‘we certainly
are, still, in the era of “posts,” which, – for better or worse – continue to proliferate’
(ibid.). She defines postmemory as a concept which ‘describes the relationship that
the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those
who came before – to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories,
images, and behaviors among which they grew up’ (ibid.). This notion of
postmemory can be expanded to include not only the conditions for the ‘generation
after’ but also the multigenerational ripple effects of massive historical trauma,
therefore addressing not only a singular postgeneration, but also plural
49
‘Our existence today is marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, living on the borderlines of the
“present”, for which there seems to be no proper name other than the current and controversial
shiftiness of the prefix “post” (1). I also discuss this quote in Chapter II.
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postgenerations. Hirsch applies the theory of postmemory exclusively to the event
of the Holocaust in her book, but points out that ‘it is a discussion increasingly
taking place in similar terms, regarding other massive historical catastrophes’ which
‘are often inflected by the Holocaust as touchstone, or increasingly, by the
contestation of its exceptional status’ (2). Nevertheless, she stresses the need for
‘connective rather than comparative’ readings in order to ‘[eschew] any implications
that catastrophic histories are comparable,’ thus avoiding ‘the competition over
suffering that comparative approaches can, at their worst, engender’ (206). It is in
this vein that I will investigate the connections between postcoloniality and
postmemory in the aftermath of the Janus-faced historical cataclysms of colonialism
and the slave trade for the postgenerations of the African diaspora within and
without the Caribbean. In particular, I will study the novelistic explorations of this
topic in Gisèle Pineau’s The Drifting of Spirits (2000) and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy
(1990).
In her text Hirsch pinpoints feminism as offering ‘important directions for
the study [of] and work on memory,’ asserting that it ‘open[s] a space for the
consideration of affect, embodiment, privacy, and intimacy as concerns of history,’
and ‘shift[s] our attention to the minute events of daily life’ (16). She and Valerie
Smith argue that ‘there have been very few sustained efforts to theorize in such
general and comparative terms about memory from the perspective of feminism’ (45). However, with regard to Caribbean narratives by black female authors, I will
forego a feminist approach in favour of a broader, womanist critical paradigm in
order to examine their treatment of these specific ‘concerns of history’ with relation
to Afro-Caribbean memory. In Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and
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Women’s Writing in Caribbean Narrative (1999) Belinda Edmondson speaks of a
kind of ‘New World memory’ that was engendered by the European imperial
presence in the Americas (163). Kincaid and Pineau seem to suggest in their
writings that it is the postmemory of this occurrence which haunts the daily
existence of the diasporic postgenerations of the New World. A paradox faced by
postcolonial writers is, how can narrative bear witness to something that has already
happened? One can only talk about a catastrophic experience in a traumatized,
fragmented way. Paul Ricoeur tells us that ‘fiction gives eyes to the horrified
narrator. Eyes to see and to weep’ (1988: 188). Nevertheless, fictional narratives
are still subject to the controlling sensibility of the reader. Thus, Kincaid and Pineau
pose a methodological challenge to the reader, prompting a reconsideration of his or
her position in relation to the uninhabitable site of traumatic memory. It is the site
of an experience which is utterly unassimilable as it can never be interiorized fully
by either the victim or the belated witness. Richard Kearney remarks that there is an
‘ethical demand to remember the past,’ but in traumatic narratives, remembrance
can only be found in traces which haunt the text (82). This comes as the result of a
tremendous shock which splinters memory – and thus perspective – irrevocably.
Accordingly, in their fiction Kincaid and Pineau scrutinize Afro-Caribbean
postmemory, a strategic manoeuvre necessary for the work of self-recovery in the
wake of postcolonial disorder – that is, both in the sense of an absence or undoing of
order, and of a disturbance of the bodily or mental functions.50
50
I also address the topic of postcolonial disorders in Chapter VI.
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II.
Trauma and Representationality
Ulrich Baer asserts that the condition of trauma ‘is a disorder of memory and
time,’ as it is caused by ‘an event that resists full absorption into narrative memory’
(9, 69). The traditional realist novel putatively synthesizes experience, but in
traumatized writing there can be no such reconciliation. There is an aporia or gap
that cannot be resolved due to trauma’s spectral, absent presence. There are also
different registers of experience depending on the degree to which traumatized
subjects find their circumstances to be either empowering or disempowering.
Nonetheless, in self-reflexive narrative, the writing subject cannot escape twodimensionality. How can one represent experience in a three-dimensional way?
The answer is, simply, one cannot. This is the paradox of self-representation, since
lived experience is the only truly three-dimensional experience. In cases of trauma,
the issue of representation becomes even more fraught since traumatic memory is an
incomplete memory as it is obscured from full cognition. Hirsch’s notion of
postmemory appears to privilege traumatic memory as inherited and therefore
somehow owned, but as Cathy Caruth argues, instances of trauma are experiences
that one does not and cannot own as they are inaccessible to full consciousness, and
must therefore remain ‘unclaimed’ (1996: 14). As Baer points out, ‘the
phenomenon of trauma presents us with a fundamental enigma, a crisis of
representational models that conceive of reference in terms of a direct, unambiguous
link between event and comprehension’ (10). Therefore, since the link between
seeing and knowing is attenuated in traumatic experience, I will adapt Hirsch’s term
‘postmemory’ in this study to indicate the imaginative reminiscence of a traumatic
event that is transmitted across multiple generations, since a mnemonic image of the
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occurrence can be neither interiorized nor owned. In their fiction Kincaid and
Pineau write from this perspective of postmemory, which functions as
antiteleological form of counter-history in opposition to the dominant, linear and
Eurocentric historiographic narratives of Caribbean experience.
Hirsch’s theorization of postmemory is based on familial ‘structures of
mediation and representation’ which, she claims, ‘facilitate the affiliative acts of the
postgeneration’ (2012: 39). However I would venture that with regard to diasporic
peoples, this concept can be broadened to include a larger, intersubjective
transgenerational remembrance that is not strictly limited to filial relationships but
also encompasses those that are cultural and collective. Hirsch seems to allow room
for this possibility when she remarks that ‘the process of intergenerational
transmission has become an important explanatory vehicle and object of study in
sites such as American slavery’ (2012: 18-19). Her theory of postmemory, then, can
be ‘especially useful in thinking about how contemporary postcolonial writers can
explore the remembrance of slavery [...] in the absence of direct experience of this
traumatic past’ (Ward 200). This notion is ‘helpful in conceptualizing the work of
writers who do not claim to have experienced the trauma of slavery, but nonetheless
feel an empathetic remembrance of, or connection to, this past’ (ibid). Kincaid and
Pineau are members of the Caribbean postgenerations who survey and test the limits
of traumatic narrative, demonstrating the centrality of the matter of representation in
postmemorial writing. How does one depict an experience that is unspeakable and
therefore cannot be narrativized? It is a question of literary ethics concerning what
is permissible – who has the right to bear witness? Is it solely the first traumatized
generation who has the authority to do so, or might the ensuing postgenerations also
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attempt an empathetic secondary witnessing? The response from Caribbean authors
such as Kincaid and Pineau indicates that the only acceptable way to treat traumatic
experience within literature is to not try to make it representable, but rather to refer
to it in traces via a kind of hauntology. This spectral effect which characterizes
postcolonial writing is comparable to the original, lingering aura that manifests itself
in traumatized landscapes such as the Caribbean archipelago.
III.
Auratic Place
The twinned calamities of colonialism and the slave trade ‘constitute a
rupture of, rather than a rupture within, history’ – a spatio-temporal disjunction that
produced widespread disorder [my emphasis] (Baer 124). This split not only
engendered and shaped the space of the New World, but it also radically altered
space on a global scale – a feat initiated by the early maritime explorers and swiftly
thereafter, formalized by Pope Alexander VI. He performed a cartographic division
of world space, apportioning one half each to the voracious Spanish and Portuguese
imperial powers by drawing an imaginary line running north-south along the
Atlantic at the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 – an act that was ‘immediately
contested’ by other European imperia such as England and France (Balibar 221).
Following Ulrich Baer’s example, I would posit that in places which witnessed this
and subsequent traumatic colonial fissures, it exhumed a sort of haunting aura, an
emanation or exhalation which emerged from clefts in the fractured topography,
enshrouding the landscape. Kincaid and Pineau read postcolonial Caribbean
landscapes in their novels and indicate that an unsettling aura continues to linger in
these areas even today, affecting both the contemporary environment and its
inhabitants. Baer utilises the Benjaminian term ‘auratic’ to describe the uncanny air
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which haunts terrains that have been scarred by devastating historical events: as in,
‘the auratic “experience of place” [which] commemorate[s] the destruction of
experience and memory’ (Baer 66). He applies this theorization to the abandoned
sites of former Holocaust concentration camps in his study; however I would
maintain that it is also relevant to topographies that were relandscaped by
colonialism, such as that of the Caribbean. The etymology of Walter Benjamin’s
neoterism ‘auratic’ hearkens back to an earlier definition of the word ‘aura,’ from
the Greek αὔρα, meaning ‘breath’ or ‘breeze’ (OED). Furthermore, in the field of
pathology, an ‘aura’ can also signify ‘a sensation, as of a current of cold air rising
from some part of the body to the head, which occurs as a premonitory symptom in
[...] hysterics’ (ibid.). This particular denotation of ‘aura’ is especially helpful in
terms of examining the subtle cracks that mark traumatized terrains, in addition to
the psychosomatic symptoms that mark the traumatized subject. In their writings,
Kincaid and Pineau probe the ‘auratic “experience of place”’ lived by Caribbean
diasporic subjects and reveal the ways in which this shapes their existence on a
quotidian basis.
Harold Bloom draws on Benjamin’s conception of the ‘auratic’ as well,
explaining that the polyvalent term signifies ‘an invisible breath or emanation [...] a
breeze, but most of all a sensation or shock, the sort of illusion of a breeze that
precedes the start of a nervous breakdown or disorder’ (230). It is this same aura
that haunts the island of Guadeloupe in Gisèle Pineau’s novel The Drifting of Spirits
(2000), first published in France in 1993 as La Grande Drive des esprits. The title
of her book seemingly alludes to an aura which disturbs the Guadeloupean
atmosphere, along with the minds and bodies of the population, as it carries the
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postmemory of colonialism and the slave trade on an intermittent, noxious breeze
that exudes from within the depths of the very earth. For example, Pineau writes:
the banana plantations were fields of slaves imploring the strongest of the gods
in the universe to send a great wind which would take them back to the land of
their ancestors. Fields of lamentation. Fields of tears. Sea of dread. Neverending stirrings and noises. Where did these nightmares come from? [...] The
banana fields that were springing up everywhere were plantations of ghosts [...]
fields of the dead. (224-6)
In this passage Pineau exposes the paradoxical link that exists between the
ecological orderliness of the plantation space, which facilitated the systematic
exploitation of local crops and resources by the colonisers, and the psychosocial
disorders of the colonised black population that sprouted up throughout the
Caribbean region as an unanticipated offshoot of the slave system. Pineau infers
that many of the current Afro-Caribbean population are beleaguered by unremitting
psychosomatic disturbances as a result of the fact that they inhabit an auratic place
marred by both previous and ongoing anthropogenic acts of violence. In such cases,
the ‘nightmares’ that haunt Afro-Caribbean postgenerations are triggered by the
postmemory of slavery, in addition to the contemporary neocolonial structures of
power which continue to subjugate them today.
IV.
Postmemory versus Rememory
Hirsch emphasises that her coinage of the term ‘postmemory’ is not to be
confused with Toni Morrison’s paradigm of ‘rememory,’ which she develops in her
novel Beloved (1988). The prefix re- ‘stresses the cyclic nature of memory, in
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which repetition and imagination are “capable of conjoint action”’ (Ying 26, citing
Casey 249). Hirsch describes rememory as ‘a memory that, communicated through
bodily symptoms, becomes a form of repetition and re-enactment’; in contrast to
postmemory, which ‘works through indirection and multiple mediation’ (2012: 823). Theoretical differences notwithstanding, she warns that ‘postmemory always
risks sliding into rememory, traumatic re-enactment, and repetition’ (ibid. 83). As I
discuss in Chapter III, Pineau analyses rememory in her novel Macadam Dreams
(2003) in the form of a Freudian repetition compulsion, a psychological
phenomenon in which a subject continually replicates a traumatic event from earlier
life, or its surrounding circumstances. Rather than devolving into rememory,
however, the anonymous narrator of Pineau’s The Drifting of Spirits and the titular
narrator of Kincaid’s Lucy actively engage with postmemory through
(auto)ethnographic photography. Hirsch cautions that ‘the challenge’ inherent in the
poetics of witnessing ‘is to define an aesthetic based on a form of identification and
projection that can include the transmission of the bodily memory of trauma without
leading to the self-wounding and retraumatization that is rememory’ (86). Rather
than a bodily self-wounding, in The Drifting of Spirits and Lucy the wound is an
affective one – the Barthesian punctum, or ‘prick,’ which is prompted by certain
photographic images. These texts seems to suggest that the aura which wafts about
in particular photographs that confront traumatic events can suddenly penetrate the
viewer who is capable of reading them with a powerful, concentrated gust of
emotion, exploding the otherwise confining strictures of historicism and formalism.
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V.
Pineau, Punctum and Studium
Roland Barthes describes his interpretation of the Latin word punctum as an
unsettling, emotional component of a photograph, ‘that accident which pricks me
(but also bruises me, is poignant to me’ (1980: 27). He opposes the notion of
punctum with that of studium, another Latin lexeme that he reworks vis-à-vis
photography to ‘not immediately’ mean ‘study,’ but ‘application to a thing, taste for
someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special
acuity’ (ibid. 26). Studium is ‘that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various
interest, of inconsequential taste’ which ‘mobilizes a half desire, a demi-volition
[…] the same sort of vague, slippery, irresponsible interest one takes’ in mainstream
culture (ibid. 27). In other words, studium is what structures a conventionally ‘wellmade’ photograph – that is, those constituent elements of a photograph which
provide an aesthetic, and thus historical, context and therefore ‘merely give
information about the past’ (Hirsch: 2012: 62). Barthes asserts that the photographic
punctum is that ‘element which will disturb the studium,’ in a motion which, I
would argue, functions as a kind of Deleuzian ungrounding in that it ‘open[s] things
up to the turbulences beneath them’ (ibid. 27, Grant 201). Gilles Deleuze writes,
‘By “ungrounding” we should understand the freedom of the non-mediated ground,
the discovery of a ground behind every other ground, the relation between the
groundless and the ungrounded’ (1995: 67). Much like an ‘ungrounding’ or the
‘blind field’ (a Bazinian expression51 that Barthes deploys in his work ), punctum
‘constantly doubles our partial vision’ by alluding to a world that exists outwith the
rectangular borders of the photograph (Barthes: 1980: 57). In encountering a
51
See André Bazin’s 1960 essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ in What is Cinema?
(2004), page 9.
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photograph ‘with good studium,’ Barthes states, ‘I sense no blind field: everything
which happens within the frame dies absolutely once the frame is passed beyond’
(ibid. 57). Of punctum, he avers, ‘whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it
is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there’ (ibid. 55).
Accordingly, in the ‘habitually unary space’ of the photograph, the mere presence of
a transcendent ‘detail’ transforms one’s reading of the image and thus also
transforms the image itself – ‘this “detail,”’ he affirms, ‘is the punctum’ (ibid. 42).
As I will demonstrate below, the narrator of Pineau’s novel initially employs ‘good
studium’ in her romanticized autoethnographic landscape photography, but even so,
she eventually uncovers the potential for punctum when she makes the important
transition to portraiture later in the text.
VI.
Photography as ‘Flat Death’
The unnamed narrator of Pineau’s fictionalized autoethnographic study of
Guadeloupe attempts to reconcile with her traumatic ancestral past through the
practice of photography. The author bases her character’s experiences on her own
encounter with Guadeloupean culture as a diasporan who returned to the island in
her teens after spending her early years living in metropolitan France. She avows,
‘La Grande Drive des esprits, I can’t be any clearer, was my own way to impose
myself as a Guadeloupean writer, as a Creole writer. Even if I was born in Paris, my
roots run deep in Guadeloupe. This novel is about planting roots’ (Loichot and
Pineau 335). Françoise Lionnet contends that autoethnography entails the
‘discovery of the ethnic self as mirrored by the other’ and observes that at times, ‘a
mirror can be the vehicle of a negative self-image (depersonalization and loss)’
(120, 121). This is due to the fact that autoethnography, a praxis which she likens to
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self-portraiture, ‘is constructed around an empty center: vanished places and
disrupted harmonies’ (Beaujour 22, cited in Lionnet 121). For the traumatized
subject, this impression is even more acute, much like having a black hole – an allconsuming yet unlocatable mass – at one’s core. Baer elucidates this effect, stating:
Traumatic experiences not only distance and estrange the onlooker but are
inherently marked by a rift between the victim and his or her experience; the
shattering force of trauma results from precisely that brutal expropriation of
the victim’s self. Thus, because trauma is dispossession and radical selfestrangement, it defines the traumatized individual through something that he
or she does not own. (20)
He contends that ‘photographs illustrate [that] a fundamental distance from the
experience of trauma is shared, strangely enough by witnesses and survivors’ and
‘the difficulty of overcoming that distance is inherent in any confrontation with
trauma’ (19). Pineau’s narrator is a young Guadeloupean woman who is distanced
from an understanding of her ‘ethnic self’ due to her doubly diasporic experience as
an Afro-Caribbean university student of photography in the Parisian metropole
(Lionnet 120). She turns to autoethnographic photography as a means of gaining
entrée to her ancestral Guadeloupean culture and working through her occluded
postmemory. Accordingly, Pineau’s text demonstrates ‘the centrality of the trope
and experience of memory’ intrinsic to the practice of photography (Richter xxviii).
However as Barthes notes, ‘Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory
[...] it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory’ (1980: 91). In
other words, remembrance is ‘challenged technologically by modern inventions that
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counter memory, even as they appear to aid it. Photography is the most notable
example’ (Leslie 125). This is due to the fact that the camera’s viewfinder seizes a
two-dimensional simulacral image which minimizes, delimits and replaces the
fuller, spatialized image that exists in living memory. The result is what Barthes
describes as a kind of ‘flat Death,’ a (literally) platitudinous, lifeless, mechanized
rendering of a memory-image (1980: 92). The photograph therefore performs a
‘mimetic approximation’ of experience that cannot traverse the ‘ultimate
unbridgeable gap that exists between [...] cognitive desires and [...] memories’
(Huyssen: 2003: 133).
Once those who have endured a traumatic occurrence firsthand have passed
away, what remain of their original sense memories are auratic traces – what Baer
calls ‘the intangible presence of an absence’ (70). Hirsch maintains that
photographs enable the capture and transference of these fragmented memories from
one generation to the next in the movement from memory to postmemory. As
Richard Crowenshaw comments, ‘Hirsch privileges photographs (in private and
public spaces) as the affective prop by which traumatic memory is transmitted
across generations’ (566). Nevertheless, I would argue that a visual tracing of
traumatic experience through photography is impossible due to the thoroughly
unrepresentable nature of trauma. As Pineau and Kincaid’s novels demonstrate, for
the diasporan the aporia of mourning engenders an awareness of the lack of, and
simultaneously, desire for, the ‘lost’ ethnic self. The diasporic subject is, therefore,
a mourning subject. Pineau’s decision to make the narrator of her text anonymous
illustrates not only the namelessness of traumatic experience, as it is inarticulable for
the victim and the secondary witness, but also the fact that the traumatized diasporic
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subject is unknown to herself. It is for this reason that the narrator of The Drifting of
Spirits takes up autoethnographic photography in an attempt at self-identification.
However, the paradox of photography is that whilst the retracing and reproduction
of an image is kept and preserved, the actual referent is at once irretrievably lost. As
Gerhard Richter deduces, ‘There can be no photograph that is not about mourning
and about the simultaneous desire to guard against mourning, precisely in the
moments of releasing the shutter and of viewing and circulating the image’ (xxxii).
‘What the photograph mourns,’ he argues, is ‘both death and the living-on, erasure
from and inscription in the archive of its technically mediated memory’ (ibid.).
Thus, although the camera’s aperture is a material opening which allows the entry of
light, the device fails to illuminate an obscured or shadowy memory; or, in the case
of Pineau’s narrator, postmemory. For instance, Pineau writes of the Guadeloupean
postgenerations, ‘They are members of the same family, products of the same
hardships, heirs to the very same history marked by shadows and grief’ (2000: 227).
Nevertheless, the narrator is able to access various points of light – traces of
emotional truth or essence that permit an empathetic relation – via the punctum
which irradiates the portraits of her fellow Guadeloupean citizens.
VII.
Photographic Discourse
A photograph can be read as a sort of imagetext52 – a picture that is alwaysalready framed by the narrative imparted by the photographer, which serves to
classify and thus archivize its subject/object. For example, Barthes explains that ‘to
recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions’ (27).
Similarly, in his theorization of the ‘optical unconscious’ Benjamin contends that the
52
See W.J.T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Interpretation (1994) for more
on this term.
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photograph is a projection of the photographer’s unconscious desire. He writes,
‘Only photography can show [the viewer] the optical unconscious, just as it is only
through psychoanalysis that he learns of the compulsive unconscious’ (2009: 176).
Therefore it is ‘through the indexical link that joins the photograph to its subject –
what Roland Barthes calls the “umbilical cord” made of light – [that] photography
[...] can appear to solidify the tenuous bonds that are shaped by need, desire, and
narrative projection’ (Hirsch: 2012: 37). Barthes states, ‘The photograph of the
missing being, as Sontag53 says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort
of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though
impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been
photographed’ (80-81). Correspondingly, in Pineau’s novel the narrator learns
portraiture in an apparent attempt to locate the photogenerated54 umbilical cord
which will connect her to her ‘missing’ Guadeloupean mother culture. Hirsch states
that ‘photographic images are fragmentary remnants that shape the cultural work of
postmemory’ (2012: 37). However, postmemory can risk becoming a fictional
retelling of historical events due to the inherent fallibility of both human memory
and photographic narrative. As Paul Stuart Landau warns, in photography ‘no one
can measure and freeze what he sees as another’s authenticity. Even grasping it for
a moment feels almost impossible, since its reality is predicated on distance’ (21-2).
The narrator of The Drifting of Spirits must therefore undertake ‘this type of
nonappropriative identification and empathy’ in her work (Hirsch: 2012: 86). Her
autonomous training in portraiture also becomes, in a way, a dual form of self-study
53
See Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977).
As in, ‘generated by light’ – for more on photogeneration see Advances in Chemical Physics:
Photodissociation and Photoionisation (1985).
54
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in that it is also a kind of self-portraiture for the alienated diasporic subject.
Whereas she fails to relate to her ancestral culture via the studium that typifies
pastoral landscape photography, she succeeds in discovering the punctum that is
made possible by autoethnographic portraiture, which allows her to experience a
profound affective tie to her compatriots.
Her preferred portraitic subjects are members of the older Guadeloupean
generations who, she believes, serve as a cultural conduit that will provide her with
access to African diasporic memory. She notes that the island’s elderly black
population represent a link to the past that is invaluable ‘in this country which is
searching for its history lost in the depths of the dark days of slavery [...] or what is
left in the memory of someone a hundred years old’ (201). However, since these
centigenerians are a rarity, the narrator/photographer understands that she must look
to the postgenerations for a sense of affiliation. Empathetic relation with her
subjects is vital to her postmemorial practice, ‘for memory is preeminently a social
phenomenon’ (Leys 112). Pineau implies that this kind of intersubjective exchange
is uneven, however, since ‘diasporic memory practices are themselves “positional”’
(Johnson 11, citing Ricoeur: 2004: 48). For example, the narrator recounts: ‘I had
got to know many people because of my profession. I had met throughout my life a
number of interesting women and men, cultivated, touching, even sincere at times.
In bunches, I had exchanged confidences and vows with quite likeable people whose
last name, whose first name, whose face, I have now forgotten’ (157). Once she
experiences an affective photographic relation to her subjects, their individual
identities become subsumed by the collective – but the punctum remains nonetheless
to haunt their portraits.
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Thus Pineau’s novel problematizes the postmemorial photographic act,
which ‘both facilitates and complicates the process of identification’ since it ‘allows
for a canvas on which to project our own stories’ (Bos 107 n10). For instance, the
narrator tells the story of Lucina, an aging restaurateur who is renowned throughout
Guadeloupe not only for her cooking but also for her beauty, and accredits this
widespread acclaim to the portrait that she takes of Lucina. The narrator states:
I was particularly fond of faces that had experienced half a century of life.
Lined but not yet ruined. Her magnificent portrait hung, for twenty years, on
the wall facing the main entrance [of the restaurant], just behind the counter.
She looked as if she was alive. Affable, welcoming, sweetly attentive to her
clients, it inspired the waitresses, pushed them forward and shot arrows at
those who dragged their feet and did not flash the kind of flirtatious Creole
smile she had taught them. As the years went by, this portrait witnessed the
parade of thousands of dishes, a good thirty styles, and all the colours in
creation. My fame grew because of this portrait. Soon my name was passed
around by word of mouth. This is how I became a success. (157)
Bonnie Thomas argues that in her novel, Pineau includes ‘feminist portraits’ of
women characters such as Lucina, whom, she observes, Pineau calls ‘une femme
matador’ (Thomas 1136, Pineau: 1993: 145). The femme matador is a French
Antillean literary archetype – a powerful, commanding woman who negotiates life’s
trials with the ferocious spirit of a fighter. In her description of Lucina’s
‘magnificent’ portrait, Pineau’s narrator/photographer conveys the image of an
empowered and empowering female figure among the black community. She names
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it as a favourite and praises the picture for its aesthetic value, which she attributes to
her own mastery; but she also extols the ways in which the portrait inspires its
countless viewers as Lucina’s restaurant business grows. She clearly admires
Lucina for her imposing presence, which plays a large part in her accomplishments
as a businesswoman. Lucina therefore serves as a role model of the self-possessed,
self-made Creole woman – a success story which the narrator seeks to emulate in her
own life.
The photographic image can also be framed by a (metaphorical or material)
caption which determines its reception by the viewer. For instance, Benjamin
writes, ‘“It is not the person who cannot read or write but the person who cannot
interpret a photograph,” someone has said, “who will be the illiterate of the future”’
(1931: 192). He advances his argument, enquiring: ‘However, surely equally
illiterate is the photographer who cannot read his own images? Is not the caption
going to become the key ingredient of the shot?’ (ibid.). Pineau investigates this
postulation at the conclusion of The Drifting of Spirits in the scene when Léonce, the
crippled (and by now, elderly) central protagonist and brother of Lucina, wishes to
have his portrait taken by the narrator and is confronted by his irate granddaughter,
named France. She admonishes him, exclaiming:
One day, we shall see your photo in a book on the Antilles which will travel
the entire world. You will be there, seated in your rocker, with your cane,
your twisted foot and your hat. The caption will read: An old-timer from
Guadeloupe. Not one more word. And that will be all of you, your life, one
point, that’s all, all that defines you! [...] So, go ahead and pose for the
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photographs! You think you are special because the lady from La Pointe
climbs up here! Your heart is dry in truth and your brain gone. (220)
She is concerned that the narrator/photographer regards her grandfather as merely a
cultural oddity – a battered and time-worn artefact of Guadeloupe’s past which she
would like to photograph for posterity. France believes that when the image of
Léonce enters the camera’s viewfinder, the narrator perceives him ‘through the
distorting filter of the anthropological exotic’ (Huggan: 2001: 41). In other words,
the exoticizing tendencies of (auto)ethnographic photography reify the subject as an
aestheticized object of photographic, and thus cultural, knowledge. Despite the
autoexoticization that inevitably results from such a practice, the narrator repeatedly
photographs Guadeloupean residents in the pursuit of identificatory possibilities.
James Clifford explains that the reason for such a quest is the desire for
completeness that is brought on by a ‘sense of pervasive social fragmentation, of a
constant disruption of “natural” relations’ (114). He states, ‘The self, cut loose from
viable collective ties, is an identity in search of wholeness […] [which embarks] on
an endless search for authenticity. Wholeness by definition becomes a thing of the
past (rural, primitive, childlike) accessible only as a fiction, grasped from a stance of
incomplete involvement’ (ibid.). Ethnographic accounts, he asserts, are therefore
‘controlled fictions of difference and similitude’ (101). In the narrator’s case, she
documents the autoethnographic present with her camera in an attempt to detect her
own likeness reflected in the images of others, thereby establishing a sense of
communion with her subjects, which she believes will somehow aid in resolving
their shared traumatic past. Such an approach is innately problematic, however, in
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that the photograph ‘captures the moment of the here and now that, once taken, no
longer corresponds to any living reality’ (Richter xxxiii). Richter argues that ‘the
photographic portrait prepares the self for its own death; it is a form of mnemonic
mortification that commemorates a passing that already has occurred or that is yet to
come’ and is consequently ‘the scene of the thanatographical image’ (ibid.). Hence,
whilst Pineau performs the work of life writing in her novel – a semiautobiographical account of her lived experience – the book is at the same time an
example of a diasporic subject’s authothanatographical writing of her ancestral
culture, and so it is the writing of a kind of death even as she records it in the
present.55
The narrator persists in her efforts despite the protestations of France, who
shouts, ‘Grandpa! Listen to me! [...] You are nothing but a mad old man! You
spend your time telling your sorry life’s story to this woman. You don’t see that she
is stealing your thoughts. She makes you enter her camera and, little by little, you
surrender yourself totally. She does not care about your stories!’ (220). France
ascertains that the narrator/photographer has the capacity to use ‘the camera and the
photograph’s caption to establish, fix, and invade the [subject’s] identity on every
level’ (Baer 33). In ‘surrendering himself totally’ to the photographer Léonce
becomes what Barthes terms ‘Total-Image, which is to say, Death in person’ (1980:
14). He explains, ‘In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend)
represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor
object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I am truly becoming a
specter’ (ibid. 13-14). Barthes infers that in sitting for a portrait, the subject
55
In this sense Pineau’s novel parallels Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) which, as
I argue in Chapter II, is an autothanatography.
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simultaneously reveals and effaces the precious secret that is his or her interiority,
and thus, authenticity. He explains this effect, stating that when he is the
photographed subject, ‘I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity,
sometimes of imposture’ (ibid. 13). Similarly, Benjamin argues that ‘Cameras are
getting smaller and smaller, more and more able to capture fleeting, secret images,
the impact of which stalls the viewer’s association mechanism. This needs to be
replaced by the caption, which includes photography in the literarization of all life
and without which all photographic construction must inevitably remain no more
than an approximation’ (2009: 192). The danger evident in his declaration is, of
course, that Benjamin’s use of ‘caption’ here seems to refer to its Latin root captiō-,
which means ‘to take,’ as in, ‘to catch, seize, capture’ (OED). Thus the caption
asserts itself over the associated image, which then appears as its captive, marked
indelibly with the signature of the photographer/possessor. In an interview with
Pineau, Valérie Loichot points out that the narrator, ‘her camera in hand, looks like
an intruder’ to the majority of the rural Guadeloupean population (335). Pineau
concurs, stating that the narrator is, ostensibly, a person ‘who attempts to grasp, to
take, to catch as many things as possible, but who feels like she always remains at
the surface of things. All she sees is a papier-mâché façade. She wants to see
what’s hidden behind the stage’ (ibid.). In ‘taking’ a picture, then, the
narrator/photographer strives to capture the subject’s authenticity in order to
penetrate the surface of the image, and hence, that of Guadeloupean culture – but as
Pineau implies, the portrait is simply an example of cultural performativity.
The photographer’s ocular unconscious is the location where meaning, desire
and vision become conflated within the mind. Benjamin explains, ‘It is a different
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nature that speaks to the camera than speaks to the eye; different above all in that,
rather than a space permeated with human consciousness, here is one permeated
with unconsciousness’ (2009: 176). The photographic punctum is a small detail
which ‘triggers a succession of personal memories and unconscious associations,
many of which are indescribable by the individual [viewer]’ (Cronin 63). In other
words, the ‘manifest content’ of a picture ‘(what is actually visible in the
photograph) may be understood at a glance,’ whilst the ‘latent content (the meaning
of a photograph) is enmeshed in unconscious associations’ (Lesy xiv). Toward the
end of the novel the narrator/photographer gradually becomes cognisant of this
within her own portrait photography and laments:
Why did I always have to invent for myself perfect friends, pictures of
negatives that swirled through my brain? Why could I not bear to see them
different from the first impression they gave of themselves? Incorrigible
idealist that I was, I was always disappointed by the new sides they revealed
afterwards. That is something I sought in vain in my lovers and friends:
perfection! Uncompromising perfection that prevented me from accepting
others as they were. Unattainable perfection that made me react with disgust
if they departed in the slightest from my ideal image [...] An image sealed in
laminated paper, as with my photographs. (219)
The naturalizing tendency of the eye manifests itself in the studium, which seeks
(illusory) perfection in the ideal Photograph, just as aesthetes like the narrator seek
perfection in those around them. This is due to the fact that the aesthetic eye is
socioculturally conditioned to perceive things in a certain way, and it frames people
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and scenes accordingly. Conversely, it is precisely the incongruity of the
photographic punctum that touches us the most deeply. Jacques Derrida argues that
punctum and studium perform a ‘contrapuntal’ kind of ‘metonymic operation’
within the photograph, and states that ‘the uncoded beyond’ of the punctum
‘composes with the “always coded” of the studium’ (1981: 57, 41). He continues,
‘It belongs to it without belonging to it and is unlocatable within it; it is never
inscribed in the homogeneous objectivity of the framed space but instead inhabits or,
rather haunts it [...] We are prey to the ghostly power of the supplement; it is this
unlocatable site that gives rise to the specter’ (ibid. 41).
The photographic image is
therefore the intersection of many different geometric points that coalesce to form
the fixed point of view from which the photographer represents the world. The
photographic ideal is the closely calculated intersection of various points, but the
most important point (location and purpose) of an image is, in fact, that of the
punctum which wounds us. The punctum is the dynamic site at which many
unconscious associative viewpoints intersect – it is at once ‘certain but unlocatable’
because ‘it does not find its sign’ (Barthes: 1980: 51). Since it does not find its sign,
the source of the punctum remains forever nameless, much like the experiences of
trauma and postmemory, as Kincaid and Pineau suggest in their texts.
VIII.
Colonial Zombification and Artistic Reawakening
The second return trip to Guadeloupe in 1963 turns out to be the last for
Pineau’s narrator, as she loses both of her parents within a span of two years and is
forced to earn a living through her photography skills. She sets up shop as a
portraitist in 1965, recalling:
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I was one of those photographers, I admit it shamelessly, who use faces as an
excuse but are, really, interested in plumbing people’s personalities. I wanted to
become a portrait painter of the soul. To lay it bare. To scrape off the terrible
shell deposited by the passage of time. To touch the essential self. And restore
the timelessness that was there at the beginning [...] Huge project! (156)
Her closing exclamation, although jocular, reveals a keen awareness of the gravity
of this artistic endeavour. In a moment of self-recognition, the narrator ascertains
that her diasporic nostalgia compels her to seek unexposed aspects of herself in the
portraits she takes of others as she works toward discovering a self-in-relation. Via
the technical prosthesis of the camera, she instinctively reaches out to her fellow
Guadeloupeans in an effort to ‘touch the essential self’ – and by that she
simultaneously implies both her self and the selves of her subjects. She laments, ‘I
have journeyed, like a zombie56 stripped of its memory and which, in a thousand
different places, looks for the memory of a former life secreted in the heart of
impenetrable fragments’ (157-8). In the Caribbean contexts of obeah or Vodou, the
‘will and memory’ of the victim of zombification ‘are gone and the resultant being is
entirely subject to the will of the sorcerer who resuscitated him, in the service of
good or evil’ (Dunham 184). Many postcolonial writers also portray zombification
‘as a metaphor for the colonial predicament [...] linked to the history of slavery’
(Murray 7). This refers to the fact that the African slave was denied his or her will
56
The phenomenon of zombification occurs in various forms of magic. In some, ‘a particular drug is
administered [to an individual] to act on the nervous system, producing death-like symptoms of
paralysis [...] after the person is poisoned and interred, “his body is then exhumed and rubbed down
with an antidote before being fed a plant producing amnesia and disorientation.” The person, now a
zombie, is set to work [...] as a “living corpse”’ (Murray 7, citing Benítez-Rojo 164). In other forms
of magic, ‘a truly dead creature [is] brought back to life’ (Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 152).
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and ancestral memory, and conditioned to endure forced labour in the service of
plantation production. As the property of the European coloniser, the slave was
under the control of the one responsible for ‘recreating’ him or her in this new
amnesic – and thus zombified and dehumanized – form. Pineau infers that for the
black diasporan, this sense of dehumanization replicates itself in postcolonial
mnemonic disorders since the subject remains detached from his or her ancestral
memory. As she demonstrates in The Drifting of Spirits, zombification often serves
as a metaphor for traumatic memory in postcolonial writing in order to address the
mnemonic dissociation of individuals and/or entire societies from cultural memory.
In The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice (2012),
Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering introduce their concept of the ‘mnemonic
imagination,’ a creative device which, they argue, can potentially aid writers in
counteracting this zombifying effect of traumatic experience. They define it as ‘an
active synthesis of remembering and imagining’ which ‘engage[s] in open dialogue
between past and present, and draw[s] effectively on what is needed from the past
within the present’ (7, 170). In this way, the mnemonic imagination is similar to
Hirsch’s notion of creative and ‘reparative postmemorial practices’ (2012: 229).
Keightley and Pickering assert that ‘it is only via the action of the mnemonic
imagination that this condition of multivalent consciousness which moves between
past and present, here and there, oneself and others, loss and renewal, can be
realised’ (183). Yet they stipulate – very problematically – that ‘this is of course
dependent on therapeutically finding a way of bringing into the light of
imaginatively holistic memory the initiating horrific situation’ (170). As Pineau’s
text indicates in the aforementioned quote, the notion of an ‘imaginatively holistic
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memory’ is an obvious impossibility since traumatic memory is ‘secreted in the
heart of impenetrable fragments’ (Pineau: 2000: 157-8). How, then, can the
traumatized writing subject enact a creative mnemonic resuscitation which will
allow him or her to break out of this historical cycle of zombification? As Keightley
and Pickering rightly point out, ‘the distinguishing feature of traumatic experience is
denial or severe inhibition of’ the process of remembrance (170). They also state
that ‘repression or mnemonic dissociation is a self-protective response to trauma,’
and as a consequence, ‘the severed links between memory and narrative identity
cannot be reconnected and agentic self-representation remains impossible’ (170,
171). Nevertheless, through the creative postmemorial acts of her
narrator/photographer Pineau identifies the incisive prick of the artistic punctum as
the means for piercing through shrouded memory. This puncturing can only happen
in scattered places, but it lets in enough ‘light’ to awaken and restore the traumatized
subject from colonial zombification.
The potential for this emancipatory effect is latent in the haunting of
postcolonial works such as The Drifting of Spirits and Lucy – both of which serve as
metanarratives for this creative reawakening process. The Drifting of Spirits is an
autoethnographic portrait of Guadeloupe in which Pineau reads the neocolonial
island as an auratic place, and explores the attendant effects this has on the
narrator/photographer as a returning black diasporan. Correspondingly, Kincaid’s
novella Lucy is an (auto)ethnographic exercise in which the author at once
investigates the white metropolitan culture of neoimperial America, itself an auratic
place, and the narrator/photographer’s position in relation to it as an Afro-Caribbean
immigrée. The fictionalized (auto)ethnographic form enables Pineau and Kincaid to
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narratologically re-examine their own experiences as Caribbean migrants, and it is
through the spectralization of their fiction that they provide the reader and
themselves glances into other and othered experiences. These brief flashes of
insight into alternate experiences demonstrate the elusiveness and ephemerality of
the artistic punctum that is sought after by not only the authors themselves in their
fiction, but also by their narrators in their photographic praxes. Such punctive glints
within their narratives also underscore the vagaries of traumatic memory, which is
characterized by disjointure and untraceability.
IX.
Postcolonial Anti-Aesthetics
The eponymous narrator/photographer of Kincaid’s Lucy is a young Afro-
Caribbean woman of approximately the same age as the speaker in Pineau’s The
Drifting of Spirits. Similarly to Pineau’s narrator, Lucy also undergoes a doubly
diasporic experience, but the trajectory is reversed since Lucy migrates from an
unnamed island in ‘the West Indies’ (most likely Antigua) to a metropolitan centre
to work as an au pair. Like Lucy’s birthplace, the exact location of her new
residence remains unnamed, but it is largely assumed by critics to be a fictionalized
version of New York City. The novel is inspired by Kincaid’s own experience
during her late teens when her family’s financial constraints forced her to relocate
from Antigua to New York to work as an au pair. In the book, Lucy goes to work
for a wealthy white woman named Mariah, whose family leads a seemingly idyllic
life of privilege. Conversely to Pineau’s narrator, an alienated diasporan who
returns to photograph her local community members and their environment in a
desperate search for affinity, Lucy’s photographic practice serves to confirm her
outsider status as a black diasporan in a white, bourgeois metropolitan
177
neighbourhood. She photographs Mariah’s family and their surroundings in an
unpremeditated disidentificatory gesture. When she purchases her first camera on a
whim, she initially attempts to emulate the conventionalized aesthetic of Mariah’s
family photo albums, as well as that of a book on photography gifted to her by her
employer. Similarly to Pineau’s narrator, Lucy strives to achieve ‘good studium’ in
her early photographic endeavours and states, ‘I was trying to imitate the mood of
the photographs in the book Mariah had given me’ (Barthes: 1980: 57, Kincaid:
2002: 10). Nonetheless, Lucy soon comprehends, ‘in that regard I failed
completely’ (120). Instead, when she feels compelled to take a photograph she
marvels, ‘But here was a picture that no one would ever take – a picture that would
not end up in one of those books, but a significant picture all the same’ (80).
Lucy reflexively deploys an anti-aesthetic discourse in her photographic
praxis that disrupts the normativizing studium of Western family photography and
uncovers its embedded structurality since it is, I would venture, what Theodore
Schatzki would call a ‘teleoaffective regime’ (28). A ‘teleoaffective structure,’ he
explains, ‘is a range of normativized and hierarchically ordered ends, projects, and
tasks, to varying degrees allied with normativized emotions and even moods’ (80).
He argues that ‘there exist practices with distinct teleoaffective structures in which
subsets of people participate’ (85). In Kincaid’s novel that practice is family
photography, and the subset is the white upper-middle class American family, which
conforms to the oedipal family structure. This Western, socially constructed
familial arrangement privileges the nuclear family as the paradigmatic kinship unit.
Lucy observes the ways in which family photography reinforces this ideology in
Mariah’s household, remarking:
178
The husband and wife looked alike and their four children looked just like
them. In photographs of themselves, which they placed all over the house,
their six yellow-haired heads of various sizes were bunched as if they were a
bouquet of flowers tied together by an unseen string. In the pictures they
smiled out at the world, giving the impression that they found everything in
it unbearably wonderful. (12)
The metaphorical ‘unseen string’ tying them together in the image is the
teleoaffective structure that organises their photographic self-representations. Sitting
for family portraits thus becomes a performance that is teleoaffectively regulated,
and the subsequent images themselves become instruments of familial selfknowledge. As Hirsch comments, ‘the self-confirming mutuality of looking that
creates pictures such as this one [that Lucy describes] can be blinding. Moving
about their house, the family members see only reflections of themselves, wherever
they look […] But Lucy – in the traditional voyeuristic position of the domestic
servant – can see their self-deceptions’ (2002: 74). Pictures such as those which
Mariah displays throughout her home serve as imagetexts that reveal to Lucy the
conventions of not only family photography, but also larger, hegemonic Western
family ideologies such as the primacy of the oedipal unit. The proliferation of
homogenizing images of oedipal family structures in Western households has a
coercive ideological effect which ‘universalizes the bourgeois nuclear family,
suggesting a globalized, utopian family album, a family romance imposed on every
corner of the earth’ (Sekula 89). Correspondingly, the British imperium discursively
replicated this oedipal family structure in the colonial family romance it construed to
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justify its paternalistic relationship with its territories – a narrative that it also
attempted to ‘impose on every corner of the earth,’ including Lucy’s homeland in
the Caribbean.
Lucy rejects such colonising mythologies in her photography, reframing
Mariah’s family and their self-representations in ways that expose the teleoaffective
structures of producing and perceiving images of the family romance. That is the
punctum which distinguishes Lucy’s photographs – unlike Pineau’s
narrator/photographer, who seeks an empathetic connection with the subjects of her
portraits, Lucy pursues a disidentification from Mariah’s family in order to break the
neoimperial chain of signification that overdetermines her identity position within
their home, which is a metonym for Western society at large. The punctum that
marks her pictures is due to precisely this anti-aesthetic approach, which
simultaneously ‘disturbs the studium’ of Western family photography and ruptures
multiple colonising discourses (Barthes: 1980: 27). Lucy senses that she is buried
upon her arrival in America by what William Haney calls ‘the sedimentation of
signifiers,’ and that in order to extricate herself she must enact a contestatory
discursive practice of disidentification (88). Judith Butler points to disidentification
as the site ‘that is the discursive occasion for hope’ (2012: 166). She asserts that ‘to
be constituted’ by a signifier of identity ‘is to be compelled to cite or repeat or
mime’ the signifier itself, whose future depends on a ‘citational chain’ (ibid. 107).
This chain operates through the ‘insistent citing of the signifier, an iterable practice
whereby the [...] signifier is perpetually resignified, a repetition compulsion at the
level of signification’ (ibid.). Disidentification, she insists, can only take effect
when the subject refuses the hegemonic regimes that mobilize resignification.
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Taking things a step beyond Butler’s argument, I maintain that in order to assert
agency and interrupt this repetition compulsion, the subject must first undertake the
laborious process of designification, which is an attempt to represent an/other
identity – one that has been hitherto historically oversignified. This work can be
executed via deconstructive play, which disrupts the organisation of signifying
structures. In the case of a traumatized subject, this involves ‘dissolving (by means
of de-signification) the active traumatic nucleus of representations and affects in the
mind’ of the subject (Alizande 94). Accordingly, the disidentificatory photographic
acts that Lucy performs throughout the novel destabilize (re)colonising identity
signifiers, initiating the important process of designification.
X.
