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MaComere -^tbbean WoI0e Volume 7 2005 Liberatory Poetics MaCombre Volume 7 ISSN 1521-9968 Copyright 2005 by Hyacinth M. Simpson All rights reserved Submission Criteria for MaComere: MaComnre is a refereed journal that is devoted to scholarly studies and creative works by and about Caribbean women in the Americas, Europe and the Caribbean diaspora. It is the journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS), an international organization founded in 1995. MaComdre is published once per year in the fall. Submissions of critical articles, creative writing, interviews, and book reviews are invited. All manuscripts should be submitted in triplicate-on disc formatted in WordPerfect 6.1 (or higher) or Word 6.0 (or higher) and in two hard copies sent in the mail. Authors should submit no more than 5 poems and/or 2 samples of prose fiction at any one time. Critical articles should not exceed 7,000 words and book reviews should be approximately 1,000 to 1,500 words in length. Authors should follow the most recent edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. All articles are refereed blind by at least two readers; consequently, the name(s) of the authors) should appear only on a separate title page, which should also include the titles) of works) submitted, street address, telephone, fax and email information and a brief biographical statement of no more than 50 words. A self-addressed envelope (SAE) with loose postage adequate for a letter notifying authors of our publication decision must be included with each submission. The journal does not accept unsolicited material that has been previously published. The editors reserve the right to amend phrasing and punctuation in articles and reviews accepted for publication. All submissions and editorial correspondence should be sent to Hyacinth M. Simpson, Editor, MaCom&re, Department of English, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5B 2K3; telephone: 416-979-5000 ext. 6148; fax: 416-979-5110; e-mail: macomere2@aol.com. The website for the journal is www.macomerejournal.com. Subscription rates for MaComere (including postage for regular mail): Individual: US $25 per issue and US $18 per back issue (Volumes 1-5); Institutional: US $35 per issue, US $25 per back issue, US $140 for 4-year subscription (beginning with Volume 6), and US $130 for back issue bundle (1998-2002); members of ACWWS receive a single issue of MaComere with their yearly membership. The editors do not assume responsibility for loss or damage to materials submitted. The editors, staff, and financial supporters do not assume any legal responsibility for materials published in the journal. Opinions expressed in contributions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors, staff, and the journal's financial supporters MaComere's Founding Editor: Jacqueline Brice-Finch Cover logo by Marcia L. Spidell Printed in Canada MaComere The Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS) Founded in 1995, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Editor Hyacinth M. Simpson Manuscript Review and Advisory Editors Carole Boyce Davies Florida International University; Jacqueline Brice Finch, Benedict College; Sarah Casteel, Carleton University; Merle Collins, University of Maryland; Andrea Davis, York University; Denise Decaires Narain, University of Sussex; Pascale DeSouza, Johns Hopkins University; Evelyn Hawthorne Howard University; Suzanne Hintz, Northern Virginia Community College; Janet J. Hampton, George Washington University; Kathleen Kellett- Betsos, Ryerson University; Anne Malena, University of Alberta; Antonia McDonald-Smythe, St. Georges University; Heather Milne, York University; Pam Mordecai, Writer; Evelyn O'Callaghan, University of the West Indies (Cave Hill); Helen Pyne-Timothy, University of the West Indies (St. Augustine); Maria Cristina Rodriguez, University of Puerto Rico; Leslie Sanders, York University; Tanya Saunders, Ithaca College; Elaine Savory, New School University; Olive Senior, Writer; Renee Shea, Bowie State University. Managing Editor Ian Andrew Matheson Managing Assistant Nalini Mohabir Editorial Assistants Merci-Noula Mina; Priyanka Jain; Diana Lam, and Dhruva Thakar Publication supported by the Office of the Vice President (Research), the Ryerson Caribbean Research Centre, and the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada MaComere Table of Contents Vol. 7 2005 Helen Pyne-Timothy About Our Name...................................... .......................v Hyacinth M. Simpson From the Editor ..............................................................vii Fiction Poems by Pamela Mordecai "Elsie"................................. ...................1 "H eartless"........................... ... ..... .. ..... 4 "Great Writers and Toads"................... .....................6 Short Story by Christine Birbalsingh "Aja's Ghost".......................... .................................. 8 Creative Non-fiction by Tiphanie Yanique "Tw ins"..................... ........ .....................15 Interview Renee H. Shea Attempting Perfection: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer..........18 Articles Joanne Nystrom Janssen "Feeling Fine": The Transatlantic Female Body in Grace Nichols's The Fat Black Woman's Poems.........................32 Julie Moody-Freeman Women's Activism in Belize: Reviving Women's History in Fiction................................... .. ...................48 Odile Ferly La historici(u)dad en "Invi's Paradise," de Aurora Arias ...............66 MaCom&re Karina Smith Invoking the Spirit of the Warrior Woman: Sistren's Nana Yah........77 Sharon Fairchild Cross-Cultural Crises in the Works of Maryse Cond ................... 96 Smitha Tripathi "Speaking Seriously": Suzanne C6saire as Theorist ......... ........ 108 Analisa DeGrave Nancy Morejon: Caution-Yoruban Silences in Utopia................119 Paulette Ramsay The Liberatory Poetics of Shirley Campbell..............................136 Alice D'Amore Kincaid's Garden: A Fourth Garden of Self-Awareness............ 150 Roiyah Saltus Mary Prince's Slave Narrative in the Context of Bermuda, Her "Native Place" (1788- 1815)............................ ................. 167 Reviews Andrea Davis Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge................................183 Elaine Savory Pamela Mordecai's The True Blue ofIslands............................187 Sharon Morgan Beckford Dionne Brand's What We All Long For................................192 Opal Palmer Adisa Shara McCallum's Song of Thieves................................... 194 Carol Bailey Paulette Ramsay's Aunt Jen..............................................199 Notes on Contibutors............................................. .............202 Helen Pyne-Timothy About the Name The word macomere is widely used by women in the Caribbean to mean "my child's godmother"; "my best friend and close female confidante"; "my bridesmaid, or another female member of a wedding party of which I was a bridesmaid"; "the godmother of the child to whom I am also godmother"; "the woman who, by virtue of the depth of her friendship, has rights and privileges over my child and whom I see as a surrogate mother." This name seemed appropriate for the journal because it so clearly expresses the intimate relations which women in the Caribbean share, is so firmly gendered, and honors the importance of friendship in relation to the important rituals of marriage, birth and (implied) death. Moreover, macombre is a French Creole word which, although related to the French language, has taken on a structure and a meaning that is indigenous to the Caribbean. The word is spelled in this way, instead of in the clearly Creole manner (macumb, makumeh, macoome, macomeh, and many other variants), so that the female connotations of the word are highlighted and those meanings which apply to males ("a womanish or gossipy man," "a homosexual") are less obvious. In those islands where Kreol (linguistic term for the French patois) is the first language, the same term in used for both females and males with the meaning determined by the context. However, in islands such as Trinidad where English has overlain Kreol, the Creole (linguistic term for the English patois) has incorporated the redundant "my macome" and "macome man," thus reinforcing both the perceptions of intimacy and the female quality of the term. Interestingly enough, Richard Allsopp in The Dictionary of Caribbean EnglishUsage (Oxford University Press, 1996) has indicated the possibility that maku in Belize, with the meaning "midwife," is also derived from this word. Hence, the word forces us to recall the continuities and correspondences in Caribbean languages and cultures, as well as the dynamic, creative and transforming power of Creoles. In the purely English-speaking islands, the only comparable term is godmother (usually the mother's best friend). In the Hispanophone Caribbean, there is the similar comadre, although, as we would expect, some of the connotations are different. Join me in continuing to interrogate all the connotations of the meaning inherent in this culturally rich lexical item from the Caribbean. - V- - vi- Hyacinth M. Simpson From the Editor Volume 7 (2005) of MaComere marks the first time the journal is being edited outside the United States. After six volumes in the capable hands of Founding Editor Jacqueline Brice-Finch and a number of guest editors, MaComere now has a new home in the Department of English at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. Although the journal's editorship has changed hands and the publication is now based at a different institution, MaComBre remains the same, as does the goal of providing an academic audience and a general readership with quality scholarly articles, fiction, and book reviews that address the lives, work, and writings of Caribbean women in the region and its diaspora. At the same time that this volume is in preparation to go to press, the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS), the scholarly organization behind the journal, is also preparing to celebrate a milestone. The ACWWS will convene its tenth anniversary conference at the Westin Diplomat Resort and Spa Convention Centre in Hollywood, Florida from May 30 to June 3, 2006. Organized in collaboration with the African New World Studies program at Florida International University, the conference will focus on the theme: "The Caribbean Woman Writer as Scholar: Imagining/Theorizing/Creating." Among other things, this theme indicates that the Caribbean woman is multifaceted: she is scholar and writer, theorist and visionary, creator and critic, architect, builder, and homemaker rolled into one. It is thus questionable to make too rigid a distinction between the roles of writer and critic because, as critics, we use our imagination to add a further dimension to and multiply the layers of our insight into texts; and, as writers, we invariably turn a critical eye on the world around us. It is this consciousness of mutual involvement, service, and ongoing collaboration that binds together the women and men who are dedicated to celebrating and critiquing female and gendered experience across the Caribbean and in Caribbean diasporic communities coalescing in the US, Canada, the UK, other parts of Europe and elsewhere. This spirit of inquiry marks Volume 7 (2005), the "Liberatory Poetics" issue. Comprising for the most part a selection of critical articles from the ACWWS conference held under the same theme in the Dominican Republic in 2004, Volume 7 provides a clear-eyed view into the language and forms that are being used to effectively address Caribbean women's oppression and marginalization and bring into being possibilities for self-empowerment and communal regeneration. Oppression can take domestic forms as vividly described in Pam Mordecai's poem "Great Writers and Toads" and expanded on in Elaine Savory's review of Mordecai's most recent poetry collection. Oppression is also political as Alice D'Amore's reading of Jamaica Kincaid's - vii- MaComere My Garden (Book), Smitha Tripathi's reassessment of Suzanne Cdsaire's work, and Karina Smith's take on the performances of Sistren Theatre Coll- ective indicate. As well, oppression can come framed as historical or ideological "truth." Roiyah Saltus's essay challenging historical misrepresentations of Bermudan slave society, Judy Moody-Freeman's use of Zee Edgell's fiction to recover the story of women's activism in the history of Belizean anti-colonial struggle, and Analisa DeGrave's thesis on the racially charged meanings of the silences in Nancy Morejon's poetry are fine examples. There can be no doubt after reading the critical and creative pieces offered here that Caribbean women (and those who support them) will continue to find ways to renew and articulate their own sense of self beyond the personal, social and political restrictions they face, very much like Grace Nichols's fat black woman who is at the centre of Joanne Nystrom Janssen's analysis. The reader will not be surprised then to discover that despite the wide range of styles and subject matter in the five books reviewed, each reviewer is emphatic about the hopeful vision presented in each work. Christine Birbalsingh's short story and the creative non-fiction piece by Tiphanie Yanique also underscore the moment of personal breakthrough that frees the character to make her or his way in life. That desire to find a space of one's own is articulated very well by Judith Ortiz Cofer in conversation with Renee Shea. This interview and the essays by Odile Ferly, Paulette Ramsay, and Sharon Fairchild indicate beyond the shadow of a doubt that the making of a liberatory poetics is alive across the various linguistic groups within the Caribbean. These are exciting times to be editing a journal on Caribbean women's writing and experience. For a long time, and especially since the 1980s, Caribbean women have been shaping and re-shaping the contours of a literary and critical tradition. The list of acclaimed writers and accomplished critics is so long that I will not attempt to name names here, but readers can rest assured that in the pages of MaComBre they will continue to find up-to-date information on creative and critical developments. Ryerson University - viii- Pamela Mordecai Elsie Elsie could cuss like a sailor rip masts too when she swept like a storm upgrading minute by minute trading levels of intensity spit shooting like sea foam from the 0 of her mouth the eye of her fury. Of fourteen children Elsie was last and lightest. When they said she was no black, had no fro, meagre melanin, she don't protest just slip out of her blouse peel off her vest and say "Okay: come make we take the nipple test." And there they were brown crowns resplendent on each breast. "If me was white, dem would be pink. Ink. Quink. Your belly rotten stink. White. Black. You decent and me slack. Hip-hip-hurray! Areolae carry the day." MaComere Elsie could cuss like a tar Drink any tippler under any bar. Recite Shakespeare; bring a tear to your eye rendering Portia's speech to the mean moneylender from Venice: "The quality of mercy is not strained. .." Reaching deep down for feeling Elsie come up to set you reeling till your sides hurt expatiating on the nature of selfish dirt- a leaven for the unstrained gentle rain that droppeth down from heaven. Brown Elsie could cuss like a salt swab a deck; ship invading bilge water to hold a craft safe; let down any size anchor; haul it up with her hands and no pulley from the blue deep. Shin up to the topsail unfurl a whirl of cloud so a vessel could fly past a hurricane upgrading minute by minute trading levels of intensity winding up ocean and air thunder and fire the very stratosphere spun into the blackening ire of her fury. Poetry by Pamela Mordecai She slips back on her vest, ready if need be to undergo another nipple test. "No way I letting skin and melanin degrees of kink in hair and booty-size downpress the little levity that live in my small chest, bounce in my little tits. All that is shit. I eating pills enough." Same time she lifting up a little miss eyes beryl green hair streaming down her back. "See. She is mine and Jesus know how she come so because her Pa's pink like a pig- look how the pikni black!" Pamela Mordecai Heartless "You with your head wrapped up in that head-tie are more to me than seraphim and cherubim..." That's how your poem began. You wrote on paper light as air left it somewhere you knew I'd find it where I can't remember now. I found it. Read it. Never breathed a word. Years afterwards I heard you'd called me heart- less. It seemed so unfair. Except now with my brain alive at two a.m. parsing the world so many raped so many dead another hostage with his head cut from his neck I see why you'd have thought callous was true. You see I couldn't figure out- no, you were absolutely right. -4- Poetry by Pamela Mordecai I had no heart. I had no heart to say I didn't love you. "You with your head wrapped up in that head-tie are more to me than seraphim and cherubim..." That's how your poem began. You wrote on paper light as air left it somewhere you knew I'd find it where I can't remember now. I found it. Read it. Never breathed a word. Years afterwards I heard you'd called me heartless. It seemed so unfair. Except now with my brain alive at two a.m. parsing the world so many raped so many dead another hostage with his head cut from his neck I see why you'd have thought callous was true. You see I couldn't figure out- no, you were absolutely right. I had no heart to say I didn't love you. Pamela Mordecai Great writers and toads (For A.M. who forgives me) He is a writer a sensitive man a thundering terrible intelligence first from this nation to win world recognition. How he celebrates his people our traditions our small quaint ways in splendid rotundas carved from our deprecated codes. His tales are stormy edifices: how the critics applaud his hurricanes of wild wet words. Beats his wife: we found her little toad face busted in wart-skinned and goggle- eyed damp with the day's first showers two jewels of white teeth beside her on the grass. .. "He says," gap-toothed her words whistled her woe, "he says I haven't grown." Poetry by Pamela Mordecai How I pray for the day great writers are all dead and women can cook wash clean shout pin the scribbles of their lives resplendent drab or not quite anything on endless clotheslines flapping in the sun. Christine Birbalsingh Aja's Ghost Aja's ghost visits me to this day. I'm twenty-nine years old, married to a French- Canadian woman who is now pregnant with our first child, and I have little connection with my family. Mom and Dad I see at weddings and funerals. Holidays I spend with my wife's family. I rarely see my other relatives, not even cousin Indira. But the ghost of my grandfather: that I see every night, his long skinny finger waving in my face, scolding me for having condemned my Aja to an afterlife of misery. I was only twelve when Aja died and I barely knew him. He had come up from Trinidad about a year before his death, almost as if he came here for the sole purpose of dying, just so that he could humiliate me in front of our entire family. And the whole family did come, one after the other, pinching my cheeks and telling me how big I had grown. I don't know what they all expected of me. Most of them were practically strangers to me anyway, except for their faded pictures in our family albums. Yet their scorn was powerful. They chopped me down and minced me up, making me feel like an idiot who couldn't do anything right. And maybe I was. But how was I to know what to do, or what not to do? It's not like my parents explained the ceremony to me beforehand. It's not as if I even knew what it meant to be Hindu. And we didn't have a dress rehearsal, like for a play. Nothing. I was on my own, standing in front of everyone and terrified of a pale, stiff corpse that smelled like that jar of dissected grasshoppers in science class. The wind was fierce the day Mom and I found Aja collapsed in his kitchen. It was one of those chilly, ripping November winds that leave trees bleak with bare branches, announcing brashly that winter is on the way. And judging from Aja's position on the floor, it was as if he had been blown over, like a tiny leaf, light brown in color with long skinny fingers, unable to hang on any longer. But the window was intact; no foul play on the part of angry skies. I remember thinking that's what I would look like when I died, because I looked just like Aja: short and skinny with wide brown eyes. "9-1-1!" My mother spoke in verbless sentences when she got agitated. "9-1-1!" I grabbed the phone and dialled, while my mother laid her head on Aja's chest. "My grandfather is sick," I said into the phone, even though, somehow, I had sensed that he was already dead. "Down. On ground!" my mother yelled. Aja's Ghost "Uh, down. He fell down," I repeated. "Is he breathing?" The operator's voice was brutal, like the edge of a stone on a cliff. "Is he breathing, Mom?" "No, I, uh, no. No beats!" I relayed the information to the operator and she said they would send out a team. A team? I thought. But this isn't a baseball game! I was only twelve. I know I use that excuse a lot-that somehow twelve-year- olds are stuck in this black hole in which they are unable to learn-but I use it only for me, for my particular situation. My lack of knowledge wasn't limited to my twelfth year; it grew up with me from when I was young, mushrooming around me as I got older, engulfing me like a parachute just fallen from the sky. For instance, the summer of my ninth year my father was going to take me with him on a business trip to India. "You can see where we from, boy," he said. "But we're not from India," I whispered to myself. "We're from Trinidad, Dad," I said out loud, triumphantly, as if I remembered anything about the island where I was born. "Where you tink us Indians in Trinidad come from, boy?" he replied, slapping me on the shoulder playfully. I didn't know if I was supposed to answer his question. I had never really thought about it. No one had ever thought to mention it to me, as if they figured I would just somehow know. Indian people in Trinidad didn't seem any stranger to me than African people or Chinese people. Everyone just lived there, didn't they? Like here, in Canada, the Korean twins in my geography class, the Jamaicans on the soccer team, the Iranians I met up with in detention. Did they all actually come from somewhere else? Teachers always talked about this thing called "multiculturalism" as if they were talking about a disease or something, but all I knew was that we were Canadian. I didn't end up going to India. It was the same excuse as always: "I have too much wuk fuh do, boy. Is how yuh tink yuh moddah get to put food on the table? Yuh bettah stay here. Next time." That was Dad all over again. I hardly ever saw him. He usually dashed into the house for dinner, chatting loudly with someone on the phone in between mouthfuls, and then he'd dash right back out again. I didn't really miss him because I didn't know what it was like to have him around. But Mom missed him. She was always angry with him. MaComere They argued a lot about his work. I remember sitting up in bed listening to their muffled voices. I couldn't figure out exactly what they were saying-something about Dad needing to work because Mom didn't. I hated the quarrelling. I used to pray to God (not any god in particular, for I had no clue at that time that there was more than one) to make it stop. One day the arguing did stop just like that, suddenly, right in the middle of a clash. I never bothered to thank that mysterious God, mostly because I had forgotten that I had prayed in the first place, but also because just as soon as the arguing stopped, I wanted it back. I missed it, for silence set in, and I realized that the fighting was better than the silence. But there was no going back. Mom and Dad didn't talk about anything ever again. I couldn't sleep for weeks and weeks because of the silence. I even tried instigating arguments on occasion-"Mom forgot to clean your suit for that meeting; I took your briefcase out in the garden and filled it up with mud. Oh, the phone? I plugged it out and forgot to plug it back in." But all I got back in return was ghostly silence. I didn't want to go to India that summer anyway. India was a big brown spot on Mrs. Gibson's globe in geography class. Everyone was poor and prayed to cows who were their cousins in a previous life. I'd seen the movie Gandhi in history class; I knew what India was like. I figured that going to sleep-over camp with my friends was much more constructive. Besides, if anyone at school had found out my family was from India, as my father claimed, and not from Canada, as my perfect Canadian accent confirmed, I would have had to put up with those "Paki" jokes, like Sanjit and Vijay did. So, for me, ignorance was bliss; that is, until Aja's funeral. Aja died of a stroke, which was actually not one of the worst ways to go because he had no pain. He just passed out and never woke up again. Preparations for his funeral became first priority, and my father was around all the time. He never left the phone; I mean more so than usual. Every so often he would say something that wasn't English, like that bilingual girl in my French class who would switch back and forth between English and French: "I fait cold aujourd'hui." Or, "On peut jouer outside?" Only the words my father was speaking were not French. I tried to ask him what was going on, why he was talking to so many people, but he never answered me. Not that I expected him to. My mother was scrubbing floors, cleaning walls, washing everything in sight. The washing machine thumped madly, flopping around as if possessed. "I've had enough," it seemed to scream, but my mother would just keep stuffing it full with things we never used. I tried asking her what was going on, but she'd just sigh quietly and mutter something about family: "The family coming boy. We mus' get ready fuh the funeral." - 10- Aja's Ghost When all was clean and the furniture sparkled as if it was made of sunlight, my mother took all the washed curtains and folded them into neat piles. She then took all the mirrors and pictures that were hanging up around the house and turned them the other way, facing the wall, as if there were little invisible people living in the walls who had complained that they only ever saw the backs of things. During all this cleaning, people kept showing up at our door: morning, afternoon, 3:00 a.m., it didn't matter. My father welcomed them with a sprinkling of that phone language of his and my mother made up their beds. They all looked a little familiar. I had seen them in family photographs: relatives from Trinidad who pinched my cheeks and told me how big I'd grown and lamented how much I would miss Aja. I had known Aja for nine months and twelve days exactly. I was at the airport the night he arrived and I helped my parents move him into his apartment. I did a lousy job of cleaning the bathroom-my mom yelled at me for that-and I inadvertently put away all of Aja's clothes into the closet in the guest bedroom instead of his own. Dad yelled at me for that. But apart from that embarrassing introduction I rarely saw Aja. He was a quiet man with an unhappy face. He always looked like he was crying but his cheeks were perfectly dry. When he did speak, his voice was rather rough, his Trinidadian accent usurping any chance of comprehension. Sometimes when he talked to me I just smiled and nodded while thinking about my last baseball game or the test I had just failed. My family consisted of me, my angry mother, my absent father, and relatives who meant nothing to me, except of course for my father's brother-Uncle Ragnauth-and his family. Uncle Ragnauth and Aunty Lakshmi came from Ottawa for the funeral and had to stay in the basement because we had run out of bedrooms. They brought Indira, of course, my dreaded cousin who was exactly one year older than me. When they lived in Toronto, we used to spend our birthday together: March 23rd; we pretended we were twins. We would share our presents and cakes. Uncle and Aunty were very religious. They made Indira take all sorts of religious and cultural lessons, and I used to make fun of her because I could play baseball with my friends while she had to spend Saturdays taking classes. I went to a few of her Indian dance recitals, with her jingling bangles and foot bells. How embarrassing for her, I had thought. Once she came to a baseball tournament of mine. Luckily for me she didn't understand a thing, so when I let four batters walk and almost knocked out Freddie Bartlett with a wild pitch to his forehead, Indira congratulated me anyway and said that maybe I would play in the major leagues one day. Then Indira grew up. It was like Jack's beanstalk. One summer she was shorter than me and kind of cute and sweet; the next summer she was towering - 11- MaComere over me, like the CN Tower, only alive and female. She no longer wanted me at her recitals and I never invited her anymore to my baseball games. We had grown apart, right at the time we were meant to: puberty. Indira was growing breasts. I could see her bra through her shirt and feel the raised material on her back. So I did the only thing I could: snap the strap any chance I got. She hated me from then on. It was lucky that Indira had morphed into a girl with breasts because, soon after, Uncle Ragnauth got a job in Ottawa and they all moved. Had she been the same girl I thought of like a sister, I might have missed her more. From then on, they only came down maybe once every summer for a week, and Indira would attack me any parent-free chance she got. Indira was well behaved this time at the funeral, which was held the second day after Aja died. No punching or kicking or calling me a wuss. This visit she was less violent, less physical. Her payback took on a more mature tone for she served as my interpreter. "Death is very impure," she said, like a professor, instructing me in its mysteries. "Everything we do is to remove this impurity." "How can we remove it if Aja's still dead?" I wanted to catch her in a lie, to trip her up. "You clean, Stupid." "Oh." I guessed that made sense. I remembered Mom's frantic cleaning. "Cleaning is