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Your Excellency President Liverpool, Madam Chair, PVC Carrington, Monsignor Lewis, Dr Honychurch and the School of Continuing Studies, ladies and gentlemen. Let me begin by thanking Dr Honychurch and the organizing committee of this groundbreaking conference and festival, for inviting me to address you today. I am very grateful for the chance to participate in this important occasion which brings Jean Rhys home, at last, to the island. It's an important occasion, I think, when a nation publicly recognizes and celebrates the achievement of women's writing which, even if it's sometimes uncomplimentary to home (I'm thinking of Jamaica Kincaid on Antigua), is still responsible for bringing that country and its people into the imagination of the world, helping people to see and smell and dream of Dominica thousands of miles away.
I have borrowed my title from a current exhibition of paintings in the Barbados National Art Collection, "At Home in the Island," because it because it reminded me of Jean Rhys, born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams at Roseau, Dominica in 1890. As you know, she left her beautiful island in 1907 for schooling in England, returning only once, in 1936. And yet, Rhys was never more at home than when writing the Caribbean. Her unfinished autobiography Smile Please (1979) and a significant number of short stories recall her childhood in the Caribbean. The novel Voyage in the Dark (1934), opens with a compelling evocation of the Caribbean, its colours, sights, smells, and warmth, and memories of Dominica haunt the narrator and her text. And of course her masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) — and that's why some of you here, along with students all over the Caribbean, are studying it for CXC: because it's a masterpiece — is fundamentally grounded in Caribbean landscape and social history.
At the same time, even at home in the island Rhys's writing expresses a profound sense of "unhomeliness." When Rhys's creole protagonist in Wide Sargasso Sea refers to the England she has never seen as a "dream," she expresses an unease that is representative of the colonial condition. Like Antoinette, West Indian children in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century learned about the "Mother Country" from books. Indeed, the disparity between the (tropical) world of real life and the fantasy (English) world of books in Merle Hodges's Crick Crack Monkey (1970) is something with which Antoinette could identify: "Books transported you always into Reality and Rightness, which were to be found Abroad." So her real ancestral, cultural home is abroad. At the same time, Antoinette is also educated from a young age into the culture and folklore of black West Indians, the reality that surrounded her. But she is forcibly reminded of her distinctness from this kind of "native" culture by virtue of the historical barriers of race and class. So Antoinette is a "white cockroach" for the blacks and a "white nigger" for the English, wondering "who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all" (85). Olive Senior's wonderful poem to Rhys, "Meditation on Red" (reproduced here with the poet's permission from Gardening in the Tropics: Poems, Toronto: 1994, 44-53) imagines Rhys in England as "landlocked," "marooned/in the grey" and longing for the blue skies, bright colours, flowers and warmth on the other side of the wide Sargasso Sea. The ambivalence of the white creole woman is figured as a kind of double consciousness, a division of loyalties and affiliations: to places, to people, to cultural practices.
So one of the ideas I am signalling in the title of my presentation is that the Caribbean has been a difficult place to be "at home" in. Apart from the indigenous Carib and Taino (whose home was stolen and despoiled by European colonists), all other racial and ethnic migrants came here from other homes and the vast majority (African slaves, indentured servants from Ireland, England, Scotland and later, China and India) found the new place pretty inhospitable. Over and over in early accounts of the West Indies, it is imaged as a place of disease, hardship, hard labour, brutality and various kinds of enslavement. There were those whites who made their fortune from the land and the sweat of others, yet so many were absentees: they preferred to make their real homes elsewhere. Yet despite this "unhomeliness" their descendants have made a place for themselves in the West Indies and in so doing, transformed a brutal history of exploitation and corruption, of destruction of land and lives, into a quiet triumph. We rarely acknowledge this achievement: the miracle of survival and the miracle as Edward Kamau Brathwaite puts it in The Arrivants, of "making/with their/rhythms some-/thing torn/and new" (270). But you will see that after such a history, it is not a simple matter to consider the region unproblematically a beloved ancestral home. And Rhys's figure of the white creole woman is a striking literary portrayal of this divided consciousness.
I am using the term white creole in the original meaning of a locally-born white. Over time, the label became more inclusive, to cover all those born in the Americas. The nineteenth century Jamaican "doctress," Mary Seacole refers to herself as a creole, meaning one of mixed blood; in Trinidad, the word usually means Afro-Trinidadian (that's why Rhys reminds someone in a letter that "all Creoles are not negroes"); finally, a "creole" is also a kind of language created in contact zones like the Caribbean. But in a way all these meanings share the crucial similarity: peoples, languages, strains of cattle and so on that resulted from the mixing of races and cultures in the New World, part of Brathwaite's notion of making something torn and new.
