Making Homes in the West/Indies

Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid

Antonia Macdonald-Smythe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136544439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study focuses on the ways in which two of the most prominent Caribbean women writers residing in the United States, Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid, have made themselves at home within Caribbean poetics, even as their migration to the United States affords them participation and acceptance within its literary space.

Chapter One
Talking Back to the Bildungsroman

“Make sure you done grow before you start giving backchat¹”

Caribbean proverb.

The restlessness and dissatisfaction that initiate the literary subject’s movement away from the familial and the familiar and the anxiety to become an articulate and an articulating self are widespread anxieties. The Bildungsroman² is typically the literary form used to ideologically map out this process. However, with the frequency of its narrative representation of the journeying subject as the white male, the Bildungsroman has come to be identified with a western model of development, which, in inscribing the white male as the universal protagonist, theorized his particular progress into adulthood as prototypical. In spite of its bias, this genre continues to be employed within a variety of literary cultures as a narrative site within which to constitute subject formation. Specifically, in a Caribbean literary context, race and gender considerations together with the experience of colonialism have created particular aesthetic inflections so that self-assertion and self-ascription are usually presented in terms of a racial, national and sexual identity.

Reviewed, recast, and rendered more applicable to the discursive formulation of the marginal subject, the Bildungsroman in the twentieth century contextualized the journey of the Caribbean protagonist into adulthood, framing a development of voice and agency within an experience of conquest and domination. Nevertheless, the Bildungsroman has a utility greater than the examination of the process of ‘soul-making of the individual.’ Accommodating more than the contested progress of the protagonist into maturation, it became a literary form useful to the depiction of political self-representation in colonial and modernist contexts that deny the validity of homeland and wholeness. In the 1950’s, the genre was used in West Indian literature to represent the experience of an entire community. Indeed, one of the most individualistic of Western literary forms was now appropriated into a context where communal forms of representations were still the dominant impulse and the Bildungsroman was deployed as a means of writing the silenced community into history.

Of necessity therefore, the Bildungsroman undergoes transcultural modifications in its relocation in different discursive arenas suitable to a variety of resistance ideologies. With Caribbean adaptations, the development of the protagonist and the assumption of a position of responsibility in society is presented within a larger paradox. On one hand, there is the detailing of a process whereby the unformed native is being molded into a suitable colonial subject. On the other hand, the Caribbean Bildungsroman records the ways in which native culture resists imperial invalidation and acquires significance in the folk world as a powerful, sustaining and sustainable force. The journey toward selfhood occurs against a backdrop of the competing power of the metropolis and the folk community, a struggle often characterized in postcolonial studies as the imagined encounter between Prospero and Sycorax.

The buliding for the Caribbean protagonist, Caliban,³ becomes an act of strategic alignment with either of these societies. Consequent to this process, Caliban develops a double consciousness, in that he carries the traces of both discourse communities. In his famous formulation of “double consciousness,” W.E.B. Du Bois speaks of the formation of African American subjectivity within a socio-historical context, which ‘only lets one see himself through the revelation of the other world-the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others … One even feels his twoness — an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two warring ideals in one dark body” (17). Whereas Du Bois’s theory had established the Negro as living within a hyphenated context, Veve A. Clark, in “Diaspora Literacy and Marasa Consciousness,” goes beyond this oppositional framework to identify another alternative, one that she calls ‘the third principle.’

Clark offers instead “the reformation of form,” a reduplicative narrative posture which assumes and revises Du Bois’s double consciousness. In the wider field of contemporary literacy criticism, this reformative strategy approximates the “deconstruction of mastery” (42).⁴ For Clark, the deconstruction of mastery occasions an interactive creativity which she establishes Du Bois’ Hegelian dialectic as having overlooked. She then posits marasa consciousness as a vernacular approach that better situates diasporic activities and uses examples of Vodoun and jazz as representations of deformed mastery. Marasa consciousness as explained by Clark is a theory that has its basis in Haitian Vodoun, marasa being the Vodoun sign for the Divine Twins. The creation myths among the Fon/Ewe of Dahomey speak of these twins as non-patriarchal in character and their power as non-gender specific. The twins are part of the contradictions embodied in ancestral spirits such as Legba. Loko and Ayizan. Clark uses this nonspecificity to suggest a way of apprehending the world that operates outside binaries. “Marasa consciousness invites us to look beyond the binary … the ability to do so depends largely on our capacities to read the sign as a cyclical, spiral relationship” (43). It is not for Clark an either/or situation, but instead a both/and opportunity where the seemingly unreconcilable are resolved.

