Reference: Gendering the Caribbean, Reading the Caribbean:

Approaches to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, ed., Klaus

Stierstorfer, Heidelberg University Press, 2005, pp.211-234.

Denise deCaires Narain (University of Sussex)

Gendering the Caribbean

O Adam
make me a poet please
and not no wo-man poet
let me be free
and gender-
less dear Ad

At this point I stopped Eaves-dropppingi

Most accounts of Caribbean writing designate its 'proper' beginnings

with a group of writers who started publishing in the fifties and
sixties while based, for the most part, in Britain. These writers V.S.
Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Derek
Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, to name a few - were all male. It wasn't
until the late 1980s that this gender balance began to shift and
Caribbean women writers started to be published more widely. It
would not be contentious to say that Caribbean women writers are
now more visible than their male counterparts. In what follows, I'll
explore the ways that the Caribbean has been conceptualized, both
implicitly and explicitly, as a gendered space and outline some of the
factors which might account for the shift away from the male-
dominated literary culture of the 1960s.
The historical context out of which Anglophone Caribbean
literature and culture was produced is one of conquest and
destruction. Columbus's so-called 'discovery' of the 'New World' was
rapidly followed by the decimation of the native peoples he found
there. As George Lamming puts it, "what we know about the modern
Caribbean is that it is an area of the world that began with an almost
unprecedented act of genocide."ii Decades of buccaneering and
piracy and the cavalier exchanging of 'ownership' of the islands were
eventually replaced by settlement and the establishment of
plantations on the islands (and on the mainland of South America).
The labour required for the plantations to be functional led to the
shipping of millions of slaves from Africa. When slavery was
abolished, Indians were shipped to the West Indies as indentured
labourers (small numbers of Chinese and even fewer numbers of
Portuguese were also deployed for a short time as indentured labour).
Even this most cursory outline of Caribbean history conveys the
sense of brutality and high-handed imperial machismo which created
the modern Caribbean. The legacy of this volatile history continues
to shape debates about literature and culture in the region in a range
of ways that have significant implications for the gendered
identity/identities of the region.
While the outline of the main trajectories in Caribbean history
sketched above are widely accepted, it is also the case that the precise
contours of this account are constantly being contested and revised
in response to questions and challenges generated by sociocultural
debates within the region and by ongoing research projects. The
intersecting vectors of 'gender' and 'race' continue to be crucial to
these revisions and these, in turn, impact upon the literary history of
the Caribbean. In other words, both the 'History' and 'Literary
History' of the region are unstable discourses, inflected by the
cultural agendas of the day and by the kinds of research such agendas
make possible. Thus, the brisk assertion at the start of this piece
listing several male writers as the originators of Caribbean Literature
must be read as provisional: a convenient starting point, rather than
a secure foundational moment.
J.Edward Chamberlin's book-length study of West Indian poetry
starts with a bald statement which conveys economically the most
important historical fact in any discussion of Caribbean literature:
"Slavery shaped the West Indies".iii But, until recently, historical
accounts of slavery assumed the male subject as normative, focusing
on the brutalising and emasculating impact of slavery on the African
man and eliding the specific experiences of women slaves. This
'male-centred' approach is perpetuated in some sociological and
anthropological texts which examine Caribbean culture from a
revisionist viewpoint. Peter Wilson's Crab Antics, for example,
published in 1973,iv suggests that the cultural spaces occupied by
men and women in the Caribbean are fairly rigidly demarcated with
men occupying the outside/public space, associated with reputation
and women occupying the inside/domestic space, associated with
respectability. Reputation and respectability represent different value
systems: the indigenous and internally generated on the one hand
('nativist'/male) and the colonially-inherited, externally driven on the
other ('imported'/female). Apart from the overly-neat dichotomizing
of inside and outside, Wilson's model posits resistance as an
exclusively male phenomenon. As Jean Besson argues:

In particular, I challenge Wilson's thesis that Afro-Caribbean women are

passive imitators of Eurocentric cultural values of respectability; that the
counter-culture of reputation is male-oriented; and that cultural resistance
to colonial culture is therefore confined to Afro-Caribbean males.v

Richard Burton's, Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the

Caribbean, published in 1997,vi while offering excellent discussions
of Afro-Caribbean cultural forms including religious practices,
cricket and carnival, largely follows Wilson's schema and, as a result,
elides the role of women in resisting colonial domination and
overstates the role of African-Caribbean men as exclusive agents of
resistance. This tendency is even more pronounced in Christian
Habekost's discussion of the dub poet in, Dub Poetry, published in
1986:

[] the poet on stage with flying dreadlocks, an angry expression on his

black face, murderously kicking into the air with his motorbike-boots just
as the police boots kicked him. [] Mutabaruka comes on stage half
naked, chains around his bare feet and when he lets the gunshot ring out,
his face distorted by pain, in 'Ev'rytime Aear de Soun'' then it gets under
the whitest of skins and is enough to 'blacken' the whitest soul. (Dub
Poetry, p.36)vii

The hyperbolic thrust of Habekost's admiration strikes a very uneasy

note, invoking an almost reverential treatment of black male anger
which collapses any critical distance between performer and
critic/audience, rendering the performance a spectacle of 'pure anger'
to be 'simply' consumed. The idea of spectacle and display and the
righteousness of male anger are features of some more recent
interpretations of contemporary popular cultural forms, particularly
in Jamaica, and I'll return to this later.
 Another strand in the revisionist work undertaken in Caribbean
studies has been done by scholars who have attended to the specific
ways in which slavery was experienced by women and how these
women also resisted their enslavement. Barbara Bush's Slave Women
in Caribbean Societies 1650-1838, for example, offered a sustained
discussion of the specific modes of resistance which slave women
made use of, from abortion and infanticide to poisoning the planters'
food and feigning illness.viii In poetry, Grace Nichols's collection, i is
a long memoried woman, provided one of the earliest and most
sustained literary representations of slave women's culture, offering
insights into infanticide, for example, in the poem 'Ala':

and call us out

to see .. the rebel woman

who with a pin

stick the soft mould
of her won child's head

sending the little-new-born

soul winging its way back
to Africa -- freeix

More recently, many sociologists and historians have charted the way
that plantation slavery distorted gender roles in the colonies and
postcolonies of the Caribbean. Christine Barrow argues:

In summary, the Caribbean social-gender system has been built on an

insecure and ambivalent foundation. Throughout slavery, colonialism
and even today, the system imposed an ideology of masculinity and
femininity while simultaneously refusing to build the socio-economic
structures required to support it in practice.x

While much of the early work on gendering Caribbean history has

been produced by feminist scholars within the general remit of
'women's studies', the emphasis has now shifted to a wider
understanding of the importance of gender as constitutive of both
male and female roles and, increasingly, there is a willingness to
interrogate constructions of Caribbean masculinities as well as
femininities. This is a welcome development, especially if it allows
for the possibility of moving beyond the romanticizing tendency of
some of the literature cited above with its subtext of 'men-in-crisis'.
This 'men-in-crisis' line of argument gained more credibility in the
wake of Caribbean feminism when arguments were made about
Caribbean women themselves contributing by their very visible
presence and successes to the further emasculation of 'the'
Caribbean man. Such arguments also tended to characterise
Caribbean feminism as another suspect imported ideology. It is worth
noting, too, that the contributions of Caribbean feminists succeeded
not only in drawing attention to women's experiences but also, in
unsettling orthodox views of Caribbean culture. Such interventions
called into question the exclusive focus on the African male subject
as the privileged focus of scholarly attention. Alongside this, the
increasing willingness to make the stories of Indian indentured
labourers an integral part of Caribbean history and culture,has begun
to transform understanding of what it means to be a Caribbean
subject. Gender is again crucial to this understanding.
It has been argued that slavery 'de-gendered' both male and female
slaves by violently rupturing family and kinship ties as well as
forcing men and women alike to do extremely demanding physical
work. Indian indentured labourers were treated differently for,
although the conditions in which they worked and were
accommodated were similar in many ways to those which prevailed
under slavery, they were permitted to retain many of their cultural
and religious practices. This ensured animosity between Africans and
Indians (the familiar 'divide-and-rule' strategy of colonialism) which
continue to inflect the political life of Guyana and Trinidad up to the
present.xi It is widely accepted that Indian men far outnumbered their
female counterparts, particularly in the early stages of indentureship.
This fact helped to consolidate the Indian woman as a 'scarce
commodity' in the patriarchal symbolic system of the plantation
where 'she' functioned to some extent as the prized proof of the
Indian's higher status than that of the African. Already demonised for
taking the black man's work on the plantations, 'the' Indian man was
further demonised as 'hotheaded' and quick to use the cutlass in
defence of 'his woman'. Later, as the economic wealth of some
Indians increased, Indian women's participation in public life was
often curtailed. Thus, when Forbes Burnham (President/dictator of
Guyana and leader of the (primarily African) Peoples national
Congress) introduced National Service in Guyana in the late 1960s,
some Indian families sent their daughters abroad to avoid any risk of
them being involved in 'contaminating' sexual relations with black
men. Olive Senior, in the title story of her collection, The Snake-
Woman and Other Stories, offers a snapshot of the distorted
perceptions of Indians which prevailed:
'These coolie-woman like nayga-man,' he was saying, 'for the coolie-man
is the wussest man in the whole world. If they have a wife and she just
say "kemps" he quick fe chop off her head. So plenty of the coolie-
woman fraid of the coolie-man and want the nayga-man working in the
cane to take them back to the hill with them so they can get far away from
the wicked coolie-man and furtherer away from the sea which they hate
like pisen for is the sea that carry them away from India.xii

Colonial history, then, resulted in highly racialised gender roles with

white women occupying the most privileged position. Hilary Beckles
cites Lucille Mair's succinct summary of this typology, "in Caribbean
slave societies the black woman produced, the brown woman served,
and the white woman consumed."xiii It is hardly surprising, given this
context, that it was 'race' rather than 'gender' that would drive literary
debates in the region, at least initially. But, while gender may not
have been explicitly on the cultural agenda, I would argue that it did
inform the contexts of production and reception of literary works and
it was implicit in definitions of what was considered a suitably anti-
colonial literary voice.
So, in West Indian Poetry, published in 1984, Lloyd Brown
dismisses West Indian poetry from 1760 1940 as "uneven at best,
and in some respects [are] downright unpromising"xiv because it
remains enslaved to English culture and tradition. Following on from
this period, the works that are recognised as articulating the
beginnings of a suitably resisting Caribbean voice are those which
deploy what I have called elsewhere a 'muscular morality'. xv Walter
M.Lawrence's poem 'Guiana', for example concludes, "For the cry
goes up from the deepest despair; God give us a chance to be men!"
while, more famously, Claude McKay's 'If We Must Die' represents
another example of the poet as a brave and heroic figure in the face
of oppression (in McKay's poem, the immediate context is that of a
violently segregated deep South of America):