Anyway, to return to the figure of the white creole which is so associated with Rhys's work: and I am going to draw on another example of visual art to clarify. Last month, the Barbados Museum hosted a multi-media exhibition by a white Barbadian artist, Joscelyn Gardner, which was entitled "White Skin, Black Kin; Speaking the Unspeakable." The installation also billed itself as an "intervention into the Barbados Museum Galleries," indicating that it constituted an intervention into received history (that is, the stories we have been told about our past, the official version of the West Indies). Specifically, as the title, "White Skin, Black Kin" makes clear, it challenged the supposedly impermeable boundaries between these categories (black and white, us and them) which have been inscribed as fundamental in the official historical narrative. Gardener's work acknowledges that it's not that simple. With Brathwaite, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, she reminds us of the plain fact of creolization. Which means that in fact the story of "white" in the Caribbean is as much the story of "black" and "brown," and vice versa. Creole history is essentially collective.
And this (shared) history also obsesses the writers of Caribbean, who revisit and rewrite the story of the past over and over again from different angles: the version of the winners, the losers, the silenced, the liars, the marginalized, the insiders, the outsiders. No one version tells the whole story: the "truth" of Caribbean history is a composite. Gardner's intervention makes a space for one set of marginal players in the drama of plantation society: creole women and girls, black, white and all combinations in between. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the story of such women was, if at all, told by male narrators and generally mentioned just in passing. The history of women, especially white creole women, has until recently received scant serious attention by Caribbean history in its colonial or current manifestations. The exhibition tried to address this disparity, emphasizing "the hybrid identities" of white creole women, and the degree of interculturation and interrelation with black and brown creole women in plantation society.
Received history, the official version, preferred to keep them separate, and to distinguish between white creoles and white European women. Early accounts bemoaned the degeneration of whites in the tropics. For Lady Nugent, writing from Jamaica at the start of the nineteenth century, on arrival Europeans of "the upper ranks ... become indolent and inactive, regardless of every thing but eating, drinking and indulging themselves" (1966: 98). The lower ranks of course were much worse. The white creole "ladies" seem to her a stupid lot (91), happiest when disputing and gossiping (197) or discussing goods with the shopkeepers (179), and maintaining their households "in the Creole style": that is, with numerous black servants "running and lying about" (76). How could they be less than frivolous, muses Frances Lanaghan in her description of Antigua in 1844, since they are socialized with blacks; hence
[white creole] girls of fourteen could find no other amusement than, seated upon the floor, amid their negro attendants, to pass their time in eating "sling" [wet sugar], or sucking sugar-canes, while their listless mothers lay stretched upon their couch, leaving their children to learn their alphabet as best they could. (vol.2: 200-1)
And speaking of alphabets and language, the planter's wife Mrs Carmichael notes in 1833 the widespread use of "negro language" among the white population in St. Vincent, adding that creole children "have it almost as bad as the blacks" (76-7). So the actuality of Caribbean creole society, even then, plainly undermined the reassuring colonial myth of absolute and intrinsic distinction of races and cultures. Such evidence of hybridity flew in the face of the "moral" reason for being in the West Indies: to civilize and Christianize the savages. Instead, a new strain of "white negro" (Carmichael's term) was emerging and this had to be condemned.
The worst features of degraded native/creole womanhood are distilled in the figure of the madwoman in the attic of Charlotte Brontë's English novel, Jane Eyre (1847). Rochester's Jamaican wife appears in the novel as an it: a wild animal ("a clothed hyena") with "shaggy locks." She is tall and mannish, dark of complexion and with "bloated" facial features. A crudely painted gothic lunatic, her madness as far, as we are told, is the result of "the fiery West Indian place" of her birth and her "impure, depraved" nature as a result of tainted blood (descended from "idiots and maniacs through three generations"). This unnatural hybrid ("a white negro"), to be locked up like a slave and conveniently killed off so that the Englishman can marry the nice, pure English Jane, struck Rhys a flesh and blood white creole (brought up to revere English books) as wrong. "I wanted," she admitted, "to write her a life." The result was Wide Sargasso Sea: In restoring the white creole woman's voice to West Indian literary history, Rhys symbolically finds a way to let Antoinette come home, at last, to the island.
A few more observations; and one last analogy with visual culture. At the Barbados Community College display of fine arts by students in May, I was struck by Pamela Lewis's massive relief sculpture in clay, a tribute to women of the Caribbean. Of the figures she had depicted to represent female achievement across the whole wide region, two were from Dominica, and one was the writer, Phyllis Shand Allfrey. This reminded me that Rhys's achievement was not singular. Between the 1930s and the 1960s when women's voices hardly figured in the literature of the West Indies, Dominica alone nurtured three significant talents. Rhys was born in 1890, Elma Napier in 1892 and Phyllis Shand Allfrey in 1915. All white, they were nevertheless quite different women.
Elma Napier (née Gordon-Cumming) was born in Scotland, spent nine years Australia with her first husband, and later married Lennox Napier with whom she traveled extensively, settling finally in Dominica in 1932, where they spent the rest of their lives. Active in local politics, Napier was the first woman elected to a West Indian Legislative Council in 1940, pioneered cooperative efforts, village boards and self-help programs. She published several novels in the 1930s, and contributed to the regional literary journal Bim during the 1950s and 1960s until her death in 1973.
