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In this paper I would like to test the idea of hybridity as being a transgressive cultural tool in the study of Caribbean, showing its engagement with the category of 'race', that still remains the major criterion for the structuring of identities in the region. I would do so analyzing the representations of hybridity in two contemporary Caribbean novels: Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys and La Migrations Des Coeurs (transl. into English as Windward Heights, 1996 by Guadaloupean Maryse Condé.
I will use Jean Rhys's Caribbean classic with its multiple dynamics of 'belonging' as the sounding board for Condé's trajectories of hybridity. My paper will focus mainly on the female subjects through which the two authors explore the ambiguities and contradictions of the category of hybridity.
This will lead, eventually, to the analysis of both authors' attempts at rewriting the past out of the Imperialist authority, in fact each novel relaborates on an English Victorian classic, Jane Eyre and Wughtering Heights respectively, in order to aim at a different and productive experience of what is defined as 'Caribbean Creolization'.
Quoting Edouard Glissant, "the Caribbean are a multitude of relationships" mostly produced, shaped, either encouraged or prevented by the European colonizing powers. Apart from referring to the visual mark of miscegenation characterizing Caribbean people, terms like Métissage and Creolization have come to define theoretical approaches to the study of histories, languages, politics and cultures that take into account the myriads of ways of being Caribbean, reclaiming specificities while looking for contact zones among 'differences'.
The relevance of hybridity in the Caribbean is itself related to the significance of the "Creole" presence in the islands.The 'creole' originates from a combination of the two Spanish words 'criar' - to create, to imagine, and 'colon' - settler, into criollo, designating "someone born and raised in the Caribbean of no native descent". Although it has come to refer to different people in different islands at different times, generally the 'creole' has always been the most indicative product of Caribbean iterculturation and by far the figure that has most haunted its narrative imagery. Creole, is, however, a double-edged word; one that both does and does not assert a fixed identity and it both is and is not entangled in the logic of race.1
A case in point is the figure of the white Creoles, whose skin colour has historically prevented to be fully welcomed by the blacks, while their 'naturalisation' in the Caribbean has hindered an unproblematic inclusion in the West. They could 'pass' in both spaces, but nowhere fully.
Being a white Creole woman Jean Rhys has seen her position in the Caribbean literary tradition widely contested by critics. Edward Brathwaite, for instance, has stressed on the barriers between white West Indians and the racial and cultural mainstream, so that the texts of the former could not constitute a "truthful recognition of the situation".2 The suggestion of my paper is, instead, that we should move away from such fixed racial hierarchies for a better evaluation of the variety of Caribbean voices.
Maryse Condé, for instance, although belonging to what Brathwaite calls 'the racial mainstream' (as a black woman born and raised in Guadaloupe), has charted different migrant trajectories that locate her closer to Rhys than to many Black intellectuals of the French Caribbean. Like Rhys, Condé has left Guadaloupe soon for Ghana first and then for Paris and finally for New York, where she currently lives and teaches. Like Rhys's, again, her work has triggered the theoretical debate around Caribbean creolization, especially as it explores issues of racial and cultural hybridity in her fiction, choosing women to epitomise transgressions and aspiration to change.
Maryse Condé has interestingly associated Caribbean creolization to a mangrove swamp, stretching between sea and earth.3 Mangrove roots, in fact, do not necessarily precede the tree as the latter may shoot down new roots from its branches. This lack of correspondence between roots and trees refers for Condé to the impossibility of cultural genealogy or authenticity in the Caribbean. None the less, despite its lack of a recognizable roots/origins, Condé repeats the fishermen's definition of the mangrove as being "the roots of the sea", without which the sea "would have no meaning".4 This interesting definition of the mangrove reminds us of the peculiar significance of Caribbean hybridity, which is not to be intended as an easy amalgamation irrespective of its different origins, but as the proud affirmation of a complexity, a Creoleness without which the Caribbean would not exist (and without which, as a consequence, what we refer to as the West will not be the same).