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we'll fight the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!xvi
This emphasis follows on, quite 'naturally', from colonial discourses
in which discussions about slavery, emancipation and (eventually)
self-rule were all conducted in terms of what it was to be 'a man'.
Where women feature in this poetry at all, they are often represented
as the land, rather than as active agents defending 'the land'. If the
colonizers depicted the New World as virginal territory to be
penetrated and conquered, nationalists conflated the woman with the
land as the symbol of what was being fought for. The black woman
in these poems is often presented as 'natural' and grounded in the
earth, the symbol of everything that the white woman is not. When
women themselves wrote, they were generally perceived as writing
in an altogether different register, covering themes which were
peripheral to the task of challenging colonial culture. So, a figure like
Una Marson, publishing in the 1930s and 40s has only recently
received critical attention from feminist critics whose understanding
of 'resistance' is more expansive than that which obtained in Marson's
time or, indeed, Lloyd Brown's.xvii Marson's poem, 'Kinky Hair
Blues', for example, offers an altogether more playfully low-key
register of resistance than that evident in McKay's poem above:

I hate dat ironed hair

And dat bleaching skin.
Hate dat ironed hair
And dat bleaching skin.
But I'll be all alone
If I don't fall in.xviii

The speaker concludes that she will have to straighten her hair and
bleach her skin if she wants "some kind of man to win" and this
pragmatic complicity and playful dramatising of ambivalence is a
register which becomes increasingly unacceptable in the 1960s and
70s when the demand for an unequivocally challenging nationalist
voice is more urgently focused. The following extract from a well-
known poem by Bongo Jerry, 'Mabrak', is indicative of the robust
register required:

BLACK ELECTRIC STORM

IS HERE
How long you feel 'fair to fine'
(WHITE) would last?
 How long in darkness
when out of BLACK
come forth LIGHT?
MABRAK is righting the wrongs and brain-whitening...
Not just by washing out the straightening and wearing
dashiki t'ing:
MOSTOFTHESTRAIGHTENINGISINTHETONGUE -
so...
Save the YOUNG
from the language that MEN teach,
the doctrine Pope preach
skin bleach...
MAN must use MEN language
to carry dis message:

SILENCE BABEL TONGUES; recall and

recollect BLACK SPEECH.xix

The poem first appeared in a special edition of the West Indian

journal, Savacou in 1971, titled, New Writing, a collection of poems
which generated a heated debate, later characterised as 'Afro-Saxons
versus the Tribe Boys', about the relative value of African rather than
European cultural models. Laurence Breiner, in an unpublished paper
entitled, 'How To Behave On Paper': The Savacou Debate' gives a
good summary of the issues involved:

Above all, the Savacou debate was about what amounts to the decorum
of poetry - a matter of values, standards, the rules of the game [...] the
critical furore over the Savacou anthology was most particularly about
what should be printed, and about how a poem should look on paper.xx

This debate about the decorum of poetry clearly implies a robustly

masculine, black African aesthetic positioned in direct opposition to
a European aesthetic, and a politics initially determined to overturn
this binary, rather than to deconstruct it. That the region's two most
influential poets, Derek Walcott and Edward Kamau Brathwaite,
became associated with 'oppposite' poles in this dichotomy (the
former being perceived as more oriented to conventional European
poetic models and the latter associated with a 'folk-centred' poetics)
only consolidated this binary. Discussions of poetry have been so
intensely focused on the roles of Walcott and Brathwaite in the
formation of an appropriately authentic and muscular 'indigenous'
poetic identity that both poetry and the figure of the poet have tended
to be perceived as normatively male.
And both Walcott and Brathwaite, in different ways, do place the
male subject at the centre of their respective oeuvres. For example,
Walcott's castaway poems construct the figure of the shipwrecked
castaway as an Adamic name-giver who names (and claims) the 'New
World' while Another Life paints a picture of the artist as an
embattled young man. Shabine, in 'The Schooner flight' is a 'red
nigger' who defends his poetry from the sneers of his fellow seamen
robustly:

Had an exercise book,

this same one here, that I using to write
my poetry, so one day this man snatch it
from my hand, and start throwing it left and right
to the rest of the crew, bawling out, 'Catch it,'
and start mincing me like I was some hen
because of the poems.
[]
There wasn't much pain,
Just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend,
But none of them go fuck with my poetry again.xxi

Brathwaite's The Arrivants, focuses on the travels and travails of the

black man in the New World, whether it is the figure of 'Uncle Tom'
on the plantation, 'Brotherman-the-Rasataman' or, as in the extract
below, the 'poor harbourless spade':

I am a fuck-
in' negro,
man, hole
in my head,
brains in
my belly;
black skin
red eyes
broad back
big you know
what: not very quick

to take offence
but once
offended, watch
that house
 you livin' in
an' watch that lit-
le sister.xxii

