HTML last
revised 13th May, 2005.
Transparency no longer seems like the bottom of the mirror in which Western humanity reflected its own image. There is opacity now at the bottom of the mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by populations, silt that is fertile, but in actual fact, indistinct and unexplored, even today, denied or insulted more often than not, and with an insistent presence that we are incapable of not experiencing.
Edward Glissant
...who am I
and where is my country
and where do I belong
and why was I ever born
Jean Rhys
The displacement of White Creoles in post-emancipation culture has been invariably attributed to their loss of privilege. The collapse of the Caribbean plantation economy in the 1830s turned the former Creole planter class into an economically disenfranchised minority. Moreover it unleashed veiled hostilities between the planter class and the former slaves which had previously been restrained largely by money and power. The latent hostility which undergirded master slave relations surfaced thereafter with a vengeance to execute its terrible outworkings. Ethnic groups thrown together by enforced enslavement, personal and social disintegration, fragmentation and loss, exacerbated by an ongoing commitment to denigration, found themselves with no way back "home". The imperative was to grapple with the hostility implicit in radical hierarchies of difference which undergirded imperialism. The goal was to construct a viable, if not just, social order.
This essay1 explores displacement in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. It analyses the location of the White Creole protagonist who is poised between the desire for rootedness and the inability to belong. The youthful Antoinette, a stranger in her tall, far, island birthplace,2 exists in an exilic condition within the lush fallen Edenic landscape. Arguing that an individual's sense of place in any society essentially relational, I read Rhys's evocations of displacement as exposing fissures in the racist assumptions which undergirded colonial societies, with a focus on the text's implied and explicit dialogue with the racist ideologies and discourses of the day. Finally, I interrogate Rhys's insistence on her longing to be black.
Jean Rhys's fiction, Wide Sargasso Sea has raised troubling issues in relation to place and belonging. Whereas Rhys herself would have been perceived within Dominican society as unequivocally located within the White Creole planter class, she succeeds in problematizing the location of the white Creole heiress who is the protagonist of her most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. Moreover Rhys has emerged as arguably the most famous West Indian woman writer, within an ethos in which the West Indian female voice has belonged quintessentially to black women penning a significant corpus of resistance literature in protest against the deployment of a colonial education, and specifically the imperial canon, as a primary civilizing force. As articulated by Merle Hodge: "I began writing, in my adult life, in protest against my education and the arrogant assumptions upon which it rested: that I and my world were nothing and that to rescue ourselves from nothingness, we had best seek admission to the world of their storybook." (202) Rhys insisted that, she had imbibed the cultural ethos of and hence could claim right of belonging to the denigrated Afro Creole world encapsulated in her autobiography (Smile Please). This is also the contradictory location of her protagonist Antoinette as demonstrated in her cultural liminality and her cravings for intimacy with her black surrogate Mother Christophene and sister Tia. This unwelcome assertion, along with the climatic suicidal leap to the crazed hope of Tia's welcome (Wide Sargasso Sea) set off a lengthy literary debate on the viability of such a relationship within the socio-cultural framework. This in turn came to be related to the issue of the inclusion of Rhys within the burgeoning West Indian literary canon. As I have argued elsewhere:
Much ink has been spilt over issues of homelessness, nostalgia, the centrality of the natal place, the creative schizophrenia and the aesthetic fertility of the exilic condition. Significantly, this stance which has been echoed repeatedly work of the now canonized male and female West Indian writers ... was first announced in 1934 by Jean Rhys. In other words, arguably, one of our earliest, major representative West Indian literary foremothers, by virtue of birth, stylistic innovation and thematic focus was a member of the planter class. (Morgan forthcoming)
Rhys's border crossing posture irrespective of her phenotype and that of her protagonist, demonstrates the inevitable slippage in fixed positions ascribed to ethnic groups in the racialised, imperial, socio-symbolic order. The Manichean ideology attributed to whites purity, beauty, order and divine right of rulership; it attributed to blacks, ugliness, impurity and divinely ordained servitude. The drop of blood formulation which drew its authority from Social Darwinism affirmed the superiority of the Caucasian race, its ascendancy on the evolutionary ladder and the powerful miasma which can be imparted by one drop of black blood, which reputedly had the power to reverse the evolutionary process. The One-Drop Rule, dictated that any person with any discernable sub-Saharan "blood" is "a negro". The rule which was rooted in the theories of taxonomy developed by "scientists" in the 1600s and 1700s, was based on the notion that the black man occupied the lowest rung on the evolutionary ladder closest to the ape. Moreover his genes by virtue of their brute dominance had the power to override those of any other human family with which they may become mixed. Blacks were a kind of dominant missing link between human and ape. In the wake of colonial conquest and slavery, these theories served as moral justification for the capitalistic imperialistic pursuits.