Clark’s marasa consciousness is similar to Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of creolization⁵ as an indigenous perspective from which to understand West Indian literature. Moreover, in supplementing DuBois’s “double consciousness, “marasa consciousness affords a useful transition to a discussion of the relationship between Afro-Caribbean creolization and African American double consciousness. In The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1730 - 1820, Brathwaite establishes creolization as a process, a situation of continuous conflict generated by more than the mere juxtaposition to and relationship with metropolitan society. Creolization is instead a complex, symbiotic and dynamic process by which both metropolis and colony are transformed through intervention. The discourse of creolization concedes an uneven relation of power between colonizer and colonized and extends the imperial encounter to one which doubles back on itself. In so doing, it problematizes Caliban’s activities and creates a shifting context within which to read Caribbean letters.

With Caliban’s intervention into the Bildungsroman, there was more than an inversion of a genre or an annexation of a discourse that would serve his revolutionary polemic. What was at work in those early West Indian novels was what Brathwaite has defined as “reciprocal interchange” allowing for an ongoing mediation of Propsero’s triumphant epistemology with the noise of Sycorax’s “strange and terrible magic”. In The Tempest, Caliban describes the island as “full of noises / sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not” (3.1.135-136). It is the clamor of those noises which reminds him that Sycorax, though imprisoned in a tree, is not defeated. Her noises move Caliban to revolt, the noise of Prospera’s language returns Caliban to surly servitude. While dualism is inevitable, the tension of these choices creates a vigorous instability that does not allow for the domination of one set of noises but instead makes a space for an ongoing dialogue.

And in his refusal to be silent and amenable, Caliban was making defiant use of Prospera’s language as an instrument of interrogation and resistance, thus subverting a traditional European form to power his rebellion. Caliban’s Bildungsroman critiqued the patriarchal society that Prospero had presented as ideal. The means by which Prospero forged his manhood, his humanity, his nationality, and ultimately his superiority were now made to craft access to the selfhood denied to Caliban. In the redefining of Prospera’s terminology for self-development, the Bildungsroman became what bell hooks in Talking Back has established as “an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges the politics of dominion that would render [one] nameless and voiceless” (8). Caliban’s talking back was operating on different registers, each register articulating a particular grievance, all interested in recapitulating Prospera’s hegemony and in establishing Caliban as an active and powerful subject.

However in the imitation and adaptation of a European form, there was the unconscious perpetuation of some of its limitations, specifically the paternalistic myopia which had emphasized the maturation of one kind of subject while ignoring the existence of a resisting Other. Caliban’s transgressive operations on Prospera’s invidious text of individualism tended to substitute a communal and collective identity for the individual articulation of selfhood. Such an elision created the seamless narrative of a monolithic black identity which left no space for difference or for the Caribbean woman who for the most part was objectified as part of a nationalist landscape, or confined to the supporting roles of daughter, mother and wife.⁶

The writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid critique the aforementioned modes of representations. Although they may not be consciously talking back to earlier West Indian writers, they are reacting to the ideology that had shaped this previous generation. Specifically, Cliff and Kincaid contributed to the further creolization of the Bildungsroman by destabilizing both maculinist and popular feminist conventions of representing the female subject. Their strategies in Aheng and Annie john while participating in feminist, nationalist and postcolonial theories of resistance, do not allow for the easy location of either writer in a particular ideological camp. For while identity and representation remain critical anxieties in these two novels, that self is in fact highly contested. It is an autobiographical self, yet both writers are rewriting personal history in ways which persistently critiqued what constitutes autobiography. It is a filial self, constructing its subjectivity through resistance to the regimes of power that are located in the maternal. It is a sexual self whose positioning along a continuum of sexuality eschews both homosexual and heterosexual labels.

This chapter also argues that Annie john and Aheng function as manifestations of Kincaid’s and Cliff’s Kunstleroman. Each woman embarks on a journey toward artistic selfhood and uses autobiographical fiction to mark out her own hi/dung. The material conditions which facilitate the literary production of the two novels are reflected in Annie john and Aheng as the circumstances which frustrate Annie’s and Clare’s reproduction of themselves in society. The triumph of the fictional protagonist in achieving selfhood is engineered to imitate each writer’s success in establishing herself as a published author. Further, the importance of community in the articulation of each protagonist’s hi/dung is repeated in Kincaid’s and Cliff’s varied manipulations of literary history to forge their identities as writers-identities which challenge and transform literary forms of self-representations.