most important! See Aja?" She pointed to his dead body lying in the coffin in the middle of the room. I flinched upon seeing Aja's limp lifeless body. He looked real but not, like a scene from a science fiction movie. But I couldn't show my fear. So I gathered all my courage and continued listening to Indira, trying not to look at Aja. "Your dad and my daddy helped clean him and dress him at the funeral home. Now he's perfectly clean and pure." As Indira kept talking, my eyes drifted across the room. Everyone was sitting on plastic chairs Mom had rented. Sadness crept on people's faces, like shadows on a windy winter night. Indira and I, being the youngest ones, sat in a corner, the dunce corner, where she explained everything. All the other relatives sneered when they heard our conversation. I even overheard Aunty Urmi whisper to someone: "How disgraceful he doesn't know his traditions." - 12- Aja's Ghost "And the other thing we do is try to help Aja, not him actually, but his soul, get to a good place." I pictured Aja's shrivelled ghost floating around, banging into things, desperately trying to find this good place. "Well, where is this place?" It was a perfectly legitimate question, I thought, for if we knew where it was, we could take him there. "I don't know, Stupid," she replied. "No one knows until they're dead. We can only help the spirit along, like how your mom reversed the pictures on the walls." She pointed. What? No little wall people? "And now they'll light a deya," she continued, pointing towards all the adults around the room, "and they'll also perform apuja." Most of the ceremony was done in Sanskrit. It was similar, as Indira tauntingly informed me, to the language that my dad had been speaking on the phone. She tried to translate the few words that she knew, while I sat silently. I listened intently to the few English parts, though, for I didn't want Indira to have to explain those to me too. Uncle Ragnauth stood up clearing his throat and proudly stated: "The living entity in the material world carries his different conceptions of life as the air carries aromas. Thus he takes one kind of body and again quits it to take another." Uncle Ragnauth went on for ages and I struggled to understand what he was saying. My head was starting to hurt from the excessive concentration and my mortification over my ignorance was making me feel ill. Picturing Aja's ghost floating around, sitting next to me, maybe flying in one nostril and out the other wasn't helping either. It was all too much for my twelve-year-old stomach to handle. That sadha, as Indira had called it-"the meal close family members eat in order to stay pure themselves"-was starting to chum. It was all I had eaten that day. I could hear my gastric juices slapping up against those tasteless boiled potatoes, the stringy saltless beans forming an army in my stomach, tying everything up, tightly, tautly. I had a vague feeling of nausea. "What's that my dad's reading from?" I asked Indira, dizziness starting to take over. She looked at me with shameful eyes. "Don't you ever go to Temple?" I looked down at my shoes, wondering why my parents never told me any of this. "It's the Bhagavad-Gita, Stupid!" - 13- MaComere Next thing I knew, my mother was pulling me up out of my seat, pushing me towards my father. "What, Mom?" "Up. Over there." She pointed. "Dad." Verbless. I guessed she was agitated. Maybe she realized she should have taught me these things. Traditions aren't inherited-they're learned. Everyone was staring: sadly, daringly. Aja's coffin stood ominously in the center of all of us. Uncle Ragnauth stood on one side, my father on the other. "Go on," whispered Indira. "This is your last chance to make Aja proud. They pass you over the body from son to son. It's your chance to show your courage by keeping Aja's spirit away from here and sending it off to the good place." So I went, walking bravely up to my father. He lifted me up easily, my tiny frame not weighing much, I suppose, and handed me over gently, perpendicularly, my face directed to the floor, over to Uncle Ragnauth, both of them chanting something in Sanskrit while doing it. So there I was, travelling across Aja's open casket, staring at his empty face and his spiritless body, inhaling the fumes from whatever purification solution that was lingering nauseatingly. Three times. Pass me over the body three times and my job would be done. That's what Indira said. But on the second passing my head started spinning and sweat started dripping from my pores. I wanted to shout to Dad, to get him to stop, to get him to put me down. How could I help Aja reach the good place? But my father didn't notice, just as always. My father didn't notice me. He proceeded to hand me back over to Uncle Ragnauth for the third and final time. Indira's words kept repeating in my head: "Purity is very important; if Aja is impure he won't ever find the good place." Suddenly, I could feel my stomach grinding, and I could hear my head thumping, just like the washing machine, full of things that were never used. So halfway there, halfway to Uncle Ragnauth, my mouth opened like an upside-down volcano and I vomited all over Aja's purified corpse. Aja's ghost has visited me every day since. It's only now that I've figured out why. I'm about to have a child of my own, a son. But I have nothing to teach him, nothing to give. How can I teach my son what I still don't know? My own father is now sixty-two. We never became close, even though I hoped for it. He's still my father, though, and I don't want my son, at his Aja's funeral, to be on his own like I was. - 14- Tiphanie Yanique Twins My room is in my grandparents' house. Though we live in a neighborhood known for public housing projects, my grandmother and grandfather once owned their house outright. Then they mortgaged it for my cousin's trial, but he went to jail for murder and now the bank owns our home. But it's still ours in a way. My grandparents don't rent it; they pay a mortgage. There is a difference. My grandmother used to walk down the street tapping the sidewalk with her foot as she declared loudly, "This is my pavement." She was the one who fought the government to put sidewalks in our neighborhood. She has other magic too. My grandmother raised twins: my mother and I. My mother is my grandmother's second child. She is the only left- handed one. Left-handedness is very important in my family. My grandmother was left-handed until the nuns beat her into right-handedness in school. She often says this ruined a part of her, though she does not say what part; and now there is a pattern in my family. Every one of my grandmother's children has had a left-handed child first. Every second grandchild is right-handed and after that the pattern disappears because my mother has only two children, as does one of my aunts. These first left-handed children all carry the thing that was beaten out of their grandmother. I am the only grandchild whose mother is also left-handed. My mother was the brilliant one. "She's the best thing that ever happened to that high school," says an old classmate. "Too bad she was, you know, a little crazy," says someone who claimed to have voted for her when she ran for the local senate. "The smartest one in the family and you know intelligence sometimes leads to insanity," says my aunt. "A talented poet," says an old professor mentor. "That's what you took from her," says my grandmother, eyeing me to make sure I took nothing else. I eye her back when she is not looking. Identical twins claim to know each other more intimately than the rest of us could imagine. Because of this, many young, misunderstood girls wish for a twin all through middle and high school so they can have someone to know them without making too much effort. Someone to finish their sentences. Someone to read their minds. When identical twins who have been separated at birth find each other, they laugh and cry and touch each other. My eyes! My nose! Look, you also have a mole. Watch, my hair also bends in that funny way. And then there are other things. See, I have a filling in this tooth. Incredible! So do I; I have a scar behind my knee from something I cannot remember. And here is mine! Then their talk grows slow and fearful. No one is born with scars and fillings. Life happens and then these things result. How do separate lives happen and then result in the same evidence? The twins look at each other and see the same crooked shadow on the other's face. They say in unison: "The woman who MaComere raised me was a librarian. I grew up in a house where books were like ornaments on the coffee table, spilling like abstract art off shelves." This is what my mother looks like: She has what is referred to in the Virgin Islands as "coolie hair." In the seventies, she wore it in a 'fro; now she always wears it back from her face. She wears big glasses that she never takes off for pictures. She is honey colored. She is tall and thin and she walks with her back very straight. Her eyes are slanted and small. She had acne in high school. Her face is a little flat and it is narrow. She has an incredible smile and absolutely perfect teeth, though she never had braces. This is what I look like: My hair is kinkier than hers. I wear glasses, though I often take them off for parties or when working around the house. But I always wear them in pictures. I am honey colored. I am not as tall as she is-I always thought I'd be taller-and I am not as thin. Even in high school when I was very skinny, her old wedding ring would only fit my pinky. I believe I walk with my back straight. My eyes are a little slanted and a little small. I still have acne. My face is a little flat and narrow. I am told I have a nice smile, although my orthodontist takes the credit for this and shows me off to his other patients. Sometimes when identical twins are separated at birth they will face different challenges. One will be shorter and uglier somehow. Children in orphanages tend to be very small and crooked-a result of trauma that stunts them worse than black coffee. When I was growing up in my grandmother's house I read a lot (she was a librarian and my mother was also a librarian). As a child I would pull books off the shelves and see comments in the margins of Robin Hood or Uncle Tom's Cabin-simple comments such as "interesting" or a brief question: "Why"? I was out of the house before it dawned on me that those were my mother's comments. Now when I read, I make the same kinds of notes. Perhaps one day a child of the next generation will find them and not be able to tell the difference between hers and mine. One day, pulling books off shelves, I found a photo album. The inscription on the inside said "Property of Tiphanie Yanique" (my mother was the only person who used my middle name until I decided to use it too). It was my property but I hadn't taken any of the pictures. I saw myself as a baby, then as a little girl, then pictures of my baby brother and another, without an identifying caption, of a white man I didn't recognize. The inscription said the album belonged to me, so I took it. It was only half full so I put my own pre-teen pictures in the remaining pages. When I was sixteen, and years after she had moved (or been sent) to a home for the mentally unstable in Puerto Rico, my mother asked for this album. She claimed it was hers. I told her that it was mine because she said it was my property; besides, I had already filled it completely with pictures of my friends, my grandmother, my brother and my favorite teachers. When this explanation - 16- Twins didn't satisfy her, I told her I had lost it, but in truth it sits on my shelf to this day. Around the same time my mother was asking for the album, my mother's sister called me. My aunt was in New York, I was in St. Thomas and my mother was in Puerto Rico. My mother had asked my aunt to collect her poems so they could be published. My aunt said she didn't know where the poems were, so they had to be in my room (mine and my mother's) somewhere. I do remember seeing them. They were typewritten on almost translucent paper. But that was years ago. "Try," my aunt said. Then my mother called, frantic. She said she came across one of her poems published under another person's name (by that time, I'd had two poems published in small magazines). "Find my poems," she directed over the phone, "publish them properly." I looked and looked but I never found them. Eventually, she forgot about the poems. Or perhaps she gave up on me. Afterwards, I went through a period of fear. I would send pieces I wrote to the Library of Congress to get them officially copyrighted. And I'd get back notices declaring that the pieces were indeed mine and would always be. For the entire year that my mother was agonizing over her lost poems, I copyrighted every insignificant thing I wrote. This was very expensive, but although we are poor, my grandmother gave me the money to get the copyrights. She is very afraid that I will become my mother. I don't copyright my work anymore. I allow myself to hand in a story at a workshop and let people take it home or lose it. Often, I let myself forget to put my name on something I worked very hard on. Sometimes when I'm in a cafe, I scribble scenes down on a napkin and then forget it when I throw out my coffee cup. Perhaps someday I will see one of my stories with another name beneath it. Perhaps someday I will go into a bookstore and I will see a book with my name in the place of the author's and I will stare at it and wonder if it's mine. - 17- Renee H. Shea Attempting Perfection: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer Judith Ortiz Cofer remembers that even as a young child in Puerto Rico, she knew instinctively that storytelling was a form of empowerment and that her abuela and the other women in her family told stories as a way of passing on power from one generation to another. Once she was educated, Cofer has said, she transferred that oral tradition into literature. In her poems, essays, novels, and short fiction, she tells stories of her Navy father whose "homecomings were the verses / we composed over the years making up / the siren's song that kept him coming back" ("My Father in the Navy," Reaching for the Mainland 25). In "Siempre,"she recalls her mother, "still vibrant with her other selves" as the timidly exultant teenage bride, the anxiety-drive young mother in a strange country, and always the battle to keep loving life in spite of exile, loneliness [.. .]. (A Love Story Beginning in Spanish 19) Cofer wonders about the term "macho man"-which she points out actually means "male man" -and reflects on the possibility of a woman having or being macho ("Taking the Macho," Woman in Front of the Sun 63-72). She writes about being an immigrant and muses whether we might all be immigrants in these days when we live in such a diverse cultural garden. Born in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico and raised in the United States, primarily New Jersey, Cofer is currently the Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Her latest work is a collection of poetry, A Love Story Beginning in Spanish, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2005. In 2004, she published Call Me Maria, and in the previous year a novel The Meaning of Consuelo, which was one of two winners of the 2003 Americas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature. Woman in Front of the Sun (2000), prose and poetry, is her memoir about becoming a writer. Her novel, The Line of the Sun (1989), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1989; Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990), a series of essays and poems, was awarded a Pen/Martha Alband Special Citation in Nonfiction; The Latin Deli (1995), a collection of essays, short fiction and poetry, received the Anisfield Wolf Award for Race Relations in 1994; The American Library Association named her collection of short stories, An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio (1995), a Best Book of the Year for 1995-96. Cofer is widely anthologized in textbooks for middle school, high school, and college and has contributed to magazines both literary and popular. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter -18- Attempting Perfection: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Readers look to Cofer for her honest explorations into what it means to be bilingual and bicultural, to grow up, as she says, "with conflictive expectations: the pressures from my father to become very well versed in the English language and the Anglo customs, and from my mother not to forget where we came from" (Acost-Belen 93). She writes primarily in English, but says she "writes obsessively" about her Puerto Rican experience. She calls English her "literary language, the language [she] learned in the schools," and Spanish her "familial language" ("And Are You a Latina Writer?" Woman in Front of the Sun 105-115). In her poem "El Azul," she writes, "We dream in the language we all understand / in the tongue that preceded alphabet and word" (Woman in Front of the Sun 126). Cofer can be playful about her heritage in such poems as "Latin Women Pray" where she imagines "Margarita, Josefina, Maria, and Isabel / All fervently hoping that if not omnipotent," God might "at least be bilingual" (Reaching for the Mainland 27). In "Don't Misread My Signals," an often anthologized essay, she writes about the stereotyping of Latina women, and "In Search of My Mentors' Gardens," she muses on Alice Walker's warning not to be content with "segregated literature" (Woman in Front of the Sun 91-104). She is inspired by a wide range of writers, including Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker herself, as well as the Spanish-language writers Miguel Cervantes, Pablo Neruda, and Isabel Allende. Renee Shea interviewed Judith Ortiz Cofer on April 21, 2005. RS: How did you choose the provocative title A Love Story Beginning in Spanish for your new book? Why did you decide to put together this collection of poems, many of which you published before in journals and magazines? JC: Poetry books are usually formed that way. You publish a lot of different poems in journals and at some point you feel that you have a critical mass. The poems in this collection date back as far as fourteen years, so it's a new book in that it's newly collected work. I've always felt that a poetry book has to coalesce, come together in form, so I don't write poetry in the same way I write novels, which is with one idea in mind. I have quite a few poems that I kept looking at and wondering if they made a book, and about two or three years ago I thought a pattern was emerging-not just a thematic pattern but a way of looking at the book as a whole. I thought that at this point in my life when I'm 53 years old and have lived most of my life in the United States but never left my connection to the island behind, there was finally a story in my poetry; and it had to do with coming from Spanish, beginning in Spanish on the island where I - 19- MaCombre was born and my parents were married, to my present situation, which is that I live in Georgia. I consider this my home. I have a family and a love story here. I think all human life is a love story-not necessarily a romantic story but one of connections you make along the way. Mine began in Spanish and is now in English, but then it goes back again to Spanish. What I wanted was for the poems to reflect that, to have a sense of continuation. So that's where the idea came from. The love story has to do with the fact that I have a very strong narrative impulse. Even when I'm writing poetry, I'm thinking in terms of how this affects my narrative, how I can plug it into a narrative. I don't think in manipulative terms, but that's how my brain works. I had originally thought that the title poem, "El Amor: A Story Beginning in Spanish" would be the first, but I thought in a way that announces that the story has closure, so I moved it to the end because that poem says a story can begin anywhere in any language at any time. I wanted it to remain open to indicate that the story is always happening. It's an Ars Poetica. RS: When you republish a poem as part of a book do you revise it? Do you feel that's cricket? Or is the poem frozen in the moment in time when you first published it? JC: Absolutely, I revise. The poem is mine and it belongs to the journal only when it first appears. I think it was Auden who said a poem is never really finished; we just abandon it at some point. To me, poetry is an attempt at the perfection of language, which is of course impossible in human terms. But every time I look at a line, I ask myself, "Can it be made better?" Coleridge said a good poem is "the best words in the best order." That sounds simple, but what is best? Many of the poems that are now in this book appear from slightly changed to dramatically changed because I have changed and learned a few things. RS: There are several Penelope poems in the section "From a Sailor's Wife's Journal." How did they come about? JC: The actual genesis of those and some on the Bible as well came from my having to teach both parts of a world literature course when I was first starting out. I had to read these texts very carefully, and I started feeling cheated out of the voice of Penelope. I think her story was more interesting than Odysseus's. His was episodic: then I did this; then I had an affair with Calypso, which is all very fascinating. But Penelope's personal life interested me. I'm also interested because Penelope is a sailor's wife, as was my mother. I don't think people need to know that as any woman will recognize Penelope's anguish and her need to fly off and have a life outside of the palace. I started a -20- Attempting Perfection: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer series of these poems, and the ones in the book are only a small portion because I found myself weaving and unweaving, as Penelope was doing, trying to get her out of the house. RS: They seem more romantic than many I've read (such as Carol Ann Duffy's "Penelope") which are more feminist talking-back readings. Yours seem dreamy almost-a saddened Penelope, but one still longing for her beloved Odysseus. JC: I don't see them as romantic. I see the first poem, "Dear Odysseus," as a woman in love yearning to go with her man and for her man to return. But I see the series as a progressive separation. She remembers him as this romantic hero who doesn't want to stay on the farm. She also sees the carolers and partiers coming home from a pagan ritual after having made love and drunk wine; and there's a yearning there. So I saw Penelope's separation not as, "Oh I'm liberated now; I think I'll raise hell." I saw it as an intellectual and emotional coming to terms with her independence. So the poems are meditative in that way. I see my Penelope coming to liberation but not getting up on a stage and announcing, "I'm a liberated woman now." That's not how it happened to my mother or a lot of women. First it's emotional. I tried to infuse those poems with images of flight and the freedom that she's considering. RS: Your Penelope is also very attuned to her own sexuality. JC: That reflects my kind of feminism, which doesn't reject the romance of the flesh, doesn't reject a woman admitting that she's weak in love but strong in her mind. Maybe that's my Latina-ness, but I've never felt the need to grandstand my liberation. It's internal, and I try to live life as a free woman. But that doesn't eliminate the possibility of being connected to another human being through passion and sexuality RS: For some time, I've wanted to ask you about the hibiscus. Obviously, this flower means a great deal to you (it's a hallmark of your website). What's your connection to this "ephemeral" flower? JC: You're getting the inside story in a way. This was a gift I made for my daughter. The poem was originally dedicated to Tanya. The hibiscus represents my background. It was the first flower I became aware of as a child because it was all over the island. In Silent Dancing, I talk about how the hibiscus was everywhere. As little girls, my cousins and I used to play with them. We rolled them up and pretended they were cigarettes; we put them in our hair; they represented the island. But in this poem, there's the one thing I didn't think about as a child: how brief the hibiscus's life is, how beautiful it is in full bloom, MaComere and how suddenly it wraps itself into a little shroud. It allowed me a moment of meditation about a woman's beauty in her life. The reader doesn't need to know this, but this was a time when my daughter- who is a mathematician and a wonderful gardener and cook (unlike her mother)-was feeling depressed. I took her this hibiscus that I had bought, and before I gave it to her, I looked up information about it. That description yielded the images in the poem. It's a sort of carpe diem poem-not an original theme, but it says to enjoy the flower, understand it is beautiful and also has practical uses, and that it can suddenly disappear. It is short-lived. RS: This collection opens with a quote from Denise Levertov: "You invaded my country by accident, / not knowing you had crossed the border." Is she one of your favorites? JC: When I was an undergraduate in college, she was one of the few female poets I found in anthologies. She wrote about the Vietnam War, but I thought that the line-"you invaded my country"-could be taken in any number of ways. I wanted an ironic reversal on immigration: I have not invaded your country; this culture has invaded my country and my internal country, too. I found her words particularly appropriate for what I was trying to do. RS: I want to turn to Call Me Maria now. In your letter to the reader that you did for the publisher, you quote [Constantine] Cavafy's poem "Ithaka" -more Homer. You seem to have a real connection to The Odyssey. JC: I can't help but be an English teacher, and this seminal story of loss, separation, and beauty mirrors everything I have known in my life: my father was a veteran of every war since Korea until he died and my mother lived a life of exile and waiting. We were influenced by history because my father was always involved in it. We were brought to the U.S. but lived in a bubble of culture. The Odyssey has been key to understanding the recurrent nature of certain events. In this ancient text, Homer brought in the idea of the family waiting for the warrior, and it gave me a framework for thinking about my life. In fact, I recently wrote a chapter for a high school textbook on Cavafy because I love his work. Those lines, "As you set out for Ithaka / hope the voyage is a long one, / full of adventure, full of discovery," have meant a lot to me because my father's journey was long and full of adventure but not happy, and I wanted something different for me and my child. RS: This book crosses multiple genres with its poetry, narratives, and letters; indeed, you call it "a novel in letters, poems, and prose." How does -22- Attempting Perfection: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer something like that start with a poem? When did you know this "novel" would be multi-genre? JC: When I started thinking about this book, I was doing a lot of traveling and trying to keep a notebook and I asked myself, "Who is the character?" I often do this. In order to think about a character or a situation, I will start a poem about it. To me, poetry is a door to a place that may be lost in my brain. When I am writing a poem, I actually have to set an alarm-and this is not mystical, it's psychological-because I enter a place where I am trying to do what psychologists do in deep analysis. Some of the poems toward the end of the book came to me first, and that's how I started entering Maria's brain or personality. At some point, I had all these pieces, which I sent to my editor and said, "I think I'm going to try writing this book in sections because this is how it's coming to me." She liked some of the pieces so much that I started thinking of Maria as someone watching the world, collecting and trying to make a collage of some sort appear. As soon as I knew she lived in a basement apartment and was watching the world go by through the top half of her window and that she heard voices and was separated from the world, I started thinking in terms of what impressions she was gathering. So I had her writing things about her teachers, about her friends, the smell of cologne. She comforts herself in her initial loneliness by trying to construct the world. The more I wrote and sent to my editor, the more she liked the idea of allowing Maria's voice to emerge. RS: So much of your work is about writing, literally and figuratively writing oneself into the world. But this one has an even stronger emphasis on language. Again, I am quoting your letter to your reader: "I wanted Maria to learn to give meaning to her journey by becoming a recorder of experience, that is, a writer." Can you talk a little about why you did that? Because it seems to me that making her so specifically a writer might narrow the audience that feels connected to her. JC: I hope that hasn't happened. When I go to schools, often with immigrant students, the last thing they think about is the writer. What they see is that she is a girl desperately trying to find a place and to find language. She just happens to use writing. They mainly talk about her relationships with Whoopi and Uma, her abuela, her parents. The fact that she is a writer is coincidental to many of these kids. They seem to think of the writing as a way she has found to integrate herself into the barrio. RS: As you were writing those poems that are about grammar and syntax, the technical elements of language as in "English Declaration: I Am the MaComere Subject of the Sentence" or "English: I am the Simple Sentence," did you have in mind a kind of a didactic purpose for your young audience? JC: Not at all. I'm completely against didacticism in art. I think any lessons in art should be subliminal and playful. I thought of this as simply a frame for where the kids go during the day. They have to put up with teachers telling them about grammar and sentences. I tried to imagine myself, and I was nerdish, so Maria takes these boring exercises she was given to do and makes them into poems. RS: I have to say that this one is a Valentine to teachers; and