Revisiting Mansfield Park
I would argue that in its narrative framework, Kincaid’s Lucy represents the
contemporary black Antiguan’s novelistic response to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
(1814). Austen’s work tells the story of Fanny Price, a girl from a poor British
family who is taken away at a young age to live on an estate in the countryside with
her wealthy uncle, a baronet. There she is mistreated by her uncle Thomas Bertram
and his wife, who regard her more like a servant than a relation. As Edward Said
discusses in Culture and Imperialism (1993), it is possible to read Austen’s tome
contrapuntally in order to glean an understanding of its imperial context from the
subtle ‘references to Sir Thomas Bertram’s overseas possessions [that] are threaded
through’ the text (62). Bertram is, of course, a member of the crumbling British
plantocracy, with a foundering plantation on the island of Antigua. Austen’s subtext
could suggest that the precarious state of the plantation is due to the enactment of
the Slave Trade Act, which abolished the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807.
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It did not, however, abolish slavery itself – this did not occur until the Slavery
Abolition Act of 1833, nineteen years after Austen’s book was published. Her novel
is therefore set during this interim period, and she utilises the character of Fanny to
interrogate the British ruling class for their complicitous role in the atrocities carried
out within the slave trade system. Since ‘as a social type Sir Thomas would have
been familiar to eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century readers who knew the
powerful influence of the class,’ Austen depicts him as an archetype of the absentee
British planter (Said: 1993: 94). She performs her inquest of this particular class in
the scene when Fanny talks to her cousin Edmund about an earlier conversation she
has with Bertram upon his return from Antigua:
Fanny: ‘Did not you hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?’
Edmund: ‘I did – and was in hopes the question would be followed up by
others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.’
Fanny: ‘And I longed to do it – but there was such a dead silence!’ (155).
Here Said interprets Austen’s ‘aesthetic silence’ and ‘discretion’ as literary
techniques designed to encode the imperialist agenda – that is to say, he suggests
that in declining to comment when the issue of slavery is mentioned, Bertram
condones its practice – and hence, so does Austen (Said: 1993: 94). However if, as
Said states, ‘every novelist and every critic or theorist of the European novel notes
its institutional character,’ then it is also true that a writer of novels can use the
genre’s cachet to challenge corrupt policies within other sociocultural institutions,
such as the plantation (ibid. 70). Bertram’s silence potentially signifies a more
general attitude amongst the bourgeoisie that the practice of slavery is necessary to
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maintaining British imperial dominance, and in turn, their lifestyle. It is not,
therefore, a permissible topic of discussion – unless that discussion directly affects
business. Thus, the gaps or silences in Austen’s text are as crucial to the narrative as
what is actually stated. As Peter Haidu observes, ‘Silence can be a mere absence of
speech; at other times, it is both the negation of speech and a production of meaning’
(278). Haidu maintains that the ‘semantic content of these rhetorical forms of
structured silence’ underscores ‘more fundamental linguistic instabilities which
might preclude the limitative determination of both spoken and unspoken meanings’
(279). Furthermore, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Austen was in fact
an abolitionist; if this is the case, the silences surrounding slavery in the novel could
also refer to its unspeakable horror.57 Rather than participating in imperialist
discourse, as Said accuses, I and many other critics would contend that Austen’s text
engages in a contemporaneous counter-discourse since ‘the “slave trade” was still a
burning issue, a persistent and horrifying scandal, debated in Parliament and
extensively reported and discussed in newspapers and periodicals’ (Southam: 1995:
13). Additionally, it can be argued that Austen’s novel is a sort of protoautoethnographic study of British bourgeois culture and its imperial undergirding
through the eyes of the accidental servant girl, Fanny. In Lucy, Kincaid restages
Austen’s primal scene of interrogation over 175 years after Mansfield Park. Now
we are in the hegemonic moment of the neoimperial United States, and the
accidental servant girl is recast as a black immigrant from Antigua, the very island
57
This is a plausible theory since, as Brian Southam notes, Austen’s father was ‘appointed principle
trustee of a plantation in Antigua’ (1995:14). In addition, her brother Francis served in the royal navy
and ‘reported on “the harshness and despotism which has been so justly attributed to the
landholders”’ he observed while on duty in the West Indies (Southam: 2005: 196). He also expressed
to her his ‘“regret that “any trace of it should be found to exist in any countries dependant on
England, or colonized by her subjects”’ (ibid.).
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that facilitated the rise and fall of the Bertrams’ fortune. Kincaid utilises the migrant
figure of Lucy, who traverses national and social boundaries, in order to investigate
the white upper-middle class in America and their collusion with neoimperial
structures of racial and economic oppression.
XI.
Creolising the Metropole
Lucy is part of the post-Second World War influx of Caribbean immigrants
who, in a large-scale movement of reverse colonisation, relocated from the
Caribbean colonies to the (neo)imperial centres in search of work and in so doing,
‘creolised’ the metropole, as the title of H. Adlai Murdoch’s monograph infers.58
Murdoch explains that this concept refers to ‘the creolizing, transformational force
of hybridization [that] makes it a critical component of the cultural fusion that
emerges from the diaspora’ (224). This phenomenon was not strictly confined to
Europe, however, as a considerable number of ‘low-skilled’ immigrant workers
from the Afro-Caribbean population also migrated to the United States during this
period (Ueda 73). Kincaid narrativizes this transitional moment in Lucy, deploying
a tropological strategy in which ‘problematic or disruptive figures come from the
periphery of empire to threaten a troubled metropole’ (Arata 107). For instance,
Lucy recalls:
In a daydream I used to have, all these places were points of happiness to
me; all these places were lifeboats to my small drowning soul, for I would
imagine myself entering and leaving them, and just that – entering and
leaving over and over again – would see me through a bad feeling I did not
have a name for. I only knew it felt a little like sadness but heavier than that.
58
See Murdoch’s Creolizing the Metropole: Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film
(2012).
184
Now that I saw these places, they looked ordinary, dirty, worn down by so
many people entering and leaving them in real life, and it occurred to me that
I could not be the only person in the world for whom they were a fixture of
fantasy. It was not my first bout with the disappointment of reality and it
would not be my last. (3-4)
In an affective expression of disidentification, Lucy photographs her metropolitan
surroundings in order to discern the cracks in the whitewashed facade. Through the
viewfinder of Lucy’s camera, Kincaid illustrates that the neoimperial metropole is
also an auratic place and the haunting effects of colonialism are not, in fact, limited
to the (neo)colonial periphery. Her novel problematizes the ‘here and there’ trope
that characterizes much of emigration and (neo)imperialist discourses by
demonstrating that the colonial ‘problem’ is also extant in the metropole. Lucy, a
servant who is taken on rather than taken in by (or taken with, for that matter)
Mariah’s family, is symbolic of this absent presence which undermines the tidy,
binaristic (neo)imperial relationship of centre and margin. The anti-aesthetic
viewpoint of her photography is an attempt to represent the surreptitious, hegemonic
structures of neoimperial reality – in contrast to the liberal humanist fantasy of
multiculturalism propagated by contemporary Western sociopolitical discourse,
which is endorsed by Lucy’s employer.
Mariah has a (literally) different worldview to that of Lucy, who observes:
‘She acted in her usual way, which was that the world was round and we all agreed
on that, when I knew that the world was flat and if I went to the edge I would fall
off’ (32). Echoing the indigenous Caribbean speaker in Kinciad’s short story
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‘Ovando’ (1989),59 Lucy perceives the world as flat, much like the way that it is
rendered in the photograph or imperial map – both of which demarcate the space
that the subject/object inhabits therewithin. Lucy comprehends that her social
movements are restricted to a certain prescribed space within a fixating
neoimperialist discourse. Mariah, on the other hand, unconsciously perpetuates
colonial zombification from her liberal humanist perspective. Lucy is gradually
awakening from this existential torpor, as evidenced by her repeated use of phrases
such as ‘for a reason not clear to me’ and ‘I did not yet know the answer to that,’
which indicate that she forgoes blind acceptance of her circumstances in favour of
questioning their validity (10, 120). For example, she pronounces, ‘Mariah wanted
all of us, the children and me, to see things the way she did’ (35-6). Hirsch points
out that ‘Kincaid’s bold move is to decenter Mariah’s perspective – the humanist
view […] which simply records the world’s roundness – and to offer us Lucy’s
instead’ (2002: 73). Mariah’s world seemingly has no sharp edges, unlike Lucy’s,
which is full of piercing edges that cause her pain – an as yet unspecified pain that
nonetheless manifests itself in the punctum of her photographs.
XII.
Presence and Play
In his preface to The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1998),
Hal Foster declares that the anti-aesthetic ‘signals a practice [...] that is sensitive to
cultural forms engaged in a politics [...] or rooted in a vernacular – that is, to forms
that deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm’ (xv). Correspondingly, Lucy
implicitly rejects the forced organicism of Mariah’s family snapshots – despite the
fact that Lucy takes pictures in the domestic setting where she resides, she is
59
The Taíno speaker in ‘Ovando’ remarks, ‘My world is flat [...] Its borders are finite’ (220). See
Chapter I for an analysis of this story with regard to cartographic discourse.
186
unconsciously aware that it is not actually her domicile. Moreover, as an au pair she
cannot even claim the status of a houseguest who is privy to Mariah’s hospitality.
Rather, she is, as the title of the novel’s first chapter indicates, but a ‘poor visitor’ to
Mariah’s home who is economically dependent upon her as her employee and
therefore, her subordinate (3). Kincaid thus reconceives Austen’s protagonist
Fanny, who is treated as merely a ‘poor visitor’ to the Bertram household, in the
form of the black immigrant servant Lucy. On an unconscious level, Lucy perceives
that her station as the black domestic servant in a wealthy white household entails an
oversignified identity, which is negatively defined as lacking the attributes which
mark her privileged employers. She acknowledges this circumscribed position when
she describes the contents of her bedroom at Mariah’s house and offhandedly
reveals, ‘I had [...] no photographs of myself’ (120). In fact, at no point in the novel
is she ever photographed. From the very outset of her tale, Lucy is sensitive to the
fact that she is an absent presence in her new location, with no chance for
developing a positive relational identity. For example, in the novel’s opening pages
she matter-of-factly proclaims that if she were to capture a picture of her future, it
‘would have been black, blacker, blackest’ (6). She unintentionally positions her
photographic acts in an artistic move which mobilises an ‘ironic negation and the
anti-aesthetic purge of subjectivity,’ illustrating the fact that as a black immigrant
and servant she exists ‘outside of all familial relations’ (Singer 265, Hirsch: 2002:
76). Here Kincaid redeploys the Fanonian trope of blackness as negation60 within a
neoimperial racial hierarchy.
60
See Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952).
187
As an absent presence in the metropole, Lucy is a figuration of the revenant,
a reminder of the unresolved social violence of the colonial past that continues to
inflect the neoimperial present. Kathleen Brogan notes that ‘the past that resists
integration into the present because it is incomprehensible or too horrific’ often
‘takes shape as a ghost’ within postmemorial literature (7). She postulates, ‘When
the individual’s distress derives from the larger trauma of a group, pathologies of
memory take on a cultural and political significance, reflecting a society’s inability
to integrate with the present both traumatic experience and a pre-catastrophic past’
(6-7). However, Lucy is not the only character to experience pathologies of
memory, since Mariah and her family display symptoms of (neo)imperial amnesia.
As Mark Simpson warns, ‘The contemporary moment is a gravely dangerous one,
not least because it finds collective memory in jeopardy, threatened by [...] the
operations of imperial amnesia: memory manipulated in the service of a larger
forgetting crucial to the aims of empire’ (133). Simpson argues that a ‘key’ aspect
of sociopolitical discourse in the United States is ‘the exceptionalist narrative that
relies, so decisively, on a politics of mobility: as a special case, the United States can
be in its actions, and can move in its interventions, without precedent’ (ibid.). He
maintains that it is ‘an understanding that works not just to distinguish the United
States from other imperial formations but also to separate (and indeed to except) the
American imperial present from its imperial history and legacy’ (ibid.). Kincaid’s
haunted narrative elucidates the asymmetrical infrastructures on which
contemporary forms of neoimperialism operate in the United States, and their effects
on both postcolonial and neoimperial consciousness and collective memory.
188
Lucy re-examines black servitude in the context of the contemporary United
States and its historical echoes of slavery, as waves of postwar Afro-Caribbean
migrants such as the eponymous protagonist were compelled to abandon their
homelands and labour in rich, white American households due to the perilous
economic conditions in the Caribbean neocolonies. In so doing, Kincaid tacitly
references the proto-capitalist ‘tradition’ of forced labour upon which early America
was founded, and explores modern forms of involuntary labour that are imposed on
immigrants to the contemporary United States in the service of its developed
capitalist economy. It is involuntary or unfree labour in the sense that residents of
impoverished neocolonies are impelled to uproot themselves and migrate to
neoimperial centres such as the U.S. in order to find work. These migrant workers
then become a constituent part of the modern capitalist machine and its system of
filiation. Kincaid discursively denaturalizes this coercive filiative bond in her novel,
and reveals it to be an instrument of retraumatization that replicates the terrors of
slavery. For instance, Lucy’s employers attempt to reinforce this bond by insisting
that she acquiesce to their neoimperial family romance. Lucy recalls, ‘How nice
everyone was to me [...] saying that I should regard them as my family and make
myself at home. I believed them to be sincere’ (7). On the contrary, she does not
feel at home with them at all; and from the moment of her arrival she feels the very
walls of their house begin to close in on her as Mariah’s family tries to control her
place within it. For example, in describing her new bedroom, Lucy states:
The ceiling was very high and the walls went all the way up to the ceiling,
enclosing the room like a box – a box in which cargo traveling a long way
should be shipped. But I was not cargo. I was only an unhappy young
189
woman living in a maid’s room, and I was not even the maid. I was the
young girl who watches over the children. (7)
Kincaid’s use of symbolic imagery in this scene is particularly disturbing because it
is evocative of the system of chattel slavery. It was a system in which the black
body became commodified as the property of slave owners and investors, which
could be inventoried and shipped as ‘cargo’ across the Middle Passage. She
therefore suggests that Lucy’s position as a black domestic servant in America is a
retraumatizing repetition of history in which she only belongs to her employer’s
family in the sense that she is treated as their possession rather than as another
family member. Thus it is a new form of biopower61 in that it is a recapitalization of
the black body, which becomes an object of neoimperial desire, as its labour will be
consumed by the capitalist machine. However, Lucy breaks the recolonising spell of
the neoimperial family romance by declaring, ‘But I was not cargo’ [my emphasis].
With this (now conscious) act of defiance, Lucy resists the implicit subservience and
objectification coincident with her role in Mariah’s household.
She represents the Afro-Caribbean migrants who are obliged to work in the
neoimperia and yet, once there, are subject to what Deleuze would call a ‘society of
control,’ which operates through various political and cultural networks designed to
regulate the black body and its movements (2011: 139). Deleuze argues that we are
now in the moment of societies of control, characterized by a neoliberal
‘intensification and generalization of the apparatuses of disciplinarity’ which has
61
Michel Foucault develops the concept of ‘biopower’ in The History of Sexuality (1976), the first
volume of The Will to Knowledge. This term denotes the power of a political entity to subjugate and
control the bodies – and thereby the lives – of the populace.
190
succeeded the previous moment of Foucauldian ‘disciplinary societies’ (Peet et al.
11, Foucault: 1995: 193). He cautions that the systems of control which have
evolved post-Second World War are more ‘free-floating’ and thus decentred and
surreptitious, and he concludes that ‘there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look
for new weapons’ (2011: 140). Since societies of control also exercise power
through socialising forces that enact politico-ideological domination, Lucy’s vital
weapon is her camera, which she wields in order to refocus and subvert hegemonic
social images such as those which perpetuate the Western family romance.
Kincaid’s ekphrastic62 narrative play thereby works to dismantle the organising
sociopolitical structures which are intended to ‘reinforc[e] the perpetual
postponement of arrival’ for the migrant, ‘understood as the development of a sense
of home that can accommodate cultural multiplicity and contradiction’ (Härting
1222). Her protagonist is compelled by an anti-aesthetic drive, which facilitates her
resistance to the hegemonic Western plenitude of presence that pervades her
environment. First it is the colonising presence of Britain in the Caribbean, and then
the recolonising presence that permeates her surroundings in the neoimperial United
States. As a defensive manoeuvre, Lucy transforms the codified practice of Western
family photography into a medium for contestatory acts of anticolonial selfexpression.
In her narrative Kincaid confronts and ultimately surmounts the pressing
issue of a lack of discursive space for black diasporic self-representation by
subverting traditional modes of white, Western self-representation such as family
photography and even the novel itself. She achieves this effect using hybrid
62
‘Ekphrasis’ is a rhetorical device in which one artistic medium speaks to (or of) another.
191
iterations of the very artistic media she is challenging, disassembling and
reassembling them from within. She not only reconceptualizes domestic
photography through her provocative use of ekphrastic descriptions, but also tackles
the canonical novel via her cogent reworking of Mansfield Park. Kincaid
narratologically disembeds the racial and class modalities which shape bourgeois
Western social systems and pathological behaviours. As a result, she creates a
hybrid discursive space that ‘critically appropriates elements from the master-codes
of the dominant culture and “creolises” them, disarticulating given signs and rearticulating their symbolic meaning otherwise’ (Mercer: 2003: 255). Robert Young
remarks that in the postcolonial diasporic context, hybridity ‘works simultaneously
in two ways: “organically,” hegemonizing, creating new spaces, structures, scenes,
and “intentionally,” diasporizing, intervening as a form of subversion, translation,
transformation [...] Hybridization as creolization involves fusion, the creation of a
new form, which can then be set against the old form, of which it is partly made up’
(1995: 23). As Kincaid demonstrates in Lucy, the diasporic hybridization of
Western modes of representation is a dialogic process which involves the interaction
of mimesis and antimimesis in order to reveal the constructedness of
institutionalized forms such as the Photograph and the Novel.
Thus, the tension between presence and play is at work on a number of levels
in Kincaid’s text, disrupting the theoretical unitariness of various hegemonic
discourses: epistemological, ontological, national, historical, identitarian, racial,
photographic, novelistic. Consequently, in Lucy she portrays a reality that is
dialogic and therefore unstable, and which exists in opposition to the world that
Western ‘realist’ fictions claim to portray in models such as the Family Photograph
192
and the Novel. Kincaid undertakes the important work of narratological de- and
reconstruction, a method which Derrida explains in his essay ‘Structure, Sign and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ (1978), stating:
Besides the tension of play with history, there is also the tension of play with
presence. Play is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is
always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of
differences and the movement of a chain. Play is always an interplay of
absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, play must be
conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence; being must be
conceived of as presence or absence beginning with the possibility of play
and not the other way around. (292)
Lucy exhibits a tension of Western presence with diasporic play through the specular
interchange of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic depictions of American domestic reality
within the novel. Features of the anti-aesthetic include references to ‘historical
discontinuity, juxtaposition of categorically discontinuous entities, freedom from
logical procedure’ (Singer 228). Kincaid thus highlights the need to be ‘more
concerned about the absence of alternative, critical visualizations that can assist in
capturing the political context of crises, thereby potentially shifting the scopic
regime from the colonial to the postcolonial’ (Pollock 73). She works to bring the
scopic regime within a postcolonial purview via the intermittent, yet extremely
poignant (and thus punctive), ekphrastic passages in Lucy. These sections describe
either Mariah’s family portraits, Lucy’s own snapshots of Mariah’s family, or
perhaps most significantly, the absence of photographs of Lucy.
193
This absence is most palpable in the scene when Lucy looks around her
bedroom and comments, ‘All around me on the walls of my room were photographs
I had taken, in black-and-white, of the children with Mariah, of Mariah all by
herself, and of some of the things I had acquired since leaving home. I had no
photographs [...] of myself’ (120). Contemplating this photographic display, she
continues, ‘I was lying there in a state of no state, almost as if under ether, thinking
nothing, feeling nothing. It is a bad way to be – your spirit feels the void and will
summon something to come in, usually something bad’ (121). As Lucy scans the
pictures that cover her bedroom wall and notes the absence of pictures of herself,
she is overcome by a sense of great emptiness. She is marked by a post-traumatic
pathology which Caruth, echoing Sigmund Freud,63 calls ‘a pattern of suffering that
is inexplicably persistent’ (1996: 1). It is a type of suffering that is generally
symptomatic rather than self-explanatory. This is due to the fact that it is ‘a
pathology of the self, a state that impairs a person’s nature as a unified agent, as a
subject of experience, and as an object of reflexive importance’ (Oshana 109). This
pattern of suffering is caused by retraumatization since ‘traumatic experiences recur
and […] they attain meaning only at and through this belated repetition – like
negatives that harbor an image until they are printed and emerge from developing
vats’ (Baer 10). The unsettled and unsettling anti-aesthetics of Kincaid’s novel
performs a radical ekphrasis that depicts Lucy’s artistic attempts to vitiate these
retraumatizing moments and develop a new self-image.
It is a form of self-reflection that exercises what Foster calls a
‘counterpractice of interference,’ or what Derrida would call ‘play’ (Foster xiv, xv).
63
See Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), chapter three.
194
Through the counter-practice of anti-aesthetic photography, Lucy takes on the major
project of self-writing. For instance, she acknowledges: ‘But the things I could not
see about myself, the things I could not put my hands on – those things had changed,
and I did not yet know them well. I understood that I was inventing myself’ (148).
Lucy is the implied, invisible referent of all of her pictures, and thus her
ethnographic photographs of Mariah’s family are also a kind of autoethnographic
venture. It is an attempt to work through her traumatic postmemory, as well as to
escape the retraumatizing structures in which she is currently enmeshed. She is the
negative centre of the web of family photographs that hangs on her bedroom wall,
the absent presence dwelling unseen among Mariah’s family. As a black immigrant
servant in a white metropolitan household, she represents the burgeoning AfroCaribbean diasporic presence which is striving to assert itself in an oppressive
Western society that continually, obstinately, endeavours to efface it. Through her
domestic photography, Lucy illuminates the otherwise concealed networks of
exploitation and erasure still at work in contemporary Western society and which are
faced by black diasporans such as herself in their day-to-day experiences.
XIII.
Conclusion
In explicating the ‘eidetic64 differences between image and memory’ in his
text Memory, History and Forgetting (2004), Ricoeur draws on Edmund Husserl’s
phenomenology of Bild (the German lexeme for ‘image’) and contends that
‘portraits’ and ‘photographs’ are material examples of ‘presentifications that depict
64
‘Eidetic’ is a philosophical term ‘applied to an image that revives an optical impression with
hallucinatory clearness, or to the faculty of seeing such images’ (OED).
195
something in an indirect manner’ (45, 46). ‘Presentifications’65 are acts of
intentional conscious experience in which the subject mnemonically reproduces, and
therefore makes co-present, the original lived experience of a past event or object. It
is the mnemonic evocation or recognition of the present absence of an event and is,
consequently, a form of double consciousness. For instance, Husserl asserts that
‘memory is the presentification of something itself in the mode of the past’ (1991:
61). However, as I have argued earlier in this chapter, traumatic memory is
complicated by the pathological nonrealization of experience, since the traumatized
subject cannot interiorize the catastrophic event. Thus, it follows that he or she also
cannot experience mnemonic presentification. The Husserlian model of mnemonic
presentification is therefore inadequate when applied to traumatic memory, which
can only achieve what Andreas Huyssen would term a ‘mimetic approximation’ of
remembrance (2003: 133). Nonetheless, where Husserl’s theory of mnemonic
presentification falls short, I would postulate that hope remains for the traumatized
subject in the form of Husserl’s concept of imaginative presentification which, I
would suggest, is made possible through creative postmemorial practices. For
example, Ricoeur (in his analysis of Husserl) states that an act of imagistic
representation in the form of ‘a figured presentation such as a portrait or
photograph’ induces ‘an identification with the thing depicted in its absence’ (2004:
429). As this chapter evinces, Kincaid and Pineau’s protagonists perform an
imaginative presentification of African diasporic memory through their
(auto)ethnographic photography. This study leads me to deduce that what
postgenerations transmit intergenerationally are in fact imaginative, rather than
65
For more on his notion of ‘presentification,’ see Husserl’s Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and
Memory (1898-1925) (2006).
196
mnemonic, presentifications of the traumatic past. Such a conclusion invalidates
Hirsch’s conceptualization of postmemory as a kind of intergenerational mnemonic
presentification. This is due to the fact that a traumatic experience cannot be
realized; hence memories of it can neither be owned nor transferred.
In The Drifting of Spirits and Lucy, (auto)ethnographic photography is a
form of imaginative presentification of the past which facilitates the exploration of
identity for the Afro-Caribbean subject, who grapples with not only traumatic
ancestral memory but also myriad contemporary retraumatizing structures. As
Stuart Hall remarks, ‘Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are
positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narratives of the past’ (1994: 394). I
would add that this is also true with regard to our positioning within the narratives of
the present, amidst the multiple ongoing processes of self-formation. Kincaid and
Pineau’s protagonists negotiate the ‘tenuous fissure between past and present that
constitutes memory’ and imaginatively evoke the past within the present via their
photographic presentifications (Huyssen: 1995: 3). In the case of Pineau’s narrator,
the praxis of (auto)ethnographic photography initiates a process of identification
with her fellow Guadeloupeans, who are the subjects of her portraits; whereas in
Lucy’s case, it sets in motion a process of disidentification from Mariah’s family
and the (neo)imperialist ideologies that they espouse. Pineau’s
narrator/photographer represents the privileged, Western-educated Afro-Caribbean
migrant who wants to reconnect with her ancestral culture, and the pictures she takes
enact a kind of portraitic memorialization of the elderly Guadeloupean generation.
Lucy, on the other hand, symbolizes a different kind of Afro-Caribbean migrant
altogether. She represents the ‘economic migrants,’ who, Barry Levine contends,
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‘are, in reality, “economic refugees”; since purported societal and especially
political conditions created the migrants’ economic misery, migrants, like refugees,
are also victims [...] a refugee flees persecution, a migrant poverty’ (8). As a result,
Lucy’s portraits capture a very different ça-a-été, or ‘this-has-been,’ than those of
Pineau’s narrator within her photographic discourse (Barthes: 1980: 79). Rather
than venerating her subjects, Lucy frames her portraits in ways that demystify
romantic imagings of the white (neo)imperial Westerner and uncover the
recolonising structures that permeate Western visual regimes. In centring their
narratological focus on such complex figures, Kincaid and Pineau depict a
contemporary countervision of the black Caribbean female subject and engage in a
form of cultural decolonisation that articulates a previously suppressed AfroCaribbean female consciousness.
Kincaid and Pineau indicate that ‘as generational memory begins to fade’
and those who have experienced events directly begin to disappear (such as the last
generation to have lived during the period of slavery), the imaginative dialectic with
the past by postgenerations becomes crucial for the survival of ethnohistorical
(post)memory (Huyssen: 1995: 2). Huyssen points out the urgent ‘need to invent, to
create images’ that will ‘go on living’ which, he argues, propels postmemorial art
(ibid. 218). It is a way of (post)memorially presentifying the past that allows for the
fulfilment of mnemonic desires through imaginative practices. They are invariably
imaginative, since instances of massive historical trauma cannot be interiorized. As
a consequence, traumatic memories are the lacunae of all postmemorial narratives,
be they literary or photographic. Accordingly, in these works by Kincaid and
Pineau the traumatized subject is also the lacuna of her own postcolonial life
198
narrative, which she conveys through the medium of (auto)ethnographic
photography. In terms of the fictional phenomenology of the postmemorial
photographic act, Pineau’s narrator is the lacuna of her ‘major project of a picturebook,’ just as Lucy is the lacuna of the photographic narrative that wallpapers her
bedroom (Pineau: 2000: 36). This retropologizing of the Fanonian image of
blackness as negation by Kincaid and Pineau visualizes the otherwise invisible mark
of trauma that is borne by their protagonists. Naturally, the photographic images
that they take cannot articulate this trauma, but rather they are ‘its lacunary remains’
(Didi-Huberman vi). Such an artistic treatment of trauma by these
narrator/photographers allows for a desubjectification66 of the self, which
counteracts the zombification that is inherent in the self-subjection to (re)colonising
discourses.
Kincaid and Pineau emphasise the primacy of the visual in determining
colonised identity – through both the hegemonic Western gaze and the resultant
images that it produces. As a response, they take up the fundamental task of
becoming ‘creative agents in the process of visual decolonization’ (Emery 210).
Their novels ‘address the conditions’ of African diasporans whose ancestors ‘were
denied the power to see and [were] used – as commodified objects of a market gaze,
picturesque figures in a tropical paradise, or visual markers of [...] racialist
categories – to constitute that power in others’ (ibid. 2). ‘In their writings,’
postgenerational authors such as Kincaid and Pineau ‘reconstruct visionary
subjectivity for these ancestors and their descendents’ (ibid.). As Jean-Paul Sartre
asserts, ‘The whole problem [of a naive ontology of the image] is born of the fact
66
For more on the concept of ‘desubjectification,’ see Michel Foucault’s ‘What is Critique?’ (1996).
199
that we have come to the image with the idea of synthesis [...] The image is an act
and not a thing’ [my emphasis] (144). Postcolonial writers must therefore work to
decentre the Eye of History – which is also, of course, the Western Eye. It is an allseeing Eye that totalizes, and thereby synthesizes, all that lies within its gaze. In
Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992) Mary Louise Pratt dubs
this particular Eye or I the ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey,’ an imperialist viewpoint which
involves a ‘particularly explicit interaction between esthetics and ideology, in what
one might call a rhetoric of presence’ (197). Pratt discusses the panoptical gaze that
typifies landscape descriptions within imperial travel writing, but this perspective is
also evident in imperial practices of visual anthropology such as ethnographic
photography. It is what David Spurr calls ‘a corrupt aesthetic, an aesthetic of
consumption’ by way of possession (46). He describes it as ‘the aesthetic
transformation of social reality,’ which becomes ‘a mode of representation by which
a powerful culture takes possession of a less powerful one’ (45, 59). In this sense,
he argues, aestheticization ‘can be understood quite literally as colonization’ (ibid.).
It is a form of ‘ocular hegemony’ which ‘assumes that the visual world can be
rendered knowable before the omnipotent gaze of the eye and the “I” of the Western
cogito’ (Mercer: 1996: 165). Kincaid and Pineau respond to hegemonic, imperialist
acts of vision by reasserting postcolonial visual agency within their novels and
refiguring auratic places that are marked by colonialism in, respectively, the
neocolonial margin (Guadeloupe) as well as the neoimperial metropole (New York
City).
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The Drifting of Spirits and Lucy are novelistic portraits of an ontopological
‘elsewhere’ – a traumatized placeworld67 which exists within both the (neo)colonial
periphery and the (neo)imperial centre and which affects the inhabitants therein.
Accordingly, Kincaid and Pineau frame their texts in ways that simultaneously
ontologize the black female postcolonial subject and ontopologize the postcolonial
auratic place. The space of unimaginable experience which haunts these novels is
conceived in terms of both the specular and the spectral – or in Derridean terms,
presence and absence. It is a reformulation of visual representation through
continual ekphrastic play. Since ekphrasis ‘appears to represent representation
itself,’ it opens up a space for the deconstruction of otherwise controlling
representational forms (Emery 209). In an interrogative move, Kincaid and Pineau
problematize the notion of representationally bearing witness to traumatic events – it
is a truth that ‘continues to escape’ the traumatized subject as it is also a truth that is
‘not available to its own speaker’ (Caruth: 1995: 24). The deferral of the source of
truth operates in a dexterous and multivalent manner in Kincaid and Pineau’s
traumatic narratives, which continuously and unrelentingly open upon themselves in
a gyral ungrounding process. The deferral here is always of the origin. For
example, in their novels the deferral of the photograph’s referent parallels the
deferral of home for the displaced narrator/photographer as a diasporic subject. This
deferral of home in turn parallels the endlessly deferred experience of trauma, which
can never be cognitively placed or given a home. If it cannot be placed, it cannot be
represented or re-presentified, at least not mnemonically (conversely to Hirsch’s
theorization of postmemory). Therefore, Kincaid and Pineau seem to suggest that
67
For more on Edward Casey’s term ‘placeworld,’ see his Getting Back Into Place: Toward a New
Understanding of the Place-World (2009).
201
imaginative presentification is the only option for the postgenerational writer since
the original experience of trauma is unknowable. Their disruptive play of différance
polemicizes the polarities of memory and imagination, reality and representation,
fixity and transience, observer and observed, Western and diasporic – engaging in a
liberatory dialectic between postcoloniality and postmemory.
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Chapter V
‘Black’ Magic and Uncommon Realities in the Caribbean: Obeah, Quimbois
and Garden Space in Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau’s Autofiction
I.
Introduction
Obeah is a syncretic West Indian form of folk medicine and religion that
originated in the seventeenth century with the cultural creolisation of enslaved West
Africans in the colonial Caribbean plantation space. Variations of obeah are still
practised among Afro-Caribbean communities in archipelagic and continental
Caribbean nations today, including Antigua and Guadeloupe, the respective
birthplaces of authors Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau. In the French Antilles, a
portion of the Afro-Caribbean population practises a version of obeah called
quimbois. This comes despite the fact that obeah in its various forms was outlawed
in both the British and French West Indies by the colonial authorities, and it is still
illegal in parts of the Caribbean today. Obeah has been demonized by the West
since the early colonial period, when it was first discursively constructed as a crime
by the British plantocracy, who used the term indiscriminately to condemn any
mystical or mystifying activities by African slaves as ‘black magic.’
Afro-Caribbean authors such as Kincaid and Pineau speak to the role of
obeah in contemporary anglophone and francophone Caribbean contexts,
respectively, within their autofictional works. This chapter adduces passages from
Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) and Annie John (1983) and
Pineau’s Exile according to Julia (2003) and The Drifting of Spirits (2000) in order
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to demonstrate that obeah is an ‘uncommon wealth’68 unique to the Caribbean since
it is a cultural practice distinct to African diasporic communities in the region.
Practitioners of obeah serve as living links between the ancestral traditions of Africa
and those of the modern diasporic Afro-Caribbean cultures, thus making obeah a
form of resistance to (neo)colonial oppression in British Commonwealth nations as
well as French Overseas Departments, or D.O.M.s (Départements d’Outre-Mer).
Kincaid and Pineau feature obeah prominently in their oeuvres, portraying it as a
border epistemontology69 which challenges Western conceptions of lived reality.
They demonstrate that the Creole household garden performs an integral function in
the lives of obeah practitioners, who grow their ingredients for ritualistic purposes in
this space, one in which they also practise certain important obeah rituals. Their
work indicates that domestic knowledge of obeah and its related practices is
passed down familially and often matrilineally, and contrasts it with the hegemonic
incursion of Western medicine, i.e. pharmaceuticals. This chapter connects both
colonial and contemporary institutional policing of the black body and of nonWestern religious and medicinal practices, and touches on current issues of Western
medical neoliberalism and commodification of health/care.
II.
History of Obeah
In the contemporary West Indies, ‘obeah’ has become a more generalised
‘catchall’ term that now ‘signif[ies] any African-derived practice with religious
elements’ (Brown 145, Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 155). Diana Paton explains,
‘The reified idea of obeah as a unitary phenomenon, distinct from organized
68
I presented an excerpt from this chapter at the 2014 European Association for Commonwealth
Literature and Language Studies (EACLALS) triennial conference, the theme of which was
‘Uncommon Wealths: Riches and Realities.’
69
As in, a way of knowing and being-in-the-world.
204
spiritual communities and existing across the Anglophone Caribbean but not beyond
it, owes much to colonial law-making processes, although it has subsequently taken
root in some Caribbean communities’ (3-4). The word ‘obeah’ is ‘found across the
anglophone Caribbean’ and can denote a noun, adjective, or a verb (Bilby and
Handler 153). It is ‘probably one of the most widely known African-derived terms
found in the region,’ however its etymology is ‘uncertain, probably via Caribbean
Creole,’ and is thought to have originated in ‘a West African language, perhaps
Igbo’ (ibid., OED). Possible root words in Igbo are abià, which means ‘knowledge’
or ‘wisdom,’ or obìa, which means ‘healer’ or ‘doctor’ (OED). Additionally, ‘a
number of etymological theories have been proposed for this word, most of which
seek an origin in a West African language. One of the most popular of these has
been that [the terms] obeah man and obeah woman are partially calqued on’ the
Akan word ɔbayifó, meaning ‘witch, wizard, sorcerer’ (ibid.). Nevertheless, ‘it has
recently been shown that attempts to find an etymon may have been influenced by a
negative attitude [toward] the practice of obeah on the part of those who first wrote
about it in English, and a consequent tendency to look for West African words with
negative connotations’ (ibid.). Therefore, although it originated as a traditional form
of medicinal and spiritual practice, the designation ‘obeah’ became discursively
conflated with sorcery and witchcraft by the colonialists, and people and things
linked with obeah became implicated in malevolent magical activity. These
negative associations were perpetuated throughout history by both the colonisers
and the colonised due to its criminalisation by colonial authorities, and this effect
persists within contemporary Caribbean societies.
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The European colonisers perceived obeah ‘as one of the few means of
retribution open to the slave population,’ and rightly so, as it proved to be a unifying
force for the slaves and a source of great apprehension and confusion for
government officials and slaveholders alike (Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 156). In
The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008)
Vincent Brown asserts that during the colonial era, ‘Whites both believed in and
doubted the efficacy of black supernatural power. They continued to regard it as
“superstition,” but of a peculiarly threatening kind. Most important, from the
standpoint of the [...] plantocracy, obeah could motivate the enslaved to direct
political action’ (149-150). As a response, anxious colonial authorities ‘set in motion
a number of [...] deterrents’ which legalized the persecution of obeah practitioners
(Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert ibid.). For instance, in 1787, British colonial laws
which governed the slave population included a clause that stated, ‘Any slave who
shall pretend to any supernatural power, in order to affect the health or lives of
others, or promote the purposes of rebellion shall upon conviction suffer death, or
such other punishment as the Court shall think proper to direct’ (Campbell 39).
However, these amendments to colonial law ‘were ultimately ineffective’ as they did
little to control the practice of obeah among slaves, or to suppress its incendiary
potential as a political tool (Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert ibid.). Obeah quickly
grew beyond a cultural practice and evolved into an outright political phenomenon.
In fact, obeahmen and -women were repeatedly counted among the leaders of slave
rebellions as their cultural prestige meant they had extensive influence over their
fellow slaves, and consequently they were able to motivate them to direct action
against their oppressors.
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The most notorious case in which obeah was used as an instrument of largescale insurrection was Tacky’s Rebellion, which occurred in Jamaica during the
summer of 1760, and was the most significant slave uprising in the Caribbean prior
to the Haitian Revolution in 1790. The revolt was named after Tacky, an Akan man
who was a chief in the Gold Coast region of Africa before he was enslaved and
taken to the Jamaica colony. Court documents reveal that Tacky ‘had planned and
instigated the uprising with obeah practitioners as his closest counselors. He and his
co-conspirators called on the shamans to use their charms to protect the rebels from
bullets and to administer binding loyalty oaths, which required the plotters to
consume a concoction made up of blood, rum, and grave dirt, which they believed to
have sacred significance’ (Brown 149). There were substantial casualties on both
sides of the fight, although the numbers are glaringly uneven. Roughly sixty whites
were killed before the colonial militia managed to quell the rebellion; and many
more African and Creole slaves were slaughtered in the relentless campaign for
retributive violence on the part of the colonisers. For example, Brown writes,
‘During the revolt and the repression that followed, more than five hundred black
men and women were killed in battle, were executed, or committed suicide, and
another five hundred were exiled from the island for life’ (148). Tacky’s Rebellion
‘threatened British control’ of its colonies ‘for the first time since the Maroon Wars
of the 1730s,’ which also took place in Jamaica (ibid.). Tacky took inspiration from
his maroon predecessors in utilising obeah as a defensive strategy – during the First
Maroon War (1730-1739), the resistance was led by an obeahwoman, alternately
called Nanny, Granny Nanny, or Queen Mother of the Blue Mountains.70 Obeah
70
For more on the figure of Nanny, see Sharpe, Jenny. Ghosts of Slavery: An Archeology of Black
207
practices were an integral part of maroon warfare in the West Indies and elements
such as ‘music, dance, and libations’ were incorporated into the maroons’ ritualistic
preparations for conflict with the British plantocracy (Edwards 158). These
practices served a tactical function, since ‘during the ceremony instructions could be
easily passed on to persons preparing for battle’ (ibid.). Accordingly, from its very
inception obeah functioned as a powerful form of cultural resistance in the
Caribbean, and it continues to do so today. Contemporary Caribbean authors such
as Kincaid and Pineau enact a literarization of this diasporic resistance in their
portrayal of obeah within their fiction, which thus mobilises a form of cultural
decolonisation.
III.
Obeah and Health
Obeah religious practices served to build communities among the diverse
African slave populations which converged on Caribbean plantations, and obeah
was consequently ‘seen by [...] colonial authorities as a threat to the stability of the
plantation and the health of colonial institutions’ (Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert
156). These opposing historical perceptions of obeah as a tradition which was
simultaneously beneficial to the health of the African slave population and yet
detrimental to the ‘health’ of colonial institutions engendered a paradox which
continues to surround its practice even now. The historical function of obeah ‘as a
set of secret rituals intended to bring about desired effects or actions and promote
healing, is thought to have provided the slave population with at least an illusion of
autonomy as well as a familiar method of access to the world of spirits, a measure of
social control and medical care’ (Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 156). It was ‘also
Women’s Lives (2003), Chapter 1.
208
used by the slaves as a system of intergroup justice’ in ‘preventing, detecting and
punishing crimes among [themselves]’ (Patterson: 1969: 190). Thus obeah had a
positive, multidimensional role within slave society as it was also a mode of selfregulation. Remarkably, despite the historical and contemporary prevalence of its
sociocultural and legislative condemnation, members of the Caribbean population
continue to practice obeah and its derivatives, and writers such as Kincaid and
Pineau portray these controversial traditions within their fiction as acceptable ways
of not only understanding, but also being-in-the-world. Their novels reappropriate
the notion of ‘black magic’ and, rather than a pseudonym for necromancy, they
portray obeah as a legitimate cultural practice that enriches the quality of life for the
black Caribbean population.
The notion of a British ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ and the similar
construction of the French D.O.M. network represent contemporary extensions of
the more archaic notion of ‘commonweal,’ a political term which denotes a
community that is founded for the ‘common good.’ However, as this chapter posits,
neocolonialist structures which advertise themselves as such types of ‘communities’
by bestowing their constituent territories with government citizenship or nominal
leadership by the Crown are in fact (following the Deleuzean paradigm) coercive
‘societies of control’ designed to manage the activities of their inhabitants (Deleuze
2011: 139). It is, to cite Thomas Hobbes, a ‘Common-wealth by Acquisition’ in
which the ruling power takes possession of all that lies within its purview (228).
Hobbes’s Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth
Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651) is a treatise on statecraft in which he advocates the
rule of an absolute sovereign power that determines the ‘common good’ of the
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people rather than allowing them to decide for themselves. Correspondingly,
although the residents of Caribbean Commonwealth nations and D.O.M.s are
technically citizens of the neoimperia, they scarcely see the benefits of economic
assistance and their political voices are rarely heard.
The British and French Empires seemingly followed a Hobbesian political
model during the establishment of their colonies, and the laws that are in place in
their neocolonial territories today hardly deviate at all from their original wording
with regard to non-Western cultural practices such as obeah. In his text Hobbes
deduces that in an exemplary commonwealth, religious power is subordinate to civil
power. Likewise, the deployment of politico-ideological force by the modern
neoimperium results in a kind of epistemontological violence that delegitimizes
diasporic spiritual worldviews. As Paton remarks, ‘There is a destructive circularity
to the story of the construction of “obeah”’ in that ‘dominant definitions of the term
were produced through colonial law-making and law-enforcement practices that
continue, along with Protestant theology, to influence popular understandings of
obeah in the Caribbean. In that sense, obeah is a creation of colonialism as much as
it is a construction of Africans in the Caribbean’ (17). The discursive reification of
obeah within colonial administrative documents as a ‘superstition’ or a ‘crime’ is a
process in which diasporic identity and autonomy become elided – because they are
legal documents, these written colonialist accounts become the ‘official’ and thus,
authoritative, accounts of obeah and its practitioners. Nonetheless, this
delegitimization of obeah through the written (colonial) sign can also be vitiated
through de- and reconstructive postcolonial creative writing practices. Kincaid and
Pineau accomplish this through their autofictional writing, which restores cultural
210
legitimacy to obeah as a traditional form of religion and medicine. For instance, in
an interview Kincaid confirms that obeah was an ordinary aspect of growing up in
Antigua and states, ‘I was very interested in it – it was such an everyday part of my
life, you see’ (Kincaid and Cudjoe 408). Kincaid’s mother and grandmother were
both practitioners of obeah and utilised its traditional healing methods at home, in
addition to consulting with local obeahwomen. Mildred Mortimer argues that
‘Caribbean women’s writings [...] posit resistance by emphasizing the importance of
female elders and their unique role in communicating the knowledge of healing arts,
nurturing, memory, and survival skills to women’ throughout the region (24). The
construction of such intergenerational womanly cultural matrices serves as a means
of defence against hegemonizing Western medicine, which intruded upon the
Caribbean during the colonial period, propagating ‘universal patriarchal truths’ that
remain deeply entrenched in current neoliberal medical discourse (McSpadden et al.,
Eds. 35). In the colonial territories, ‘The Western simply became “universal”’ and
regional medicinal practices were ‘reduced to one single model, all systems of
science to one mega-science, all indigenous medicine to one imperial medicine’
(Kumar-D’Souza 35). This form of medical biopower enabled the colonial state to
regulate the black body even more closely – at the cellular level. Afro-Caribbean
writers such as Kincaid and Pineau disrupt recolonising cycles of acculturation and
medicalization of the black body within their novels by abrogating Western
discursive constructions of obeah and reinstating its cultural validity.
As this study illustrates, obeah is at once an ecological and a corporeal
practice since it transforms both the natural and social environments within the
Caribbean. Obeah as a corporeal practice is one which employs healing and
211
supernatural abilities, and as such it represents the physical embodiment of diasporic
culture. An obeahman or –woman is also a representative figure of the body of the
oppressed Afro-Caribbean population. Obeah is therefore an embodied form of
resistance to subjugation by Western discursive regimes. It is a form of lived
resistance by which the Caribbean lived body recovers its autonomy in order to
restore the health of the body politic – in other words, the true ‘commonwealth.’ As
Patrick Bellegarde-Smith observes, other ‘ways of being challenge the Western
world’s triumphant universalism, yet few things are as certain as the existence of
parallel realities’ (2). Obeah and quimbois are frequently listed as ‘neo-African’
practices; however, as evinced by the textual examples from Kincaid and Pineau
herewithin, I would argue that ‘neo-African’ is a misnomer. Although these
practices are African-derived, in their historical evolution they have become
culturally creolised. In the case of the Caribbean, the colonial encounter engendered
not only a New World, but also new ways of perceiving and conceiving this world,
in the form of new spiritual and medicinal discourses ‘created from [dis]membered
segments’ (ibid.). These (dis)membered segments included slaves from various
West African cultures as well as surviving members of indigenous Caribbean tribes
and, later, indentured servants from diverse European, Middle Eastern and Asian
nations. Kincaid and Pineau utilise obeah within their autofictional narratives as an
axiomatic which provides representational space for such diasporic
epistemontologies. They link this representational space with lived Caribbean space
by portraying the roles of obeah and quimbois within the domestic sphere –
particularly within the space of the Creole household garden. Caribbean domestic
space has historically been controlled by the coloniser, but within Kincaid and
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Pineau’s writings it is reclaimed and reconstructed by the contemporary diasporic
subject. In their novels, the diasporic cultural practices of obeah and quimbois equip
their characters with an agentic positionality from which to contravene
institutionalised Western epistemontological forces.