Socially, slaves were constructed as chattel owned by a master class. Laws and social mores protected white women's bodies and exalted their reproductive capacity as pivotal to the continuance of the master race; the same agencies appropriated and yoked the black woman's productive and reproductive capacities in the service of imperialism. And yet as Rhys's fiction intimates, lived experience often mocks and deflates ideology.
Rhys's thematic emphases and symbolic associations within her Caribbean fictions overturn this socio symbolic hierarchy and reflect a reality which seems much truer to the social interactions of the time - that the black and white worlds were intimately interrelated, with substantial permeability between individuals and symbolic categories. In practical relational terms and indicative of the dynamic of power relations masked by this ideology, black blood did not have "universal" power of contagion. Frequent intercourse between white males and black females were a staple dimension of plantation society, littering the estates with highly visible outcomes of miscegenation, polygamies, and bastardizations. These interpenetrations - the pleasurable and voluntary, the distasteful and enforced - proved inevitable. Indeed a major agenda of the colonizer was to satisfy his lusts through sexual adventurism, while policing the sexual purity of white women as boundaries markers and symbols of the spotlessness and value of the civilization and the enterprise of empire. Unregulated interracial male sexual experimentation was a kingpin of the bizarre playground which Europe created for itself through the imperial machinery. Other related points of cultural interpenetrations were manifested in Wide Sargasso Sea in the band of Cosway cousins whose connection imparted right of access to the planter's larder and to his coffers. Hence Antoinette's characteristic excess in the distribution of food and money.
The slippage in the semantic categories also emerged as a psychic necessity required to deal with the blatantly evil dimension of slavery. Arguably the burden of moral justification of slavery was so great, it could not stop with the demonization of blackness. In Lamming's Natives of my Person, alterity is based on race as well as nationality. The evil, lascivious, monstrous enslavers originate from the rival colonizing Kingdom of Antartica whose demonization is necessary to preserve the fiction of British moral superiority and the rightness of their enterprise. It is them and not us who: "Against the will of God and the sacred needs of their own blood they do enter into the most uncritical acts of fornication with these heathen women, blaspheming against their body and in a manner not fit even for the pleasure of beasts..." (125) Similarly, the white West Indian planter became emblematic in abolitionalist discourse, of seepage of the contagion of blackness as reflected in excessive engagement with the flesh, immoderate consumption of food and alcohol, and indulgence in tainted interracial sexual unions. Antoinette and her Martinican mother are also victims this brand of othering which answers to the necessity to deflect the evil dimension of slavery onto its true practitioners - the other, evil, whites who are so necessary for maintaining assumptions of purity and right of rulership. The gossips declare: "He drank himself to death. ...and all those women! She never did anything to stop him - she encouraged him. Presents and smiles for the bastards every Christmas" (20).3
The complexity of this dynamic and the power of race to operate as a fluid set of overlapping discourses which subsumes a range of other differences is evident from the opening lines of Wide Sargasso Sea: "They say when trouble come close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother 'because she pretty like pretty self' Christophine said." (1) This interplay of inclusions and exclusions demonstrates the semantic slippage of essentialising categories based on race and nationality. Moreover these shifting constructions are sensitive to socio-economic vicissitudes - the them and us ranks alter most radically in times of trouble and hardship. The ambiguous opening pronoun "they" is without antecedent. Its causal connection to the phrase: "so the white people did" (my emphasis) implies that "they" equal the white people. Significantly the next line states categorically: "But we were not in their ranks" indicating how race construction can engulf other classifications of social relations - in this case Jamaican nationality. The story does not end here for Christophine's counter resistant statement locates the root of exclusion in sexual jealously extended by women against a women who "pretty like pretty self". The terse opening statement privileges the perspective of the black slave woman who occupies the lowest rung on the social hierarchy of being and knowing. In the plethora of conflicting even irreconcilable voices: them vs us, Anglophone vs Francophone, white vs black, Jamaican vs Martinican, the child is willing to valorize and draw comfort from Christophine's knowledge.