In both poems the aggressive rhetoric used requires a male speaker

for the poem to work. That poetry was the genre in which the
challenge to 'English Literature' was most dramatically staged is
perhaps not surprising, given the elaborate conventions and complex
structures of the form and the desire of many Caribbean poets to
refute these 'effete' conventions. The emphasis on challenging the
conventional decorum of poetry became focused on the issue of voice
and on an authentically West Indian voice. This emphasis (evident
in both extracts above) required poets to look to a range of 'everyday'
folk traditions and to the vernacular Creole language for inspiration.
In the process, there was a tendency for women to be acknowledged
in their role as providers of 'the mother tongue' but it was the male
performance of Creole speech in public spaces that came to be
associated with a distinct form of cultural resistance.
In fiction, Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, published in
1956, xxiii was championed as an exemplary text because of its
sustained use of a stylised Creole for the narrative voice throughout,
rather than reserving Creole speech for dialogue, as was the norm.
The novel focuses on a group of West Indian men who have migrated
to London and who spend their time 'liming' round the city, looking
for work and hustling white women (variously referred to as 'pieces
of meat', 'ting', 'pussy' etc.). West Indian women make only fleeting
appearances as the novel charts the increasingly desperate ways that
the politically impotent 'boys' seek to assert their manhood and
consolidate their reputations via sexual conquest. Selvon's text, while
recycling images of (white) women which define them entirely in
terms of their sexuality, is primarily concerned with exposing the
futility and vulnerability of the West Indian men in a racist and
hostile London. Due to this focus, the casual and relentless sexism of
'the boys' did not really become an obstacle to readings of the text
until well into the 1980s. In other words, Selvon's construction of an
authentically West Indian voice, hailed as the major achievement of
The Lonely Londoners, rendered the sexual politics of the text
inaudible.
Another early text, V.S. Naipaul's Miguel Street, published in
1959, is similarly focused on 'what it means to be a man'. In these
linked short stories, Naipaul describes the way a young Trinidadian
boy navigates his way to manhood in a street where the men must
publicly display their 'maleness' by verbal or physical conquest of
other men or, more often, of women. Apart from one story, 'The
Maternal Instinct' (which describes a (stereotyped) black woman
who takes pride in the fact that her eight children are conceived by
eight different men), all the stories focus on male characters who
have a precarious existence in one way or another but whose stories
and repartee about their exploits help to bolster their reputation on
the street. The ritualised beating of women punctuates the text,
defining the worlds of men and women as rigidly separate. When
Bogartxxiv leaves his second wife, one of the narrator's friends asks
why and is told that he did so, "To be a man, among we men". xxv In
another story, the carpenter, Popo, tells the boy, "Women and them
like work. Man not make for work." (p.17) In these stories, Naipaul
describes, in typically sardonic manner, the gender relations that
prevail in the street and, despite the playfulness of his treatment, he
exposes the lack of ambition and vulnerability of the men. In the
process of this exposition of the Trinidadian man's precarious hold
on masculinity, the text also hints at a deep mistrust of women; a
mistrust which is prominent in many of Naipaul's other texts.
Bhakcu, in 'The Mechanical Genius', for example, is furious with his
wife for pressurising him to buy a lorry to generate more income,
because he then 'tinkers' with it and breaks it. Not only is the (Indian)
woman here presented as a 'money-grabber' but she is complicit with
her own mistreatment (she oils the cricket bat that her husband beats
her with) and, Naipaul's young narrator suggests, the 'tongue-lashing'
she gives her husband is worse than his physical abuse of her:

All the time he had the lorry, he hated his wife, and he beat her regularly
with the cricket bat. But she was beating him too, with her tongue, and I
think Bhakcu was really the loser in these quarrels (p.123).

Space permits me only to gesture towards the works of some of the

other writers mentioned at the start of this piece. George Lamming's
seminal text, In the Castle of My Skin, also follows the development
of a young boy growing up (in pre-independence Barbados) and
gradually apprehending the way that both 'race' and class unfairly
curtail his ambitions. Women/girls are present in the novel as
mothers and lovers but not as part of the group of boys whose
consciousness the narrative privileges. Towards the end of the novel,
as G prepares to leave the island for Trinidad, his mother makes him
a farewell supper of cou-cou (a favourite Bajan dish). The detailed,
loving description of her movements as she cooks consolidates her
in the role of revered and celebrated 'Mother', a role that is the most
conspicuous female role in early Caribbean texts. The exception to
this would be the novels of Wilson Harris in which realism is rejected
in favour of a more intuitive and suggestive discourse characterised
by fluidity, circularity and excess, characteristics often loosely
aligned with 'feminine principles'.xxvi
More recently-published male writers are generally more alert to
a wider range of possibilities than the rather limited definitions of
'woman' that characterise the earlier writing and which generally fit
into the familiar Madonna/whore dichotomy. David Dabydeen, in
Coolie Odyssey and Slave Song, frequently deploys what he
describes as 'the erotic energies of the colonial experience'. xxvii
Dabydeen configures this as a fraught encounter between the black
man (in Dabydeen's poetry 'black' encompasses both 'Indian' and
'African') and a Miranda figure who functions as the 'forbidden fruit'
or prized possession of the white man. So, in 'Slave Song', the
speaker fantasizes? boasts?:

Is so when yu dun dream she pink tit,

Totempole she puss,
Leff yu teetmark like a tattoo in she troat!xxviii

The violence of this image strikes an uneasy cord, however much the
violence can be rationalised as being integral to the poetics of the
persona of the poem. Clearly, Dabydeen is deliberately overdoing the
'savage' stereotype in a manouever which seeks to deconstruct it but
there is, perhaps, too much sheer delight and rhetorical swagger in
lines such as, 'Bu yu caan stap me cack dippin in de honeypot/
Drippin at de tip an happy as a hottentot!' (p.46) for this reader to be
convinced that it is offered 'in good faith'. Robert Antoni offers a
more successful exploration of the 'erotic energies of the colonial
experience' in his novel, Blessed is the Fruit, which alternates
between the first-person narratives of a white woman and a black
woman in what is an innovative rewriting of Jean Rhys' Wide
Sargasso Sea.xxix
 It is not really till the 1980s when Caribbean women writers start
to be published and read in significant numbers that gender is placed
firmly on the region's literary agenda and the limited definitions of
'woman' circulating in male-authored texts begin to be challenged.
The disillusionment which followed independence in most parts of
the Caribbean compromised the dominant anti-colonial trajectory of
Caribbean writing and this, coupled with the powerful influence of
African American women writers (Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison,
Alice Walker) and the global attention being paid to 'women's issues'
during the United Nations Decade for Women (1975-1985), provided
the impetus for a flurry of publications by Caribbean women. Pamela
Mordecai and Mervyn Morris edited the first anthology of Caribbean
women's poetry in 1980, Jamaica Woman.xxx The title recalls the
poem, 'Jamaica Oman', by Louise Bennett, a poet widely
acknowledged as one of the major literary forbears of Caribbean
writing. The poem opens:

Jamaica oman cunny, sah!

