Abstracts

Without you Mother, who am I and where do I belong?’:
Mothering, Home and Identity in Kincaid’s Annie John
and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea”.

Caryn Rae Adams
Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature
The University of the West Indies, Barbados

West Indian women’s writing is primarily concerned with the relationships between women throughout the generations, and the mother-daughter paradigm is the most complex. In several texts, the relationship between the mother and daughter is portrayed as extremely problematic, leading to an early and unnatural severing of ties between the two. Exile, fragmentation and even madness can be the result. More often that not, the grandmother or an older female figure takes over the role of the mother – she becomes the nurturer, and unlike the mother, allows the daughter space to construct her own identity. The grandmother figure serves as a source of strength during this traumatic growing process.

Caribbean women’s writing insists that there is always more than one interpretation to a text, which not only allows for multi-faceted points of view, but encourages critical analysis. Within this dynamic, the personal relationship of mother and daughter mirrors the political relationship between motherland (colony/island) and Mother Country (colonial power/metropolis), where notions of home and identity are conflicted for the exile and expatriate. The motherland becomes symbolic of the biological mother, and the Mother Country in turn acts as a new kind of surrogate, almost like the grandmother figure. The female child seeks other support networks or mother substitutes, or engages in acts of defiance against the mother, most of which fail her on the path to positive self-construction.

The girl child’s inability to replace her biological mother results in a desire to escape the mother/motherland – in search of a new space, where defining herself outside the mother’s parameters is possible. Using feminist psychoanalysis, this paper aims to examine the negative results of these unnaturally severed ties between mothers and daughters, with special emphasis on Annie John and Wide Sargasso Sea. I intend to show that while escaping the motherland in order to construct a viable female identity may be ideal, one can never really escape the motherland, just as one can never really leave one’s biological mother. As the daughter must acknowledge her biological mother, she must recognize her ties to home. Any new self, though constructed elsewhere, will always have its origins in this familiar place, with its familiar people. The condition of self-imposed exile is therefore ambivalent, as the girl’s ties to the motherland will always bind, despite what this space represents in her troubled past.

Jamaica Kincaid and Jean Rhys, despite their obvious differences in age, race, class, country of origin and exile and period of writing, analyze similar issues. They both utilize an apparently plain yet complex and lyrical narrative style. They both challenge the reader to rethink assumptions and to challenge apparent truths. Psychoanalytic theories of mothering can shed new light on notions of home and identity can be understood without perpetuating a continual cycle of negative stereotypes which determine the island space as restrictive and limiting. I believe that understanding the mother-daughter paradigm fully, especially as it relates to ideals of home and self, can speak to Caribbean women’s situation in exile and perhaps point the way towards reconciliation with the motherland.

“Kneading/Needing the Myth: Female Masculinity
and Feminised Masculinity in
Mittelholzer’s Children of Kaywana”

Shala Alert
Department of Literatures in English
The University of the West Indies, Jamaica

“‘To the death, Grandfather… I’ll fight to the last breath,’ [Hendrickje] said. ‘The Van Groenwegels never run.’ […] ‘Did you hear your daughter? Her great-grandmother’s blood. Strong in her. Fire-blood, by God! This is Kaywana speaking’” (Mittelholzer 149-150). Masculinity in most societies, according to Thomas K. Fitzgerald, is defined more by what it is not (i.e. femininity) than by what it is; boys are bombarded with images that tell them which characteristics are undesirable, and they quickly learn to simulate “a culturally approved masculine pose... built on the negation of anything believed to be ‘womanly’” (114). Consequently, when femininity is defined as passive, weak, cowardly and deceitful, masculinity is defined as active, strong, brave, and honest. Masculinity is further tied to the male’s aggressive and victorious response to violence or the threat of violence (Fitzgerald 114). Gender therefore becomes a kind of mythical standard that is defined outside and independent of the actual lives and needs of men and women, and exists mainly to provide an arguably unattainable model for these men and women as opposed to merely reflecting their often necessarily transgressive lives. In Mittelholzer’s Children of Kaywana, Kaywana embodies what Judith Halberstam calls female masculinity, specifically in her active pursuit of a mate and her openly aggressive responses to violence and the threat of violence directed at her and her children, while her consort Adriansen van Groenwegel performs a comparatively passive feminised masculinity. The two come together and in their seed their contrasting, but equally transgressive, performances of gender ascriptions unite out of necessity to create a new mythology informed by Kaywana’s female masculinity (i.e. her “fire blood”) and Adriansen’s biologically and racially powerful gender identity (embodied by his name). I would like to argue, therefore, with close reference to Mittelholzer’s novel, that while the myth of gender seems to occupy an impenetrable place in society the demands placed on the individual by nature, nurture or environment will invariably dictate the texture of his/her performance of gender, transgressive or not, and accordingly new mythologies are created in the fight for survival.