Predictably then, the indeterminacy of Antoinette's racial position, the uncertainty as to whether or not she is tainted with blackness proves in the long run to be a powerful determinant of the construction of her identity. In terms of marital fidelity, inbetweenity is associated with Antoinette the "intemperate and unchaste" in a manner that it is not associated with her adulterous husband. This is heightened by her unwillingness to maintain the boundary of chastity necessary to protect the interest of the Caucasian family and ultimately of empire. Yet arguably this is where the imperial enterprise based on unstable constructions of ethnic dissociation and purity of blood implodes on itself. This is what threatens the husband as he vacillates between attraction and revulsion. Like the insidious landscape which teases and tantalizes and defies containment, Antoinette is possessed of hybridized, creolised modes of being and ways of knowing which cannot be contained within the semantic category of whiteness. Rhys provides valuable insight into the fissures along which the colonizer's ideology cracked and ultimately falls apart and its impact on the material circumstances, most particularly on the lives of those who straddled its planks.
Rhys answers the black white polarity with a formulation which appears to be a straightforward reversal. It is Antoinette's shadow protagonist Anna Morgan of the semi-autobiographical Voyage in The Dark who articulates what remains only implicit in Wide Sargasso Sea: "Being black is warm and gay; being white is cold and sad" (p. 27) Yet Antionette is unquestionably ambivalent in relation to some black people. Faced with the servant girl Myra with the big feet, mournful disposition, and hell and brimstone predictions, she turns instead towards the image of the young English country girl - The Miller's Daughter. The desire is not for blackness as phenotype but for a place within a culture, an ethos and community, which arguably, the hostile social relations render impossible. At the firing of Couliblri, the rage of the former enslaved brims over putting paid to fallacy that they are only happy lazy children who would not hurt a fly. Antionette runs towards Tia to be greeted with a stone, and with the hostility of a stone wall, and with a crying girl as in a mirror. For all of her longing to black, Antionette cannot penetrate the mirror.
Prior to the imperial enterprise, there had always been a concern with difference. But the imperative to transmute difference into hierarchy which emerges as a justification of the colonizing impulse requires a mammoth leap. Theological discourse along with "objective" anthropological discovery and the inventive application of the social sciences were all pressed into the service of "languaging" the enterprise. Tupper's poetic representation of the white man's burden demonstrates the clever deployment of biblical authority in the interest of world conquest:
Stretch forth! Stretch forth! From the south to the north.
From the east to the west,--stretch forth! stretch forth!
Strengthen thy stakes and lengthen thy cords,--
The world is a tent for the world's true lords!
Break forth and spread over every place
The world is a world for the Saxon race
Martin Tupper "The Ango-Saxon Race". (1850)
The poem is drawn from the biblical injunction to the barren woman to prepare for a period of expansion (Isaiah 54).4 The injunction intended to alleviate the shame of the woman who is disempowered because of her barrenness, is translated here into a patriarchal and imperial script of empowerment which names British males as the world's true lords with a divine right of rulership based on race taxonomy. The directive to create space for shelter and protection for numerous children which would in turn generate self affirmation and social acceptance for the barren woman, becomes subverted in the imperial narrative into forced conquest and theft of the other's land justified by racial ascendancy. The persona's declaration on behalf of the world's true lords, rings with the authority and conviction necessary to dignify, exalt and even idolize the idea. As Conrad puts it succinctly: "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much. What redeems it is the idea only....something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to" (10).