IV.
Obeah in Contemporary Antigua
Pursuant to the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, the British imperium,
reluctant to relinquish control over the Afro-Caribbean population in the colonies,
drafted new sets of laws in order to regulate their behaviour now that they were
ostensibly ‘emancipated.’ ‘After slavery ended,’ Paton writes, ‘the law of obeah
shifted radically and permanently’ in the British West Indies (5). She explains:
The outlawing of obeah during slavery had mostly been encoded in statutes that
applied specifically to enslaved people. As with many other crimes in the
immediate post-emancipation period, if obeah was to continue to be illegal, it
was necessary to reframe the law. Between 1838 and 1920 the law regarding
obeah was remade across the Caribbean, culminating in an intense period of
legislation from around 1890 to 1920. In this period anti-obeah provisions were
adopted or revised by [the colonial governments]. For most of these colonies,
the legislation passed at this time lasted until well after the territories to which
they applied had become independent states. In some places […] the legislation
still stands today. (6)
Paton also notes that the legislative similarities across various colonies ‘resulted
both from deliberate copying by one colony of the laws of others and from imperial
pressure toward consistency across Britain’s Caribbean colonies’ (ibid.). For
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example, the current laws in Kincaid’s homeland of Antigua refer to the revised
Obeah Act of 1904, based on the original Small Charges Act of 1891. The present
legislation declares that the term ‘obeah’ ‘means obeah as ordinarily understood and
practised, and includes witchcraft and working or pretending to work by spells or
professed occult or supernatural power’ (‘The Obeah Act’ 2). Moreover, it states
that ‘whosoever [...] consults any person practising obeah shall be liable to a fine not
exceeding three thousand dollars or to be imprisoned’ (ibid. 2-3). Accordingly, it is
not only the practitioners such as obeahmen or –women who are criminalised by
Antiguan law, but also any citizen who seeks consultation with them. In an
interview, Trinidadian writer Selwyn Cudjoe asks Kincaid about the role that obeah
plays in her writing, to which she responds, ‘[it] was part of my actual life, and it’s
lodged not only in my memory, but in my own unconscious. So the role obeah
plays in my work is the role it played in my life. I suppose it was just there’ (408).
There is no mention whatsoever of obeah’s illegality in her conversation with
Cudjoe, and this omission seems to suggest that to them, obeah is simply an aspect
of everyday Caribbean life.
V.
Kincaid and Obeah
Kincaid has a firsthand connection to the world of obeah in that her mother
practiced obeah rituals and healing treatments at home and also consulted an
obeahwoman regularly. Additionally, her maternal grandmother, a Carib from the
neighbouring island of Dominica, was an obeahwoman herself. This serves to
illustrate the syncretism intrinsic to the development of obeah in that it originated
among the African diaspora but soon spread to other ethnic communities throughout
the Caribbean, including indigenous populations. Kincaid recounts quite matter-of-
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factly that her grandmother ‘believe[d] in spirits’ and ‘she did have friends who
were soucriants’ (1989: 406). Here Kincaid uses a Lesser Antillean Creole French
term – a soucriant, also called soucouyant or soucougnan, is a malignant creature, a
kind of vampire-witch who is believed to travel by fireball, shed her skin at night
and suck the blood of her victims. Furthermore, the author recollects that her family
blamed Western medicine for the sudden death of her uncle because it was
administered as treatment rather than obeah remedies. Cudjoe asks of Kincaid’s
mother, ‘Her brother died? He was sick at home, during the rains,’ to which she
replies, ‘Her brother John had died when she was a child, from obeah things. He
had a worm crawl out of his leg. Now, this sounds odd, but it did happen’ (406).
Kincaid incorporates her uncle’s harrowing experience into two of her autofictional
novels, The Autobiography of My Mother and Annie John, which I discuss below.
VI.
Obeah and Creoleness in The Autobiography of My Mother
The Autobiography of My Mother is set in Dominica, the birthplace of
Kincaid’s mother, and is a fictional reconceptualization of the experiences endured
by her mother during the early twentieth century. In the book, the protagonist Xuela
gives a straightforward account of the horrifying and repulsive circumstances
surrounding the death of her brother Alfred due to a malignant obeah spell which is
similar to the one that was cast on Kincaid’s uncle in real life. Xuela recalls:
This boy died. Before he died, from his body came a river of pus. Just as he
died, a large brown worm crawled out of his left leg; it lay there, above the
ankle, as if waiting to be found by a wanderer one morning. It soon dried up and
then looked as if all life had left its body thousands of years before. They
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became inseparable then, my brother and the worm that emerged from his body
just as he died. (111)
Xuela remembers how her mother, a Carib, tried to save Alfred using obeah
remedies concocted to undo the hex that afflicted her son and ravaged his young
body. She tells how her brother ‘was lying on a bed of clean rags that was on the
floor. They were special rags; they had been perfumed with oils rendered from
things vegetable and animal. It was to protect him from evil spirits. He was on the
floor so that the spirits could not get to him from underneath’ (108). Xuela then
contemplates the different sets of beliefs held by her mother and father, which is a
point of contention between them. She states that her mother ‘believed in obeah,’
whilst her father, a man of Afro-Scottish lineage, ‘held the beliefs of the people who
had subjugated him’ (ibid.). Xuela draws an explicit connection between the belief
in Western science and a kind of internalised colonialism. Accordingly, Kincaid
narratologically identifies the hegemonic presence of Western medicine in the
Caribbean as a form of oppression which has a delegitimizing effect on traditional
African-derived healing practices.
Xuela continues her tale of Alfred’s ordeal, stating, ‘He was not dead; he
was not alive. That he was not one or the other was not his fault’ (ibid.). This
zombielike state was also a result of the obeah curse placed on Alfred by an
unknown member of the community who wished him harm. Xuela observes:
It was said that he had yaws; it was said that he was possessed by an evil spirit
that caused his body to sprout sores. His father believed one remedy would cure
him, his mother believed in another; it was their beliefs that were at odds with
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each other, not the cures themselves. My father prayed to make him well, but
his prayers were like an incitement to the disease: small lesions grew larger, the
flesh on his left shin slowly began to vanish as if devoured by an invisible being,
revealing the bone, and then that also began to vanish. (109)
Alarmed, Xuela’s mother seeks a more powerful obeah cure in a desperate attempt
to heal Alfred. Xuela states, ‘she called in a man who dealt in obeah and a woman
who dealt in obeah who were native to Dominica, and then she sent for a woman, a
native of Guadeloupe; it was said that someone crossing seawater with a cure would
have more success’ (ibid.). Here Kincaid portrays obeah as a unifying agent, a
rhizomic Caribbean cultural practice that brings people together across not only
cultural, but also national boundaries. For instance, during the early twentieth
century, the period in which the novel is set, Dominica was a British Crown Colony.
The obeahwoman who comes to Alfred’s aid is from Guadeloupe, which was a
French colony at the time. Alas, despite the combined efforts of his family and the
obeahman and -women, Alfred ultimately succumbs to his illness since ‘the disease
was indifferent to every principle; no science, no god of any kind could alter its
course’ (ibid.).
VII.
Obeah and Maternality in Annie John
Kincaid’s depiction of obeah in Annie John differs considerably from that
within The Autobiography of My Mother. Like Alfred, Annie John is also a child
who suffers from a mysterious sickness during a distressing episode within the text.
However, Kincaid interpolates her uncle’s real-life ailment much less directly in this
passage, interweaving elements of his actual malady and treatment with Annie’s
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muddled thoughts in an abstract, dreamlike vision. Since the eponymous
protagonist is also the narrator of the novel, we are inside her consciousness as she
endures a prolonged bout of illness. Unlike the case of Kincaid’s uncle or that of the
character Alfred, the cause of Annie’s infirmity remains unidentified in the novel.
The majority of critics tend to link this incident to the onset of puberty and
individuation from the mother since when Annie recovers, she finds that she has
grown taller and she possesses a more independent demeanour. Similarly to
Kincaid’s uncle, Annie also falls ill ‘during the rains,’ as Cudjoe puts it, which is
typically a period of growth for the island’s vegetation (406). Thus it is possible that
Kincaid uses an overt ecological metaphor here to connote a time of ‘budding’
young womanhood. After all, Annie’s enigmatic condition coincides with a period
called ‘The Long Rain,’ as Kincaid entitles this chapter of the book (108). This title
alludes to the Antiguan climate, which follows a cycle that alternates between the
wet and dry seasons, the rainy season lasting for months at a time before returning to
a state of drought. Then again, I would argue that it is overly facile and rather
reductive to conjecture that Kincaid describes this event in such an incredibly
complex, multivalent manner simply to illustrate the confusion of pubescence.
Kincaid portrays this occurrence in a highly maternally inflected passage in
which Annie’s worried mother, Mrs John, summons Annie’s maternal grandmother
Ma Chess – a Carib obeahwoman from Dominica – to aid in rehabilitating Annie
using traditional obeah methods, along with (grand)motherly care. Initially, Ma
Chess suggests that Annie’s mother call on the help of Ma Jolie, a local
obeahwoman. At first Mrs John declines, knowing that Annie’s stepfather
Alexander, a devout Anglican, would object. Instead she opts to take Annie into
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town to see the doctor, an Englishman named Dr Stephens. However, upon
examination, Annie states that ‘he could find nothing much wrong, except that he
thought I might be a little run-down. My mother asked herself out loud, “How could
that be?”’ (110). Annie is soon bedridden, and her condition worsens.
It is then that her mother sends for Ma Jolie, who performs several obeah
rituals and produces multiple herbal tinctures which she administers to Annie. In
spite of this, Annie’s health continues to deteriorate. She recounts, ‘I don’t know
how long it was after this that Ma Chess appeared. I heard my mother and father
wonder to each other how she came to us, for she appeared on a day when the
steamer was not due, and so they didn’t go to meet her at the jetty’ (123). Ma Chess
suddenly materialises at the John residence, all the way from Dominica and
completely unannounced, and Kincaid never reveals her mode of transportation. As
a result, she instantly enshrouds the character of Ma Chess in an air of mystery and
enchantment, and illustrates her connection to the world of spirits. Annie’s
encounter with her grandmother is a particularly sensory experience as if, like a
newborn, she is discovering her maternal figure for the first time. She notes, ‘When
Ma Chess leaned over me, she smelled of many different things, all of them more
abominable than the black sachet Ma Jolie had pinned to my nightie. Whatever Ma
Jolie knew, my grandmother knew at least ten times more. How she regretted that
my mother didn’t take more of an interest in obeah things’ (123). It is Ma Chess’s
wish that Annie’s mother follow in her footsteps and become an obeahwoman, but
she does not share the same level of devotion to its practice. Mrs John is therefore
unequipped to assist in Annie’s recuperation as it requires expertise in obeah and is
consequently a task which Ma Chess must undertake alone.
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Annie’s grandmother therefore steps into the maternal role, as Mrs John is
forced to defer to her greater knowledge of obeah and can only stand aside and
watch helplessly. In an incredibly poignant and carefully nuanced passage, Ma
Chess seemingly regestates the frightened and delirious Annie, who recalls:
Sometimes at night, when I would feel that I was all locked up in the warm
falling soot and could not find my way out, Ma Chess would come into my
bed with me and stay until I was myself – whatever that had come to be by
then – again. I would lie on my side, curled up like a little comma, and Ma
Chess would lie next to me, curled up like a bigger comma, into which I fit.
(125-6)
Annie coils into the foetal position in moments of intense suffering and dread, and
Ma Chess instinctively re-envelops her in a womb of (grand)motherly nurturing and
love. It is significant that her protective, swathing presence restores her
granddaughter to her essential self – as Annie states, Ma Chess maintains a state of
amniotic cohesion with her ‘until I was myself – whatever that had come to be by
then – again’ (ibid.). When read more meticulously, this scene reveals its intricate
political undertones. I agree that it can be read as limning Annie’s individuation
from her mother, as the majority of critics propound, but I would venture that
Kincaid portrays this event on a decidedly more politically charged, even polemical,
scale. Correspondingly, Mrs John can be read as a Westernized half-Carib, halfAfrican woman who functions as an allegorical sign for the colonial (mother) island.
In this scenario, the colonial mother-island is incapable of sufficiently caring for its
children, the contemporary Antiguan population, whom Annie John embodies via
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her multiracial heritage. Furthermore, Annie John shares the exact same name as
her mother and thus represents the potential for a newly embodied version of the
Caribbean populace – one which is closer to its precolonial roots. As a figuration of
the Caribbean child Annie must therefore return to the primal scene of her
formation, which is the site of her originary culture(s). Kincaid links Ma Chess to
autochthonous Caribbean culture and ancient African culture, respectively, as she is
both a full-blooded Caribbean indigene and an authority on obeah. Hence, the
author identifies Ma Chess as the natural locus for this allegorical rebirthing process.
Here Kincaid simultaneously associates obeah with maternality and metonymizes
the wisdoms of originary mother culture(s) which predate those of Western
medicine and scientific knowledge in the sagacious, instinctual character of Ma
Chess. Additionally, obeahwomen are traditionally given the affectionate title ‘Ma,’
a term of endearment conventionally used for grandmothers in Caribbean culture,
and Kincaid infers the existence of an entire motherly matrix of obeahwomen such
as Ma Chess and Ma Jolie who unite in order to preserve the well-being of their
community.
The author reaffirms the rhizomic structure of this network by not only
demonstrating its inter-island marine root/route system, but also its interethnic
composition, as women from the Carib community such as Ma Chess also adopt
African-derived obeah customs, which complement native Caribbean spiritual
practices such as animism and shamanism. This serves to reinforce the creolised
constitution of obeah, in addition to the shared cultural history of the African slaves
and the indigenous Caribbean peoples. Kincaid thus alludes to their shared
oppression as ethnic groups which were subjugated and enslaved by the European
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invaders; but at the same time, she also elucidates a positive outcome of this painful
history in the form of obeah. For example, Nicolas Saunders remarks:
It was one of many ironic coincidences of Caribbean history that the great
number of enslaved African peoples transported across the Atlantic to work on
Caribbean plantations possessed animistic religions similar to those of the Taíno
and Carib. When African slaves escaped to the mountains or otherwise came
into contact with remaining Amerindians, their worldview was probably a point
of spiritual connection, despite different languages, cultures, appearances, and
traditions. (250)
Kincaid also highlights obeah as a means of cultural resistance to Western
colonialism and its patriarchal hegemony. In both The Autobiography of My Mother
and Annie John, she juxtaposes maternal obeah healing practices with patriarchal
Western medicine. This is evident in the latter novel when Annie says of Ma Jolie,
‘She gave my mother some little vials filled with fluids to rub on me at different
times of the day. My mother placed them on my shelf, right alongside the bottles of
compounds of vitamins that Dr. Stephens had prescribed’ (117). Kincaid employs
symbolic imagery in this scene, metaphorizing an ideological comparison via the
physical placement of the two healing methods beside each other on the shelf. This
sight proves greatly displeasing to Annie’s stepfather, whom she identifies as her
father figure, and she states, ‘When my father came in to see me, he looked at all my
medicines – Dr. Stephens’s and Ma Jolie’s – lined up side by side and screwed up
his face, the way he did when he didn’t like what he saw’ (117). Accordingly,
Kincaid aligns Western medicine with the anglicized male figures in the novel – the
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English physician Dr Stephens, and Annie’s Afro-Caribbean stepfather Alexander,
who is a staunch Anglican. The fact that Annie identifies her stepfather as her actual
father can be seen as alluding to the intrusion of the colonial Father and attendant
paternalistic, colonising discourses upon non-Western domesticity. Moreover,
Kincaid implicitly links Alexander John’s Anglicanism with his belief in Western
science, thereby underscoring the connection between Western religion and
medicine as twinned hegemonic ideologies that impinge on non-Western belief
systems. In both Annie John and The Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid seems
to suggest that although these Western and indigenous ideologies coexist within the
British West Indies, they do not do so harmoniously. The same can be said for the
frictile comingling of quimbois and Western ideologies in the francophone
Caribbean context, as Pineau demonstrates in her writings.
VIII.
Quimbois in the French Antilles
Curiously, in the English translations of Gisèle Pineau’s novels, quimbois is
universally translated as ‘obeah’ for an anglophone readership. Whilst there are
numerous incarnations of obeah throughout the Caribbean, it is important to note
that ‘the term “obeah” only exists in the anglophone region’ (Bilby and Handler
153). Although quimbois is a variation of obeah, it is also a distinct cultural practice
unique to certain parts of the francophone Caribbean. As Margarite Fernández
Olmos and Lizbeth Paravisini-Gebert note in Creole Religions of the Caribbean
(2011), ‘The practice of Quimbois, like that of Obeah, has been outlawed through
most of the islands’ postencounter history’ (180). Nevertheless, they point out that,
similarly to obeah, quimbois ‘has prevailed despite its persecution, because it fulfills
a vital social function through its healing capabilities and its contribution to the
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preservation of African culture, principally that of the cult of the ancestors, and in
offering protection from a number of supernatural beings that prey on the living’
(ibid.). Quimbois is alternately called tjenbwa or kenbwa in Lesser Antillean Creole
French. The French lexeme quimbois originated in the Creole injunction Tjenbwa,
which translates in French as ‘Tiens bois,’ or in English as ‘Take drink.’
Alternatively, it can also translate in English as ‘Take root.’ This was a command
given to patients by traditional healers, called quimboiseurs in French or tjenbwasès
in Creole, who used various plant roots in their medicinal concoctions.
It is a fitting appellation for this cultural tradition, as those members of the
Caribbean population who obstinately continue to practice obeah and quimbois in
the face of (neo)colonial assimilation tactics do so in order to ‘take root’ in their
originary culture(s). The same can be said for authors such as Pineau, who draw
attention to the fundamental role of quimbois in French Antillean culture. Fellow
Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, a literary foremother and supporter of Pineau,71
addresses this issue in La parole des femmes: Essai sur des romancières des Antilles
de langue française (1979) [The Speech of Women: Essay on French Antillean
Novelists (my translation)], and remarks:
Il est évident que dans la littérature, le quimbois peut simplement servir
d’élément d’exotisme, comme la description de scènes considérées comme
pittoresques. Cela peut être une manière de relever un récit et de restituer cette
prétendue saveur antillaise. Quand cela serait, cela traduirait l’importance des
pratiques qualifiées de magiques dans la vie et la réalité des îles. (53)
71
See Condé and McCormick, page 528.
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It is obvious that in literature, quimbois could simply function as an element of
exoticism, as in the depiction of scenes that are considered ‘picturesque.’ This is
a possible way to ‘spice up’ a tale and restore the alleged Antillean ‘flavour.’
When this is the case, it reflects the importance of magical skills in the life and
reality of the islands. [my translation]
Condé’s tone here is noticeably sardonic, and she emphasises the urgent need for
French Antillean novelists to illustrate ‘la méconnaissance des esprits de ce temps
en ce qui concerne les religions traditionnelles africaines’ (‘the ignorance of the
zeitgeist regarding traditional African religions’ [my translation] (48). She
continues, ‘Cependant il n’en est pas moins vrai que les esclaves arrivaient aux
Antilles avec tout un tissu de croyances et de pratiques qui tant bien que mal
s’intégraient à la religion catholique imposée. En Haïti, cela donne le vodou. Dans
les petits Antilles, le quimbois’ (‘However, it is no less true that the slaves arrived in
the Antilles with a whole network of beliefs and practices that were somehow
integrated into the imposed Catholic religion. In Haiti, this gave us voodoo. In the
Lesser Antilles, quimbois.’) [my translation] (48-9). Here Condé accentuates the
syncretic merging of belief systems that coincided with the merging of African,
European and indigenous Caribbean bodies within colonial island spaces.
She points to Haitian writer Maximilien Laroche’s portrait of the Haitian
citizen as paradigmatic of the Caribbean populace as a whole. Laroche states, ‘Si
donc l’Haïtien est ainsi tiraillé entre son être (le créole) et son paraître (le
français), c’est qu’au plus intime de lui-même, sa vie repose sur une opposition
inconciliée que l’on peut résumer par le dualisme vodou-catholicisme, français-
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créole.’ (‘So if the Haitian is thus torn between his being (Creole) and its lookalike
(French), that which is the most intimate part of himself, his life is based on an
irreconcilable opposition that can be summarised by the dualism voodooCatholicism, French-Creole.’) [my translation] (3). Laroche thereby outlines the
ambivalence inherent within colonialist discourses of representation which, as Homi
Bhabha maintains, entrap the colonised writing subject in the conflictual role of the
‘mimic man’ (1994: 122). Nonetheless, Bhabha seizes upon a positive element of
this irresolution, arguing that strategic forms of mimicry upset the polarity of this
‘dualism’ which Laroche references. This kind of mimicry, Bhabha asserts, is ‘the
sign of a double articulation’ that produces ‘slippage, excess and difference’ and
‘emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal’
(ibid.).72 As Condé, Pineau, Kincaid and others demonstrate within their work, the
Caribbean writer has the ability to destabilize the colonial will to power via the
creolisation of narrative and an ironic engagement with colonialist discourses.
IX.
Caribbean Slavery and Space
The highly pressurized environment of early colonial Caribbean island space
was critical to both the development of colonialist discourses and the counterdevelopment of anti-colonialist discourses. In his essay ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1986),
Michel Foucault declares that ‘our experience of the world is less that of a long life
developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects
with its own skein’ (22). He discusses the structurality inherent in humanity’s
compulsive spatialization of its surroundings, and cites structuralist theory as
germane to an analysis of the organisation of space as ‘an ensemble of relations that
72
For a provocative response to and challenge of Bhabha’s theorization of mimicry, see Young:
2004: 186-192.
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makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each
other’ (ibid.). Foucault traces this history of space back to the Middle Ages, an
epoch characterised by ‘a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane
places; protected places and open, exposed places; urban places and rural places’
(ibid.). ‘It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places,’
he argues, ‘that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval space: the
space of emplacement’ (ibid.). This arrangement facilitated the operations of the
feudal system, a model which was replicated by the colonisers during the ensuing
era of European imperialism. Thus it follows that structuralist theory is also an
apposite methodological approach for examining colonial spatializing policies. This
systematic division of New World space facilitated the acquisition, reinscription,
positioning and management of not only foreign territories, but also foreign bodies,
by the colonising powers. From its very inception, the European imperialist project
conflated foreign bodies with foreign landscapes in a discursive process of
naturalization, and as Martinican writer Édouard Glissant observes, authoritative
History ‘was consecrated by the absolute power of the written sign’ (1989: 76).
Consequently, indigenous Caribbean and African bodies, along with New World
space, were (re)inscribed by hegemonic narrations of colonial and capitalist
geographies that were recorded in official documents such as the slave ship manifest
and the imperial map.
Early modern European imperialism and its filial constituent, protocapitalism, engendered large-scale (dis)locations of space and people. I would posit
that the sites of these (dis)locations which were embedded in New World space by
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the colonisers were heterotopic73 in nature as they each served specific functions that
were singular to the early capitalist enterprise. These heterotopias were, namely, the
colonies themselves, in addition to their numerous subspaces, which were formed in
a filiative process of division and replication. These were of course the plantations,
as well as their subsidiary sites such as the various spaces of production (crop fields,
mills et cetera), and also domestic spaces such as the Great House and the slave
village. The one markedly incongruous (yet nonetheless heterotopic) space within
the plantation, I would argue, was that of the slave garden. In Fanonian terms,
colonial society was a Manichean world divided in twain that operated according to
an asymmetrical balance of power.74 The panoptic layout of plantation space
enhanced what Foucault would likely call its carceral character75 as slave bodies
were monitored from the Great House, which was positioned on an elevated surface.
This setup coerced the slaves to internalise the external eye of their overseer – the
planter or slave master – thereby provoking self-imposed surveillance and
effectively rendering the enslaved subject an automaton. In this biopoliticized
existence, characterised by what Giorgio Agamben terms (following Aristotle76) zoē,
or ‘bare life,’ the indigenous Caribbean body, and shortly thereafter, the African
body, became commodified objects of racialized labour in a slave economy (4). The
slaves were unfree in nearly every conceivable way, excepting their time in the slave
garden space, which allowed them some semblance of humanity and selfsovereignty.
73
‘Heterotopia’ is a concept in human geography developed by Foucault to denote places and spaces
of otherness that are simultaneously physical and psychical. See Foucault: 1986.
74
See Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
75
Foucault indicates that heterotopias can also be sites characterised by discipline and regulation,
such as prisons. See Foucault: 1986: 25, 26.
76
See Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (1999).
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The slave garden was a parcel of land, usually near their living quarters,
where slaves cultivated their own foodstuffs for consumption. Jill Casid investigates
African slave garden space in Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (2005)
and describes it as ‘a transplanted and alien piece of Africa that imperial
representation struggled to assimilate’ (201). On imperial maps, Casid notes, these
areas were labelled ‘Negro ground’ by the cartographer and were ‘differentiated’
from other, more regulated plantation subspaces by ‘crosshatched line markings’
(ibid.). She argues that ‘by their multidirectional angling that contrasts with the
uniform shading used for other parts of the plan, these lines connote disarray and
haphazard arrangement’ (ibid.). The slave garden therefore represents a creolisation
of space on the part of the slaves, and a simultaneously ecological and geographical
reassertion of African diasporic presence which has left an indelible mark that is
discernible even on a hegemonic construction such as the imperial map. Citing
colonial administrative documents, Casid continues:
If ‘negro grounds’ and slave gardens were to be pleasing to the eye when
‘kept in order,’ the specter of disorder likely conjured [...] a magical and
revolting landscape of slave and maroon alliance, obeah practices with
bewitching herbs, and the knowledge and cultivation of alien and indigenous
plants with healing and sustaining but also lethal properties. (210)
As Casid indicates, the imperial cartographer perceived the slave garden as a
spectral space that was both unknown and unknowable and which, as a result,
perpetually haunted the (highly ordered) surrounding plantation landscape. For
instance, Casid writes that the slave garden ‘represented an alien and menacing
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aesthetic’ from the viewpoint of the colonisers (213). Consequently, the slave
garden was, as Casid suggests in this passage, a literally ‘revolting landscape’ – a
landscape that was in revolt – as it existed in a state which defied plantation
orderliness. It was a living, breathing body of chaotic vegetal growth that
relentlessly threatened to encroach upon or overtake the nearby regimented grounds.
Hence a parallel of this situation in colonial ecology is also perceptible in terms of
human geography in that the enslaved body was seen by the colonisers as a constant
threat, ‘at once real and imaginary, of disorder’ (Foucault: 1995: 198). In both
cases, the resultant colonial imperative was therefore one of spatial containment.
The constant danger of slave uprisings drove the plantocracy to rule their fiefdoms
as ‘societ[ies] penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms,’ which
(literally) fortified the plantation space (ibid. 209). Notwithstanding these extensive
disciplinary networks which were mobilised in plantations across the Caribbean,
slave gardens were in fact the loci of many slave rebellions throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
X.
Obeah and Garden Space
The ‘slave garden plot’ came to have a dual meaning during the colonial
period as these grounds were also a meeting place where slave conspiracies to revolt
were planned, and in some cases, executed. During some slave rebellions, the
requisite herbs for malevolent obeah concoctions were grown, harvested and
blended with the intent of poisoning the planters or slave masters. As a
consequence, ‘in the name of curbing slave unrest, the colonial courts routinely
sentenced suspected obeah practitioners to deportation or, in more extreme cases,
execution’ (Browne 456). As Casid remarks, ‘the slave garden was supposed to root
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the slave to the plantation,’ but its inclusion on the plantation layout ultimately had a
counter-effect completely opposite to the effect which was intended in the scheme of
colonial landscape design (213). The African slave garden functioned as a prototype
for the contemporary Creole garden, as is apparent in its iterations in modern AfroCaribbean literature. Accordingly, the slave garden, or jardin d’esclave in the
francophone context, was the earliest form of the Afro-Caribbean household garden,
or jardin de case. The slave garden therefore ‘represents the first form of territorial
appropriation for the transported African, and as such, the earliest expression of
Caribbean identity’ (Mortimer 57). The Creole garden, then, has long been rooted in
representational space, and offers ground for diasporic modes of self-articulation
within physical space. It provides a way of disrupting the landscapes of colonial
power, thereby remapping not only island territory, but also Caribbean selfhood.
Hence self-identity and place-identity become not only coextensive, but also
cogeneric, within the Creole garden. Although it was initially designed as a space of
enclosure which would fix the African slaves within their prescribed roles and
within plantation space itself, the slave garden in fact became a site of creolisation
and community for fellow slaves of different African cultures. Their continued
practice of obeah along with their cultivation of associated plants, in spite of the
colonial suppression of African cultural practices, permitted the slaves to sustain an
affiliation to each other and to their ancestral traditions. The contemporary Creole
garden upholds this unifying aspect of slave garden space, as Kincaid and Pineau
demonstrate within their novels.
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XI.
Utopic vs. Heterotopic Garden Spaces in Caribbean Literature
In his theorization of heterotopic spaces Foucault asserts that ‘perhaps the
oldest example of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the
garden’ (1986: 25). Heterotopias are sites that are grounded in reality, and they
therefore exist in contrast to utopias, which are imaginary spaces of unattainable
perfection. Following Foucault’s logic, then, the earthly garden cannot be Edenic –
conversely to imperialist discourses regarding the purportedly utopic New World
‘island paradise.’ Louise Hardwick comments that ‘the earliest Antillean literature,’
dating from the nineteenth century, was ‘marked by the doudouiste tradition
perpetuated by béké authors [...] who celebrated the Antilles as a natural paradise in
texts which were destined to captivate a metropolitan audience’ (132). Here she
points out that in the earliest examples of so-called ‘Antillean’ literature, the land
was again reinscribed by the white, colonialist perspective, as these texts were
written by békés. Béké is a Lesser Antillean Creole French term used to describe
descendants of the early European settlers in the Antilles. Guadeloupean writer
Ernest Pépin notes that these literary imagings of the Caribbean were typified by
‘the physical grace of the Creole doudou’ (2). The doudou is ‘a stereotypically
beautiful, desirable Creole woman’ whose name is ascribed to a literary tradition
called doudouisme, which ‘was prominent in the later colonial era,’ and which
‘celebrated the beauty of the Antilles but remained blind to grittier social realities’
(Hardwick 133). Pépin explains that doudouiste literature:
inscribes the Caribbean in a sort of ideological vacuum, deporting it to an
Eden located ‘elsewhere’ and defaced by all the clichés that the colonial gaze
has come to expect [...] this is a crudely staged sham, its very excess
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annihilating nature and preventing all possibility of meaning, so that there
remains only a hollow, exotic stage-set of fantasy islands caressed by a
vanilla-scented breeze. [...] In this way, doudouisme conceals reality behind
a mask that serves a poetics of deterritorialization. (ibid.)
As a result, Pépin asserts, doudouiste literature ‘epitomizes the bankruptcy of a
space that has become fetishized and dehumanized, emptied of all meaningful
human value’ (3-4). Contemporary Caribbean writers such as Kincaid and Pineau
write against this tradition, ‘inviting a re-reading of the landscape which restores
integrity and complexity to Caribbean space. For them, the landscape is no exotic
stage-set but a lived environment which is to be celebrated and problematized as an
integral component of identity’ (Hardwick 133). These authors deploy a countergeopoetics that reconceives Caribbean space, embroidering the ‘veined tapestry, the
evolving tapestry’ of its living landscapes, of ‘worlds [they and their] ancestors have
known,’ and repopulating them with fully realized, multifaceted characters (Harris:
1999: 224). The characters that Kincaid and Pineau develop in their novels move
within heterotopic garden spaces which they delineate using a vibrant plenitude of
diasporic presence. These authors therefore demonstrate a ‘literacy of the
imagination’ that obviates the exoticising entrapments of previous (colonialist)
Caribbean literary traditions (ibid. 225).
Foucault describes garden space as heterogeneous, a ‘sort of microcosm’
which ‘is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world’
(ibid. 26). This was certainly the case for the slave garden, which was physically the
smallest parcel of the plantation ‘world’ but also the only part of it that effectively
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belonged to the slaves; thus it represented the totality of their cultural world.
Foucault also maintains that heterotopic sites ‘open onto what might be termed [...]
heterochronies,’ which we could perhaps envision in Bakhtinian terms as
chronotopes77 that are unique to heterotopias (ibid.). He posits that the ‘heterotopia
begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of break with their
traditional time’ (ibid.). This is true of Creole garden space, as it has historically
been a site where the intergenerational transmission of knowledge occurs, and has
therefore functioned as a kind of time-space continuum. In this way the Creole
garden becomes, as Foucault would say, an ‘other space’ – a space of alterity in the
sense that it is the space of the racialized Other, and also because it is a space in
which time is distorted, or even, distended (ibid. 22). Moreover, Foucault insists
that ‘heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both
isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not
freely accessible like a public place’ (ibid. 26). Resultantly, although the design of
the Creole garden plot is one of enclosure, it is actually a penetrable and rhizomic
space that is open to acts of relation.
XII.
Creole Gardens, Bhabha and the Unhomely
The creation of New World heterotopias such as the colonies and plantations
led to a sense of what Bhabha terms, in his 1992 essay ‘The World and the Home’
(following the German etymon of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the Unheimlich78),
77
‘Chronotope’ is a term coined by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination (1981) and he uses
it to describe the ways in which configurations of time and space are represented discursively. He
states, ‘We will give the name chronotope (literally “time space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of
temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (84). Rather than
conceptualizing the chronotope strictly as a ‘formally constitutive category of literature,’ as Bakhtin
proposes, I would argue that it can also be treated discursively as a formally constitutive category of
sociocultural reality (84).
78
See Freud’s Das Unheimlische (1919).
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the ‘unhomely’ for the migrant subject, whose sense of dislocation begins with ‘that
rite of “extra-territorial” initiation’ – the crossing from one place to another (141).
In the case of the African slave, it is the voyage through the Middle Passage, on yet
another heterotopic site, the slave ship. In search of ‘a postcolonial place’ within
literature, Bhabha asks, ‘What kind of narrative can house unfree people? Is the
novel also a house where the unhomely can live?’ (ibid. 142). Pointing to Toni
Morrison’s eponymous essay (1989), he seeks a literary site where ‘unspeakable
thoughts unspoken’ can finally be articulated. He asserts, ‘The unhomely moment
relates the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider
disjunctions of political existence’ (ibid. 144). This notion of a disoriented and
disorienting re-envisioning of diasporic experience is evident in the writings of
Kincaid and Pineau. They implicitly address the postmemory of slavery in their
haunted narratives via what Bhabha calls ‘the uncanny literary and social effects of
enforced social accommodation, or historical migrations and cultural relocations’
(ibid. 141). Their characters are ‘overdetermined, unaccommodated postcolonial
figure[s]’ in search of a new locational identity (ibid. 142). Bhabha, redeploying
poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term, argues that the spectralization of postmemorial
fiction ‘provide[s] an “inscape” of the memory of slavery’ (Bhabha: 1992: 151,
Hopkins 176). ‘Inscape’ is a neologism coined by Hopkins that denotes ‘the crucial
features that form or communicate the inner character, essence, or “personality” of
something’ (Phillips xx). Bhabha subsequently suggests that the narratological
inscape of postmemorial writing provides a location from which previously
‘unaccommodated’ postcolonial authors can speak and thereby find a literary ‘home’
in the site of the unhomely. Accordingly, if we apply Bhabha’s logic to
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contemporary Afro-Caribbean women’s writing, the imaginary ‘inscape of the
memory of slavery’ can be linked to the material landscape of Creole garden space.
Rather than inhabiting literary ‘houses of racial memory,’ as Bhabha suggests,
postgenerational Afro-Caribbean writers such as Kincaid and Pineau often
narratologically dwell out-of-doors, within the open-air garden space (ibid. 147).
Since it is also what I would term an auratic place,79 the Creole garden is a verdant
plot whose lushness belies the fact that it is a site marked by traumatic loss and
displacement. However, novelists such as Kincaid and Pineau recognise that the
imaginative geography of the Creole garden is subtended by multiple strata of
dislocated narratives, which can be unearthed and then recultivated within
postmemorial literature.
XIII.
Creole Garden and Topophilia
‘Topophilia’ is a neoterism invented by Yi-fu Tuan in Topophilia: A Study of
Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (1974) in order to denote ‘the
affective bond between people and place or setting’ (4). In the textual examples
cited in this chapter, Kincaid and Pineau present topophilic autofictional narratives
in which ‘life stories are [...] geographically grounded’ (Mortimer 2).
Correspondingly, Edward Soja contends that life writing has ‘milieux, immediate
locales, provocative emplacements which affect thought and action’ (114). In terms
of the texts chosen for this particular study, Kincaid and Pineau locate the source of
topophilic sentiment within the lived, and living, Creole garden space. Their life
narratives are thus ‘contextualized in space that is neither passive nor inert, neither
neutral nor void. Space, like history, is a shaping force and a social product’
79
See Chapter IV for this theorization.
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(Mortimer 2). In her essay ‘Silent Performances in Guadeloupean Dooryard
Gardens: The Creolization of the Self and the Environment’ (2007), Catherine
Benoît explicates the ‘typology of gardens’ that exist within the Caribbean region,
which means that the individual Creole garden ‘cannot be conceived of without
reference to a house, to the people who live in it, to their ancestors, and to the spirits
of their dead’ (127, 130). Furthermore, she comments, ‘It has been noted that in the
Caribbean there is no clear delineation between one property and another, fences are
not common. A tree can indicate delimitations between two gardens, but the
boundaries are actually defined by practices and walking habits based on social
interactions among inhabitants, neighbors, visitors, and the dead’ (121). A
hermeneutical approach to the Creole domestic landscape reveals that each
household garden has a distinct spatial arrangement that reflects the owner’s
particular role within Caribbean society. For example, Benoît remarks, ‘There are
hyperritualized gardens indicative of an intense religious life, such as the gardens of
healers’ (127). Creole garden environments are thus marked by their owner’s
worldview, and the presence of specific plants therein speaks to the ways in which
the gardener participates in this worldview. For instance, Benoît states that ‘many
of the plants’ which are found in the ‘gardens of people of African descent’ are ‘not
present in a béké garden’ (128). The hyperritualized garden space belonging to the
obeah or quimbois healer which Benoît mentions here fits the Foucauldian model of
what I would call the hyperritualized heterotopia. Foucault stipulates that in order
to enter such a space, ‘the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get
in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures. Moreover, there
are even heterotopias that are entirely consecrated to these activities of purification -
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purification that is partly religious and partly hygienic’ (1986: 26). In the same way,
practitioners of obeah or quimbois maintain a corporeal and spiritual connection to
their garden by performing certain cosmoecological rituals. Benoît notes that ‘this
link is maintained’ by activities such as ‘taking specific baths in the garden and
planting trees for specific purposes’ (123). These practices mutually imbricate a
person’s identity and his or her surroundings in ways that strengthen topophilic ties
to the garden landscape.
Tuan asserts that when topophilia is the ‘compelling’ emotive force, ‘the
place or environment has become the carrier of emotionally charged events or
perceived as a symbol’ (93). In these narratives by Kincaid and Pineau, the Creole
garden operates as a tropological symbol which conveys a postmemorial heritage.
Following Foucault’s outline of the garden heterotopia, I would argue that the
Creole garden functions as a metaphorical umbilical cord which links the AfroCaribbean population to the ancestral/spiritual world. Foucault describes the
structure of the archetypal garden as physically organised around ‘a space still more
sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its
center’ (1986:25). Correspondingly, in the Creole garden an ecological umbilical
cord is symbolically attached to a newborn child once the physical umbilical cord is
cut by his or her parents in a sacred ritual that follows ancient African practices.80
For example, Benoît observes:
In Guadeloupe, an individual becomes a person through rituals performed at
birth, both on the newborn body and in the garden, binding body to place. The
umbilical cord of the newborn is placed at the foot of a breadfruit or more often
80
See Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert page 181for more information on this ritual.
238
a fruit tree. People then treat this tree with particular consideration. A first link
is thus established between the individual, his birthplace, and his parents, if not
his ancestors. (123)
The Creole garden therefore replaces the biological womb of the mother, becoming
the ecological womb which will encase the child’s spiritual being throughout the
remainder of his or her lifetime. Additionally, in his essay Foucault states that ‘the
basin and water fountain’ were located at the centre of the archetypal garden, ‘and
all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space’ (1986:
25-6). Rather than a material fountain, then, in Kincaid and Pineau’s autofictional
works the Creole garden centres around a metaphorical conduit, the spiritual font
from which flow subterranean histories, stories and knowledges. Creole garden
space thus functions a kind of umbilical cord that connects the diasporic population
to their African mother culture.
XIV. Topophilia in Annie John
In Annie John Kincaid depicts the Creole garden as a formative space where
the eponymous protagonist spends memorable topophilic moments with her mother
during her childhood. For instance, Annie describes the practice of gardening with
her mother and recalls fondly, ‘Sometimes she might call out to me to go and get
some thyme or basil or some other herb for her, for she grew all of her herbs in little
pots that she kept in a corner of our little garden. Sometimes when I gave her the
herbs, she might stoop down and kiss me on my lips and then on my neck. It was in
such a paradise that I lived’ (25). Here Kincaid reveals the affective ties created
between Annie and the material garden environment during such tender exchanges
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with her mother. Their household garden is a site where Mrs John grows culinary
ingredients in addition to various other herbs, plants and trees which provide
components to be extracted for medicinal and spiritual obeah purposes. Annie
describes one such ritualistic practice, that of protective bathing, as another time of
mother-daughter bonding. She recounts:
My mother and I often took a bath together. Sometimes it was just a plain
bath, which didn’t take very long. Other times, it was a special bath in which
the barks and flowers of many different trees, together with all sorts of oils,
were boiled in the same large caldron. We would then sit in this bath in a
darkened room with a strange-smelling candle burning away. As we sat in
this bath, my mother would bathe different parts of my body; then she would
do the same to herself. We took these baths after my mother had consulted
with her obeah woman, and with her mother and a trusted friend. (14)
Here again Kincaid highlights the inextricable links that exist between the Creole
garden, obeah and maternality as foundational aspects of Caribbean culture which
serve to strengthen not only familial ties but also more macroscopic affiliative
networks, especially between multiple generations of women. She portrays obeah as
a vital element of the collective archipelagic unconscious that undergirds female
relationships and therefore acts as an important structuring force within Caribbean
society.
XV.
Topophilia in Exile according to Julia
Originally published in French as L’Exil selon Julia (1996) and translated
into English in 2003, Exile according to Julia is a semi-autobiographical tale based
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on Pineau’s doubly diasporic experience growing up in cultural exile in France
during the 1950s and 60s. Her family was part of the massive transplantation of
West Indians who migrated to European metropoles following the Second World
War in search of work and better prospects for their children. Pineau’s father
enlisted in the French army and moved their family from Guadeloupe to Paris,
where she was born and raised. She did not visit her family’s homeland until 1970,
when as an adolescent she joined them on their return to the French Antilles. Much
like Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother, which was published the same
year as L’Exil selon Julia and which is at once the story of the narrator Xuela and
that of her dead mother (also named Xuela), Pineau’s novel tells the tale of the
narrator Marie81 and, at the same time, that of her grandmother Julia. Thus, as
Xuela writes her autobiography, she simultaneously writes that of her mother, and
Marie does the same for her grandmother. Similarly to Kincaid’s text, which is the
author’s narratological re-envisioning of her mother’s life, Pineau’s work is a
reimagining of her grandmother’s traumatic displacement. Pineau explains:
In [the novel] I tell the story of my grandmother, the six years she spent in
France. [...] I lived in France an exile by proxy, at my grandmother’s side
because it was she who really was an exile. She had not chosen to come to
81
Marie, the name of the narrator, is also Pineau’s middle name, and the author makes ‘a veiled
reference to the surname Pineau, when the narrator explains that Man Ya’s husband, Asdrubal, feels a
keen sense of belonging to France because of his surname’ (Hardwick 142). Pineau writes, ‘He said
he was descended from a big family in Charentes. In France, in the course of his military campaigns,
some white people had shown him on a map the exact spot where his name originated. His name
came directly from France. It was neither a name made up on the day of abolition nor a remnant
from Africa. He was proud of it’ (84). Harwick remarks that ‘To the metropolitan French reader,
this conveys the idea of the popular aperitif, “Pineau des Charentes.” As a consequence, the reader
can deduce that the narrator’s surname is Pineau, despite the fact that the word is never used.
Nonetheless, this remains a cryptic reference to paternal lineage in a text which privileges maternal
figures’ (142). In this novel, the male characters are conflated with the colonial Father, since both
Asdrubal and Marie’s father join the army because they feel an affinity to France that stems from
their French surname.
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France. She came because my father wanted to save her from the brutality of
her husband who beat her [...] I was searching for a hospitable country, and I
recognized this country in my grandmother’s stories. I longed to belong to
this country, to say to myself: ‘Yes, I am from Guadeloupe, me too.’ (2003:
173)
Correspondingly, in Pineau’s book the family absconds with Marie’s grandmother to
Paris in order to rescue her from her abusive husband Asdrubal, whom they call
‘The Torturer.’ Marie’s grandmother is addressed affectionately by the family in
Creole as Man Ya, which translates in English as ‘Ma Ya’ (short for ‘Ma Julia’).
Man Ya comes to serve as an important cultural link to Guadeloupe for the family
since Marie’s parents have all but abandoned their Creole legacy in an attempt at
assimilation.
Through her vivid topophilic descriptions of the island worlds of quimbois
and the household garden, Man Ya’s storytelling infuses her grandchildren with vital
knowledge of their homeland and thus, their heritage. Her actions serve as an
example to her daughter-in-law, who finally tells the children about her hometown,
exclaiming, ‘Routhiers is a place...how can I describe it...Woods! At the foot of the
Carbet Falls. Interminable mist and drizzle. Rich black earth. You throw a seed,
and from it grows a forest that holds wicked zombies and witches’ magic’ (12).