The Legend of the Penis: Real or Perceived?:
Exploring male sexuality in selected Caribbean
works over the past 50 years

Tyrone Ali
M.Phil. Student (Literatures in English)
The University of the West Indies, Republic of Trinidad and Tobago

Caribbean writers are continuously engaged in penning works that reflect a pivotal focus on sexuality as a critical dimension of gender identity. Sex and sexual behaviour seem to be a cornerstone in understanding masculinities. Barrow (1998) avers that male sexual prowess is a lifelong preoccupation. The sex play of a young boy, 'the force ripe little man', is regarded with amused indifference, if not admiration. West Indian literature is rich with the sexual exploits of men and their tenacious capacity to conquer the female at all costs. Indeed it is a (sexual) power that affords masculinism, in general, the opportunity to give special status to male sexuality. Brittan (1989) regards it as "some kind of primordial force which sweeps everything before it". Yet, it would be inaccurate and misleading to suggest that this one-dimensional tract of male sexual ideology can be generically attributed to masculine identity for all Caribbean men. Evidence of this assertion can be traced in the works of Caribbean authors who treat with male sexuality along a continuum. This ranges from a mere allusion to sexual behaviour to a prominence of heterosexuality as a marker of hegemonic masculinity, to a blatant destabalisation of culturally established heteronormative identities.

West Indian literature propels the notion that the penis is supreme in generating a sense of self and belonging and manhood which many men feel the need to ascribe to in forging particular identities within a community of multiple masculinities. Indeed, this can be dangerous to the future of Caribbean gender identities should there be an adherence to the legend of the penis. The attention paid by selected Caribbean authors to male sexuality - and by extension, the power(lessness) of the penis- as it contributes to constructions of male identities will be explored with a view to ascertaining whether this legend is real or perceived.

Caribbean Visions or, to put it another way, ‘we moving’

Jean Antoine-Dunne
Senior Lecturer in Literatures in English
The University of the West Indies, Republic of Trinidad and Tobago

A recent book by Mary Lou Emery entitled Modernism and the Visual in Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2007) focuses on the importance of the visual in Caribbean writing and suggests a re-visioning of the persuasive idea of the dominance of the oral in Caribbean writing, which has held sway amongst Caribbean literary theorists for the past forty years or so.

I will look at Emery’s ideas and explore, via the route of my own research, the importance of the visual in giving shape to the thought, creativity and imaginative genius of Anglophone Caribbean writers.

The main proposition of my paper is that the Caribbean writer becomes a seer out of necessity since addressing the problems of perception demands a reorientation of ways of seeing, both in terms of the human person and the land itself. For the artist seeing becomes a complex and visionary process.

This paper will initially scan the works of Lamming and Harris and the ways in which the eye becomes implicated in their creative projects. It will then explore the visual as it is used to signify a static or fixed image or idea within Caribbean writing and the relationship between this fixity and the transformative power attributed to images when a particular rhythm or movement is attached to the still picture. What concerns me here is the play between stasis and movement and the attempts made by artists to engage the senses of the reader to a point where the act of seeing takes on the positive power to move him/her beyond the confining limits of historically determined versions of self.

This paper will analyse the formal structure of selected works by Erna Brodber and Derek Walcott and explore specific images or orchestration of images that seek to simulate or approximate movement in the work of these writers.

It will also look at how a writer such as Kamau Brathwaite, who is so steeped in the sound systems of the Caribbean, has come increasingly to depend on graphic shapes through which meaning is projected via the movement of the eye.

Who’s your Daddy? Genealogies of
Jamaican Performance Poetry

Laurence A. Breiner
Boston University

That a Bajan is apparently the father of perhaps the most robust generation of Jamaican poetry has always been a problem for the family. But that generation had plenty of Jamaican uncles, and a look at their poetic genes can tell us something about why the lady responded so strongly when the stranger came to town.
The genetic heritage in question is Jamaican poetry during the years of World War II, the era of Norman Manley’s socialism and Edna Manley’s cultural patronage, when the Manleys’ inner circle supported a number of likeminded writers who published in the PNP’s Public Opinion and Edna’s Focus. These writers, particularly George Campbell, H. D. Carberry, Michael Smith, and Ken Ingram, to varying degrees regarded poetry as public art, and explored the notion of the colonial subject in two crucial positionalities: as speaker of poetry, and as its subject matter. Their work, both explicitly ideological and aesthetic, influenced the next generation of Jamaican writers, including especially Morris, Baugh, and Scott, who in turn were the “uncles” of performance poetry, bringing their own heritage to bear on its nurture and broughtupsy.
Nearly every intellectual and even politician of the 1940s made a conscious effort to earn his (only rarely her) “right to say we” in solidarity with the roots population he wrote for, about, and (sometimes) to. Symptomatic of that effort is the unusually unstable and variable subject position of the speakers of the poems of H. D. Carberry. Analysis of that instability reveals the working out of a conception of public poetry which differs from the practice of performance poetry, but ventilates issues crucial to the later development.