Both Windward Heights and Wide Sargasso Sea have a female protagonist marked by an inescapable hybridity. Rhys explores and explodes in her novel both the unitary perspective of the original story of Jane Eyre and the supposed vantage point of the white Creole woman, untangling a whole landscape of tensions in and outside her protagonists, which makes it difficult to identify a stable ideological stand in the novel. Rhys chooses to portray the reality of the Caribbean from the perspective of two young people, Antoinette and Rochester, a white Creole woman and an Englishman, that get entangled in the muddy water of their differences without being able to bridge their gap of understanding (the metaphoric 'Wide Sargasso Sea' of the title)
Antoinette is the product of an "inbred, decadent and expatriate society".5 She is resented by the freed slaves and exploited by the English nouveaux riches ready to supplant the destitute planters. She appears as a fragmented, insecure and disoriented character, who internalises other people's languages and contradictory values. Her perception of racial relations is less based on skin colour than on the different cultures she is banned from: the black Creole traditions from which she is divided by history and the English cultural heritage made up only of those mythic tales of nobleness and courtesy she fails to measure up to. She is clearly trapped in a real as well as metaphorical childhood where small incidents of everyday life appears to be independent from the landscape of racial instability surrounding her. The narrating Antoinette still believes that her racial identity is simply a matter of choice, that through an act of will she can make herself belong to the black community she feels close to.
She lives split between a sensual, absentee and financially ruined white Creole mother, the caring and mysterious black nurse Christophine and the defiant black Tia, her 'failed' friend. It is interesting to note that all these women are at the same time wild, fierce spirits and victimised characters, and this doublemess is even more powerfully rendered since they are all part of the secret that Rochester tries hard yet vainly to grasp. For instance, Antoinette's mother Annette enacts a desperate femininity that makes her only apparently in charge of her emotional stability as well as of her financial status. In fact, after the fire set at Coulibri Estate Antoinette sees her mother surrendering to the kisses of a "fat black man" and getting "all soft and limp in his arms"(p. 85). In this ambivalent scene Rhys leaves the doubt on who is exploiting whom, as we come to know it from the child's biased and intransigent perspective. Rhys purposely lets the readers' judgment oscillate between Annette's supposed lasciviousness and her actual mental vulnerability that would make her the easy vehicle of black men's retaliation on the white planters.
Unlike her mother, Antoinette does not realise that her white Creole world is crumbling beneath her feet as she is not able to make connections between her family's financial crisis, her mother's isolation and Tia's hard feelings towards her. As critic Carine Mardorossian argues, in most of the novel "Antoinette's personal is not political".6
Rhys complicates the power and gender struggle even further in that Antoinette and her mother Annette are not simply 'colonised' by men and their status of victimage can by no means be equated with the violation black women in particular endured during and long after slavery. Annette, for instance, fears black people's harassment but she never relates their hatred to the historical circumstances of slavery she and her family were complicit in. Antoinette herself tends to dismiss her family's responsibilities in history, whether deliberately or unintentionally, as we realise from one of her first exchange with Rochester: "white cockroach is what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders" (p. 64 the emphasis is mine).
Rhys's intention is, thus, to introduce a complex power structure, where the same individual enacts domination and resistance, both for different purposes and in different contexts. She is not interested in a victim / victor opposition, but in a continuous game of repulsion and seduction, where both try to pull each other into each other's world, resolving their contradictions and misunderstandings by exiling the other into what is for her/him a 'foreign place'.
Antoinette goes through various stages of racial identity in Rochester's eyes, since the more she is marooned7 the more he sees her as a hybrid creature, exposing elements of blackness in her features and attitudes. While seeing her wife's body as a site of scrutiny and investigation, her sexual desire as more and more dangerous and her femininity deceitful, Rochester also questions Antoinette's racial belonging: "Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either" (p. 40).
Strangely enough, whereas Antoinette sees herself as a hybrid belonging nowhere fully, in her husband's eyes she is a true creature of the Tropics and so an ambivalent, excessive, indolent, melodramatic, languid and sickening as the landscape she inhabits:
Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green, the flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near (p. 42 the emphasis is mine).
It is interesting to note that Rochester feels threatened the most precisely by the excess of those very colours - blue, purple, green and red - that young Antoinette had used to stitch the roses and her name on her canvas while at the convent and that in a way had come to signify her identity
...we are cross-stitching silk roses on a pale background. We can colour the roses as we choose and mine are green, blue and purple. Underneath I will write my name in fire red, Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount Calvary Convent, Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1839 (p. 29 the emphasis is mine).