most of all to your husband, I think (though he's a math teacher). JC: The whole book is dedicated to my husband. The students call him Mr. C. He teaches math, and I wrote that poem "Math Class: Sharing the Pie" completely about him. Talk about an idealist! People think that because I'm the poet that I'm the idealist, but it's not true. My husband teaches for almost no money in a school that sees a lot of poverty in rural Georgia. He spends 10- or 12-hour days trying to convince kids math is beautiful. One thing I did that was kind of strange was that I imagined my husband in a school in New York but yearning for Georgia. I wanted Maria to see that her nostalgia and loneliness was not just because she was a Puerto Rican girl, but that there could be this white guy from the South also yearning for a completely different landscape and also feeling alienated and lost. Mr. Golden is a poet who tells the kids he has learned math by counting birds, so this is a tribute to the heroes of the classroom, the ones who really do care. RS: Maria has to be one of your favorite characters. You've made her into such an exceptional person. Is she? JC: I like her because even though she is a bookworm, she is completely involved in life. Maria and I are only similar in a few ways: her parents are not mine, but what I like about her is that she chooses to be with the parent who needs her the most. She doesn't choose the easy life, but she loves her father despite the fact that he's a mess. She despairs at his womanizing and drinking, but she is still his collaborator. I like her not so much because she's a bookworm like me but because she jumps into life and doesn't take the easy way out. RS: Comparisons to House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros seem inevitable. Were you inspired by Esperanza and her quest? Or do you see these more as parallel tracks? JC: I considered that, but I think Maria is different. The form [of vignettes, poetry and prose] may be similar, but I've done this before in The Latin Deli. -24- Attempting Perfection: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer Sandra did a fabulous job and no one can imitate The House on Mango Street. But I knew the comparisons would be made because we're both Latina. Still, I don't think Esperanza and Maria are the same. Do you? RS: Both are writers. Both seem to be finding an individual voice to speak for the community. JC: But Maria stays. She's not just interested in telling the stories. She wants to find a voice for herself. Esperanza is gaining power so she can leave and tell the stories, but Maria chooses to stay in the barrio. But any comparison to Sandra I consider a great compliment. RS: Also, in that letter to the "reader" you wrote, "Language wins you friendship and buys you freedom." I doubt that Spanish or Spanglish always wins you friends. Doesn't it marginalize some readers? JC: This may sound harsh, but I am not thinking of the reader when I'm writing; I'm thinking of the story. If it requires Spanish or Spanglish, that's what I put in, mainly because I think of reading literary works as work, not simply entertainment. When I was trying to become an English teacher and find an identity for myself, I read everything I was told to read. The greatest works often contain many other languages: Greek in The Waste Land [by T.S. Eliot], Italian with [Ezra] Pound, French with many people. I just assumed if I couldn't grasp the meaning in context, if the work was important enough and we were interested enough, that we would go find a dictionary and look things up. So, in order to create the world that Maria lives in, I could not write all standard English. I try to use my art and craft to provide context, but I expect my reader to find a way to understand the culture I'm writing about. RS: In another interview, you said that you're not a political writer "in that [you] never take an issue and write a story about it [.. .] the politics are background noise" (Acosta-Belen 85). Yet the stand you implicitly take about language seems very political. JC: Is nobody going to read Mark Twain because of the dialect? Or Zora Neale Hurston? I claim the right as a writer to have my characters speak credibly in their chosen form. I may not be a political writer, but it doesn't mean I'm not a political person. My politics are infused in my work. RS: Politics are certainly infused in The Meaning of Consuelo, and I wonder if Consuelo is a character you couldn't have written until now. Is she someone you wouldn't have been able to get inside of even, say, ten years ago? -25- MaCombre JC: That's very insightful. In many of the reviews, Consuelo is called "grim" or kind of dark. But this is a story I had to write when I felt I had enough distance from and compassion for my culture. I love all the celebratory aspects of the Puerto Rican culture and I feel so grateful to have come from a culture that has yielded so much for my work. But there are also things that bother me, such as the homophobia and how the Catholic Church has conspired to maintain this sense of the woman as servant, the suffering one. In this book, I wanted a girl growing up during a time when she saw options and had to make painful choices to define herself. That's why I called it The Meaning of Consuelo. Consuelo means "comfort." She was born and raised to play a part and at some point she has to define what Consuelo means and decide that she will be her own Consuelo, her own comfort. I had to know something first. That takes living. It could not have been my first novel. RS: This is your first real mainstream press book. It's published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Has this made a big difference? I know you've talked about appreciating the support of smaller presses yet feeling frustrated by the lack of resources for both ensuring a first-rate presentation and promoting the book. Is this a breakthrough? Why do you think FSG was interested in it? Was it because of your reputation and prizes or the story itself? JC: I haven't moved into the mainstream. I'm not a bestselling author in terms of huge numbers. My great luck is that my work is used extensively in high school and college textbooks. I think Farrar, Strauss & Giroux took a chance on me. I've been very aware that I have a public, but it doesn't have to do with the masses-just a faithful, loyal following. There's not a linear progression of success as though I started out with a little press and worked up to FSG. I am thrilled to be published with them, and Beacon Press has done a fabulous job with the paperback. But every book is different. Recently, University of Georgia Press did something very courageous. They commissioned a translation of Woman in Front of the Sun, and it's coming out in Spanish (Mujer Frente al Sol). Poetry is almost impossible to place. University of Georgia Press has been loyal and has kept my books in print no matter what the numbers, so I give them the poetry. If I write another novel, my agent will send it around, and it will find a publisher. RS: You've written about your grandmother's influence on you through her storytelling and much more (though she was not formally educated). -26- Attempting Perfection: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer You pointed out in an interview with Stephanie Gordon that she belonged to a generation of women who did not need "political rhetoric" in order to establish themselves as "liberated women." What exactly did you mean? JC: I think that part of my stance as a feminist comes from my grandmother as well as my mother. Mama (my name for her; Mami is my mother) never doubted her own power for one minute; yet she was maternal, nurturing, and as feminine as any woman I've ever known. She did not feel that one negated the other. She empowered herself internally. She didn't have to go around saying, "I am woman, hear me roar"; she just roared! She was a great model because she took action. She was a great problem solver, and yet she never talked about her philosophy of feminism. I just knew that all of her actions were based on her ethical system. I watched her be powerful without giving up the things she wanted to have. I've said that I knew I wanted my art but I didn't want to give up being a wife and mother to have it. So many women of my generation at some point in their lives came to believe that it was not possible to have a family and be liberated as a feminist. That was an early way of looking at things. If someone asked my grandmother who wears the pants in the family, she'd say, "Well, your grandfather does, but why would I need to wear pants? I have the power." RS: When asked where you see literature going in the U.S. in the next two decades in your interview with Lorraine Lopez, you predicted that a new generation of people from diverse cultural backgrounds, and who have gone through the education system, will be creating a literature that represents the true diversity of this country. I think about your grandmother here, but aren't you also describing Maria and Consuelo? JC: Isn't that funny? It takes you to tell me what I think! When I created Maria and Consuelo, I was thinking not of myself, but, particularly with Maria, I was thinking of someone who embraces a multitude of tongues and who chooses to speak standard English when it is necessary in the same way African-Americans speak one dialect in the home but understand that when they're on Wall Street they speak the language of the mainstream. So, right now in my honors undergraduate writing class, I have a girl from Egypt and another from Greece. They're writing stories about leaving their countries and coming to Atlanta, and I think how wonderful if one of these girls becomes a writer-a Southern writer. RS: When I saw you last October, you commented that your students are your "daily news" and that without this interaction you would live your life more and more internally. Could you talk about that? Could it possibly be true that gregarious as you are, you are, in fact, more inclined toward being an introvert than an extrovert? -27- MaComere JC: Actually, yes. Being gregarious is my public persona. When I am not traveling or teaching, I'm usually very alone in what my husband calls "the cave" or "the dungeon." I keep the drapes drawn and everything quiet. I have always had a need for solitude because I live in my mind. I love a day when I don't have to do what I do today: meet students, go to a meeting, a dinner. I will enjoy every minute of these activities because that is how I absorb life. But then tomorrow I will enjoy staying in my pajamas and working alone in my basement with only one light on. I'm afraid if I didn't have these requirements of students waiting for me, I would more and more live in my mind because that's where my imagination resides. I understand the need for both, which is why I choose to have a family and to teach. RS: I've heard you say many times that you carved out writing time for yourself by reserving 5 to 7a.m. each day, starting when you had a young daughter. Do you still do that? Do you write every day? JC: I still do mainly because I've trained myself. People who run or do one thing obsessively or compulsively at a certain hour find that it becomes a need. I find that my best work comes when I have not spoken to anyone yet; when I've just been asleep the whole night before I can easily move into this realm right from dreams. It doesn't always end at 7a.m. now because I have more leisure, but I find that about three hours is all I can do. RS: I love seeing the eclecticism of your influences just by reading the epigraphs and introductions to your books: Pablo Neruda, Denise Levertov, Virginia Woolf, May Sarton, W.S. Mervin-across time and culture. You must be a voracious reader. JC: Out of need and pleasure. One of the things I've been doing lately is taking the writers that I love and reading them from beginning to end. I did that with Flannery O'Connor last summer: all letters, stories, books. I just got everything of [Vladimir] Nabokov to read, but I haven't started yet. But the other thing is that I am on endless comprehensive exam committees. Writers are not like scholars because they put together weird lists of what they want to be examined on. I just finished one that made me reread Aristotle's Poetics! I may have read these things a long time ago, but once again my students keep me reading far and wide. RS: But other influences are Alice Walker and Flannery O'Connor; and you know that one of my very favorite pieces of yours is "In Search of My Mentors' Gardens" where you talk about them. It seems that you're able to -28- Attempting Perfection: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer take in so many different approaches and influences, even styles, and appreciate them for being one thing or another without judging them. JC: This is the thing I tell my graduate students. Everybody feels that they have to write out their own experience and feelings, but the master works of literature were written when the writers entered another consciousness-even that of a giant cockroach! I tell them, if you're an African-American and reading only African-American writers, all you are seeing are things you need to know for yourself as a human being but not as an artist. An artist has to take in everything. One of the things I do when I'm teaching a poetry seminar is have my poor graduate assistants go to the library and find every poetry anthology from every poetry ghetto-like Lesbian Poetry Writers of the 1950s or Puerto Ricans Angry at the World along with the Norton Anthology and others-and tell them they must read at least one book per week out of themselves. I say, "Does it matter if that poem gives you chills? Does it matter that this poet is a white guy in Vermont?" One of the things I believe in-and maybe I'm sounding political now, but I am a dictator in class-is that people have been taught that they can only think in terms of themselves and write in those terms. That is so wrong. I have found the greatest artistic lessons from people whose lives I think are reprehensible. I dislike the way James Dickey lived his life, especially the way he treated women, but I still cry when I read some of his poems, so one has to separate the personal from art. And I have to practice what I preach. So, I read people on my students' reading lists whom I wouldn't normally turn to, and often I learn even more about myself. RS: Virginia Woolf certainly isn't inimical to your belief system, though she lived a very different life and came from a different background and time. Yet, you've written about what a profound influence she's had on you. JC: Models are a gift, but you have to discover what you need; and with her, I found an intelligent woman's voice saying, "Dig in your own backyard. You have treasures. Go back into your memory. Follow the track left by some emotions to your 'moments of being.'" RS: I want to follow up on a wonderful point you made in your interview with Lorraine Lopez when you talked about reading and writing being separate activities (you were explaining why you would not choose to read aloud certain of your works). You referred to "the eloquent silence" between the writer and the reader. What is that "eloquent silence"? JC: When I'm reading a story in complete solitude, there is this voice in my head implanting invaluable lessons, so there's a silence in a mystical yet biologically understandable way passing information from an object in your -29- MaCombre hand into your most important condition as a human being, your unconscious mind. So the "eloquent silence" is between the text, writer, and reader, even if the writer wrote hundreds of years ago. Reading is probably the most important thing I do for myself. RS: I read somewhere that you're working on a novel with an old woman as the protagonist? JC: I never finished that. I started a novel some time ago about an old woman who used to be a dancer and was in Miami. But I realized I didn't know enough about this woman. I still think about her. Perhaps some day. I've written so much in the voice of a young person that I definitely want to turn that around. RS: What are you working on now? JC: Because I just finished three books in two years and collaborated on this translation, I'm now just planning. I have about 50 pages of notes toward a novel, but don't want to talk about it because I don't know if it will happen. RS: But you're always writing poetry, which you've called "the ultimate discipline"? JC: I work on poems all the time. I have several new ones, but they're not ready to send out. I'm in the gathering stage right now with notes all over my table. WORKS CITED Acost-Belen, Edna. "An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer." MELUS (Fall 1993): 84-99. Gordon, Stephanie. "An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer." A WP Chronicle (October/November 1997): 1-9. Lopez, Lorraine. "Possibilities for Salsa Music in the Mainstream: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer." Ortiz Cofer, Judith. A Love Story Beginning in Spanish; Poems. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2005. -Call Me Maria. New York: Scholastic, 2004. --. The Meaning of Consuelo. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. --. Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming A Writer. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2000. -30- Attempting Perfection: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer --. An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio. New York: Penguin, 1995. --. Reachingfor the Mainland and Selected New Poems. Tempe: Bilingual Press Review, 1995. --. The Latin Deli. Athens, GA & London: University of Georgia Press, 1993. -. Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood. University of Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990. --. The Line of the Sun. Athens, Georgia; University of Georgia Press, 1989. -31- Joanne Nystrom Janssen "Feeling Fine": The Transatlantic Female Body in Grace Nichols's The Fat Black Woman's Poems In i is a long memoried woman, Guyanese-bom British poet Grace Nichols writes a series of poems about an unnamed woman who endures the Middle Passage and becomes enslaved in the New World. The poems document the individual woman's experiences while also re-imagining the history of all slave women, making her what Denise deCaires Narain calls "a kind of New World Everywoman" (183). In an interview, Nichols explains that the volume of poetry was prompted by a dream about a young woman swimming from Africa to the Caribbean. Because the girl carried a garland of flowers, Nichols said that she "interpreted the dream to mean that she was trying to cleanse the ocean of the pain and suffering that she knew her ancestors [. ..] had gone through" ("Grace Nichols in Conversation" 18). In her dream, the swimming woman was able to bring about healing and redemption through her re-navigation of the Middle Passage. Nichols's picture of a woman swimming across the ocean is similar to the image of the ship, which Paul Gilroy describes in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness as "a living, micro-cultural, micro- political system in motion" (4) in his theorizing of black Atlantic history and culture. Like Nichols's image of the girl swimming between countries and cultures, Gilroy envisions the ships travelling between Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, mirroring the historical reality of slave ships crossing the Middle Passage. By focusing on the black Atlantic, Gilroy emphasizes creolization and hybridity over cultural nationalism, arguing that both are critical to black people's identity because of their historical experience of forced migration. He also evokes "the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts" (4), an intermingling that can be seen in literatures and cultures influenced by the Middle Passage. While this physical migration occurs in Grace Nichols's i is a long memoried woman, the resulting cultural mixing affects a contemporary black British woman in her second volume of poetry, The Fat Black Woman's Poems. As the title suggests, the subject of these poems is an assertive and playful fat black woman who challenges Western conceptions of female beauty, history, and politics. And, in accord with Gilroy's theory of the black Atlantic, the poems draw upon imagery from African, Caribbean, and British cultures, melding them together as part of the woman's experience and cultural memory. However, the fat black woman's emphasis on her body as the mode of transport, or site of cultural assemblage, suggests the inability of Gilroy's ship image to adequately capture a black woman's experience: the body allows the woman to -32- "Feeling Fine": The Transatlantic Female Body in Grace Nichols's The Fat Black Woman's Poems formulate and demonstrate her identity as drawn from multiple locations, and to draw attention to the role of gender in past and present cross-cultural exchanges. Paul Gilroy developed his theory of the black Atlantic in response to dominant cultural criticism which categorized experience based on national identity or race. Instead of accepting inaccurate and destructive notions of national, ethnic, or racial purity, Gilroy believes that contemporary black English people, because of their history of dispersal, "stand between (at least) two great cultural assemblages" (1). From his perspective, this reality makes necessary an international and transcultural paradigm-what he calls "the theorisation of creolisation, metissage, mestizaje, and hybridity" (2). His resulting model, the black Atlantic, calls attention to the cultural interaction between Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe, especially in the way that black British communities "have forged a compound culture from disparate sources" (15). Gilroy argues that ships function as a useful image for exploring cultural exchanges between communities because they historically served as the primary means of social interaction between them. As ships moved between ports, they brought with them people, ideas, and cultural artifacts such as books, tracts, and music (4). Ships, sailors, and transnational movement also played significant roles in the lives of black literary figures such as Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Phyllis Wheatley, and Nella Larson (13, 17-18). Perhaps more importantly, ships focus attention on other circulations that contributed to cultural exchange and amalgamation such as the slave trade and projects to return to an African homeland (4). Gilroy does not see the movement of people and ideas, however, as primarily negative. In addition to moving across the black Atlantic as commodities, black people also have "engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship" (16), which brought about a creative cultural fusion that celebrates and enriches black culture. Besides evoking noteworthy historical realities, ships also serve as a useful metaphor for theoretical reasons. Because ships are mobile and transitory, Gilroy argues that they represent "shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected" (16). This flux mirrors the unstable and mutable identities of black people, a result of being "involved in trying to face (at least) two ways at once" (3). In addition, ships capture cultural and community dynamics because they are "micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity" (12). On a small scale, ships demonstrate the intermixture of people, groups, and philosophies, which Gilroy argues has occurred in all cultures influenced by the black Atlantic. Thus, Gilroy's theory emphasizes the structural and communal nature of the cross-cultural exchange rather than draw attention to an individual's experience of it. While the image of ships navigating the black Atlantic offers some assistance in interpreting Nichols's poetry, an anecdote by another Caribbean- British author suggests one of its weaknesses. Caryl Phillips, who was born on MaComere the island of St. Kitts but raised in England, describes a moment in his life while he was a college student at Oxford that drastically changed his thinking about cultural belonging. One day as he was walking past Blackwell's bookstore, he saw a book titled Between Two Cultures: Migrants and Minorities in Britain displayed in the window. In that moment he thought, "That's it, isn't it? I'm between two cultures." After a few years, however, he changed his mind: "Eventually I came to understand that the very title of the book is deeply disturbing, because I don't believe people are between two cultures. I think people inhabit two cultures" (Caryl Phillips). In his choice of words, Phillips suggests that cultures are experienced physically rather than imagined intellectually. And, contrary to Gilroy's image of being caught in an undefined, connecting cultural space, Phillips believes people can paradoxically reside or dwell within more than one culture simultaneously. In Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject, Carole Boyce Davies argues that the relationship Phillips describes between people and cultures takes on new dimensions when applied to black women writers, since renegotiating identity is fundamental to both these writers and to the experience of migration. She states, "It is the convergence of multiple places and cultures that re-negotiates the terms of Black women's experience that in turn negotiates and re-negotiates their identities" (3). But, instead of creating a composite identity, Davies suggests that black women's subjectivity exists in multiple locations: "Black women's writing cannot be located and framed in terms of one specific place, but exists in myriad places and times, constantly eluding the terms of the discussion" (36). As a result, she argues their work "should be read as a series of boundary crossings" rather than as bound to geographical, national, or ethnic categories (4). These border crossings, while documenting the women's travel between cultures, also signify the women's resistance to colonialism and patriarchy. As Davies states, "Black female subjectivity asserts agency as it crosses the borders, journeys, migrates and so re-claims as it re-asserts" (37). Rather than simply symbolizing cross-cultural exchange, as Gilroy suggests, intercultural movement for black women writers also represents the formation of multiple identities and the ability to oppose traditional authority structures. Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues that Gilroy's theory about the black Atlantic poses another serious problem for women: "The focus on the movement of ships and peoples across the Atlantic can be prematurely celebratory without adequately considering how gender and class inform and define transoceanic travel" (206). Historically, males have had the privilege of transience, DeLoughrey points out, which makes Gilroy's paradigm of migration one that favors a masculine experience. Unlike their male counterparts, the female writers that DeLoughrey examines depict oceanic movement "as a repetition of the familial, social and cultural rupture consistent with the (re-)experience of the middle passage" (206). In this way, she challenges two of Gilroy's assumptions: -34- "Feeling Fine": The Transatlantic Female Body in Grace Nichols's The Fat Black Woman's Poems that the roving ships represent the collective experience of black British people and that the transatlantic journey signifies a positive cultural fusion. Cultural travel, rather than contributing to a constructive hybridity, sometimes leads to estrangement and dislocation for female writers. The use of the female body to express movement between cultures more adequately captures women's experience of migration, in part because it ties in directly with the historical experience of bodily enslavement. Slavery reduced the body to a commodity, simultaneously stripping it of human worth and granting it trade value. In this context of being bought and sold as goods, the body became the object that slave owners attempted to subdue but which slaves tried to retain as their own. M. NourbeSe Philip further points out the body's significance: "Unlike all other arrivals before or since, when the African comes to the New World, she comes with nothing. But the body. Her body. The body-repository and source of everything needed to survive in any but the barest sense" (300-01). Because her body was a slave woman's only resource, it became her means of survival as well as her only source of resistance. And, since physical bodies experienced the journey across the Middle Passage, any re-imagining of that past must incorporate the body. As Nichols's dream about the swimming woman suggests, a woman's body can recall the pain and degradation of her servile past while also depicting her active response in the present. From the first poem of the collection, Grace Nichols highlights the significance of the body for black women in remembering and refiguring the past. Called "Beauty," the poem redefines both the word and the concept of beauty, representing it in the corporeal body of "a fat black woman." Significantly, the woman is depicted as floating in the sea like Gilroy's ships: "riding the waves / drifting in happy oblivion" (7). But unlike his image, which focuses on a journey experienced by a community of people, the fat black woman resides in the water alone-a solitude that emphasizes her individual experience, both of crossing the ocean and of determining a cultural identity. Her floating also contrasts with the slave ships' swift and purposeful voyages in order to maximize profit. The woman has no such destination-she merely exists, "drifting" and "riding the waves," content to remain between land masses rather than speeding to reach a destination (7). The woman's placement in the sea also connects her to the slaves who experienced the Middle Passage. Because of the brutality and dislocation that so many people suffered on slave ships, many Caribbean writers, according to DeLoughrey, "depict the Atlantic Ocean as a consistent force of cultural separation and displacement" (214). In contrast, the fat black woman's contented bobbing in the water suggests a refiguring of the journey in which she has made peace with the sea, depicting the water instead as a prodigal family member or lover who returns to her body with an affectionate gesture: "the sea turns back / to hug her shape" (7). In this way, the woman's contemporary -35- MaComere drifting acknowledges the history of slavery, while still imagining an alternative where the body and the sea work in harmony. In buoying her up and holding her body in its waves, the water even allows the woman to become overwhelmed with a temporary forgetfulness described in the poem as "happy oblivion" (7). Paradoxically, only through imagining an alternative to a brutal past can the fat black woman momentarily forget it. Another poem in the collection depicts the woman in harmony with water, but this time the sea is a bathtub. In "Thoughts drifting through the fat black woman's head while having a full bubble bath," the woman uses her bathing body to challenge Western ideologies that have historically oppressed her. The poem begins with a lulling rhythm with the words mimicking the water's oscillation: "Steatopygous sky/ Steatopygous sea / Steatopygous waves / Steatopygous me" (15). In pairing the nouns with an adjective that refers to having fat buttocks, the woman suggests a union between herself and nature in their similar excess and grandiosity-a blending together that mirrors the harmonious relationship between the woman and the water in the first poem. The nine lines in the middle break the rhythmic pace of the first section with the woman's aggressive desire: O how I long to place my foot on the head of anthropology to swing my breasts in the face of history to scrub my back with the dogma of theology to put my soap in the slimming industry's profit some spoke. (15) In contrast with her union with nature, the woman wants to attack the ideological forces of Western culture by using her body as the powerful assault weapon. Similar to the slave woman's use of her body as a tool of resistance, the fat black woman also uses her body in contemporary times to fight oppressive structures. Interestingly, the historical realities the woman wants to confront occurred on both sides of the Atlantic, suggesting a link with Gilroy's concept of hybridity. By squashing anthropology, she crushes ideologies that saw black- skinned people as less than human; by striking history, she combats the forces of imperialism that led to African slavery; by making theology serve her body, she critiques Western Christian missionaries who erased African culture in the name -36- "Feeling Fine": The Transatlantic Female Body in Grace Nichols's The Fat Black Woman's Poems of religion; and by clogging up economic production, she obstructs the sugar industry that propelled slave trafficking. From her bathtub in England, the woman travels through history and around the black Atlantic in order to assert her rejection of the structures that have oppressed her ancestors. After this strong assertion of desire, the poem ends in the same way it started, with the cadenced "Steatopygous sky," "sea," "waves," and "me," again figuring the woman as contentedly drifting in the water (15). While these poems suggest links with Gilroy's ships, they also indicate the inadequacies of the image. Gilroy acknowledges that his metaphor recalls the Middle Passage, but the inanimate boats are able to do little more than replicate the transcultural movement that occurred historically. By placing the fat black woman physically in the sea, Nichols refigures the relationship between the black body and water as reconciled and harmonious rather than disrupted and conflicting. The image of the body also grants the woman agency in the water, allowing her the ability to resist both forced movement and oppressive ideologies-actions nearly impossible for a woman on a slave ship. The woman's body is powerful as a means of both confrontation and reconciliation. The woman does not only remain located in the water; she dwells comfortably on the land as well, fluidly moving between geographical locations. While the woman clearly lives in England, poems are also set in Africa and the Caribbean, with the woman seeming equally at home in all three places-a depiction consistent with Davies's articulation of black women's ability to exist in multiple locations. In addition, the woman draws on aspects of the three cultures that she sees as beneficial while ignoring or rejecting characteristics that are inconsistent with her values, thus revealing her own role in assembling a cultural identity out of various traditions. Instead of celebrating this cultural assemblage or feeling dislocated within it-the two opposing possibilities suggested by Gilroy's theory about the black Atlantic and DeLoughrey's research about women writers-the fat black woman merely accepts it, portraying herself as confident and secure in the ethnic mix. Nichols's alignment of the body with land suggests a daring vision. While the sea offers dangers to the slave's body in the history of the Middle Passage, land is hardly a more comfortable place, especially for women. M. NourbeSe Philip articulates the parallels that existed between the woman's body and the land: "The man who walking, getting into his boat his plane his ship- taking the product of her body and the body's wisdoms-her children-like he taking the crops she (dis)tending. Body and place. Fertilized. Cultivated. Harvested. In the same way" (302). Denise deCaires Narain also points out that women's bodies and the land have historically been conflated with colonial notions of the New World "as virginal territory to be penetrated" (151). Like an uncharted region, a woman's body has been seen as a territory to be conquered and subdued. This may offer insights into why the fat black woman speaks from -37- MaComere or about places on each corner of the black Atlantic's triangle. In addition to acknowledging each culture's contribution to her identity, her figuration of herself as mobile and fluid, rather than specifically located, resists a melding of the woman's body and the land. In the second poem of the collection, "The Assertion," the woman first becomes linked to Africa, since the poem presumably occurs in a tribal past. Like an African queen, the woman sits on her golden throne while "white robed chiefs" bow to her. Besides her presence on African soil, the woman fixes herself to the physical location in that she "sits / on the golden stool / and refuses to move" (8). The woman's body plays an important role in the poem, and her physical features are described in detail: her eyes are "beady with contempt," her fingers are "creased in gold," and she shows "her fat black toes" (8). The woman's imposing physical presence allows her to truly inhabit her space-both her throne and the entire mythical scene. Her bulk contributes to her commanding presence as she is described as "heavy as a whale" and "ringed in folds" (8). After she establishes her authority and the chiefs submit, the woman asserts, "This is my birthright"(italics in original), a statement with an ambiguous pronoun that could refer either to her participation in African culture or her feminine power as privileges owed to her from her birth (8). If "this" refers to both, then she simultaneously affirms her African roots and her female authority as being inherent qualities that influence her present identity in significant ways. While the woman affirms African history as influencing her contemporary life, she does not depict it nostalgically. A closer reading reveals that a battle rages between the woman and the chiefs: her eyes are filled partly with contempt, and her determination to remain seated on the throne is a sign of a power struggle. The chiefs' submission to her authority seems equally forced. They acquiesce in "postures of resignation" (8). The gendered and cultural dynamic of this poem suggests that although the woman acknowledges the tribal community as her ancestral home, she rejects its misogynistic history. By claiming this moment as her birthright, she accepts the people and culture as central to her history and identity, but she simultaneously expresses contempt towards this culture's treatment of women. The woman's insistence on a new way of relating between men and women parallels the woman's formation of a new relationship with the water in "Beauty." Like her use of her body to challenge Western ideologies while in the bathtub, the woman employs her body as a key tool of resistance in this poem as well and takes advantage of her immensity to remain firmly planted on her throne. The woman's attitude is not one of retribution, however, which becomes obvious near the end of the poem. Once the chiefs have resigned to her authority, she emits "a fat black chuckle" while showing her "fat black toes" (8). When her power is recognized, the woman is at ease and relaxed. -38- "Feeling Fine": The Transatlantic Female Body in Grace Nichols's The Fat Black Woman's Poems The fat black woman demonstrates a similar love-hate relationship with the Caribbean. In "Tropical Death," she describes affection for the place and her desire for return. In this poem, the woman asserts that she wants "a brilliant tropical death / not a cold sojourn / in some North Europe far / forlorn" (19). She recalls the warmth of the climate and the vibrancy of its natural world, uniting body and water imagery again in her wish to be clothed with the sea. In addition to desiring the beauty of the location, the woman yearns for elements of the culture, such as the people's freedom of expression in experiencing grief, hoping to have for herself "some bawl / no quiet jerk tear wiping" (19). The woman contrasts the culture's manifestation of its feelings with the silence of English grieving, which she calls "a polite hearse withdrawal" (19). In these ways, the woman depicts the Caribbean as her home-both in its emotional expression and its physical location-that she would like to return to at her death. As in many of the poems, the fat black woman's yearning for a Caribbean death at this point also recalls the dehumanizing system of slavery. The woman desires "all her dead rights" in which she will be noticed and publicly grieved during "sleepless droning / red-eyed wake nights." The community's noisy and prolonged sorrow at her imagined death contrasts with the numberless deaths of her nameless ancestors that received little, if any, acknowledgement under slavery. The woman further articulates the objects of her yearning in the penultimate stanza by listing "her mother's sweetbreast," "the sun leafs cool bless," and "her people's bloodrest" (19). In spite of her distance, the woman feels a deep connection to the Caribbean as the home of her mother and the site of her ancestors' resting place. With each of the spondees ending these lines, the pace of the poem slows, bringing it to rest and paralleling the woman's desire for a final tropical death. Like Africa, however, the Caribbean also has a history of female subjugation that the fat black woman rejects. In "The Fat Black Woman Remembers," the woman recalls her mother acting like "the Jovial Jemima," joyfully tossing pancakes for a white family. The fat black woman reveals the rage hidden under her surface grin by remembering her mother's "happy hearty / murderous blue laughter," thus stressing the contrast between the cheerful surface performance and the enraged inner emotion. The woman's demeaned position in the home becomes apparent through the long list of her work: "starching," "cleaning," "scolding," "wheedling," and "pressing" (9)-always for others. The present participles suggest the work's never-ending and tedious nature, and the combination of tasks reveals her ambivalent position in the household as both distributing affection as a mother and waiting on the children as a servant. The destructive scene intensifies when it becomes apparent that with all of the attention given to the white family, the mother's own children receive inferior care. In this poem, the woman connects a Caribbean existence with servility, revealing no yearning or nostalgia for that place or culture. In -39- MaComere fact, in the last lines of the poem, the woman distances herself completely from the stereotype by saying, "But this fat black woman ain't no Jemima" (9). At first glance, these poems seem to affirm Gilroy's concept of hybridity since the fat black woman portrays herself as connected to her African and Caribbean heritages, although she lives in England. The woman experiences each of these cultures while solidly residing in each one, suggesting instead a greater similarity with Davies's concept of inhabiting cultures rather than dwelling between them, as Gilroy's ship image suggests. This multiplicity is visible in the woman's acceptance of both her African and Caribbean ancestries as central to her identity- she claims her "birthright" of her African heritage in "The Assertion" while also claiming the "dead rights" of her Caribbean culture in "Tropical Death." At the same time, by dwelling within both cultures, the woman is able to resist aspects of those cultures that are oppressive, specifically the misogyny that resigned women to stations of servility rather than granting them positions of authority. The woman's choices about what to accept and reject in each culture draw attention to her status as a woman, a level of identification that Gilroy obscures by focusing on the larger political unit of the ship. Her gender profoundly shapes her ability and desire to embrace multiple cultures, suggesting the importance of this consideration in any theorization of the black Atlantic. Carole Boyce Davies affirms the importance of gender in postcolonial discourse when she asks, "Where are the women in the theorizing of post- coloniality?" (80). While she does not target Gilroy directly, her criticisms apply to his theories. Davies argues that most postcolonial theories are too totalizing and do not account for the work of women writers, assuming "that the formerly colonized have no basis of identity outside of the colonizers' definitions" (81). Women's writing, however, often has a distinctive project: "Much of it is therefore oriented to articulating presence and histories across a variety of boundaries imposed by colonizers, but also by the men, the elders and other authorized figures in their various societies" (88). As Davies suggests, women writers recognize and respond to colonization-"both externally and internally imposed"- in a complex manner, which requires new ways of thinking about their writing (106). Their work also requires paying attention to their resistance of all forms of domination, whether historical or contemporary, physical or ideological. The necessity of approaching women's writing with the awareness that Davies advocates can be seen most clearly in poems in which the fat black woman is resident in England. In "The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping," the woman pieces together knowledge from Africa, the Caribbean, and England to negotiate a winter shopping trip during which she travels "from store to store / in search of accommodating clothes" (11). The mannequins and saleswomen, who fit the cultural stereotype of "thin" and "pretty face[d]," communicate social ideals of slenderness through their fixed grins and "slimming glances" (11). -40- "Feeling Fine": The Transatlantic Female Body in Grace Nichols's The Fat Black Woman's Poems Mara Scanlon argues that the fat black woman "moves through modern London [... ] as an alien nationally, socially, and physically" (61), but the woman's ease in the situation refutes this claim. The woman completely understands the non- verbal communication and confidently dismisses its messages in the good- natured comment "Lord is aggravating." As an alternative, she recalls the clothing in the Caribbean described as "soft and bright and billowing / to flow like breezy sunlight / when she walking" (11). Since the English shops do not carry such clothes, the woman draws upon hybrid languages from Africa and the Caribbean and "curses in Swahili /Yoruba / and nation language under her breath" (11). Interestingly, the saleswomen communicate only through non- verbal eye contact, "thinking [the fat black woman] don't notice" (11), but she fully understands them. In response, the woman speaks in multiple languages that the saleswomen cannot understand thereby revealing herself to be the most culturally sophisticated and linguistically fluent among the women. The fat black woman experiences three cultures at once in this single moment: she shops in England, remembers the free-flowing clothing of the Caribbean, and curses in languages from Africa and the West Indies. Her portrayal of the transcultural shopping expedition, however, contrasts with the celebration of cultural fusion that Gilroy advocates. The woman documents the experience as "a real drag" involving "all this journeying and journeying" (11). Instead of delighting in her ability to draw upon three cultures, she is frustrated by her inability in this particular location to demonstrate the same multiplicity that she embodies: while she envisions the Caribbean clothing she finds comfortable; in England she encounters few options in her size. But at the same time, the woman does not experience the cultural migration as a disruption in the way that other female Caribbean writers, such as the ones DeLoughrey has examined, portray it. The woman seems at home in the stores, apparent not only in her understanding of non-verbal cues but also in her humorous conclusion. She says, "when it come to fashion / the choice is lean / Nothing much beyond size 14" (11). It is a statement that reveals her dexterity with both linguistic and cultural shifts and interchanges. While the body allows the woman to experience and draw upon several cultures as she moves through society, it also allows her to challenge Western and Caribbean paradigms of female beauty and strength. In two poems written to suitors, Nichols's fat black woman delights in her body's beauty and sexuality. In an essay, Nichols wrote that by being black and fat yet still claiming herself as attractive and erotic, the fat black woman "brings into being a new image-one that questions the acceptance of the 'thin' European model as the ideal figure of beauty" ("Battle" 287). In addition to responding to Western ideals, the fat black woman challenges images of women in Caribbean literature. Denise deCaires Narain points out that aunt or maternal figures, "the large, strong black women" who emanate a power related to their physical largess, dominate as their "facility with Creole makes them formidable agents and [their] -41- MaComere presence in the text is often to act as repositories of Creole culture" (70-71). The fat black woman exudes a similar power, using her body's size to claim authority and challenge oppressive ideologies. But unlike the Caribbean aunt/mother figure, the fat black woman also radiates a powerful sexuality. As in several other poems, the fat black woman's focus on her size and sexuality also responds to the history of slavery and speaks against not only the ways it physically degraded women's bodies but also the philosophies it spread about the value (or lack thereof) of black women. Black slaves experienced hunger and malnourishment as they traveled across the black Atlantic and served white owners in the New World; it is a specific aspect of slave experience that the fat black woman resists through her wonderful plumpness. Historically, a black woman's sexuality held value only for its economic benefit, as NourbeSe Philip points out: "The European buys her [.. .] to service the black man sexually-to keep him calm. And to produce new chattels-units of production-for the plantation machine" (289). The fat black woman evokes her own sexuality purely for her own pleasure, avoiding men who "only see / a spring of children / in her thighs" (14). She also speaks to and subverts slave' women's vulnerability to rape, which NourbeSe Philip calls "the most efficient management tool of women" (288). By initiating sexual encounters for her own pleasure, the woman remains in control of herself as a sexual being and so replaces sexual vulnerability with sexual strength and control. In this context, the woman's delight in her body and its sensuality does not merely confront Western and Caribbean ideals about the ideal body and sexual desire; it also challenges the historical dehumanized position of slave women. Both of these outcomes are evident in "Invitation," a poem in which the fat black woman claims the power of determining her own appearance. If her weight really was "too much" for her, she tells the male listener, she would have lost weight through diet and exercise. Since this is not the case, she says, "I'm feeling fine / feel no need / to change my lines" (12). Not only does the woman assert her ability to manage her weight, she also professes happiness with her appearance and does not allow cultural ideals to influence how she looks. By managing her appearance and her emotional response to her body, she claims an independence from the English and Caribbean standards that portray heaviness as desexualized, thereby confidently ending the first section by enticing a lover with the words of Mae West: "Come up and see me sometime" (12). The woman further challenges dominant ideologies in the second section of the collection by repeating her invitation and then providing a description of her body's beauty and sensuality. Offering no apologies but only inducements, she says: My breasts are huge exciting amnions of watermelon your hands can't cup -42- "Feeling Fine": The Transatlantic Female Body in Grace Nichols's The Fat Black Woman's Poems my thighs are twin seals fat slick pups there's a purple cherry below the blues of my black seabelly there's a mole that gets a ride each time I shift the heritage of my behind. (13) In this description, the fat black woman describes and defines herself, giving meaning to her body parts instead of allowing others to determine their significance. The woman describes her breasts as large and stimulating, and by positioning the line that says that they cannot be held in the suitor's hands almost outside the poem's margins, she implies with the text and its placement that her body cannot be possessed or occupied by men. The imagery also aligns the woman's body with the sea in the description of her thighs as "slick pups" and her stomach as a "black seabelly," which further resists male colonial notions that the woman can be inhabited or invaded like the land. However, in her reference to "the heritage of [her] behind," the woman acknowledges that her ancestry has marked both her body's color and proportions (13). In this poem, the woman challenges cultural ideals, refusing to be defined by set narratives about women's bodies while also recognizing her in her body the shape of her own cultural heritage. The fat black woman also attracts a man with her sexualized body in "The Fat Black Woman's Instructions to a Suitor." The woman encourages the man to dance with her in a variety of styles, including the boggie-woggie, the Charlestown, the chicken funky, and the foxtrot. Most of the dances the woman selects are social dances in which men and women move together as partners, but the tone varies considerably among them from the lively and exuberant hop, to the slow and sensual tango, to the dignified and genteel minuet. In their steps and movements, many of the dances enact ritualistic courtship with the man as the leader. The woman maintains a spirit of romance yet playfully undermines the male leadership first by taking the lead in telling the man to execute each of these dances, and second, in her final challenge: "After doing all that, and maybe more / hope you have a little energy left / to carry me across the threshold" (21). The male act of carrying a woman suggests his capture of her or his role as the rescuer, a role the woman playfully undercuts by taking the initiative in suggesting it and then questioning his ability to accomplish it. This poem also emphasizes the woman's celebration of her multiple identities, as well as her desire that her partner embody the same cultural diversity that she is able to encompass. The woman draws upon traditions from all over the world: the Charlestown and hop originate in American swing and jazz; the minuet began as a French peasant dance; the highland fling was created -43- MaComere in the Scottish highlands; the tango was invented in South America; and the limbo began in Trinidad. Even though the dances originated in various local regions around the world, they all gained international popularity: Unlike folk dances, which remain embedded in the culture from which they arise, social dances readily cross national borders and achieve international acceptance. Thus wherever ballroom dancing exists, the Germanic waltz, the American fox trot, and the Argentine tango are found in the repertory of accomplished social dancers. (McDonagh 627) In focusing on these dances with international origins, the fat black woman emphasizes her ability to know and perform cultural rituals from around the world. But she precedes her mentioning of each dance with a command to her suitor: "Do the boggie-woggie / Do the hop / Do the Charlestown [...]" (21). The woman desires that her partner celebrate and enact the same multiplicity and diversity that she displays through her body's movements The dances in this poem, however, are not purely celebratory. The origins of these dances origins correspond to slavery's movement of people around the black Atlantic. For example, the Lindy hop, an American dance that reached wide audiences, originated among African-Americans in Harlem and contains "certain elements [that] can be traced back to African and early African-American dance forms" (Millman 201). And while the tango is associated with Argentina, it also has African roots. Maria Susana Azzi notes that in the late eighteenth-century almost thirty percent of the population of Buenos Aires was of African descent and that these people provided the movement and rhythms of the tango (91). And, while scholars debate the origins of the Trinidadian limbo, one of the theories states that the dancer's movement under a stick mirrors the action of "slaves on the ship [who] were made to come out of their spaces in the holds by bending backwards and coming out by their legs first" (Ahye 251). In participating in these dances, the fat black women not only acknowledges the mixing of cultures that occurs through artistic expression; she also remembers the cultural dispersion of people due to slavery, and in the case of the limbo, physically reenacts their treatment on slave ships. In this context, the body provides the only means of illustrating the physical experiences and movements of people and cultures across the black Atlantic. In each of these poems, the body is central to the woman's experiences and therefore to her depiction of and responses to them. In her strong, fat and beautiful body, the woman challenges ideals of beauty and contests male domination. Focusing on the body and its movement in dances also allows the woman to capture and act out her own unique embodiment of multiple cultures even as she grieves the history of human exploitation that made possible the cultural fusion of the dances she celebrates. Gilroy's roving ships capture some -44- "Feeling Fine": The Transatlantic Female Body in Grace Nichols's The Fat Black Woman's Poems of the ambivalence about transcultural exchanges that Nichols's poetry suggests, but the image of the floating community that Gilroy privileges in the ship neglects the experience of cultural exchange and fusion at the individual level, both in the past and the present. And, as suggested by Davies, his image does not address the specific implications of migration for women. It is the body as metaphor that underscores the female dimensions of black Atlantic history and contemporary experience. In the last poem of the series, "Afterward," Nichols proposes a future vision in which the cultural mythologies-of both society and gender relations-are reversed. In this poem, the fat black woman becomes a founder of a new civilization. The woman emerges from a forest to find herself in a new Edenic land, with remnants of the earth and the sea on her body, "brushing vegetations / from the shorn of her hair" and "flaunting waterpearls / in the bush of her thighs" (24). Although the imagery evokes both the water and the land, the place is unidentified and unnamed, suggesting a location with elements of her various homelands yet with none of the historical implications. In addition to these images, the woman is "blushing wet in the morning / sunlight," beautiful and sensual in the glow of the sunrise. She does not fear physical violence in this scene, however, because her emergence coincides with "the wind [pushing] back the last curtain / of male white blindness" (24). The woman does not speak in this poem; she merely sighs at the sight of the new world: "there will be an immense joy / in the full of her eye / as she beholds" (24), which implies a comparison with the Biblical story of God spoke the world into being and then "saw everything that he had made" (Genesis 1:31). As the only remaining member of her race, the woman sets out "tremblingly fearlessly / [to] stake her claim again" (24), which Mara Scanlon accurately describes as "a radical political move on the part of Nichols" and credits the poet with givingn] to her mythological woman the task of recolonization, the chance to do over what has oppressed her people" (64). In this final poem, Nichols also unifies the themes of her other poems by showing the woman as united with both the water and the land, sexual but not vulnerable to male violence, and connected to those with shared ancestry while separate from their historical oppression. The woman's body plays an important role in this vision in that it has allowed her to recall the past, experience the present, and imagine new possibilities for the future. Through the character of the fat black woman, Grace Nichols demonstrates the contributions of multiple cultures to a black woman's identity. While her depiction acknowledges the hybridity that Gilroy emphasizes with his ship metaphor in The Black Atlantic, her image of the body expands beyond his theory by underscoring the gendered nature of cross-cultural travel. Because of its ability to dwell in various locations rather than between them, the woman's body highlights the way in which female identity can be multiple rather than composite. And, because it was the historical site of oppression, the body also allows the woman to reformulate her relationship to significant aspects of the -45- MaComere slave trade, including the water, her ancestral home countries, and her oppressors. The focus on the body also enables remembering the horrors to which black female bodies were subjected in the past while also redefining and celebrating black women's beauty, sexuality, and strength in the body of the persona in the poems. Finally, the woman imagines a new future-one that she can only envision through her bodily rebirth-that allows new possibilities for her and her people. At each point, the fat black woman forms a positive relationship between herself, her body, and her cultural histories in ways that acknowledges their interrelatedness. As a result, she does not depict herself as disrupted or dislocated but instead asserts: "I'm feeling fine / feel no need / to change my lines" (12). WORKS CITED Ahye, Molly. "In Search of the Limbo." Caribbean Dance from Abaku6 to Zouk. Ed. Susanna Sloat. Gainsville, FL: UP of Florida, 2002. 