Writers and Subjectivity: Lamming, Brathwaite, Hall

Richard Clarke
The Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature
The University of the West Indies, Barbados

Does identity precede the act of representation which accordingly functions merely to name or express a pre-given fact? Or is it, rather, the other way around? That is, is identity, rather, a function of the act of representation through which it may be said to come into being? To address these (and related) questions, I will compare the views expressed in three essays: Lamming's "The Negro Writer and his World," Brathwaite's "The African Presence in Caribbean Literature," and Hall's "Cultural Identity and Diaspora."

No, Woman, No Cry: Rita Marley’s Feminist Fable

Carolyn Cooper
Department of Literatures in English
The University of the West Indies, Jamaica

Rita Marley’s iconoclastic autobiography, No, Woman, No Cry, sub-titled My Life With Bob Marley, contests the hagiographic image of her superstar husband, charging him with rape, both literal and metaphorical. Destabilising Bob Marley’s pedestal, a dry-eyed Rita Marley celebrates her emancipation from the constraints of patriarchy. Affirming the power to define for herself the meaning of her life-story, Rita Marley narrates an archetypal feminist tale that both gestures to Bob Marley’s seminal role in her life and, simultaneously, subverts his authority. The sub-title, seemingly a marketing strategy to exploit the Bob Marley brand, does signify the way in which Rita Marley’s fate appears to have been inextricably tied to her husband’s. But it also ironically acknowledges the fact that Rita Marley’s full freedom is enabled by extricating herself from the bondage of paternalistic affiliation: her life without Bob Marley. The paper addresses the multiple fictions of autobiography, especially when the narrative is shaped by an amanuensis, as in the case of No, Woman, No Cry.

Bita Plant as Literary Intellectual:
Anticolonialism and Banana Bottom

Raphael Dalleo
Department of English, Florida Atlantic University

The standard reading of Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom is as a nationalist allegory in which the main character, Bita Plant, moves away from an allegiance to European high culture and discovers the pleasures of Jamaican popular culture. As the back cover of the 1986 Pluto Press edition puts it, “rejecting her European education, Bita is emotionally drawn to her Black culture” such that “her search for independence coincides with the rediscovery of her roots.” But while this linear narrative, away from Europe and towards immersion in the folk, may animate a certain type of nationalist politics, I will argue that rather than Bita distancing herself from European high culture, that culture maintains its prestige for Bita throughout the novel and even into the final scene of her reading Pascal.

Instead of seeing the primary opposition as between Europe and Jamaica, then, I would like to suggest reading the novel as Bita’s efforts to navigate between different models of middle class allegiance, and that what she ultimately rejects is not European culture; she rejects becoming part of the respectable, professional colonial middle class. Through figuring Bita’s development in this way, we can see how Banana Bottom invests its hopes in a literary intellectual class, married to the physical power of the peasantry, as the future for Jamaica. Banana Bottom makes its case for the literary intellectual as leaders of Caribbean anticolonialism as opposed to the technocratic elite of the island. Identifying this conflict within the Caribbean middle class as central to McKay’s novel calls attention to how it defines Caribbean anticolonial writing of the first half of the twentieth century, including José Martí’s “Nuestra América,” C.L.R. James’ Minty Alley, Aimé Césaire’s essays in the journal Tropiques, and Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée, setting the stage for George Lamming and the writers of the 1950s and 1960s.

“Migration Trauma”: An Examination of Narrative
Structure and Strategies in Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point

Whitney B. Edwards
Department of English, Howard University

Trauma as a concept has been defused of its original meaning and has become somewhat commonplace or pedestrian. It is used in everyday conversation and discourse, and, sometimes, in reference to events that may indeed be troubling, but that are not, in fact, traumatic at all. For these reasons, I want to return the concept to its medical origins in order to provide a clear understanding of it. In medical terms, “trauma” is understood as damage to tissue, or some other physical wound. The extrapolation of the term to incorporate the idea of psychological trauma was perhaps first explicitly articulated in the context of psychoanalytic studies by Sigmund Freud in 1920. Psychological trauma, one form of which can be culture shock, a shock experienced to varying degrees by many migrants, can mark itself in the form of physical pain or other indicators on or within the body.