These insidious fabrications and ideologies are exacted a cost. They not only undermined the colonizer's ability to know the subject race, more significantly they worked against self knowledge. The impulse to know is shared by both Antoinette and the husband. Antoinette longs to know Tia in a knowing that can potentially pierce the barrier of race, a knowing based on her need to end loneliness and isolation, by promoting reciprocity, and mutual respect. But this knowing is partial. Antoinette who claims to have no knowledge why a location could possibly be named massacre would purge the land of memory and markers of its violent and unjust past. Antoinette would embrace a truncated version of the past with a cultivated forgetting through erasures which would facilitate community; Tia, on other hand, foregrounds past injustices and present inequities. Intimacy eludes them.
The husband similarly longs to know the other. His knowing is intended to colonize the inner being of the other, consume its essence thereby to gain power over person and landscape. This is the agenda of the imperial enterprise and this is the agenda of the husband. Both Antoinette and her husband encounter an impenetrable, opaque surface. For Antoinette the opacity is a consequence of her failure to acknowledge complicity and responsibility. For the husband, the opacity is a consequence of his compulsion to rule, his lack of self knowledge, insecurity and consequent inability to allow autonomy to the other. The inscrutable African ex-slave Christophine demonstrates her inability to be fully known and absorbed by the process of enslavement and by his ways of knowing which attempt above all to engulf and consume other in order to prove mastery.
This opacity also extends to the place. Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin argue that place in post colonial societies is a "complex interaction of language, history and environment" (p. 319). The speaker in the post colonial framework - whether settler, indigenous inhabitant, or forced migrant settler experiences a gap between their experienced environment and the description which the imperial language provides:
In this sense the dynamic 'naming' becomes a primary colonizing process because it appropriates, defines, captures the place in language. And yet the process of naming opens wider the very epistemological gap which it is designed to fill, for the 'dynamic mystery of language' as Wilson Harris puts it, becomes a groping step into the reality of place, not simply reflecting or representing it, but in some mysterious sense intimately involved in the process of its creation, of its 'coming into being' (Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin, 391-392).
Rhys's evocation demonstrates a related process: the manner in which the mystery of place escapes the coloniser's semantic imposition. The force of an ungraspable reality pushes against limitations of language and in unravels the man because of his inability to locate / language / signify himself within the environment. The Caribbean landscape is both beckoning and impenetrable; it is wild and lush and it is corrupt and untamable. It discloses great mystery and beauty but this merely tempts the greedy of heart to cry: "I want what it hides" (p. 73). The husband/colonizer can only describe the landscape in terms of excess: "Everything is too much.... Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger" (pp. 89-90). His experience escapes his received language and framework of reality such that it leaves him disoriented, displaced and estranged. Moreover the husband's insecurities dictate that what he cannot possess he is constrained to hate: "I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain....Above all I hate her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it" (203). The acquisitive orientation which is at the heart of Western imperialism which reduces the core of people and landscapes to mere things to be possessed. It is doomed to fail because not withstanding how great one's power, one cannot possess the soul of the other. It is to this essence that Olive Senior refers in "Meditation on Yellow" (in blatant disregard of post-modern contentions) when she celebrates the intense frustration of the colonizer and the contemporary dealer in the commoditization of black bodies and "exotic tropical" landscapes. Senior's tourists are also constrained to grasp after what they cannot possess:
you cannot tear my song
from my throat
you cannot erase the memory
of my story
you cannot catch
my rhythm
(for you have to born
with that)
you cannot comprehend
the magic
of anacondas changing into rivers
like the Amazon
boas dancing in my garden
arcing into rainbows
(and I haven't had a drop
to drink - yet)
You cannot reverse
Bob Marley wailing
making me feel
so mellow
in that Caribbean yellow
at three o'clock (17)
Antoinette's intense love and belonging to the Caribbean landscape is sealed from the inception. But the Caribbean earth tied as it has been to a history of oppressive social relations means differently to its people groups. For the African slave descendents the land has retained associations with back-breaking, oppressive, unpaid labour. For the progeny of indentees it has been ambivalently associated with the excruciating labour of the cane field and reward in the form of land disbursement at the end of the indentureship period. Antoinette demonstrates an intense love of and connection to the land which is arguably exemplary of a genuine heart connection, but which ultimately cannot be extricated from socio economic privilege. This is the love which is reflected in Ian McDonald's "A White Man Considers the Situation" who considers "retreat from these well loved shores" when seething unrest of the black masses indicates that his " brutal tenancy is over" (66). The depth of the potential displacement is reflected in the family symbol of intergenerational rootedness designed to span five generations of patriarchal inheritance - the tree planted by his father's father to grace the persona's grandson's christening chair. Similarly in No Telephone to Heaven, Michelle Cliff's protagonist Claire Savage crawling on her belly under a grandmother's house seeking her buried navel string discovers she can only return to the "ruinate" landscape only after murderous conflagration, when the ashes of her remains descend to regenerate the earth. In all three fictional scenarios, it is hostile relational dynamic generated by the brutal tenancy of enslavement and its aftermath that flouts possibilities of rootedness and belonging.