247-61. Azzi, Maria Susana. "Tango." International Encyclopedia ofDance. Ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen. Vol. 6. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 91-94. Caryl Phillips. Dir. Dan Griggs/Media Revolution. Videocassette. Lannan Foundation, 1995. Davies, Carole Boyce. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. New York: Routledge, 1994. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. "Gendering the Oceanic Voyage: Trespassing the (Black) Atlantic and Caribbean." Thamyris 5 (1998): 205-31. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. McDonagh, Don. "Social Dance: Twentieth-Century Social Dance before 1960." International Encyclopedia ofDance. Ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen. Vol. 5. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 626-636. Millman, Cynthia R. "Lindy Hop." International Encyclopedia of Dance. Ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen. Vol. 4. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 201-203. Narain, Denise deCaires. Contemporary Caribbean Women's Poetry: Making Style. New York: Routledge, 2002. Nichols, Grace. "The Battle with Language." Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference. Ed. Selwyn R. Cudjoe. Wellesley, Ma: Calaloux, 1990. 283-89. --. "Grace Nichols in Conversation with Maggie Butcher." Wasafiri 8 (Spring 1988): 17-19. --. The Fat Black Woman's Poems. London: Virago, 1984. -46- "Feeling Fine": The Transatlantic Female Body in Grace Nichols's The Fat Black Woman's Poems --. i is a long memoried woman. Karnak House Publishers, 1983. Philip, M. NourbeSe. "Dis Place: The Space Between." Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. Ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1994. 287-316. Scanlon, Mara. "The Divine Body in Grace Nichols's The Fat Black Woman's Poems." World Literature Today 72.1 (1998): 59-66. -47- Julie E. Moody-Freeman Women's Activism in Belize: Reviving Women's History in Fiction Caribbean women's writing then (Caribbean Literature in general) has to be understood first within the context of the various imperialist discourses and then against them as a rewriting of those discourses. -Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, Out of the Kumbla I think more women than men were in the streets supporting the early leaders. They contributed money and labor. But apart from very token acknowledgment of their contributions, the women were not part of the dialogue. They were not part of the discourse. So I think women writers in the Caribbean, including myself, inserted our work into the discourse, so that, for example, in any discussion now of Caribbean literature there are a number of women whose work must be taken into account. -Zee Edgell, qtd. in Irma McClaurin's "A Writer's Life in Transition" In the opening pages of Beka Lamb, Zee Edgell sets up critical moments for her readers in which the narrator debunks the "heteropatriarchal"' myth of Belizean nationalism which features Belizean men as solely responsible for birthing the nation: The People's Independence Party, formed nearly two years before, was bringing many political changes to the small colony. And Beka's grandmother [Granny Ivy], an early member of the party, felt she deserved some credit for the shift Beka was making from the washing bowl underneath the house bottom to books in a classroom overlooking the Caribbean Sea. (2) While the narrator's words in the aforementioned quote reveal the People's Independence Party to be crucial to the reconfiguration of the body politic in Belize (formerly British Honduras), they also identify Granny Ivy as an agent of socio-political and socio-cultural change. She credits her own activism in the decolonization movement for the access her granddaughter Beka, a young Creole girl, now has to formal academic education.2 Defying the strict public / private polemic of women's lives in the British colony, Granny Ivy utilizes both the public and private spheres to change another woman's life. Publicly, Granny -48- Women's Activism in Belize: Reviving Women's History in Fiction Ivy becomes an official PIP party member to fight against British hegemony, for the right to an education and the vote, and an overall improvement in the lives of Belizeans. Privately, in the sphere of women's homes, she doubles up on household chores by completing Beka's ironing and washing of the Lamb family's clothes, which provides Beka with more opportunity to study. Zee Edgell's depiction of this form of activism is a powerful tribute to Belizean nationalist women, a powerful critique of colonialism, nationalist history and politics in Belize, and a crucial re-figuring of feminist discourse and its definitions of activism. In this essay, I demonstrate that while historians of Belize's social and political history have omitted or marginally recorded Belizean women's political contributions, Edgell's recording of their political activism in her first novel Beka Lamb (1982) reveals that they are agents of social and political change. Thus, this novel critiques and reshapes the skewed historiography of Belize as well as the traditionally masculinist discourse of nationalist power politics. The narrator's comment, quoted in the first paragraph of the paper, illustrates Edgell's documentation of then British Honduran women's political activism in the 1950s as well as her engagement with and (re) writing of Belizean historiography as regards the nationalist movement. Edgell's (re) visioning of history in Beka Lamb is illustrated in her depiction of Granny Ivy and her friends' (Miss Eila, Miss Janie, and Miss Flo) fervent political activity and in her personal comments regarding her novel and growing up during Belize's nationalist period. I draw from Edgell's novel and her own words in talks and interviews to examine her imagining of Belize as a nation and her dialogue with Belizean politics and historiography. In Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey document the development of Caribbean historiography, noting a shift form a homogenous approach rife with the absences of "differences based on gender as well as race, class, colour, caste, nationality, and occupation" to a more heterogeneous approach (xiii). Shepherd et. al. attribute this development in Caribbean historiography towards feminist consciousness: The integration of a feminist empirical approach, which uses gender and other intersecting variables as an analytical tool, with the historical discourse on the Caribbean developed only in the 1960s and 1970s. Caribbean historians were late in realizing the epistemological and pedagogic importance of utilizing this approach for the construction of women's history. Influenced by prevailing ideas in the discipline which saw women's experiences as trivial or non-historical, and by aspects of Marxist ideology which confined women to the private sphere in the division of labour, the pre-1960s texts -49- MaComere tended to dichotomize the activities and experiences of men and women into the categories of: public vs. private; work vs. family; and personal vs. political. These approaches masked the true contribution of women to Caribbean history and not only left them out of the history books but resulted in a distorted historical account which only partially represented the reality. (xiii) The development of Belizean historiography rehearses the absences, omissions, and distortions that Shepherd et. al. document. Some of the seminal historical texts on Belize-Narda Dobson's A History ofBelize (1973), Cedric Grant's The Making of Modern Belize (1976), and Assad Shoman's Thirteen Chapters of a History of Belize (1994)-completely omit or only marginally reference women's contributions to history. In 1998, Anne S. Macpherson's dissertation, "'Those Men Were So Coward': The Gender Politics of Social Movements and State Formation in Belize, 1912-1982," became the first historical text to fully document Belizean women's activism in Garveyism, nationalism, and the movement toward independence, among others. Before Macpherson's dissertation, one of the first authors to pay tribute to nationalist women in Belizean history was fiction writer Zee Edgell. In 1982, one year after Belize achieved its independence and amidst the patriarchal political rhetoric that was defining the new nation, a new voice emerged, one that was significantly female and writing in an important genre: the novel. While completing her ethnographic study of Belizean women titled Women of Belize: Gender and Change in Central America (1996), Irma McClaurin discovered that although people could recount Belize's oral history of women's activism, no written documentation existed. McClaurin argues that "the country has a long tradition of women's political activism [. . ] but it is a muted one that so far has been ignored by social historians and political scientists who construct Belize's history as essentially androcentric" (174). For example, McClaurin notes, "Shoman provides an excellent history of party politics in Belize, but any insights he may have into the workings and minds of women as political figures are not included" (174). McClaurin credits Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb with providing "the only evidence to be found of women's contributions to mainstream politics" (174). Edgell's novel begins the reclamation of women's history in Belize and forces one to interrogate the marginalization of this history. Edgell believes that the political parties in Belize, particularly the early nationalist parties in the 1950s, could not have made it if not for Belizean women. She redresses their exclusion in her depiction of what she terms the "North Front Street Group" which, in the novel, recalls the political involvement of Edgell's grandmother Inez Lamb Webster and her friends Miss Flo, Miss Janie, and Miss Eila in the form of Granny Ivy and her group of female friends: "I felt good that I had not lost those women because so Women's Activism in Belize: Reviving Women's History in Fiction many Belizean women have been lost, women who contributed to the society. Their names are not lost to me. Whenever I want to see Miss Flo, I can look in this novel. I couldn't do it for all the groups, but for the 'North Front Street Group' I can do it" (Personal Interview 1997).3 Edgell's documentation of women's activism in fiction is a crucial step toward reconfiguring a history that has previously "muted" women's history and their involvement in politics. Beka Lamb is a prime example of what Nana Wilson-Tagoe's points out as significant to much of West Indian literature: "The rewritings of and engagements with 'history' in the writings of West Indian authors problematize the nature of historical knowledge itself by demystifying its objectivity and making it serve the imperatives of self definition" (38). Wilson-Tagoe's assertion is confirmed in personal interviews with Zee Edgell in which she comments on her role as writer as well as on the purpose of her novels. In an interview with Renee H. Shea, Edgell reveals: Belize is very complex, and I want to write as much as possible of it through fiction. I'm not a trained historian, but I find that our history is very selective; some by British writers, some by Belizeans. You know, they say that history is written by the victors. You never know what history is going to be left. Say that the Creoles disappear, or continue to diminish; I would want others to know the way I saw Belize during my life. That's part of what I am trying to do-leave a record. (583) Edgell's words indicate a concern with how history gets written and who gets to write it. As well, she is concerned with the influences that shape a particular narrative of history and how people in former colonies can rewrite/revision official accounts of history to reflect their own realities. In the interview with Shea, Edgell says: I feel it necessary to write back. British and American travel writers have written about not only Belize but other parts of the world, and I feel it's very important to have on the shelf books by Caribbean writers. Others came and said the "continent was dark and empty." But some of us, the Maya, for example, were right there. (582) One of the negative perceptions Edgell refers to is evident in Aldous Huxley's travel writings where he claims that "[i]f the world has any ends, British Honduras [. .] would certainly be one of them. It is not on the way from anywhere to anywhere else. It has no strategic value" (qtd. in Shea 581). Because Edgell is concerned with how history is written, her novel is very much -51- MaCombre about reclaiming a written history for Belize and reconfiguring the negative images of the country. Edgell's novel, however, is not only concerned with reclaiming a history for Belize; it is also concerned with the reclamation of women's history. Her novel is as much about women coming to voice as it is about herself as a writer finding her voice on major issues dealing with history and sexual politics in Belize. In my personal interview with her in 1997, she addressed the issue of women's lost history: "If you read the history of Belize, it would be hard to find a woman. There is not a woman mentioned in the books." Assad Shoman's Thirteen Chapters of a History of Belize (1994), the first history text to be written by a Belizean is a case in point. Shoman attempts to justify in his introduction to the text his reason for not including a sustained dialogue on women's history: "It is also my hope that by then [his second edition of the book] there will be more empirical data, and a body of theoretical work, available to sustain a feminist perspective of Belizean history" (xviii). While Shoman does make some effort to identify the role women played in the history and the politics of Belize, his acknowledgment of this lack of "data and theory" on women's history in 1994 reveals an all too common problem that is not peculiar to Belizean history.4 Relegated mostly to the private spheres of society throughout the world, women have often found their history excluded or marginalized. Edgell herself has had personal experience with being excluded from written accounts of her country's history. She recalls Cedric Grant's The Making of Modern Belize (1976) erasing her contributions: "He mentioned the editor of The Reporter [a local newspaper], but he didn't mention that I was the first editor. I am the one who started that" (Personal Interview 1997). The exclusion of Edgell's contribution to journalism in Cedric Grant's history text is of major concern because it underscores one obvious example of a Belizean woman's major contribution to Belizean journalism lost to history and also because it explains why Edgell would find it necessary to use her fiction as a document to record Belizean women's history. Beka Lamb depicts a year in the life of Beka, a fourteen-year-old Creole girl and her seventeen-year-old friend Toycie; the latter becomes pregnant, is expelled from high school, goes insane, loses her baby, and dies during a hurricane. The novel is a coming-of- age story of two young Belizean girls and documents the interconnection "between British colonial suppression of cultural traditions and histories [and] its oppression of women's lives" (Moody-Freeman 30). The novel also addresses the unrecorded/muted history of women's nationalist activism and examines in particular what it meant to be black, Creole, and female in 1950s British Honduras where racial, gender, and class oppression was a daily reality within local black communities and the wider colonial society. Women in the novel envision a hopeful life for themselves and their (grand) children in their activism against colonialism, and much of that activism was in the form of supporting the male leaders of the nationalist movement. -52- Women's Activism in Belize: Reviving Women's History in Fiction When Edgell was writing the novel, she began with "a specific incident in Belizean history over which [her] characters have no control but which has a direct effect on their lives" ("Belize: A Literary Perspective" 3). The story is set in 1951 when Edgell, like Beka and Belize, was coming of age. This was a period of great political activity when Belizeans were fighting for self- government from British rule. The country was reeling from rising costs due to the devaluation of the dollar on December 31, 1949 (Dobson 330-31). The People's Committee, the country's first political party, was formed with John Smith as chairman and George Price as Secretary on that same night with a three-fold purpose: to prevent the country from being included in the West Indian Federation; to achieve self-government from Britain; and to improve social and economic conditions in the country (Grant 128). According to historian Cedric Grant, The People's Committee garnered the support of the unemployed, especially "the youth and intinerant waterfront labourers, small shopkeepers, manual government workers, clerical workers and young civil servants" and their most avid supporters were the housewives who "struggled to make ends meet as the prices of staple foods went up as much as 30 or 40 percent" (Grant 126). On 29 September, 1950, the People's Committee was dissolved and the People's United Party-renamed the People's Independence Party (PIP) in the novel-was born. The novel explores how the Lambs-Beka's family-their relatives and friends cope with the effects of the socio-economic and political situation at this time. Edgell's depiction of the North Front Street Group and its involvement in the Women's group and party politics in Beka Lamb reclaims Belizean Creole women's history. Referring to women's activism in the nationalist movement of Belize in the 1950s, Edgell states: "Women didn't have any real power to change their lives or be involved in actual party politics; they were actually cooking rice and beans, potato salad, and handing out leaflets. I watched them march in the streets more than the men. They gave time, labor; I am sure that some of them gave money" (Personal Interview 2005). Edgell's description underscores traditional divisions of public and private sphere in Belize, even as it makes the connection that most historians ignore by pointing to how female domestic pursuits had a direct impact on political outcomes; it clearly blurs the distinction between public and private and challenges conventional ideas about power. Duly noted in history texts recounting the politics of nationalism in the 1950s are the names of men: John Smith; Leigh Richardson; George Price, the secretary of the first political party, the People's Committee, and first Prime Minister of Belize; and Phillip Goldson, Assistant Secretary of this political party who eventually formed the opposition National Independence Party (NIP) (Shoman 205). However, the women who fought alongside them remain nameless. Edgell argues that Beka Lamb records the contributions of women who were familiar to her and whose political activities mirrored that of thousands of other women in Belize: "I put them [women] there for historical -53- MaComere reasons. I don't know if any of these parties have these women's names listed anywhere" (Personal Interview 1997). Some of the Belizean women she knew and who were involved in politics appear in her novel: My grandmother was really and truly an early member of the PUP party,-which I call PIP in the book [Beka Lamb]. She had a group of women, Miss Janie, Miss Flo. Some of those names are real. I kept Miss Janie because I wanted to honor those women. I changed my grandmother's name, but I didn't change Miss Janie's name. I didn't change Miss Eila's name, and I didn't change Miss Flo's."(Personal Interview 2005) Beka Lamb, the novel's title and the name of its protagonist, was given in honor of Edgell's grandmother, Inez Lamb Webster. While Edgell's grandmother and her father were both politically active, it was the former rather than the latter that she went with to meetings held by the People's United Party, for when in her grandmother's charge, she had to go where she went (Telephone Interview). She was taken to the public meetings that were held alfresco in Belize to bring awareness to the nationalist cause. Edgell states that children on a whole in Belize were taken everywhere because the women had nowhere to leave them. She elaborates: "Because I grew up with so many women, I just wrote instinctively about them because the men were always absent. My father was working hard. My brother was very small [young]" (Personal Interview 1997). Because Edgell grew up with women, and she was included in everything they did, women became her role models, and this reality is remembered in the novel. Furthermore, it is evident in the novel that politics permeated the society and the majority of the people at the time-as with the characters in the book-were interested in politics. But, as was the case with Edgell and her grandmother, it is Granny Ivy who has the most profound influence on Beka. Roydon Salick points to her significant influence on Beka: "And if her father seems reluctant at times to answer her questions, Granny Ivy compensates for that loss by regularly encouraging Beka to attend the meetings of the People's Independence Party" (115). The novel remembers this influence as well as the North Front Street Group's passion about the decolonization movement. According to Edgell, "anything was better than what they had [during that period,] so they [her grandmother and her friends] were a mutual support group for each other united by this political idea [nationalism]" (Telephone Interview). Through the depictions of Granny Ivy and her women friends at public meetings, the novel rehearses Edgell's girlhood experience of being exclusively in the company of politically conscious women and involved in the nationalist political movement of the 1950s. The following excerpt from the novel shows how close a connection there is between the real life history that Edgell lived and the scenes she wrote in her novel: -54- Women's Activism in Belize: Reviving Women's History in Fiction Granny Ivy and Miss Eila sat on three-legged stools, in the company of Miss Janie and Miss Flo, under Battlefield's only tree, an ackee, the roots of which burrowed beneath a wall, six feet high, separating the Canadian Bank Compound from the rest of the park. Toycie and Beka, faces sombre, leaned against the trunk of the ackee tree scanning the crowd with anxious eyes. (105) In this same scene, the narrator provides an economic reason for why Granny Ivy and her friends, along with hundreds of other party followers, wait patiently for the politicians: The time appointed for the meeting at Battlefield Park had come and gone . yet, men, women, and children continued to pour onto the small, sandy piece of circular ground in the centre of town where meetings, rallies and celebrations had been held for a longer time than anyone could remember. The majority of the people, hundreds deep around the elevated rostrum in the middle of the park, did not have very much in the way of material goods, and they were excitedly looking to the politically aware, racially diverse leaders, busy on the platform, to provide them with the possibility of having more. (105) In addition to attending political meetings regularly, the North Front Street Group also participated in Women's Group activities such as raising funds through bake sales and marching in National Day parades, as the novel depicts. The North Front Street Group as well as other Belizean women were avid militant supporters of George Price and the PIP. During my talks with her, Edgell recalled a form of political activity Belizean women took part in: "My Gran was the ring leader in the group of 'bembe' [a creole word for quarrelsome]6 They would get out on the battlefield, and if Mr Price was passing by, you only had to look funny and they would ask you 'Why are you looking at him like that for?' They adored Mr. Price" (Personal Interview 1997). In contrast to Edgell's comments about her grandmother's political militancy, Anne S. Macpherson, the first historian to conduct an in depth study of Belizean women's activism, documents that in her 1992 interview with Edgell, "Zee Edgell does not define her grandmother Inez Webster as a bembe. [. .. ] Still, during the national strike [1952], Webster was arrested for 'watching' outside the BEC sawmill [that is, according to the Belize Billboard, 5 December 1952]" (298). It is interesting to note Edgell's distancing of her grandmother from the term "bembe" in her interview with Macpherson. I would argue that this arises from negative public perceptions toward "bembes." Macpherson's citation of MaComere both Edgell's comments and archival records describing Miss Inez as just "watching," as opposed to, for example, cursing, stoning or destroying property illustrates that Inez Webster was involved in non-violent activism, which was still seen to be as threatening as violent resistance was to the colonial establishment and its defined gendered roles for women during this period. In "'Those Men Were So Coward': The Gender Politics of Social Movements and State Formation in Belize, 1912-1982," Macpherson's inclusion of oral history interviews with women who were politically active in 1950s nationalist politics illustrates how "bembe" activism could escalate to verbal and physical violence, actions that often offended middle class sensibilities. The following excerpt from an interview in Macpherson's study illustrates the violent resistance that could ensue from "bembe" party supporters: I remember it so well. [... ] I think it was on Canal Street they had a meeting [... ] and they were talking all these kind of things, and the bloody women they move out, and they went around there, and they started to stone [throw bottles] and Francis and Wilson couldn't come out because they were going to beat the hell out of them if they had come out. (296- 97). Macpherson quotes two other activist women who recalled "bembe" activity: Retired teacher and radio entertainer Gladys Stuart defined the bembes as "women who were not afraid to fight or curse [ .. ] they would fight, they were abusive." Miss May recounted with glee how people exclaimed when they saw the People's Committee women approaching during street actions: "The bembe di come," they would call, and she would respond, "Mek dehn arrest all a wi!" (296) In Beka Lamb, Edgell's depiction of the North Front Street Group illustrates a non-violent level of political resistance in the women's group activities. In contrast to this depiction, however, she reveals another level of activism: verbal and physical resistance which, although not physically threatening, was offensive to people who were taught to accept British class-based notions of social behavior. Edgell's depiction of Miss Arguelles who sells newspapers exemplifies this latter form of resistance. In the novel, after church one Sunday, Miss Arguelles protests what she believes is the Jesuit priests' involvement in trying to make Belize a part of Guatemala. She shouts at Father Mullins: "You Keatolics are the ones encouraging our boys to have talks with Guatemala! You are trying to make one big Keatolic nation" (103). In a final protest, she lifts her skirt "exposing a fat, black bottom encased in a long pair of white drawers" -56- Women's Activism in Belize: Reviving Women's History in Fiction (104). Edgell also shows the public's negative perception of Miss Arguelles's action: Aie ya yie!' and 'Yohooo!' yelled the crowd [. .] Father Mullins, stopped, lifted his long arm with deliberation and described, in the air, an exaggerated sign of the cross at the broad expanse of white against black [. . ] It was a burning shame, Beka felt, that Miss Arguelles was letting creoles down. Senora Villanueva was pressing a handkerchief delicately to her temples. (104) This scene depicts people's varying responses to "bembe" behavior, but most telling is Beka Lamb's reaction of shame because Creoles-blacks-were already considered as being uncivilized within the country's colonial culture. Whether the actions of "bembes" took on the dimensions of non-violent or more militantly verbal and physical activism, both Edgell's novel as well as Macpherson's historical documentation of women's nationalist activity conclude that these women were proud of their activism and found their actions empowering. According to Macpherson, becauseue the term is laden with middle class judgments about poor women's sexual morality and general worth, nationalist women's identification with it speaks to their collective consciousness. For Miss May and her friends, to be a "bembe," fighting for one's country and children, was to be respectable and self-respecting" (296). Ironically, the political independence that nationalist women fought for as depicted by Edgell in her novel did not materialize in quite the way they had anticipated as the social hierarchy and values remained intact when power was transferred from the British (and male) colonial government to a multi-ethnic group of British Honduran men who simply maintained the status quo for the most part. Hence, the continuation of women's marginalization in Belizean history and the need to document their contributions in Beka Lamb. Anne Macpherson's work is