Man Ya realizes that such tales of supernatural creatures frighten the children and
she reassures them with stories of her garden, which she limns as a safe haven that
will protect them from malignant beings and spells. Marie recounts:
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But all at once, she takes us back to her garden, and we escape from the bad
men. Even more than her house in Routhiers, she misses her garden. She
pictures it for us, a wonderful place where all kinds of trees, plants and
flowers grow in abundance in an overwhelming green, an almost miraculous
verdure, dappled here and there with a silver light that shines nowhere else
but in the heart of Routhiers. She conjures up an everlasting, flowing spring,
gushing from a rock, hurled onto her lands by the great Soufrière. She lets
us see her river, which comes down from the mountain to flow through her
woods and wash her clothes. She sings us the song of every bird; afterwards
she names the foliage and fruits. Then she hoists us into the branches of her
trees, just so we can see the horizon better, the horizon with its little bumps
of islands bending under the weight of their smoking, spitting, pot-bellied
volcanoes. We see it all through her eyes and believe her as one believes in
Heaven, wavering endlessly between suspicion and deep conviction. (8)
Man Ya’s imaging of her garden allows her grandchildren to feel transported to
another world as they are captivated by her storytelling, which enlivens every
contour of the landscape. The intensity of her topophilic sentiment when she
reminisces about her garden almost renders the Guadeloupean environment palpable
for her grandchildren, despite the fact that they have never seen it. Therefore,
Pineau’s text seems to suggest that topophilia can also occur in an imagined, inner
landscape, or inscape, to use the Hopkinsian term. The children come to know the
whole of the island terrain as well as its flora and fauna through imagined sensory
experience. In hearing her stories, these terrestrial features become so utterly
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intertwined with Man Ya’s identity that the children conflate the two within their
psyche and begin to view her as an embodiment of the Guadeloupean hinterland.
Her mention of La Grande Soufrière82 in this passage further aligns her with the
countryside since it is a near homonym of the French verb souffrir, which means ‘to
suffer.’ The pronunciation of this active volcano’s name lends it an
anthropomorphic quality, and makes it sound as though its constant state of inner
turmoil causes it to suffer. Furthermore, the fact that its name is gendered as
feminine linguistically imparts an image of a feminised neocolonial landscape that is
suffering. Similarly, Man Ya’s internal unrest due to her agonistic separation from
her homeland manifests itself in an illness that her family names ‘[la] maladie de
l’exil’ – a kind of ‘exile sickness’ [my translation] – and her physical condition
parallels the volcano’s dolorous existence (1996: 129). However, just as volcanic
eruptions give birth to new island territories, so too do Man Ya’s effusive topophilic
narratives (re)produce the island space of Guadeloupe afresh for her grandchildren,
and subsequently help to ease her pain.
In this scene Marie describes her grandmother as a kind of sorceress who is
able to ‘conjure up’ Guadeloupean topography with her very words as though she is
casting a spell. Her skill as a raconteuse83 enables Man Ya to mesmerize the
children with her topophilic eloquence, revealing herself as a kind of obeahwoman
or quimboiseuse. Indeed, at other points in the novel she tells them how her garden
in Guadeloupe not only ‘gives her food’ but also ‘herbs’ which she uses for
quimbois practices (104). She pledges to teach them ‘the herbs for healing, the
82
La Grande Soufrière is an active volcano located on the island of Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe, and it
is the highest mountain peak in the Lesser Antilles. Its name translates in English as ‘The Great
Sulpherer.’
83
Raconteuse is the French lexeme for ‘storyteller.’
244
medicine-roots, the blessed barks’ and show them ‘the secrets of bushes’ and how
‘to recognize the jagged edges, the lacy shapes and the scents, the feel and the right
use’ (124). Like the obeahwomen in Kincaid’s novels, Man Ya is a compelling
maternal figure whose demiurgic powers are most evident when she is either
physically or spiritually present in her household garden. When Man Ya’s family
snatches her from her garden and brings her to Paris, they tell her, ‘Too bad for The
Torturer! He will see, but too late, that he has lost the treasure of his life’ (22).
Marie recalls Man Ya’s immediate response: ‘“And my garden?” cries Man Ya.
“Who will take care of my garden?”’ to which Marie’s mother replies, ‘“Don’t
distress yourself, Manman. You have already worked hard enough”’ (ibid.).
Stricken with grief, Man Ya feels useless and vulnerable when she is no longer able
to tend to her garden. She prays to God:
I never wanted to leave [...] my house and my animals, my garden, my
vanilla. I only implored You every day that the Torturer would change from
being an animal, that the spirits would grant him the favor of getting his
night’s sleep. I am not a woman who weeps, You know that very well. You
have put seas and seas between him and me. I don’t know why. These
children look on me as a strange creature. The whole blessed day they speak
with RRRR in their mouth. I don’t understand their language. And there are
only whites in France. And I don’t understand why blacks go to lose
themselves in that country. (44-5)
Man Ya cannot speak French and only knows Guadeloupean Creole French;
therefore she has difficulty understanding when her family members speak Creole,
245
as they pronounce the rhotic ‘r’ sound rather than the typical non-rhotic Creole
pronunciation, which is more like a ‘w’ sound. Nevertheless, they seem to speak the
same language when they talk about her garden. She feels that her family has ‘lost
themselves’ and their sense of identity in moving to Paris, but soon comprehends
that they can rediscover their Creole inheritance through hearing her stories and
envisioning her garden.
When the first spring of her period of exile arrives, Man Ya discerns that
some of her restlessness is a result of being cooped up in the family’s tiny Parisian
flat. Marie recounts, ‘Of course, she does not feel at home in Île-de-France, in the
narrow confines of an apartment. But it’s either that or death Back Home, they tell
us in a whisper’ (8). Île-de-France, where Marie’s family lives, is the most densely
populated section of Paris, and it is almost completely covered by the metropolitan
area. Île-de-France translates in English as ‘Island of France,’ and in migrating
from Guadeloupe to Paris, Marie’s family effectively moves from one ‘island of
France’ to another, since Guadeloupe is an island D.O.M. Furthermore, due to the
fact that the current Antillean population in metropolitan France is larger than either
the population of Guadeloupe or Martinique (the islands with the two largest
populations out of all the Caribbean D.O.M.s), it constitutes what Alain Anselin has
termed la troisième île – ‘the third island’ (8). Man Ya finally ventures outside to
explore, and Marie remembers that her grandmother ‘thanks the Good Lord for this
favor. And, since from now on she is obliged to stand upright in this land, she takes
us in hand and suddenly throws all her energies into a grand spring-cleaning’ (45).
Man Ya takes the children outdoors and Marie marvels at her revived sense of
purpose, stating:
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Her joy increases even more when she sees the garden. It is sighing and
weeping under the suffocating heat of three heights of weeds. Two feet in
military boots, body bent in two, as if she were at the bedside of a patient,
Man Ya weeds, sows, waters, and watches over the growth of the young
plants. Handling the earth, turning it over, feeling it between her fingers,
delights her. She makes the earth hers. The features on her face express
serenity. She forgets her fingers swollen by the cold, the icy cotton wool
falling in winter, the cold piercing her bones, the red brick in her bed. She
reaches another dimension. The tree of life growing in the middle of her
stomach to hold her heart like a nest in its branches smiles and puts out
flowers. Carrots, lettuce, beets, tender peas, tomatoes grow prodigiously.
Tilling the soil gives her life, sustains her. (46)
The etymology of the name Île-de-France may refer to the land which lies between
the rivers Oise, Marne and Seine, or it may have been an earlier reference to the Île
de la Cité, one of the two natural remaining islands on the Seine River within the
city of Paris, and the city’s geographical centre. Thus, Man Ya builds a Creole
garden in the very heart of the metropole, creolising the neoimperial landscape while
concurrently renewing her creative womanist spirit. With this scene Pineau seems
to suggest that the Creole garden is transportable, as it can migrate along with the
diasporic subject due to the topophilic sense memories possessed by the travelling
gardener. Wilson Harris, a writer from the British Commonwealth nation of Guyana
in the continental Caribbean, asserts that ‘exile is the ground of live fossil and
sensuous memory within uncertain roots that are threaded into legacies of
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transplantation’ (1983: xx). Correspondingly, within her novel Pineau examines the
exilic predicament of the doubly displaced Caribbean subject in the neoimperial
centre. This particular episode cited above illustrates Foucault’s contention that the
heterotopic garden is adaptable. For example, he states, ‘A society, as its history
unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion [...]
the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it
occurs, have one function or another’ (1986: 25). Hence, I would posit that Man Ya
enacts a kind of migratory topophilia that permits her to recreate a Creole garden
heterotopia on foreign soil. This diasporic cultural practice enables her to ‘stand
upright in this land’ and ‘make the earth hers,’ thereby taking a step in colonising
the metropole (45, 46). In so doing, she reasserts diasporic presence while working
to disembed monolithic Western presence from a parcel of the metropolitan
landscape.
This image of Man Ya weeding an overgrown garden reiterates the leitmotif
that Pineau introduces in the poetic epigraph to the French edition of the book and
which ricochets throughout the entire novel. Metaphorizing intrusive particles of
postmemory as ‘weeds,’ she writes:
Hasards de la mémoire, inventions?
Tout est vrai et faux, émotions.
Ici, l'essentiel voisine les souvenirs adventices.
Il n'y a ni héros ni figurants.
Ni bons ni méchants.
Seulement l'espérance en de meilleurs demains. (1996: n.p.)
Chances of memory, inventions?
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All is true and false, emotions.
Here, most neighbouring weeds are memories.
There are no heroes or extras.
Neither good nor bad.
Only the hope for better tomorrows. [my translation]
Pineau depicts traumatic memory as an open wound that is cracked like the patch of
earth which Man Ya attempts to heal. Spectres of obscured memories invade the
consciousness like weeds that grow at random in the spaces between remembered
episodes of past experience. The novel’s epigraph ‘prefigures [Pineau’s] recurring
use of botanical and environmental imagery in passages on memory and identity
throughout the text’ (Hardwick 144). Notably, as this study demonstrates, The
Drifting of Spirits and Exile according to Julia exemplify Pineau’s consistent use of
such imagery to depict auratic places that are fractured by colonialism within both
the neocolony and the metropole, respectively.
XVI. Topophilia and The Womanist Garden
In their autofictional works, Kincaid and Pineau illuminate the topophilic
phenomenology of the domestic garden space, which Alice Walker identifies in her
essay ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’ (1983) as a site that has historically
‘[fed] the creative spirit’ of black women whose foremothers were forcibly
transplanted to the Americas (239). She avers that the practice of gardening has
provided (and continues to provide) a way for women of the African diaspora to
engage productively with their imposed landscape. Of her own mother, Walker
marvels, ‘Whatever she planted grew as if by magic [...] Because of her creativity
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with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of
blooms’ (241). She remembers her mother’s garden as ‘a garden so brilliant with
colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity’ (ibid.).
Walker locates the primal scene of womanist expression in the act of gardening and
its imaginative, inspired conception of the surrounding environment. She therefore
stresses the importance of gardening as a form of feminine self-representation and
connects this to, as she states, ‘the way my mother showed herself as an artist’ (240).
Walker aligns gardening with storytelling as ways of leaving behind a living,
breathing matrilineal legacy and comments, ‘I have absorbed not only the stories
themselves, but something of the manner in which [my mother] spoke, something of
the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories – like her life – must be
recorded’ (ibid.). Kincaid echoes this sentiment in an interview by Moira Ferguson,
whom she tells about her mother’s homeland Dominica, stating, ‘You know, it had a
lot of memory for my mother; a lot of my writing inspiration, writing soil is in that
soil’ (166). Similarly, in the interview by Cudjoe, Kincaid avows:
The fertile soil of my creative life is my mother. When I write, in some things I
use my mother's voice, because I like my mother's voice. I like the way she sees
things. In that way, I suppose that if you wanted to say it was feminist, it can
only be true. I feel I would have no creative life or no real interest in art without
my mother. It's really my ‘fertile soil.’ (402)
With this statement Kincaid conflates her mother with the Caribbean soil itself,
thereby retropologizing the colonialist notion of a feminised island landscape in a
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gesture of self-empowerment. In so doing, she discursively reclaims the Caribbean
terrain as a space for the enunciation of women’s creational powers.
Correspondingly, Walker implores her fellow black female artists, ‘We must
fearlessly pull out of ourselves and look and identify with our lives the living
creativity some of our great-grandmothers were not allowed to know’ (237). This
life-affirming mode of artistic reproduction was historically stifled by the colonisers
in favour of forced biological reproduction since the primary function of slave
women was to give birth to more slaves. The Afro-Caribbean feminine artistic drive
was brutally repressed and Walker contends that as a consequence, ‘the vibrant,
creative spirit that the black woman has inherited’ continues to ‘pop out in wild and
unlikely places to this day’ (239). As she argues in her essay, these ‘wild and
unlikely places’ which are the sites of womanist creative acts are, of course,
household gardens. Walker repeatedly uses descriptors such as ‘magic’ and ‘wild’
to limn the womanist household garden as an enchanted setting and the site of
fantastical happenings (241, 239). She wonders at this mysterious effect of the
garden atmosphere, stating, ‘I notice that it is only when my mother is working in
her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible’ (241). As
Walker infers, strange and miraculous events can literally take place within the
garden as it is an otherworldly space which enables spectres of vestigial African
spiritual practices to thrive. Accordingly, she observes that the garden environment
seemingly illumines its keeper, imbuing her with an ethereal quality while it ‘feeds
the creative spirit’ within (239).
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XVII. Creole Garden and Ancestral Presence in The Drifting of Spirits
Pineau depicts the supernatural ambience of the French Antillean Creole
garden in her novel The Drifting of Spirits, a multigenerational tale which
investigates the role of an African ancestral presence in the everyday lives of
Caribbean people. The Creole garden is a space of spiritual communion with one’s
ancestors in that the gardener tends to this space using knowledge passed down
throughout generations. In Pineau’s novel, however, it is also a space of direct
communication and interaction with ancestral revenants. Much of the story centres
on the protagonist Léonce, whose club foot earns him the nickname ‘Kochi,’ a
Guadeloupean Creole French word which translates in standard French as ‘tordu,’ or
in English as ‘twisted.’ He was also born with a caul, meaning that a part of the
amniotic membrane still covered his head when he emerged from the womb. This,
combined with his club foot, sets Léonce apart from the rest of the Guadeloupean
community, who regard him as peculiar. As Pineau writes, in Afro-Caribbean
culture, a caul is seen as a strange and powerful gift since ‘to be born with a caul is
to automatically possess supernatural powers. It is to open the gateway to the spirits
who roam at the edge of the earth. It is to deal with the dead, to listen to words from
the other world and to see beyond the visible’ (2000: 5). From the time of his very
birth, Léonce bears a corporeal mark which signifies his propinquity to the
supernatural world. He enters the natural world with part of the amnion still
attached to and encasing his head, and he is therefore both physically and
psychically connected to the womb of his African mother culture. I would argue
that the image of the caul covering Léonce’s eyes functions symbolically as a
noticeable echo of the Du Boisian veil in that it endows him with a double
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consciousness. Similarly to the connotations of the veil in W.E.B. Du Bois’s
theorization in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in Pineau’s novel Léonce’s veil
serves a positive purpose, despite the fact that many within his community have a
negative attitude toward his ability, as it allows him to perceive the workings of the
elusive spirit world. In Du Bois’s treatise, the veil is a visual manifestation of the
colour line; thus the black subject is doubly self-aware – able to perceive not only
his or her interiority but also an exteriorized vision of him- or herself as perceived
by the white population. Du Bois therefore sketches ‘the two worlds within and
without the Veil,’ and specifies that he has ‘no desire to tear down that veil’ but
rather wishes ‘to creep through’ it (12, 15). Pineau seems to undertake the same
endeavour in her narrative, peering through the discursive colonialist veil of ‘black
magic’ which enshrouds those who subscribe to the quimbois worldview. In so
doing, she narratologically transforms this veil into a mark to be worn with pride
and in triumph over such forms of cultural violence. Correspondingly, Du Bois also
sublimates the presence of the veil since it is both a blessing and a curse for the
black subject. For instance, he argues that the recognition of the veil changes the
‘child of Emancipation’ into ‘the youth with dawning self-consciousness, selfrealization, self-respect’ (15). Pineau’s narrative suggests that Léonce must also
bear his supernatural faculty with dignity since it makes him exceptional and
provides him with an enviable closeness to his ancestors. For example, she writes,
‘A gift is earth to be gently turned over without haste [...]. A gift is a little of God’s
heaven come down to earth. It is a garden of delights with fruit to be guarded –
thieves are lurking – its flowers to be adored, its herbs to be weeded [...] A gift is the
union of heaven and earth’ (2000: 88). Here Pineau links the notion of a
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supernatural gift with the image of the Creole garden, indicating that like a garden,
this gift is also something to be cultivated and guarded carefully as it is precious to
its owner.
Nonetheless, Léonce’s mother Ninette is terrified by her son’s gift and
consults a quimboiseuse who instructs her to apply ‘a battery of failsafe remedies’
designed to protect a child who is ‘born with a caul’ against ‘the all-powerful
drifting spirits’ (5). The local quimbois belief system in Guadeloupe holds that the
dead preside over the living, and thus they can either watch over them protectively
or curse their existence. Ninette follows the old woman’s advice, fearing that
Léonce’s gift will draw him too near to the unpredictable spirits and consequently,
too near to danger. Pineau details the elaborate rituals which Ninette must carry out:
With great care and infinite patience, she put the caul out to dry on a
bleached-out rock in the yard. When the sun had finished its job, she
pounded the caul until it was reduced to a fine dust, which she fed to the
child in small spoonfuls. Finally, she attached a pentacle of virgin
parchment to his neck, said a series of novenas and dragged herself on her
knees through countless churches in Guadeloupe. The caul eaten, the gift
disappeared. (5-6)
Despite the departure of Léonce’s gift, the community continue to look upon him as
a curiosity and the invisible mark of the vanished caul lingers permanently on his
countenance. Well aware of his perceived abnormality, young Léonce works harder
than most, saving up enough money to build a beautiful cabin. He then sets about
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obsessively cultivating a garden in an effort to capture the attention of his future
wife Myrtha, the town beauty.
As the title of chapter nine in the novel indicates, it is truly ‘an extraordinary
garden’ since the spirit of his deceased grandmother, Ma Octavia, returns to visit
him in this space, and subsequently, his gift which allows him to engage with the
spirit world also returns to him in full force (74). Léonce was Ma Octavia’s
favourite grandchild during her lifetime, and her ghost appears in his garden one day
in a spectacular display that transforms his modest plot into a lush paradise. Pineau
describes this marvellous encounter:
He had fallen asleep at the foot of the star-apple tree. He had hardly fallen
asleep when he awoke. A completely different person. As if he was
emerging from his body to be born a second time. A very fine film veiled
his eyes. A song of joy rose to his lips, for a miracle had happened. Around
him the garden that he had left without a trace of fruit was bursting with
fruitfulness. [...] The sprouting cane looked like a giant sea urchin, so dense
were the innumerable, bristling shoots, as if their points were ready to pierce
the heavens. The three banana trees that he loved had produced phenomenal
branches which, judging by their appearance, each weighed more than a ton.
And then he came to a halt before the breadfruit tree. The puny shoot,
planted the previous month, dominated everything, standing some thirty feet
tall. In its branches, laden with breadfruit, nestled colourful and glittering
fauna [...] Their singing encircled the star-apple trunk where Léonce stood,
petrified. He wanted to dance, to sing, to whistle a tune he knew. But no
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sound left his throat. Then he was happy to fill his eyes, his ears and his
nostrils with the paradise that his humble garden had become. (81)
Here Pineau depicts the sudden appearance of Ma Octavia as an explosion of
verdant splendour, thereby aligning feminine ancestral spirits with womanist
creative power. Moreover, Ma Octavia discloses that the reason for her
materialization is so that she may provide grandmotherly guidance which will
influence Léonce’s actions in the material world. She tells him, ‘I am returning to
you the gift that your mamma took away. Take good care of it! Don’t abuse it and
use it wisely! I have spoken’ (84). In The Womb of Space (1983) Harris argues that
this interaction with the dead within imaginative fiction ‘suggests an activity of
image beyond given verbal convention into non-verbal arts of the imagination in the
womb of cultural space as though an unstructured force arbitrates or mediates
between articulate or verbal signs and silent or eclipsed voices [...] in folk religions,’
whose absent presence ‘subsists upon implicit metaphors of death-in-life, life-indeath’ (xix). Likewise, in her novel Pineau discursively imbricates the natural and
supernatural worlds in order to bring to the surface a submerged dialogue with preColumbian cultures that were interred by colonialism. The Creole garden is an
empowering space for the diasporic subject as it allows a reacquaintance with his or
her forebears through regenerative cultural and spiritual practices. As Pineau
illustrates in the scene when Ma Octavia comes to Léonce’s plot, with the advent of
the Afro-Caribbean garden the New World landscape is no longer a formidable
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space of ‘indefinite detention’84 for the black subject. It is now a sheltering,
maternal ‘womb of space’ which serves as the locus of the cross-cultural
imagination.
XVIII. Conclusion
The cognitive and material geographies of the Afro-Caribbean subject have
historically been (re)inscribed by the coloniser, from the time of the first colonies to
the present neocolonial moment of the Commonwealth nation and the D.O.M. The
narratological imperative of Afro-Caribbean writers, then, is to first unmap historical
geographies of power, and subsequently to perform a counter- or remapping of both
the Caribbean landscape and inscape. This can be achieved via the reorientation of
authorial positionality toward local ways of knowing and being-in-the-world.
Kincaid and Pineau present the Caribbean decolonial imaginary within their
autofictional works and depict obeah and quimbois, respectively, as decolonial
epistemontologies.85 It is an occupation of the terrain of hybridity (as represented
novelistically by the Creole garden) that provides an alternate space of enunciation
from which creolised forms of self-articulation become possible. For instance, I
suspect that based on her factual comments regarding the practical and downright
necessary functioning of obeah in Caribbean life, Kincaid would dispute attempts to
label her autofictional work as evidentiary of ‘magic realism.’ Any narrative –
fictional or otherwise – is obviously representationalist; however, Kincaid
endeavours to accurately portray an/other way of life that is nevertheless exemplary
84
Here I am referencing the title of chapter three in Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of
Mourning and Violence (2004).
85
Here I am applying Walter Mignolo’s model of ‘decoloniality,’ which he outlines in The Darker
Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (2011). This theoretical paradigm
has considerable potential for transdisciplinary applications, and is unquestionably relevant to an
analytic of contemporary Caribbean literature.
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of truth. For example, in the interview by Cudjoe she affirms, ‘These stories were
accepted; this was a part of my reality’ (409). In other words, that which appears to
the controlling Western Eye as ‘surreality’ is, to the authorial eye or I, an honest
depiction of the Real. Tellingly, some non-Caribbean academics who write
handbooks on Caribbean authors such as Mary Ellen Snodgrass in Jamaica Kincaid:
A Literary Companion (2008) tend to describe the work of writers like Kincaid
dismissively as ‘comprised of bizarre, experimental surreality’ (20). As Harris
suggests, the eye of the Western critic or ‘Caribbeanist’ is frequently, habitually, a
recolonising eye.86 For instance, he remarks, ‘It is hard for anyone – however
entrenched are public hypocrisies – to deceive oneself that the Caribbean poet is not
at odds with the philistine establishment of the West Indies’ (1983: 120). Following
Walter Mignolo’s anthropological paradigm, I would argue that the non-Caribbean
literary critic or ‘expert’ who establishes the criteria for the Canon of West Indian
Literature is also the one who inhabits the epistemic zero point. 87
Reductivist efforts to classify writers such as Kincaid and Pineau as
‘experimental’ ‘magic realists’ represent situated attempts to totalize Caribbean
knowledges in a sweeping, universalizing act of epistemological synthesis that
produces an artificial, philistine Caribbean knowledge (singular). Harris laments
this ‘habit in the region of assembling bodies of knowledge in coercive identity,’ and
infers the negative ontological and identitarian effects of such academic
manoeuvring upon the Caribbean psyche (ibid. 124). Such an uncritical approach to
Caribbean literature subsumes its authors under the sign of anthropos while
86
87
See Harris’s The Womb of Space (1983).
See Mignolo’s 2011 essay ‘I Am Where I Think: Remapping the Order of Knowing.’
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simultaneously consolidating Western presence within the Caribbean literary canon.
As Harris asserts:
The denial of profound exile, the refusal to perceive its own dismembered
psychical world, is basic to Caribbean philistinism. It has led to a body of
education which describes, feasts upon, rather than participates in, the
activity of knowledge. Knowledge is imported technology (rather than
‘experimental’ art or science). Indeed the term ‘experimental’ is used by
Philistine establishment not to imply the necessities of concentration upon
asymmetric reality but to endorse suspicions of the creative imagination.
(ibid. 122)
Uncritical interpretations of Caribbean literature are therefore decontextualizing acts
of epistemic violence. As Harris insists, it is crucial to contextualize Caribbean
literature within critical analysis and recognize the importance of ‘cross-cultural
imaginations that bear upon the future through mutations of the monolithic character
of conquistadorial legacies of civilisation’ (ibid. xv). In terms of not only creolised
writing practices, but also those which are spiritual and medicinal such as obeah and
quimbois, syncretism does not equal synthesis. Rather, creolisation is made up of
segmentarized processes,88 just as it is made up of segmentarized cultures.
Although obeah in its myriad iterations has been historically suppressed, it
has nonetheless persevered as an integral part of Caribbean existence. To omit
obeah entirely from the writing of Caribbean literature, or to dress it up in the more
marketable garb of ‘magic realism,’ is to devalue it utterly. Kincaid and Pineau
88
For more on this theory, see Orlando Patterson’s 1975 essay ‘Context and Choice in Ethnic
Allegiance: A Theoretical Framework and Caribbean Case Study.’
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undertake the ‘subtle repudiation of arbitrary codes of knowledge’ through their
revisionist portrayals of obeah as a valid and valuable epistemontology within their
novels (ibid. 126). It is an alternate way of being-in-the-world which binds its
practitioners more closely to that world by grounding them in the Caribbean soil.
Originating in the slave garden and continuing to flourish within the modern Creole
household garden, obeah ties Afro-Caribbean people to the island terrain in a
restorative way, providing them with nourishment and producing a fertile creative
spirit. This symbiotic relationship with the landscape represents an ironic inversion
of the fixative bond with the land that the colonisers initially intended for the
African slaves in allowing them to cultivate their own gardens. In this way,
gardening allowed African slaves ‘subtle fissures of illumination within the
prisonhouse of existence’ on the plantation (ibid. xvi). The sense of fulfilment
which Kincaid and Pineau’s characters experience within the contemporary Creole
garden allegorises ‘the drama of psychical awakening from [the] nightmare
programme of the past in the future, the ceaseless nightmare of history’ (ibid. xviii).
Harris emphasises the illuminative function of postmemorial narratives which, he
suggests, reach ‘forward and backward into the distance of time’ in order to shed
new light on the transgenerational effects of slavery within the Afro-Caribbean
psyche (ibid. xvi). These are stories in which ‘character emerges from the
unconscious sediment of history raised by almost involuntary degrees into
consciousness to bring about quite different narrative illuminations than one
associates with the function of documentary realism’ (ibid. 123). This productive
engagement with the past ensures the protensity of the diasporic creative
imagination, as postgenerational writers mine ‘resources of futurity and imagination
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that may alter perception through and away from fixed habit, greed and monoliths of
terror’ (ibid. xvi). Authors such as Kincaid and Pineau expose the narrative
possibilities permitted by the time-space continuum that exists within the heterotopic
Creole garden, a microcosm of the Caribbean world.
Such a protractile re-envisioning of archipelagic time and space is made
possible by ancestral presence, which these authors identify as a governing force in
the daily lives of African diasporans. This absent presence reveals itself in the
elusive gleam which haunts auratic places such as the Caribbean landscape and
which, at times, can also penetrate the diasporic subject when he or she connects
with this landscape through cultural practices such as obeah, quimbois or gardening.
It is the same shimmer which irradiates Walker’s mother in her personal narrative,
and Kincaid and Pineau’s characters in their autofictional tales. Thus, ancestral
presence is both an external and internal force since it organises Caribbean
heterotopias and subsequently also influences their inhabitants. Harris explicates
these dazzling bursts of the extraordinary in the seemingly mundane movements of
everyday Caribbean life, and pronounces:
One may with hindsight glimmeringly perceive that vehicles of genesis, that
human cultures tend to symbolise into absolute structuralism, may possess
ironic textures to mirror apparently non-existent life in subordination to
ruling unconsciousness across aeons of matter and space that are the
geologic equivalent to blind cultural habit by which we are governed. (ibid.
xvi-xvii)
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Accordingly, Caribbean autofictional texts which resist conscription within orders of
knowledge that are preordained by Western or Westernized academics unearth what
Harris terms ‘blocked muses’ – diasporic forms of inspiration which, he argues,
have been repressed by the mimetic drive89 (ibid. xx). This conscious disruption of
the rationalist cycle of repetition within the Afro-Caribbean psyche simultaneously
unravels the teleology of Western authoritarian ideologies and unlocks the
unconscious diasporic imagination. As a result, Harris maintains, ‘The subtlety of
such illumination is woven into the living imagination to make an intuitive leap and
to come abreast, as in a dream, of the secrets of potentiality’ (ibid. xvi). Following
his logic, I would posit that the rejection of mechanistic epistemic forces produces a
vitalistic counter-force which enables anticathexis within the mind of the Caribbean
writer.90 This explains the riotous materialization of ‘unconscious knowledge’
within Caribbean autofiction, which results in ‘the phenomenon of otherness that
moves in the novel’ (ibid. 126, xvii). The densely imagistic worlds that Kincaid and
Pineau limn within their autofictional texts are, therefore, manifestations of the
living diasporic imagination.
The themes discussed in this chapter prompted the desire to introduce here a
brief but adductive reading of Harris and Emmanuel Lévinas which examines their
psychological treatment of artistic production and applies it within a contemporary
Caribbean literary context. I would venture that these ideas which Harris puts forth
regarding the Creole creative imagination, particularly those in his chapter entitled
‘Artifice and Root,’ seem to represent Caribbean-centric reverberations of Lévinas’s
89
The mimetic drive, as Harris explicates in his text, is an unconscious impulse that exists in
opposition to Bhabha’s postulation of conscious, tactical forms of mimicry.
90
For more on psychoanalytic applications of the mechanistic-vitalistic paradigm of causality, see
Gray et al. General Systems Theory and Psychiatry (1969), page 10.
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theorizations in his 1948 essay ‘Reality and its Shadow.’ Lévinas identifies art
which erupts from the unconscious as the only authentic mode of artistic production
and contrasts it with what he terms ‘committed art’ and ‘committed literature,’
which represent hegemonic forms of knowledge (2). For example, he contends, ‘Art
does not know a particular type of reality; it contrasts with knowledge. It is the very
event of obscuring, a descent of the night, an invasion of shadow’ (3). Harris
seemingly reworks this hypothesis in his own study when he asserts that Caribbean
literature is conceived ‘in a context of exiled creation or hidden shadow that
accumulates into a brushstroke that marks a stage in the ambiguous trespass of
freedom’ (1983: 96). Consequently, Harris’s dual concept of ‘artifice and root’
resonates with Lévinas’s notion of ‘reality and its shadow,’ and indeed these two
sets of terms can be considered in parallel. Harris’s conception of Caribbean art as
reaching ‘forward and backward into the distance of time,’ and thereby existing
outside of the rational temporalization of time, echoes Lévinas’s call ‘To disengage
oneself from the world’ (Harris: 1983: xvi, Lévinas 2). For instance, Lévinas urges
the artist to perform ‘a disengagement on the hither side – of an interruption of time
by a movement going on the hither side of time, in its “interstices”’ (2-3).
Elsewhere in his writings Harris delineates a Caribbean phenomenology of time
which demands that his fellow artists ‘deepen our perception of the flora and fauna
of a landscape of time’ (1999: 174). This call resounds within the work of other
Caribbean writers such as Glissant, who declares, ‘Our quest for the dimension of
time will therefore be neither harmonious nor linear’ (1989: 106). This shared
worldview is reflective of an Afro-Caribbean collective unconscious, one which
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defamiliarizes the lived environment in ways that deconstruct Western fabulations of
Caribbean space and time.
Correspondingly, authors such as Kincaid and Pineau demonstrate that obeah
knowledges are deeply embedded in the Caribbean collective unconscious. For
example, in the interview by Cudjoe, Kincaid describes obeah consultations as not
only a ritualistic practice, but also a psychical practice ‘which keeps the unconscious
all oiled up’ (409). These consultations are a way of recalibrating the mind and
maintaining its receptivity to shared diasporic modes of thought. Speaking to his
encounters with obeah while growing up in Trinidad, yet another British
Commonwealth nation in the Caribbean, Cudjoe concurs with Kincaid and states:
Each society has its own means of coming to terms with that other part of its
world. Call it what you may, one has to come to terms with it if one wishes
to lead a healthy life. Each society constructs its own mechanisms: we tend
to privilege the Western and call it ‘good’ and ‘proper’ and call ours ‘bad,’
‘pagan,’ and everything else, but I guess it’s [a matter of] how one looks at
it. (ibid.)
Practitioners of obeah possess a mindset which disavows insidious Western
discursive regimes in favour of embracing diasporic cultural practices as sources of
self-empowerment. Throughout Caribbean history, ‘supernatural beliefs and the
machinery of the colonial state were inextricably enmeshed. Colonial masters
confronted African spirituality, while black shamans wielded a (sometimes)
countervailing political influence. In practice, neither masters nor slaves recognized
a distinction between material and spiritual power’ (Brown 151). Thus, ‘as far as
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colonial officials were concerned, the ban on obeah was a ban on alternative
authority and social power,’ and this continues to be the case across much of the
neocolonial Caribbean today (ibid. 150). Kincaid and Pineau’s positioning of obeah
as the axis of their narratives thus represents a strategic way to disarticulate
monolithic representations of Caribbean lived reality and detach themselves from
the self-replicating colonial machine. As Cudjoe points out, obeah exists within
‘that other part’ of the Caribbean world which was sublated by colonialist discourse
and thus cast into epistemontological darkness.
However, Harris argues that it is precisely this tenebrous quality of occluded
cultural wisdoms that enables the diasporic subject to countermand the ‘over-text of
ego-historical command’ which the mimic man ‘reveres and obeys’ (1983: xvii).
For instance, he proclaims, ‘Obscurity or darkness may bring to imaginative fiction
and poetry a luminous paradox, depth and tone’ (ibid. xvi). It is through these
‘intuitive fissures of illumination and subtle transformations of bias,’ Harris insists,
that we ‘may look afresh with somewhat shattered yet curiously liberated eyes’ at
the spectacle of living creation (ibid. xvii). Kincaid and Pineau’s autofictional texts
which were selected for this study instantiate how to think, act and see decolonially
within imaginative fiction, and thereby delink from imperialist models of writing.
Harris clarifies his similar authorial tactic, remarking, ‘In describing the world you
see, the language evolves and begins to encompass realities that are not visible’
(1997: 265). It is a creative methodology which deconstructs rationalist binaries in
order to expose the illusion of opposites. Such an approach reveals that elements
such as existence and (apparent) non-existence are not only concomitant, but also
codependent and thus interactive. In much the same way, Kincaid and Pineau depict
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obeah as part of an invisible structuring force which builds connective matrices
between the natural and supernatural worlds. In autofictional texts such as The
Autobiography of My Mother and Annie John, and Exile according to Julia and The
Drifting of Spirits, respectively, Kincaid and Pineau seem to suggest that the terrene
and the ethereal are, in fact, supervenient within the psyche of believers in obeah
and quimbois. Simultaneously rendering the familiar, telluric world opaque and the
intangible spirit world incandescent, they convey an intricate dialectic which
visualises a decolonising counter-imagination. It is the narratological presencing of
an absence – the textual haunting of contemporary Caribbean landscapes by
previously ‘exiled men and gods’ (Harris: 1972: 73). Their narratives realize the
glossy neocolonial world of fallacious ‘emancipation’ and ‘independence’ that is the
assimilated Caribbean nation-state, and at the same time, they show how the outline
of this world is also shaded, and thus shaped, by its seemingly unassimilable
diasporic adumbrations. Kincaid and Pineau thereby redress Afro-Caribbean selfexpression, utilising cultural apparitions within their novels to coruscatingly uncloud
diasporic consciousness and dispel internalised discourses of self-subjection.
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Chapter VI
Postcolonial Pathologies: Labour Migration and Disordered Subjectivities in
Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Gisèle Pineau’s Devil’s Dance
I.
Introduction
Pursuant to my redress of Marianne Hirsch’s conceptualization of
postmemory in Chapter IV, in this chapter I argue (following Caruth: 1996) that
since the traumatized subject cannot fully realize disturbing events, a potential
consequence is that he or she exteriorizes them in a somatization of suffering which
inscribes the body with pathological disorders. These disorders take myriad forms,
all of which contemporary hegemonic socio-medical discourse – part of a larger
neoimperial, neoliberal system – attributes to madness. This circumscription is the
result of a nexus of overdetermining historical, political and social forces that
discursively hystericize the black female body, fixing it in a state which is at once
fitful and stagnant. I will examine Jamaica Kincaid’s novella Lucy (1990) and
Gisèle Pineau’s novel Devil’s Dance (2006) in order to illustrate the condition of
immobility which is paradoxically inflicted on the female Afro-Caribbean migrant
subject. As a result, Kincaid and Pineau’s protagonists enact a reassertion of the
black female body, which represents an attempt at presencing an absent referent –
that is, not only their own selves but also the nameless source of trauma – both of
which have hitherto been non-realized. For instance, if the black man is ‘the result
of a series of aberrations of affect,’ as Martinican theorist Frantz Fanon asserts in
Black Skin, White Masks (1952) what, then, are the constituent elements of the black
woman’s subjectivity (2008: 8)? Due to the black woman’s double discursive
displacement in dominant, masculinist Caribbean narratives of decolonisation by
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Fanon et al. she once again bears the brunt of patriarchal universalism, which
excludes the woman subject from consideration. In Lucy and Devil’s Dance,
respectively, Kincaid and Pineau focalize their narratives on the contemporary
female Afro-Caribbean migrant labourer, whose case is even more fraught as she
experiences a triple sense of self-alienation due to not only her gender and race, but
also her status as an unfree labourer in the neoimperium. Their texts demonstrate
that this sense of estrangement is engendered within the highly stratified society of
the neocolony and then compounded by the more clandestine retraumatizing
psychosocial structures of the metropole. Kincaid and Pineau suggest that this
condition of profound self-alienation leads to internal divisions and disorders which
manifest themselves somatically and which can often become debilitating and
thereby immobilising. This chapter will place Kincaid and Pineau’s narratives
alongside a larger, ongoing transnational and transdisciplinary discussion which
theorizes migrant subjectivity. I will investigate the ways in which attendant
discourses work to recolonise the actual dislocated migrant subject by reappropriating this subjective position, consequently retraumatizing and
repathologizing dispossessed subjects, whose positionality becomes discursively
invalidated.
In their study Postcolonial Disorders (2008), DelVecchio Good et al. insist
that ‘contemporary studies of subjectivity must necessarily address “disorders” – the
intertwined personal and social disorders associated with rampant globalization,
neoliberal economic policies, and postcolonial politics’ (2). They continue,
‘Whether read as pathologies, modes of suffering, the domain of the imaginary, or as
forms of repression, disordered subjectivity provides entrée to exploring dimensions
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of contemporary social life as lived experience’ (ibid.). I find this concept of
‘disordered subjectivity,’ a term they borrow from psychopathology, to be helpful in
terms of theorizing the postcolonial subject. However, I would counter their
description of ‘contemporary’ (by this I presume they actually mean ‘postcolonial,’
which should not be so carelessly conflated with ‘contemporary’) social life as lived
experience by pointing out that many postcolonial authors complicate this notion in
their fiction. They problematize the concept of lived experience via hauntological
rhetoric, which spectralizes the world of the living with traces of ‘an impure history
of ghosts’ (Derrida: 1993: 118). Here I am referring to Jacques Derrida’s theory of
hauntology, which he introduces in Specters of Marx (1993).91 Derrida emphasises
that hauntological practice is neither ontological nor epistemological since the figure
of the ghost ‘is’ insofar as ‘one does not know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it
responds to a name and corresponds to an essence’ (5). He continues:
One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this
non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer
belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one
knows by the name of knowledge. (ibid.)
In the case of postcolonial literature, then, it is the spectre of colonialism which
haunts the text. More specifically, in Afro-Caribbean literature, it is the
postmemory of slavery – the source of nameless, unknowable ancestral trauma. The
system of slavery was a constituent part of the larger system of proto-capitalism
which simultaneously built the New World and bound it inextricably to the Old
91
I also employ this theory in Chapter II.
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World via the expropriation of labour and resources from the colonies. Hundreds of
years later, this bond persists in the neoimperialist, late-capitalist present.
Correspondingly, in his analysis of Karl Marx, Derrida links the figure of the
ghostly apparition to the spectre of capital which haunts the modern world. He
argues, ‘For the singular ghost, the ghost that generated this incalculable
multiplicity, the arch-specter, is a father or else it is capital’ (1993: 173).
Furthermore, Derrida asserts that the capitalist system is one which ‘proliferates’;
hence ‘one can no longer count its offspring or interests, its supplements or surplus
values’ (ibid.). I would argue that Derrida’s postulation can apply to the figure of
the colonial Father, who is also the father of capitalism in the New World territories.
As I argue in Chapter II, the colonial Father has historically been an absent presence
in the Caribbean – first, through absentee planting and government rule by proxy,
and later, through a network of vestigial (neo)colonial structures. Following
Derrida’s logic, I would argue that this imperialist-capitalist-patriarchal desire to
inseminate the occupied territories and breed a ‘New World’ Order resulted in the
unnatural proliferation of widespread disorder. Consequently, it is this disordered
experience which I investigate in this chapter. I am particularly interested in
examining the disordered subjectivity of the black female migrant labourer, as she is
a figure who has historically been an involuntary constituent of this filiative system
and yet she remains inexcusably undertheorized.
I would posit that as doubly diasporic, migrant writers, Kincaid and Pineau
appear to utilise the figure of the Afro-Caribbean female labour migrant as an
allegorical sign for the cross-cultural dilemma of the displaced black woman subject,
whose arrival within a legitimating social discourse has hitherto been endlessly
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deferred, just like her deferred arrival within either the ‘home’ nation in the
Caribbean or ‘host’ nation in the neoimperium. They explore this predicament in
their respective works, Lucy and Devil’s Dance, as their protagonists are women
migrant labourers who journey to the metropole in search of work, but once there
they are promptly met with neoimperial forces of subjection. Kincaid’s Lucy (1990)
is an autofictional novella which tells the tale of the eponymous character, a teenage
economic migrant who is compelled to leave her impoverished island birthplace in
‘the West Indies’ (largely assumed by critics to be Antigua) to work as an au pair for
an affluent white family in New York. The protagonist of Pineau’s 2002 novel
Chair Piment,92 translated into English in 2006 as Devil’s Dance, is also an
adolescent economic migrant to the neoimperium, albeit for very different reasons
from those of Lucy. Pineau relates the story of a woman named Mina who is forced
to flee Guadeloupe after a sequence of tragic events. Mina is orphaned by the
untimely deaths of her parents, and soon thereafter she also loses her sister Rosalia
and their home when the cabin catches fire, reducing the structure to ash and
burning her sister alive. Like Lucy, she immigrates to the metropole in order to
enter the service industry – once Mina arrives in Paris she takes a job as a high
school cafeteria worker. Kincaid and Pineau demonstrate a preoccupation with the
figure of the Afro-Caribbean female migrant labourer that enables them to explore
their own doubly diasporic experiences as intellectual labourers in the metropole, as
well as the historical experiences of their African foremothers who were
transplanted to the Caribbean to work as slaves.
92
Chair Piment translates in English as ‘Hot Flesh’ – meaning ‘hot’ as in ‘spicy.’
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II.
Theorizing the Migrant
The figure of the migrant has long been a site of contestation, conflation and
confusion within academic discourse. The term ‘migrant’ is frequently used
interchangeably with ‘diasporan,’ ‘refugee,’ ‘homeless,’ ‘nomad,’ and ‘exile,’
among others. The ‘politics of domination, migration, subjectivity and agency’
which are coincident with such phraseology are of paramount importance, but are
often ignored by its users (Davies 59). Countless volumes exist which attempt to
either analyse or compose a ‘poetics of travel’ that delineates a kind of mobile
subjectivity, using the euphemistic notion of ‘travel’ as a way of sublimating
discourses of actual dislocation. For the purposes of this chapter I will focus on four
such major works (five if you count the fact that one of these is bipartite): namely,
Capitalism and Schizophrenia (two volumes: Anti-Oedipus [1972] and A Thousand
Plateaus [1980]) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; Poetics of Relation by
Édouard Glissant (1990); Culture and Imperialism (1993) by Edward Said; and
Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist
Theory (1994) by Rosi Braidotti. I will also examine the responsive text Black
Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994) by Carole Boyce
Davies, which posits itself as an alternative formulation to dominant postmodernist
and postcolonialist discourses of ‘travel’ and offers discursive options specifically
for the black woman (migrant) writer. Furthermore, I will investigate whether or not
these theoretical frameworks are applicable in specific cases of forced migration. It
is in this context that I will read Kincaid and Pineau’s representations of black
female migrant labourers in their respective fictional works Lucy and Devil’s Dance.
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Here I have included the original dates of publication for these theoretical
treatises on migrant subjectivity in order to establish a clear timeline of the
development of the ideas that I reference throughout this study. Clearly, there was a
flurry of writing by key philosophical and academic figures throughout a roughly
two-decade-long period from the 1970s through the 1990s which addressed this
poeticized notion of ‘drifting’ subjects. This chapter will evaluate some of the
fundamental concepts within this set of texts and endeavour to bring them into a
more current context with particular regard to the contemporary figure of the AfroCaribbean female migrant labourer as she appears in Kincaid and Pineau’s writings.
I will also address the ways in which this sublation via sublimation of the discourses
of actual dislocation by dominant Euro- and American-centric cultural and academic
discourses such as History, Postmodernism and Postcolonial Studies contributes to a
sense of madness or pathologization on the part of the multiply displaced black
female labouring subject. These discourses are capitalized here in a dual sense: 1) I
have capitalized the first letter to distinguish them as discourses that 2) circulate
multivalent forms of capital, which is always symbolic.
