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"Do you consider yourself a West Indian?"
She shrugged. "It was such as long time ago when I left."
"So you don't think of yourself as a West Indian writer?"
Again, she shrugged, but said nothing.
"What about English? Do you consider yourself an English writer?"
"No, I'm not, I'm not! I'm not even English."
"What about a French writer?" I asked.
Again she shrugged and said nothing.
"You have no desire to go back to Dominica?"
"Sometimes," she said.1
In this paper, I would like to explore the depiction of Dominica in Jean Rhys' early short stories, "Trio", "Again in the Antilles", "Mixing the Cocktail" in Left Bank, and more substantially, in Voyage in the Dark. I chose this topic of the representation of Dominica in her early writings because it reveals not only her relationship to the native island but also her unique position in modernist writing, as well as her complex cultural location.
When Rhys was under the "patronage" of Ford Madox Ford and wrote short stories for the Left Bank and Other Stories, in Paris in 1927, the strong inter-relationship between primitive modernism and mass entertainment was furthered by the arrival of Jazz in 1917, when negrophilia, the obsession with black culture, was prevalent in the city. The intensity of negrophilia in France in the 1920s was associated with a crisis of national cultural identity emerging from World War I that constituted a trauma for European countries, generating a prevalent sense of the corruption of nationhood. During this period of cultural introspection, black arts appealed to French people who were seeking alternative modes of expression in the modern world. In works such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Gullaume: Sculputures Negre (1917), Henri Clozat and Andre Leval: L'Art Negre et l'Art Oceanien (1919), what were perceived to be precivilized societies were elevated in the critiques of the barbarity of the war, and black culture was associated with purity and childlike innocence.2
This trend of primitivism remained in modernist art, and was further developed by the post-war cultural anxiety, with the need of the image of the "other". Magazines such as the Revue Negre helped to propel a mythologized construction of the black 'race' which served to reinforce the French sense of self. This problematic aspect of primitive modernism can be perceived in the choice of the Prix Goncourt for literature in 1921, which was awarded to the novel Batouala, by Martiquan novelist, Rene Maran in 1921.3
In this context, Rhys was introduced to the literary scene by the publication of Left Bank, in which Ford strategically places Rhys as an exotic writer from a new world who can interpret the old world in innovative ways. In the preface of the Left Bank, Ford comments on Rhys as follows:
And coming from the Antilles, with a terrifying insight and a terrific - an almost lurid! - passion for stating the case of the underdog, she had let her pen loose on the Left Banks on the Old World.... What struck me on the technical side...was the singular instinct for form possessed by this young lady.... Her business was with passion, hardship, emotions: the locality in which these things are endured is immaterial. So she hands you the Antilles with its sea and sky - 'the loveliest, deepest sea in the world - the Caribbean!' - the effects of landscape on the emotions and passions of a child being so penetrative....4
In his remark, the words such as instinct, passion, emotion, and child, the very words that were used to categorize the nature of the black people, are used in order to describe Rhys as well as her writings. What he takes as a quality in her writing is a new, innocent way of writing the "old world". Ford accentuates the exotic characteristics in her writings, but in doing so, he constructs Rhys as the other of the European culture and demonstrates his unconscious stereotypes of the races that postures himself as somehow superior and objective.