useful in bringing about an understanding of how nationalist women perceived their role in bringing about social and political change, particularly given the fact that men received all the credit. Macpherson tells us that "women did not contest male power in the struggle against colonialism but subordinated their critiques of and conflicts with men to the common nationalist struggle" (293) and that 1950s activist women, like their male counterparts, "envisioned a national state providing [... ] expanded higher education and health care, better wages and working conditions, subsidized housing, paved roads and running water, as well as the vote" (Macpherson 294). But according to Macpherson, there were clear gender distinctions in the way women and men perceived their activism and their roles in the nationalist cause. This is illustrated in the words of one female witnesses included in Macpherson's study who said, "It was for the children more than any other thing" (275) and in the sentiments expressed in the Daily Clarion by another MaComere woman who, after gaining the right to vote, said: "I come prepared to vote; I put my rice on from six o'clock this morning" (295). Furthermore, their commitment to the nationalist political cause would supersede even domestic abuse as demonstrated in the following account cited by Macpherson: "May Davis and her friends paid little heed to the fact that 'the husband fist we up' for attending rallies rather than preparing meals: 'I never care 'bout that; I care 'bout me party'" (301). In these snippets from oral history, one gets a more layered account of 1950s Belizean women's political involvement and the extent of their agency in the political and domestic spheres. Belizean women chose political activism in spite of the barriers to activism in their domestic lives because effecting political change, they believed, would enhance their and their families' lives. Edgell's novel indicates a deep understanding of the gendered nature of Belizean nationalist politics and the realities of domestic life, which Macpherson documents sixteen years later. In Beka Lamb, Granny Ivy and her son Bill Lamb argue when Bill discovers that Granny Ivy has draped the home in blue and white flags (in support of the People's Independence Party) to celebrate National Day. Not only does Bill tear down her flags, he in turn drapes the house in the red, white, and blue Union Jack. Bill's statement to his mother rehearses the complex racial and political climate as well as the power he assumes in the household as the sole (and male) breadwinner of the family: "Look here Ma! If you want to associate yourself with people selling this country down the river for a bunch of quetzal, it is your privilege to do so, but outside this yard, so long as I am the provider of bread in this household, we will continue to fly the Union Jack until I decide it is time to do so differently" (141-42). Both Creole, Granny Ivy and Bill Lamb express two opposing viewpoints. While Bill Lamb's loyalties lie with the British, his mother believes in self-government. Furthermore, Bill Lamb's assertion of his financial authority in the family affirms Lauren Niessen De Abruna's argument about the "imbalance of power between men and women in their societies and the problems of identity and inequality in relation to male dominance" (87). However, Edgell demonstrates women's resistance to dominance through Granny Ivy's humorous yet determined reaction to Bill Lamb's scolding. The narrator comments that after Bill Lamb forces Granny Ivy to remove the flags, she begins singing "in a sad, high wail, turning the song into a hymn, all about the 'Baymen's Glory' and how it made 'this land my own'" (142). The narrator also comments that "Granny Ivy and Beka's father spoke to each other only through the mouths of other family members for a long time afterwards" (142). In this context, song and silence are used as instruments of power within female spheres. The juxtaposition of song and silence indicates Edgell's conscious manipulation of their potential contradiction to express a dimension of women's linguistic control.7 -58- Women's Activism in Belize: Reviving Women's History in Fiction Another example from the novel demonstrates Edgell's awareness of the interrelations between women's nationalist agenda and their domestic responsibilities: "As soon as marketing was concluded for the day, Lilla encouraged Granny Ivy to hover around Battlefield Park, or near the tiny office of The Bulletin to bring home, for family discussion, everything she gathered about the political situation in town" (149). At one point, Granny Ivy tells Beka: "I could die happy knowing you and the boys are growing up in your own country and that it had a chance to become something" (152). Granny Ivy's hope for the country is tied up with her hope for her grandchildren, echoing the sentiments of the woman quoted earlier who told Macpherson they (the women) did it (political activism) "for the children more than any other thing" (275). Together, these examples illustrate Macpherson's conclusions that while men fought in the nationalist cause for some of the same reasons women did, women "accepted their domestic responsibilities but fought for a state and society that would guarantee their ability to fulfill them without hardship, regardless of men's presence or contributions" (Macpherson 295). Edgell's depiction of the North Front Street Group offers an example of women's political activism in Belize that reveals Belizean nationalist women in the 1950s were fighting not just for women or a feminist revolution but against colonialism and an improvement in the lives of all Belizeans. The opening scene of the novel lays out the full implications of a successful political campaign against colonialism and its inequities: On a warm November day Beka Lamb won an essay contest at St. Cecilia's Academy [. .. ] 'Befo' time,' her Gran remarked towards nightfall, 'Beka would never have won that contest." It was not a subject openly debated amongst the politicians at Battlefield Park [ .] At home, however, Beka had been cautioned over and over that the prizes would go to bakras, panias or expatriates. 'But things can change fi true,' her Gran said [ .] Her Gran continued, 'And long befo' time, you wouldn't be at no convent school.' (1) The juxtaposing of images from present time of the novel-the early 1950s-with past images of British Honduras in Beka Lamb underscores the significant gains made in British Honduran society as a result of the combined efforts of nationalist women and men. First, the opening sentence of the novel announces Beka's present triumphant literary success. However, Beka's feat becomes even more remarkable when set against images of a past period "long befo' time" in a colonial society when such success would not have been possible. The interconnectedness of racial/ethnic, gender, and class oppression which limits the lives of women in colonial British Honduras is implicit in the narrative: in a time past, Beka "a flat-rate Belize creole," a poor Black girl, -59- MaCombre would not have had the opportunity to go to high school like "bakras, panias or expatriates"-whites, Spanish, and foreign girls-or win an essay contest. The lexical markers-"bakras, panias or expatriates"-indicate the inherent racial hierarchy which prevented young black girls from obtaining an education. Gender and class oppression and a family's lack of resources to pay for a high school education combined to keep young black women in the home, a point duly noted by Granny Ivy who "seldom failed to comment that at fourteen, Beka's age, she had long been accustomed to handling a bowl and iron alone, and do some cooking as well" (Beka Lamb 2). Second, if "befo' time" racism, sexism, and class oppression prevented young black girls from attending high school and winning essay contests, the narrative premise in the novel is that Beka's success came about because of Granny Ivy's party activism and because she assisted Beka with chores for "whenever her daughter-in-law, Lilla, had troubles with her eyes, Miss Ivy washed and ironed the family's clothes so that Beka could study" (2). Thus, Edgell intimately links and values women's private lives and contributions with their very visible and public political activism. Even though Belizean women were at the forefront of the decolonization movement, Caribbean and Belizean historiography have marginalized their contributions in the past because historians have failed to make, as Edgell does, the link between the private and public spheres of women's activism. Beka Lamb reconfigures the traditional myth of nationalism in Belize by featuring women prominently in the nationalist movement. Impressed upon our minds are images of women at the forefront of the movement, in the trenches as it were, attending women's group meetings, navigating household and political party responsibilities, devotedly and fervently supporting nationalist politicians at political rallies, and protesting. In public. This is no simple and idealistic depiction of nationalist women's struggle. Granny Ivy faces personal pain; she wrestles with the effects of social and political oppression and repression which include poverty and racism while enduring male domination in the form of her son's heavy handed authority at home. The images of nationalist women's struggles and triumphs are intimately connected, as Edgell depicts in an example from Granny Ivy's life. At the beginning of the novel, curious about her grandmother's stories about "befo'time," Beka asks her: "What would happen to me before time?" (2) However, Granny Ivy does not respond to Beka as the older woman had been cautioned by Lilla, Beka's mother against filling Beka's head with "old-time story'" (2). Beka does not get an answer to her question until the novel's conclusion when Granny Ivy tells Beka about her own girlhood dreams and lost opportunities: "Did you want to do something special when you were a girl, Granny Ivy?" "I was hoping to get a job learning to train animals with a circus like that one that came to town" -60- Women's Activism in Belize: Reviving Women's History in Fiction "Why didn't you get the job and go with the circus?" "Well, for one thing, it wasn't a very practical idea and for another Toycie's first trouble caught me too, and I turned to rocking the cradle." "But at least you didn't break down and die, Granny Ivy," Beka said. "There are ways and ways, Beka. [. ] But in Toycie's sense, no, you could say I didn't break down." (170) This exchange between Granny Ivy and Beka demonstrates that intimate link between personal struggle with oppression and resistance and the tentative triumph over it. Positioned at the conclusion of Beka Lamb, this dialogue also presents an image of Ivy's life "'befo' time" which, when compared to Beka's triumph of winning an essay contest in the novel's introduction, offers a point of departure from which to measure the social improvements Granny Ivy's political activism has wrought. The contrast between Beka's life opportunities and accomplishments and her Gran's lack of opportunities makes evident the improvements Ivy's party activities have made in one young black girl's life. Therefore, Edgell's depiction of Granny Ivy, a woman who like Toycie was left pregnant and unmarried but who became politically active and challenged a colonial system, reconfigures the image of nationalist British Honduran women not as invisible or marginal actors but full-fledged agents of social, cultural, and political change. Ultimately, Beka Lamb, like each of Edgell's novels, reveals that the struggle for women's rights in Belize is a human rights struggle that is connected to struggles against other forms of oppression. In Beka Lamb, Zee Edgell began her task of (re) writing Belize's history of decolonization from a perspective that repositions women's experiences from the margin to the center. In her second and third novels, In Times Like These and The Festival of San Joaquin, she continues with (re) writing the history of Belizean women's impact on their country's political development and vice versa. In "Women and Nationhood: Zee Edgell's 'In Times Like These,'" Kristen Mahlis notes Edgell's refusal to separate the public and private spheres by "insisting that female bodily experience and political intrigue share the narrative stage" and argues that "In Times Like These gives voice to the cause of Belizean independence, while insisting that individual and collective struggles for self- determination, especially those of women whose narratives have remained largely absent from the history of nations, invariably exceed the temporal and ideological boundaries fixed by a gendered and thus exclusionary narrative of national identity" (138). Edgell has also pointed out that In Times Like These she "tried to show the complex and various effects outside interventions can sometimes have on the economic, political, social, and cultural lives of people living in a developing nation like Belize" ("Personal Experience and Fiction"). -61- MaComere In The Festival of San Joaquin, Edgell again "insists" on illustrating the interconnections between the public and private spheres as she links sexual, social, and economic politics in a neo-colonial moment in post- independent Belize. Shaped by several public cases of national and international spousal abuse and murders as well as documented cases of environmental activism against deforestation in Belize, Edgell's eco-feminist focus in her third novel thrusts its Mestiza protagonist, Luz Marina, and her community into a battle against Belizean and international businesses for the preservation of Belizean trees and lands. Luz struggles against an abusive husband, whom she eventually kills, and fights for the return of her children against her dead husband's rich Mestizo family whose exploitation of Luz extends to the larger society in the forms of their workers and Belizean natural resources as they conspire with foreign investors to sell Belizean lands. Poor people-both men and women-in the predominantly Mestizo community join forces in the struggle against these exploitative Belizean landowners and foreign investors. Therefore, in Edgell's third novel, Luz Marina's environmental activism is influenced by her desire to improve and control her life and the lives of her children in an oppressive political, social, and economic environment. Finally, rooting her novels in history allows Edgell to examine global issues of exploitation and oppression through the particular lens of home place and make important connections between the past, present, and future, which serve to bring about an understanding of herself, her family, and Belizeans. Likewise, rooting her novels in history also allows Edgell to engage with and respond to the various modes of historical writings-travel writings, journals, newspaper writings and historical texts-that have misrepresented Belize and its people. According to Edgell, "One can never put truth on paper, for when you do, it becomes fiction because you only have one perspective" (Telephone Interview). These words, which reveal Edgell's critical stance on history and fiction, might well apply to travel writers and historiographers as well as to her own novels. I have illustrated before in this essay Edgell's critique of travel writers as well as historiographers. She has said that "history is selective" and thus she writes to "leave a record" (qtd in Shea 583). Referring to Aldous Huxley's book Beyond the Mexique Bay and in it his question to Britain about British Honduras-"Why then do we bother to keep this strange little fragment of the Empire?"-Edgell replies: "By the time Beka Lamb was published, Belize had attained its independence and it is now perhaps important only to myself that a partial answer to Aldous Huxley's question now sits on some library shelves [. . ] an undreamt of bonus in those far off days during the ten years I struggled to write Beka Lamb" ("Personal Experience and Fiction"). Of her own works, she says that they are only one perspective on the life she knew growing up, or of what she researched and studied in order to write. As much as she enjoys her own novels and the journey she took in order to write them, she would love to read other perspectives of Belizean life and history (Telephone -62- Women's Activism in Belize: Reviving Women's History in Fiction Interview). She longs for other visions of Belize and encourages this in her support of Belizean women writers published in Gay Wilentz's two-volume Memories, Dreams and Nightmares: a short story anthology ofBelizean women writers in 2002 and in 2005. Simultaneously, she continues her woman-centered engagement with (re) writing Belizean history in her forthcoming novel On the River Belize. This fourth novel, which tells the story of an emancipated slave, Leah Lawson McGilvry, who puts down a slave rebellion on her concessioned property, tackles the "complexities of slavery in Belize" by (re) imagining the history of one of the last known slave rebellions to take place on the property of Grace Tucker Anderson, a former slave herself.8 NOTES 1. I am using the term "heteropatriarchal" in the context of Michelle Wright's work, Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Wright argues that "the discourse of the modem nation-from its inception in the eighteenth century and in many ways even today-operates on a series of heteropatriarchal assumptions buoyed by an equally heteropatriarchal rhetoric in which the national polity is composed of active (male) and passive (female) members: the former lead, make laws, and otherwise protect the latter, who devote their lives to serving and obeying the former" (10-11). 2. British Honduras was the name of Belize prior to 1973, the official date of the name-change. I use it in this paper to refer to specific events and passages within the context of 1950s Beka Lamb. I use Belize to discuss Belizean historiography in general regardless of historic period. 3. In her May 16, 1997 interview with me, Zee Edgell coined this term to refer to Granny Ivy and her friends in the novel. In reality, these women represent her Grandmother Inez Webster and her friends. 4. Assad Shoman acknowledges the invaluable assistance he received from Ann S. Macpherson: "I am grateful to Anne Macpherson, who unselfishly provided me with source material she is gathering for her own research, helped me to get my head together on gender and other issues" (ix). 5. In a telephone interview with me on November 19, 2005, Edgell revealed the significance of her novel's title and the sources of the name of her young protagonist, Beka Lamb. While the second portion of name, Lamb, was given in honor of Zee Edgell's grandmother Inez Lamb Webster, the first portion was -63- MaComere given in honor of Beka Betson, a young woman at Holy Redeemer School, Belize City 6. In the context of Belize, "bembe" is always used to refer to women. While some "bembes" are quarrelsome and will initiate a fight, many will not; however, if provoked, they will not back down from a verbal or physical altercation. These women elicit a range of societal reactions from scorn and fear to admiration and respect depending on the context. 7. Thanks to Karla F. C. Holloway for bringing to my attention this powerful linguistic dimension of women's power politics. 8. Zee Edgell spoke about her forthcoming novel On the River Belize in my interview with her on July 30, 2005. In this interview, she spoke of some of the questions she was trying to answer by examining slavery in Belize: "Why do men and women have difficulties in Belize? Why is it that some Creole groups do not blend with other Creoles?" Through her examination of the historiography of slavery in Belize and archival documents such as slave registers, Edgell felt that she was able to come to a partial understanding of how slavery has shaped contemporary Belize. WORKS CITED Davies, Carole Boyce and Elaine Savory Fido. Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc., 1990. Dobson, Narda. A History of Belize. London: Longman, 1973. Edgell, Zee. Personal Interview. 29 -30 July 2005. --. Telephone Interview. 19 November 2005. --. Personal Interview. 16 May 1997. --. "Personal Experience and Fiction." Grinnell College, Iowa. 1 April 1997. --. The Festival of San Joaquin. Heinemann, 1997. --. "Belize: A Literary Perspective." Inter-American Development Bank Lecture Series. 30 September 1994: 1-12. --. In Times Like These. Heinemann, 1991. --. Beka Lamb. Oxford: Heinemann, 1982. Grant, Cedric. The Making of Modern Belize. Cambridge University Press, 1976. Huxley, Aldous. Beyond the Mexique Bay. N.Y.: Harper, 1934. Macpherson, Anne S. "'Those Men Were So Coward': The Gender Politics of -64- Women's Activism in Belize: Reviving Women's History in Fiction Social Movements and State Formation in Belize: 1912-1982." Diss. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998. Mahlis, Kristen. "Women and Nationhood: Zee Edgell's 'In Times Like These.'" ARIEL: A Review of international English Literature 31.3 (July 2000): 125-140. McClaurin, Irma. "A Writer's Life: A Country in Transition." Americas July/August 1994: 38-43. --. Women ofBelize: Gender and Change in Central America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1996. Moody-Freeman, Julie. "Waking the Gone: Nine Nights As Cultural Remembrance of An African Heritage in Belizean Literature." Canadian Women Studies/les cahiers de la femme. Special issue on "Women and the Black Diaspora." 23.2 (Winter 2004): 30-37. Niessen De Abruna, Laura. "Twentieth-Century Women Writers from the English-Speaking Caribbean." Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference. Ed. Selwyn Cudjoe. Wellesley: Calaloux Publications, 1990: 86-97. Saylick, Roydon. "The Martyred Virgin: A Political Reading of Zee Edgell's 'Beka Lamb.'" ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 32.4 (October 2001): 107-118. Shea, Renee H. "Zee Edgell's Home Within: An Interview." Callaloo 20.3 (1998): 574-583. Shepherd, Verene, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey. Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. Kingston: lan Randle Publishers, 1995. Shoman, Assad. Thirteen Chapters of a History of Belize. Belize City: The Angelus Press Ltd., 1994. Wilentz, Gay, ed. Memories, Dreams and Nightmares: a short story anthology of Belizean women writers. Volume 1. Benque Viejo del Carmen, Belize: Cubola Productions, 2002. --. Memories, Dreams and Nightmares: a short story anthology of Belizean women writers. Volume 2. Benque Viejo del Carmen, Belize: Cubola Productions, 2005. Wilson-Tagoe, Nana. Historical Thought and Literary Representation in West Indian Literature. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Wright, Michelle. Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. -65- Odile Ferly La historici(u)dad en "Invi's Paradise," de Aurora Arias La cuentistica de la dominicana Aurora Arias es sumamente urbana, lo cual la ubica en la tradici6n cuentistica contempordnea de las otras Antillas hispanas. En esta region, la ciudad adquiere una significaci6n que quizis no tenga en otras parties de las Antillas. Aqui muchas de las ciudades llevan la huella de la Conquista. Es destacable este rasgo en una ciudad como Santo Domingo, sobre todo en la llamada Zona Colonial, con unos monumentos como el Alcazar de Col6n, la cathedral, o las ruinas de San Francisco, por citar algunos. Tradicionalmente, esta herencia colonial se ha valorizado considerablemente en el Caribe hispano. En La isla que se repite Antonio Benitez Rojo observa como "en los paises no caribefios de la America Latina [ .] subsiste, desde el tiempo de las guerras patri6ticas, cierto resentimiento hacia lo espaiol. En el Caribe, sin embargo, la gente ha conservado como profundamente suyos los muros de piedra que dan fe de su pasado colonial, incluso los mas cuestionables." "En realidad," afiade, "puede decirse que no hay ciudad del Caribe hispanico que no rinda un verdadero culto a sus castillos y fortalezas, a sus cafiiones y murallas, y por extension a la parte 'vieja' de la ciudad, como sucede con el Viejo San Juan y La Habana Vieja. Alli el edificio colonial es visto con una rara mezcla de respeto y familiaridad" (Benitez Rojo 2). Mientras Benitez Rojo nombra aqui San Juan y La Habana, ciertamente sus observaciones son aun mas validas para Santo Domingo. Como punto de partida de la exploraci6n y de la colonizaci6n del Nuevo Mundo, hechos hist6ricos designados con frecuencia por el discurso dominant como la llegada de la Civilizaci6n a las Am6ricas, Hispaniola, y mas precisamente Santo Domingo, result ser el mas antiguo puesto colonial del Caribe. V6ase, por ejemplo, lo que afirma Fernando Casado en una de las paginas de la red de la Secretaria de Estado de Turismo: "La civilizaci6n europea entra en el Nuevo Mundo por Santo Domingo, como hubo de Ilamarsele por su hist6rica ciudad, y desde alli parten los grandes nombres de la conquista a repartir la historic de lo que es hoy" (Secretaria de Estado de Turismo [Fernando Casado], secci6n "Mfisica, ritmos y bailes," primer parrafo, 03 de marzo de 2006). En otra secci6n del mismo document podemos encontrar el siguiente comentario: La isla Espafiola fue la primera colonia europea del Nuevo Mundo y en su capital Santo Domingo, Ilamada Ciudad Primada de Am6rica, se originaron las primeras instituciones culturales y sociales coloniales, se construyeron las primeras fortalezas, las primeras iglesias y la primera cathedral, el primer hospital, los primeros monumentos y la primera universidad. -66- La historici(u)dad en "Invi's Paradise," de Aurora Arias (Secretaria de Estado de Turismo [An6nimo], secci6n "Historia," segundo parrafo, 12 de abril de 2004). Semejante orgullo derivado del papel de este pais en la colonizaci6n del Nuevo Mundo se encuentra en la pigina de la red del Consulado General de la Repiblica Dominicana en Genova, Italia, que define Santo Domingo como el "embajador de la cultural colonial hispanica en el 'nuevo mundo'" (Consulado General de la Republica Dominicana en Genova, Italia [An6nimo], secci6n "La Repiblica Dominicana," 12 de abril de 2004). A pesar del uso de comillas, tal ret6rica result en una supervalorizaci6n del element europeo o espainol en la cultural dominicana, en detrimento de los aportes taino, y sobre todo africano. Mientras el aporte taino ya se reconoce plenamente desde hace various siglos, no es asi en relaci6n a la herencia africana, que hasta hoy en dia se ve minimizada en la Rep6blica Dominicana. Aqui se puede recurrir nuevamente al sitio de la red de la Secretaria de Estado de Turismo. Tras reproducir una cita (sin identificarla) que caracteriza el pueblo dominicano como "un pueblo mestizo en sus creencias y costumbres; mestizo del espafiol conquistador y del africano esclavo, con alguna gota de sangre indigena en sus nostalgias" (Secretaria de Estado de Turismo [An6nimo], secci6n "Historia," primer parrafo, 03 de marzo de 2006), afiade el autor del document turistico: La conformaci6n misma de nuestra identidad es el product de sincretismo, en el que se mezclaban desde los valores de las sabanas africanas, la arrogancia, el machismo, y la prepotencia guerrerista del europeo, abarcando el sabor a valle propio de nuestras poblaciones caribefias, las cuales enriquecen extraordinariamente la conformaci6n de nuestra identidad. (Secretaria de Estado de Turismo [An6nimo], secci6n "Historia," und6cimo parrafo, 03 de marzo de 2006, cursivas afiadidas). Se ve aqui reducido el aporte africano a unos "valores de las sabanas africanas," mientras "la arrogancia" y "el machismo" del europeo aparecen como constituyentes imprescindibles de la identidad dominicana. Este articulo examine la imbricaci6n entire historic y ciudad en el cuento de Aurora Arias "Invi's Paradise," de ahi el neologismo "historiciudad." En este cuento, Arias nos present otra cara de la capital. Si el Santo Domingo de Arias sigue vinculado con el pasado, se trata sin embargo de un pasado muy distinto al que se encuentra en las historiografias tradicionales del pais o en los panfletos turisticos mencionados. En "Invi's Paradise" se opera una reescritura del pasado, tanto lejano como reciente, que al reinsertar la presencia taina y africana y al reafirmar el papel de la mujer en la construcci6n de la naci6n, cuestiona la -67- MaCombre historiografia official. A la vez, Arias nos revela una nueva topografia de la ciudad, un Santo Domingo de los principios de los ochenta cuya imagen desafia el glorioso retrato tradicionalmente divulgado. El argument del cuento es sencillo. La acci6n se sitia a principio de los ochenta, en 1984 quizis, y se ubica en Invi, un barrio popular de Santo Domingo, creado por el Instituto Nacional de la Vivienda (INVI) bajo el gobiemo de Balaguer. Aqui en un apartamento se reine un grupo de diez j6venes anticonformistas para charlar y divertirse. Un dia, los j6venes descubren una cueva en el malec6n, y decide trasladar alli su Cuartel General. Esta misma noche, presencian una aparici6n, una nave venida de otro mundo. El cuento es interesante a various niveles. Primero, esboza el retrato de un Santo Domingo que derrumba la imagen official de la ciudad elaborada por gobiernos sucesivos y otros organismos gubernamentales tales como los susodichos Secretaria de Estado de Turismo y Consulado General en Genova. El cuento cuestiona ademis los valores heredados de la tradici6n occidental tan elogiados en la ret6rica conventional, demostrando en particular la falta de democracia que prevalece en el pais. Finalmente, en "Invi's Paradise" se opera una reescritura del pasado que, aqui tambi6n, pone en duda la vision del pasado a la vez que la concepci6n de la identidad colectiva tradicionalmente divulgadas en la Repfiblica Dominicana. Como dicho anteriormente, el INVI, creado en 1962, fue el organismo gubemamental encargado de la construcci6n de viviendas de modesto costo para remediar a la aguda carencia de alojamiento que surgi6 con la ripida urbanizaci6n del pais a partir de los sesenta. Tanto la ubicaci6n del barrio INVI como la sucinta descripci6n de las viviendas evidencian c6mo en este Santo Domingo totalmente remodelado, la esplendorosa arquitectura colonial cede el paso a unos edificios deprimentes y de poco interns arquitect6nico. El barrio INVI se encuentra "[cerca de] la autopista 30 de Mayo" (Arias 13) la mayor artera de transito capitalino, y las condiciones