When applied to people, the term ‘migrant’ has two divergent denotations:
on the one hand, it can signify ‘a person who moves temporarily or seasonally from
place to place’; on the other, it can mean ‘a person who moves permanently to live
in a new country, town, etc., especially to look for work, or to take up a post, etc.; an
immigrant’ [my emphasis] (OED). Thus the word is already characterised by a
certain duality from the outset which necessitates a level of care in its usage.
Furthermore, ‘since the classical homo migrans is still defined in male terms,’ as
Christiane Harzig asserts, ‘malestream’ academia neglects the fact that migration is
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‘a gendered process’ which ‘reflects the different positions of women and men in
society’ (15). What about the ‘feminina migrans,’ then – how do we conceptualize
female ‘gender on the move’ outwith ‘the stereotype of the male pioneer’ (ibid.)? In
conventional imperialist travel narratives, the intrepid white male ventures alone
into the unknown, scouts the terrain and carves a path for himself, conquering native
landscapes and peoples along the way.93 However, for the female protagonists in
Kincaid and Pineau’s contemporary anti-imperialist narratives, the trajectory is not
linear or uni-directional. Nor is it motivated by hubristic patriarchal avarice, but by
dire economic need. Their journeys consist of multiple moves in more than one
direction and are impelled by a plethora of exigencies. Their movements within the
narratives also implicitly reference the historical voyages of their foremothers across
the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. Nevertheless, Kincaid and Pineau
avoid explicitly retracing these routes and instead refer to them via narratological
circumlocution. Africa is of necessity the absent referent of their narrative
structures, as it is an unknown ancestral homeland to the people of its diasporas. As
Isabel Hoving notes, there is a ‘crucial awareness’ within Afro-Caribbean writing
‘of Africa as the land from which those in the Caribbean are exiled’ (35). Hence in
Kincaid’s novella, Lucy travels to the burgeoning neoimperium of the United States,
whilst in Pineau’s novel Mina travels to the more ancient imperium of France.
However, Kincaid and Pineau indicate that both characters are followed to the
(neo)imperia by the postmemory of slavery. Their writings suggest that, in line with
Hoving’s argument, ‘Caribbean people of African descent are also exiled from their
own birthplace, because the colonial system does not offer them an opportunity to
93
See Susan Bassnett’s essay ‘Travel Writing and Gender’ in The Cambridge Companion to Travel
Writing (2002) or Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992).
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participate in the community’ (ibid. 36). Nonetheless, ‘if Caribbean people leave for
the “mother country,” that is, the site of colonial power, they will experience yet
another state of exile as a second-class citizen in hostile surroundings’ (ibid.). As
Hoving observes, Afro-Caribbean subjectivity ‘does not come into being by just one
journey but by a complex exile from Africa and the Caribbean as well as Europe.
Modern Caribbean identity, then, constructs itself through negotiating the often
centrifugal forces of these different forms of displacement’ (36). Kincaid and
Pineau explore the gender-specific aspects of this ‘complex exile’ for the
contemporary female Caribbean subject in their characterizations of Lucy and Mina.
Their migratory flows produce geographic and cognitive mappings that are
decidedly more intricate due to their layered gender, cultural and racial
identifications.
Similar critical attention is essential when using the term ‘nomad,’ which
defines ‘a member of a people that travels from place to place to find fresh pasture
for its animals, and has no permanent home. Also (in extended use): an itinerant
person; a wanderer’ (OED). The word ‘nomad’ has of course been misappropriated
and romanticized widely within academia. For example, in Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari theorize a ‘schizoanalytic’ nomadism, which I
will outline in closer detail in Section III of this chapter. It is ‘a philosophy of
signification based on a poetic interpretation of the nomadic condition’ (Hoving 37).
Deleuze and Guattari align this concept with that of ‘deterritorialization,’ which
refers to ‘the postmodern movement of continuous displacement of significations,
languages, discourses, and identities, a shift that implies constant deconstructions
and reconstructions’ (ibid.). In opposition to this term is ‘reterritorialization,’ which
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is ‘the second movement in a dual movement, by which one positions oneself
temporarily, to break away again afterward’ (ibid.). In her study In Praise of New
Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant Women’s Writing (2001) Hoving states that
this methodology is intended as:
a nomadic way of traveling or signifying, not the imperialistic one that
would be aimed at settling and appropriating. By situating the alienation in
language itself, Deleuze and Guattari use the notion of deterritorialization to
indicate a general condition that affects ‘us all.’ They seem to formulate a
discourse of displacement and travel of universal validity. (ibid.)
Indeed, the immediate problem with Deleuze and Guattari is that their claims smack
of an imperialist Eurocentrism, which reappropriates the anthropological notion of
nomadic movement as a model for ‘postmodern’ subjectivity. They exhibit the
unicentric tendency of postmodernist discourse to absorb indigenous and counterhegemonic discourses into its centre, thereby denying a range of differences.
Hoving remarks that Deleuze and Guattari’s analytic fails to ‘[recognize] the power
relations causing differences in alienation’ (ibid.). Furthermore, since their new
configuration of subjectivity advocates a kind of ‘“postgender” becoming,’ as
Braidotti observes, it also dissolves gender difference (116). As Hoving insists, ‘the
kind of free mobility advocated by Deleuze and Guattari cannot be realized outside
the sphere of imperialist power relations,’ and this all-encompassing sphere also
envelops that of gender relations (38). The self-serving assumptiveness that
underpins their postmodernist vision of the ‘free mobility’ of subjectivity disavows
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the unfree mobility of various oppressed groups, whose movements are delineated a
priori by those in positions of power.
Moreover, this postmodernist exploitation of ‘other’ cultural forms such as
nomadism is also a kind of analytic imperialism in that it represents a type of critical
consumerism. For instance, in her essay ‘Deterritorialization: The Rewriting of
Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse’ (1987) Caren Kaplan argues:
Deleuze and Guattari are suggesting that we are all deterritorialized on some
level in the process of language itself and that this is a point of contact
between ‘us all.’ Yet we have different privileges and different
compensations for our positions in the field of power relations. My caution
is against a form of theoretical tourism on the part of the first world critic,
where the margin becomes a linguistic or critical vacation, a new poetics of
the exotic […] Theirs is a poetics of travel where there is no return ticket
and we all meet, therefore, en train. (191)
The twinned hegemonic forms of ‘theoretical tourism’ and ‘poetics of travel’ have
certain implications for the restricted movements of the dispossessed migrant
subject. I am reminded of the opening of Kincaid’s treatise A Small Place (1988), in
which she states:
Since you are a tourist, a North American or European – to be frank, white –
and not an Antiguan black returning to Antigua from Europe or North
America with cardboard boxes of much needed cheap clothes and food for
relatives, you move through customs swiftly, you move through customs
with ease. Your bags are not searched. You emerge from customs into the
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hot, clean air: immediately you feel cleansed, immediately you feel blessed
(which is to say special); you feel free. (4-5)
Similarly, the theoretical tourist moves through the academic version of customs –
that is, the site of canonization – with ease. His or her intellectual baggage is not
searched on the way into a non- or counter-hegemonic discourse to detect whether
he or she has smuggled in any imperialist ideological weaponry; nor is it searched
on the way out of that discourse to detect whether he or she has perpetrated any kind
of cultural theft. The theoretical tourist’s ‘work’ is swiftly ushered into the canon,
itself a manifestation of the selfsame articulations of the hegemonic universal
subject – one who is blessed, special, free. Meanwhile, this imperialist
romanticizing of migrancy dispossesses the non- or counter-hegemonic writer of his
or her subjective standpoint. This leads to an inquisition by the makers of the
Canon, who demand to know just what sort of ‘nomadic’ theoretical framework this
(multiply dispossessed) author is writing from, as they find it difficult to ‘locate’
exactly what he or she is doing.
Despite her extended critique of Deleuze and Guattari in Nomadic Subjects,
Braidotti nevertheless (and rather curiously, I might add) adopts their philosophy of
a ‘nomadic aesthetics’ in what she calls her ‘postmodernist feminist’ study (15, 31).
Like them, she exults in this self-reflexive, self-aggrandizing imperialist theory and
rhapsodizes about the potential of linguistic experimentation within critical practice.
Braidotti co-opts Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘schizoid’ analytic language in
her description of a kind of critical polyglossia, nominating herself as a shining
example of ‘the nomadic polyglot’ and exclaiming:
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What else are Alice Walker and Toni Morrison doing but redesigning the
boundaries of the citadel that was English? Becoming a polyglot in your
own mother tongue: that’s writing. Françoise Collin, the Belgian-French
feminist theorist and writer now based in Paris, has coined the expression
‘l’immigrée blanche’ – the white immigrant – to describe the condition of
people who are in transit within their most familiar tongue; in her case,
between the French language of Belgium and that of Continental France.
The sense of singularity if not of aloneness, of the white immigrants can be
immense. (15-16)
Here the postmodernist-consumerist drive is at its most obvious and frankly,
disturbing, within Braidotti’s text. She aligns herself with Collin as fellow
immigrées blanches and bemoans the ‘singularity’ and ‘aloneness’ of their shared
position as white-academic-cosmopolites. Not only that, she places Collins and
seemingly, herself – ‘born in Italy, raised in Australia, educated in Paris, and
Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands,’
according to the back cover of her text – alongside Walker and Morrison, AfricanAmerican women authors who are, yes, academics, but who use their privileged
position to write about the struggles of actual dispossessed women affected by the
aftermath of slavery, rather than extolling ‘the shifting landscape of my singularity’
as Braidotti does in her work (17). The imperative of nomadology as it is laid out by
Deleuze and Guattari, and subsequently Braidotti, seems to be one of itinerant
postmodernist navel-gazing. Whilst some of the ideas and neologisms which they
develop in their bounding expositions can be useful when applied circumspectly
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within critical analysis, it must be noted that they aestheticize what are, for some,
very real conditions marked by violent mobilities.
Postmodernism and its hybrid forms such as Braidotti’s brand of ‘feminism’
reveal themselves as homogenizing, totalising modes of academic consciousness out
of which, some critics argue, iterations of postcolonial theory emerged. If
Postmodernism is the realm of the ‘nomad,’ then Postcolonial Studies is the domain
of the ‘exile.’ In Culture and Imperialism, Said elaborates his theoretical construct
of the ‘exilic’ intellectual and proclaims:
Exile, far from being the fate of nearly forgotten unfortunates who are
dispossessed and expatriated, becomes something closer to a norm, an
experience of crossing boundaries and charting new territories in defiance of
the classic canonic enclosures, however much its loss and sadness should be
acknowledged and registered. (384)
If Said’s ‘postcolonial’ rhetoric sounds familiar, that is because it is the reiteration
of, paradoxically, imperialist discourses of exploration and exploitation featured in
the travel narratives mentioned earlier in this section. It is also, therefore, the
patriarchal rhetoric of penetration, breaching desirable spaces belonging to someone
else and occupying them in order to satiate desire. This pleasure is fleeting and
bittersweet, however, due to the sense of ‘loss and sadness’ prompted by one’s being
far away from home. In this way Said appears to conceive the condition of
intellectual exile in terms of (the much older travel narrative) Odysseus – he
envisions this particular form of exile as an epic quest which requires the thinking
hero to travel to distant lands in order to engage in a kind of cerebral warfare.
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Furthermore, this normativizing of the experience of exile by conflating it
with a pleasurable ‘experience of crossing boundaries and charting new territories’
evinces the totalising, consumerist imperative of Postmodernism. For example, Said
continues:
The reader and writer of literature – which itself loses its perdurable forms
and accepts the testimonials, revisions, notations of the post-colonial
experience, including underground life, slave narratives, women’s literature,
and prison – no longer need to be tied to an image of the poet or scholar in
isolation, secure, stable, national in identity, class, gender, or profession, but
can think and experience with Genet in Palestine or Algeria, with Tayib
Salih as a Black man in London, with Jamaica Kincaid in the white world,
with Rushdie in India and Britain, and so on. (ibid. 384-5)
Ironically, Said laments neoimperialism’s ‘new overall pattern of domination,’
which is the creation of ‘a powerfully centralizing culture and a complex
incorporative economy’ (ibid. 395). Yet, from the way he describes it, the
institution of Postcolonial Studies – in whose formation he actively participates
(particularly with the writing of this text) – does not sound all that much different.
So where does an incorporative symbolic economy like Postcolonial Studies leave
an Afro-Caribbean female migrant writer like Kincaid? Stuck in customs while her
bags are being searched, it seems, as she does not appear to match Said’s profile of
an archetypal intellectual-in-exile. In fact, this is his only mention of Kincaid within
the text and he tellingly, dismissively, locates her ‘in the white world’ – a noticeably
ambiguous, nebulous location as he apparently finds it difficult to pinpoint her
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narratological milieu. Said seems unsure of how to place (i.e. fix) her within
postcolonialist discourse as she does not fit in with the other (rather conspicuously
male) motley of intellectuals whom we can identify as professional migrants.
Remarkably, he ignores the fact that, aside from being the only woman on his
shortlist, Kincaid is also the only person on it whose reasons for migration were
economic. Due to the grim financial situation in Antigua, her family forced the
teenage Kincaid to relocate to the United States and work as an au pair so that she
could send part of her earnings back to them (an experience which she fictionalizes
in Lucy).
More to the point, she is the only intellectual on Said’s roster who did not
migrate for traditionally male pursuits – i.e., in order to attend a prominent British
university like Salih or Rushdie, or to drop in on Black Panther movements and
Palestinian refugee camps (only to leave and write a book about/capitalize on these
experiences) like Genet. In other words, Kincaid’s intellectual production stems
directly from this traumatic (gendered) experience of being coerced into the position
of migrant labourer in the metropole. Not only that, she was made to work as a
domestic labourer – a black servant in a wealthy white household. Thus, her
experience of ‘the white world,’ as Said sardonically puts it, was and is very
different to that of Genet, Salih, Rushdie, or Said himself, an Ivy League-educated
intellectual. In her late teens – roughly the same age that Salih, Rushdie, or Said
would have been when they were about to start university in the neoimperia –
Kincaid was pressured to abandon her education after the births of her three younger
brothers. She has explained in interviews that her family intended for her income as
a domestic labourer to help support her brothers, whose education was prioritised
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over hers because they were male.94 Thus it was never her choice to reside in ‘the
white world,’ and her story exemplifies the fact that migration is indeed a gendered
process which cannot be categorized as neatly or glibly as Said does here.
Similarly to Said, Martinican writer Glissant devises a Caribbean discourse
of ‘exile’ in Poetics of Relation and associates exilic experience with a ‘lack of
rootedness,’ which, he argues, is felt and expressed through ‘language’ (16, 15). He
proposes a positive form of ‘exile’ that he terms ‘errantry,’ a form of ‘errant thought
that emerges from the destructuring of compact national entities that yesterday were
still triumphant and, at the same time, from difficult, uncertain births of new forms
of identity that call to us’ (2003: 18). ‘In this context,’ he declares, ‘uprooting can
work toward identity, and exile can be seen as beneficial, when these are
experienced as a search for the Other (through circular nomadism) rather than as an
expansion of territory (an arrowlike nomadism). Totality’s imaginary allows the
detours that lead away from anything totalitarian’ (ibid.). Here Glissant discernibly
echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s postmodernist vision of a philosophical nomadism
that espouses a free mobility – however, it is one which is unavailable to the
neocolonial subject in, for instance, Glissant’s native Martinique. He attempts to
overcome this rhetorical hurdle by arguing (very problematically) that for those
groups who ‘are marginalized’ such as, he offers offhandedly, ‘the blacks in South
Africa,’ ‘internal exile is the voyage out of this enclosure. It is a motionless and
exacerbated introduction to the thought of errantry’ (ibid. 19-20). Here Glissant’s
explication of ‘errant thought’ is a blatant paraphrasing of Deleuze’s much earlier
claim in his essay ‘Nomad Thought’ (1973) that ‘the nomad is not necessarily one
94
See ‘Jamaica Kincaid: Her Story’ (BBC: 2001).
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who moves: some voyages take place in situ, are trips in intensity’ (149). Thus
‘errant thought’ does not, in fact, represent a new form of ideology – instead it is
merely a rearticulation of Deleuzian philosophy. Glissant continues, ‘Whereas exile
may erode one’s sense of identity, the thought of errantry – the thought of that which
relates – usually reinforces this sense of identity’ (ibid. 20). Yet, he also states that
‘for colonized peoples identity will primarily be “opposed to” – that is, a limitation
from the beginning. Decolonization will have done its real work when it goes
beyond this limit’ (ibid. 17). He therefore presents this model of errantry – a
philosophical practice which is really just Deleuzian nomadism wearing a
‘postcolonialist’ mask – as the way forward in crossing the psychical and social
boundaries that delimit identity for the neocolonial Caribbean subject.
Glissant asserts that the ‘relational’ capacity of errantry enables thinking
relationally or cross-culturally which, he asserts, is a step toward cultural
decolonisation (ibid. 18). However, his choice of the particular term ‘errantry’ is
immediately suspect due to its masculinist overtones – a knight-errant is of course ‘a
knight of medieval romance who wandered in search of adventures and
opportunities for deeds of chivalry and bravery’ (OED). Thus, following the
patriliny of Deleuze and Guattari and Said, Glissant re-envisions the intellectual-inexile as a wandering Afro-Caribbean knight, gallantly crisscrossing discursive
terrains on an epic quest for knowledge. In other words, he follows their
narcissistic, patriarchal example and models the black philosophical nomad after
himself. Where are the examples for the black woman intellectual-in-exile? For
surely these supposedly chivalric intellectual-knights-errant cannot be bothered to
‘rescue’ this damsel as she is scarcely even mentioned in their tales. Furthermore,
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she does not need or want rescuing, as Walker contends in her text In Search of Our
Mothers’ Gardens (1984), since the womanist intellectual is, by her definition,
‘Traditionally capable, as in: “Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you
and a bunch of other slaves with me.” Reply: “It wouldn’t be the first time”’ (xi).
Hence, womanist writers such as Walker, Morrison, Kincaid, Pineau and others
emphasise the potential for mobile sovereignty on the part of black women that lies
within, as Walker states, a kind of ‘willful behavior’ (ibid.).
Carole Boyce Davies attempts to insert herself in the womanist tradition via
her writings on black migrant subjectivity, and ‘describes “womanism” as a
redefinition of “feminism” that qualifies the latter term’s overdetermination by the
experiences of Western white women’ (John 58). Davies explains:
There is a consistent move to find new language to encompass our
experience. This comes either in modifying the term by an adjective of some
sort: ‘Black’ feminists […] ‘African’ feminist[s] […] radical or Marxist
feminist[s] for some white or black women who find the term ‘feminist’ too
contaminated with bourgeois experience. (Davies and Fido xii)
In Black Women, Writing and Identity, Davies identifies Walker’s conceptualization
of womanism as ‘another term of meaning for “Black feminist”’ that offers a ‘new
starting point from which to express a reality’ (121-2). However, she also states,
‘Black feminist criticisms, then, perhaps more than many of the other feminisms,
can be a praxis where the theoretical positions and the criticism interact with lived
experience’ (55). Whilst the notion of an interaction between praxis and lived
experience is a crucial and indeed indispensable aspect of theorizing subjectivity,
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Davies’s argument here and elsewhere employs hierarchizing language that
nominates black feminist criticisms as implicitly ‘better’ in general than other
discursive forms. Therefore I would argue that her work is not in fact womanist,
since Walker takes pains to define the womanist imperative as one which is
inclusive of other viewpoints. For example, Walker writes that a womanist is ‘not a
separatist […] as in: “Mama, why are we brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins
are white, beige, and black?” Ans.: “Well, you know the colored race is just like a
flower garden, with every color flower represented’ (xi). Here she infers the need
for solidarity among people of colour, while at the same time emphasising that all
races are in fact ‘cousins’ of one another, thereby highlighting the connectedness of
the entire human race.
Despite the obvious problems intrinsic to Davies’s methodology, she raises
some important points in her groundbreaking study, which represents a pivotal
intervention into the discussion of migrant subjectivities. She frames the displaced
black woman subject in terms of diasporicity, centring it on her theory of ‘migratory
subjectivity,’ which she explicates here:
If we see Black women’s subjectivity as a migratory subjectivity existing in
multiple locations, then we can see how their work, their presences traverse
all of the geographical/national boundaries instituted to keep our dislocations
in place. This ability to locate in a variety of geographical and literary
constituencies is peculiar to the migration that is fundamental to African
experience as it is specific to the human experience as a whole. It is with
this consciousness of expansiveness and the dialogics of movement and
community that I pursue Black women’s writing. (4)
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She points out that ‘the re-negotiating of identities is fundamental to migration as it
is fundamental to Black women’s writing in cross-cultural contexts’ (3). Davies
therefore envisions a kind of ‘migratory consciousness’ that allows room for
subjective pluralism since, as she states, ‘Without it, we remain locked into the
captured definition of the term “Black” […] or “minority” as it is in the dominant
discourse’ (17, 33). She also identifies ‘the gap between feminist assertion and
Black nationalist assertion into which Black women disappeared and, paradoxically,
out of which Black female specificity had to articulate itself’ (7). This is
symptomatic of a broader solipsism within prevailing theoretical discourses,
including those which speak from otherwise ‘marginalized’ positions, such as
feminist and black nationalist expressions.
For instance, Davies comments, ‘Academic writing is in many ways an
insular type of discourse which circulates among the learned or initiated’ (40). This
prompts her to ask, ‘To whom do theorists speak?’ (ibid.). The implied rhetorical
response is, of course, ‘Themselves.’ Davies maintains that ‘Theory, as it is reified
in the academy, still turns on Western phallocentric (master) or feminist
“gynocentric” (mistress-master) philosophy. […] Theory is therefore anxious about
its paternity and patriliny’ (39). She notes her agreement with Catherine Lutz, who
asserts, ‘Theories spawn patrilineal offspring who belong more to their father theory
than their mother data’ (n.p.). Consequently, Davies advocates ‘creative theorizing’
as a methodology which has the potential to make theoretical discourse accessible
and applicable more widely, and argues that it ‘is a central aspect of some Black
women’s writing’ (59). She elucidates this concept of creative theorizing, stating:
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For Black women’s writing, I believe it is premature and often useless to
articulate the writer/theorist split so common in European discourses, for
many of the writers do both simultaneously or sequentially. If we define
theory as ‘frames of intelligibility,’ by which we understand the world, and
not as a reified discourse used to locate, identify and explain everything else
[then we can effectively conceptualize the work of Black women writers].
(35)
I am inclined to agree with Davies that in writings by many black women authors,
there is no theorist/writer split.95 Following this logic, I will consider the ways in
which Kincaid and Pineau (re)write the figure of the black female labour migrant
within their fiction, theorizing this particular subjectivity from their own
positionalities as black female migrant writers. I will also examine the relationship
between the figurations of the black female service labourer and the black female
intellectual labourer that undergirds their work. I would argue that the discursive
constitutions of these two types of labouring subjects are inextricably linked as the
processes of their formation are in fact cogenerative. That is to say, the
development of these subjectivities is marked by a dialogical interactivity which
achieves a kind of ‘critical relationality’ between the authorial subject and the
fictional subject (Davies 54).
This critical relationality which Kincaid and Pineau exhibit in their work
illustrates Davies’s contention that black women’s writing ‘re-connects and remembers, brings together black women dislocated by space and time’ (4). This
95
See for instance bell hooks’s writings, such as Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
(1990).
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unifying aspect is a vital strategy of postmemorial writing praxes for black diasporic
women writers as it brings together women across different time periods and
dismembered populations. It also allows for self-reflexivity and multiplicity within
black female self-expression since, as Davies contends:
The ‘mythical norm’ as Audre Lord calls it, or the ‘standard,’ is defined as
white male, monied, propertied, middle or upper class, […] Christian,
heterosexual. The more one can check off in these categories the better off
one is in society. These standards are given positive value in society and the
rest of us it seems must strive to emulate them or be defined as ‘strange’ or
‘mad.’ Anytime we pose Black women and women of color against these,
generally we note the oppositional or negative marking inscribed. (30)
Davies therefore advocates a writerly approach in which ‘Black’ is ‘deliberately
removed from its moorings in pathology and inferiority and [re]located in power’
(6). Renée Larrier argues that Davies’s concepts of migratory subjectivities and ‘the
repositioning of identities which results when writers relocate’ enable a ‘reading
across the diaspora’ that is ‘relevant to […] Caribbean writers’ (3). I concur with
Larrier’s view of Davies here and will adopt these particular notions in my own
analysis of Caribbean women writers in this chapter. I also agree with Davies’s
claim that diasporization is the appropriate framework for theorizing the displaced
black female subject. However, Davies is bafflingly inconsistent in her use of this
framework within her study, and at times she lapses into hegemonic intellectual
nomadism. It is within the specific context of ‘diaspora’ that I will examine Kincaid
and Pineau’s fiction in this chapter, rather than within the contexts of ‘migrancy,’
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which is too broad, ‘nomadism,’ which is inapplicable, or ‘exile,’ which has
potentially unsuitable connotations. This is where I deviate from Davies’s model, as
she strangely aligns herself with Deleuze and Guattarian collaborative theories of
nomadology, citing in particular Deleuze’s essay on ‘Nomad Thought’ (1973) as a
paradigmatic influence on her own theorizations (Davies 44-5). Indeed, Deleuze
and Guattari appear to be a kind of Derridean ‘arch-spectre’ – the patriarchal point
of reference for all of the filiative theoretical texts on migrant subjectivities that I
have listed here by Braidotti, Said, Glissant and Davies. Hence, a closer
examination of Deleuze and Guattari’s relevant ideational material concerning
nomadic subjectivity and subsequent theoretical responses is (unavoidably) germane
to my analysis of Kincaid and Pineau’s treatment of the female Afro-Caribbean
migrant labourer. I will endeavour to reassess these received modes of Deleuze and
Guattarian thought from the recontextualized, historicized and gendered context of
female Afro-Caribbean specificity. This chapter will also illustrate the ways in
which Kincaid and Pineau perform a kind of creative theorizing within their fiction
that engages with and contests hegemonic discursive regimes which attempt to fix
the black female subject within a prescribed position.
III.
Caribbean Capitalism and Schizophrenia
In their two-volume work Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Capitalisme et
schizophrénie), which consists of Anti-Oedipus (L’Anti- Œdipe: 1972) and A
Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux: 1980), Deleuze and Guattari examine
unconscious desire with relation to capitalist society and its reproductive processes.
They introduce the concept of ‘desiring-production,’ which they use ‘in tandem with
“social production” to link Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx: the term conjoins libido
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and labour-power as distinct instances of production-in-general’ (Holland: 2010:
n.p.). Furthermore, the notion of ‘desiring-production’ interrelates their key terms
‘desiring-machines’ and the ‘body without organs’ (Deleuze and Guattari: 2003: 1,
9). Deleuze and Guattari indicate that capitalist desire is ‘a combination of various
elements and forces’ which exert pressure on the body, ultimately rendering it an
automaton, a ‘body without organs’ (Seem xxvi). They assert that ‘the body without
organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain
time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product’
(Deleuze and Guattari: 2003: 9). Under the synthesizing forces of capitalist desire,
they argue that the body itself becomes a passive ‘desiring-machine’ (ibid.). Thus
the subject who inhabits a ‘body without organs’ becomes regimented by a
dehumanizing, ‘totalitarian system of norms’ that constructs any non-compliant
action as anomalous and therefore threatening to capitalist society (xxiii, 154).
Deleuze and Guattari contend that as a result of this biopolitical policing of bodily
movement and expression, the oppressed subject experiences psychosomatic
disorders. They write: ‘We maintain that the cause of the disorder, neurosis or
psychosis, is always in desiring-production, in its relation to social production, in
their different or conflicting regimes, and the modes of investment that desiringproduction performs in the system of social production’ (ibid. 140). However, they
denounce the binary axiomatic of Freudian psychoanalysis which codes and
concentrates behaviours into either normal or pathological categories. They insist
that to medicalize thought, emotion, affect and sexuality is to reduce psychosomatic
experience to functional indices. In turn, they demonstrate that psychoanalysis is
complicit with the selfsame capitalist forces of biopower that discipline and control
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the potentialities of the body and mind. Deleuze and Guattari destabilize this
normal/pathological binary in order to reveal the damaging, negative connotations of
its structure and, at the same time, also elucidate the positive nature of transgressive
behaviour which overrides this restrictive overcoding. In fact, they sublimate the
condition of schizophrenia by developing a rhizomatic critical practice that they
term ‘schizoanalysis,’ which draws on and also contests the postulations of a diverse
group of thinkers.
Remarkably, however, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly acknowledge the
‘patriarchal organization’ of our ‘capitalist society’ only twice within Anti-Oedipus,
and not at all in the follow-up A Thousand Plateaus (188, 191). This is particularly
striking given their abrogation of the psychoanalytic model of the oedipal complex
and (notoriously phallocentric) Freudian theory more broadly within this bipartite
work. Moreover, not once is the term ‘gender’ mentioned in either text. This gross
oversight is also astounding since, as Eugene Holland points out, ‘If schizoanalysis
had a story to tell about patriarchy, it would be about the becoming-psychological of
gender oppression’ (1999: 116). Holland underscores the ‘non-remuneration of
women’s “reproductive” labor, which is one notable feature of the segregation of
human reproduction from social reproduction under capitalism that Deleuze and
Guattari do not discuss’ (ibid.). He continues, ‘Controversies over whether such
non-remuneration is essential to the extraction of surplus-value from work that is
remunerated, or merely a hold-over from older forms of patriarchy and therefore
slated for decoding and axiomatization in more advanced stages of capitalism, are
not engaged by schizoanalysis’ (ibid.). Hence, central to the import of this chapter
is the fact that, as Holland also emphasises, ‘Patriarchy certainly does not disappear
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under [late] capitalism; it merely goes underground: it becomes psychological […]
Capitalism reproduces patriarchy psychologically by producing hierarchically
gendered subjects according to specific mechanisms’ (ibid.). In failing to address
the gendered oppression that is a constituent element of capitalist psychodynamics,
Deleuze and Guattari participate in the reproduction of patriarchal domination
within the symbolic order which they purportedly critique.
Having identified the consolidation of power in this phallogocentric
symbolic order – in which, as I and others argue, Deleuze and Guattari’s study takes
part – this leads me to the next logical question. If the symbolic is the determining
order of the subject, as Jacques Lacan asserts,96 where is social-symbolic agency to
be found for the woman subject? Deleuze and Guattari attack what they call the
‘analytic imperialism’ of Freudian psychoanalysis in their interrogation, yet they fail
to free female desire from its gendered ‘neurotic’ yoke (2003: 25). Accordingly,
this chapter inspects the ways in which Kincaid and Pineau depict the plurality of
female desire in their novels using a narratological strategy that is resistive to such
discursive imperialisms that are based on patriarchal repression. These authors
illuminate the contradictions and excesses of the multiple black female self, which
does not cohere to the pervasive notion of a normative unitary subject. Their
depiction of transgressive female protagonists such as Lucy and Mina therefore
represent literary contraventions of traditional monadic gender identities. As
Braidotti remarks, Deleuze and Guattari clearly state ‘that “all the lines of
deterritorialization go necessarily through the stage of becoming-woman”’ and that
‘the “devenir-femme” is not just any other form of becoming minority but rather is
96
See Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
Book XI (1998).
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the key, the precondition, and the necessary starting point for the whole process of
becoming’ (114). Thus, becoming-woman is ‘the crucial step insofar as woman is
the privileged figure of otherness in Western discourse’ (ibid.). For example,
Deleuze and Guattari insist, ‘it must be said that all becomings begin with and pass
through becoming-woman’ (2000: 277). Braidotti notes that:
the reference to ‘woman’ in the process of ‘becoming-woman,’ however,
does not refer to empirical females but rather to topological positions, levels
or degrees of affirmation of positive forces, and levels of nomadic, rhizomic
consciousness. The becoming woman is the marker for a general process of
transformation. (114)
The obvious issue here is, as Braidotti comments, that ‘it is as if all becomings were
equal […] The problem for Deleuze [and Guattari] is how to disengage the subject
position “woman” from the dualistic structure that opposes it to the masculine norm,
thereby reducing it to a mirror image of the same’ (115). She continues,
‘Considering also the emphasis that [they place] on decolonizing the embodied
subject from the sexual dualism on which the phallus has erected its documents and
monuments, it does follow that for [them] the primary movement of renewal of the
subject is the dissolution of gender dichotomies and of the ideas that rest upon
them’ (ibid.). Naturally, as Braidotti comments, ‘This results in a confrontation’
between Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘theories of multiplicity and becoming-minority and
feminist theories of sexual difference and becoming subject of women’ (ibid.). The
problem, she explains, is ‘how to free “woman” from the subject position of
annexed “other”’ (ibid.). In view of Braidotti’s reappraisal of Deleuze and
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Guattari’s theorizations on becoming subject with regard to sexual difference, in this
chapter I argue that contemporary womanist writers such as Kincaid and Pineau
work to decolonise the black female subject precisely from this position of embodied
otherness, on their own terms. Their fictional works represent a counter-articulation
of black female subjectivity which destabilizes negative, reductive categorizations
such as the ‘Other’ or the ‘neurotic subject’ by writing from, and thus out of, these
positions in a strategic gesture of wilful mobility (à la Walker).
In their study, Deleuze and Guattari extol the rhizomatic deterritorialization
of the self and the landscape which occurs during the schizophrenic process of
‘becoming.’ They work to depathologize disorderly thought by illustrating the ways
in which it opens out onto ‘fields of potentials’ that relandscape the surrounding
symbolic environment (2000: 94). For instance, they proclaim:
That is what the completion of the process is: not a promised and a preexisting land, but a world created in the process of its tendency, its coming
undone, its deterritorialization. […] [This] produce[s] the new land – not at
all a hope, but a simple ‘finding,’ a ‘finished design’ where the person who
escapes causes other escapes, and marks out the land while deterritorializing
himself. (2003: 354)
In contradistinction to Freud, they explain that the neurotic subject ‘cannot be
adequately described in terms of drives, for drives are simply the desiring-machines
themselves. They must be defined in terms of modern territorialities. The neurotic
is trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of our society’ (ibid. 37).
Deleuze and Guattari maintain that the residual or artificial territorialities which
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constitute contemporary society were historically embedded by capitalism. They
rewrite Marx’s materialist account of the history of capitalist modes of production
by highlighting a historical pattern in which ‘capitalism institutes or restores all sorts
of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting,
as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of
abstract quantities’ (ibid.). Consequently, they affirm, ‘That is what makes the
ideology of capitalism “a motley painting of everything that has ever been
believed”.97 The real is not impossible; it is simply more and more artificial’ (ibid.).
They discern that the ‘movement’ of ‘schizophrenic deterritorializations’ represents
a movement away from this artificiality and toward a regrounding within the Real
(ibid. 373). Their post-Marxist conceptualization of the ‘coming undone’ of the
capitalist landscape via deterritorialization also seems to echo Walter Benjamin’s
envisioning of an ‘undone’ landscape that is a new point of beginning or origin in
his essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940)98 (ibid. 354).
Following Deleuze and Guattari’s theorizations, Glissant resumes this
dialogical visualisation of a deterritorialized landscape and (re)locates it within the
Caribbean archipelago. Glissant reopens their tangential discussion of the
construction of racial difference within the capitalist-imperialist system, and their
treatment of the ‘question of an intense potential for investment or
counterinvestment in the unconscious’ of ontological categorizations (Deleuze and
Guattari: 2003: 115). This topic is noticeably peripheralized in their study, which
does not fully explore the ways in which (they argue, echoing Fanon) the black
97
Here Deleuze and Guattari paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertions in Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(1883-5).
98
I discuss this text in-depth in Section V of this chapter.
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subject internalises the maxim, ‘I am the outsider and the deterritorialized’ (ibid.
115). Whilst Glissant engages with Deleuze and Guattari’s claims on the subject of
race, he does not challenge their elision of gender difference. As Elizabeth Grosz
contends, Deleuze and Guattari ‘fail to notice that the processes of becomingmarginal or becoming-woman means nothing as a strategy if one is already marginal
or a woman […] What they ignore is the question of sexual difference, sexual
specificity and autonomy’ (2001: 1441). Glissant seemingly colludes with this
totalising methodology; and together with Deleuze and Guattari ‘they exhibit a
certain blindness to their own positions as masculine’ (ibid.). As Grosz clarifies,
this is ‘not because they are men, but because they are blind to their own processes
of production, their own positions as representatives of particular values and
interests that are incapable of being universalized or erected into a neutral theoretical
model’ (ibid.). Following in the ungainly footsteps of Fanon, Glissant explores the
psychodynamics of social production for the exclusively male Antillean subject.
What happens when gender difference is layered over racial difference – when one
is the multiply oppressed object of History? Later sections of this chapter will
consider the ways in which womanist writers such as Kincaid and Pineau address
this aporia in masculinist versions of historicity, particularly concerning Antillean
historical experience.
Glissant is heavily influenced by the theorizations that Deleuze and Guattari
set forth in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which he adapts to a Caribbean
(neo)colonial context, specifically with regard to the role of slavery in local
ethnohistorical (post)memory. This occurs most notably in his essay collection Le
discours antillais (1981) and its successor, La poétique de la relation (1990). In Le
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discours antillais, translated in English as Caribbean Discourse (1989), Glissant
investigates the psychosocial effects of Afro-Caribbean historical experiences and
enquires, ‘Would it be ridiculous to consider our lived history as a steadily
advancing neurosis? To see the Slave Trade as a traumatic shock, our relocation (in
the new land) as a repressive phase, slavery as the period of latency, “emancipation”
in 1848 as reactivation, our everyday fantasies as symptoms?’ (1989: 65-6). In his
theoretical oeuvre, Glissant also interweaves Deleuze and Guattarian theory with
Martin Heidegger’s ontological critique of transcendental, teleological historicism
which he elaborates in Being and Time (1927), and applies a similar argument
within an Antillean context. He concurs with Heidegger’s condemnation of
historicism’s analytical conceptualization of the past as a series of occurrences that
are gradually totalised within a narrative of presence. Glissant perceives that this
fictional narrative of presence is also therefore a narrative of absence, which is
enacted through a discursive practice that he terms ‘raturage’ (1982: 226). In the
original version of Le discours antillais, Glissant refers to ‘le raturage de la
mémoire collective,’ which was an intended effect of the imperialist writing of
History (224). Raturage does not translate in English as ‘erasure,’ as many critics
and translators (rather spuriously) interpret Glissant’s assertion in their texts, but
rather as ‘crossing-out.’ Therefore, he indicates that ‘la mémoire collective,’ the
‘collective memory’ of the Afro-Caribbean population, was not actually erased by
imperialist discourse (a complete removal which would translate as effacée rather
than raturée), but in fact struck through.
This is a crucial distinction, as it infers that Antillean collective memory and
history are recoverable since they are an underlying, absent presence. They are the
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sublated narratives which underwrite the totalising grand narrative of imperial
History. However, due to the fracturing violence of this totalisation, these subtexts
exist only in fragments. In his subsequent text Poetics of Relation (1990) Glissant
therefore calls attention to ‘the diffracted synchronicity of [Antillean] people’s
histories’ which, he argues (following Deleuze and Guattari), can be reconnected by
a ‘rhizomatic’ model of Afro-Caribbean historicity (2000: 221 n1, 11). He cites this
praxis as one which is liberatory in its connectivity as it allows for instances of
cultural exchange or ‘relation,’ since he notes that ‘historicity only takes place in
liberated geographies’ [my emphasis] (ibid. 221 n1). Glissant identifies the
Heideggerian conception of historicity as the opening of human experience onto its
futurity by ‘living [one’s] relation to the past’ (Heidegger 299). Heidegger states
that the lived experience of historicity is a process of ‘anticipatory resoluteness,’
whereby one’s subjectivity can ‘come futurally toward itself’ through this
connection to the past (ibid.). Accordingly, Glissant maintains that the subject can
experience historicity through a rhizomatic or ‘relational’ extension of the self
which reaches backward and forward in time between the past and the future.
However, not once does Glissant mention the implications of historicity for
the female Antillean subject in his study. He depicts ‘[une] histoire doublement
subie et raturée,’ ‘a history which is ‘doubly suffering and struck through’ –
nonetheless it remains a masculinist account of Afro-Caribbean history [my
translation] (Stevens 229). Therefore the history of the Afro-Caribbean woman
subject is one which suffers exponentially as it is multiply displaced by
phallogocentric Caribbean literatures of decolonisation. These writings by Glissant
and his contemporaries (particularly Derek Walcott and the Créolistes, as I argue in
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Chapter I) follow a Fanonian theoretical paradigm which replicates the violent,
colonialist strikethrough of black women’s history and identity. Paradoxically, this
literary machismo could perhaps be considered as evidentiary of the very historical
‘neurosis’ that Glissant theorizes in his work, as it is a recolonising, patriarchal
fixation on male experience (1989: 65). Womanist Caribbean authors such as
Kincaid and Pineau perform a literary revisionism which tacitly examines the
markedly different gendered experience of history as endured by the Afro-Caribbean
woman subject. I would posit that by investigating the conditions of the
contemporary Afro-Caribbean woman labourer, they are able to explore the
gendered historical experience of unfree labour through postmemorial writing
praxes. Furthermore, I would argue that these postmemorial methodologies are also
rhizomatic/relational in that they write across the multiple trajectories of female
Afro-Caribbean migration experience, a transnational operation that is also
transgenerational and transhistorical.
In their respective fictional works Lucy and Devil’s Dance, Kincaid and
Pineau explore the links between slavery, capitalism and schizophrenia for the
contemporary female Antillean labouring subject. This literary intervention disrupts
cycles of recolonisation within the imperialist-capitalist order, which is structured by
patriarchal matrices of control. These systems (in)form personal and social identity,
and Kincaid and Pineau demonstrate the ability of anti-imperialist and antiassimilationist writers more generally to destabilize the will to power that underpins
these identitarian foundations. Through their writing praxes, these authors enact the
disalienation of the oppressed black subject. These types of literary practice, which
engage with the paradoxes of lived and spectralized experience, work toward
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deterritorialized narrative landscapes. Kincaid and Pineau successfully produce the
‘liberated geographies’ of not only the self, but also the environment, that their male
counterparts could only partially theorize due to an internalised, recolonising
patriarchal bias. There is a large (gender) gap between theory and practice in the
work of the masculinist theorists discussed in this chapter – one which
unconsciously replicates imperialist Enlightenment ideology. The prototype for
Enlightenment patriarchy, as we know, dates even further back to the time of
Antiquity and Classical philosophical ‘development.’ There exists, therefore, a
historical problematic of gendered ‘analytic imperialisms’ (to paraphrase Deleuze
and Guattari) which are both self-serving and self-replicating. Ensuing sections of
this chapter will adduce passages from Kincaid and Pineau’s texts in order to
examine the ways in which they attempt to break out of this unicentric, patriarchal
chain of filiation in order to articulate black female specificity from an unbounded
diasporic context.
IV.
Afro-Caribbean Female Migrant Labourers
Belinda Edmondson locates the source of ‘anxieties for Caribbean migrant
women authors over literary authority’ in the gendered realm of intellectual labour
in the neoimperial context, which, she asserts, replicates Victorian attitudes (6). For
instance, she states, ‘The Victorian perception of difference in black labor – black
men attempting intellectual labor, however perniciously, black women attempting
arduous physical labor, however pathologically – is one that [undergirds] the way in
which the intellectual “inheritance”’ of the imperium is ‘passed on to West Indian
men’ (8). She continues, ‘The inversion of gender characteristics that the [imperia]
imagined onto black West Indian society circumlocuted the discourse of later West
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Indian nationalism, such that the nationalist project became inseparable from the
epistemological issue of defining West Indian [gender identities]’ (ibid.).
Edmondson deduces that for ‘nonwhite’ men to ‘make a case for self-government,
they must state their case as gentlemen, which means they must, ‘in essence,’ be
made into mimic men who espouse neoimperialist ideals regarding nationalist
authorship and cultural authority (5). She points out that contemporary Caribbean
discourse is ‘still marked by a utilization of a specifically [imperialist] vision of
what constitutes intellectual production’ (ibid.). As Edmondson maintains, it is
important to ‘highlight the speciousness of the hierarchical kinds of labor associated
with both groups,’ i.e. Afro-Caribbean men and women, ‘by illustrating their
[discursive] connectedness as binaries of each other’ (ibid.). ‘Therefore,’ she
concludes, if contemporary male authors ‘base their literary authority on intellectual
labor – the project of writing the Caribbean into literary existence – then the
physical labor so often associated with migrant women can also be re-imagined as a
basis for women’s literary authority’ (ibid.). Edmondson posits that ‘the centrality
of the figure of the female domestic laborer,’ in writings by Afro-Caribbean women
(for example such as Kincaid’s Lucy) ‘suggests that this trope functions
allegorically. It fuses the image of woman as worker with the contending image of
woman as creator, such that immigrant labor is transformed into a symbol with
literary possibilities’ (ibid. 157). However, I would argue that this fusion is evident
regardless of whether the migrant character is a domestic labourer or whether she
performs service labour within a different sector. The fact remains that since these
authors choose to focalize their narratives on the experiences of female migrant
labourers, they present a deliberately gendered point of view which imagistically
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(and automatically) conflates the woman as worker with the woman as creator. This
approach opens up even greater literary possibilities that metanarratologically
investigate larger issues which I will explore here, adducing Kincaid and Pineau’s
works as examples.
Kincaid and Pineau take things a step further in Lucy and Devil’s Dance,
layering class difference over gender and racial differences – demonstrating the kind
of ‘radical’ womanism which Davies identifies as a framework for those black
women writers who object to discourses that are ‘too contaminated with bourgeois
experience.’ (Davies and Fido xii). They analyse the unfree movement of the
contemporary female migrant labourer, which is part of the aftershock of what
Glissant calls ‘our irruption into modernity’ – the forced modernisation of the
Caribbean region due to the establishment of proto-capitalism in the colonial era
(1989: 100). Michael Niblett observes that ‘Glissant’s argument thus emphasizes
how, in the Caribbean, that history of precipitous development combined with
underdevelopment is registered homologically in the literary field’ (39).