In the Left Bank, three short stories depict the image of the Antilles: "Trio", "Mixing the Cocktail" and "Again the Antilles". Trio is a brief sketch of a night at a Montparnasse restaurant where the narrator encounters her three "compatriots from the Antilles": One man of a coal black skin, a young attractive girl with lighter complexion whom the narrator assumes that she had white blood in her vein, and a fat coffee-coloured woman with the Martinique turban. By seeing them, the narrator experiences the home sickness. The narrator describes the girl using stereotypical images:
The fuzzy, negress' hair was exactly the right frame for her vulgar, impudent, startlingly alive little face: the lips were just thick enough to be voluptuous, the eyes with an expression half cunning, half intelligent.... supple, slender, a dancer from the Thousand and One Nights....5
However, the girl sings, ironically, "F'en ai m-a-r-r-e," in other words, "I am fed up" as if she is fed up with the narrator's framing description of her.6
According to Sue Thomas, these short stories intrinsically use the discourses of pre-established images of Dominica by travel writings,7 in which people in Dominica are portrayed to be under the "enervating influence of the sultry climate".8 Futhermore, they demonstrate the effects of "lack of robustness" and excessive appetites, especially for alcohol, sex,9 and spicy food; idleness; and luxurious life on the supposedly biological features of gait, complexion, eyes, and intelligence.10 In "Mixing the Cocktail", the narrator uses the myth of the pirate Morgan's treasure, the blue sea, drowsiness, the obeah: the tropes that were used to describe Dominica by the travelers. "A wild place, Dominica. Savage and lost. Just the place for Morgan to hide his treasure in".11 But also, the narrator tells that she is described as "gone native" by her mother who is anxious to define her daughter as English. The mother exclaims: "you must break yourself of your habit of never listening. You have such an absentminded expression. Try not to look vague." As a result, the narrator feels cut off from her family as well as their Englishness, and she thinks:
I long to be like Other People! The extraordinary, ungetatable, oddly cruel Other People, with their way of wantonly hurting and then accusing you of being thin-skinned, sulky, vindictive or ridiculous. All because a hurt and puzzled little girl has retired into her shell.12
On the other hand, "Again the Antilles" is a story of a quarrel between an editor of the Dominica Herald and Leeward Island Gazette, Papa Dom, and Mr Hugh Musgrave, a white plantation owner. Papa Dom is described as a "born rebel" and "a firebrand" and he "hated the white people, not being quite white, and he despised the black ones, not being quite black", while Mr Musgrave is regarded as a dear, but peppery, who is "neither ferocious nor tyrannical" as a plantation owner.13
When Papa Dom wrote an article, accusing Mr Musgrave for his atrocious act of tyranny, he misquotes a poem. Mr Musgrave takes his opportunity, pointing out that the poem that Papa Dom quotes was not from Shakespeare but from Chaucer, and comments:
It is indeed a saddening and a dismal thing that the names of great Englishman should be thus taken in vain by the ignorant of another race and colour.
Papa Dom is not discouraged by this and questions the authorship of the poem. He continues
I fail to see that it matters whether it is Shakespeare, Chaucer or the Marquis of Montrose who administers from down the ages the much-needed reminder and rebuke.
According to Sue Thomas, Papa Dom existed in reality but his characteristics are in contradiction to Rhys' portrayal. The real Papa Dom, Augustus Theodore Righton, was known to be nothing of the firebrand.14 However, it seems, by giving Papa Dom a different image and accentuating the conflict between the two racial groups, Rhys foregrounds the colonial situation of Dominica, which is far from the exotic image of Dominica portrayed by precedent travelogues. In her picture of the West Indies, she subverts the popular depiction of the tropics and refuses to surrender the prevalent image of her native island, however, these stories demonstrate her ambiguity and ambivalence with the people in the West Indies, where Rhys nevertheless preserves her stereotyping gaze.
Rhys does not write or use the West Indian image after the Left Bank. Although there are indirect allusions to the tropics in Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight, she does not use the West Indies as literary trope until the Voyage in the Dark, published in the inter-war period, 1934. In this work, Rhys sets the home of the semi-autobiographical heroine, Anna, to be an island of the West Indies. Although she does not directly mention the name of the island, the latitude and the longitude of the island is Dominica:
lying between 15 10' and 15 40'N. and 61 14' and 61 30'W. 'A goodly island and something highland, but all overgrown with woods,' that book said. And all crumpled into hills and mountains as you would crumple a piece of paper in your hand - rounded green hills and sharply-cut mountains.15
Voyage in the Dark is a story of Anna Morgan, a nineteen-year-old chorus girl. Throughout the novel the warm memory of her childhood in a West Indian island is contrasted to a cold English landscape. Thereby juxtaposing the image of England and Dominica, Rhys seems to question the binary between the dream and reality, the issue of the mother country for the white creole colonial.