de vida no son de las mis agradables: "sacard Papo su mecedora al parqueo; columpiando el tufo, hablari de los zafacones del condominio repletos de k6tex y de mimes; de seguro gritard iabajo el gobierno!" (Arias 11). Las dificultades econ6micas de los dominicanos se ven enfatizadas en el texto, dado el particular moment en que se sitia la acci6n: la ddcada de los ochenta fue una de gran penuria en el pais, impulsando una oleada emigratoria masiva. La "cuna de la civilizaci6n europea en las Amdricas," joya arquitect6nica del Caribe, recibe entonces un trato poco elogioso en la cuentistica de Arias. De hecho, la "civilizaci6n" o sociedad que nos revela el cuento tampoco es muy gloriosa. Arias nos pinta un pais a principio de los ochenta heredero de un conservadurismo politico y social viejo de cinco decadas. El texto es inequivoco en su critical de la herencia political de tres d6cadas de dictadura trujillista (1930- 1961), seguidas de 12 aiios del regimen de Balaguer (de 1966 a 1978).' Del gobierno de este 6ltimo, nos dice: "aquel apartamento construido por el viejo -68- La historici(u)dad en "Invi's Paradise," de Aurora Arias gobierno, el mismo que elimin6 a los iltimos en atreverse a ser heroes" (Arias 16). Los heroes aludidos aqui son los llamados "constitucionalistas," iniciadores de la revoluci6n del 1965- lamada tambi6n guerra de abril-que buscaba reinstalar como president a Juan Bosch, derrocado por un golpe de estado nueve meses despu6s de su elecci6n.2 Al parecer, el espiritu civilizador en el que la ret6rica official tanto insisted desemboc6 en una tradici6n de autoritarismo, para dar luz a una sociedad que carece de libertad individual y derechos democriticos.3 Este clima socio-politico explica la oleada emigratoria hacia los EEUU a partir de los sesenta. Ya en los afios ochenta, con la several crisis econ6mica que afecta al pais, esta emigraci6n es mis a menudo motivada por razones econ6micas: "zafacones y desavenencias, huelgas, vecindario, alto costo de la vida" (Arias 14), son tantos elements de la vida cotidiana de los cuales intentan huir los j6venes del cuento. Asi uno de los personajes comenta: "Mi mama [... .] quiere que me vaya en una yola, dizque a vivir mejor" (Arias 25). Entonces result ser ir6nico el epigrafe del cuento, que remite a una vision paradisiaca de la Republica Dominicana promulgada en las agencies de turismo: "Qu6 bien me siento en mi Invi's Paradise." (Arias 11). En un Santo Domingo post-trujillista ain marcado por restricciones sociales, la conduct de los j6venes anticonformistas se nota y choca. El cuento abre con la siguiente frase: "Rasga Terror las primeras notas en la guitarra y falta poco para que la vecina del piso de arriba, afanosa en saber qu6 estin haciendo los raros inquilinos de la segunda, baje a pedirles prestado un palito de f6sforo" (Arias 11). Mas adelante el texto subraya de nuevo la rigidez social que rodea los j6venes del grupo: "bailan pri-pri en medio del asfalto, la gente del barrio los esti mirando" (Arias 18). Sin embargo, la llegada al poder del Partido Revolucionario Dominicano, de tendencia centro-izquierdista, de 1978 a 1986, se ve caracterizada en el texto por una mayor libertad individual y social. Esta 6poca se present como una especie de edad de oro. En efecto, la voz narrative, la del personaje Irena, relatando los hechos una d6cada despu6s, asume un tono proustiano, miltoniano: estos comentarios vienen en cursiva en el texto "Aquello era Invi's Paradise y ya no existe" (Arias 12). Sabe a tiempo perdido, o mis aufn, a paraiso perdido. De aqui la palabra "paradise" del titulo. Irena afiade que esta d6cada de felicidad y libertad ya termin6: "La mayoria ya no estd, nos fuimos yendo cada quien por su camino, algunos demasiado cerca (al otro mundo), otros demasiado lejos, pendiendo para siempre del hilo de un perfect asombro, como Josh Tibi de Los Ej6rcitos, el mas fragil [del grupo]" (Arias 12). Aqui el texto alude tanto a la demencia y la muerte como a la emigraci6n, lo cual parece sugerir de forma implicita que, con el retorno al poder de Balaguer en 1986, a la era liberal sucedi6 otra de restricciones que consolid6 el flujo emigratorio. Aparte de este retrato iconoclasta de la Primada de las Am6ricas, tambi6n es interesante el final del cuento. La aparici6n ins6lita de la nave da lugar a una reescritura del pasado dominicano, empezando por la Conquista. En la escena -69- MaComere del descubrimiento de la cueva, el texto parodia de forma explicit los relates de la Conquista. Cuando Erica pregunta: "LY qud, qu6 encontraron?," Terror4 le contest: "un paraiso," y Behique afiade "el paraiso del Invi. [.. ] invi's Paradise!" (Arias 13-14). Este dialogo hace una obvia referencia al descubrimiento del Nuevo Mundo, descrito posteriormente en las cr6nicas de la Conquista como un paraiso. Mas adelante, el cuento parodia de nuevo los textos de la Conquista, cuando, para conjurar la aparici6n de la nave, el egocentrico Terror recupera la ret6rica official: "Vamos a componerle una canci6n a los vikingos. Yo. Ellos tienen que saber que van a desembarcar en Santo Domingo, Quisqueya, Primada de Am6rica, je, la tierra de Terror" (Arias 32). Ademas de parodiar textos fundadores de la naci6n dominicana, el cuento procede a la reinscripci6n no s61o del pasado taino, sino tambi6n de la presencia negra. Al ver la aparici6n, cada cual reacciona de forma distinta. Behique, por ejemplo, recurre a la invocaci6n de nombres ilustres del pasado dominicano: "No se preocupen, los espiritus de la gente de nosotros nos protegen, Mama Ting6, men, Santa Marta la Dominadora, tranquilos, men, tranquilidad. Somos elegidos, Cigua, men [.. .] Que nadie se paniquee, somos fuertes, tainos, men. Mandela, Africa, Yemalla, men" (Arias 29). En cambio, la reacci6n de Sara consiste en derrumbar uno de los mitos fundadores dominicanos, el que atribuye el descubrimiento de America a Crist6bal Col6n: "eso que viene aqui, en medio del mar, es una de las naves vikingas de cuando los tainos, men, que los vikingos nos descubrieron primero que Col6n" (Arias 30). Tras minimizar la importancia de Col6n y los espafioles en la historiografia dominicana, Sara destaca el papel jugado por los tainos, cuando mas adelante afiade: "mira qu6 bonitos son [esos hombres], con esa barba roja, men. Erica, vocdale en ingles: jellos ser los tainos!, o sea, nosotros [ .] idiles que Anacaona soy yo!" (Arias 31). En cuanto a Terror, como ya se dijo, encuentra refugio en la ret6rica hispanista official que refiere a la Hispaniola como "Primada de las Americas" (Arias 32). Las varias reacciones de los protagonistas evidencian todas la necesidad de amparo. Pero al mismo tiempo, son tres versions de una misma historic, relatada desde distintas perspectives: la perspective afro-antillana de Behique, con la invocaci6n de Santa Marta, Mama Ting6, Mandela, Africa y YemallA, la perspective taina relatada por Sara, con la menci6n de Anacaona, y el punto de vista hispanista adoptado por Terror. Pero cada personaje adopta no tan solo una perspective del pasado, sino varias. Aunque la mayoria de las referencias del Behique remiten a la relaci6n del Caribe con Africa, su mismo apodo-que refiere a un curandero en la tradici6n taina-asi como su menci6n de los tainos lo conectan con el pasado precolombino de la isla.5 Lo mismo vale para los dos otros protagonistas: Sara, miembro de la 61ite blanca del pais, se proyecta como una cacica taina, mientras el afro-dominicano Terror se enorgullece de su pasado hispano. Todos demuestran aqui su concepci6n del pueblo dominicano como mestizo. -70- La historici(u)dad en "Invi's Paradise," de Aurora Arias La invocaci6n de los cinco iconos que son Santa Marta, Mama Ting6, Mandela, Yemalla y Anacaona anima a los protagonistas a enfrentar la amenaza que represent la aparici6n de la nave. Es notable en particular la menci6n de los nombres de Anacaona, Santa Marta la Dominadora y Mama Ting6, mediante los cuales el texto evoca tres eras distintas del pasado y unos aspects culturales propiamente dominicanos. Estas tres figures tienen dos puntos en comiun: son las tres femeninas, y quedaron todas en la memorial colectiva como figures de rebeldia. Anacaona, la iltima cacica taina de la isla, se convirti6 en un simbolo por su resistencia sostenida a la llegada de los espaioles. Era duefia de Xaragua, que, ademas de ser en la dpoca de la Conquista el mas pr6spero y populoso de los cinco cacicazgos de Hispaniola, fue tambidn el ultimo en caer en manos de los espafioles, oponiendo una resistencia de mas de diez afios a los invasores. De alli la invocaci6n de Sara y el comentario de Behique "somos fuertes, tainos, men," que podria parecer incongruente, dada la aniquilaci6n total de los tainos poco mas de cuatro ddcadas despu6s de la invasion espafiola. En cuanto a Santa Marta la Dominadora, es una figure dominant del culto religioso afro- dominicano, como indica su nombre. Santa Marta, compafiera del Bar6n del cementerio, se conoce en el vudu haitiano como Erzili zy& rouges, y se represent habitualmente con una serpiente en los hombros. La supervivencia en el Caribe de aspects culturales tales como los cultos de origen africano atestigua de por si la insumisi6n al process de aculturaci6n y asimilaci6n de los negros durante la 6poca colonial, una practice que el escritor haitiano Rend Depestre denomina "cimarronaje cultural." Resulta ser de importancia primordial entonces un icono como Santa Marta, sobre todo en la zona hispana del Caribe, donde la imposici6n de la fe cristiana mediante la erradicaci6n de los cultos africanos fue mis virulenta que en el resto de la regi6n.7 El vinculo con el origen africano de Santa Marta sigue en pie, como evidenciado por su iconografia actual en el Caribe-con el detalle de la serpienteque es una replica de la imagen difundida en Africa occidental de la deidad Mami Watta.8 V6ase, por ejemplo, la representaci6n que hace el artist dominicano contemporineo Jorge Severino en su cuadro intitulado "Santa Marta la Dominadora" (que apareci6 en la portada del numero de la revista estadounidense Callaloo Vol. 13 No. 3 [verano de 1990]). La deidad no es el 6nico element en el cuento en aludir al pasado de resistencia de los afro- dominicanos. En la cueva, los j6venes tocan el tambor y el fututo, o concha, ambos instruments que desarrollaron un papel primordial en la comunicaci6n entire esclavos, sobre todo en tiempos de rebeldia. La herencia africana se ve asi reafirmada, y asociada al pasado de insumisi6n de la isla al igual que el pasado taino. Es notable que "la Cigua," que design habitualmente un pajaro oriundo de la Repfblica Dominicana, sirve aqui de apodo para una de las protagonistas estrechamente vinculada con la cultural negra: la Cigua es morena, y aficionada a los bailes tradicionales afro-antillanos. -71- MaComere Finalmente, la evocaci6n de Mama Ting6 remite a un episodio de la political agraria del gobierno de Balaguer, que result en el despojo de numerosos campesinos en la ddcada de los setenta. Florinda Soriano Mufoz, alias Mama Ting6, era una campesina analfabeta, y la dirigente de un sindicato campesino en Gualey, Hato Viejo (en el municipio de Yamasa, provincia de San Crist6bal) opuesto a la expropiaci6n de sus tierras por el gobierno. Fue asesinada el Iro de noviembre de 1974.9 Hasta hoy se recuerda a Mama Ting6 como una martir de la Republica Dominicana, y su nombre se volvi6 sin6nimo de resistencia. Anacaona, Santa Marta y Mama Ting6 son asi las tres asociadas con un esfuerzo de impedir el despojo- sea fisico, en el caso de tierras cotizadas por conquistadores o terratenientes, o cultural, en el caso de un patrimonio religioso-de los dominicanos a trav6s de los siglos. Obviamente, no es casual la elecci6n de las figures de Anacaona, Santa Marta, y Mama Ting6, ni su evocaci6n en este pasaje del cuento. Los protagonistas recurren a estos iconos para conjurar una invasion, y el consiguiente despojo, que creen inminentes con la aparici6n de la nave. Cabe notar que entire las dos mujeres y la deidad mencionadas, dos (Anacaona y Santa Marta) no son exclusivamente dominicanas, sino que compartidas con la cultural del pais vecino, Haiti. Al elegir figures de resistencia que se encuentran en ambas cultures, Arias pone en duda la traditional definici6n de la naci6n y cultural dominicanas, y mas precisamente el concept de "dominicanidad," elaborado mayormente por un process de negaci6n de lo haitiano, vidndose lo dominicano definido como fundamentalmente distinto, o mas auin, opuesto a la cultural y la naci6n vecinas. iAhora, qu6 puede significar la aparici6n de la nave? Las interpretaciones son multiples. La descripci6n de la nave es la siguiente: la nave se acercaba movida por enormes remos de madera [...] venida desde no se sabe cual rinc6n del pasado, cargada de hombres rojos y sangrientos [que] comenzaron a gritar algo desde la proa en un idioma de pirates, con sus escudos, sus sombreros de metal, y esas lanzas, como dispuestos a iniciar una guerra que los tomaba desprevenidos y no les convenia. (Arias 33) Esta nave, algunos la identifican como una nave vikinga. Los hombres son "rojos y sangrientos", y por "rojos" se debe entender aqui "pelirrojos," como lo explicit la reacci6n de Sara: "mira qud bonitos son [esos hombres], con esa barba roja" (Arias 31). Ademas, uno de los personajes le sugiere a la gringa del grupo, Erica, que se dirija a los hombres del barco en ingles. Con estos dos detalles, hombres pelirrojos que hablan en ingl6s, el texto opera una conexi6n direct entire los vikingos y los estadounidenses. Tambien la descripci6n de la pagina 33 vincula los vikingos a los pirates: "comenzaron a gritar algo [.. .] en -72- La historici(u)dad en "Invi's Paradise," de Aurora Arias un idioma de pirates". Pero lo que quizas mas Ilame la atenci6n es la extraordinaria similitud entire estos nuevos invasores y otros del pasado: si no fuera por los detalles del color del pelo, de los yelmos con cachos, y de los escudos, estos hombres parecerian unos conquistadores espafioles. A lo largo de la historic, el pais ha conocido varias invasiones desde el mar: vikingos, espafioles, pirates, y en repetidas ocasiones estadounidenses, en el 1916 y en el 1965. Una interpretaci6n possible seria que, al fin y al cabo, el invasor siempre es el mismo. N6stor Rodriguez interpreta la nave como un simbolo del peso de la historic dominicana, que, como concluye el protagonista Josh Tibi, siempre se repite, inmutable: "lo que esta sucediendo no es nada del otro mundo, que esa nave vikinga siempre estuvo ahi, Piscis, y siempre lo estara. Ahi eternamente. Porque todo lo que fue sigue siendo. Todo, Piscis" (Arias 33). Rodriguez nota c6mo Josh Tibi "es el unico de los contertulios que parece captar la imposibilidad de superar el lastre de una memorial hist6rica que se prolonga hasta el hastio" (Rodriguez 104). Sin embargo, con esta alucinaci6n colectiva provocada por la ingesti6n de un t6 de hongos, el texto parece sugerir aqui que esta l6tima invasion ya no es fisica, sino mis subrepticia, mas insidiosa. Se puede interpreter esta alucinaci6n como una metafora para la dominaci6n creciente de los EEUU en el pais. Esta dominaci6n ya no es tan abierta como en los tiempos de ocupaci6n, sino que se ejerce por influencia political, como sucedi6 ya en varias ocasiones en el pasado. Por otra parte, esta dominaci6n ha cambiado de naturaleza: de military y political, pas6 a ser tambi6n cultural, de ahi el ingles del titulo del cuento, "Invi's Paradise." Otra interpretaci6n possible, que tambi6n explicaria el uso del ingl6s, seria ver en esta nave uno de los numerosos cruceros llenos de turistas norteamericanos y europeos que desembarcan en la Rep6blica Dominicana en un flujo continue desde los afios ochenta. En conclusion, se ve asi c6mo el Santo Domingo de Arias, al igual que el de la ret6rica official, sigue estrechamente vinculado con el pasado. Sin embargo, no se trata aqui de un pasado de conquista relatado desde el punto de vista de los espafioles, sino de la otra cara de la historic, la de un pasado de resistencia- tanto en el plano fisico como en el plano spiritual -contado desde el punto de vista de los tainos y afro-dominicanos, cuyos emblemas son Anacaona, Santa Marta y Mama Ting6. NOTAS 1. Tras asumir en 1960 el cargo de president en el gobierno de Trujillo, Joaquin Balaguer Ricardo fue miembro de la junta que sucedi6 al asesinato del dictador de 1961 a 1962. Fue elegido president en 1966, permaneciendo durante tres mandos consecutivos hasta 1978, tras operar un cambio constitutional que -73- MaComere prohibia la reelecci6n del president. Vuelto al poder con las presidenciales del 1986, se mantuvo en cargo hasta 1996 mediante las elecciones fraudulentas de 1990 y 1994. 2. Fundador del Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD) en 1939, Juan Bosch es la figure mis destacada de la oposici6n a la dictadura de Rafael Trujillo y al gobiemo de Joaquin Balaguer, heredero politico de Trujillo. Elegido president en diciembre de 1962, Bosch s61o lleg6 a gobernar nueve meses, antes de ser derrocado en septiembre de 1963 por los militares, a causa de su orientaci6n socialist. Juzgado demasiado radical, Juan Bosch se separ6 del partido en 1973 para fundar el Partido de la Liberaci6n Dominicana (PLD). De 1978 a 1986, ya sin el liderazgo de Bosch, el PRD accede de nuevo al poder, con los presidents Antonio Guzmin Femnndez (elegido en 1978) y Salvador Jorge Blanco (elegido en 1982). 3. Benitez Rojo destaca tambidn esta herencia political de autoritarismo del process colonizador al subrayar la incongruencia del carifio evidenciado en el Caribe hispano por la Conquista y la colonizaci6n: "Esto no puede menos de llamar la atenci6n por cuanto la colonizaci6n espahiola en Am6rica no fue mejor que otras, y si se consultant las piginas de cualquier historic local, se le echara en cara haber sido autoritaria en lo civil, monopolistica en el comercio, intolerante en la religion, esclavista en la producci6n, beligerante hacia las corrientes reformistas, y discriminadora con respect al indio, al mestizo, al negro, al mulato e incluso al criollo hijo de peninsulares." (La isla que se repite 2). 4. Como explica Nestor Rodriguez, Terror era un cantante que se convirti6 en un idolo de los j6venes a finales de los setenta y principios de los ochenta por denunciar la represi6n del gobiemo de Balaguer (Escrituras de desencuentro en la Republica dominicana 101-102). Su nombre viene en cursivas en el texto de Arias. 5. El behique funcionaba a la vez como curandero y jefe spiritual en las comunidades tainas. 6. Anacaona era la mujer de Canoabo, el cacique de Maguana (hoy en dia en la region del Cibao en la Republica Dominicana). Tras la deportaci6n por los espafioles de Canoabo y la caida de su reinado en manos de los conquistadores en 1494, Anacaona se refugi6 en Xaragua, su cacicazgo de origen (hoy en dia en los alrededores de Leogane en Haiti), donde sucedi6 a su hermano Bohechio. Segln las cr6nicas de la Conquista, era una poetisa distinguida. Tras caer -74- La historici(u)dad en "Invi's Paradise," de Aurora Arias victim de una traicionera maniobra, Anacaona fue capturada y ejecutada por los espafioles en 1503, convirti6ndose desde entonces en una leyenda. 7. Si bien no alcanz6 los extremes de las posesiones espaflolas continentales, el control religioso en las colonies hispanas del archipil6ago fue much mas estricto que en los territories de la region controlados por otras potencias coloniales. V6ase, por ejemplo, las represiones descritas en el primer capitulo de La isla que se repite de Benitez Rojo (19-22), motivadas en gran parte por la ira que provocaron los colonos ind6ciles al burlar las autoridades religiosas y econ6micas de la corona. 8. Quiero agradecer aqui a Luis Nicolau por sus comentarios. 9. Florinda Soriano Mufioz, era dirigente de la FEDELAC (Federaci6n de las Liguas Agrarias Cristianas), organizaci6n que luch6 contra el desalojo de 350 families pobres de las tierras que ocupaban y laboraban desde varias ddcadas. Fue detenida, golpeada y asesinada por un capataz de un terrateniente en Hato Viejo. Tenia 58 afios de edad. OBRAS CITADAS Arias, Aurora, Invi's Paradise y otros relates. Montreal: Concordia University, Critica Canadiense Literaria Sobre Escritoras Hispanoamericanas (CCLEH), 1998. Benitez Rojo, Antonio, La isla que se repite: el Caribe y la perspective posmoderna, Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1989. Consulado General de la Rep6blica Dominicana en Genova, Italia: pagina web, 2004. Depestre, Rend, "Bonjour et adieu A la n6gritude," en Bonjour et adieu a la nigritude, Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980. 82-160. Rodriguez, Ndstor E. Escrituras de desencuentro en la Republica dominicana. D. F., M6xico: Siglo Veintuno editors / Estado Libre y Soberano de Quintana Roo, 2005. Secretaria de Estado de Turismo: Pagina web, abril de 2004, aun vigentes el 03 de marzo de 2006. Severino, Jorge, "Santa Marta la Dominadora" (cuadro), 1977. 72 x 40 -75- MaComere pulgadas. Una reproducci6n de este cuadro apareci6 en la portada del nimero de la revista estadounidense Callaloo Vol. 13 No. 3 (verano de 1990), y se puede encontrar en la red: -76- Karina Smith Invoking the Spirit of the Warrior Woman: Sistren's Nana Yah Yuh granmadda Was Nana Mountain strong Fighting pon er piece of lan She plant er corn In likkle pool a dirt Between hard cockpit stone -Jean "Binta" Breeze, "Testament," Spring Cleaning Nana Yah, which opened in March 1980, was staged in one of the most turbulent periods in Jamaica's political history. The beginning of 1980 saw the Manley government declare Jamaica in a "state of emergency" following the eruption of politically motivated gang warfare on the streets of Kingston-a situation sparked in part by the impact of the International Monetary Fund's Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) on disadvantaged Jamaicans. In the politically fraught atmosphere that surrounded the 1980 elections, Nanny was evoked by both Michael manley and Edward Seaga, the country's political leaders, as a signifier of Jamaican nationalism. While some critics refer to Manley and Seaga's political rhetoric as cynical populism,' the importance of Nanny transcends political ideology. Patricia Mohammed refers to a recent example of Nanny's significance in her article "Taking possession: Symbols of empire and nationhood" when she relays the story of graffiti artists, on the eve of Queen Elizabeth II's visit to the University of the West Indies Mona campus in 1994, "emblazoning in dramatic hand [...] the message 'Nanny a fi we Queen'" (7). Further, as Jenny Sharpe in her recent book Ghosts of Slavery (2003) points out, "[T]oday Nanny appears in more fiction, plays, and poems than any other Afro- Caribbean woman who lived during the era of slavery"(1). The decision by the Sistren Theatre Collective to devise a play about Nanny's life reflects Jamaica's social and political climate during the 1970s: the Manley government's socially progressive policies paved the way for groups such as Sistren to emerge; the women's movement was gaining strength both locally and globally; and decolonization of Jamaica's cultural production had gained momentum. The production of Nana Yah catapulted Sistren2 into a new phase of existence and was the catalyst for the company's transformation from a co- operative into a professional theatre company, cultural organization, and "feminist democracy," to use Alexander and Mohanty's term in their text Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (xxviii). The Sistren Theatre Collective was formed when Honor Ford-Smith, a drama tutor at MaComere the Jamaica School of Drama, was employed by the Manley government to work with twelve working class women from the Impact program (a government initiative to alleviate unemployment) on a skit for the 1977 Workers' Week Festival.3 The skit, Downpression Get a Blow, depicted the conditions for women working in a United States-owned garment factory in which union membership and/or worker solidarity was (and still is) strongly discouraged. Ford-Smith describes the process of devising Downpression as "an exchange of experience" ("Sistren" 248). The performance did not use any written material and was based on the personal testimony of one member of the group-a method of working that became the model on which Sistren's future work was based. Between 1977 and 1980, the twelve women attended drama classes at the Jamaica School of Drama with Ford-Smith where they shared their personal testimonies, experimented with theatrical forms, and explored aspects of Jamaica's oral tradition. The workshops resulted in the group's first major production, Bellywoman Bangarang (1978), which, based on the personal testimonies of members of the group, dealt with taboo issues such as teenage pregnancy, rape, and domestic violence. Nana Yah represented a new direction for the group as Sistren members, by dint of researching Nanny's life, began to work as a theatre collective rather than a co-operative where the central purpose was emotional support for its members. In this article, I will argue that Nana Yah is a particularly important production for its ongoing relevance as a "feminist" intervention into local/global politics. By invoking the spirit of Nanny, Sistren legitimizes Jamaica's oral tradition and the role women have played in making that tradition a powerful ideological weapon against (re)colonization. In her essay "Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideologies of Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity," Chandra Talpade Mohanty theorizes about the possibilities of resistance for women workers in the capitalist processes of recolonization. Although Mohanty admits that the notion of feminist resistance seems impossible for women working in home-based industries or multinational-owned factories, she gives examples of the way in which feminist organizing, mainly through the formation of workers' unions, has actually challenged the structures of exploitation (4). Honor Ford-Smith, writing at least a decade before Mohanty, makes the opposite point about the perception of agency in postcolonial societies, the economies of which are dominated by multinational companies and development banks: "These forces create a sense that power exists outside of oneself, that a sense of personal agency is possible only to the extent that one is able to make the best of a bad situation" ("A Cultural Worker's Dilemma" 21). Yet women are resisting domination and exploitation by using what Mohanty describes as "vibrant, creative, collective forms of mobilization and organizing" (11). Sistren is a case in point. Although the members of the group wanted initially to devise a play around the way men treated them, Sistren's first skit explored women's -78- Invoking the Spirit of the Warrior Woman: Sistren's Nana Yah experiences of working in garment factories, and the consequences of collective organizing in the pursuit of improved conditions. Theatricalizing these stories of exploitation gave rise to more complex investigations into the commodification of women in capitalist modes of production as well as their overall role in Jamaican society. By broadening its focus, Sistren was able to create an example of a "feminist democracy." Firstly, as Alexander and Mohanty point out, "feminist democracies" are born out of the decolonization process and respond to the State's treatment of women. Secondly, they involve the questioning of "naturalized" hierarchies in society with the aim of transforming relationships between people through collective organizing. Thirdly, within "feminist democracies" one's agency is theorized differently so that self-determination becomes a reality despite the existence of hegemonic forces keeping one oppressed. Fourthly, alternatives are crafted within "feminist democracies" in order to effect social change; and, finally, the fostering of transnational alliances with other women's organizations is essential (xxviii-xxix). Part of Sistren's development as a "feminist democracy" involved the transformation of the company into a professional theatre collective; it is a transformation that began with the creative process behind, and performances of, Nana Yah. Nana Yah commemorates the life of Nanny, the Ashanti woman, Obeah priestess, and Maroon warrior who led a group of fugitive slaves or Maroons in guerrilla warfare against the British slave owners in eighteenth-century Jamaica. Maroon oral histories suggest that Nanny possessed extraordinary magical powers that enabled her to provide spiritual and tactical leadership for the Windward Maroons. Honor Ford-Smith describes Nanny as a tactician, a stern general, a herbalist, a cultivator. She bounced bullets off her bottom or she caught then and threw them back. She trapped British soldiers in a cauldron which boiled at the foot of the hill on which Nanny town stood. When her people were on the verge of starvation and about to give up the fight, Ni received pumpkin seeds, which, when planted, yielded fully grown pumpkins in record time, enabling the Maroons to continue the war. (Lionheart Gal xv) Written historical accounts, however, focus on Cudjoe's leadership and the significance of his decision to make peace with the British in exchange for land and freedom, and some even question Nanny's existence.4 Although there is a paucity of written accounts, Stella Dadzie has identified two references to a "real" historical figure that may be the Nanny of popular memory in the records of European "observers and militiamen": in 1788, Philip Thicknesse reported seeing a "ferocious-looking Obeah-woman" at the signing of the 1739 Peace Treaty, and Joseph Williams, who interviewed the Accompong Maroons in -79- MaCombre 1938, was told that there were five members of the Ashanti family who led their ancestors in battle: Cudjoe, Accompong, Johnny, Cuffee, Quaco and Nanny (34). Jamaican historian Lucille Mathurin is in no doubt about Nanny's leadership of the Maroons: "Official documents give relatively scanty but highly significant information about her" (1). Nana Yah, too, debunks colonial histories in which female slaves are figured as passive victims of British brutality or submissive followers in rebellions instigated by their male counterparts. Nanny's existence, according to Ford-Smith, is an early example of female leadership in Jamaica, and "was not merely one instance of a woman exercising power, but grew out of a tradition of female leadership in Akan society" ("Caribbean