Allfrey was born in Dominica, the second daughter of the English Crown Attorney and his French Caribbean wife. She lived in England for some time, becoming involved with the British Labor Party, before returning to Dominica and co- founding the Dominica Labor Party. In 1958, she was elected a Minister in the West Indies Federation government. After the collapse of the Federation, she and her husband ran the Dominica Herald and later the weekly Star newspaper until the 1980s. As well as poetry, short stories, a novel and essays, she also wrote an unfinished political novel.
Like Rhys, Napier and Allfrey used their fiction to challenge an exploitative colonial mindset and to counter negative portrayals of Dominican creole women. Aware of the history of English racism and exploitation of blacks in the colonies, Teresa in Napier's A Flying Fish Whispered (1938) loathes expatriate and colonial administrators who have no real commitment to the island beyond making money, and who construct a creole like herself as "a savage West Indian" (103). And Joan in Allfrey's The Orchid House (1953) allies herself with the black population in their labour and political reform struggles, seeing class rather than race as the root of internal division in the island. But the most striking commonality in the work of all three writers is the the attachment of the creole woman for her tropical landscape, which exercises a powerful influence. Compare for instance Rhys's Antoinette embracing the earth as does Rhys herself in Smile Please (1979) with the white creole in Napier's Duet in Discord (1936: 8-9) craving the Dominican landscape in with a "love that has something almost physical about it, so that in moments of pain I have quite literally lain down full length and drawn solace from the ground." The writers share an exquisite and clearly informed depiction of the Dominican landscape in all its specificity. Other recurring issues in the texts are the gaps between various cultural groups that must be delicately negotiated; the problematic pull between Mother Country and island home; and the intimate yet fraught relationship of black and white women in the domestic realm.
Elaine Campbell notes parallels in the novels of Napier and Rhys, although according to her (1982: 92), Napier wrote to Alec Waugh in 1939 asking "who is Jean Rhys? I must try and read her.... None of us have ever heard of her." Rhys left Dominica around 1907, while Napier only arrived in the nineteen-thirties, and while they met once in Dominica in 1936, Napier – who Rhys referred to as a literary lady – does not seem to have registered who she was entertaining. Yet Campbell notes echoes of images central to Wide Sargasso Sea in Napier's earlier book, A Flying Fish Whispered. In any case, my purpose here is to suggest that Rhys is part of a tradition of early Dominican writing, which acknowledges "unhomeliness" even as it evinces a shared love and commitment, expressed in diff ways, to the place and its people. Perhaps in the discussion period, you can teach me about current writers and their traditions.
Of the three, only Rhys has achieved widespread international recognition. And perhaps why there is so much fighting about whom she "belongs" to. For, literary history is as riddled with politics as any other and not long after the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, critics were engaged in a debate about whether to class the text within a British or a French tradition, or whether it could really be called Caribbean. As a young-ish graduate at Oxford, I was in love with West Indian literature, Rhys's writing included. Imagine my alarm then when I read in Brathwaite's Contradictory Omens (1974) that by virtue of the writer's and the central character's race and cultural distance from the majority of black West Indians, Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea was not an authentically West Indian novel. The political context, of course, was different then; so over twenty years later (1995, 75), Brathwaite confesses to "some sense of chagrin" about his comments on Rhys, "since in the 60s we were so race-consciously fragmented, some of us at least fought over the importance/value/significance of" Wide Sargasso Sea. It seems to me far more productive to adopt Brathwaite's spirit of inclusiveness, as discussed in his theory of creolization. It is Brathwaite, after all, who feels that the goal of art is a "meaningful federation of cultures": "there is no 'one West Indian voice'" (1969, 270; italics mine).
Today, as we celebrate the writer and her work at home in the island, such critical quibbles seem ridiculous. Rhys's literary legacy is important for many reasons and I've tried to suggest some. Her fictions sensitize us to the complex ways in which different groups at different times have tried – or not – to be at home in the islands. They recreate the peculiarly insider/outsider perspective of the white creole, and their multiply layered visions of connections fill a gap in the historical record. They subtly reveal the crucial – if frequently resented – interdependence of black, brown and white women in the Caribbean and the interculturation that was the result. They unsparingly examine the cost of colonial and patriarchal domination. They contribute to a Dominican tradition of early women's writing, and indeed to a regional tradition: Olive Senior's poem to Rhys is the homage of one writer to another, united in their shared love of the Caribbean and of the writer's craft that brings it to life. For her, Rhys imaged as a work has enabled "dark voyagers like me" to sail "to safe harbour/in the islands." And her fictions evoke the aching beauty of this timeless land with passion and consummate skill.
The past can never fully be recaptured or redressed; it can only be revisited. Rhys's work facilitates such imaginative revisiting and, to quote Stuart Hall, enables "a different sense of our relationship to the past, and thus a different way of thinking about cultural identity." Let us honour her memory, welcome her home, by fully engaging with her writing in the next few days and long after.
© Evelyn O'Callaghan, 2004.
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