The displacement of Rhys's protagonists is complete. Unable to fully belong to the Caribbean the British colonial is condemned to inbetweenity. The colonizing system is represented metonymically in the novel yet representing the colonial's distance from what must forever be a dream space, Antionette declares "we changed course and lost our way to England" (213). England for the white Creole is its own illusory psychic space constituted out of fragments of second-hand memories.
Rhys's fiction speaks to the limitations of the race and nation as ontological markers. When birth and nationality emerge as questionable categories does she point towards any other entity which can sustain belonging and being. Although Rhys appears to reverse the black white problematic, she nevertheless transcends the binary to speak to belonging that is relational. Her unanswerable longing for blackness transcends the social signification of race and incorporates cultural ethos and people which for her spell home, welcome, and rest. Ironically, in grappling with the loss of Caribbean landscape as homeland, Rhys once again foreshadows the broader metaphorical issue of homecomings for Caribbean people groups adrift within alien and alienating experiences who mediate between lost ancestral cultures, harsh poverty-striken island societies and hostile metropolitan host cultures. So Edward Braithwaite in "Postlude/Home" asks "Where is the nigger's home / In Paris Brixton Kingston Rome? (21) And Martin Carter in "University of Hunger" bemoans "O long is the march of men and long is the life / and wide is the span / O cold is the cruel wind blowing." (22) And Derek Walcott's displaced poet returns not to an Afro-Greek's hero welcome but to the sure convictions that their can be "homecomings without home" (Homecoming: Anse La Raye 168). Rhys's disembodied protagonist Antoinette arguably survives the leap to speak from beyond the grave about repetitive disembodied wonderings. Homecoming then can only be a contradictory return in and to a Caribbean imaginary. Antoinette as a presence who speaks her narrative presumably from the other side of her suicidal leap is chained to a cycle of disembodied wondering, headed for a destination to which she will never arrive, caught in a liminal state between black and white, between so called civilization and savagery, between Britain and Caribbean. In "I Used to Live Here Once" insubstantially of protagonist and latent hostility of Creole children combine to cause her to know the impossibility of return. In Voyage in the Dark the illusory nightmarish return is to the fearsome though potentially liberating Carnivalesque Caribbean space. In Wide Sargasso Sea opaque mirror which separate Tia and Antoinette becomes penetrable pool only in illusory space. And the jury is still out on the issue of whether this act of dissolution is one of destruction or affirmation.
Rhys's triumph is to have emerged from her socio-cultural ethos with the insight and boldness to craft fictions which reflected a reality which she felt viscerally - the fissures in late 18 century and 19 century race ideology which posited that human beings can be divided into small groups called races; that each race possesses unique, fundamental, biologically inheritable, moral and intellectual characteristics which constitutes the essence of that race; that these inherent characteristics impart divine destiny including the destiny to conquer or to be conquered; that whiteness and its inherent superiority is the normative yardstick by which all other people groups should be measured and found wanting. These notions have been debunked in contemporary science and anthropology but remain extremely compelling in the popular imagination and highly significant in identity politics and interracial interaction today. Rhys transcended a dangerous divide that Jewish/African-American philosopher and race scholar Naomi Zack defined in the 1990s thusly:
It became clear to me that generally speaking, among themselves, blacks do not consider whites to be human beings in the same deep sense that they are human beings; and whites do not consider blacks to be human beings in the same deep sense that they are human beings. So among ourselves within each race, the other race simply does not exist (p. 25).