The story opens up by the depiction of Anna's alienation in England. For Anna, going to England was not just going to another country, but rather an experience of being born again:
it was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. the colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things you right down inside yourself was different...16
Anna does not get used to England, and especially when it is cold, she tries to pretend that she is still at home and remembers the smell of the island:
It was funny, but that was I thought about more than anything else - the smell of the streets and the smells of frangipani and lime juice and cinnamon and cloves, and sweets made of ginger and syrup, and incense after funerals or Corpus Christi procession, and the patients standing outside the surgery next door, and the smell of the sea breeze and the different smell of the land-breeze.17
The memory of the island and the smell is so pervasive that she feels "Sometimes it was as if I were back there and as if England were a dream" but "at other times England was the real thing and out there was the dream, but I could never fit them together." It indicates that the two worlds, Dominica and England, are considered as totally different places that cannot coexist on the surface of the same planet. Gradually, Anna gets used to England, except the cold and the monotonous cityscapes that looked exactly alike to one another. The landscape of the city that Anna depicts is swarmed with identical houses, streets and people, and she cannot hide her disappointment to find out the difference of the image of England that she had read from the books which she read as a child:
I had read about England ever since I could read - smaller meaner everything is never mind - this is London - hundreds thousands of white people white people rushing along and the dark houses all alike frowning down one after the other all alike all stuck together - the street like smooth shut-in ravines and the dark houses frowning down
This depiction of England and London is interestingly similar to that of her contemporary writers from the West Indies. For instance, V.S. Naipaul depicts London as the city where everyone shuts their doors behind their backs (Mimic Men), and Samuel Selvon (Lonely Londoners) does it as a city where people with pale stricken faces swarm like insects. The disappointed love for the motherland (England) is not only experienced by Rhys but similarly with other West Indian writers and it is not specifically the experience of the white creole.
The alienation in England where people keep themselves behind closed doors stays as her impression of the country:
The white furniture, and over the bed the picture of the dog sitting up begging - Loyal Heart. I got into bed and lay there looking at it and thinking of that picture advertising the Biscuits Like Mother makes, as Fresh in the Tropics as in the Motherland.... There was a little girl in a pink dress eating a large yellow biscuit studded with currents.... There was a tidy green tree and shiny pale-blue sky... and a high, dark wall behind the little girl... But it was the wall that mattered. And that used to be my idea of what England was like. 'And it is like that, too,' I thought.18
The binary opposition of England and Dominica is intensified in the confrontation of Hester and Francine; the former incarnates England whereas the latter incarnates Dominica. Hester is the stepmother of Anna whom Anna's father, Gerald, brought from England. For Anna, Hester represents Englishness:
She has clear brown eyes which stuck out of her head if you looked at her sideways, and an English lady's voice with a sharp, cutting edge to it. Now that I've spoken you can hear that I'm a lady. I have spoken and I suppose you now realize that I'm an English gentlewoman. I have my doubts about you. Speak up and I will place you at once. Speak up, for I fear the worst. That sort of voice.
The relationship between the two is awkward since Hester is dubious about the racial background of Anna's mother and despises her family on her mother's side. Hester also voices the English or European fear of degeneration, that the European settlers are degraded and dishonored in many respects if the family stays for five generations in the tropics, and that they become closer to native and lose English traits, regress back into barbarism and are thus inferior to the English people. Hester hates Anna's mother's side uncle, Uncle Bo, whom she thinks is rather Uncle "Boozy", and who has illegitimate children all over the island:
A gentleman! With illegitimate children wandering about all over the place called by his name.... But I gave Ramsaya a piece of mind one day I spoke out and I said, "My idea of a gentleman, an English gentleman doesn't have illegitimate children.... How I always disliked him!...19
In fact, Hester despises Anna's mother's family for they are fifth generation in the West Indies, however, she protests that they hate her and claims that she is the victim. Anna accuses Hester for thinking her mother was a colored, a term for a creole with mixed racial background.
'Unfortunate propensities,' she said. 'Unfortunate propensities which were obvious to me from the first. But considering everything you can't help them. I always pitied you. I always thought that considering everything you were much to be pitied.' I said, 'how do you mean, "considering everything"?' 'You know exactly what I mean, so don't pretend.' 'You're trying to make out that my mother was coloured,' I said. 'You always did try to make that out. And she wasn't.'20
Hester's distancing from her mother's side of the family, who once were slave owners, demonstrates the anxiety of the degeneration and regression firmly believed at that time: that Europeans are corrupted by living under the tropical climate and, in generations, "going native" was a general view of the people on the settlers. This is the reason why Hester pities her, demonstrating that she is the superior being capable of judging Anna and Anna cannot escape this fate.