Is how dem jinnal so?
Look how long dem liberated
An de man dem never know!xxxi

The poem goes on to praise the clever ('jinnal') way in which

Jamaican women exercise their strength and power without arousing
suspicion in their men. The covert exercise of women's power which
the poem celebrates is indicative of the cautious attitude taken by the
editors of this collection in the short preface to the collection which
displays a somewhat ambiguous stance to feminism:

Because these poets are all women, one may be tempted to raise the issue
of whether they are 'poets who happen to be women', or something called
'woman poet'. But that is not the point. The poems are various. [] there
is nothing limp in the responses of the poets here, nor is there any
aggressive feminism in their work (p. xi).

The preface simultaneously acknowledges and denies the relevance

of gender to poetic output, a caginess that perhaps suggests a
suspicion about 'feminism' as an 'imported' ideology and a reluctance
to risk alienating a readership for whom a nationalist, rather than
feminist, agenda was paramount. However, a poem, such as Pamela
Mordecai's 'Protest Poem: for all the brothers', offers a sharp and
unapologetic critique of the politics associated with 'the brotherhood'.
The poem parodies the ideologically charged discourse of resistance
of the brothers by placing it in dialogue with the wry, straight-talking
of an 'ordinary Jamaican woman':

2. Blessed be the proletariat whom

we must mobilize
we must motivate
we must liberate
we must educate
to a new political awareness.

3. Is di ole chattle ting again: di same

slavery bizness, but dis time di boss
look more like we an im does be smarter.
Not a dam soul goin' mobilize my ass
to rass dem jokin. Any fool can read
Das Kapital: what is dat to de poor?xxxii

Jamaica Woman was an important publication, signalling both the

presence of several relatively unknown women poets and the need to
introduce gender to discussions about literature in the region. In the
decade or so that followed, writers such as Olive Senior, Erna
Brodber, Jamaica Kincaid, Grace Nichols, Merle Hodge, Michelle
Cliff, Zee Edgell, Velma Pollard, Janice Shinebourne, Beryl Gilroy,
Joan Riley (amongst others) published first novels or collections of
short stories. And poets such as Lorna Goodison, Dionne Brand,
Marlene Nourbese Philip, Olive Senior, Grace Nichols, Mahadai
Das, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Merle Collins, Valerie Bloom, Amryl
Johnson (amongst others) published collections of poetry. By the
early 1990s, with the publication of anthologies of Caribbean
women's fiction as well as collections of critical essays about this
writing and a range of international conferences focused on these
writers and texts, the category 'Caribbean women's writing', became
relatively well-known as a distinct field of scholarship.

The emphasis in much of this critical writing was on challenging the

male-centredness of Caribbean Literature and 'giving voice' to
women. In their jointly written introduction to the critical anthology,
Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, Carole Boyce
Davies and Elaine Savory Fido argue:
 the most urgent and central concern we must have in the sphere of
women's writing is to encourage writing. The first essential is to find all
the lost writers - those many, many women all over the region who have
poems in drawers and inside books, pieces of fiction unpublished and
confined to obscurity.xxxiii

This recuperative project is one shared by many other constituencies

of feminist scholars and activists in their various challenges to
complacently 'male' literary traditions. But, as with other
constituencies of women writers, the apparently straightforward task
of 'finding' and 'hearing' those female voices eclipsed in conventional
literary accounts proved more complicated than might have been
expected. So, while, the editors of Out of the Kumbla can point to the
distinctly female themes which Caribbean women write about
(motherhood, sexuality, subjectivity, anxieties about identity, the
relationship to nation and colonial history), distinguishing a shared
ideological position on women's oppression proved more difficult.
This difficulty is present in the preface to the collection in which
Savory Fido and Boyce Davies discuss the relative merits of the
terms 'feminism' and 'womanism'; the former favouring womanism,
with its emphasis on 'women's talk, customs, lore', as a 'softer, more
flexible option than feminism' while the latter opts for feminism as a
term with more political bite.xxxiv In Sylvia Wynter's 'Afterword', this
issue is complicated further in her argument for a 'demonic model of
cognition' outside the discourses of both patriarchy and feminism.xxxv
Evelyn O'Callaghan's Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches
to West Indian Fiction by Women, published in 1993, though more
unapologetically feminist in orientation, interrogates Caribbean
women's texts in the broader context of postcolonial discourse. In
doing so, O'Callaghan's work initiates an (ongoing) process of
contesting and broadening the parameters of the category, 'Caribbean
women's writing'. As O'Callaghan acknowledges at the start of her
book, the category is a recent and contested one:

When I first began to study West Indian fiction in the 1970s, I was
under the impression that there were no women writers from the region
apart from Jean Rhys, and there was some reservation about her.xxxvi

Doubts about Jean Rhys's place in West Indian literature revolve

around the fact that she was a white West Indian whose ancestry
included members of the plantocracy. Kamau Brathwaite states his
views on this matter bluntly:

White creoles in the English and French West Indies have separated
themselves by too wide a gulf, and have contributed too little culturally,
as a group, to give credence to the notion that they can, given the present
structure, meaningfully identify or be identified with the spiritual world
on this side of the Sargasso sea.xxxvii

The debate surrounding her place continues to resonate and has been
documented in numerous places.xxxviii But, for my purposes here, I
want to stress that, despite such reservations, Rhys is invariably cited
as a literary mother (along with the Jamaican poet and folklorist,
Louise Bennett) in most accounts of Caribbean women's writing and
several Caribbean women writers have emphasised the importance
of Rhys' work in their own development as writers. A brief extract
from Olive Senior's poem in memory of Jean Rhys, 'Meditation on
Red', conveys this sense of Rhys's writing as an enabling force for
contemporary Caribbean women writers:

Right now
I'm as divided
as you were
by that sea.