For this paper, I will apply theories of psychoanalytic and physical trauma to Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point in order to examine instances of something I will call “migration trauma.” I plan to examine the novel in order to demonstrate how the migratory experiences of the characters in the “host” country either further exacerbate symptoms of the trauma from which they may have been suffering since the moment in which the decision to migrate was made and how the subsequent migrant experience leads to the development of new symptoms. I also plan to show how such trauma may become part of the migrant’s identity, how it becomes an added factor in the process of identity “negotiation and renegotiation” (Carol Boyce Davies), and how it is used as a trope by the authors in depicting the complexities of the migrant experience. Additionally, I will analyze how this brand of trauma necessarily also accompanies the citizens of the “host” country in some form or fashion during the migrant experience.

“A Face Slipping”: Challenging dominant Canadian critical discourse on Caribbean-Canadian Literature

Stephen Flemming
MPhil Studdent, English Literature Department, York University

Claire Harris’s short story “A Matter of Fact” problematizes literary criticisms that use an author’s subject position to establish “identity,” which in Ms. Harris’s case would generally be considered Caribbean-Canadian. George Elliot Clarke, in “Harris, Philip, Brand: Three authors in search of literate criticism,” comments on the one-dimensional analyses that Caribbean-Canadian authors often receive. He claims Canadian literary critics have a “tendency to overcompensate, to acclaim every writer of colour out of remorse for what we have done” (161). Clarke asserts that “[t]he trap that too many critics fall into...is that, in seeking to broadcast their own sermons against racism, sexism, imperialism, classism and homophobia, they either reduce writers to the status of sociologists or they bleach their work of aesthetic value” (164). I posit that a reaction against this brand of reductive literary criticism is evident in Harris’s short story, and that Harris presents familiar tropes in conjunction with a variety of styles that frame shifting subject positions to demonstrate the fallacy of a literary criticism that insists on placing Caribbean-Canadian literature into a set of predefined thematic instances based on an identity established by an author’s subject position.

Yearning for Utopia: Earth, Body, Deviance and
Festive-Carnival Failure in Cereus Blooms at Night

Curdella Forbes
Department of Literatures in English
The University of the West Indies, Jamaica

Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night shapes its discourse on sexuality within aesthetic paradigms drawn from pastoral and apocalypse, twin poles of environmentalist epistemology. In this project, Mootoo constructs an ontology of yearning for Utopia; that is to say, a return to the earth and nascent ‘bodyness’ –a return that is however, constantly frustrated by the malevolent animus of social forces. She further suggests the inability of traditional Caribbean aesthetics and modes of social reconciliation to fulfill Utopian desire. The ontology which I term a yearning for Utopia, is represented through an oblique yet complexly layered invocation of two aspects of Indo Trinidadian culture: the festive-carnival tradition associated with marriage rites, and the philosophical and patriarchal concern with the relation between man and nature; woman, earth and matter; karma and reincarnation; death, creation and renewal, transmitted through this same tradition. I begin from the premise that the festive-carnival tradition is integral to the narrative of respectability through which Indo Trinidadian ethnic identity is asserted, and that an important part of the festive-carnival’s work in this regard is the production of hetero-normative sexuality as a marker of social wellness and cohesion. Mootoo’s text invokes the liminal sites on which the festive-carnival masquerade, specifically its crossdressing rituals, produces the ‘codes of unseeing’ by which deviant bodies and taboo sexualities are at once facilitated and suppressed. The masquerade disrupts the very play of respectability in which it engages, indeed overturns the carnival order, as it provides the cues for how in an everyday setting the tortured, deviant body may perform and give voice to its silenced, stigmatized trauma, which the masquerade disavows. In exposing the untenable dualism of the festive-carnival aesthetic, its final inability to ameliorate trauma, Mootoo places the sexually traumatized female body, the victim of unspeakable experiences (incest and rape) at the centre of her pastoral-apocalyptic discourse. The ultimate tragedy of Cereus is the tyranny of culture. The search for a mode of healing and expression that refuses the carnival and returns the body to its primal origins—an ecology of connection with the body of the earth-- is imbricated in the rituals of the carnival tradition. Faced with the need to create herself anew, Mootoo’s suffering female protagonist can only perform matikor, in which woman is subjugated territory even as she is retributive maw and renewing earth. The Utopian ecology of the body, like festive-carnival costuming, in its failure signifies not only the condition of post-lapsarian mourning, but also the failure of the traditional rituals of community.