Accordingly, there is a kind of homologous tension within Kincaid and Pineau’s
fiction that illustrates this pattern of underdevelopment within island space and the
overdevelopment of neoimperial metropolitan space. They highlight this contrast by
tracing the movement of the female Afro-Caribbean migrant labourer from the
archipelago to the metropole, which transnationalizes their narrative structures. As
Davies comments, ‘It is exactly at that intersection of discourses and their critiques
that a book like Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and a whole genre of Black women’s crosscultural writing resides’ (26). The intersectionality of works like Lucy and Devil’s
Dance reflects the liminality of migrant subjectivity, a form of identification that is
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categorized within academic discourse as either interstitial or conjunctive,
depending on the particular situatedness of scholarly intent. This relates to what
Slavoj Žižek identifies as the ‘gap between reality and its symbolization,’ which
‘thus sets in motion the contingent process of historicization – symbolization’ (9). It
is with this notion of the consubstantial processes of historicization and
symbolization in mind that I will turn my discussion to the figuration of the past
within the present through forms of artistic hauntology.
Using Walter Benjamin’s construction of the Angel of History as a
paradigm, I will examine Kincaid and Pineau’s polysemic spectralization of
contemporary Caribbean fiction in Lucy and Devil’s Dance – texts that are haunted
by both the postmemory of slavery and the spectre of capital. Their writings
demonstrate that these are phantasmal elements which glimmer within the Real, as
traces of history reveal themselves in flickering glimpses within quotidian life.
They are also spectral representations out of sheer necessity. Firstly, postmemory,
as a form of traumatic memory, cannot be fully realized and must therefore have a
symbolic function.99 Secondly, the spectre of capital is the absent presence of a
phallus, or object of desire, which is also symbolic. Consequently, both of these
non-things, or ‘Athings,’ as Derrida would call them, are ungraspable and therefore
unknowable; thus they are inherently symbolic (1993: 173). The dual phantasms of
the postmemory of slavery and the spectre of capital are inexorably linked within
Caribbean history since the enslaved Afro-Caribbean subject was the object of
commodity fetishism. S/he was dehumanized and remade as an embodied form of
capital – a commodity and thus an object (of desire). As a result of this
99
I delineate this argument in Chapter IV.
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capitalization, the enslaved subject endured what Aimé Césaire calls a process of
chosification, or ‘thingification’ in English, which, he argues, is part of the
systematized operation of colonisation (42). Moreover, this process was perhaps
even more profoundly dehumanizing for women slaves as the non-remuneration of
their labour production was compounded by the non-remuneration of their
reproductive labour. They were expected to not only toil in the fields, but also to
give birth to more slaves, often as a result of rape. This forced, non-remunerated
production and reproduction meant that the black female body became a body
without organs which enacted the filiation of the capitalist system in the Caribbean.
In turn, the Afro-Caribbean woman thus became a spectral figure within imperialist
discourse, an effect that was later recapitulated within Caribbean literatures of
decolonisation.100 In the ensuing section, I will argue that in Lucy and Devil’s
Dance, Kincaid and Pineau seemingly present reconceptualizations of Benjamin’s
Angel of History as a way of imaging ‘an impure history of ghosts’ (Derrida: 1993:
118). These writers suggest that the postgenerations of black female labour
migrants are haunted by the postmemory of ‘impure histories’ of colonialism,
capitalism and slavery. Their fictional texts work to break the overwhelming silence
which has historically stifled the black female migrant labourer, allowing her voice
to interject in opposition to this discursive stranglehold.
V.
The Angel of History, The Soucougnan and the Spectre of Capital
Benjamin’s essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940) is comprised
of short, numbered paragraphs which impart his various musings and hypotheses
that combine to form a critique of historicism. In section IX of this text, Benjamin
100
As I discuss in further detail in Chapter I.
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presents his impressions of an oil print that he owns which calls to mind the themes
of witnessing, writing and rewriting history. The artwork is by contemporaneous
painter Paul Klee and is called ‘Angelus Novus,’ which translates in English as ‘The
New Angel.’ Benjamin re-envisions the figure in the painting as ‘the angel of
history,’ describing him as ‘looking as though he is about to move away from
something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his
wings are spread’ (249). He argues, ‘This is how one pictures the angel of history.
His face is turned toward the past’ (ibid.). The angel’s posture is poised for flight,
suggesting that he is about to take off in order to escape the accumulating ruins of
the past, which are the object of his gaze. Benjamin asserts that ‘where we perceive
a chain of events,’ the Angel of History ‘sees one single catastrophe which keeps
piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would
like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’ (ibid.).
Despite the angel’s wish to remain at the scene, Benjamin pronounces that he is
about to be thrust backward by the relentless onslaught of what we might call today
History.
Benjamin remarks, ‘But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught
in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm
irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress’ (ibid.).
From Benjamin’s view, Klee’s painting captures the arrested moment when the
angel hovers at the very edge of History, spellbound by the catastrophic course of its
unfolding, which is at once immediate and immemorial. For instance, section IX
opens with an epigraph taken from Gerhard Scholem’s poem ‘Gruss vom Angelus’
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(‘Greeting from the Angel’) which states, ‘My wing is ready for flight, / I would like
to turn back. / If I stayed timeless time, / I would have little luck’ (ibid). Benjamin
indicates that this suspended moment of ‘timeless time’ which Klee depicts in the
painting cannot last due to the unremitting bluster of History. Elsewhere throughout
the essay, Benjamin condemns History’s totalising, ‘triumphal procession,’ which
records the deafening forward march of ‘civilization’ in the name of Progress and at
the expense of vanquished ‘barbarism’ (248). He observes that ‘the present rulers’
are ‘the heirs of those who conquered before them,’ and they continue their
advancement by ‘step[ping] over those who are lying prostrate’ (ibid.).
Consequently, Benjamin asserts, ‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the
“state of emergency” in which we now live is not the exception but the rule’ (ibid.).
As a response, he declares, ‘It is our task to bring about a real state of emergency’ in
order to disrupt the ‘historical norm’ (248-9). Benjamin interprets the angel in the
painting as the horrified, forlorn witness to this state of emergency – he is alone
because he turns his back to the future and attempts to remain in the present moment
in order to retaliate against the attack by destructive historical forces.
The Angel of History, then, is an archangel – likely a re-envisioning of the
archangel Michael, who leads an army of angels to victory against a band of angels
led by Lucifer, all of whom are cast out of heaven and down to earth.101 Benjamin’s
apocalyptic vision of History echoes the ‘war in heaven’ described in the Book of
Revelation in the Bible, which occurs during the Last Days. In Benjaminian
101
Benjamin was a believer in Messianic Judaism and the archangel Michael is a figure often
regarded as the defender of the Jews. In Judaism, the term ‘end of days’ is a reference to the
Messianic Age, which includes an in-gathering of the exiled Jewish diaspora. In Christianity, ‘end
time’ is depicted as a time of tribulation that precedes the Second Coming of Christ, who will face the
emergence of the Antichrist and usher in the Kingdom of God.
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eschatology, the Angel of History is an ‘Angelus Novus,’ a ‘New Angel’ who will
incite a radical transformation of the traditional ways in which history is recounted.
Benjamin rejects the tidy teleologism which History enacts via periodization in
favour of the concept of a ‘dialectical’ cultural history that resurrects subterranean
histories of oppressed peoples102 (Benjamin: 1992: 253). He perceives ‘a
revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past,’ which will ‘blast a specific
era out of the homogenous course of history – blasting a specific life out of the era
or a specific work out of the lifework’ (254). Benjamin points to ‘the struggling
oppressed class’ as ‘the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of
liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden’ (251). He argues that the
underclass is in fact ‘the depository of historical knowledge,’ one which was buried
by its sublation within historical epistemic regimes (ibid.).
St Lucian writer Derek Walcott takes up noticeably similar ideas to
Benjamin’s hypotheses regarding oppressive History within much of his own
theoretical work. He re-examines these postulations through an archipelagic lens in
order to analyse the specific conditions of the black Caribbean underclass. For
example, in his essay ‘The Figure of Crusoe’ (1965) Walcott writes of the island
subject’s ‘despairing cry’:
it is the cynical answer that we must make to those critics who complain that
there is nothing here, no art, no history, no architecture, by which they mean
ruins, in short, no civilization, it is ‘Oh happy desert!’ We live not only on
happy, but on fertile deserts, and we draw our strength like Adam, like all
102
Guianese writer Wilson Harris applies a similar contention to the Caribbean context, stating, ‘It
would seem to me that the closest West Indian historians have come to a philosophy of history is in
terms, firstly, of the Marxist dialectic’ (1999: 180).
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hermits, all dedicated craftsmen, from that rich irony of history. It is what
feeds the bonfire. We contemplate our spirit by the detritus of the past. (40)
However, Walcott’s supposedly redemptive Adamic paradigm obviously does not
apply to the female island subject, and it thereby remobilizes the Fanonian
masculinist bias outlined in the introduction to this chapter. In his essay Walcott
invokes ‘the schizophrenic Muse whose children are of all races’ – but his vision
solely addresses her sons, and completely ignores her daughters (ibid.). This
patriarchal, recolonising model merely serves to recast the Afro-Caribbean male as
the avenger of oppressed histories, thus rendering his female counterpart a phantom
by (once again) writing her out of history. Womanist Caribbean writers such as
Kincaid and Pineau respond to this Adamic absencing of women with a more
inclusive narratological approach. Their fiction features a diverse group of male and
female players, but the narrative locus is always the lived experience of the AfroCaribbean woman subject.
In Lucy and Devil’s Dance the Angel of History is, in fact, female. She is a
(re)figuration of the black woman subject, whose image has been historically
constructed through various imperialist discursive processes of negation.
Accordingly, Kincaid and Pineau limn her as the spectral, absent presence which
haunts their fictional narratives, just as she has haunted the narratives of History for
centuries. As I discuss in Chapters I and IV, representations of the non-Western
female subject are produced by subordinating discursive regimes which
simultaneously function to consolidate a positive, self-affirming Western image.
Kincaid and Pineau reappropriate the ethereal figure of the Angel of History within
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their texts, which for them represents the trace of the black woman subject that can
be found within lacunary historical accounts. For example, I would posit that in
Devil’s Dance Pineau creolises the Benjaminian Angel of History in the form of a
soucougnan, a seemingly malevolent supernatural being from French Antillean
folklore. A soucougnan is a kind of vampire-witch who travels by fireball, sheds her
skin at night and sucks the blood of her victims. Pineau seemingly depicts the ghost
of Mina’s sister Rosalia – who is burned alive when their cabin in Guadeloupe
catches fire – as a type of soucougnon. Rosalia’s apparition lurks in the corners of
Mina’s mind and, consequently, in the corners of her apartment, as her surrounding
environment becomes a projection of her paranoid imagination. Mina describes ‘her
red eyes, the flaming braids on her head,’ and confirms that she is ‘always there,’
‘all the time. Night and day. Everywhere […] She even sleeps next to me. With
her flames. Her burnt nightgown…I can feel her breathing on my neck’ (33). In
spite of the spirit’s alarming appearance, however, Mina grows accustomed to its
lingering presence and regards Rosalia’s phantom as a benign creature incapable of
harm. She explains:
I see her burning in perpetual flames. She stares at me in a strange way, but
I don’t really feel threatened. At first I was startled to see sparks dancing
around her head. There are always one or two that go astray. Sometimes I
play at catching them. They don’t burn me […] For a long time I thought
they disappeared in the palm of my hand. Magic! In reality, they don’t
exist. (52)
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Despite Mina’s nonchalance, a soucougnan is by definition a malignant figure which
feeds on the blood of its victims in order to survive. Rosalia’s apparition can
therefore be interpreted as a vampiric, and therefore also parasitic, being which
clings to Mina to sustain itself, draining her of her vitality. Her ghost can therefore
be read as a multivalent allegorical sign. On the one hand, it can represent the
postmemory of slavery, which can have a potentially leechlike psychological effect
on Afro-Caribbean postgenerations. Nevertheless, Mina does not conceive of
Rosalia’s spirit as dangerous – in fact, she actually empathises with it. For instance,
Mina wonders, ‘And what about her, did she exist? Was she treated like a person?
She was invisible, simply a phantom like Rosalia was’ (62). Hence Rosalia’s ghost
is also Mina’s doppelgänger – her haunting reflection, which is also a revenant of
the generations of colonised Afro-Caribbean women labourers who are Mina’s
foremothers.
Mina recognises that as a migrant labourer in the Hexagon, she too
experiences a phantomic existence, as she goes unrecognized by the white
metropolitan citizens. Thus, on the other hand, Rosalia’s spirit can also represent an
introjection of the white Parisian population’s view of the immigrant as a foreign
parasite which feeds upon the body of its host – that is, the host country – draining it
of its monetary resources by exploiting systems such as welfare benefits, public
housing and so on. Furthermore, as Nick Nesbitt remarks in Voicing Memory:
History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (2003), ‘at a stroke,’ ‘the
departmentalization of the French colonies […] turn[ed] these regions into the
juridical sosies of their metropolitan sister’ (6). Sosies translates in English as
‘doubles’ – thus Nesbitt infers that the D.O.M. countries are the doppelgängers of
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their French sister. They are her shadowy doubles since they do not enjoy the same
privileges as France, despite the fact that they are a constituent part of her existence.
This exploitative neocolonial system engenders what Nesbitt terms an ‘unfree
alienation’ in which the neocolonies are ‘entangled, working through the blockage,
at once psychological and material, that colonial society visits upon its subjects’
(32). He asserts that ‘in the unfree world’ of neocolonialism, ‘the subject is
compelled to systematic alienation at every level of experience: language, culture,
economics, geography, politics’ (ibid.). The exploitative neoimperialist relationship
also enables British and French corporations to profit by exporting cheap local
goods from and importing overpriced metropolitan goods to the neocolonies in the
Commonwealth and D.O.M. networks. Furthermore, the British and French
neoimperia continue to expropriate cheap labour from their territories, often in the
form of black migrant workers. In Capitalisme et Schizophrenie, Deleuze and
Guattari identify the forces of capitalism as ‘des forces alienantes,’ which translates
in English as ‘alienating forces’ [my translation] (Seem 104). Translator Mark
Seem points out that ‘the French word alienation means both social alienation and
what we English-speakers call “mental derangement”’ (ibid). Accordingly, I would
argue that Kincaid and Pineau depict the ‘social alienation’ and ‘mental
derangement’ which the Afro-Caribbean female migrant labourer experiences as a
result of the twinned alienating forces of neoimperialism and global capitalism.
Mina seemingly exemplifies what Freud would term the ‘obsessional
neurotic’ subject as she remains attached to her past via her affective fixation to the
deceased Rosalia. In his essay ‘Fixation to Traumas: The Unconscious’ (1916)
Freud explicates ‘neuroses which may be described as a pathological form of
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mourning’ (276). He contends that the melancholic subject ‘is brought so
completely to a stop by a traumatic event which shatters the foundations of his life
that he abandons all interest in mental concentration upon the past’ (ibid.). Freud
maintains that this comes as a result of ‘having been ‘fixated to a particular portion
of [one’s] past, as though [one] could not manage to free [oneself] from it and is for
that reason alienated from present and the future’ (273). In Pineau’s novel Mina
exhibits a similar affective attachment to Rosalia’s ghost: ‘Rosalia was her
companion, the staff of her grief, her shadow, her memory. But she also embodied
mystery and madness. Sometimes Mina found herself praying deep in her heart that
Rose would suddenly disappear from her life, leave her in peace at last. But then
she changed her mind immediately and begged the other not to leave her’ (51). As a
result of this fixation, Freud states that the mourning subject remains ‘lodged in [his
or her] illness in the sort of way in which in earlier days people retreated into a
monastery in order to bear the burden there of their ill-fated lives’ (ibid.). Rather
than take refuge in a mountaintop abbey, in Pineau’s novel her protagonist
withdraws to her apartment on the seventh floor of a high-rise building in the
housing projects on the outer edge of Paris. In this sense, Mina’s confinement
mirrors that of Rosalia’s spirit, which remains trapped on earth, ‘bumping up against
windows like a blind bird in a cage’ (52-3). Mina is likewise caged by her
obsessional attachment to the memory of Rosalia, which fixates her to the period of
her childhood to such a degree that she becomes alienated from the present.
Her hallucinations gradually intensify, eventually growing so persistent that
they constitute her everyday reality. For example, she states of Rosalia’s apparition,
‘She has never left my side. I started talking to her here. She listens to me when I
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talk to her. She loves stories’ (53). Mina’s imagined exchanges with the
phantasmal figure are symptomatic of her attachment to not only her childhood
trauma, but also to her ancestral trauma. The stories that she tells to Rosalia’s ghost
are tales of their forebears, which are passed down intergenerationally through the
cultural practice of storytelling. Pineau writes, ‘For her, Mina climbed back in time,
all the way back to the days before she was born, through dark corridors echoing
with the voices of ancestors who opened the book of their lives to pages that
remained intact for the sake of posterity and the magic of memory’ (38). Mina’s
delusional engagement with Rosalia’s phantom prompts the sequential recall of
tragedies which reach back throughout time, beginning with Rosalia’s demise, then
reflecting on the prior deaths of her father Melchoir and her mother Médée, and
ultimately stretching all the way back to their earliest known relative, called
Ancestor Séléna. According to the family myth, she is a Guadeloupean plantation
slave who lives to experience the second and final abolition of slavery in the French
West Indies in 1848 – the first time was in 1794, but then slavery was quickly
reinstated by Napoleon I in 1802. Finally, in 1848 the French state, under the
Second Republic, purchased the remaining slaves from the white planters and then
‘freed’ them. Séléna continues working the fields, but now as a paid labourer, and
she saves up enough money to buy a plot of land where she builds the cabin that
later becomes Mina’s childhood home. Despite her initial success, however, Séléna
later experiences what Mina’s father euphemistically calls ‘a period of decline’ (45).
Mina remembers that it is at this point when Melchoir ‘would begin to stutter. His
words grew suddenly incoherent with the flip side of the story. Séléna’s glorious
reign became frayed’ (ibid.). He tells Mina that Ancestor Séléna becomes:
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affected by a particular malady. She had an uncontrollable urge to buy. She
had a morbid and frantic tendency to hoard, to acquire more and more land,
which made her hateful in the eyes of her fellow black people. It was said
she was possessed, bewitched by evil forces. She called herself the landed
mulattress, which – due to her black skin – made people smile. (45-6)
Séléna suffers from a condition which we would culturally diagnose today as
something akin to ‘affluenza,’ Oliver James’s neoterism which he defines as ‘the
placing of a high value on money, possessions, appearances (physical and social)
and fame’ (2007: xiii). James cites capitalism as the direct cause of various
pathological forms of mental illness such as affluenza, which is at once a mimetic
and a consumerist impulse (2008: 3). Correspondingly, I would contend that in the
novel Séléna succumbs to affluenza, which turns her into a ‘madwoman’ who shuts
herself up in her cabin on Morne Calvaire, where she spends the rest of her days
admiring her vast land holdings from afar (47). I would venture further that the ‘evil
forces’ by which she is ‘possessed, bewitched’ are in fact the hydra-headed forces of
capitalism which motivate her materialism and desire to appear as a ‘mulatress,’
despite the fact that she has no European lineage. She covets the status of
‘mulattress’ as it is a racial marker which has a higher rank on the racialized
Caribbean class scale than ‘negress’ (a woman of solely African descent) due to the
presence of European heritage (46). These forces also impel her insatiable greed for
land, a possession which was historically denied the Afro-Caribbean subject. Once
she earns enough money to acquire some acreage she ensconces herself in her cabin,
whose elevated location on the morne enables her to survey the entirety of her
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property, much like the plantocracy who observed their domain from the hilltop
Great House.103
According to Ancestor Séléna, post-emancipation Guadeloupe was a milieu
of fear and uncertainty for former slaves. She states, ‘In those days, blacks didn’t
own nothing but their aching soul and the freedom that trailed after them like some
grim shadow. Niggers was waiting to see if slavery wasn’t coming back, in some
form or another, some law or decree conceived of back in France by the first cousins
of the white folk from here’ (41-2). Ironically, Séléna becomes re-enslaved by
capitalism in a different form – affluenza, which causes her to willingly accede to
this oppressive economic mode. She re-enacts the rapacious frenzy of the
imperialists in a mimetic performance that is also a kind of repetition compulsion.
For example, Freud contends that the repetition of ‘senseless obsessional action[s]’
represents an attempt to return to the primal scene of trauma – the ‘whence’ of the
neurotic symptom – in order to somehow undo its effects (1963: 276, 284). He
argues, ‘traumatic neuroses give a clear indication that a fixation to the moment of
the traumatic accident lies at their root’ (ibid. 274). However, Freud emphasises that
although the ‘whence’ of the neurotic symptom may be conscious for the traumatic
subject, the ‘whither,’ or ‘the purpose of the symptom,’ is invariably unconscious
(284). Accordingly, Séléna does not recognise the motive for her voracious
acquisitiveness, just as Mina is unaware of the basis for her hallucinations. Both
women therefore display what Freud would call a ‘pathogenic ignorance’ of the
source of their obsession (281). Pineau’s narrative reveals that in both cases, it is
the postmemory of slavery that triggers their compulsive behaviour, and the author
103
This scene noticeably echoes Mary Louise Pratt’s identification of the ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey’
trope in imperialist writings about New World space (Pratt 197).
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suggests that this postmemory is a ‘curse’ which plagues Afro-Caribbean
postgenerations (2006: 30). In the novel, she addresses the psychosocial urge
experienced by Guadeloupeans to ‘forget the journey of their ancestors, the cane
fields, and the whip […] Dance and stamp out the malediction and the images of
niggers eternally down on their luck’ (147). In this sense, their obsessional
postmemory of slavery parallels Freud’s description of the fixation to ‘a traumatic
event which shatters the foundations of [one’s] life’ such that one ‘abandons all
interest in the present and future and remains permanently absorbed in mental
concentration on the past’ (276). In Pineau’s text, the massive historical catastrophe
of slavery ‘shatters the foundations’ of not only Ancestor Séléna’s life, but also the
lives of her postgenerational descendants. Thus the deep trauma experienced by
their earliest known foremother unsettles the very ‘foundations’ of the Montério
family line from its inception (ibid.). These transgenerational aftershocks represent
the (literal) filiation of a self-replicating social disorder caused by the cataclysm of
slavery. Pineau indicates that this social disorder engenders homologous
psychosomatic disorders which can be traced throughout an entire bloodline. She
thus implies that a (second) government decree of ‘emancipation’ in the French
colonies does not in fact equate to ‘freedom from slavery’ due to the lingering
effects of postmemory. Cases such as those of Mina and Séléna align with Freud’s
remark regarding obsessional neurotic subjects: ‘It is as though these [subjects]
hav[e] not finished with the traumatic situation, as though they [are] still faced by it
as an immediate task which has not been dealt with’ (275). As a result, Freud
deduces that the obsessional symptom or ‘attack’ ‘corresponds to a complete
transplanting of the [subject] into the traumatic situation’ (274).
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It is at this point,
however, when my argument diverges from Freud’s model. He states that it is
possible for the psychoanalyst to coercively ‘transplant’ the traumatic subject into
the memory of the situation during treatment, forcing a direct ‘confrontation’ which,
he declares triumphantly, will ‘cure’ the subject of his or her trauma. Following
Cathy Caruth’s conceptualization of massive trauma as ‘unclaimed experience’ due
to its inherent unknowability, I would contend that ‘a complete transplanting’ of the
subject into the traumatic situation is impossible as this situation is not (and cannot
be) experienced directly (Caruth: 1995, Freud: 1963: 275). For instance, with regard
to recurring obsessional symptoms such as dreams, Caruth maintains that ‘the return
of the traumatic experience in the dream is not the signal of the direct experience
but, rather, of the attempt to overcome the fact that it was not direct, to attempt to
master what was never fully grasped in the first place’ (1996: 62). Due to this
nonrealization of severe trauma, a direct confrontation with the event is
unachievable as it does not correlate to a direct experience. As Caruth states, it is
instead ‘the repeated confrontation with the necessity and impossibility of grasping’
traumatic memory (ibid.). It is for this reason, I would posit, that Pineau re-invents
the Angel of History as the ghost of postmemory, since traumatic memory is an
apparition and is therefore ungraspable.
In Kincaid’s Lucy, the author seemingly recasts the Angel of History as the
fallen angel Lucifer, whose name echoes within that of the eponymous protagonist.
When Lucy asks her mother about her name, she replies under her breath, ‘I named
you after Satan himself. Lucy, short for Lucifer. What a botheration from the
moment you were conceived’ (152). In this text and in several of her other works
318
that make up part of a larger, serialized autofictional corpus,104 Kincaid limns the
protagonist’s mother as a figuration of the postcolonial mother-island, whose child is
an embodiment of the contemporary Caribbean population. Here Lucy represents
the logistical ‘botheration’ of a displaced, disenfranchised, mixed-race populace
which was ‘conceived’ by the penetration of the Antiguan mother-island by the
colonial Father. By bestowing her protagonist with a moniker that is ‘short for
Lucifer,’ Kincaid alludes to the profound evil inherent within this imperialist act of
violation. For instance, Lucy remarks, ‘I had realized that the origin of my presence
on the island – my ancestral history – was the result of a foul deed’ (135). Kincaid
infers that the current Afro-Caribbean population are the bastard offspring begat by
the imperialist-capitalist rape of the Caribbean. In her work, she implies that they
exist as a form of collateral damage, ‘as an accompaniment to and, ironically
enough, as afterthoughts’ of this encounter (Said: 1993: 402). When Lucy relocates
from Antigua to the United States, she hopes that this act of migration will enable
her to leave her hellish ancestral past behind. She views this movement as one
toward redemption, stating, ‘I understood finding the place you are born in an
unbearable prison and wanting something completely different from what you are
familiar with, knowing it represents a haven’ (95). Here she seems to buy into the
false promise of the American dream, believing that it is a kind of heavenly place
where one can live freely. She recounts:
I used to make a list of all the things that I was quite sure would not follow
me if only I could cross the vast ocean that lay before me; I used to think that
just a change in venue would banish forever from my life the things I most
104
See Annie John (1983), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), and Mr. Potter (2003).
319
despised. But that was not to be so. As each day unfolded before me, I
could see the sameness in everything; I could see the present take a shape –
the shape of my past. (90)
Like Pineau’s Mina, who is followed to the neoimperium by Rosalia’s ghost, Lucy
wonders, ‘if ever in my whole life a day would go by when these people I had left
behind […] would not appear before me in one way or another’ (8). Lucy yearns to
‘leave behind’ the postmemory of her enslaved foremothers by attempting to
unfetter herself from the binding forces of History and escaping to an ostensible
heaven in America. Once there, however, she marvels, ‘I was living silently in a
personal hell’ (136). With this statement, Lucy indicates the severely damaging
effects that her forced migration has upon her consciousness.
The postmemory of slavery continues to haunt Lucy upon her arrival in the
United States, where she comes to recognise the imprisoning neoimperialist
discourses of gender, race and class that construct her role as a domestic labourer
there. She observes, ‘I was not a man; I was a young woman from the fringes of the
world, and when I left my home I had wrapped around my shoulders the mantle of a
servant’ (95). Lucy moves within a closed system that Davies terms a ‘male
economy’ – one that is dominated by ‘phallic power’ and, I would add,
phallogocentric discourse (71, 53). As a result, Lucy notes that even if a man is
‘doomed to defeat,’ he nevertheless has ‘the perfume of a hero about him’ in
historical accounts of his life (95). She discerns, ‘Of course his life could be found
in the pages of a book; I had just begun to notice that the lives of men always are’
(ibid.). Davies explains, ‘The idea of the existence of a male economy (capitalist,
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patriarchal) that circulates differently has been offered by a number of feminist
critics. It is the context in which the repression of women and non-Western peoples
has been perpetuated repeatedly’ (ibid.). Consequently, in her novella Kincaid poses
the implicit question, what about the historical narrativization of the non-Western
woman subject? The obscurantisms of History tend to either misrepresent or
exclude the woman subject completely – particularly if she is black. Thus it follows
that ‘any representation of women, whether in fiction or in life, has to do, surely,
with gender relations, but also with more than gender relations; it is almost always
indicative of a much larger structure of feeling and a much more complex political
grid’ (Ahmad 152). As a result, Lucy quickly ascertains that for black female
migrant labourers, as was the case for their enslaved foremothers, America is not in
fact ‘the land of the free’ which its national anthem boasts. She learns ‘not to bank
on this “free” feeling,’ since she discovers that ‘it would vanish like a magic trick’
due to the coercive ‘structure[s] of feeling’ that organise her life as a domestic
servant (Kincaid: 2002: 129, Ahmad ibid.).
Once this illusory ‘“free” feeling’ disappears, Lucy feels utterly bereft,
reduced to a labouring body without organs that is ‘hollow[ed]’ out by History (ibid.
41). As a strategic response, she attempts to embrace what Cathleen Schine
describes as a kind of ‘willed nihilism’ – an outlook that is frequently misinterpreted
by critics as ‘melancholic’ (Schine n.p.). This Freudian, psychoanalytic critical urge
to diagnose black female protagonists so reductively is reflective of the prevailing
tendency to dismiss instances of non-normative behaviour as merely pathological.
This is a form of ontological, or ‘psychic violence’ that is ‘a refracted indictment of
social forms that have made certain kinds of loss ungrievable’ (Butler: 2004: 185).
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Such medicalizing discourse ‘forecloses the possibility that the person in question
can regain control of her body, let alone her brain, through her own initiative;
reversals of such conditions are rare, and they require the agency not so much of the
patient as of doctors and hospitals’ (Ahmad 146). Similarly, Stella Bolaki perceives
that ‘Lucy’s losses are unrepresentable within the kind of discourses and narratives
[that] the people around her use in order to categorise her and convince her that she
should let go of her bitterness and be happy’ (73). Lucy’s employer, Mariah, exerts
such pressure on her, deploying a teleoaffective regime that Lauren Berlant would
term a kind of ‘cruel optimism’ (23). In her text Cruel Optimism (2011), Berlant
defines this concept as ‘a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of
possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or
too possible, and toxic’ (ibid.). In Lucy’s case, she is attached to the possibility for
happiness, which she seeks in her new American milieu, but which she soon
‘discovers to be impossible’ for the immigrant labourer precisely because it is ‘sheer
fantasy.’ For a privileged white American woman like Mariah, on the other hand,
happiness is ‘too possible,’ and therefore ‘toxic,’ since the desire for it not only
structures the power imbalance between her and Lucy, but it also structures the
demise of her marriage, which is dependent upon the (false) guarantee of lifelong
happiness. Berlant points out that what is ‘cruel’ about these attachments, ‘and not
merely inconvenient or tragic,’ is that:
The subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their
object/scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being,
because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form
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provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means
to keep on living […] and to look forward to being in the world. (ibid)
She clarifies that the phrase ‘cruel optimism’ ‘points to a condition different from
that of melancholia, which is enacted in the subject’s desire to temporize an
experience of the loss of an object/scene with which she has invested her ego
continuity’ (ibid.). Cruel optimism, Berlant maintains, ‘is the condition of
maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object’ (ibid.). Hence
Mariah exhibits the cruel optimism inherent within the American imperative of ‘the
pursuit of happiness,’ and she invites Lucy to share in the illusive exemplar for
happiness that is the oedipal, bourgeois family household. However, she only
invites Lucy into this household to serve as a domestic labourer. As Davies points
out, ‘Women’s bodies become the locus for a certain social definition of gender with
specific economic import in this social construction. The working class, African
peoples and Black women have historically been socially constructed and defined as
inferior for economic gain’ (71). She asserts, ‘Dominance is therefore installed
through the subordination of other human bodies […] and the expropriation of their
labor, and therefore, of their selves’ (64). Accordingly, Kincaid demonstrates the
ways in which this prerogative of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ that is
the keystone of America’s formation is in fact one which is reliant upon social
oppression. America as a nation was of course built upon various historical systems
of unfree migrant labour, beginning with the system of slavery and then that of
indenture. It is a pattern that is perpetuated today via contemporary forms of
immigrant labour, which continue to exploit the surplus value of black bodies.
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Lucy is vexed by the fact that her employers and their bourgeois friends are
blissfully unaware of their complicity in the neoimperial forces of subjection that
intern her and other immigrant domestic labourers. She marvels, ‘They made no
connection between their comforts and the decline of the world that lay before them.
I could have told them a thing or two about it’ (72). However, Lucy indicates that
her feelings are inarticulable due to her multiplied sense of dislocation as a female
Afro-Caribbean migrant labourer in the metropole. She exists there ‘without anyone
to tell what I felt, without even knowing that the feelings I had were possible to
have’ (136). She comments:
I was now living a life I had always wanted to live. I was living apart from
my family in a place where no one knew much about me, almost no one
knew even my name [...] The feeling of bliss, the feeling of happiness, the
feeling of longing fulfilled that I had thought would come with this situation
was nowhere to be found inside me. (159)
Her overwhelming, pathological sense of lack is symptomatic of the ‘shock to the
human sensorium’ caused by the disruptive movement of labour migration (Lazarus:
2014: n.p.). This shock to the system renders Lucy an unfeeling, dehumanized,
labouring body without organs, as she is concatenated in the perverse chain of
filiation that constitutes the (neo)imperial family romance. This replication of
subordinating circumstances is a product of what Marx describes as ‘the hereditary
division of labour’ (272). It is hereditary in the sense that the late capitalist system
which structures the neoimperia is the filiative replication of a much older
exploitative schema of the division of labour.
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That Lucy is reduced to a labouring body by people like Mariah, who
informs her that she ought to be ‘happy’ about her station in life, illustrates the
multiple discourses of coercion at work in the neoimperialist American context of
domestic labour. The liberal humanist Mariah is ‘shocked’ by Lucy’s unhappy
demeanour and asks, ‘You are a very angry person, aren’t you?’, to which Lucy
retorts matter-of-factly, ‘Of course I am. What did you expect?’ (96). When Lucy
enters Mariah’s household, which represents a microcosm of the American idyll, she
feels a sense of ‘restlessness,’ ‘dissatisfaction with [her] surroundings,’ and a
disturbing sensation of ‘skin-doesn’t-fit-ness’ (145). She recalls, ‘I realized when I
crossed the threshold that I did not think of it as home, only as the place where I
now lived’ (156). As a domestic labourer in Mariah’s household, Lucy gradually
becomes cognisant of her circumscribed position within it, which means that she can
never be ‘at home’ there. This growing awareness of her displacement contributes
to an intense feeling of existential unease about her place within the world at large,
and consequently, within the narrative of History. She laments:
History is full of great events; when the great events are said and done, there
will always be someone, a little person, unhappy, dissatisfied, discontented,
not at home in her own skin, ready to stir up a whole new set of great events
again. I was not such a person, able to put in motion a set of great events,
but I understood the phenomenon all the same. (147)
Lucy feels the impact of the hegemonic (neo)imperial forces that work to
decorporealize the black body, making the black immigrant subject feel invisible,
indistinct – reminding her that she is merely a wraithlike diminution of the fallen
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Angel of History: ‘Lucy, short for Lucifer.’ She perceives that this systematic
process is part of the larger historical nexus in which ‘great events’ are recorded in
imperialist narratives that are epistemologizing, and thereby ontologizing,
representations of the conquered. For example, Lucy notes, ‘These documents
showed everything about me, and yet they showed nothing about me’ (148). To
paraphrase V.S. Naipaul, as a neocolonial, Lucy is ‘spared knowledge’ of herself
due to received (neo)imperialist discourses of (self-)subjection (66). She remarks, ‘I
was reminded that I came from a place where there was no such thing as a “real”
thing, because often what seemed to be one thing turned out to be altogether
different’ (54). Lucy therefore experiences the ideological double-bind that
delineates her subjectivity as an immigrant labourer in the neoimperium, and renders
her a passive, filiative object of migrant capital. In her novel Devil’s Dance,
Pineau’s protagonist Mina endures a similar sense of powerlessness due to her
station as an immigrant labourer in Paris.
VI.
Urban Pathologies in the Parisian Metropole
Looking out from the window of her high-rise flat, Mina also embodies the
Angel of History which surveys the devastation wrought by History from a great
height. Just as Benjamin’s angel ‘sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling
wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet,’ Mina assesses the damage
that overspreads life in Parisian logements socials, or ‘public housing’ projects
(Benjamin: 1992: 249). She ‘learn[s] everything about the project,’ ‘her universe for
the last ten years,’ by gazing from her window (Pineau: 2006: 8). Her dystopian
universe consists of ‘three diffident blocks rising between scrawny stands of trees.
And six boxlike buildings covered with graffiti. Behind the facades blossoming
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with satellite dishes were the apartments – chicken coops and rabbit hutches – where
families lived. As high as the eye could see, the project was poised between rack
and ruin’ (ibid.). Pineau writes:
Sometimes Mina stood for hours with her nose against the kitchen window,
watching from the seventh floor the comings and goings of the project’s
inhabitants. They came from everywhere and anywhere…Embittered exiles,
sodden with nostalgia. Welfare collectors of all sorts who lined up in front
of the social services. Retirees, pensioners, laborers, unemployed, minor
public servants. Left-wingers, right wingers. Far left-wingers or far-right
wingers. People from the North and from the South. From every corner of
France and the rest of the world. Good guys and bad guys from the movies.
Jaded people, fanatics, rebels, fatalists. Old women with plaid shopping
bags. Skinheads. People of every kind and color. Blacks, Whites, Arabs,
Asians. Espousers of grand humanitarian causes, loners with bewildered
looks who prepared for the Apocalypse every morning. (9-10)
Here Pineau’s description illustrates the fact that the contemporary metropolitan
housing project operates in a perpetual state of emergency, which is caused by what
Mike Davis calls in his study Planet of Slums (2007) ‘pathologies of urban form’
(128). The anarchic space of the project houses the human wreckage of History
which is the living byproduct of (neo)imperialism. Although, to be more accurate,
life in the projects in fact a kind of half-life, or a ‘semi-death’ – a spectral existence
at the fringes of the metropolitan district (Glanz n.p.). The municipal pattern of
urban segregation which relegates the marginalized poor to the city’s periphery
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enacts an ‘exclusionary geography’ that precludes their participation within
metropolitan society, despite their contribution to the growth of its capital (M. Davis
97). Pineau suggests that this sociogeographical partitioning inevitably induces a
psychological parallel for the peri-urban population in the form of schizophrenia.
This identitarian crisis is especially acute for migrant labourers such as Mina
who make the arduous journey from the neocolony to the neoimperial centre only to
be confined to its margins. Many of them are from D.O.M. countries like Mina’s
birthplace in Guadeloupe and are therefore French citizens. Nevertheless,
government housing officials tend to view them as nothing more than ‘human
encumberments’ to the French state (Stren 38). As a result, an arrival in French
society is deferred indefinitely for migrant labourers, cementing their status as
transients in a perpetual state of dislocation. Ironically, this transient condition is
also a form of stasis as it freezes them within their subjugated social position, which
remains the status quo. For instance, Pineau comments that Mina’s fellow residents
in the housing project ‘felt trapped there, trampled under life’s foot’ (9). Pineau
indicates that this sense of being downtrodden by fate produces a kind of paranoid
schizophrenia for Mina and her fellow project dwellers, whom she describes as
‘forever watchful, always on the alert’ (ibid.). Furthermore, she comments that
‘some seemed to be pursued by evil spirits similar to Mina’s’ (ibid.). The
metropolitan housing project is an auratic place105 that is haunted by the spectre of
colonialism, which permeates the atmosphere with the poisonous breath of History.
For example, Pineau writes of the inhabitants: ‘Haggard, striding swiftly along, you
could watch them turning into the maze of dead-end streets with warped sidewalks
105
See Chapter IV for my theorization of ‘auratic place.’
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that led nowhere. Others hung around in the parking lot graveyards where the
burned out hulls of cars slept their last sleep’ (ibid.). Death is ever-present in
Pineau’s depiction of the project, which conveys a panorama of social decay and
involution. Its ‘parking lot graveyards’ filled with the ‘burned out hulls’ of sleeping
cars allegorise the immobility of the urban underclass, which remains stuck in its
circumscribed position. The image of the ‘maze of dead-end streets with warped
sidewalks that led nowhere,’ suggests the wayward social paths that are
conveniently paved for the urban poor by the institutions of the state. These routes
funnel inexorably into a one-way channel which leads to the regression of urban
civilisation, despite the fact that housing projects such as Mina’s were ‘once said to
be futuristic, conceived in architects’ offices for housing part of humanity’ (ibid.).
Kincaid and Pineau present contrasting sketches of life in metropolitan
domestic spaces via their respective delineations of Mariah’s luxurious apartment in
a genteel New York City neighbourhood and Mina’s crumbling flat in the derelict
Parisian housing projects. These represent different ways of spatializing Césaire’s
theory of ‘choc en retour,’ or ‘reverse shock,’ a kind of ‘boomerang effect’ whereby
the traumatic colonial past returns to haunt the contemporary metropolitan landscape
(36). In this sense, it can be argued that Kincaid and Pineau also depict the ways in
which the contemporary politico-economic order of neoimperialist capitalism
remains deeply entrenched within place. As Fanon argues with regard to the
relationship between coloniser and colonised within colonial space, ‘from the
moment that the colonial context disappears, [the coloniser] has no longer any
interest in remaining or co-existing [with the colonised]’ (2004: 45). Ironically, as
Lucy and Devil’s Dance suggest, once the coloniser departs from the occupied
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territories and the black labour migrant follows this trajectory, she awakens the local
bourgeoisie to the attendant ‘aura,’ or ‘shock’ of colonialism that also exists within
the metropole. By narrativizing this reverse shock within the domestic sphere
Kincaid and Pineau indicate that colonialism also dwells at home in the metropole,
within lived space. It is still alive, but in a way that is embedded and therefore
difficult to detect at first glance – hence it must be spectralized within their fiction.
The characters of Lucy, Mina and Rosalia represent figurations of Caribbean
postmemory, carriers of this auratic trace whose absent presence in the metropole
allegorises the spectral existence of black migrant labourers. Their transgressive
existence within Kincaid and Pineau’s fictional narratives thereby disrupts the
universal narrative of imperialism, which is also the ‘universal narrative of capital,’
to borrow from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s formulation of history (254).
The imperialist-capitalist system strategically positions the white coloniser
and the colonised black subject within what Claudia Moscovici describes as ‘a
nonreciprocal dialectical relationship in which the former establishes superiority by
denying the humanity of the latter,’ reducing the colonised to a ghostlike form of
embodied capital (116). As Kincaid and Pineau’s texts demonstrate, this dialectical
relationship is also configured spatially since migrant labourers move back and forth
within the closed circuits of capital that are controlled by globalized neoimperialistcapitalist forces. There exists, therefore, a persistent dialectical tension between
movement and stasis due to capital’s attempts to isolate the migrant labour
population within fixed trajectories that extend between delimited territorial
networks. These politico-economic processes perpetuate domination on a level that
is at once global and intimate in its complexity due to their biopolitical control of the
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migrant labourer. Thus, the mobility of labour is not a free mobility – labouring
bodies move according to the shifting global organisation of the capitalist market.
Nonetheless, as was the case historically with regard to the proto-capitalist system of
plantation slavery, the insurrectionary potential of the labouring mind elicits the
constant threat of crisis which threatens to dismantle current global capitalist
production regimes. As Yann Moulier Boutang emphasises, this capability also
obliges ‘the bourgeois economists to establish models that immobilize labor,
discipline it, and disregard the elements of uninterrupted flight. All of this has
functioned to invent and reinvent a thousand forms of slavery’ (5). Boutang makes
explicit the fact that since its very inception capitalism was and continues to be a
form of slave economy which enchains its constituent parts in a politico-economic
system predicated upon the subjugation of the labourer.
These various ‘guises of the coercive organization of labor’ serve to limit the
mobility of the migrant labouring body and block any irregular movement (Hardt
and Negri 122). As Kincaid and Pineau’s texts reveal, these artificial, hegemonic
constructions of spatial relationships are designed to naturalize and normalize the
bounded movement of the migrant labourer, when in fact they only result in
disordered spatialities and subjectivities. The way to break out of this involuntary
and involutionary cycle is to assert one’s subjectivity through the process of
interrogating such spatio-social formations. Fanon indicates that the
depathologization of the self begins with interrogating the unnaturalness of one’s
situation. He concludes Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) by imploring, ‘O mon
corps, fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge!’ (188). This statement is
typically translated as, ‘Oh my body, make of me always a man who questions!’ but
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I believe it is closer to Fanon’s original intent to translate the latter part of the phrase
as ‘make of me always a man who interrogates,’ as this infers a more dogged and
thorough form of questioning [my emphasis]. Fanon entreats his racialized body,
the object of colonial ‘thingification,’ to transform him into a man who relentlessly
interrogates his station. The body without organs is thus rehumanized by the
interrogating mind. Like Fanon, Kincaid and Pineau’s intellectual labour production
is marked by their positionality as Afro-Caribbean migrants. Nevertheless, unlike
Fanon, they are concerned with depathologizing and rehumanizing the black female
body, so that the subject becomes ‘a woman who interrogates.’ Their texts indicate
that it is this refusal of conditioning by the intersectional oppressive forces of
capitalism that will help to unshackle the labouring body without organs. After
delinking from the capitalist machine, the body needs recalibration so that it is no
longer a capitalized, desiring machine – only then can it move freely within and
across space.
VII.
Conclusion
The topic of migrancy naturally prompts a concurrent discussion of spatiality
– and since, as Crystal Bartolovich points out, imperialism exists today ‘in its
contemporary guise as globalization,’ an analysis of economic migrancy must attend
to the ‘economic colonization of everyday life’ and its spatialization (1, 5). By
tracing the movements of the Afro-Caribbean migrant labourer in Kincaid and
Pineau’s texts, this chapter examines the ways in which the recolonising forces of
neoliberal capitalism pervade quotidian life at the particularistic level of place, in
both the neocolony and the metropole. Thus it is necessary to examine these
particulars within the inner life of a given place, while also considering that place
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within a larger, networked context. The inner life of a place pertains to
phenomenological experience and thus to ontopology, which for the migrant
labourer is an apperception of the external field of alienation, which exists along
multiple axes. Kincaid and Pineau illustrate that migrant labourers such as Lucy and
Mina must therefore make furtive movements across inhospitable territories. It is an
everyday mode of life that is evocative of wartime – what Benjamin would identify
as a perpetual state of emergency. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri open Empire
(2000), their joint treatise on the contemporary world order, with the audacious
dictum, ‘Imperialism is over’ (xiv). However, as Kincaid and Pineau establish, it is
far from over and the anticolonial struggle goes on, every single day. As Pineau
writes, Mina ‘was stricken with a stupendous revelation. […] life was one long,
endless war’ (29). As a consequence, both Mina and Lucy encounter surreptitious
modes of violence that are encoded in the everyday experiences of the economic
migrant.