As said, Antoinette's precarious position is aggravated by the 'darkening' process in her husband's eyes. However her colour crossings are a function of the change in gender 'status' she undergoes in Rochester's eyes. He recognizes signs of blackness in A. physiognomy only after she transgresses the boundaries of the Victorian ideology of femininity, that is when she instigates a night of passionate love-making by the use of the obeah draught. This drives Rochester to comment on her resemblance with the 'black' servant Amélie:
For a moment she looked very much like Amélie. Perhaps they are related, I thought. It's possible; it's even probable in this damned place (p. 81).
Similarly, Amélie's sexual forwardness results in her undergoing a similar process of racialisation. After he sleeps with her, Rochester remarks that "her skin was darker, her lips thicker that I had thought" (p. 89).
Despite his caution, the hybridity that Rochester perceives in his wife attracts and not only repels him. We can see it in one allusion he makes in the second part of the novel:
She'll loosen her black hair, and laugh and coax and flatter (a mad girl. She'll not care who she's loving). She'll moan and cry and give herself as no sane woman would - or could. Or could (p. 106).
It is my view that in the above extract the use of 'could', that Rhys herself puts in italics, implies Rochester's awareness of the constraints of the English - sane - model of womanhood. This attaches to the idea of cultural creolisation opposed to the exclusively racial identification; an idea that underlies the entire novel. Who can actually tell whether a sane woman - of whatever colour - would behave like Antoinette once creolised far from the dictates and hypocrisies of the Victorian moral code? As the next quotation also shows, Rhys uses Rochester's own comments to disrupt the opposition sanity / madness in the novel:
I was exhausted. All the mad conflicting emotions had gone and left me wearied and empty. Sane (p. 111 the emphasis is mine).
Again, the use of the adjective 'sane' seems to belie a 'slippage' of meaning, that is Rochester's doubtful attitude despite the self-confidence he is projecting outwards. After the heated confrontation with Christophine he finally wins over her, forcing her to leave, regaining in this way control and self-confidence. Nevertheless, the reason and lucidity he recovers are synonymous of emptiness, a void of emotions, an exhaustion that places him among those unable to feel passions. We sense a certain dissatisfaction from him, right when he should be enjoying his final victory over the mischievous world that had dared to defy him.
Another strategy Rhys uses to counter the idea of a fixed racial "belonging" in the novel is the use of racial stereotypes, that are constantly manipulated to challenge assumed positions of knowing, so that in the end no one stereotype is at any point exhaustive. For instance, Antoinette is the 'white cockroach'(p. 64) ridiculed and pitied by the blacks and the 'real' whites alike, on the other hand she too cannot help dismissing her servant Christophine in the stereotypical colonialist way:
I stared at her, thinking, 'but how can she know the best thing for me to do, this ignorant, obstinate old Negro woman, who is not certain if there is such a place as England?'(p. 70)8
Besides that, expressions such as "white nigger" or "black Englishwoman" used by the black characters to address Antoinette and Annette, also refute the blood-based notion of racial identity - that Rochester exemplifies - by questioning the regime of visibility with which race is usually associated.
From the examples given above, the representation of race in Wide Sargasso Sea seems to challenge its acceptance as the foundation for difference and, through its crossing with variables such as class, gender and culture, it also exposes its constructedness, which reflects again the multiple and often contradictory mappings of identities in the Caribbean.
Rhys's use of 'crossing' in the novel leads us to the pivotal sentence by Maryse Condé: "There are no races, only cultures",9 which may well be interpreted as the ideal catalyst for Condé's Caribbean rewriting of Wuthering Heights: La Migration des Coeurs (1995).
Indeed, Rhys's trajectory of hybridity is somehow halted as her novel exemplifies a kind of "failure of creolisation",10 resulted from the characters' incapability to communicate. As Italian critic Cristina Fumagalli notes, in fact, "the only thing [Rhys's characters] seem to share is a profound sense of alienation and isolation".11
Condé somehow recollects the bits and pieces of Rhys's trajectory of attempted creolization in La Migration, which is a contemporary rewriting 'with a difference', since, contrary to Wide Sargasso Sea, it does not intend to be a correction of Bronte's novel.