Why is it Black Women Cannot Be Sexual Without Being “Ho’s”?: Maryse Conde’s I, Tituba, Sexuality, Expressivity, and Freedom

Ronda C. Henry
Professor of English and African American and African Diaspora Studies, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis

In this paper, I will focus on Maryse Conde’s I, Tituba Black Witch of Salem to begin to problematize the reactions of some of my students to Tituba’s varied expressions of female sexuality throughout the text. For, within my students reactions and charges that Tituba is a “ho” lie the traces of the remaining taboos on women’s, and in particular black women’s, sexuality even today. In I, Tituba Black Witch of Salem, Conde uses her ability to create myth and fable around the historical body of Tituba to intervene in history’s silencing and “disremembering” of Tituba’s life, story, and body to provide Tituba with a subjectivity and identity that rejects women’s erasure and the very important roles they played throughout history. Moreover, she also uses the body of Tituba, and for the purposes of this paper, Tituba’s sexual desires and experiences, as a form of expressivity—particularly that of voice, freedom, self-determination, rebellion against her status as outcast and white Western mores and sensibilities (especially those of the Puritans), and the policing of women’s bodies as a form of social and gender control. Through discussing the ways in which Tituba experiences and insists on her right to express her sexual desires, we can also see Conde’s critique of the Western colonial/imperialistic relation to the Caribbean. And finally, we can also think through the question, “Why can’t women do without men?” oft-repeated throughout the novel and the functions that men’s bodies serve within the text.

Caribbean Myth and Folklore:
The Icons of a New Science Fiction

Andrea Humphrey
MPhil Student, The University of the West Indies, Barbados

Critics have recently begun to examine the contribution of authors of popular fiction to the greater body of Caribbean literature. Critics such as O'Callaghan and Bryce have demonstrated how Caribbean popular fiction, by introducing new cultural elements and changing key ingredients, simultaneously subverts and conforms to the conventions of popular fiction.

In this paper I will address how Caribbean authors, for example Nalo Hopkinson, have re-imagined the science fiction genre, appropriating icons and narrative forms from Caribbean myth and folklore to replace the signs, symbols, conventions and familiar plot lines of the genre with something new and culturally specific.

 The Desire for a Regenerative Recovery of the Past: An Application of Wilson Harris’s Discussion of Myth to Omeros and Beloved

Nicola Hunte
Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature
The University of the West Indies, Barbados

This paper offers a discussion of Wilson Harris’s analysis of myth as an expression of an ‘intuitive archetypal imagination’ and its significance as a regenerative response to the ‘conquistadorial legacy’ of the New World. This discussion attempts to illustrate these Harrisian concepts through a comparative analysis of Beloved’s and Omeros’s engagement with this legacy in their representation of the historical and ontological dilemmas produced by the New World experience of plantation slavery and the Middle Passage.

Jean Rhys and the English Rural Landscape

Joanna Johnson
English Department, University of Miami

In Landscape and Power, W.J.T. Mitchell suggests “we approach landscape as a verb rather than a noun, a process by which social and subjective identities are formed, considering not just what landscape ‘is’ or ‘means’ but what it does, how it works as a cultural practice.” This approach, along with more recent work done in relation to cultural geographies show that the English landscape is plural—landscapes—and that within it are mapped many cultural practices and identities.
One site of examination of these cultural identities is through Caribbean writing about the rural and pastoral English landscape. Specifically in this paper, I seek to examine what kinds of cultural understandings Jean Rhys’s writing manifests. Recent studies of landscapes, in particular those in line with cultural critic Raymond Williams’s work in the 1970s, have given attention to the ideological power and communities of England’s landscapes, where “constructions of rural England provide the basis for an understanding of Englishness.” How does Rhys inform and perpetuate the myth of Englishness through the rural and the pastoral space, where, as Williams puts it, there is a (false) “perpetual retrospect to an ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ society”? To what extent do Rhys’s images of “England” reinscribe such ideologies, ones which privilege England over both her immediate neighbours and her colonies further afield? How far is her idea of England ‘home,’ as Williams puts it, “in that special sense in which ‘home’ is a memory and an ideal”? Is Rhys’s perspective just an “idea” of rural England with “its green peace contrasted with the tropical or arid places of actual work; its sense of belonging, of community, idealized by contrast with the tensions of colonial rule and the isolated alien settlement”? This paper will examine how Rhys’s writing shows such an imagined contrast.