Women" 153). Nana Yah has been read as a play "on the role of women in the liberation of the West Indian colonies" (Stone 64); as "a historical fantasy about the life of Jamaica's legendary Maroon heroine" (Gilbert 154); and as an attempt "to explain how people can achieve development through celebrating their cultural heritage, and proving their strength and self-confidence" (McIntosh 19). While each of these readings sheds light on Nana Yah to a greater or lesser extent, it is important to contextualize the production, thus looking beyond the parameters of the text because, as Baz Kershaw suggests, contemporaryay live performance, especially outside theatre buildings [ .] is inevitably thoroughly contaminated by its wider cultural context"(7). Sistren suggests that Nana Yah, like its previous major production Bellywoman Bangarang (1978), "breaks silence" and celebrates the "heroine/ism" ("Caribbean Women" 2). Given the socio-political context in which Nana Yah was performed, the play can be read as an allegory of resistance to contemporary neo-colonial forces embodied in the United States and the IMF; it can be considered subversive in its "call to arms." Further, it can be read as a feminist intervention into local and global politics through its use of Nanny as a role model. In Nana Yah, Sistren's members "not only celebrate Nanny as a Maroon leader but extend her agency to all black women" (Sharpe 31). The play uses Nanny as a symbol of the courage and endurance required by Jamaicans, particularly Jamaican women, to fight against the severe impact of the IMF's SAP. Nana Yah was written and directed by Jean Small, a drama tutor at the Jamaica School of Drama, who was asked to work with Sistren as a guest director. The creative process behind Nana Yah was an important rite of passage for the members of the company as they were forced to move beyond their personal experiences in order to gain a wider knowledge of the experiences of women in both historical and contemporary Jamaican society. Jean Small recalls the difficulties she experienced working with the members of Sistren: "Africa, Nanny, slavery were merely words. They didn't have any knowledge about their historical past" ("Re: Nana Yah" 1999). Lemuel A. Johnson, in his article on Michelle Cliffs Abeng, refers to the loss of cultural memory that Small describes as "being in the island-in-between" (21).5 In order to overcome these -80- Invoking the Spirit of the Warrior Woman: Sistren's Nana Yah obstacles, Small conducted workshops on the play's major themes; she held workshops on the Ashantis and the legend of Nanny; she took Sistren members to the Institute of Jamaica where they were taught about Jamaican history; and she also held discussions on cultural dispossession under slavery ("Re: Nana Yah" 1999). According to Sistren member Lillian Foster, the group travelled to Accompong to learn about Maroon rituals in order to be true to Nanny's heritage: We did research on Accompong; we even went to Accompong in St. Elizabeth to watch the type of dance they do, the ritual: how they set up the table to feed the spirits. We put different kinds of food on the table and rum and all those things. And the dance-we call it Etu-and for what reason they do the dance. ("Interview with Robert Wasserstrom"170) The low literacy levels among the members of the group prevented Small from working from a script. To counter this problem, she encouraged the members of Sistren to do improvisations around some loose guidelines that she provided, a process called "oral theatre". Small recorded everything the women said on tape; she took the tapes home; listened to them; and extracted material that could be used to devise the script. In the end, Small wrote the play using material from the tapes, with Sistren members mostly devising the songs and dance routines used in the final production ("Re: Nana Yah" 1999). Jean Small's experiences of working with Sistren exemplify some of the difficulties the group experienced as they formed their "feminist democracy." Honor Ford-Smith, the Artistic Director of Sistren from 1977- 1988, has written extensively on the obstacles the members of Sistren encountered during the group's first ten years of existence.6 Race and class differences within the group, coupled with external pressures from funding bodies, made the development of a truly "feminist democracy" almost impossible to achieve. Although decisions were made collectively, the middle- class members of the company largely shouldered the burden of the administrative tasks while the working-class members worked on the productions and workshops. The issue of skills transferral was a sore point: the middle class women had the responsibility of passing on vital literacy skills to their working class counterparts, yet they were heavily encumbered with their own tasks, making this process rather haphazard. On top of this were the pressures placed on the group by development agency representatives who wanted Sistren to prove it could become self-sufficient in order to justify the funding provided. Although Sistren hired "resource people" (read middle class) to assist with the company's administration, this further compounded the race and class differences in the company. Sistren member Cerene Stephenson describes some of the tensions between the working and middle class women as -81- MaComere follows: They try to force you to do something you don't want to do or understand. If you don't understand, they make you feel like you are not in their league, you don't understand what they are dealing with. Some resource people have a way of looking down on us Sistren because we are not educated (qtd. in Ring Ding 80). There was an imbalance of power within the group which was heightened by social prejudices, the disparity in educational levels, class antagonism, and funding requirements, all of which Ford-Smith was acutely aware; in fact, she describes the process of reflecting on her role in the company as "extremely painful" ("Ring Ding" 216). Further, Small's remarks reflect the multiplicity of women's experiences and, by extension, the complexity of feminisms in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean because of race and class differences. Nanny's story, despite her evocations in Jamaican politics at the time, did not, at first, hold much significance for the working class members of Sistren who were locked out of historical and political discourses by their lack of education. Although the women's movement had gained strength both locally and globally during the 1970s, the particular brand of "feminism" underpinning many of the policies agreed to at the United Nations World Decade for Women conferences and which was influential in pressuring the Manley government to address gender oppression within Jamaican society did not reflect the concerns of women from all races and classes. Although Peggy Antrobus, the first director of the Women and Development Unit (WAND) at the University of the West Indies, suggests that the UN Decade for Women had a profound effect on Caribbean women (1- 2), Gloria I. Joseph argues that working class women were either disinterested in or disdainful of the international women's movement and its aims (157-158). Further, there was reluctance among Sistren members to wear the "feminist" label. While they recognized that they were oppressed as women, they also acknowledged the nexus between gender, race, and class oppressions. Added to this were the stereotypes of "radical" feminists, which were circulated throughout Jamaican society, tainting the movement and its cause. In Jamaica, as Ford-Smith points out, feminism was equated with radical "man-hating" feminists whose activities were negatively portrayed in the news media ("Ring Ding" 218). Moreover, due to the inadequacy of and, in some cases, racism within the international women's movement, many Black women and Black women's groups refused to associate themselves with the label. Although the Women's movement strengthened during the Manley era, it did not describe itself as "feminist." In fact, labelling oneself "feminist" was deemed "politically off-track" (Cobham and Ford-Smith xiii) because, despite the existence of the -82- Invoking the Spirit of the Warrior Woman: Sistren's Nana Yah People's National Party Women's Movement (PNPWM),7 it was suggested that any focus on gender issues was a potential threat to the unity of the socialist movement. Absent from the Jamaican women's movement's agenda was what Ford-Smith describes as the "hidden" aspects of Jamaican women's lives, taboo issues such as sexuality, domestic violence, and sexual assault. In fact, Sistren's determination to address these issues made the organization unique in Jamaican society (Ford-Smith, Ring Ding 21). Despite the debates about "feminism" discussed above, Sistren's work illustrates the impact of both the international women's movement and the home-grown Jamaican women's movement, perhaps because of its middle class leadership. Although the international women's movement created a space for women's groups such as Sistren to emerge, the representation of Caribbean feminisms by Western feminists has led Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert to claim that European and/or North American feminisms are not directly relevant to Caribbean women's lives. Given the length of Caribbean feminist history, Western feminisms have a limited applicability to a reality which developed in fairly local ways in response to a collision between autochthonous and foreign cultures. These local-i.e., insular or creole-responses to alien influences shaped the varieties of feminisms to be found in the Caribbean, feminisms that often clash with each other as women of different classes and races strive to achieve sometimes contradictory goals. The insular factors affecting the development of feminist movements in the region-the indivisibility of gender relations from race and class, the intricate connections between sexual mores, skin pigmentation, and class mobility, the poverty and political repression that have left women's bodies exposed to abuse and exploitation-seem alien to the concerns of European- American feminist thought. (7) Further, Paravisini-Gebert expresses concern over the way in which Caribbean feminisms have been theorized by Western feminists who, she claims, have de- historicized and, in turn, recolonized the region's women's movements via discursive frameworks such as postcolonialism which continue to emphasize the colonizer/colonized relationship. Postcolonial theorists Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins claim that postcolonial writers and practitioners "are more concerned with demarcating areas of women's subjugation under imperialism" than "destabilising gender binaries" (213). Whilst gender binaries are not given preference in so-called "postcolonial" women's cultural production, texts are often written/performed in response to current political, social, and economic situations. -83- MaCombre While women in European and North American contexts are not a homogenous group and do share some of the same concerns as their counter- parts in the South, the struggle for Caribbean women is concerned with the complexities of color/class hierarchies on the local level, and international political relationships between so-called Third World countries and economic superpowers on the global level. Unlike European and North American women, Caribbean women are the targets of development agencies offering to help them achieve the "lauded" post/modernity of the West. Paravisini-Gebert makes the important point that postcolonialism's preoccupation with former colonial masters is paradigmatic of the theory's limited scope in that Caribbean societies "are driven as much, if not more, by internal, local concerns than they are by a persistent, continual, and continuous awareness of a colonial past" (5). Nana Yah, for example, can be read, on one level, as a counter-discourse that destabilizes the hegemony of colonial historical narratives. However, as I will argue in the rest of this paper, the play draws upon the figure of Nanny to inspire Jamaican women to fight against oppressive forces, which were, at the time, manifested in the IMF. In so doing, Nana Yah exemplifies Alexander and Mohanty's conceptualization of "feminist democracy" as an "anticolonialist, anticapitalist vision of feminist practice" (xxvii). In performance, Nana Yah is constructed as a religious wake in which Nanny's life story is told to the spectators, who indirectly take on the role of mourners at her funeral service. Following the ritual of entering the performance space under an enormous Ashanti parasol, the spectators are asked to wear red armbands (the Ashanti color of mourning), given hymn sheets, and led in singing in remembrance of the Maroon warrior. Sistren members wander through the audience singing hymns composed by Ira David Sankey, a singing American evangelist (Douglas 878), to evoke a funereal atmosphere. The use of "sankeys,"8 famous in Jamaica since the Great Revival of the 1860s, reflects the importance of syncretic Jamaican religion, particularly Revivalism and Rastafarianism, as a form of resistance to colonial oppression. In one particularly important performance, the stage was built against the back verandah of Devon House (a Kingston Great House that has been converted into a tourist attraction), the audience was seated in the courtyard, and stage lights were nestled among the trees. The setting was minimalist: two parasols recalling those used by Ashanti chiefs were placed upstage left and downstage right. Boxes of varying heights and sizes were arranged at the back of the stage on which were placed calabashes, baskets, an Ashanti stool, gourds, and clay pots. Gourds were also hung from the branches of the surrounding trees (Program Notes). A group of drummers was positioned on the verandah of the house and remained there throughout the performance. Jean Small points out that Devon House was the perfect setting for the production as it recreated the atmosphere of the slave plantation ("Sistren Profile" 32). Further, Devon House was appropriate because it is in the heart of Kingston, the battleground on which -84- Invoking the Spirit of the Warrior Woman: Sistren's Nana Yah Jamaica's political war at the time was being waged. In Nana Yah, Nanny's existence is used as an example of the strength displayed by African/Jamaican women in their fight against the British slave- owners. The play reclaims the voices of women whose identities, thoughts, and feelings were silenced within the institution of Slavery. Sistren's retelling of Nanny's story legitimizes oral histories, the historical accuracy of which was discounted in "official" colonial records. Furthermore, women are cast as the guardians of Nanny's story and are responsible for passing the "legend" on to future generations. In the opening movement, the storyteller emphasizes the importance of Jamaica's oral tradition in her monologue: So unoo lissen me good Fe me no read dis inna no whiteman book Is me madda self learn me Fe is me grandmadda tell me granny An she pass it on to me? (Program Notes 1) The storyteller exemplifies the strong oral tradition among Maroons who, according to Mathurin, "carry the past in their heads" (1). Further, Sharpe suggests that "oral histories do not exist in a fixed form but change across time, often bringing into their narratives new evidence, published sources, and more recent events" (14). There is more to the storyteller's role, however, than simply relaying an historical narrative; her connection to Nanny is spiritual. She doubles as a medium through which Nanny speaks to her people. Gilbert and Tompkins suggest that the storyteller in postcolonial drama uses history to teach contemporary audiences lessons learned in the past, but in Nana Yah the storyteller's role is to remind Jamaican women that the spirit of Nanny is lodged within them and that they should look internally for courage to fight oppression. It is for this reason that Nana Yah (meaning literally "Nanny is still here") was chosen as the title for the performance. Although Gilbert and Tompkins suggest that the role of the storyteller is to make "the past 'speak' to the present" (127), their discussion of Nana Yah does not explore the reasons why Nanny's story may have been seen as a powerful political statement by Jamaican audiences in 1980. From the outset, the storyteller states that Nanny is unable to rest in peace because her people are suffering from the effects of political gang warfare and IMF austerity measures. The reason for holding the wake is to allow Nanny to use her story to motivate Jamaicans to take action against neo-colonial oppression. The storyteller urges the audience to think back to a time before the existence of "two party, foreign exchange, devaluation" so that they might draw strength from the determination of their ancestors to fight battles as fierce as Jamaica's then predicament. J. R. Pereira points out that instead of "glorying" in the militancy of the Maroons' past resistance to colonialism, Nana Yah figures -85- MaComere "the Maroon as director for the contemporary struggles in a revolutionary way" (25). Nanny's story is told using cultural forms such as storytelling, drumming, dancing, Afro-Jamaican religious ritual and symbolism, which have historically been utilized in covert forms of resistance to the colonial regime. Ford-Smith suggests that the storyteller's tales "convert what is overtly threatening to the powerful into covert images of resistance so that they can live on in times when overt struggles are impossible or build courage in moments when [they are]" (Lionheart Gal xv). The play takes its audience on an historical journey that begins in Africa on the eve of European intervention. The audience witnesses the kidnapping of Africans, their ordeal in crossing the Middle Passage, and the brutality they experienced on Jamaica's sugar plantations. Nana Yah is structured around a series of movements rather than scenes. After movements one and two in which the storyteller greets the audience and explains why Nanny's story must be retold, African gods are portrayed discussing a dream in which European ships threaten to destroy the unity of the continent. One of the characters, God Unchangeable, describes the dream as follows: I an I sight de boat dem Ah reach clear to I people shore An let out de white man pon de lan I an I sight de boat dem begin Fe swallow up de lan Fe swallow up de town Whichever part de boat dem go Dem leave some big empty hole Inna de ground An I an I see I people An fall in de hole dem An disappear... (There is a gasp of horror from all the Gods). (Program Notes 4). While Nana Yah is performed in Creole, in this movement the gods' conversation is characterized by their use of "Dread Talk" or Rasta talk. The use of Rasta is particularly significant for two reasons. First, the gods are figured from the Rastafarian religious worldview, thus pointing up the significance of the Jamaican protest movement in the psychological imagining of Africa as the "Motherland." Second, Rastafarianism, as Rex Nettleford points out, represents "one of Plantation America's most authentic expressions of organic revolt in appropriate, if anguished, response to some of the deep-set social forces that have shaped and still determine the dynamics of our Caribbean society" (187- 188). It is not by accident, then, that the gods in Nana Yah are portrayed -86- Invoking the Spirit of the Warrior Woman: Sistren's Nana Yah discussing evil social forces that could harm African people given the political context in which Nana Yah was produced. In Nana Yah, Sistren depicts the effects of global capitalism in its initial stages by comparing African cultures pre-imperial contact with their fragmentation in the postcolonial period. Further, the performers physicalize the commodification of African people in the machinery of slavery by portraying their transportation from Africa to the New World and the way in which they were exploited as cheap labour on the sugar plantations. At the end of movement three, an actress dressed in African costume places eggs in the Nyame Dua, a long pole with a three-forked twig on top in which offerings to the god Nyame are placed. Following on from this is a stylized dance sequence performed in a circle design which is symbolic of the unity of African society. The beauty of the Akan ritual is deliberately disrupted to mark the brutal upheaval endured by the captured Africans. The circle is broken by a triangular missile created by the bodies of four women with bamboo sticks and hanging cloths. The bamboo sticks double as weapons which are used to beat the Africans as they are forced onto the European ships. The character of Nanny (distinguished from the others by a simple headband) is among the group pushed onto the boats. A limbo dance is performed to a mournful tune to point up the rite of passage that the journey to the New World represented for those Africans enslaved. The transitional phase or Middle Passage is marked by each successful limbo under the stick. "Limbo," according to Wilson Harris, "reflects a certain kind of gateway or threshold to a new world and the dislocation of a chain of miles" (379). It can also be thought of as a metaphor for being "in-between" two cultures and as marking the sense of dislocation that ensues after being separated from one's home and culture. The performers then form a boat using the bamboo sticks to define its shape. One slave jumps overboard as the boat with its human cargo makes its way to Jamaica. By focusing on the experience of female slaves on the plantations, Nana Yah challenges the misrepresentation of female slave labor and the roles female slaves have played in resisting the colonizers. Ford-Smith points out that "[i]t is little emphasized [.. .] that the majority of slaves working in the field at the time of emancipation were women" or that their "dominance in field work gave the women the basis on which to wage a campaign of resistance to the demands of slave labour" ("Caribbean Women" 154-155). In movement five, the performers become a group of slaves working on the plantation. They enter the stage "singing and miming 'Go Down Emmanuel Road Gal An Bwoy' while they spread over the stage singing and performing the work action in unison" (Nana Yah 10). Sistren depicts the brutality of slavery through the personal testimonies of six female slaves who tell of their experiences on the plantation. Four of them assume the following characters: Loss of Name, Loss of Limb, Poison, and the Whip. Loss of Name describes the identity crisis she suffers after her African name, Cuyah, is replaced by the British name Sarah. She MaCombre suggests that the loss of her tribal language is like "a hebby padlock wha a bore thru me tongue an a hang hebby so till me cyan talk, me cyan seh wha inna me head, me cyan talk wha me really know, an is so dem tink me fool fool" (Program Notes 10). One of the other performers, as Abortion, tells of her love for a fellow slave who is transferred to another plantation after their relationship is discovered. Abortion, carrying her lover's child, attempts to visit him one night but is caught by the slave owners. They dig a hole for her belly "an dem deat [sic] me so till me nearly dead" (Program Notes 10). Abortion vows to kill her unborn baby if it is to be born into slavery, a method of resistance that was common among female slaves on the plantations. During each testimony, the other performers freeze and resume singing and miming their work actions as each monologue ends. The sounding of the Abeng, a horn that was used to pass messages over long distances, is used in the play to signal Nanny's escape from the plantation. As Gottlieb points out, the sounding of the Abeng was not only "a symbol of Maroon resistance" but also "a powerful metaphor for self-determination" (46). Given Jamaica's socio-political context in 1980, the sounding of the Abeng can be read allegorically as a call to free Jamaica from the clutches of IMF debt. Further, it is significant that Sistren depicts Nanny fleeing with another female slave for, as Ford-Smith points out, such resistance was "supported by a form of female organization" ("Carribbean Women" 154); such "female organization" is, perhaps, an early example of Alexander and Mohanty's "feminist democracy." In the performance, emphasis is placed on Nanny's fight against both sexism and colonialism. Upon arriving in Accompong, she is forced to participate in an initiation ceremony in which she has to fight one of the male Maroons; victory assures her leadership of the group. Sharpe claims that "[i]t is of some significance to a post-independence culture that Nanny is shown doing battle with Maroon men rather than their British enemies" (31). Nanny's first decision as Maroon leader is to move to a new campsite. The journey to Nanny Town is depicted via a choreographed sequence during which the performers walk, in a stylized manner, to the rhythm of the drums. White rum is sprinkled on the four corners of the land, after which Nanny kneels in front of the Nyame Dua and kisses it while the other performers chant throughout (Program Notes 18-19). Nanny Town became the base from which, according to historical accounts, Nanny launched her campaign against the British slave owners and their capitalist greed. In the final movement ofNana Yah, the storyteller pronounces Nanny a national heroine and encourages the audience to continue fighting the battles in which Nanny was engaged. The cast performs stylized movements to depict guerilla warfare; they mime and create the sound effects for the actions the storyteller describes. The storyteller points out that eventually the British soldiers destroyed Nanny Town but, despite its destruction, Nanny is still "we hero, fah she do wha plenty udda people never do, an me wan you fe know say, - 88- Invoking the Spirit of the Warrior Woman: Sistren's Nana Yah jus like how Nanny dwit, you can dwit too."9 At the end of the performance, a Maroon religious ritual is enacted in which eggs are placed in the Nyame Dua. As each egg is offered to the god, the actors take turns reciting the lines of the following poem by Sistren member Bev Hanson: Fe food fe put in we children belly Fe de end of poverty and hunger Fe peace and love between de Sistren and de brethren Fe get rid of de gunman and de violence Fe de young people dem learn fe discipline demself Fe we pickney dem get good education Fe we de people have pride in weself Fe we learn fe help and share wid each other Fe we de people take note of we heritage Fe Nanny stay wid we and guide we. The actors then kneel in a circle around the Nyame Dua and recite the following prayer: Tell dem, tell dem Dat we de children of Nana Yah Went to look fe food But wen we come back De basket was empty Tell dem, tell dem, Dat we de children of Nana Yah An de children of Nana Yah children beg them to fill the basket. Fi mek de river flow, and the land bear plenty food, Fi give the younger generation, the strength, and the courage Fi fight fi dem right (Nana Yah 22). Nana Yah is an example of what Baz Kershaw calls "radical performance"; that is, performance that "participates in the most vital cultural, social and political tensions of its time" (7). Sistren members were harassed in the lead-up to, and in the aftermath of, the 1980 political elections. Jean Small recalls that an attempt to stage Nana Yah in downtown Kingston in the months prior to the election resulted in drive-by shootings of some of the cast members' homes: I called a meeting and decided to shut down the show because I didn't think it was worth being shot over Nana Yah. In my mind it was not a subversive play. It simply gave black people -89- MaComere a stronger sense of history and continuity from our ancestors such as Nanny. The cast thought I was "soft" because according to them they were used to living with gunshots, but it was affecting my family ("Re: Nana Yah" 1999). Small's comments again point up the race and class differences between Jamaican women and their contrasting life experiences in different areas of Kingston. Her comments also allude to the relative safety of performing Nana Yah at Devon House which is in the heart of "uptown" Kingston. Although Small claims that Nana Yah is not "subversive," the politically charged meaning behind the poem cited above was not lost on the Seaga administration, which promptly banned the play when they assumed leadership of the country. Small recalls that a TV advertisement alerted the authorities to the "subversive" potential of Nana Yah: "I was called to provide a text of the play and I had to say that we had no text because we worked orally since Sistren was largely illiterate at that time" ("Re: Nana Yah" 1999). Nana Yah was considered subversive by the authorities because it offered an alternative to oppression; and argued against "making the best of a bad situation" ("Re: Nana Yah" 1999). Although it is not as theatrically sophisticated as Bellywoman Bangarang, Nana Yah is explicitly political and overtly "feminist." Sistren's decision to create a production based on Nanny's life story at this historical juncture was an attempt to place greater significance on women's contribution to the development of Jamaican society in light of the International Year for Women in 1975. It is not accidental that Nana Yah reflects the Manley government's political ethos, which encouraged creative expression using Jamaica's oral tradition, or that it supports that same government's decision to make Nanny Jamaica's national heroine.o1 The majority of the working class women in Sistren were members of the People's National Party, and some of the middle class members were members of the Workers' Party of Jamaica, which was by 1980 closely affiliated with the Manley government (Ring Ding 87). However, Sistren's intensified political orientation was not met with approval from all sectors of the artistic community as Jamaican theatre practitioner Keith Noel indicates: [T]his increased political commitment is not always good for art, and it had its drawbacks for Sistren [ .] There was a tendency to a kind of preaching, a kind of "communal focus" that clashed with their former approach that depended heavily on a "personal testimony" style of work. (qtd. in Wilson 44) -90- |