but I'll
be able to
find my way
home again

for that craft

you launched
is so seaworthy
tighter
than you'd ever been

dark voyagers
like me
can feel free
to sail.xxxix

O'Callaghan's study of Caribbean women's writing includes an early

chapter, 'Early versions: outsiders' voices/ silenced voices' in which
she discusses Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea but she also, more
importantly, looks at a range of other early white West Indian writers
(including Phyllis Allfrey) and argues that crucial insights into West
Indian women's culture can be gained from such writers.xl
In line with this, I would argue that the very polarised
representations of the white creole woman, Antoinette, and the black
woman, Christophine, in Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, while indicative
of Rhys' ambivalent and conflicted feelings about 'race' in the West
Indies of her generation,xli should not be replicated in debates about
contemporary Caribbean women's positions. In the novel,
Christophine is presented as strong and earthy with a formidable
presence and vocal power while Antoinette is presented as
vulnerable, uncertain of her place and tentative in her speech. Where
Christophine speaks forcefully, ("Woman must have spunks to live
in this world", she tells Antoinette),xlii Antoinette speaks in half
sentences, muttered asides and internal monologues. Rhys' white
(and white creole) women are all fragile drifting creatures whose lack
of agency has made them of questionable value to some feminist
critics. Christophine, on the other hand, uses forceful language to
challenge colonialist patriarchy in the figure of Antoinette's husband,
and may appear, therefore, to be a more positive model of female
agency.
This highly vocal, strong, black West Indian woman features
frequently in Louise Bennett's work in poems which articulate
powerfully the oppressions which the 'ordinary Jamaican woman'
faces and the fiesty way in which she survives and resists these
challenging circumstances. As a result, her work has been
consistently praised for being grounded firmly in a Jamaican context
and, in her exclusive use of Creole, her work is seen as redefining,
and indigenizing, the contours of 'the poetic'. Chamberlin, for
example, argues, that More than any other single writer, Louise
Bennett brought local language into the foreground of West Indian
cultural life.xliii Another critical text, published in 1993, the same year
as Woman Version, is Carolyn Cooper's Noises in the Blood: Orality,
Gender and the 'Vulgar' Body of Jamaican Popular Culture.xliv But,
unlike O'Callaghan's critical quest to broaden Caribbean discourse to
include an earlier group of white writers whose 'race' had tended to
preclude discussion of their work as part of a West Indian canon,
Cooper's project is firmly located in the contemporary moment and
is focused exclusively on African Jamaican popular culture.
 Louise Bennett's texts are a central part of Cooper's argument and
are described as, "the quintessential Jamaican example of the
sensitive and competent Caribbean artist consciously incorporating
features of traditional oral art into the written literature."(p.39) and,
as such, are disruptive subversions of patriarchal, scribal discourses.
In Cooper's account, the polyphonic, 'slack' oral text is set against the
tightly sealed and closed scribal text, "These vulgar products of illicit
procreation may be conceived in poor taste as perverse invasions
of the tightly-closed orifices of the Great Tradition." (p.9). The
connection is then established between woman and the oral:
"Transgressive Woman is Slackness personified, embodying the
porous openings in the oral text" (p.11), and 'slackness' is defined as
follows:

Slackness is not mere sexual looseness though it is certainly that.

Slackness is a metaphorical revolt against law and order; an undermining
of consensual standards of decency (p.141).

Despite the seductive slackness of Cooper's own discourse, the

conflation of 'slack woman' with the 'promiscuous oral text' results in
some problematic formulations. It hinges on a questionable binary
opposition between the oral and the scribal in which all oral texts are
essentially subversive and all scribal texts are inherently
conservative. As such, it elides the very conservative values evident
in a great many of Bennett's poems and ignores the complete absence
of any explicit assertion of female sexuality in Bennett's oeuvre. xlv
Further, the reliance on biologistic tropes indicated in the title itself,
Noises in the Blood, and in references to 'bloodline', 'heritage' and so
on, to describe the embodiment of Jamaican popular culture, does
suggest a problematically essentialist and exclusivist approach to
'national' culture.xlvi The kind of fancy footwork which Cooper has to
engage in to keep the 'slack woman'/'slack oral text' parallel in play
is under most pressure in the chapter on ragga culture, 'Slackness
hiding from culture: erotic play in the dancehall' in which the
infamously misogynistic and homophobic lyrics of ragga and its
accompanying body language are interpreted as evidence of black,
working-class masculinity in crisis:
Disempowered working-class men cannot be simply stigmatised and
dismissed as unqualified 'oppressors' of women. Their own oppression by
 gender-blind classism and notions of matriarchy itself motivates their
attempted oppression of women. [] a chain of disempowerment. The raw
sexism of some DJs can thus be seen as an expression of a diminished
masculinity seeking to assert itself at the most basic, and often the only level
where it is allowed free play (pp. 164-65).

Cooper does acknowledge that 'it is the sexuality of women, much

more so than that of men, which is both celebrated and devalued in
the culture of the dancehall' but she explains this double take on
female sexuality by arguing that the flamboyant way in which
women display their bodies in the dancehall is indicative of their
power:

The dancehall is the social space in which the smell of female power is
exuded in the extravagant display of flashy jewellery, expensive clothes,
elaborate hairstyles and rigidly attendant men that altogether represent
substantial wealth (p. 5).