Sexuality and Gendered Citizenship in
Sylvia Wynter’s Hills of Hebron

Nadia Indra Johnson
Graduate Student, University of Miami

A careful analysis of the history of sexuality in the Caribbean reveals a history of empire. The policing of black sexuality was integral to the colonial project and inevitably reproduced in discourses of nationalism in the Caribbean. This paper is concerned with how sexuality is used to map the boundaries of nation by producing gendered citizenships in the interest of obtaining political and economic sovereignty. Anchored in a reading of Sylvia Wynter’s Hills of Hebron as an allegory of nationalist agenda in post-emancipation Jamaica, I interrogate sexual economies in which power is negotiated and contested in a struggle to chart the boundaries of citizenship and production. Furthermore, I examine how women, albeit from marginalized positions, assert power by not only claiming ownership of their sexual identities but by challenging the impermeability of gendered citizenships.

Plays Need Love Too: Reading Caribbean Drama

Robert Leyshon
Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature
The University of the West Indies, Barbados

...a time and a season..., Errol Hill’s pioneering collection of Caribbean plays, was first published thirty-two years ago. In this short paper I reassess the significance of the anthology, and ask some blunt questions: how relevant to the concerns of contemporary Caribbean drama is Hill’s long introductory essay? Were the eight plays he selected ever much good, either as texts or in performance? Are any of them still worth reading? If so, why is the anthology currently out of print?
I also ask some of the same questions about a more recent collection of plays (Contemporary Drama of the Caribbean, edited by David Edgecombe and Erika J. Waters), and consider whether the publication of dramatic texts is always necessary for theatre to develop as a viable art form.

Looking Under Stones: Narrating AIDS and Telling Secrets in Rosemarie Stone’s No Stone Unturned

Rachel Mair-Boxill
Graduate Student
The University of the West Indies, Jamaica

In this paper, I argue that Rosemarie Stone’s AIDS memoir invests in a series of narrative and thematic dichotomies that foreground AIDS as both a disruptive and destructive trope of silence, disabling alterity and death, and a catalytic agent of psychological and spiritual transformation. Stone, the widow of the prominent Jamaican public intellectual, Carl Stone, movingly narrates the story of her husband’s death from AIDS and her surviving the dreaded illness in the context of a national and social milieu where secrecy, silence and denial cloak the discourse on AIDS as well as the public secrets of the private lives of public figures. In No Stone Unturned, AIDS is thus central to the confessional strategies that simultaneously uphold and subvert the private-public opposition while commenting on contemporary postcolonial Jamaican social and cultural concerns regarding gender and sexual politics, respectability and reputation, stigma and taboo. By enabling disclosure and truth telling, AIDS allows Stone to position the tension between public lives and private secrets as emblematic of the Jamaican middle class experience of the pandemic.

 Indo Trinidadian Women Constructing Habitable Narratives

Paula Morgan
Department of Liberal Arts, The University of the West Indies
Republic of Trinidad and Tobago

“Constructing Habitable Narratives” explores the most recent efforts to address a perennial task undertaken by Caribbean Writers of all ethnicities and genders, and indeed, practically all architects of the post colonial house of fiction. Indo Trinidadian female writers are adding their versions of writing home from exilic locations to explain the potential and pain of coming of age and assuming adult identities within culturally polyglot island societies, and subsequently building, on this foundation, habitable identities in lands of their exile.
This paper reads Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge, Naila Maharaj’s Like Heaven and Joy Mahabir’s Jouvert as narratives of development with a specific focus on cross gender and cross ethnic representation, and evocations of the making the artist as a young women. In the process, it grapples with the unremitting quest for home and belonging given the complex and problematic social locations which the characters inhabit in relation to gender and ethnicity, as well as ancestral, natal and adopted homelands.