The gulf between Anna and Hester is widened by the confrontation of Hester and Francine, a black servant in the family. Although Francine is the servant, she is the one who always takes care of Anna. It is Francine who is near Anna and watches over her. Anna, when wounded, hears the buzz of the city, listening to the voices of people passing in the street, wishes to be black: "I wanted to be black, I always wanted to be black. I was happy because Francine was there.... Being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad."21
Anna's attachment to Francine is close to the one she has for her own mother, but her attachment is disapproved by Hester who believes in the racial and class divide and fears that Anna is turning into Francine. Francine teaches Anna songs and stories, something which feminists like Trin-Minha refer to as subversive forms of patriarchal linear history that connect to orality and the circular time of women:
She was always laughing, but when she sang it sounded sad. Even very gay, quick tunes sounded sad. She would sit for a long while singing to herself and beating tambou lele -. ...when she wasn't working Francine would sit on the doorstep and I liked sitting there with her. Sometimes she told me stories, and at the start of the story she had to say 'Timm, timm,' and I had to answer 'Bois Seche.'22
Anna's attachment for Francine is fortified by Francine's teaching stories and songs, and Anna confides in Francine when she has her first period:
I don't know how old she was and she didn't know either. Sometimes they don't. But anyhow she was a bit older than I was and when I was unwell for the first time it was she who explained to me, so that it seemed quite all right and I thought it was all in the day's work like eating and drinking. But then she went off and told Hester, and Hester came and jawed away at me, her eyes wandering all over the place. I kept saying 'No rather not...' But I began to feel awfully miserable, as if everything were shutting up around me and I couldn't breathe. I wanted to die.23
It seems that Francine is the one who is connected to the place of chora, a term for a womb in Kristeva, also the orality or the physical domain of Anna. Anna is, however, sensible to realize the issues of race that divided Anna from Francine, and Anna knew that of course Francine disliked her because she was white; and that she would never be able to explain to Francine that she hates being white.24
To be with Francine, and in the circular time that is described as jouissance in Kristeva, is forbidden to her because she is white and she knows that she cannot make Francine understand her desire to be black because they are totally divided by a discourse that is based on categorization which creates myths based on differences. In this sense, Rhys demonstrates the deep fissure created by colonialism and she refutes the idea of easy reconciliation despite the fact that her heroine feels more akin to the culture of the oppressed. In doing so, she does not reiterate the modernist's representation of black culture as European ID in Freudian terms, or a dark side of the modern European man's psyche. Anna knows she is white and being white means to her to be subsumed in the linear time: "being white is getting like Hester, and all the things you get - old and sad and everything. I kept thinking, 'No...No...No...' And I knew that day that I'd started to grow old and nothing could stop it."25
Therefore, Anna is torn between Hester and Francine: she prefers Francine over Hester but knows she cannot get closer to her because of the racial and social divide, whereas she hates Hester but she knows she is in her racial group where she feels alienated. If Hester represents England, one can say that Francine represents Dominica for Anna, the place where she loves to belong but cannot belong. The figure of mother/land is an absence: just as Anna's real mother is dead, the maternal link to the land is lost. Francine and Hester are figures of substitute mothers but they cannot substitute what is lost for her. Towards the end, after she has an abortion, Anna dreams of crossing the sea, and going back to Dominica:
I dreamt that I was on a ship. From the deck you could see small islands - dolls of islands - and the ship was sailing in the dolls' sea, transparent as glass. Somebody said in my ear, 'That's your island that you talk such a lot about.' And the ship was sailing very close to an island, which was home except that the tree were all wrong. These were English trees, their leaves trailing in the water. I tried to catch hold of a branch and step ashore, but the deck of the ship expanded.26
What she dreams is her native island, Dominica, although the trees are wrong and they are English trees. She attempts to go back to her motherland by holding to the branch of one of the English trees, however, the the deck of the ship expands and prevents her from landing. Then, she hears that somebody has fallen overboard, and sees a child coffin in which the boy bishop, "a little dwarf with a bald head" with "a priest's robes and a large blue ring on his third finger" is sitting. He is alive , and commences the summoning, saying "In nomine Patris, Filii..." Anna thinks that she ought to kiss the ring but she cannot take her mind off from someone who has fallen overboard. Then she notices that the boy bishop has large light eyes in a narrow cruel face rolled like a doll. The bishop could be a caricatural representation of the church which justified slavery. Anna still tries to get ashore hopelessly, walking among confused figures, feeling powerless and tired. Then the dream rises into a climax of meaninglessness, fatigue and powerlessness, with the deck of the ship heaving up and down. After that, she keeps dreaming about the sea again and again.