I would argue, however, that the violent homophobia and

misogyny of ragga culture cannot be satisfactorily explained away
by invoking black working-class men's oppressed status. Neither can
the display of women's bodies in dancehall culture be read as simply
celebrating female sexuality. Cooper is right in saying that the
spectacular and famously revealing clothing worn by dancehall
women challenges colonially-inherited, middle-class definitions of
femininity, but this is not necessarily the primary audience for such
display. When this erotic display is read in the immediate arena of
the dance hall itself, it is much more difficult to interpret this display
of the female body as a display of female power. The documented
reality suggests that it is ragga men who control what women are
actually allowed to do with their bodies. The display by ragga queens
of sexual power dramatized in the dance hall remains, precisely, a
display of power for as long as men control the spaces and
circumstances in which that power can be acted out.
In providing sustained critical attention to popular cultural forms,
Cooper's pioneering work marks an important intervention in
discussions about Caribbean culture. However, in generating a
plethora of articles which discuss dance hall and ragga culture, and
other popular cultural forms in which men are the dominant agents,
her work risks skewing Caribbean discourse back to the 'men-in-
crisis' paradigm of an earlier critical moment.xlvii It also implies a turn
away from the literary which I believe to be counterproductive. By
way of contesting this, and indicating what may be lost in such
arguments I would prefer that the literary possibilities suggested in
the work of both Louise Bennett and Jean Rhys be kept in play. In
other words, while the robust certainties and vocal power of Bennett's
women personas provide inspirational models of resistance, the
anxious and uncertain register of Rhys' work may also enable other
literary possibilities which both affirms the power of literary
discourse itself and allows for an understanding of Caribbean literary
work which shifts the focus away from an exclusive emphasis on a
model of 'resistance' defined in terms of a rather static and
(heterosexual)male-centred understanding of 'the' anti-colonial
project.
But, in addition to refusing the pressure to choose between the
cultures represented by Louise Bennett and Jean Rhys, it is also
important to register the women's cultures which remain invisible
and inaudible as a result of these problematically opposed 'literary
mothers'. These would include the specific cultures of those
underrepresented ethnicities of the region: Amerindian, Indian,
Chinese, Portuguese, Lebanese and so on. As Brinda Mehta argues
in her recent study of Indian women writers:

The ideological fixity of blackness has been most evident in the field
of Caribbean feminism, which remained Afrocentric in its articulation
and preoccupations until the mid-1980s. With some exceptions, the
dominant framework of reference for feminist issues until that time
continued to emphasize the experiences of black women.xlviii

A more progressive definition of Caribbean women's writing would

also include lesbian women's writing and culture which, until
recently, has tended to be elided in the constituency, 'Caribbean
women writers'. Dionne Brand, for example, in her essay, 'This Body
For Itself', argues that Caribbean women have focused so exclusively
on the black maternal body that the sexual body, including the
lesbian sexual body, is absent.xlix
In this regard, the work of several writers published in the last ten
or so years have suggested more diverse and accommodating
trajectories for Caribbean culture and writing than have so far
prevailed. Several of these writers have explored the limitations of
heterosexual definitions of gender roles; Shani Mootoo's, Cereus
Blooms at Night,l for example, suggests that gender roles are socially
constructed, and can, therefore, be deconstructed and reconstructed
in creative and enabling ways. Other texts have focused on the impact
of the AIDS crisis on Caribbean subjects at home and in the diaspora;
for example, Patricia Powell's, A Small Gathering of Bones, Jamaica
Kincaid's memoir, My Brother, and Ramabai Espinet's, The Swinging
Bridge, amongst others.li There is also a growing body of critical
commentary supporting this writing,lii while other critics are
extending the parameters of the discourse on male sexuality in
provocative ways.liii I would also suggest that it may now be timely to
revisit familiar texts within the Caribbean literary canon, by male and
female writers, so that orthodox perspectives on the 'making' of
Caribbean subjects can be revised and the normatively male focus of
earlier commentary can be more thoroughly challenged. In the
process, more flexible and enabling gender roles may be identified
and a critical discourse may be generated which is as at ease with the
fluid constructions of masculinities and femininities as some of the
recent prose and poetry by Caribbean writers.