Condé rewrites Heathcliff as Rayzé - the Creole name for the barren heaths and cliffs - and Catherine as the mulatto Cathy, both described as hot-blooded and temperamental individuals.
Besides Rayzé and Cathy, many details in the novel address the multiplicity of identities in the Caribbean, which complicates and distances La Migration from its original source. First and foremost the mobile setting, shifting among the islands of Cuba, Guadaloupe, Marie-Galante and Dominica, all troubled by the post-Emancipation time and, although in different ways, by political uprisings marking the gradual but inevitable ruin of the old plantation system (issues Rhys herself had touched on in her novel).
Condé pushes the narrative structure of both Wuthering Heights and Wide Sargasso Sea a bit further, especially as she substitutes to the latter's two narrators, more than ten narrators of different sex, class, race and cultural backgrounds, who are also invested with the authority of historical commentary. Consequently, the novel has no one linear historical outlook, but rather offers "little pieces of incomplete narratives, little islands of knowledge spread over many different places".12
What I would like to stress on is that, regardless the structural hybridity and complexity of the novel, Condé denies instead to miscegenation the power to destabilise racial oppositions. Condé's is a world where the crossing of racial barriers does not constitute a threat to the colour hierarchy since the process of racial and cultural creolization is coopted by hegemonic discourse.
For instance, regardless Cathy's 'pass for white skin', the black and white communities alike will always put her back where they think she belongs.
All this high society made merry with Cathy as if they had not noticed her colour and Cathy smiled as she did not know that they would never forgive her for what she was (p. 29) (the emphasis is mine).
In order to denounce the Caribbean obsession with racial genealogy, for which even 'passing' becomes a futile gesture, La Migration makes extensive reference to the inevitability of 'blood' and the daunting presence of the ancestors. Rayzé harshly accuses Cathy of 'betraying her blood' and pities her for marrying the béké Aymeric (The white resident in the islands, of pure European descent), because "you can't lie to your own blood. You can't!" (p. 82). In this way Cathy stretches painfully between the awareness of her African ancestry and her acquired 'white' status, which results in a process of 'whitening' on her wedding day and only surrenders at the moment of her death, when her features appear to be undergoing a "darkening" process:
(...) It was if her black blood could no longer be contained and was taking its revenge. Victorious, it was flooding through her. It thickened her facial features, distended her mouth, giving a mauve touch to her lips, and with the stroke of a pencil redefined the arch of her eyebrows (p. 84).
I am arguing here that the emphasis on the physicality of race, especially in the case of Cathy's "whitening" and later "darkening", only apparently reinforces a type of racial essentialism, (that is the idea that you cannot escape your 'real' colour no matter how hard you try). It seems, instead, to question the regime of visibility in which our understanding of race is attached, in the same way as Rhys had linked race with gender and sexuality describing Antoinette's 'darkening' in the eyes of her husband.
The same strategy is at play all over the novel, as Condé relishes in describing all the most rooted stereotypes on blackness: black men's machismo and promiscuity and mulatto women's lust and irrationality that years of 'creolization' in a béké environment will never fully mitigate. The author succeeds in puzzling the readers, as she confronts them with their own most unconfessed fascinations on the Caribbean, leaving them half intrigued half disturbed by what it is perceived as 'political incorrectness'.
These very stereotypes result in Cathy's identity crisis. Like Antoinette, in fact, she is bound to 'choose' between the loyalty to her African ancestry, that Rayzé fully embodies, and her desire to integrate with the white society, represented by Aymeric, as we can see from the following passage:
It's as if there were two Cathys inside me and there always have been, ever since I was little. One Cathy who has come straight from Africa, vices and all. The other Cathy who is the very image of her white ancestors, pure, dutiful, fond of order and moderation. But this second Cathy is seldom heard, and the first always get the upper hand (p. 29 the emphasis is mine).
Like Antoinette's, Cathy's racial 'belonging' is already there despite herself, set outside her in fixed gender terms. She is only expected to choose where to locate her allegiance.
Like the end of Wide Sargasso Sea, La Migration is left open, with the newborn Anthuria, daughter of the second Cathy and the second Rayzé.
Contrary to the rest of her family, Anthuria's genealogy will not be easily traced back, since Rayzé decides to keep his former relationship with Cathy secret, in this way safeguarding the child from the obsession with racial lineage that has destroyed the other women in her family. This will potentially let her find her own way of transgressing the opposites of black and white, race and gender, love and death, reaching her own balance in the idea of 'creolization' itself.