Nevertheless, Hardt and Negri announce that imperialism as we know it no
longer exists, and that it has been replaced by what they call ‘Empire,’ which they
define as ‘a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single
logic of rule’ that constitutes a ‘global form of sovereignty’ (xii). They explain that
‘in contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and
does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and
deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global
realm within its open, expanding frontiers’ (ibid.). Whilst I agree that empire (with
a lowercase ‘e,’ as I do not subscribe to their theory) has indeed become decentred
and deterritorializing, I do not agree with their contention that it is completely
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deterritorialized and therefore placeless. Hardt and Negri appear to do away entirely
with the issue of place, repeatedly referring to the ‘indefinite non-place’ of ‘Empire’
and the ‘smooth world,’ which, they argue, it creates (210). This postmodernist
imaging of a ‘smooth world’ replicates the violent cartographic acts of the
imperialists, whose remapping of the earth rendered its ambit platitudinous and thus
more easily conquerable. Such ideology also represents a psychological assault
executed on ontopological territory, as the seepage of the cartographer’s ink
indelibly reinscribes the cognitive cartography of the inhabitants within this
conquered space. Contra Hardt and Negri’s insistence upon the ‘non-place’ of
empire, Kincaid and Pineau’s texts elucidate the fact that (neo)imperialism remains
thoroughly engrained within place. Hardt and Negri are part of the recent wave of
so-called ‘postmodernist-Marxist’ critics led by Fredric Jameson and David Harvey
who follow in Deleuze and Guttari’s wake with their idealist envisioning of the
‘rhizomatic’ possibilities of ‘deterritorialized,’ ‘globalised’ contemporary world
space.106 Hardt and Negri maintain that current ‘postmodernist analyses point
toward the possibility of a global politics of difference, a politics of deterritorialized
flows across a smooth world, free of the rigid striation of […] boundaries’ (142).
This postmodernist notion of ‘a global politics of difference’ is obviously dangerous,
as it excludes individual articulations and experiences of particularized difference.
Moreover, in the case of the economic migrant, it repeats the expatriation of the
subject from him- or herself, the ontopological displacement that is always-already
the plight of the stateless person. Such discourses have a stultifying effect on their
106
See Jameson: 1992 and Harvey: 2000.
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object by depriving the individual of an autonomous identity and, thereby, his or her
subjective agency.
Hardt and Negri maintain that this flattening of the earth’s surface by
globalisation supposedly renders it a ‘smooth world’ within the capitalist
cartographic imaginary. For example, they state, ‘In the passage of sovereignty
toward the plane of immanence, the collapse of boundaries has taken place both
within each national context and on a global scale’ (332). However, as Kincaid and
Pineau’s texts demonstrate, for the economic migrant, globalisation does not in fact
‘free’ the world of its ‘boundaries’ (ibid.). For instance, in Kincaid’s novella Lucy
comments, ‘I was unhappy. I looked at a map. An ocean stood between me and the
place I came from, but would it have made a difference if it had been a teacup of
water? I could not go back’ (9-10). As Kincaid implies, in the case of the labour
migrant, borders still remain intact which block the opportunity for movement and
in turn, for happiness. Accordingly, the penetrability or collapsibility of borders
depends upon one’s socioeconomic station. Hence it follows that the absent
presence of neoimperialism, whilst phantomic and seemingly intangible, nonetheless
actualizes itself within lived space. For example, an acquaintance of Mina’s named
Bénédicte exclaims, ‘Demons are waging war against us, you hear! But you can’t
see them…They get inside your heart and hollow out endless, bottomless tunnels,
stations and platforms like in the belly of Paris…Stations and platforms, I tell you!
But you don’t see them, you’re all blind!’ (74). Like Mina, Bénédicte is also a
Guadeloupean woman living in Paris who is plagued by visions of ghosts. She is
deemed a ‘madwoman’ due to her proclamations and spends the rest of her life
hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. Her description of the ontopological experience
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of ‘demonic’ capitalist forces here transposes a blueprint of the metropolitan
underground system in the ‘belly of Paris’ over the inner workings of the
Guadeloupean body. The body of the Guadeloupean immigrant is therefore a body
without organs, as the organ systems are ‘hollowed out’ and replaced by the systems
of Progress. Ironically, these are also systems of transportation – which shows that
the movements of the migrant labour force are laid out for them a priori by the
metropolitan state. Free movement is therefore an impossibility – an illusion.
Pineau’s metaphorical example of the subway system infers that the treachery of
Progress is subterranean, and therefore insidious. It also indicates that the ideology
of Progress is internalized by the immigrant populace, who locate this indoctrination
psychosomatically, as it is seemingly implanted within their hollowed-out bellies.
Kincaid and Pineau’s depictions of various forms of imperialist-capitalist mapping
reveal such coercive cartographies to be mimetic fallacies which, as Bénédicte
states, ‘blind’ the immigrant population to their entrapment.
Curiously, in their theorization of ‘Empire’ Hardt and Negri sublimate the
current crisis of the ‘global’ imperialist-capitalist remappings of the world and its
inhabitants, arguing that these acts (somehow, paradoxically) have a remobilizing
effect upon the labouring masses. They maintain:
In this deterritorialized and untimely space where the new Empire is constructed
and in this desert of meaning, the testimony of the crisis can pass toward the
realization of a singular and collective subject, toward the powers of the
multitude. The multitude has internalized the lack of place and fixed time; it is
mobile and flexible, and it conceives the future only as a totality of possibilities
that branch out in every direction. The coming imperial universe, blind to
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meaning, is filled by the multifarious totality of the production of subjectivity.
The decline is no longer a future destiny but the present reality of Empire. (380)
I fail to see how a totalitarian global-capitalist world order equates to a ‘totality of
possibilities,’ or to ‘the multifarious totality of the production of subjectivity,’ for
that matter. By the ‘multitude,’ Hardt and Negri are referring to the labouring
masses.107 Pineau’s aforementioned passage illustrates that although the migrant
labour forces have indeed ‘internalized the lack of place and fixed time’ (that is,
they have internalized a displaced ontopology), it does not follow that the multitude
then becomes ‘mobile and flexible.’ As Pineau’s mapping of the reinscribed
immigrant body exhibits, the labouring multitude does not ‘conceiv[e] the future
only as a totality of possibilities that branch out in every direction.’ Pineau’s
transposition of the subway system onto the black body alludes to the fact that the
trajectories of the migrant labourer are predetermined and finite. The movements of
the black labouring body are anything but ‘mobile and flexible’ within the circuitous
route of the neoimperialist-capitalist system, which precludes the possibility for
individuation or a sense of futurity.
In a section entitled ‘Endless Paths (The Right to Global Citizenship)’ Hardt
and Negri address the issue of labour migration and claim that ‘through circulation
the multitude reappropriates space and constitutes itself as an active subject’ (397).
They argue that the ‘territorial movements of the labour power of Empire’ are
‘already powerful’ due to the ‘spontaneity of the multitude’s movements’ (398).
Where is there self-empowerment to be found in violent, unfree mobilities? The
107
See Hardt and Negri page 273.
337
movements of labour migrants are never spontaneous – they are always contingent.
Hardt and Negri’s use of the word ‘circulation’ in the first quotation negates their
argument for ‘spontaneity’ in the second, as it entails cyclical, repetitive motion,
which does not permit transversal movement. They further problematize their
theory by stating that ‘the world market […] requires a smooth space of uncoded
and deterritorialized flows [of capital]’ (333). How is it even remotely possible that
these flows are ‘uncoded and deterritorialized’? They are always-already overcoded
and deterritorializing, and furthermore, the capitalist world is not a globalised,
‘smooth space’ due to the persistence of widespread material disequilibria. For
instance, as Bartolovich explains, ‘It will only be possible to ‘think globally’ as a
matter of course when the current global asymmetries, economic, political,
institutional, ideological, have been eliminated’ (14). Therefore, Hardt and Negri
also filiate within the Deleuze and Guattarian patriliny, since by subscribing to the
globalist paradigm they imbricate themselves within the same discursive regime that
they supposedly inveigh against.
In Death of a Discipline (2003) Gayatri Spivak posits an alternative modality
to globalisation in the form of ‘planetarity,’ a neoterism she invents in order to effect
a positive envisioning of world space. She states, ‘I propose the planet to overwrite
the globe. Globalization is the imposition of the same system of exchange
everywhere […and] referring to an undivided “natural” space rather than a
differentiated political space, can work in the interest of this globalization’ (72). In
an effort to avoid such discursive complicity, she points out the fact that ‘the globe
is on our computers. No one lives there. It allows us to think we can aim to control
it’ (ibid.). In contradistinction to the homogenizing image of the globe, she
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contends, ‘The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and
yet we inhabit it, on loan. It is not really amenable to a neat contrast with the globe’
(ibid.). Thus Spivak deduces, ‘If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather
than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains
underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation’ (73). Her emphasis here on the
need to reimagine oneself as a living ‘creature’ rather than a dehumanized ‘entity’ is
of the utmost importance, but she fails to uphold this point in the rest of her
argument and it is here that Spivak falters in her theorization. She stipulates that
‘planetarity cannot deny globalization,’ but rather it is a paradigm which takes into
account that ‘we are dealing with heterogeneity on a different scale and related to
imperialisms on a different model […] to this compact we must add the
financialization of the globe’ (93, 85). Nonetheless, she fails to acknowledge that
this ‘financialization of the globe’ also has a homologous effect upon the labour
forces who are enmatrixed within this totalitarian system. For example, as Kincaid
and Pineau’s texts evince, the financialization of the black labouring body
transforms it into an object of black migrant capital whose movements are driven by
the propulsive forces of neoliberal capitalism.
Despite this significant aporia within her postulation, Spivak’s concept of
planeterity provides a useful way of rethinking world space within a neoimperialist
context. As she states, ‘The “planet” is, here, as perhaps always, a catachresis for
inscribing collective responsibility as right. Its alterity, determining experience, is
mysterious and discontinuous – an experience of the impossible. It is such
collectivities that must be opened up […] when cultural origin is
detranscendentalized into fiction – the toughest task in the diaspora’ (102). She
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applies this model of planetarity to the context of literary studies, where problematic
postmodernist-multiculturalist discourses such as those of ‘World Literature’108 risk
the devaluation of heterogeneous cultural production. There must be, as Spivak
maintains, an ‘evocation of contingency’ due to material inequalities among
different cultural groups (89). Correspondingly, Bartolovich observes, ‘The
persistence of these asymmetries today […] makes it doubly important to situate all
cultural works and forms in their specificity, with reference to their conditions of
production and circulation at their point of origin as well as in wider circles’ (14).
In the case of Lucy and Devil’s Dance, an examination of these narratives must
‘situate them in their specificity’ as figurations of the female Afro-Caribbean labour
migrant and her experiences.
As Bonnie Thomas points out, ‘the Caribbean context’ is one in which ‘the
social dislocation caused by slavery continues to reverberate in the present’ (26).
Therefore an analysis of Afro-Caribbean labour migration requires adequate
attention to the historical materialities of the post-slavery context that
overdetermines this neocolonial experience. Via their depictions of the ghost of
postmemory and the spectre of capital, Kincaid and Pineau allegorise the fact that
for the contemporary black labour migrant the ‘past remains steadfastly alive in the
present’ (Bolaki 38). These apparitions are only flickeringly visible since, as
Benjamin asserts, ‘The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only
as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never
seen again’ (247). He continues, ‘For every image of the past that is not recognized
by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’ (ibid.).
108
See Moretti: 2000 and 2003.
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It is these auratic traces of traumatic history which must be examined more closely
within contemporary literary analysis. As Lucy and Mina’s narratives illustrate, in
the Caribbean context, these phantoms are still ‘waging war’ on the black labouring
population (Pineau: 2006: 140). Therefore Kincaid and Pineau’s texts narrativize
Benjamin’s assertion that history does not exist within a ‘homogenous, empty time,’
but one which is shot through with holes due to historical acts of violence (252).
These holes are still perceptible in the present, and whilst they exist as gaps, they are
also openings onto knowledge. As Benjamin explains, ‘the time of the now’ is ‘shot
through with chips of Messianic time’ (255). It is for this reason that he contends,
‘the struggling, oppressed class itself is [a] depository of historical knowledge’
(251). However, he also points out that it ‘appears as the last enslaved class,’ a fact
which Kincaid and Pineau reference in their portrayal of Lucy and Mina’s ‘servile
integration’ in what Benjamin would call ‘an uncontrollable apparatus’ – the
apparatus of capitalist neoimperialism (ibid., 250). It is for this reason that their
works must be, as Benjamin states, ‘historically understood’ in order to grasp fully
the nature of the present (254).
As Lucy and Devil’s Dance illustrate, we do not yet inhabit the postapocalyptic moment or deterritorialized terrain that Benjamin envisages in his essay.
Kincaid and Pineau’s tales speak to the fact that we are still in the maelstrom –
living amidst the storm of Progress. As Benjamin points out, ‘we have been
endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That
claim cannot be settled cheaply’ (246). The postmodernist viewpoint is one which
seeks to avoid the inevitable struggle that must endure before this claim can be
settled. The filiative discursive chain which stretches from Deleuze and Guattari
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and concatenates works by Glissant, Said, Braidotti, Davies, and Hardt and Negri
perpetuates the rehomogenizing drive that imperialist and now ‘globalist’ discourses
display in their totalisation. Literary critics who employ such discursive regimes
lack the perspicacity to detect the danger inherent in universalising and naturalizing
the experience of dislocation. Their discourses which espouse thinking ‘playfully’
across reading endeavours are inequivalent to the strategic use of play by creative
anticolonial theorists such as Kincaid and Pineau, who deploy these self-same
discourses in order to destabilize them. Academic tourism and poetics of travel are
forms of adventuring within uncritical literary theory that repathologize the migrant
subject. Texts such as Lucy and Devil’s Dance work to undercut these effects by
materializing the everyday struggles of the oppressed migrant labour class. They
simultaneously reassert the labouring body and repudiate notions such as
‘posthuman bodies,’ ‘nomad hordes,’ ‘nomadology’ and ‘mass worker nomadism,’
et cetera (see Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri). Moreover, Kincaid and
Pineau emphatically reassert the female Afro-Caribbean labouring body within their
narratives, thereby attending to the (gendered, racialized, historicized, classed)
specificities of psychosomatic experience. Their writings indicate that the
expressive and creative capacities of intellectual labour power can render art a
potent form of resistance. In other words, the reassertion of the labouring mind
leads to the reassertion of the labouring body. In Kincaid and Pineau’s texts, the
Angel of History becomes what Terry Eagleton would term ‘an eschatological sign
for the future’ (n.p.). This artistic praxis represents an effectual way of writing a
redemptive future into existence, since the formation of subjectivity is a constitutive
process. By blasting the black female migrant subject ‘out of the homogenous
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course of history’ or out of the rehomogenizing (dis)course of contemporaneity as it
is framed by complicitous neoliberal-postmodernist-capitalist-imperialist
perspectives, Kincaid and Pineau exemplify that the writing of anticolonial literature
is an active politics of self-realization (Benjamin: 1992: 254). Their narratives
instantiate the potential for writing oneself through and beyond the colonial past and
its psychosomatic and materialist impressions upon the late capitalist present, into
the protean realm of the future which beckons ever more stridently above the
tempestuous din of Progress.
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Conclusion
Re-orienting Dislocated Caribbean Ontopologies
By way of a conclusion, I wish to bring the work of Jamaica Kincaid and
Gisèle Pineau into extended dialogue with that of Guyanese author Wilson Harris,
whose groundbreaking creative theorizations are a practicum in reframing Caribbean
discourse through the optic of the cross-cultural imagination. His notion of the
‘psyche of place’ is similar to Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘ontopology,’ but Harris
applies this within a distinctly Caribbean context – terrain which is masked by the
illusion of ‘an apparent void of history’ but which is in fact subtended by striations
of subterranean histories (Harris: 1999: 93, 166). Correspondingly, this thesis traces
the convoluted veins of Caribbean history which lie within the cleavages that were
created when the New World erupted into being. ‘Reading across the archipelago’
is therefore a critical exercise which measures the deep structure of contemporary
Caribbean literature by charting the underlying links between island historical
experiences. As Harris insists, ‘The tasks of a critic are manifold and difficult,
especially when it becomes necessary to descend with the creative imagination into
half-excavated, half-reluctant living strata of place that lie under reinforcements of
habit or convention or fortress institution that may parade itself as a moral
imperative’ (ibid. 91). Rather than immure oneself within the ‘fortress institution’
of academia or participate in architectural spectacle by ‘parading’ along the
polished, glossy promenade that is the surface structure of Postcolonial Studies, this
thesis demonstrates that the critic must ‘descend with the creative imagination’ into
the gaps of History.
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In so doing, it becomes possible to test the depth and breadth of archipelagic
writing and uncover these ‘half-excavated, half-reluctant living strata of place.’
Harris maintains that ‘it is within the context of such ‘“non-existences” or
vanishing/reappearing places and cultures’ that ‘life blazes and speaks’ (ibid. 120).
A mining of the spaces which constitute these historical lacunae reveals that lived
Caribbean experience is, as Harris asserts, ‘a phenomenon of place and psyche’
(ibid. 118). His fellow Afro-Caribbean authors Kincaid and Pineau narratologically
examine the phenomenon of a dislocated ontopology, which registers a dislodged
sense of place within the human sensorium. They narrativize the disorientation that
ontopological displacement engenders whilst at the same time gesturing toward the
creative possibilities of ontopological re-orientation. This is facilitated by the
concurrently inward- and outward-looking activity of autofictional writing which
undergirds Kincaid and Pineau’s corpora of texts. For these authors, the
fictionalization of lived, personal experience serves as a means ‘to identify in a new
and scarred way with the live fossil of the self, to re-open imprints that have
hardened into a block device, block divisions, block poverty, block wealth, within
the body of a civilization’ (ibid. 216). Within their autofiction, Kincaid and Pineau
inspect the historical scars of forced migration, subjugation and enslavement which
mark Afro-Caribbean selfhood. These are ‘the dilemmas of history’ which continue
to ‘surround’ the Afro-Caribbean subject due to their entrenchment within
neocolonial society (ibid.156). Accordingly, Kincaid and Pineau consider the ways
in which these wounds are more deeply imprinted by their fossilization within the
monolith of contemporary neoimperialist-capitalist civilisation. Moreover, these
marks are profoundly impressed by the additional weight of gendered experience
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which bears down on the body and psyche of the female Afro-Caribbean subject.
Kincaid and Pineau work to disembed these ‘block devices’ which pressurize their
experiences, as well as those of their characters, by eschewing calcified viewpoints
of Caribbean place and ontology and continually re-orienting their ontopologies.
This strategy functions to undercut ‘the tautology of fact – embalmed fact’ which is
the prerogative of History (ibid. 179). For example, Kincaid pronounces, ‘I am very
much a writer, but the writing itself that I do, I try not to have any fixed view or any
fixed understanding of it’ (Kincaid and Buckner 461). Similarly, Pineau affirms, ‘I
am rather the kind of writer who lets herself be carried away; I enter, in a way, into
an unknown, unsuspected world, and I keep moving forward’ (Pineau and
Veldwachter 180-1). Kincaid and Pineau repeatedly adjust their authorial
trajectories in a process of perpetual ungrounding and re-orientation that mirrors the
shifting planes of subjective experience within Caribbean and metropolitan milieux.
Hope illuminates the dark recesses of marginalized Caribbean histories
within their fictional oeuvres, which demonstrate that a wilful ontopological reorientation produces new ways of visualizing the world. As Harris remarks, ‘The
true capacity of marginal and disadvantaged cultures resides in their genius to tilt the
field of civilization so that one may visualize boundaries of persuasion in new and
unsuspected lights to release a different apprehension of reality, the language of
reality, a different reading of texts of reality’ (ibid. 183). In other words, Kincaid
and Pineau re-orient their narratives by discursively tilting the Atlantic Rim, the
‘field of civilization’ that delineates Caribbean experience, and spatializing ‘a
different apprehension’ of reality. For the reader, who is most likely in the
privileged, lofty position of ‘critic,’ the result is rather dizzying – a bewildering
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sense of (readerly) ontopological displacement within narrative space. This
defamiliarization of the Caribbean ‘language of reality’ displaces the reader’s sense
of self since he or she is no longer at the centre of textual reality. Harris explains:
Marginality is not so much a geographical situation (even as the word
‘Europe’ implies more than a place or a fixture) but rather an angle of
creative and re-creative capacity […] It involves us in a curiously tilted field
in which spatial pre-possessions and our [readerly] pre-possessions are
dislodged; in which we pursue […] a perception of re-visionary distances
between viable centre and raised or flexible, moving circumference. (ibid.
220)
This reconceptualization of the archipelagic world promotes empathy on the part of
the reader, who identifies with the ontopologically displaced characters since, as
Harris contends, ‘marginality is a raised contour or frontier of habit in the
topography of the heart and mind’ (ibid. 220-221). The methodological angles from
which Kincaid and Pineau approach their writings enable the reading of Caribbean
experience along an extended gradient of human understanding. This steep
narratological incline causes the reader, author and characters to rush toward one
another in a movement of ethical confluence. As Paul Ricoeur states, ‘L'ipséité du
soi-même implique l'altérité à un degré si intime que l'une ne se laisse pas penser
sans l'autre, que l'une passe plutôt dans l'autre’ (‘The selfhood of oneself implies
alterity to such an intimate degree that one is not allowed to think without the other,
that one instead passes through the other’) [my translation] (1996: 14). Kincaid and
Pineau’s texts thereby underscore the importance of reading as an act of relation, a
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transfiguration of the world’s ambit which destabilizes the frontiers of ‘self’ and
‘other’ and allows for slippage between them.
The central task of this thesis has been to (re)locate the singular female AfroCaribbean subject within theoretical territory – an enterprise that Kincaid and Pineau
also undertake in their creative theorizations. This figure has hitherto remained the
fossilized object of historical knowledge, and the recovery of her subjectivity is
achievable through the exposure of ‘the submerged authority of dispossessed
peoples’ (ibid. 166). In the Foucauldian sense, this study has sought to elucidate the
‘archaeology’ of the female Afro-Caribbean subject as she is limned in Kincaid and
Pineau’s writings.109 Michel Foucault explicates this analytical strategy, stating, ‘It
is a question of searching for another kind of critical philosophy. Not a critical
philosophy that seeks to determine the conditions and limits of our possible
knowledge of the object, but a critical philosophy that seeks the conditions and the
indefinite possibilities of transforming the subject’ – as in, not only transforming the
literary subject, but also ‘transforming ourselves’ (1997: 179). Kincaid and Pineau
utilise the domain of the imaginary as an unbounded context which provides ground
for re-examining female Afro-Caribbean subjectivity, as well as the reader’s own,
through relational acts of reading. This praxis exists in opposition to empiricist acts
of reading which, as Foucault infers, circumscribe their object within fixed
epistemic categories. The empirical reader concatenates within discursive
imperialisms and reinscribes the figure of the Afro-Caribbean woman under the sign
of anthropos. Relational forms of reading, on the other hand, enact a double
movement of deconcatenation whereby the reading subject and the literary subject
109
See Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).
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(who is also a projection of the authorial subject in the case of autofiction) are
unshackled – a process which disrupts historical cycles of epistemic violence.
Harris argues that ‘a philosophy of history may well lie buried in the arts of
the imagination’ and he describes Caribbean art forms as ones ‘which reflect a long
duress of the imagination’ (1999: 156, 166). Here he plays on the concept of the
‘longue durée’ of history, which writers re-envision in order to narratologically work
through the coincident ‘long duress’ of the repressed Afro-Caribbean imagination.
In this way, Harris notes that traumatized Caribbean histories and subjectivities can
be ‘lifted into transfigurative dimensions’ (ibid. 217). Hence Kincaid and Pineau
depict the ways in which traumatic history inflects current modes of Caribbean
experience since it does not in fact remain in the past, but also structures the present
due to its transgenerational continuance. Their postmemorial creative production
operates as a countervailing response to forms of subjection in that they unlock the
creative, political potential of the Afro-Caribbean unconscious. This effect
transpires when ‘a sudden, catastrophic eruption, emanating from unpredictable
numinosity in the body politic, occurs. It is as if the phenomenon the [empirical]
mind is disposed to cheapen or flatten strikes back in an uncanny way’ (ibid. 214).
This uncanny form of retribution is actualized via the spectralization of
postmemorial Afro-Caribbean literature, which is haunted by the context of postslavery. As Pineau states, ‘I am quite attuned to the role of the obscure in the
process of creation. […] I try to go as far as possible over into the unknown. It
would be like going into something that appears in a fog’ (Pineau and Veldwachter
181). She and Kincaid obliquely reference the ways in which postmemory haunts
auratic places in their narratives by drawing attention to recolonising state structures
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within the Caribbean and the neoimperia. Thus they engage in critically
reimagining the state while also establishing themselves and their characters as
political subjects within that state. Pineau indicates that this repositioning of AfroCaribbean subjectivity is possible through the empowering authorial practice of
hauntology. She avers of Afro-Caribbean writers, ‘we function in the present but
this functioning is nourished by our past experiences’ (Pineau and Veldwachter
182). Nonetheless, Kincaid and Pineau’s narratives illustrate that ‘the planet on
which we live – however mapped or raped or circumscribed – remains […] a planet
at risk’ due to the incessant reincarnation of various imperialisms (Harris: 1999:
215). Consequently, these artists also ‘read across the archipelago,’ tracing its
lineaments and probing its auratic places in order to unearth the latent, impacted
spaces created by colonialism. They are impacted in the sense that they are severely
affected by the conditions of (neo)coloniality, and also in that they have been tightly
compressed by historical forces. In a piece about Kincaid’s work, Derek Walcott
writes, ‘Genius has many surprises and one of them is geography. While we settle
in the tradition of expecting art to be made only in certain places on the map – in
those fixed points of culture that make us as assured of our position as the geometry
of the stars – some cell, in the least predictable place, is accreting things to itself’
(cited in Vorda and Kincaid 49). Kincaid and Pineau indicate that these spaces must
be opened up and illumined in order to perceive buried truth about the female AfroCaribbean subject, who defies conscription within a fixed empirical category. As
Kincaid states, ‘The truth is multifaceted. A lie is one thing. One single thing’
(Kincaid and Buckner 469).
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Appendix
An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid
This interview was conducted at Kincaid’s home in North Bennington, Vermont on
30 July 2012.
JK: Simone Schwartz-Bart, Gisèle Pineau, [Maryse] Condé, when they write,
because of the connection France has with its colonies, which it doesn’t call
‘colonies,’ it’s ‘overseas France,’ it’s a part of France, it’s just far away from
France, it’s a complicated schizophrenia that France has with its colonies. It’s
France, and they’re French, but they’re a funny kind of French. Whereas with
Britain, we are never British, and the British people in the colonies are never part of
it. Their home is always England; not Britain, even, but England. We hardly knew
[anything else]…
So how that relates to writers is I think that the francophone writers, from the
French Empire, they feel they are a part of French literature, a part of French
tradition, even though it’s complicated. Whereas we, and I’m particularly thinking
of myself really, but my observation is this, that we of the English-speaking places,
especially outside Africa, we don’t really have a natural audience. You know, we
come from very small places, where we are sort of unusual in these places that we
come from. That we would write, that we would do anything really, we’re very
unusual. But in particular, you know, writers need an audience. They need people
to read them. We don’t have a natural constituency, I think, in the West Indies.
And I’m really aware of that every time someone says, ‘Who do you write for?’
And I say, ‘I don’t really write for anybody.’ Because they people I would write for
wouldn’t read me. You know, ten Antiguans?
DS: So do you feel that you mostly write for yourself?
JK: Not even for myself – I just write because I’m compelled to do it. I don’t
really have any other way of knowing the world, except in reading and writing. I
don’t really understand anything except when I do that, so I do it. But it’s true that I
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don’t have a constituency. When my publisher publishes my book, he’s not
guaranteed that there will be ten thousand people who will read it because they are
like me. I’m not a Jewish writer, I’m not a woman writer, I’m not an AfricanAmerican writer, you know; but I draw from all those people. Two or three of them,
in these groups of people, find me interesting, but I don’t have a natural constituency
of readers. I’m not part of any specific tradition, which is sort of sad. But I was just
comparing that to say how the francophone writers are very much in French writing.
DS: Are you frustrated by critics or interviewers who try to pigeonhole you into a
certain category, i.e. as a woman writer or as a diasporic writer?
JK: No, not at all. I wish it would stick! I wish it were true. I wish I felt a part of
women’s writing or a part of black writing, but I don’t, really. I write, and, you
know, it finds a kind of level somewhere. No, I don’t feel [frustrated]. I think, ‘go
ahead, put me in as many categories as you can find.’ It would mean the men
writers too. That would be really great. Men’s books sell. […] But no, no, I don’t
mind.
DS: So many of the texts that you write are intertwined with your personal
experiences, but do you find it strange or off-putting that sometimes interviewers
will ask you deeply personal questions about your life? Do you ever feel that
sometimes they’re crossing a line with some of the questions that they ask you?
JK: Not yet, no. I mean, I wonder what they could [ask]? If they were to ask me,
‘Are you still getting your period?’ the answer to that would be no. I’m out of
menopause, all you have to do really is look at my Wikipedia page; it says I was
born in 1949. I didn’t invent this [the Wikipedia page] by the way – I don’t know
who did. And that is true, and by now, I’m 63, so if you ask me ‘Are you still
having your period?’ I would say, ‘Well, I’m 63, what do you think?’ It would be
kind of a miracle. Ah, let me see, so what would be crossing the line? I don’t know
yet. No one has, so far, asked me something that I would consider crossing the line.
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DS: That’s good. It’s something I wondered about while I was reading some
previous interviews that you’ve done.
JK: [Arches eyebrow in a challenge] So, what’s your next question? [Laughs]
DS: [Laughs] No, no, I’m not going to try to cross any lines here. My next question
is, does it seem to you that some people can’t seem to tell the difference between
fiction and autobiography within your work? That they would simply take the
protagonist to be you, or the protagonist’s mother to be your own mother?
JK: And they would be right. I have never written about a mother I invent – yet.
You know, the question is, why do I get asked such a question? For instance, if you
read [Sidoni-Gabrielle] Colette – of course she’s dead, and maybe it’s also the time
she lived in – but no one ever asked her that question. Is it autobiographical, is it
fiction, or is it nonfiction? She crossed the line all the time. And some Modernist
writers, they cross the line, it’s only that it’s so fantastic…I mean they mix the line
up – fiction, nonfiction. And it’s only that they mix things up – they render reality
in what you’d call a warped way, so what is fiction, non-fiction?
I think I get asked that question because it’s so obviously autobiographical.
But I also get asked it I think because there is something partly to do with race and
gender, that there is really an unconscious desire to get a hold of it, to grasp it, and
to belittle it in many ways. That it can’t be that good or particularly good because
it’s ‘just her life.’ I think that asking me, and constantly saying it’s
autobiographical, is it fact or is it fiction, is a way of, I think, belittling the work. No
one asks men that. There are so many men who make their lives [this way], but no
one asked Henry Miller that. I think it does have to do in some ways with who I am
and what I look like. But I don’t care. Belittle away!
DS: When you are writing, do you even see those lines between fiction and
nonfiction?
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JK: No. No. There are some things when I’m writing nonfiction like the book
about my brother, or when I write about the garden or when I write about travel.
But particularly the book about my brother, which has so much of family incidents
in it which I have worked into my fiction, when I’m writing something like that, I’m
very, very careful to be true. In fact, I asked someone who knew our family very
well if there was anything untrue in the book about my brother, and she said, ‘Yes,
you got his birthday wrong.’ And I think he was born on the 6th and I said it was the
5th. But everything else in it was true.
But in the other things I’ve written which are clearly autobiographical, the
facts are manipulated and distorted and reworked. For instance, in Annie John, the
sickness that the girl describes is something that happened when I was about seven.
I had whooping cough. All the sensations I write during [Annie’s] metamorphosis,
took place when I was seven. But I remembered that, and I remembered that after I
had that illness, when I got better I was not the same person that I was [before]. And
I was something [like] about five or seven. I had a lot of these diseases, you know.
I had whooping cough, typhoid, measles – I had the measles or chicken pox. I had
ringworm, and I also had two sets of parasites: hookworms and longworms.
DS: Were you just prone to sickness as a child?
JK: I was. Well, whooping cough and so on, those are childhood diseases.
Typhoid, I don’t know if it was going around, or I got it from the vaccine. I was
vaccinated against it and I got it anyway. But the two great diseases I had that put
me to bed were whooping cough, from which I think I almost died – I remember
whooping and being bundled up and taken somewhere in the middle of the night –
and typhoid, where I spent two weeks in hospital and saw children around me dying
from it. The other big disease I had was hookworms which I think I almost died
from that, from malnutrition, because they didn’t know what it was, I just kept
getting thinner and thinner, and weaker and weaker. In any case, I sort of collapsed
those two illnesses into one, and made something out of them. They happened
before I was eight, but I put them in Annie John in the adolescent girl’s life and
made them into a period of metamorphosis for her. So that’s fact being manipulated
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into fiction. In fiction, or when I’m writing fiction, there is a lot of fact, but it’s
highly ‘renditioned,’ as they say. And I mean that in all its senses, including the
modern one of torture. It’s been tortured.
DS: When you’re reliving these moments, do you find that it’s torturous to write
about them?
JK: No, I love when I have these insights into the past when I see how…ooh it’s a
true pleasure, it’s like a drug to recognize that the past will fit into this thing I’m
doing, this line of emotion I’m on and I can find some illustration of it, some
specific scene that will illustrate it, that will heighten it, and send it further. No, it’s
not torture at all. Those are the moments when I think, ‘Oh, I’ve suffered simply for
this moment of writing this sentence!’
DS: Do you go into writing the piece with the intention that you’ll include these
scenes, or does it come to you as you’re writing and you think, ‘This works well
here, I should include this’?
JK: It’s more like the latter. And sometimes something occurs to me after I’ve put
the piece to bed and I think, ‘I should have thought that, that could’ve gone well
here.’
DS: I was wondering that about dreams, because you often include dreams in your
work. Do you ever include your own dreams in your books, or are the dreams that
you describe unique to the texts?
JK: I think they are unique to the texts. When I use dreams it’s because they really
do occur culturally among the people I’m writing about. Culturally, dreams are very
important in people’s lives where I’m from. People tend to live by their dreams very
much, and they tend to live by signs of things. Like, I was just going in and out of
the door, and there were all these moths clinging to the door in some way, and you
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know, I don’t know what they mean really, but if those moths were living where I
come from, they would have had a symbolic attribute.
For instance, we’ve been surrounded by green grasshoppers this summer,
which you’ll hardly ever see; usually it’s brown. I don’t know if it’s the weather or
their seven-year cycle or what but green grasshoppers are very positive – brown
ones, not so much. So when I see a brown grasshopper, I quickly turn away, even
though I’ve lived here for over forty years now, away from Antigua. When I see a
brown one, I turn away, when I see a green one, I carefully put it in a safe place
because green is a good thing. But I use dreams only because they’re natural to the
characters in the place I have them, but they’re not my dreams, it’s what I imagine
they would dream, and the dream is usually a complimentary aspect to their real
lives…I have to make their dreams believable and organic to their lives.
DS: My thesis has to do with the relationship between place and identity and the
ways in which one shapes the other. What do you think your work says about this
relationship?
JK: I have a kind of natural revulsion against the thing we call identity, and I don’t
like it. It’s now used to do so many wrongs, and I think it has a limitation for the
individual who adopts something called identity. But I see why it’s invented and
why it’s stressed more and more because there’s so much cruelty perpetrated against
certain groups of people. But that’s about power, that’s not about identity. And
who you are, you can’t really know.
DS: My work is more about identity from the context of cultural memory and
ontology and how place fits into that and shapes that.
JK: Well, I’m glad you put it that way though, because it gets us to think about
what is it that we’re talking about. So now you say culture, and again, it’s one of
these things…I was just reading an interview with Mitt Romney saying that the
reason that the Palestinians weren’t as prosperous [as the Americans] is because
their culture was not as good.
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DS: That’s frightening.
JK: If this man becomes president, it’ll be the end. [Sighs] So culture, what is it
that we mean? A people’s traditions? I think he [Romney] was quoting Guns,
Germs and Steel? That book has been so misused. Do you know that book?
DS: No, I don’t know it.
JK: It’s a bestselling book about why some people rise up to dominate others and
why some people are dominated and then become extinct. It’s such a reductionist
view of analysing people. It may very well be true, but it doesn’t make it any less
disgusting. It doesn’t mean that it was right.
But anyway, culture – so many things shaped me. When you talk about
culture, there is the culture of Africans who were enslaved, there is the culture of my
grandmother, who was a Carib Indian. My mother retained some things of her
[culture] though I’m not entirely sure of what they would be in terms of [the]
material, but she would often refer to her mother. Her mother was a big part of her.
Her mother had a mysterious quality – she would appear and disappear, and that
seemed to have to do with her Carib Indian-ness, not her Africanness. But I would
say that the two things that shaped me would be that and British, English culture.
The African cultural influence that I have from enslaved people comes from the
general society that I’m from, which had lots of African cultural influence, as you
can imagine. Culturally, the things that shaped me came from travel. They’re
recent things; they’re not things that were in Antigua from the time of the druids or
something. They’re transient things. So I’m very suspicious of the word ‘culture’
and it’s probably because I don’t come from a strong tradition of it. You know,
African-American culture, I can see it and I adopt it. My children are very much
influenced by it, and are part of it. They are African-American, mostly, and
certainly identify as such.
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DS: When you’re writing about a specific place like Dominica or Antigua, are you
thinking about their specific landscapes and specific cultures, or are you thinking
more about these transient things?
JK: Well, again, because I have become so suspicious of landscape and its
influence on people, and how human beings tend to draw a certain inspiration for
themselves and give themselves certain qualities from the landscape that they come
from. The big example in America of course is the West, and there’s this idea of the
Western person. And we draw that image from the landscape of the West. It’s
rugged; it seems impervious to ordinary forces. You have to be really strong to live
in it because it’s harsh, it’s unforgiving; you draw courage from it if you can live in
it. You’re brave because you have crossed the frontier and you have settled there.
Oh yeah, all kinds of crap, like Dick Cheney is from Wyoming, he’s a Western man,
of course he doesn’t have a heart. Oh now he does, he has somebody else’s heart –
he got a heart transplant, I think. Why a horrible man like that is alive is a mystery.
But landscape – take the New England landscape, which someone like
Robert Frost is identified with, that sort of Yankee independence, closed-mouthness, as an almost harsh, unforgiving person, a strong person but a mean-spirited
person because they draw from the short summer, the long winter, the endurance, all
that kind of thing. Landscape and identity – well in my case, what would that be? I
come from this tiny island and it’s surrounded by two bodies of water, having a
different effect on the surface of the earth. So what’s my identity if I’m going to
look at landscape? Beautiful beaches? People relaxing? So you see how
troublesome it is for me.
So here’s what someone like me would do, is draw on the landscape that I
find in literature, and the literature that I find is English. So it’s the English
landscape. My idea of landscape is found in Romantic literature, it’s the pastoral.
And then when I begin to look further at that, the landscape that I find in Romantic
literature is an invented landscape. It’s not the original landscape of England
anyway. It’s the landscape that has begun to be financed by the people I’m from.
So I’m a nowhere man, really.
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DS: If the pastoral is the landscape that you picture, and that’s not a landscape that
truly exists in the Caribbean either, is the pastoral an image that you are consciously
or subconsciously evoking when you’re writing? You say that the pastoral is the
only landscape that you know.
JK: Well you’ve read my books, I’ve only written them. I don’t reread them.
What is the landscape in my books? It’s internal.
DS: It’s a psychological landscape.
JK: I don’t have a landscape. I don’t come from anywhere.
DS: When you’re writing about the different islands that you’re depicting, you do
include some natural elements in talking about the mountains and the flowers and
things like that, but they’re more of a backdrop to the internal landscape that you’re
describing.
JK: Yes. Yes. I don’t have a landscape. I have written about landscape. I’m
starting to write about living in New England, and so I’ve been writing about the
landscape. But I find that it’s not a natural influence on me, so strangely I’ve
become interested in geology. I’ve been describing the New England landscape
from a geologic, earth science point of view. How old is this mountain? What
formed it? I walk around and I look at it. I was in the Catskills yesterday, and I was
driving around, and I was noticing the rocks, you could see how they were cut
through, how layered it was, how sedimentary.
So the landscape, when I look at it, I’ve begun to look at it, in some way, as
prehistory. I can’t make an identification with the landscape the way a New
Englander, a person born here would. Because I actually see the ridiculousness of
drawing something from it, to identify with it. I think it’s sort of humorous really, to
say ‘I’m a Western person – I’m from the West, I’m a Texan, I’m a New
Englander.’ I think it’s a kind of almost childish thing to do. So I can’t do it – now
that I see how childish it is, I can’t do it. So the landscape has become something
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more than something to enhance myself. I actually feel rather small in it. Well, you
know, it’s very transitory. I mean, it’s not eternal. It wasn’t always here.
DS: It didn’t always look like this.
JK: It didn’t always look like this. It’s illusory. So I’m sorry, but I just can’t make
myself identify with something that’s not going to be here forever. And by forever,
I really mean forever.
DS: Do you feel that male and female writers engage differently with landscape or
the environment that they’re depicting in their work?
JK: I think that’s probably true, yeah. I would have to say that I do think that
would be true. I don’t think that the idea of the Western personality is a female
invention or that the New England stoicism is a female invention. I am making a
guess that no woman would do that. On the other hand, I’m not sure.
DS: Ok. I want to move on to some questions about specific works. I am currently
working on a chapter about The Autobiography of My Mother –
JK: That has more landscape in it than anything else, I think.
DS: Yes, I think so. It’s more about the way that Xuela moves through the
landscape during her personal journey. In her experiences, she associates different
places with different moments in her life as she’s reflecting on it. I was curious
whether you saw her as an allegorical figure representing the coming together of
these three different peoples in the Caribbean, or in Dominica specifically, or if you
envision her as more of a fully developed character, and not so much as an
allegorical figure. There seems to be a debate among critics about whether she is
strictly an allegorical figure or if she’s a fully developed character.
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JK: [Laughs] It is true that I am influenced by mythology – Biblical, among other
kinds. But especially Biblical: the King James version, which is a different version
than the Hebrew version of the Bible. I am very much [influenced by that]. And I
am influenced by English poetry, epic poetry. So in some ways, all the characters
that I’ve written about: Annie John, even, you can read them very easily as
allegorical. They’re very intense, and the books are very short. [They’re intense] in
the way that a character in an epic story is very intense. An epic is about a long
journey – mine is about a long journey, but I write about a character in the journey.
In Annie John, the allegory of it is the colony and the mother country. She’s
a colony; her mother is England, essentially. Lucy is Lucifer; that is very true. And
so it’s easy to read Xuela as an allegory. I’d say they’re an attempt to do both. But
I’m primarily not interested in character the way most people are, you know, the
description of a person’s hair…In most writing, when you write about a person, you
write about their hair and so on, it really is their hair, it really is the clothes they’re
wearing. With me it’s both: it covers the body because you shouldn’t go out naked,
but the clothing is also specifically something. I wouldn’t separate them. They’re
allegorical, and they’re also meant to be real. Though I think if I had another kind
of luxury, if I had allowed myself…I don’t regret how I’ve written at all, but I can
imagine knowing what I know now, that I would’ve written only allegorically. I
might have written only poetry. I didn’t know it was possible. Now I think it’s not
possible because it’s too late. You need a younger mind to write poetry.
DS: Do you write poetry at all?
JK: No. Any impulse I have like that, I try to put it in prose. I try to make the
prose more like poetry. But no, I would never write poetry. I see too many poems,
why I’d do it…[Laughs] It’s easier to write good prose – for me. It would be very
hard to write poetry; it would be impossible.
DS: What you write is a poetic sort of prose – it’s very lyrical.
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JK: I like that. I like doing that. But I wouldn’t dream of putting it in poetry.
Poetry is really hard. People don’t understand that, so they go rushing off writing
poetry, but then most of it is very bad. [Laughs] Very bad.
But to go back to the allegory, I didn’t know that there was a debate about it.
[Laughs] I don’t read criticism, mostly because when I do read it, I think, ‘I actually
provided something for this brilliant person to write about?’ Some of these people
are really, really brilliant, and I think, ‘Wow, how did you know how to write this?’
I can’t believe I’ve provided someone with material to think [about] this way. Also,
you know, in some ways, it’s what I would’ve liked to do. I think I would’ve liked
to have been trained to read things in a complicated way, and I really wasn’t, so I
can’t believe I would’ve provided such a thing. In any case, I don’t read it, so I
wouldn’t know that people have thought about it.
DS: Well, you have no real need to read it; it doesn’t affect what you do.
JK: No, that’s true.
DS: But are you consciously developing these characters allegorically as you’re
writing them? Or is it something that you recognize further on?
JK: Further on. I don’t start out writing allegorically, it’s concrete. It’s just the
way my mind works, and my children will tell you that – they accuse me of
exaggeration. And it’s not exaggeration, it’s really the way I see things. So when I
name the character Lucy, for instance, that’s a good example – it’s only much later
in it that I recognize that I’ve been describing Paradise and that she was thrown out
of it, and that her name is Lucy and it is connected to Lucifer. She’s living in a kind
of Hell, but feels happy in it, and would rather that than the ‘paradise’ of servitude
and obedience in her mother’s circle.
But it says something to me that – I don’t want to call myself an artist – but it
seems to me that people do who work in a certain way, the mind, their imagination,
knows things that they don’t know. If you are lucky or if you are brilliant or
whatever you want to call it, you walk into it. You find the path – I mean, not to be
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too mystical. The unconscious has a wholeness to it that the consciousness can
never have. The unconscious is a true, perfect world, and consciousness is
fractured. However, you can’t eat in the unconscious. The body actually needs the
fracture to exist.
I don’t consciously say, ‘I’m going to do this.’ But that’s what I end up
doing, I end up doing the thing that leads to the question of, ‘Is she allegorical or is
she a real character?’ She’s both. You know in some ways I suspect I didn’t have
the courage, really, to go a certain way, to only write allegorically. But it’s never far
from my mind. I turn everything into – not a metaphor, metaphor is a weaker form
of allegory – I really want the allegory. For me, the greatest pleasure, the greatest
form of poetry, is the epic poem.
DS: Do you feel that your novels are a way of telling part of that epic story? It’s
not a way of condensing them; it’s a way of telling part of the epic story – in
episodes.
JK: Yes, I can only tell one part.
DS: Within A Small Place you state that when you think of England, what you see
are ‘the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no
fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which
might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most
painful of all, no tongue’ (31). Were you thinking of these people who were made
orphans by colonialism when you were developing The Autobiography of My
Mother? Were you sort of translating what you said in A Small Place and putting it
into a fictional context?
