Practices of Resistance in the Caribbean

Narratives, Aesthetics and Politics

Wiebke Beushausen, Miriam Brandel, Joseph Farquharson, Marius Littschwager, Annika McPherson, Julia Roth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351838771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

The Caribbean has played a crucial geopolitical role in the Western pursuit of economic dominance, yet Eurocentric research usually treats the Caribbean as a peripheral region, consequently labelling the inhabitants as beings without agency.

Examining asymmetrical relations of power in the Greater Caribbean in historical and contemporary perspectives, this volume explores the region's history of resistance and subversion of oppressive structures against the backdrop of the Caribbean's central role for the accumulation of wealth of European and North American actors and the respective dialectics of modernity/coloniality, through a variety of experiences inducing migration, transnational exchange and transculturation. Contributors approach the Caribbean as an empowered space of opposition and agency and focus on perspectives of the region as a place of entanglements with a long history of political and cultural practices of resistance to colonization, inequality, heteronomy, purity, invisibilization, and exploitation.

An important contribution to the literature on agency and resistance in the Caribbean, this volume offers a new perspective on the region as a geopolitically, economically and culturally crucial space, and it will interest researchers in the fields of Caribbean politics, literature and heritage, colonialism, entangled histories, global studies perspectives, ethnicity, gender, and migration.

Part I
Narratives of/as resistance

Languages, poetics, and politics in Caribbean literatures

1
Using folklore to challenge contemporary social norms

Papa Bois, Mama D’Lo, and environmentalism in Caribbean literature

Giselle Liza Anatol

In The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora (2015), I explore various incarnations of the skin-shedding, blood-drinking female folk figure known in the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean as the ‘soucouyant,’ ‘loogaroo,’ ‘volant,’ and ‘Old Higue.’ Whereas she is considered demonic in most traditional folktales, I investigate the ways writers of the past thirty years tend to use her as a figure of resistance and female empowerment, especially by representing her penetrations of the skin or other, more literal, sexual acts to resist confining norms of middle-class ‘respectability.’ This essay continues that work of examining how contemporary authors incorporate folklore into their fiction for purposes beyond independence-era calls for Caribbean-centric (typically anti-European) culture. I consider as my primary text the children’s novel The Protector’s Pledge (2015) by Danielle McClean, which mentions the soucouyant, but primarily employs the folk figures of Papa Bois and Mama D’Lo to promote a strong environmental message. However, despite the author’s attempts to simultaneously equalize gender relations and broaden women’s roles in today’s society, she ends up presenting characters that conform to traditional standards of gendered behavior. In other words, her novel initially seems to be a model of resistance as it contests both the hubris of human beings when it comes to the non-human natural environment and an ideology that posits women as physically, socially, and intellectually inferior to men. However, a closer inspection reveals that this spirit of resistance falls away at several key points in the narrative—particularly when it seems to depict a hierarchical relationship between Papa Bois and Mama D’Lo.

According to conventional accounts, Papa Bois (pronounced ‘bwah’)—‘Father of the Woods’—and Mama D’Lo (also spelled ‘l’eau’)—‘Mother of the Waters’— protect the non-human natural environment. They might be said to represent what scholar Robert Marzec calls “[t]he nomadic, resistant component” that comes forth in “enunciations of the land” to challenge the traditional imperialist script, which tries to contain and control all the territories it represents, whether through fences, maps, or fiction (136). Papa Bois primarily guards the “the Great Trees” and animals, sounding a cow’s horn when hunters approach (Besson 2), while Mama D’Lo’s role seems to be that of the punisher: in a collection of folklore from Trinidad & Tobago, Gérard Besson describes her actions against humans “who commit crimes against the forest, like burning down trees or indiscriminately putting animals to death or fouling the rivers” as highly punitive (15). Interestingly, this language of punishment is tied up with her gender and sexuality: mortals who harm the forest “could find themselves married to her for life, both this one and the one to follow” (Besson 15). The marriage is a curse, not a blessing, and the consequence is rendered as especially dire since she normally takes the form of a “hideous creature” with her lower body in the form of a giant anaconda.