Eulogizing and Locating Freedom: Problematizing
Three Recent Barbadian Texts

Philip Nanton
The University of the West Indies, Barbados

Why, some forty years on from political independence, is Barbados being encouraged to re-enter the celebration of ‘freedom’ associated with emancipation and political independence, through a celebration of black-nationalist heroes? What are some of the outcomes? Between 2003 and 2006 three full length dramatic productions each celebrating officially sanctioned Barbadian heroes Bussa, Samuel Jackman Prescod and Rt. Hon. Sir Errol Walton Barrow were performed at University of the West Indies, Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination, Cave Hill, Barbados. The aim of my paper is to discuss the texts of the plays which appear to raise a number of questions relevant to the notion of heroes and freedom: is the way that the stories are told about the past in Barbados and its relation to the present still relevant today? What is the search for ‘heroes’ about? Is the utopian project still viable after forty years of political independence ? My paper revisits the trilogy to examine these questions and to explore the presentation of nationalist history in dramatic from through the writing of one specific historian, Professor Hilary Beckles, with access to a particular power base, the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill’s Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination with substantial official financial support for each production.
The first part of my paper critiques the three plays to examine the concept of freedom that they offer; in particular I examine the implications of the linear structure of history adopted in telling the tales, the use of language in the plays and the association of the notion of freedom with a number of ideal values of Barbadian society. The second part of my paper argues that is the performance of the plays were designed to support a national unifying and healing process the outcome is somewhat different. By constantly telling the story of the nation in a utopian format these ceremonial enactments draw attention to the limitations and fragility of yhe body politic, the difference on which it is built and the diverging interests that is has to unite.

Venezuela in the Trinidadian Literary Imagination

Jennifer Rahim
The University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago

The close proximity of Trinidad to the South American mainland has wedded the two landscapes in shared histories of conquest, migration, political insurrections, territorial wars, commerce and cultural exchange that have their beginnings in the conquistadores’ frantic quest for the mythic El Dorado. This paper explores a series of fictions in which Venezuela figures in the literary imagination of writers who have dealt with the Trinidad experience. It seeks to analyse the ways in which cultural and literary discourse has attempted to (re) imagine the mainland. The paper argues that together the literature attests to an ambivalent constellation of functions accrued to a landscape that continues to serve as a point of illusive origins in the project of historical reconstruction, a symbol of the primal, erotic Other of exploration and escape, a site of strategic acts of disappearance and returns, a mythical land of new beginnings, economic opportunity and so on.

Bun or Fire Bun? Macka Diamond’s novel Bun Him!!!

Kim Robinson-Walcott, PhD
The University of the West Indies, Jamaica

Commentators on contemporary Jamaican popular music often bemoan the current dearth of conscious or ‘fire bun’ lyrics, i.e. those calling for change in the society, in contrast to the lewd morality allegedly witnessed in much of dancehall. ‘Bun’ can have an entirely different meaning in Jamaican parlance, however. In Macka Diamond’s immensely popular dancehall song “Bun Him”, Macka with the support of co-performer Black-er relates a scenario where the woman as victim of her partner’s infidelity is advised to return the favour – to ‘bun’ him. Such productions, in music or in print, bring to the fore the image of the “cunny Jamaica oman” as celebrated by Louise Bennett, whose cunning and ‘jinnalship’ have been touted as a survival response to oppression and victimization in a traditionally male-privileged society.
Yet Macka’s recently published novel Bun Him!!!, advertised on its cover as “Jamaica’s First Official Dancehall Novel”, plays a somewhat different version of the song: the protagonist Sandra is bored with her sugar-daddy husband and decides to have some fun on the side. Sandra is no victim; indeed, a reading of Bun Him!!! reveals that there are no victims in this novel. Against a background of raging societal amorality or immorality, in an environment of female ascendancy and male marginalization, Bun Him!!! reflects burning contemporary societal issues of gender relations and sexual politics, and disturbing trends of materialism, crumbling values and questionable attitudes.
Unsurprisingly, the book Bun Him!!! is already claimed by both publisher (Macka) and booksellers to be a bestseller. Surprisingly, the book, often verging on pure, unadulterated (puns intended) pornography, seemingly unabashedly immoral for the most part, in the end reveals itself to be supremely moral – perversely emerging from under soiled covers as a ‘fire bun’ moral tract.

Water Without Berries: Race, Sexuality and Citizenship in Caliban’s (M)Otherland

Patricia J. Saunders
Department of English, University of Miami

The “absent woman” (both mother and partner) is one of the most notable and problematic aspects of Caliban’s colonial inheritance. However, this absence plagued both Miranda and Caliban in Shakespeare’s “tempestuous island;” and the return of the father/son to his “homeland” was no less problematic in the Caribbean. The “motherlands” of their imagined nations (and imaginations) were overwhelmed by a desire for re/patri(n)ation which, despite their best efforts, could not be achieved without distancing themselves further from that which they desire most, the physical and geographical (M)other/land. George Lamming’s Pleasures of Exile and Water with Berries oscillate between speculating about the implications of these “absent mothers” and the near annihilation of the black female (sexual and political) body from the imagined nation (and the imagination). This paper examines the displacement of black female bodies (through violence) and the emergence of violence as a means of “managing” transgressive sexuality that threatens the power of the patria, the nation and the possibility of a “return” to the mother/land. This consideration, I argue, opens another, more complex reading of the gender and sexual politics that have informed and continue to shape contemporary Caribbean nationalist narratives.