JK: Yeah, I think that’s the most explicitly political novel. I was trying to say a lot
of things in that book. A Small Place was written for my editor, Mr. Shawn. I was
trying to explain to him where I came from. It wasn’t meant to be a book, it was
meant to be a little essay. Then the editor who replaced him [Shawn] refused to
publish it because he said it would make the advertisers unhappy. And so Roger
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Straus published it as a little book. But it wasn’t meant to be a book. I had just
begun to really think in that way, consciously. You know, in Annie John, which is,
as I say, very allegorical, she expresses political thinking, you know, in the chapter
‘Columbus in Chains’ and a little bit in ‘Somewhere, Belgium’ where she’s laughed
at by these boys and she imagines herself as Charlotte Brontë. But that was just the
beginning. Then in A Small Place, I wanted to tell Mr. Shawn what my life was
like. All the writers, we all thought he liked each one of us best. And it was clear
that that wasn’t true, but that’s how we felt. So I wanted to tell him what I was like,
and that’s who that was written for. But that was the beginning of me thinking
about things – history, etc., and making more deliberate, conscious choices. Then I
wrote ‘On Seeing England for the First Time’ afterwards and so on.
But yeah, Autobiography is the most explicit [example of] political thinking
and feeling about the individual in the world, plucking out one person, and how
these great events modify one person’s consciousness, and modify their progress in
the world, and inhibit their progress in the world. And by progress I mean their
development as a human being, the way they would understand the world in all its
complications. Not that they would be rich and prosperous and powerful and ugly
and do vicious things. But just sort of, you know, an understanding of their full
humanity, and maybe no one ever understands, maybe full humanity is not possible,
but more than a lot of us were never allowed. But the idea of not being able to
participate in the world in all its given-ness. For instance, not being allowed to read,
or only being allowed to read certain things, not being allowed to freely interpret
things, you know, a text, for instance. Not being able to love Wordsworth, for
instance, because he’s Wordsworth, but forced to memorize parts of Wordsworth
that are actually detrimental to your understanding of yourself. And by that I mean,
a widespread example of a British colonial education is to memorize ‘I Wandered
Lonely as a Cloud.’ Most of us would never see a daffodil, but we’d commit to
memory the awe, the wonder of the appearance of a daffodil, a flower we would
never see, and that must be distorting in some way. That is a kind of violence that is
in every way worse than a beating. You know, a beating, you can make something
out of that. But to be forced to commit to memory something you will have no idea
of, that’s bound to do harm to you in a way that a beating can’t.
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DS: That’s something Spivak calls ‘epistemic violence,’ this type of violence that
affects your knowledge base, your understanding of what is knowledge. So the idea
of trying to force this love and awe of the daffodil is just a small part of forcing you
to love and be in awe of England. It’s just a way of kind of condensing it within
your consciousness.
JK: Hmm. Hmm. Yes. Yes. And so your consciousness, by which we mean,
really, your unconscious, because that’s where that stuff resides. It’s not in your
consciousness; it’s in your unconscious. For instance, if you commit to memory a
love of the daffodil and all it comes with, it makes everything that is in your real life
tawdry and worthless and wanting. You feel cursed, you feel as if you have been
condemned to live with the lesser things.
Take the beach for instance; I remember that most of us Antiguans never wanted to
live by the beach because it was ‘common.’ We wanted to live inland. It was only
people coming from far away who lived on the beach. You talk about landscape - we
didn’t feel that the beach was valuable. We went to it once a year, and we lived
within shouting distance of it. It would be a big deal to go to the beach, and then
you’d go home. That’s what I mean; we have the beach, not daffodils. Well, the
beaches are nice, but you can never have daffodils.
What about ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’? It’s a hymn; it’s a closing hymn on
Sundays. [Sings] ‘When I see the white cliffs of Dover…’ None of us will ever see
it! And we long for something we’ve never seen in the first place! And they are
equivalent of the pearly gates of heaven! You know, that’s not good, that penetrates
your unconscious. So this place that is really the source of evil becomes,
allegorically, heaven for us.
DS: So you long for an image of something because that’s the only way you’ll have
ever seen these things – in an image of a daffodil, or an image of the white cliffs of
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Dover. You long for something that is not even real to begin with. It’s just an
image.
JK: Yes. Yes. You know, it’s fucked up. It’s no accident that the person who
came up with the idea of the double consciousness of the Negro comes from that
part of the world [the Caribbean]. You know, Frantz Fanon. Fanon is a great writer.
DS: Speaking of Fanon, do you think that Xuela’s experience is an example of that
kind of internalized colonialism in the way that she views herself and the way that
she views the various groups of people on the island? Do you think that all of your
characters are experiencing that to some degree?
JK: Yes. How could they not? That is their reality, yeah; a double consciousness,
or really it’s a double unconscious. They actually live in three worlds, not two.
There’s the world, and that too has two faces: it has the colonial rule, and it has the
rule of people between each other. And then of course, there’s the unconscious,
where you have the colonial manipulation of what is subtly important in your moral
arrangement of the world, and then you have the unconscious or what you call
cultural influences which are actually organic to the people you live with, not the
people [from] far away. So you’ll have Wordsworth and Milton and so on, and then
you’ll have calypso and jump-up and so on, which are influences, both external and
internal. There are a number of worlds you live in when you are ruled, you know.
The ruler lives in two worlds, the conscious and the unconscious, but the ruled have
all sorts of lives. It’s amazing that there are not more mental cases. [Laughs]
DS: [Laughs] You’ll have to ask Pineau about that.
JK: [Laughs] Well, you know, here’s something to consider, and I don’t think
anyone has done it yet. French women are crazy, they write about mental illness.
It’s almost never true in Anglophone writers. I can’t name one Anglophone writer
in the Caribbean who dabbles in mental illness, can you?
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DS: It’s only ever the madwoman in the attic who is tucked away and never talked
about.
JK: You’re thinking of Rhys, but Rhys is influenced by the French. She’s from
Dominica, and Dominica is very French.
DS: For Pineau, I know I’ve read that she says she can’t do only writing, or only be
a psychiatric nurse. She has to do both because one is really informing the other,
and some of the things that she sees she has to get out of her in some way.
JK: Have you read [Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s] Juletane? This book will tell you
much about what Pineau is writing about. It’s the French writers who write about
madness. And believe me, Rhys is very influenced by French culture – she grew up
in Dominica, and if you look at the history of Antoinette, she’s French.
DS: Do you speak French?
JK: No. No, I used to speak patois because my mother is from Dominica, but I’ve
forgotten it. I can sort of speak it – no, no I’ll say no because I once tried to speak
French in France years ago and they laughed at me, so I decided I would never
speak it again. […] But that’s something to think about, that the French women
almost always dabble in madness.
DS: Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s something that anglophone writers
don’t want to talk about?
JK: I think that madness is considered shameful in anglophone culture. In fact, I
once read a piece by Bruno Bettelheim that said how unfortunate it was that Freud
was translated into English by James Strachey because English culture was not
hospitable to the unconscious, even though a lot of great psychiatrists were English
like Endicott. We consider it shameful, whereas they make it seem like a form of
true expression, like passion. To be crazy is to be passionate. But the other thing
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about the francophone writers is that you will notice that the men are from
Martinique and the women are from Guadeloupe. And I don’t know why that is. I
asked them, but they pretended they hadn’t noticed that was true. But they’re all
interested in madness.
Well the idea that you wouldn’t have control, and that you would celebrate
that…you know there was a tradition of women quarrelling in the street in Antigua
and they were operatic. One would be at one end, and one would be at the other,
and they would just shout these obscenities and degrading remarks to each other,
and people would hang out of their windows to listen to them. It was very theatrical.
And if you were caught doing it by the police you would be given a summons – you
could be jailed for it. So it was really discouraged. It was considered mad and a
lack of control, disturbing the peace. Whereas in francophone culture, you would
get dressed up for it. As I remember it, when it happened, it would be mostly
women from Guadeloupe or Dominica who did it and they would wear, like my
mother, these outlandish headpieces, and they would just kind of get out there and
do it. They were either from there or they were Catholic. But no one who was an
Anglican or a Methodist did it, as I remember it.
DS: Because of its different historical influences, do you think people from
Dominica identify more with the French or the British tradition?
JK: The French. Though it’s funny, the two Prime Ministers they had, Phyllis
Allfrey – well she’s dead. She was not Prime Minister, but she was a representative.
Do you know her work? She’s the other writer from Dominica, other than Rhys.
She stayed in Dominica, Phyllis Allfrey. She wrote some books – they’re not very
good, they’re kind of English. [Laughs] Whereas Rhys is French; she really is in a
French tradition. But yeah, the madwoman [of Wide Sargasso Sea] – Antoinette is
French. The mother marries an Englishman, Mr. Mason, but Antoinette’s mother is
French. Mason is English, but her mother is French, and it’s the mother she inherits
her madness from, and the darkness from.
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DS: That’s a whole other story, isn’t it? Inheriting the madness from the mother
and not the father?
JK: Yeah. But she’s French. And Rhys goes to France first, you know. That’s
where she lived and met Ford Madox Ford.
DS: Yes…You know, they’re associating madness with the feminine.
JK: Yeah. The men don’t go mad. I don’t know the men of francophone literature
very well except for Texaco.
DS: Chamoiseau.
JK: Yeah. But Fanon was interested in madness, and then they become
psychiatrists. I don’t know one anglophone writer who’s a psychiatrist.
DS: Yeah. That’s something I’d like to find out.
JK: Yeah. It’s almost as if they’re dabbling in scientific voodoo psychiatry.
Because it’s interested in the unconscious, and voodoo is a lot about the
unconscious. Voodoo is about making your unconscious do something consciously.
So it makes a man want to marry you – a man who has no interest in you at all, but
you are in love with him and you do all sorts of things to draw his unconscious into
thinking that you are what he wants and he does it. Again, maybe that’s just me
mythologizing everything.
DS: Do you think obeah has to do with the unconscious as well?
JK: It does have to do with the unconscious. Yeah, that’s what it is. It makes
something that’s not real, real.
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DS: Is that something that you have carried over with you from Antigua? Do you
still believe in elements of obeah at all? Like how we were talking about the idea of
there being a different angle of looking at things, the way you did with the moths on
your door?
JK: You know it’s an interesting thing. I hadn’t thought about it until you said it,
but I’m sure now that it must be an influence on me. Speaking of culture, that
would be what I suppose I mean about African culture being an influence on me.
And that sort of thing comes from Africa. Yeah, I think it is an influence on my
writing or on my thinking.
DS: Even now. And you said that your mother had been interested in obeah.
JK: Not interested – she practised. She saw an obeah woman every Friday
afternoon, and she did it behind my father’s back because he really hated it very
much.
DS: Did your mother’s practising of obeah come from her mother?
JK: Well, yes, her mother had, as I told you, this mysterious way of appearing and
disappearing, and she comes from Dominica where it was practised very much. It’s
practised in the French islands, and the French islands tend to be Catholic. And
Catholicism lends itself to these mystical, not Protestant, beliefs. So she had an
obeahwoman who came from Dominica, but that woman would go to Guadeloupe
all the time. Guadeloupe supposedly had better obeah than Dominica because it was
French. But the best obeah was from Haiti, where they had real voodoo religion.
They’re not Santería, they’re voodoo. There’s a difference, and I don’t know really
the difference. Voodoo is an official religion in Haiti. I was just in Cuba and I was
surprised at the large number of people who practice Santería, white and black. A
lot of white people believe in it.
But yeah, she practised [obeah] all the time. I couldn’t go out of the house;
none of us could leave the house in the mornings, before she had examined
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everything and we had to collect our own urine and sprinkle it around the house. I
don’t know why. And there were all sorts of things dabbed on us, oh God. And
every Friday afternoon she would go to the obeahwoman and do things. Actually
twice it happened, I had a brother – he’s still alive – and he was supposedly
possessed by an evil spirit set on him by one of my father’s lovers. Yeah, women
were always trying to get men to be only with them, and they would do things. The
Mighty Sparrow actually has a great song about it. It was called ‘To Tie a Man Up’
but it was said in a broken kind of English.
DS: I wanted to ask you about some remarks by different critics about The
Autobiography of My Mother. One critic states, ‘The objection can easily be made
that Kincaid is unfair to Antigua, Dominica, and the Caribbean because of her exilic
status. Her distorted picture of her homeland(s) then results in the blighted
landscape and characters of The Autobiography of My Mother’ [Sheehan 86]. How
would you respond to these claims about your book?
JK: [Laughs] Oh I think I have read that – is it by two men?
DS: No it’s by Thomas W. Sheehan.
JK: Oh it’s two men who wrote disparagingly about my book about my brother and
[they] say something similar, and I just laugh. I think I have read that quote, and I
just find it amusing. That’s such nonsense.
DS: It’s quite an outlandish assertion to make.
JK: It really is, because what was blighted about the landscape?
DS: I think maybe he is talking about the cultural landscape, because there is
thought to be a lack of hope.
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JK: What could that possibly mean? That’s just so amazing to me when people say
I’m angry or I have heard that about the lack of hope.
DS: Or unfairness.
JK: It’s so weird. It’s just not something that would ever be said about a man.
That’s simply not true. But it also doesn’t matter. Not that it should all be positive
and just glowing and all, but that’s silly. First of all, I’m not in exile. I go home all
the time, and love these places. But in any case, I don’t say it’s me. It’s not, ‘Now,
this is my story.’
DS: This is what I mean about confusing the protagonist’s voice with the author’s
own thoughts. I mean, obviously it’s your voice to a degree because you’re the one
writing it, but these are the character’s opinions and outlook, not your own.
JK: It’s interesting because in contrast to that – the way I’ve portrayed the
landscape in Autobiography – is a book called My Love, My Love by, I think it’s
Rosa Guy, and it’s a retelling of The Little Mermaid, and it takes place in, I think it’s
Haiti, and she describes it lovingly, you know, the beauty of this island and so on.
And it’s just sort of a terrible book. [Laughs] And that just sounds like what they
call ‘political correctness,’ that I didn’t describe it [the landscape] in some
politically acceptable way.
DS: And you can write about it in whichever way you want to. On a related note,
another critic accuses Xuela of ‘emotional vacuity,’ describing The Autobiography
of My Mother as a novel in which ‘Kincaid explores what would have been her
mother’s life had [her mother] remained in Dominica and refused to have children –
borrowing from her mother’s life to build a narrative of emotional vacuity’
(Paravisini-Gebert 38). Do you agree with this assertion about what you were trying
to do with this novel or with this character? Do you feel that Xuela is emotionally
vacuous?
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JK: Hmm! Well, ‘vacuity,’ that’s not quite the word that she should’ve used,
because what Xuela does is deliberate. She chooses not to be sentimental, not to
surrender to the thing we call love or to certain kinds of sentiment. She does choose
not to do that. But ‘vacuity’ would imply that she’s stupid – and it’s a choice that
she makes. It’s not a surrender; it’s a choice. Surrender implies that something has
been victorious, and so you surrender to it. But I think she feels quite victorious in
her ability to make choices about her life.
But again, I’m happy to hear that someone has thought enough about it to
come to that conclusion. I mean, the truth is, people really do like to read stories of
hope. People on the whole would prefer if Xuela had overcome something and
perhaps gone off to the Crimean War like Mrs [Mary Jane] Seacole or something,
done something wonderful like given birth to the island’s doctor or something. No,
she doesn’t. She thinks it’s a triumph, however wrongly.
DS: It’s not as though she lacks emotion. She loves Roland, but she chooses to be
with Philip.
JK: Yes. Yes.
DS: It seems like other than her dead mother, Roland is the only other person she
loves.
JK: Yes.
DS: Because it’s not clear whether she really loves herself.
JK: I don’t think she loves herself. But I am almost sure that I don’t believe in selflove. I don’t know what that would mean. That seems kind of gross and limited to
love yourself. It’s necessary not to participate in your own degradation. But to love
yourself, that seems so fruitless. I don’t think she loves herself. She’s not interested
in participating in her own degradation, and that, for her, is the triumph. In the
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world in which she lives, that’s a big thing, to be able to resist participating in your
own degradation, to have some control.
DS: Why does she choose not to be with Roland? Does she somehow view being
with him as a form of degradation? The power relations between her and Philip are
interesting. Does she choose to be with Philip because she can be in a more
powerful position with him than she could have been in with Roland?
JK: Well, I think it would have been hard for her to see Roland’s degradation. His
degrading social position would have been hard for her to participate with him in it,
and to not have been able to free him. Ways of being free in a place like that are
very limited [for someone] in her position. To have self-control in a place like that,
you give up control over other things. You know, you can’t love the way you would
love, or to have children is to constantly see your children’s lives limited, over and
over again. I think she’s one of those people who would rather be dead than red.
She doesn’t see a way of bearing fruit and being free. For her, it’s too tied up with
degradation and subjugation. It’s her voice that’s important to her. It’s interesting
that people don’t really see what’s important to her. If you want to talk about selflove, it’s a kind of selfishness really, but what’s important to her is to be able to
speak, to just say, ‘I am.’ And she doesn’t see a possibility of loving herself and
holding herself as a free person, being able to speak period, just to speak – not just
for herself or on behalf of anybody, but just to speak.
DS: Do you think that in telling her story, that she is telling the story of her mother
and her foremothers? Given that the title of the novel is The Autobiography of My
Mother, is she deliberately trying to speak for these other women in telling her
story?
JK: Not consciously, but I think there are many people like that, who would’ve
been able to see themselves in that, but I don’t think it would have been possible [for
her]. I mean, the spirit of it, the voice of it, is very much my mother’s. And some of
the incidents, the father’s leaving...my mother feeling orphaned by her own mother
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very much influences the book. Yeah, The Autobiography of My Mother – it seems
so clear to me, but then when somebody asks me about it...
DS: I’m not saying that you can even tell me what the title means explicitly. But it
seemed to me when I read the novel that it is more of Xuela’s autobiography, but in
finding her voice and being able to tell her story, she is also speaking for her
foremothers.
JK: Yes. She is the child of herself. So it’s her child speaking of her, but it’s her
also.
DS: She is her own creation.
JK: Yes, she’s self-realized.
DS: There seems to be this shift when she has her first abortion, when she returns to
the land of her mother’s people, she seems to come out of that experience as a
different person. The act of the abortion is a kind of rebirth for her.
JK: Yeah. Yeah. My mother and her friends had abortions all the time. They
didn’t have birth control, so they knew how to do it. It was all digested; it was all
things that would make their wombs just...shed. I remember telling this to a woman
who was an early feminist, and she said, ‘Oh, that’s not possible.’ And it made me,
for a moment, doubt that this had happened. And of course, it is possible –it’s like
the morning-after pill. But they did it with botanicals; they would gather these
bushes, and one of them was a bush that you also used to sweep the yard. And I’ve
written about it, that it was as if their wombs were just swept clean. There were all
these cliques of women; they would get together at one of their houses. They would
just arrive and they would hunker down. One of the things that’s a mystery to me is,
what were my days like? Because I just remember my days being all of these
things, but surely it was all in the same day. How would it work? They would just
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arrive and they would start to talk in these little whispers, and I wasn’t allowed to be
around them.
DS: So this is something that you can remember happening during your youth?
JK: Oh, it happened all through my life. I remember her trying to abort my
youngest brother, and doing the same things, but it didn’t work. But I remember one
before that that worked. She would bleed heavily, and then it would stop. And then
I started my period, and I remember her telling me what to do. In those days, before
there were tampons and sanitary napkins, in my culture I was given twelve squares
of cloth, and you wore a little elastic band, and you had two pins, and you would just
wear it, and it would absorb the blood. And I had a little pail, and when they got
dirty I would put them in it, and then wash them. This was before artificial bleach,
and the way they got white again is you would soak them up and put them in the
sun, and they would become white again. Then I would fold them up. And how
long did that take? Anyway, we had no running water; I had to go to the pipe to get
the water. I would think in America by that time they would have had sanitary
napkins...I remember my first sanitary napkin I had was when I came to America, so
that was 1966.
DS: So they weren’t readily available in Antigua?
JK: I had never heard of them, really. When I came here, I don’t even remember
how the transition would have worked. I don’t think I left home with cloths....Until
I was twenty-one I had erratic periods. I was very thin, probably I was anorexic and
didn’t know it. When I was 5’ 9” I was 107 pounds, when I was sixteen. And then I
grew two and a half inches. I weighed 117 pounds when I was 5’ 11” and a half.
DS: You just didn’t eat much?
JK: I didn’t like eating. Well, I’ve made up for it since.
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DS: You do talk about food in your novels – especially in Annie John, there are a
lot of these vivid descriptions of meals. Do you maintain any Antiguan culinary
traditions at home or make any dishes that you had when you were growing up?
JK: No. No. I don’t know how to cook like that. I cook mainly from an Italian
cook named Marcella Hazan, and Julia Child. But that’s from when I was a nanny;
the family I worked for, she [the mother] liked to cook French food, and so I learned
to cook that. I’ve been cooking from Julia Child since 1968, and the first cookbook
I bought was The Art of French Cooking in 1971 or ‘72. I still have it. But no, I
don’t know how to cook Antiguan food. When I go home, it’s all I want to eat. I
never liked eating when I was a child. I used to have my mother chew up my food
for me, and she would. That’s the strangest part, that she actually would chew my
food and give it to me.
DS: That’s becoming a new ‘thing,’ for the parents to pre-masticate the food, and
then feed it to the children from their mouths like a bird.
JK: Is that true?
DS: Yes.
JK: I wonder what it means.
DS: I think it’s part of what they call ‘attachment parenting.’
JK: Don’t worry; they’re not going to leave. My daughter is upstairs. My son will
come home. And it’s wonderful…for us parents that you all are so available. It
keeps us young…I love cooking for them.
DS: So your mother never taught you to cook?
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JK: Not really, no. She was a cook and I suppose she loved cooking, so I never
learned to cook. I can’t remember cooking. I did the dishes and I did the cleaning
and the ironing. Ironing I did a lot, she taught me to iron and I still do it. But I
don’t know how to cook Antiguan food. I make polenta, not the thing we call
fungie, which is polenta really. It’s funny because my brother knows how to cook
Antiguan food really well. My brother who visits, sometimes he comes up here and
he cooks. But yeah, I don’t know how to do it. The children remember her [my
mother] just making…she could take a can of corned beef and just make it into
something so delicious. Just so delicious.
DS: It would probably be difficult to find some of the ingredients needed for
making some of these Antiguan dishes.
JK: Yeah but you could adapt. It’s funny because Harold, my son, just said to me,
‘Could you cook some curried goat?’ And I’m pretty sure I could do that because
that’s just a stew. I could do that. So fungie, that’s just polenta and pepper pot, it’s
got okra in it. I probably could do it, could adapt it. But I just don’t. You know, I’d
make ratatouille.
DS: That’s something to look forward to then when you go home, to have the
dishes that you remember.
JK: Yes. Yes. But, you know, the thing is, when I go home, the places I like to
eat, people don’t like to eat that way anymore. They like Kentucky Fried Chicken.
DS: Oh I know; it’s everywhere. I can’t believe it. I just went to Beijing a few
weeks ago, and KFC was everywhere.
JK: I was there in 1999, and they were there, and I think McDonald’s was there
already, and people loved it, just loved it. And Chinese food in China is so good.
[Sighs]
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DS: I know; it’s amazing…But back to Autobiography, why did you choose to
dedicate this particular novel to Derek Walcott?
JK: Oh, well, we’re friends. It wasn’t a specific dedication, but you know, I always
want to thank people who have been kind to me, and he was very kind when I first
started writing. I was so appreciative, and he wrote a wonderful quote [about me].
It was just a way of thanking him, and I thought, ‘Oh, I’d better do it now, because I
don’t know if I’ll ever write another book.’
DS: It was something I wondered about, because I don’t think anybody has ever
asked you about that dedication.
JK: Yeah! I don’t think anybody noticed. I dedicated my travel book to my editor,
again, that was just because I wanted to thank him. It’s the only book he never
published because it was commissioned by National Geographic. That was my plant
book.
DS: Another question about Autobiography – Xuela says, ‘for me, the future must
remain capable of casting a light on the past such that in my defeat lies the seed of
my great victory, in my defeat lies the beginning of my great revenge’ – what does
Xuela envision as her ‘great victory’ or ‘revenge’ in the novel (215-216)?
JK: I suppose having the final word. I think she feels she has to outlive everybody,
so that how it looked is what she says. You know how they say that history belongs
to the victor? I think that’s what she’s talking about. I think so.
DS: You described her as ‘godlike’ in an interview. Is that what you mean here?
JK: That’s my mother. I always thought my mother was one of those people who
could give birth to her children in the morning and eat them at night every day.
That’s Xuela. Just to have the final say over everything. Just so that how she says it
is, is how it remains.
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DS: So having the final say is her greatest revenge. Is it because people have
attempted to stifle her?
JK: Yes, and because historically, or traditionally, people speak about her and
[about] people like her. They determine how they appear to us. And I think for her
to be able to say not only how she appears, but most importantly, how she was.
How she was and how she is, and to reach beyond the grave to determine the truth
about her.
DS: Yeah, because as I read it she’s dying as she’s telling her story, and she has to
get it all out before she dies. Although she does tell the story of her own death.
JK: You know it’s funny; if you were to read a document like that, you could
imagine that it were really someone’s journal. It has a truth to it, I think – as it
should, because it really is rooted in someone’s life – in my mother’s life, and
people like her. What she means is that she does have the ability always…I mean,
her greatest fear is to be defined by others, to be shaped by others, and others do
want to shape her.
One of the great acts of domination we have is to name something, to speak
of something, so clarify something. The thing can’t clarify itself. It’s one thing to
do it with plants or land or something, but when you do it to people, once again you
distort their existence, you distort their consciousness. For her, I think, a victory
would be for that to never let that happen again because her whole presence in that
world is possible because others made it possible. Her own name and all her
experiences are determined by others. You know, self-possession...What seems
‘barren’ and ‘vacuous’ to a critic is, to her, a triumph. The ability simply to, as I
say, from beyond the grave, say this is who I am, I was, will be. It’s vain. If you
want to say anything about her, she’s not only vain, it is in vain. Her efforts are very
masculine in a way, because she wants to conquer herself. She wants to be her own
dominator.
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DS: I don’t know if I read her as masculine though, I read her as more
androgynous.
JK: I only mean that she’s masculine in that her aspirations are to do what men
have done, not what they do, but what they have done, which is to conquer. And her
aspiration is to conquer, but only herself. She doesn’t learn from these acts how to
do it to others; she learns how to do it to herself.
DS: Moving onto Annie John – in your fiction, you often emphasise the importance
of natural cycles to life in the Caribbean and juxtapose them with more ‘Western’
ways of understanding the world. This particularly seems to be the case with regard
to temporality, such as going by the changing of the seasons, the cycles of the moon,
or the arc of the sun in the sky, versus going by the clock and the wristwatch. For
instance, in Annie John, you juxtapose the shifting of the local wet and dry seasons
with the insistent tolling of the Anglican Church bell. In the novel, the Anglican
Church bell structures the day for Annie’s family, and could be viewed as symbolic
of an imposed Western sense of order. While I was reading Annie John, it struck me
that your use of time as a structuring element in the narrative is somewhat
reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Would you say that similar to the
way in which Big Ben symbolizes England in Woolf’s novel, perhaps the tolling of
the Anglican church bell is a symbolic reminder of England’s enduring presence in
Antigua?
JK: Huh! I must have been thinking that, though not that I can consciously
remember. It is true that the day as Annie lives it is very structured, and structured
around a European idea of time, that it’s divided. Time is about efficiency – the way
it’s an essential ingredient in capitalism, time and how to use it efficiently, that it
equals financial gain or loss. And even though we were not involved in our daily
life in it, it was a European idea that was imposed on us, how to use our time
efficiently, having nothing at all to do with labour or any loss or gain.
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It was just another one of those things, ‘Oh, by the way, here’s time, and this
is how a day works: breakfast, lunch, dinner, school…’ It was very much drilled
into us to be punctual, and we had no idea what was the reason for it. In a place like
that it’s not really of any use…The bank opens at 8:00, it closes at 3:00, arbitrarily.
We had no idea why it wasn’t open on Saturdays. It meant really nothing to us,
other than it made us feel as if we were civilised – not that we were part of
civilisation, but as if we were civilised. It just was something to do, that we had to
be aware of, the time. There’s the Anglican Church bell; it’s 3:00; the children will
be out from school. When they’re out from school, we must go. Actually it was
torture for me, the whole time business, as a child, because I was rather lazy in the
sense that I didn’t like to do anything other than daydream. I just loved
daydreaming, and time was always interfering with it, because that’s the nature of
dreaming, time is warped. It’s night, it’s day – it doesn’t have a border. So the
whole notion of time, the clock, it was torture for someone like me. I just wanted to
be left alone. Time impinged on what I then thought to be my true self, the person
who was daydreaming, making up worlds in which I could exist and populate with
words. I loved reading.
DS: I have a question that relates to ‘Ovando.’
JK: Yes. I haven’t thought of him in a long time.
DS: The themes of nothingness and becoming ‘nothing’ are prevalent in several of
your stories, including ‘Ovando’ as well as The Autobiography of My Mother, and
‘Blackness’ and the title story from At the Bottom of the River. The idea of
becoming ‘nothing’ seems to have mainly negative implications of cultural erasure
in your works. However, at times it seems to have positive implications in that
becoming ‘nothing’ can also be a kind of transcendence. Can you explain a bit more
about these different ways of becoming ‘nothing’ that you depict in your texts?
JK: Well, I think sometimes I’m trying to expatiate what it consists of to be human,
and it almost seems unbearable. You have to do so many things that are terrible.
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I’m reading a book by Claude Lanzmann, it’s his autobiography/memoir. He’s the
man who made a nine-and-a-half hour film about the Holocaust – it’s called Shoah,
and it’s a marvellous, extraordinary film. In his account of his life, at an early age
he participates in the resistance. He and his family, because they are French Jews,
are always in danger of being killed, and he knows people who are sent off. So he’s
obsessed, understandably because he’s Jewish, but also because of what he’s
witnessed, he’s obsessed with this subject. I think later on he becomes very much a
Zionist. And you wouldn’t think there would be a problem with Zionism.
It made me think after reading it – I’ve always felt, but now, more strongly
than ever, but maybe it’s because now because I’m so old, to alleviate my own
suffering, it’s not worth causing someone else to suffer. I now know that. It’s true.
I have not been tested, but I think to alleviate your own suffering, if it means causing
others to suffer, I don’t think I can do it anymore. Or at least I don’t want to do it.
And I am not a pacifist at all, but I think I can’t. I think to make myself not suffer –
not suffer less, but not suffer at all – if it involves others suffering, I cannot do it
anymore.
But that’s sort of what I’m thinking, along those lines. I don’t contemplate
suicide or my own erasure, mind you, but I accept that just to get out of bed, you’re
violating… you’re doing something that’s wrong. I accept. But it’s along those
lines that I was thinking. Just to be nothing. To be human, or how we’ve
understood to be human, seems so unbearable to me. It feels just awful, just wrong.
And Ovando is really that kind of person. Now he’s a real conquistador, one of the
early ones after Columbus. They just did so much that was unspeakable. People
just disappeared – you talk about murdering people, within fifty years of Columbus
meeting the Arawaks, they were dead, they were gone, they were vanished from the
face of the earth. I think it’s just unbearable what it costs to be human.
DS: That to live must be to do so at someone else’s expense.
JK: Yeah. Yeah…And I don’t quite know if it’s not true that for you to live,
someone has to die. And if that’s really so, I guess I can accept it, but can fewer
die? Maybe not fifty million, maybe only five? Maybe only one. But it’s that
383
question of God and Abraham, ‘How many should I kill?’ That Biblical question. I
don’t know. But I think sometimes people who are the most nothing are the people
who are the most alive. Like Dick Cheney is a completely nothing person, nothing.
He’s an awful, awful, nothing person, and he’s alive. And some people who we
know are dead are more alive than he is. So it’s that sort of thing that I was trying to
sort out.
What is nothing, and what is something? What is it to be alive as Dick
Cheney? How can that be? I ask every time someone wonderful dies, ‘And why is
Dick Cheney alive?’ He’s just the most convenient person for me. You know, Nora
Ephron died, and I didn’t know her particularly, really, but she seemed like a
perfectly good person. People who knew her loved her, and that was one day I
thought, ‘And why is Dick Cheney alive?’ How can this be? Does Satan work this
hard? Is evil that easy? That this seemingly nice person can die, and Dick Cheney
finds a heart, and not only that, his artificial heart worked?
DS: I was also thinking, along the lines of talking about nothingness, that if you
look at Autobiography, Xuela seems to embrace this idea of emptiness. What does
that mean?
JK: Well, again, it’s an abstract thing to put in a novel, isn’t it? But I was thinking
about the kind of person who can embrace nothing. Just the absence of the loudness
of ambition, of desire for something worldly, just to accept that this is all there is.
And that there will be a nice day of trying to hear the blade of grass grow, trying to
see a patch of blue in the sky, and that might be all there is. That isn’t a Swiss bank
account. You needn’t have the largest motorboat in the world. Just to embrace
something else.
Because I think in her case, she had come to see that even the desire for love
brings with it so much that you don’t want. Even the most wonderful form of love
holds within it something dark and sad – death. So many people have lived all their
lives with each other, loved each other, and then one of them dies and it’s
heartbreaking, and it’s sad. If you think about that long enough, you think, ‘I want
nothing.’ When you see that kind of sadness, which has had so much joy to it, it’s
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hard to be satisfied in telling yourself, ‘Well, at least they loved each other.’ Yeah,
something like that. I used to have these high thoughts.
DS: So giving yourself over to someone is a form of death.
JK: Even forms of love are forms of death. Partly why it’s difficult for me to edit
my book is because I have thoughts like that in it, and I weigh how the sentence
goes, and do I really want to say this? It’s hard to understand. And no one will
understand it but someone studying for her doctorate at the University of Edinburgh!
[Laughs]
DS: [Laughs]
JK: [Laughs] You know, that’s fine, and I’m very grateful. Yeah, it’s all a form of
death, and so what is death? You know the thing I really hate about death is that it
doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t judge. I hate that. It ought to not happen to some
people. On the other hand, the alternative, eternal life, is apparently not so great.
You have to have eternal life, but be young. That’s the other myth, the woman who
asked her god-lover to give her eternal life, but she forgot to ask that she should be
eternally young too. But had she asked for that, a lion would’ve come and eaten her
up, because she hadn’t asked specifically for a lion not to come and eat her up.
DS: There’s always a catch.
JK: There’s always a catch. And she would’ve become the mane of the lion.
DS: It’s as though birth into the world is a form of death.
JK: Yes. Yes. You begin the long haul, as you are born, and you grow into death.
Yes.
385
DS: There’s no other way to go, try as you might. [Laughs] You know, it’s difficult
to put some of these thoughts into words, but you have to put them out there. But
doing so will probably only raise more questions as you are grappling with it. I
think no other novel has made me think so much as Autobiography has done.
JK: Oh that’s so amazing.
DS: It’s confounding, and I think that’s why a lot of people either haven’t written
about it or have just written it off as being ‘bleak.’
JK: But the other thing is, why is a woman in her [Xuela’s] position thinking about
these things in this way? It’s supposed to be the big momma novel. If she were a
white woman in France or Germany or something, it would be quiet acceptable. But
she’s not supposed to be [doing this]. I hate to say these things, because they sound
so self-something, but the truth is, if I were German, this wouldn’t be a question.
The ‘vacuity’ would be interesting, because she’s talking about these real things that
we know about, and we’re interested in – justice and injustice, and the weight of
history and so on. But she’s also talking about something that a person like her is
not supposed to be talking about. And I’m so grateful that you see her in this way.
I mean, she makes a choice to do something that she’s not supposed to do.
She’s not really supposed to have these kinds of thoughts. She’s supposed to be a
nothing that triumphs over her suffering. She’s supposed to be a Harriet Tubman or
something. Well, she just isn’t that, and I’m never going to have those sorts of
characters. They’re not terribly sophisticated, first of all. You know, the thing that
happened in 1492, and the transferring of people from one part of the earth to the
next, either they volunteered or they were forced, it was a huge thing, but it didn’t
rob some of them of the ability to think, ‘Who am I? Why am I?’ Your history isn’t
only tied up to this material weight, this body, this skin and bones and blood. It
doesn’t limit them, they also might have thoughts of, ‘Why this? Why not
something else? What does it mean?’ Or it might lead them to a desire for
abstinence from the thing we call life, a desire to explore what it means to cease to
386
exist, to just contemplate ceasing to exist, not suicide, but just to think of themselves
as abstractions.
Being always on the brink of extermination, having black skin, being a
woman, doesn’t rob you of the desire to want to know, ‘What if?’ and to have a
sense of wonder and awe. I think it is disappointing to some people, perhaps, that I
don’t do more of the solid, predictable thing. For instance, it interests me to think,
what if the tables had turned? What if Africans had gone to Europe? Would it have
been the same? What would have happened?
DS: The way that she describes herself is so interesting – it’s very existential.
JK: It is! It’s meant to be. I mean, who says, ‘From the moment I was born, I had
death facing me because my mother was dead’? Her mother is dead, so she is
always facing annihilation.
DS: In Lucy, the title character remarks on her initial fear of walking through the
woods while on vacation with Mariah’s family, stating, ‘Without wanting to, I
would imagine that there was someone or something where there was nothing. I
was reminded of home. I was reminded that I came from a place where there was no
such thing as a “real” thing, because often what seemed to be one thing turned out to
be altogether different’ (53-4). Is this merely a straightforward statement referring
to Lucy’s fear of spirits such as jablesses or soucriants, or could it also be viewed as
a larger metaphor for the nature of life and its uncertainties in the West Indies?
JK: Yes. Yes. It was both. That was conscious. Again, as I say, I am often using
the concrete to make a metaphor to refer to the abstract.
DS: I want to talk a bit about the new novel now, entitled See Now Then.
Amazon.com describes it as ‘the brilliant and evocative new novel from Jamaica
Kincaid – her first in ten years – a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies.
This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time
operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully and Kincaid inhabits each
of her characters, a Mother and Father, their two children living in a small village in
387
New England, as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and
the future—for, as she writes, “the present will be a now then and the past is now
then and the future will be a now then.” Her characters, constrained by the world,
despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear
sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear. See Now Then is Kincaid’s attempt to make clear
what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the
beginning, the middle, and the end.’ Can you tell me a bit more about this new
book?
JK: That pretty much sums it up. I wrote that, though I don’t think I put the
‘brilliant’ part. I don’t know how to describe it other than that. You’d have to ask
me something specific about it. But you should read it first.
DS: Yes, I would love to include it in my thesis if I can. Does the new novel
incorporate any of your personal experiences, or is it a departure from that?
JK: Well, it’s a departure in that I’ve never written about certain parts of my life,
and my adult life. I sort of just started to write about when I started to write, how I
came to writing. Maybe it’s in a more spare style than Mr. Potter, but it continues
from that [style]. The sentences are long and they change points of view. There is
hardly any dialogue in it. People just speak, they just declare. The narrator of the
story is a mother. It’s a mother, a father, two children – sounds like my life. And
the family breaks up – sounds like my life. I got divorced.
DS: Much of your fiction is set in the Caribbean, although you have lived in the
United States for much of your life. What prompted you to set this new novel in
New England?
JK: Again, talking about landscape, I wanted to write about a landscape, and I
knew New England. I began to basically tutor myself in what you now call the earth
sciences – you know, geology. There is no time more profound than geologic time,
and I was trying to understand billions of years, and the past, and I was trying to
388
understand what we mean when we say ‘the future.’ I came to understand that the
future must be a social construct because it’s something that hasn’t happened yet: ‘in
the future.’ For instance, next week Monday, that man [the lawn maintenance
worker] will come and do that [mow the lawn]. But what does it mean? Next week
Monday will only be next week Monday if I am here to say it is next week Monday.
But next week Monday is really indifferent to me saying it’s next week Monday. Or
the other thing is, in the future we will go to Mars but Mars is there, you see. There
is no future Mars. It’s only that we will go to Mars. Science fiction talks about the
future but I hadn’t understood yet that the future is only something we haven’t
interacted with yet. I can’t explain it any better than that.
DS: Tell me about the title, See Now Then.
JK: You see the thing about ‘then,’ it’s a word you use in this way: ‘Then, I did
that. Then I will do that.’ But this moment…oh it’s really going to sound silly.
This moment was here before it was there. And then it’s there. I was just trying to
understand how a series of things happened to me that I could only see were
happening at a certain point, but they were always happening. They had a present to
them, but they were happening a long time before I became aware of them. So I
began to try to understand consciousness, really. When you become aware of
something, is that when it’s happening, or…
DS: Or was it already happening?
JK: Or was it already happening? Is your awareness really the principle of the
thing or is the principle the thing itself, and your awareness is…I was just trying to
make something whole that can never be whole, really, the present, the past. As I
say, the future really is more of a construct, because at least when something has
happened, you have experienced that it has happened. But it’s only faith, like I have
faith that next Monday will come, but next Monday will come whether I am alive or
dead, or whether I am in Italy, next Monday he [the landscaper] will be here. When
I say these things to a physicist they say, ‘Oh, you’re talking about string theory.’
389
Because apparently there are people who think, mathematically, that there is
something happening right next to me that I can’t see, right next to us, a whole set of
things that we are not aware of.
DS: And ‘then’ can mean ‘next’ or it can mean ‘in the past.’
JK: Yes, it has those two meanings. So I say something like, ‘Then, she did soand-so.’ For instance, the character will describe sitting in this chair, but then she
might also say, ‘The chair was still there. It wasn’t yet in the place that you now see
it.’ Even though she’s describing something real, that is happening right then, she
can tell you something in the future, and how the thing in the future is operating on
the thing she is describing now. Again, the person who finds Xuela “vacuous” will
find this character beyond vacuous. Her name is Mrs. Sweet. She’s very peculiar,
very domestic: she bakes bread; she washes her children’s clothes. But she’s a
writer. She’s sitting in a room, writing.
DS: Is it Sweet as in ‘S-w-e-e-t?’
JK: Yes, and it has a double meaning.
DS: The title sounds as though you have melded two different expressions, ‘See
now…’
JK: Yes, as in, ‘Look here.’
DS: And ‘Now then,’ which is meant to draw attention to what you’re about to say.
JK: Yes. And they’re just three words, they don’t have any commas. They have
nothing to connect them. There are spaces in between. They just float. So the
narrator is telling you, ‘Look at this, this is how this is right now, but look at it there,
and look at it here.’
390
DS: Does she say, ‘This is how it will be,’ or only, ‘This is how it is and this is how
it was’?
JK: She does all those things. You’ll see. It’s only 157 pages, but it will torture
you, sorting it out. [Laughs] The allegorical is very much a part of it. The two
children, their names are Heracles and Persephone, and they have like characteristics
of the classical.
DS: Have you been working on this throughout several years?
JK: Yes. For several years, it’s such a pathetic amount. It’s just a little book. It’s
a pamphlet.
DS: But if it’s condensed…
JK: It’s very condensed.
DS: Then it carries more weight than a larger book would.
JK: [Smiles] Yes. Yes.
DS: Was it an intentional shift for you to move from writing novels to doing travel
writing and garden books?
JK: No, no. It’s just the way I am. I just write about whatever is interesting to me,
and domestic life is always interesting to me. The way in which I was a mother of
small children was interesting to me. I think I never took anything I did seriously in
the sense that I never thought anyone would notice what I was doing. I never
thought anyone would notice that I wrote or that my children would notice that I was
really writing. I never thought I would have readers. I just never took anything
seriously in the sense that I don’t have ambitions for its success. But I’m very
grateful and surprised.
391
DS: Do you show your writing to anyone else besides your publisher when you’re
working on something?
JK: No, or I send it to someone who might be interested in publishing it. Not the
New Yorker or any of the big magazines. It’s sort of pre-emptive really; I didn’t like
what they were publishing, and so I thought they wouldn’t like what I was writing,
so I don’t show it to them.
DS: So you mainly just show things to Farrar, Straus and Giroux?
JK: I always show them to Jonathan [Galassi], my editor. He’s a big supporter.
DS: You don’t show anything to family or friends?
JK: Not really, no, because everybody’s a writer and they have their own work to
do. I want to read a friend’s book but I have to finish this [the manuscript] first
before I can do anything.
DS: It must be difficult to find time for leisure reading when you’re working.
JK: No, no, I do. Reading is part of working. Gosh, I just love getting into bed
once a day and trying to understand how the earth, as I see it, got made. I was
driving through the Catskills, as I told you, yesterday, and I was just poring over a
map, trying to figure out the roads I was on…But this has been an obsession. I’m
realizing that I’m doing the things that I wanted to do as a child. My favourite
subjects were history, geography, and botany, and then I just read novels as, you
know, reading. I just read everything. But my favourite pastime is to read a book of
history or a book of geology. I’ve been teaching myself geology, but that’s really
hard. It has a lot of geology in it, the new book, because it’s about time. You know,
I just make a casual reference to the Cambrian Era or something, as if I really know
what the Cambrian Era is.
392
DS: So is your book about the striations of time?
JK: Yes, the way things get layered, and the top thing presses the bottom thing
down. You know, the Great Plains are going to sink one day under the weight of all
that, and it will either sink down or something will push it up and make mountains.
Oh, it’s all at work right now. Actually, the things that are at work right now, they
don’t know about. The things they can see working, something else is happening
that they can’t tell about. That’s something I love about the time of the earth, the
way the earth works. It’s so slow. On the other hand, the speed of light is
something else. Because you know how by the time we see the light from Saturn, it
takes so long…But look at how we think of that as the speed of light, but when we
look at the earth, we think it’s so slow, but it’s probably the same case. But with the
earth, we don’t say it’s speedy – we say it’s slow. But if it takes say a month to
reach that, isn’t that sort of slow?
DS: The day-to-day experiences always feel slow, but then later you end up saying,
‘Look how time flies!’
JK: But you see, that’s the importance of the clock. The clock, the bell ringing, is
like one of those ropes you use to climb the side of a mountain. If you didn’t have
the bell ringing, you’d just fall off into slothfulness! [Laughs]
DS: [Laughs] But is that really such a bad thing?
JK: [Laughs]
DS: Not if it leads to daydreaming and creativity.
JK: Oh, I love daydreaming.
DS: Is it in fact laziness if you’re in the process of creating something?
393
JK: You’re only lazy because you won’t do what someone wants you to do! Who
calls you lazy? My mother called me lazy, because I wouldn’t clean the house. I
hated cleaning the house – I wanted to read! I was always thought to be lazy.
394
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