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys' counter-discursive response to Bronte's Jane Eyre, she undermines racist and prejudicial assumption of the Victorian writer and society. She undermines the master narrative by unsilencing an alternative reality and valorising the mode of being of the other, affirming the permeability of the coloniser and colonized divide. Yet such is the nature of socialization process that Rhys nevertheless reflects muted complicity with "her people, the enemy".5
The problematic of race as a basis of belonging and non belonging within Caribbean societies remains pertinent today. The legacy of colonialism included powerful, insidious and penetrative baggage of race ideology. V.S. Naipaul, who has oftentimes demonstrated his own susceptibly to its toxins, writes of the West Indian (read Afro-Caribbean) in The Middle Passage: "Pursuing the Christian-Hellenic tradition, the West Indian accepted his blackness as his guilt, and divided people into the white, fusty, musty, dusty, tea, coffee cocoa, light, black, dark black. He never seriously doubted the validity of the prejudices of the culture to which he aspired" (p. 7). Paradoxically race ideology with its crippling, unwholesome baggage was evoked as the rallying point for mammoth social construction. A deliberate counter-discursive affirmation of blackness, black consciousness, pride and achievement was installed in the place of white supremacy. Moreover creolization which was associated with Afro-Caribbean identity was installed as the cohesive force of the new nations of the Caribbean. Charles Carnegie in Postnationalism Prefigured argues that the error was that there was no fundamental critique and debunking of racist ideology. Its contemporary entrenchment at the level of popular culture and within academic thinking has proven to be so deep that the binary structure of naming continues to yield a veritable melee of ethnic constructions.6 More damning is the fact that social, material and ideological mechanisms which held the binaries in place are alive and well. Whereas white racism was dishonoured and compromised as complicit with the immoral colonial impulse, it was replaced with a newly unearth black essentialism which was so pivotal to what cultural scholar Stuart Hall terms in "Cultural Identity and the Diaspora" the reach for "ancestral groundings." This construction was at the root of the ethnic national affirmation which was foundational to the new nations of the Caribbean. Beneath a veneer glossed by state touristic discourses on "rainbow countries" and patriotic discourses which avow "here every creed and race find an equal place", the ancient race problematic seethes to erupt in seasons social upheaval and political electioneering. Its characteristic demonization of the other, impartation of moral characteristics to phenotypical features and erasure of ethnic identities inbetween, remain largely unquestioned in the popular imagination and cultural expression. This framework of racial classification continues to impose "false identity" on persons, arrogate their power of self-definition, and erase the presences inbetween.
Such spurious contestation based on race retains the power to undermine the viability of Caribbean island societies. An urgent requirement remains to elucidate discursive practices fostered by racialised world view and to replace these with more productive ways of understanding our worlds and futures. The Caribbean nations can indeed benefit from an appreciation Rhys's gropings towards relationship and community based on share cultural ethos as opposed to race. The nations can also benefit from her counter-discursive expose of permeability, slippage and complicities in the racialised systems which have contributed to our making.
1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at Presented at the Jean Rhys Conference and Literary Festival in Dominica on June 10-13, 2004. I am grateful for comments received from conference participants.
2 From a poem by Dominican Phyllis Allfrey which is dedicated to Jean Rhys. The poem reads:
I remember a tall far island
floating in cobalt paint
The though of it is a childhood dream
torn by midnight plaint
There are painted ships and rusty ships
that pass the island by,
and one day I'll board a boat
when I am ready to die
The timbers will creak and my heart will break
and the sailors will lay my bones
on the stiff rich grass, as sharp as spikes,
by the volcanic stones
Creation Fire 52
3 Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin point to an extreme example of the application of the concept of race for establishing the superiority of an imperial culture. This is the seventeenth-century inclination to refer to the Irish as "bestial" and "steeped in profanity, cannibalism, musicality, witchcraft, violence, incest and gluttony" (202) They continue:
In this description the Irish sound remarkably like Africans as described by nineteenth-century English commentators. Indeed by 1885, John Beddoe, president of the Anthropological Institute, had developed an 'index' of 'Nigrescence' that showed the people of Wales, Scotland, Cornwall and Ireland to be racially separate form the British. More specifically, he argued that those from Western Ireland and Wales were 'Africanoid' in their 'jutting jaws' and 'long slitty nostril' and thus originally immigrants of Africa (202).