Although both folk figures defend the forest and its creatures, it seems that Papa Bois is more remote in his interactions with humans, almost playing the part of reserved judge, while Mama D’Lo is relegated to the role of warden:

There are many stories of Papa Bois appearing to hunters, sometimes as a deer who would lead them into the deep forest and then suddenly resume his true shape, to issue a stern warning and then to vanish, leaving the hunters lost or perhaps compelling them to pay a fine of some sort, such as to marry “Mama Dlo.”

(Besson 2)

This arrangement reflects a gender hierarchy of relations within many Caribbean families, in which the father acts as the final arbiter; his very presence is a warning against breaking the rules, whereas the mother doles out the physical punishments of spankings or ‘licks.’ The very evocation of the father’s presence to curb children’s unruly behavior (“All-you wait ‘til your father gets home!”) perhaps speaks to the superior social power of men in patriarchal societies, as they can control others and maintain authority without engaging in a physical struggle; perhaps there is also a sense of the need for men to hold back because their greater physical strength could harm the child. I would argue that in many cases, this dynamic continues to reinforce notions of women’s inferiority: they are not viewed as any kind of ‘real’ physical threat and they must use violence to maintain their more tenuous grip on authority.

In the preceding passage from Besson, the terms of the marriage are not described, but sexual relations with a feminized serpent are definitely evoked, suggesting a phallic battle instead of the female partner in a conventional, passive, ‘penetrated’ role. Like the figure of the soucouyant, whose body flies out of the domestic sphere and traditional sexual roles by penetrating her victims’ homes and then their bodies to suck their blood, Mama D’Lo represents chaos to the patriarchal order. She provides lessons about how to treat the non-human landscape, but also conveys strong messages about what type of woman is desirable.

Correspondingly, while Papa Bois’s body is meant to be unsettling—sometimes because of its hybridity and at others because of its instability—it is not referenced as ugly. At times he is an amalgam of a man and a beast with cloven hooves, but he “appears in so many different forms and fashions … sometimes as a deer, or in old ragged clothes, sometimes hairy and though very old, extremely strong and muscular” (Codallo, qtd. in Besson 2). His physique is something to be admired for its vigor, or else, in cervine form, sought for its beauty. His trans-species appearance resonates with Homi Bhabha’s discussions of hybridity, intermediacy, and the “in-between”:

What is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, “opening out,” remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference – be it class, gender or race. Such assignations of social differences – where difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between – find their agency in a form of the “future” where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory. It is, if I may stretch a point, an interstitial future, that emerges in-between the claims of the past and the needs of the present.

(Bhabha 219)

While Mama D’Lo’s hybrid snake-human body carries the same signification in terms of “opening out,” the “interstitial” time that merges future, past, and present, and the agency and potential power of a border-crossing identity, hers is definitely rendered as grotesque in its blendedness. Conventional legends about these two figures typically reinforce, rather than confront, the discomfort and anxiety that arises when women’s bodies take on non-originary, non-singular manifestations that are imbued with a great deal of power.

As a work of children’s literature, The Protector’s Pledge inherently addresses questions of power. Children’s literature is one of the few genres in which most of the texts are not written by the population they are for, revealing a fundamental tension between the desires of the author and the desires and perceived needs of the reader.¹ However, contemporary writing for children has become much more child-centered, allowing youthful characters more agency than children often experience in lives where they are not given options about going to school, taking baths, bedtimes, and the foods they eat. The novel falls into the category of middle-grade fiction for children; it is not quite Young Adult (YA) literature in that its adventure-seeking protagonist, Jason Valentine (who goes by the initials “JV”), is only 12 years old, and the book continually strives to build the confidence of child-readers by allowing them to identify with a protagonist who succeeds in his goals and quests even though he, like them, appears relatively powerless in daily life.

Children’s literature is an important field, although often unrecognized as such among many adult audiences, who identify it as frivolous entertainment. As I argued in Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays (2003), books for children “can be soaked up ‘into the bloodstream’ of young readers (Cullinan 226). This vivid metaphor speaks to the ways children unconsciously absorb not only the plot of the tales, but also the values imbedded within” (Anatol, “Introduction” xiv). Although McClean’s book—especially as an independently published e-book— does not have anywhere near the readership of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, its potential to affect a larger number of readers through Internet distribution networks makes it worthy of analysis. Trinidadian poet André Bagoo proposes the following about the potential of online publishing, particularly for writers of the Global South:

I wonder if the Internet, while often seen to be in animus with publishing, is not also an opportunity for post-colonial countries like ours, to publish our own stories in our own ways, using cyberspace’s breadth of tools and its reach.