I would argue that it is precisely the focus on fixed categories of race that allows Condé's radical vision of hybridity to flourish. According to her idea of a Caribbean relational identity, in La Migration Condé shows that race is a function of other variables such as class, gender, culture and that especially someone's complexion accrues meaning only in the specific social context where people learn 'how and what to see'.
From the analysis and the comparison of the two novels, we can conclude that both Rhys and Condé interrogate on the possibility of a productive idea of hybridity, sharing Homi Bhabha's view that "hybridity is the third space which enables other positions to emerge". Hybridity seems to be never achieved in Rhys and Condé's fiction whereas, in fact, it is already there, in that space preceding the subject's racial identification by others. Indeed, in both the novels considered creolization is intended not as what follows, but as what constitutes the idea of race. This idea seems to survive both the incommunicability between men and women and the identifications that men - Rochester as well as Rayzé and Aymeric - impose on the female 'hybrid' subjects, Antoinette and the two Cathy respectively. I would like to conclude by stating that, eventually, the subversive racial logic the two authors seem to offer, at different stages of their trajectories, is one in which the issue is not whether but when and in which context someone is black or white.
1 "Of Whatever Color: (dis) Locating a Place for the Creole in the 19th Century French Literature" by Chris Bongie, in Francophone Postcolonial.
2 Braithwaite, Edward, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean, Mona: Savacou Publications, p. 38, quoted by Elaine Savory Fido in "The Jean Rhys Debate: A Forum", Wasafiri, 22, p. 69.
3 The idea of the mangrove as metaphor for the intricate tangle of Creole identities is the core of another novel by Condé La Traversée de la Mangrove ("Crossing the Mangrove"), Paris, Mercure de France, 1989. For an in depth analysis of the imagery in the novel see Malena, Anne, "The Mobility of the Self in La Traversée de la Mangrove", in The Negotiated Self The Dynamics of Identity in Francophone Caribbean Narrative, Peter Lang publishing, Inc., New York, 1999, 67-91.
4 Heather Smith, "'Roots beyond Roots': Heteroglossia in Myal and Crossing the Mangrove", in Small Axe, n. 12 (on line)
5 Wyndham, Francis, "Intoduction to the First Edition (1966)", Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea, Penguin Books, London, 1966. (All the following quotations are from the above edition and are included parenthetically in the text.)
6 Mardorossian, Carine, "Shutting Up the Subaltern, or, Opacity as Obeah in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea", p. 8, courtesy of the author. The essay is now published in Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters 22.2 (1999): 602-622.
7 The term 'marooned' is interestingly repeated in the novel with a double implication. The first is the reference to a defiant and strong personality - the 'maroons' were descendants of slaves who fled to the interior of the islands to fight the British - that both Antoinette and Annette in their own way possess. The second refers to the condition of economical/social/psychological disempowerment that leave them at the mercy of men, as we can see from Annette, who abandons herself to her black caretaker. Fearing of being bound to a similarly 'marooned' woman, Rochester will anxiously assure himself he cannot have feeling for his wife because she is too different from him
8 Ironically, Christophine is not the only 'ignorant' woman doubting on the reality of England. Once secluded in Thornfield Hall, Antoinette will constantly ask Grace Pool to take her to England, where she imagines she would win her husband back.
9 Quoted in Mardorossian, "Maryse Condé's Windward Heights: A Rewriting of Postcolonial revisionism", p. 3., courtesy of the author. A version of this paper is forthcoming in Maryse Condé: By Way of Introduction. Eds. Sally Barbour and Gerise Herndon. Africa World Press.
10 Evelyne O'Callaghan, Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women, London, Macmillan, 1993, p.34, quoted in Fumagalli, Maria Cristina, "Maryse Condé's La Migration des Coeurs, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and (the possibility of) Creolization", Ibid., p. 67.
12 Rosello, Mireille, "Caribbean Insularization of Identities in Maryse Condés Work: from En attendant le bonheur to Les derniers trios mages", Callaloo 18.3 (1995): 565-578, pp. 572-73.
© Marika Preziuso, 2004.
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