"Sing, O barren woman,
you who never bore a child;
burst into song, shout for joy,
you who were never in labor;
because more are the children of the desolate woman
than of her who has a husband,"
says the LORD.
2 "Enlarge the place of your tent,
stretch your tent curtains wide,
do not hold back;
lengthen your cords,
strengthen your stakes.
3 For you will spread out to the right and to the left;
your descendants will dispossess nations
and settle in their desolate cities.
New Intereational Version
5 The formulation "my people the enemy" is Lamming's ironical evocation of the deep regret with Afro-Caribbean persons stand apart from and view the outworking of a perceived contagion of blackness in others. In other words it is "my people the enemy" who bring down the race.
6 This is particularly stark in a nation like Trinidad and Tobago where the shifting nature of identity politics has been captured in the fluid naming of its ethnic groups. Since Columbus managed to sail east to reach west and indentees were transported from the East Indies to the West Indies, these immigrants who were known initially known as East Indian as opposed to West Indians, to differentiate them from American Indians and from the former African slaves and their descendents. They later became known as West Indian East Indians when they assumed settler status and finally East Indian West Indians in response to the cry for integration. Today their descents are known as Indo-Trinidadians or even Indians. The growing assertion of an "ethnically and culturally pure" Indian identity in the 1990s and 2000s has caused Afro-Trinidadians in recent times to sufficiently inherited contempt of things African to interpellate themselves Africans. The scenario becomes far more complex when one factors ethnic categories such as a Spanish and a French Creole and a Portuguese, not to mention the myriad intermixture into the equation. (I discuss the issue of Indian ethnicity in greater detail in "East/West/Indian/Woman/Other: At the Crossroads of Gender and Ethnicity".)
Ashcroft Bill, Griffith, Gareth and Tiffin Helen. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. 2000. London: Routledge 2003.
___. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge. 1995.
Braithwaite, Edward. "Postlude/Home" In The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. 1967. London: Oxford University Press. 1973. (p.77).
Bronte, Charlotte. 1847. Jane Eyre. New York, London: W.W. Norton 1987.
Carnegie, Charles. Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Carter, Martin. "University of Hunger". In West Indian Poetry Edd. Kenneth Ramchand and Cecil Grey. 1971. Harlow: Longmans UK Editions. 1989. p. 21
Cliff, Michelle. No Telephone to Heaven. New York: E.P. Dutton. 1978.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. Harmondworth: Penguin. 1973.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979.
Glissant, Edouard. The Poetics of Relation. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press. 1997.
Hodge, Merle. "Challenges of the Struggle for Sovereignty: Changing the World Versus Writing Stories." Caribbean Women Writers. Ed. Cudjoe. Massachusetts: Calaloux Publications, 1990. 263-268.
MacDonald, Ian. "A White Man Considers the Situation" In West Indian Poetry Edd. Kenneth Ramchand and Cecil Grey. 1971. Harlow: Longmans UK Editions. 1989. p. 65.
Morgan, Paula. "'Home Comings Without Home': Reading Rhys and Cliff Intertextualy", Journal of West Indian Literature.
___. Fashioning Women for Brave New Worlds. Forthcoming in Mango Season.
Lamming, George. Natives of My Person. 1972. London: Pan Books, 1974.
___. Water With Berries. London: Longman 1971.
Naipaul, V.S. The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies: British, French, Dutch in the West Indies and South America. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
Naipaul, V.S. In a Free State. London Andre Deutsch, 1971
Walcott, Derek. "Homecoming, Anse La Raye". In West Indian Poetry Edd. Kenneth Ramchand and Cecil Grey. 1971. Harlow: Longmans UK Editions. 1989. p.168
Rhys, Jean. Voyage in the Dark. 1934. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
---. Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
---. "I Used to Live Here Once". In Sleep it off Lady. 1976; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
Senior, Olive. Gardening in the Tropics. 1994. Toronto: Mc Clelland Stewart, 1994.
Zack, Naomi. "My Racial Self Over Time." In Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race. Toronto: Sister Vision, 1994.
© Paula Morgan, 2005.
HTML last
revised 13th May, 2005.
Return to Conference papers.