As it can be seen from this dream scene, Anna cannot go back to her home. Her return is refused in her dream as well as in her mind just as she cannot be like Francine. In other words, Dominica is her lost home where she is denied, and she cannot, as the sign of her obedience, kiss the ring of the bishop, who represents Christianity, patriarchal order as well as England, and she tries incessantly to get ashore. She cannot go either way and is trapped in the sea. It seems that this dream scene reveals that Anna is not allowed to identify Dominica as her home, even though she loves it and she does not belong to England either.
Rhys' representation of Dominica does not deal with the reality of Dominica and the protagonists' representation is too much dependent on her childhood memory and that on mystical images adorned with legends, songs and tropical things. In doing so, Rhys does juxtapose the image of Dominica to the monotonous, depersonalised and isolated landscape of London but she does not do it in a way to mystify or exoticise Dominica, or criticize the city as European travelers have done. She identifies herself as a Dominican "I am the real West Indian, I am the fifth generation on my mother's side"; however, she cannot return to Dominica which she loves so much, nor can she become like Hester. Home is lost just as her mother is lost.
The state of exile and loss of the fixed national identity can be compared to the other modernist writers. However, Rhys' sense of home and exile is different from that of Hemingway, who considered exile as a beneficial experience that enriches one's life:
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.27
The dislocation and exile of Rhys seems to be different from that of the other modernists like Hemingway whose exile was race-neutral and inspiring. Rhys' position, situated between England and Dominica, recalls Said's definition of exile. According to Edward Said, once an organic bond between nationhood and citizenship is broken it cannot be reconstituted, and nationalism and exile become opposites that cannot be reconciled: "exile, unlike nationalism, is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being".28
For Said, the potential of exile lies not in its ability to praise the hardship of exile into poetic inspiration but in its ability to transform the foundation of humanistic belief. In this sense, Rhys' inability to identify with any nationality and her chosen state of in-betweeness can be considered as a statement against the logic of nationalism, or sharp boundaries that separates self from the other, in a critique of colonialism and the war. Rhys is labeled as an apolitical writer by earlier critics such as Al Alvarez.29 However, her chosen state of exile is a political statement that questions the prefabricated values of belonging at a time when nationalism was prevalent in Europe.
1 Plante, "A Remembrance," 275-76, quoted by Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys's Historical Imagination, Chapell Hill, London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995, p. 1.
2 Rubin, 'Modernist Primitivism', vol. 1, Boston, 1984, p. 2.
3 Antoine, Regis, La litterature franco-antillaise, Paris: Karthala, 1992, p 156.
4 Ford, F.M. "Preface to Left Bank" Tigers Are Better Looking with a selection from The Left Bank. London: Andre Deutsch, 1968, pp. 148-149.
5 Jean Rhys, "Trio", The Collected Short Stories, N.Y.: Norton & Company, 1992, p. 35.
7 Sue Thomas, The Worlding of Jean Rhys, Conneticut: Green Wood Press, 1999, p. 61.
8 Rees Abraham, comp., The Cyclopaedia, London: Longman, 1819, quoted in Thomas p. 54.
9 Stephan, Nancy. "Biology: Races and Proper Places", in Degeneration, ed. Edward Chamerland, N.Y: Columbia UP, 1985, p. 103, also mentioned in Thomas, p. 54.
10 Edward, Bryan, The History, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies, (London 1793-1801), vol. 2: 7-16.
11 Rhys, "Mixing the Cocktail", Ibid., p. 38.
13 Rhys, "Again the Antilles", Ibid., p. 40.
15 Rhys, Jean. Voyage in the Dark, N.Y: W.W. Norton, 1982, p. 17.
19 Voyage in the Dark, p. 148.
27 Hemingway, Ernest, A Moveable Feast, U.K: Penguin, 1973, epigraph, a letter to a freind 1950.
28 Said, Edward, Reflection on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 360.
29 Alvarez, Al, 'The Best Living Novelist', New York Times Review of Books, 17 March 1974.
© Midori Saito, 2004.
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