(Laughlin)

Bagoo laments the lack of publishers in the region: “We need more publishers in the Caribbean. Persons living in this region still have to seek publishers in North America or the UK” (Gyasi).

Besides resisting notions of irrelevant children, The Protector’s Pledge contests the dominance of White/European characters in fictional works for young people. This concept is especially critical for readers of color from the Global South, and/or from African diaspora (and other cultures’) communities in the Global North, who seldom see themselves in literature. It is also crucial for White readers from the Global North who do not see the Other as influential in their world. Pushing back against the idea that only White lives matter, The Protector’s Pledge provides a counter example to the myriad books published each year that do not feature any people of color, or only portray them in marginalized—or, at best, sidekick—roles. And as Black librarians, educators, and parents have been arguing in print for over half a century, “When books [of a certain culture] are neglected, adults and children [of all races] who need positive role models or awareness of a view other than the stereotypical one given by the media are deprived of a valuable insight into the true identity of a given group” (Rollock xii).²

In her novel, McClean provides snapshots of life in the fictional Caribbean village of Alcavere, located just on the outskirts of a dense tropical forest called Oscuros, thus contributing to her young readers’ education of what life is like for an adolescent boy in the rural Caribbean. The novel simultaneously teaches young readers about Trinidadian folklore, culture, and beliefs of the past, while also encouraging them to think about the world’s future through the representation of environmental concerns. It speaks to a “need” being articulated more and more often in ecocritical scholarship: “to bring postcolonial and ecological issues together as a means of challenging continuing imperialist modes of social and environmental dominance” (Huggan and Tiffin 2).

The author places value on Caribbean experiences—and experiences of the Americas overall—in an attempt to subvert the European colonial education that indoctrinated members of Caribbean societies for decades. Instead of privileging life in Europe and the US, the author concentrates attention on the beauty, danger, and intellectual stimulation present in the region. Granny tells JV stories about his parents’ adventures outside their village community, and “[t]hese narratives became JV’s favourite bedtime stories … H]e was transported to extraordinary places like ruined pyramids of ancient civilizations, volcanic peaks, coral reefs, lush rain forests, and even a deep lake of liquid asphalt that, according to legend, had swallowed an entire Amerindian village” (McClean, loc. 669). While there are certainly more famous pyramids in Egypt and coral reefs in Australia, the reference to Trinidad’s Pitch Lake—the world’s largest natural asphalt deposit— grounds the narrative in the Americas. Stunning coral reefs exist in Tobago, Mayan pyramids in Mexico, and volcanoes proliferate throughout South America, in countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.

Most importantly for my work here, though, is how the book conveys lessons about gender norms and social acceptability through the attitudes, beliefs, and stories shared by JV’s community and the larger society. JV has been raised by Granny, known as “Miss B” to the rest of the vicinity.³ She is an herbal healer to whom many people come for assistance with complaints such as headache, cramps, and snake bite. McClean introduces a conflict between traditional folkways and more contemporary practices when one of the villagers, Paulette De Couteau, rejects Granny’s offer of a concoction for her ailing husband: “Paulette looked kindly at her and shook her head slowly. ‘Thank you, Miss B, but we’ve never been ones for traditional medicine. No offense’” (McClean, loc. 330–38). Granny is not insulted, suggesting a harmonious balance between belief systems. However, the fact that McClean herself uses the term “superstitions” to refer to certain villagers’ viewpoints challenges the reader’s ability to remain neutral by insinuating misconceptions and false knowledge: “With its reputation as a ward against bewitchment, twef [a type of vine] was a com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and table
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Narratives, politics, and aesthetics of resistance across the Caribbean and its diasporas
• PART I Narratives of/as resistance: Languages, poetics, and politics in Caribbean literatures
• PART II Resistance in/as activism: From theory to practice and back
• Index