New World Studies

Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution

Laurie R. Lambert

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813944272
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement under Maurice Bishop overthrew the government of the Caribbean island country of Grenada, establishing the People's Revolutionary Government. The United States under President Reagan infamously invaded Grenada in 1983, staying until the New National Party won election, effectively dealing a death blow to socialism in Grenada.

With Comrade Sister, Laurie Lambert offers the first comprehensive study of how gender and sexuality produced differe nt narratives of the Grenada Revolution. Reimagining this period with women at its center, Laurie Lambert shows how the revolution must be recognized for its both productive and corrosive tendencies. Lambert argues that the literature of the Grenada Revolution exposes how the more harmful aspects of revolution are visited on, and are therefore more apparent to, women. Calling attention to the mark of black feminism on the literary output of Caribbean writers of this period, Lambert addresses the gap between women's active participation in Caribbean revolution versus the lack of recognition they continue to receive.

1. Generational Ties, Revolutionary Binds

Family as Archive in the Writing of Merle Collins

IN A scene from Merle Collins’s Angel, first published in 1987 (a revised edition was published in 2011), a group of Grenadians are engaged in a parish council meeting, a participatory democracy style of governance promoted by the New Jewel Movement (NJM) whereby government officers were directly responsible to the people within their districts. At this political gathering, however, before a word is spoken about the construction of new roads or access to running water, the meeting chair announces a skit by a women’s group and the reading of two poems by members of the community. A woman by the name of Sister Miona Spencer comes to the stage. Collins describes her as middle-aged, dressed in the red and black colors of the revolution, and as a participant in a literacy program, where she has been learning to read.1 Sister Miona is a rural woman who exhibits a natural affinity for politics. She recites a poem about the 1951 protests led by Leader, and how these events served as a precursor to the 1979 movement led by the Horizon political party. Collins uses the pseudonym “Leader” for Grenada’s first prime minister, Eric Gairy, and “Chief” for Maurice Bishop, Grenada’s second prime minister and revolutionary leader. “Horizon” is the fictionalization she chooses for the NJM, Bishop’s political party. Using rhetoric to move the crowd with the ease of a seasoned politician, Sister Miona begins with a description of Leader’s 1951 efforts, alludes to his downfall, and then describes the rise of Horizon and the changes they have brought to her life and the nation as a whole:

Ay! Well we try it in ’51!

We say come Pa come

Ting bad for so

Take up we burden

We go help you go!2

In Collins’s description of the scene, cheers from the crowd punctuate Sister Miona’s performance. Sister Miona’s praise poem for the revolution encapsulates a brief history of Leader’s radical political movement in the 1950s, when he fought for universal adult suffrage for Grenadians and increased wages for rural laborers. Initially the rural masses supported Leader and he championed their cause. When he dropped their “burden” in order to fatten his own purse, however, they “cant im over.” This “canting over” of Leader clears the way for Horizon to seize power and bring opportunities such as free education to Grenadians across generations, including Sister Miona and her grandchildren. The poem establishes a local genealogy for the Grenada Revolution as a radical process that follows, and in some ways grows out of, Leader’s previous politics. Sister Miona legitimizes the revolution through her description of the ousting of Leader as a collective endeavor. “We cant im over,” she insists.

What is critical in Miona’s narration is her attention to the trajectory of radicalism and political leadership in Grenada, from Leader’s attempt to lead the people in the anticolonial struggle to the ascent of Horizon in the public sphere and Leader’s eventual descent:

De Horizon come up

Pa star go down!

An we watchin de Horizon

Like is really a dream

Sister Miona’s status as an elder allows her to hold this double vision of radicalism in Grenada. She has been a participant in both movements and can therefore offer an account of them both. Her poem thus functions as an oral history while at the same time offering her audience some philosophical insight into the shape of Grenada’s radical histories. In this poem and in the novel more broadly, Leader’s radical movement of the 1950s makes the Grenada Revolution itself legible.

I begin with a reading of this poem embedded in the novel because it is exemplary of the structure of Angel and Collins’s second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, which came out in 1995. In both novels Collins conceptualizes the Grenada Revolution as in a long genealogy of conflict and radical politics. I read Angel for its fictionalized representation of the 1979 NJM-led revolution as a response to and a legacy of the 1950s anticolonial struggles, led by Eric Gairy; and The Colour of Forgetting for its staging of centuries of conflict from the earliest encounters between the Caribs, the early indigenous island inhabitants, and the French colonizers in the seventeenth century to the revolution in the 1970s. I link the themes of radicalism and repetition by arguing that Collins’s novels trace cycles of radicalism in Grenada between the multiple political eras. By narrating the revolution as part of a genealogy in her poem, Sister Miona naturalizes the work of Horizon in a Grenadian political history spanning nearly three decades. Collins does similar work in Angel and Colour, where she represents revolution as a cyclical construct, emphasizing the Grenada Revolution as part of multigenerational efforts to thwart empire. In both novels Collins’s linking of different periods of radicalism is an effort to work out the patterns of colonial resistance in Grenada and the instances of violent trauma that these patterns produce. By the end of each work she arrives at a vision for revising revolution that moves beyond the sense of tragedy that characterizes the final days of October 1983.