A Dispersion of Duppies

Robert Schmid
Graduate student, The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill

The belief in spirits called “duppies” has its origin in West African society. The duppy is a malevolent force that must be appeased. The belief in these spirits was taken to the Caribbean when Africans were brought over as slaves. Today, folktales, stories and songs about duppies abound in Caribbean society.
A topic with as much social and cultural significance to the Caribbean as duppies, is bound to make its way into the lyrics of reggae songs. In fact duppies are commonly referred to in reggae. Artists from Bob Marley to Bounty Killer have written lyrics about them, introducing an international audience to this West Indian folklore with its ancient West African roots.

Making the Fragments Whole: Language, Oppression, and Empowerment
in Creole Identity

Susan C. Shepherd
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis

This paper argues that the experience of oppression and the devaluing of a particular language can lead to new forms of expression that go beyond traditional dichotomies of colonizer and colonized. Issues of individual and societal silence and silencing, representations of self and other, and the expression of “unacceptable” meanings in “acceptable” form will be discussed as they relate to the work of Lamming, Brathwaite, Kincaid, Lovelace, and Danticat, and to analyses of creole language use and attitudes, Dread Talk, and calypso. In linguistic studies of West Indian creoles, fragments of language and culture are often traced to African and colonial sources. To arrive at an understanding of the whole, we need to focus on the new creations that bring those fragments together. How do creole speakers, writers, and artists appropriate and transform the language of the colonizer? Can this transformation be part of the politics of change?

“Who’s Pimpin’ Who?”: Female Subjectivity in Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe

Jennifer Thorington Springer
Department of English, Indiana University

Purdue University IndianapolisAustin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe reads like an extended calypso due to its lyrical language and a title that infers the use of double entendre. The “polished hoe” can be interpreted in its literal sense, tool, or the more pejorative colloquial meaning, ho/whore. Clarke’s protagonist Mary is presented as a polished ho/whore (subject) who uses the hoe (object) to commit murder. The focus here will be more on the interesting use of ho/whore to describe Mary’s subject position and less on the use of hoe as object. Most hos/whores need pimps. This paper explores the complex roles of would-be pimps in the novel. One of Mary’s first pimps is her own mother. What motivates a mother to “pimp” her daughter? As she recognizes her “power,” though limited, in the role of Mr. Bellfeels’ mistress, does Mary become her own pimp? Furthermore, Clarke’s novel has the potential to join existing work of Caribbean women writers and scholars who document the double-colonization of black women by giving voice to the atrocities of slavery such as the sexual violence black women experienced. However, The Polished Hoe falls short in that Mary’s story is shifted from the center to the margin. Clarke’s female-centered text fails as Mary’s narrative becomes secondary to that of the male characters. In his attempt to liberate and empower Mary, does Clarke inadvertently “pimp” her? Is Mary’s black body used (pimped) as a conduit to demonstrate the history of colonization, more notably the role or subject position of men? Who’s pimpin’ who?

Mothers, Birth, and Trauma in Edwidge Danticat's
The Farming of Bones

Beth Wolk
Department of English, University of Delaware

In The Farming of Bones, overwhelming traumas affect those on both sides of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and Danticat argues for the unity and healing that must follow shared pain. In this text, Amabelle Désir is the most consistently traumatized character. Having lost her parents, lover, and two homes (one on each side of the island of Hispaniola), she, in effect, becomes an incarnation of the suffering mother/island, linked to the unifying mythic mother figure that emerges in Hispanic, African, and Native Caribbean cultures. In this role, Amabelle is capable of assuaging the suffering of both nations through shared pain and healing. Physical and emotional suffering (traumatic stress) form the backdrop of this book: on a larger, historical scale, Haitians living in the Dominican Republic are massacred during "El Corte" (The Cutting) in the name of racial purity. On a smaller scale, secondary characters such as Valencia and Kongo who have both lost their sons demonstrate the pain that is universal to all people of Hispaniola. The text negotiates a theory of traumatic reconstruction through Freud's death instinct theory, trauma theory, Benitez-Rojo’s concept of carnaval, and Lacan’s depiction of self-conception. Freud’s argument for a time of death which precedes life parallels Amabelle's time of "death" before she embraces healing and rebirth. That healing begins when Amabelle learns of Trujillo's death and spontaneously dances the kalanda, a representation of Benitez-Rojo's concept of carnaval. Her identity as an incarnation of the mother-island is alluded to through a Lacanian search for self in, among other places, fresh water sources. As she enters Massacre River at the end of the book, her communion with the island, its people, and its traumas is complete.