Notes

1 Velma Pollard, 'Version': Considering Woman, London, The Womans

Press, 1989, no page reference.
2 George Lamming: "Concepts of the Caribbean", Frank Birbalsingh (Ed.),
Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English, London, 1996, 2.
3 T.E.Chamberlin: Come Back to Me My Language, 1.
4 Peter Wilson: Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-Speaking
Negro Societies in the Caribbean, New Haven, 1973.
5 Jean Besson: "Reputation and Respectability Reconsidered: A New
Perspective on Afro-Caribbean Women". In Janet H. Momsen (Ed.):
Women and Change in the Caribbean, London, 1992, 30.
6 Richard D.E. Burton: Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the
Caribbean, New York, 1997.
7 Christian Habekost: Dub Poetry: 19 Poets From England and Jamaica,
Neustadt, 1986.
8 Barbara Bush: Slave Women in Caribbean Societies 1650 1838,
Bloomington, 1990.
9 Grace Nichols: i is a long memoried woman, London, 1983, 23.
10 Christine Barrow (Ed.): Caribbean Portraits: Essays on Gender Ideologies
and Identities, Kingston, Jamaica, 1998, xvii.
11 By far the largest numbers of indentured labourers were taken to Guyana and
Trinidad.
12 Olive Senior: The Snake-Woman and Other Stories, London, 1989, 3.
13 Hilary Beckles: "Sex and Gender in the Historiography of Caribbean
Slavery". In V. Shepherd, B. Brereton & B. Bailey (Eds.): Engendering
History, Kingston & London, 1995, 127.
14 Lloyd Borwn: West Indian Poetry, 1.
15 Denise deCaires Narain: Caribbean Womens Poetry: Making Style, London,
2002, 5.
16 Claude McKay: "If We Must Die". In Paula Burnett (Ed.): The Penguin
Book of Caribbean Verse in English, London, 1986, 144.
17 See Alison Donnell: "Sentimental Subversion: The Poetry and Politics of
Devotion in the Work of Una Marson", V. Bertram: Kicking Daffodils:
Twentieth-Century Women Poets, Edinburgh, 1997, 113-124; and Denise
deCaires Narain, op. cit., Chapter 1.
18 Paula Burnett (Ed.): The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English,
London, 1986, 158.
19 Bongo Jerry: "Mabrak" reprinted in P. Burnett, op. cit., 70.
20 Laurence Breiner: "How to Behave on Paper: The Savacou Debate". In
Journal of West Indian Literature 6, 1, 1993, 1-10.
21 Derek Walcott: "The Schooner Flight" in Collected Poems 1948 1984, New
York, 1986, 345-361.
22 Edward Kamau Brathwaite: The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, London,
1978 [1967], 30.
23 Sam Selvon: The Lonely Londoners, London, 1956.
24 Most of the men in the street have nicknames which signal their aspirations
to transcend their 'real' identities and become 'heroes'.
25 V.S.Naipaul: Miguel Street, London, 1971, 14.
26 Wilson Harris's essay, "The Womb of Space" explicitly develops ideas
related to 'the feminine principle'.
27 Paula Burnett: The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, London,
1986, 430.
28 David Dabydeen: "Slave Song". In D. D.: Turner: New and Selected
Poems, London, 1994 [originally published in Slave Song, 1984], 46.
29 Robert Antoni: Blessed is the Fruit, London, 1998.
30 Pamela Mordecai & Mervyn Morris (Eds.): Jamaica Woman: An Anthology
of Poems, London, 1980.
31 Louise Bennett: Selected Poems. In Mervyn Morris (Ed.), Kingston,
Jamaica, 1982, 23.
32 Mordecai & Morris, 1980, op. Cit., 101.
33 Carole Boyce Davies & Elaine Savory Fido (Eds.): Out of the Kumbla:
Caribbean Women and Literature, New Jersey, 1990, 17.
34 Ibid., "Talking It Over: Womanism, Writing and Feminism" (ix-xx).
35 "'Beyond Mirandas Meanings': Un/silencing the 'Demonic Ground' of
Calibans 'Woman'". In ibid. 355-372. Sylvia Wynter is well-known as a
cultural commentator but she is also one of the few women to have published
a novel in the 1960s: The Hills of Hebron, New York, 1962.
36 Evelyn OCallaghan: Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West
Indian Fiction by Women, London, 1993, 1.
37 E.K. Brathwaite: Contradictory Omens, Mona, Kingston, 1974, 38.
38 For a succinct overview of these debates by Peter Hulme, followed by E.K.
Brathwaites response, and a further commentary by Elaine Savory Fido,
Evelyn OCallaghan and Denise deCaires Narain, see Wasafiri, 20, Autumn,
1994, 5-11; Wasafiri, 21, Spring 1995, 69-78; Wasafiri, 28, Autumn, 1998,
33-38.
39 Olive Senior: Gardening in the Tropics, Toronto, 1994, 51-2.
40 See E. OCallaghan: A Hot Place, Belonging to Us, London, 2004 for a book-
length discussion of the work of early white West Indian womens writing.
41 See Veronica Greggs excellent study of Rhys: Jean Rhyss Historical
Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole, Chapel Hill and London,
1995.
42 Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea, Harmondsworth, 1968 [1966], 84.
43 J. Edward Chamberlin: Come Back To Me My Language, Toronto, 1993, 95.
44 Carolyn Cooper: Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the 'Vulgar' Body
of Jamaican Popular Culture, London, 1993.
45 See Louise Bennett: Jamaica Labrish: Jamaica Dialect Poems. In Rex
Nettleford (Ed.), Kingston, 1966 and Mervyn Morris (Ed.): Selected Poems,
Kingston, 1982.
46 To be fair, Cooper does acknowledge this issue of essentialism, op.cit., 4: The
emotive trope of blood and bone connotes what may be constructed as 'racist'
assumptions about biologically-determined culture, if the label is applied by the
alienating Other. Assumed by the in-group, this figure of speech denotes a
genealogy of ideas, a blood-line of beliefs and practices that are transmitted in
the body, in oral discourse. However, invoking notions of an in-group which
revolves around a blood-line does appear to fix the boundaries of the in-
group in relation to a black, nationalist Jamaican identification; a paradigm
which is limited in both sociopolitical and aesthetic terms, given the diverse
ethnicities encompassed in the region.
47 See several contributions to a 'Special Topic on Jamaican popular Culture'.
In Carolyn Cooper & Alison Donnell (Eds.): Interventions 16, 1, 2004 and
the special issue on 'Genders and Sexualities'. In Faith Smith(Ed.): Small
Axe, 7, March 2000 for further discussions.
48 Brinda Mehta: Diasporic (Dis)Locations: Inoi-Caribbean Women Writers
Negotiate the Kala Pani, Kingston, 2005, 13.
49 Dionne Brand: Bread Out Of Stone: Recollections, Sex, Recognitions, Race,
Dreaming Politics, Toronto, 1994, 9-49.
50 Shani Mootoo: Cereus Blooms at Night, London, 1999.
li
Patricia Powell: A Small Gathering of Bones, Oxford, 1994; Jamaica Kincaid:
My Brother, New York, 1997; Ramabai Espinet: The Swinging Bridge,
Toronto, 2003.
51 See also: the issues of Interventions and Small Axe, cited above; see also,
Evelyn OCallaghan's 'Heterosexuality and Sexual/Textual Alternatives',
294-319. In C. Barrow (Ed.): Caribbean Portraits: Essays on Gender
Ideologies and Identities, op.cit. and Alison Donnell: Twentieth-Century
Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary
HistoryLondon, 2005, pp. 181-249.
52 See for example, "Jahaji Bhai: Notes on the Masculine Subject and
Homoerotic Subtext of Indo-Caribbean Identity". In Small Axe, 7, March
2000, 77-92, and Wesley Crichlow: Buller Men & Batty Bwoys: Between the
Caribbean and Canada, amongst others.