Collins refuses to narrate revolution as romance, tragedy, or epic—all genres relying on tropes of masculine heroics that her work rejects.3 Instead her writing is a disarticulation of these genres as she imagines revolution as a complex series of multigenerational experiences among women, the working class, and the peasantry. Alongside the emphasis on multigenerational struggle, her novels and the poetry of the 2003 Lady in a Boat explore the impact of women in particular in predicting and trying to guard against the repetition of tragic errors in anticolonial efforts. When their perspectives are sidelined, women are left to reconcile the aftermath of revolutionary struggle by finding ways of healing and moving on. I read Collins’s oeuvre on Grenada as comprising feminist, decolonizing texts that disrupt imperialist epistemologies of linear history and time. Her work functions as an alternative archive, expanding the temporal contexts of the revolution and narrating Grenada’s radical history from the points of view of figures that often fall out of conventional archives, which focus on institutions and the powerful men who run them. Her novels set up the problem of thinking revolution and revolt in cyclical time, and her poetry works through ways of reconciling the trauma and shame that accumulate over several generations of political violence. Reading this literature as a historical source, it is possible to see how Collins presents different voices working through colonialism and radicalism, using ancestral knowledge to address the violence and trauma produced by these processes.

The Doubling of Radical Politics and Violence

Collins wrote her first novel, Angel, while she was conducting research in British colonial archives for her dissertation on Caribbean governments.4 The novel details Angel’s upbringing in rural Grenada, her undergraduate years at the University of the West Indies (UWI), and her return to Grenada as a young teacher. During this time we see the rise and fall of Chief and the building of the Horizon political party with the support of younger Grenadians such as Angel and her brothers. Though much of the novel is dedicated to narrating Angel’s coming of age contemporaneously with that of the nation, the novel cannot be accurately described as a Bildungsroman because Collins begins with the perspective of Doodsie, Angel’s mother. The prominence of Doodsie’s voice signals Collins’s investment in a multigenerational story. We see Doodsie’s own social and political views influencing those of Angel. This idea is echoed in the novel’s representation of the similarities between the politics of 1950s colonial Grenada and those of 1970s postcolonial Grenada. Here Collins pushes the beginning of the Grenada Revolution beyond the neat historical time point of March 13, 1979, and into the longer temporal frame of radicalism on the island. In Omens of Adversity, the anthropologist David Scott discusses the representation of cycles and generational time in Collins’s work on the Grenada Revolution. Analyzing the “allegorical economy” of Colour, Scott writes: “The collapse of the Grenada Revolution is conceived not as the catastrophic end of a teleological history of continuous progress but, rather, as merely one significant episode in a larger story of generations of conflict in what is now imagined and represented as the cyclical pattern of a general history whose generative logic is catastrophic.”5 The cyclical pattern that Scott identifies in Colour is also present in Angel, even though I do not read the generative logic of the histories in Angel as catastrophic but rather think of Collins’s work as focused on the constant need for political struggle and thoughtful dialogue with history. Both novels use the conceit of the familial generation as the primary measure of time while highlighting relationships between characters of different generations in order to narrate local history. For the reader who expects Angel to be about the revolution, the novel begins with what feels like a prequel. To see Chief, we must also see Leader, and to understand Angel, we must also understand her mother, Doodsie. Revolutionary time in Angel is cyclical. It is a temporal double consciousness that evokes a radical past in order to assert a radical present. In these assertions, however, the voices of women characters often serve to interrupt the cyclical movement by articulating a dis-ease with the present political choices. By articulating their dis-ease, they open up the possibility of imagining other ways forward.

In the novel’s opening scene, rural workers watch a local estate burn to the ground.6 The year is 1951, a period in Grenadian history known as “Sky Red.” During that time Eric Gairy, then a union leader and activist, began organizing Grenadian estate workers to demand better wages and improved working conditions. Large segments of Grenada’s rural working-class population joined him in strikes and protests before the Grenadian legislature. The protests also involved more clandestine action, such as arson and methods of resistance that can be traced to slavery.7 In the novel, the opening scene is populated by workers and their families, including Doodsie, and Angel, who is a toddler at the time. Before children like Angel are able to truly process what they are seeing, they are already witnesses to the anticolonial struggle that defines the experiences of their parents. These events will have an impact on their own anti-imperialist struggles in the future. Whether the reader knows, if only vaguely, what is to come, or even has no previous knowledge of Grenada’s history, by the end of the novel Collins forces us to hold two moments of political rupture simultaneously, Leader’s era overlapping with Chief’s, Doodsie’s political experiences overlapping with Angel’s, as two generations experience radical movements that mirror each other.

By presenting a dual view of history, Collins sets up readers to understand that the end of the Grenada Revolution was not the first instance of the intermingling of radical politics and violence in Grenada. The challenge for Collins, and for readers, is to acknowledge that the benefits of resistance tend to be coupled with elements that are violent and potentially traumatic, even for the beneficiaries of that resistance. Doodsie’s mother, Ma Ettie, serves as a reminder of this during this opening scene. Ma Ettie observes Doodsie and Angel that evening, noticing the “strange mixture of fear and acceptance” on Doodsie’s face as the estate house burns to the ground. She then utters a prayer as she, Doodsie, and Angel—three generations—enter their home for the night. “Let not our enemies triumph over these your children, Lord. Take a thought to the life and salvation of the little children in that burning house, Lord, and to all your children of this world.” Collins is careful not to represent this moment of resistance as one of uncomplicated victory for the workers. As the estate house burns, Ma Ettie’s prayer is motivated by concern, mirroring the look on Doodsie’s face. The precise enemies and tribulations from which she seeks protection are not named, but it is clear that she has reason to be frightened of both the prevailing colonial elite and those from within the collective of workers resisting that elite, who decided to set the fire. Ma Ettie and Doodsie are concerned about not being able to make ends meet because of the meager wages their family earns, but they are also troubled by what the burning of the estate house portends. The disregard for life is at the front of Ma Ettie’s mind. The children in her prayer are both her fellow workers—children in God’s eyes—and the young offspring of the estate owners, children who were likely Ma Ettie’s charges when she worked as a housekeeper on the estate. She is disturbed by the violence of political resistance. Other workers depicted in this opening scene appear ambivalent about the burning of the estate house as a mode of resistance. Their silence and apparent discomfort around the fire betray certain misgivings about what implications this anticolonial resistance might have for their society and their concerns about violence.

Another important intergenerational scene of violence and witnessing takes place much later in the novel. The time is October 1983, and the government that led the Grenada Revolution is on the verge of collapse. Reflecting historical events from 1983, the novel depicts the prime minister, Chief, being freed from house arrest by a crowd of spectators, including schoolchildren. At odds with Horizon, his own party, Chief finds he still has the support of the general public. After freeing Chief, a group of civilians carries him to the military installation on a nearby fort. Before long, however, several army tanks approach the fort, and a gunfight ensues between Chief’s supporters and the soldiers on the tanks, who support Horizon’s Central Committee. The civilians caught up in the chaos are stunned: “The people hadn’t moved until the very end. They knew for sure that the soldiers wouldn’t shoot them. Until the shots came, . . . On the road below, people rushed by, screaming, hurtling along the road, bending forward, glancing back, mouths parted, eyes wide in faces frozen into silent masks of unbelieving terror.”8 The faces frozen into silent masks represent voices that are violated during this moment of political violence. Most people were in disbelief that the soldiers would turn their weapons against the people. Those witnessing it include schoolchildren, the leaders of the revolution, and the older generation, who would have remembered scenes of violence from the 1950s under Leader.

I juxtapose the 1951 estate burning and the 1983 massacre at the fort to highlight the dialogue Collins sets up in Angel among multiple generations experiencing radical violence. Collins represents violence in all its complexity in these scenes. It is a tool used in anticolonial resistance, but it is also available to the political and military leadership to discipline and control the general population. A feeling of discomfort undergirds the estate-burning scene: the people witnessing the burning of the buildings are torn between their desire to be free of the oppression that the estate (ostensibly a modern-day plantocracy) represents and a troubling sense that the destruction of those buildings will not produce their freedom.

I am interested in how Collins represents the history of violence that accompanies Grenada’s history of radicalism. In the estate scene the people in the crowd know they must accept this violence to gain certain freedoms and make progress in their efforts to shape a more just society, but they still find it distressing. Their concern is borne out in the legacies of 1951. When Gairy first came to power in the 1950s he was a beacon of racial progress, a dark-skinned Grenadian from humble roots with no connection to the entrenched planter class. As he rose to greater power throughout the 1960s and 1970s, however, he oversaw legal and extralegal forms of state violence, including the use of the police force and the secret force known as the Mongoose Gang to terrorize his opponents. This is exactly how Collins represents the character Leader in Angel. He begins as a union ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: (En)Gendering Revolution
• 1. Generational Ties, Revolutionary Binds: Family as Archive in the Writing of Merle Collins
• 2. After the Invasion: Masculine Authority and the Anxiety of Revolution
• 3. “Comrade, Sister, Lover”: Dionne Brand and the Limits of Radical Movements
• 4. Legacies of Mercy: Neoliberalism and the Disavowal of Revolution
• Conclusion: In Search of Our Mothers’ Revolutions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index