The Creolized Bildungsroman: An Early West Indian Version

Autobiography, an account of the life of an individual, is a literary tradition that came into prominence in the eighteenth century. Like the Bildungsroman, autobiography also describes the relationship between the individual and society and is in most instances as much a personal history as it is a representational one, given that the fate of the individual is often inextricably linked to that of society. However, despite the remarkable similarity of theoretical intent, the autobiography has for a long time maintained a generic separation from the Bildungsroman. In “Shadowing, Surfacing/Shedding: Contemporary German Writers in Search of a Female Bildungsroman,” Sandra Friedman provides a useful account of the relationship between the two genres:

Autobiographical accounts, insistent upon the accuracy of their narrative content, came to serve as an exemplary function, indicating the path one’s life should take, either by explicit or implicit injunction. Together, the Bildungsroman and the autobiography acted as complementary counterparts of the same expressive role: the fictional and the non-fictional account of the individual in his (‘his’ is, of course, being used in this context intentionally) development, in his struggle to integrate himself, his ideals, and his perspectives into an increasingly industrialized, materialistic, and alienating bourgeois society. (304-5)

Friedman goes on to connect the distinctive blurring between the two forms to Germany’s post World War II crisis of identity. The introspective realization of man’s inhumanity to man had, according to Friedman, generated suspicion of the concept of truth as universal. Truth now came to reside provisionally, in the one’s own experience-in the life lived:

‘Fiction’ writers, in turn, began infusing their narratives with ‘new subjectivity’ authenticity. In such novels, authors traced their own experiences and development in the process of combating-or conforming to-their society. This autobiographical material is set within an ostensibly fictionalized framework that removes the work from the realm of the traditional autobiography. (305)

The Bildungsroman also maintains the connection between the individual and the society for there is a parallelism between the story narrated and the process of reading it. Martin Swales in The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse traces this connection to Karl Morgenstern, the earliest architect of the concept of the Bildungsroman as it came into being in the nineteenth century. Morgenstern developing the ideas of Jacob, an earlier theorist, defined the genre thus:

It will justly bear the name Bildungsroman, firstly and primarily on account of its thematic material, because it portrays the hi/dung of the hero in its beginnings and growth to a certain stage of completion; and secondly because it is by virtue of this portrayal that it furthers the reader’s bildung to a much greater extent than any other kind of novel.

Accordingly, the act of writing serves a larger social purpose. The reader is transformed both by the experiences recorded in the text and by his identification with the protagonist.

In the revisioning of the Bildungsroman, West Indian stories of maturation are as much narrative explorations of the artist’s own struggle to define his subjectivity, as they are accounts of the anxiety of West Indian nation to establish themselves as sovereign in the face of imperializing forces. It is this second task which goes beyond the concerns of the European expression of the genre. Further, the West Indian artist establishes himself as the prototypical subject and uses his own experiences as the basis upon which to narrate the development of a wider community. Sandra Poucher Paquet in “West Indian Autobiography” provides specificity to this claim:

Autobiography gives the writer direct access into his privileged relationship to the West Indian community as an insider, and, additionally it gives him the opportunity to define the quality of his relationship to that community in ideal terms. Self-revaluation becomes a way of laying claim to a landscape that is at once geographical, historical, and cultural. In this fashion, the writer is privileged to write himself into the symbolic systems that make up West Indian literature and culture. In the process, the autobiographical self as subject is transformed into a cultural archetype, and autobiography becomes both the lived historical reality and the myth created out of that experience. Personal experience and historical events alike are transformed into autobiographical myth. (198)

In the Castle of My Skin is one of the earliest examples of the West Indian male Bildungsroman. In his introduction to the 1983 edition of this novel, George Lamming provides a retrospective explanation of the circumstances which generated his writing of In the Castle of My Skin and confirms the willful blending of autobiography and fiction. He explains: “In the desolate frozen heart of London, at the age of twenty-three, I tried to reconstruct the world of my childhood and early adolescence. It was also the world of a whole Caribbean reality” (p. xii). The novel is rich with correspondences between Lamming’s own childhood and the life he creates for the boy G. A larger didactic intent is driving the Bildungsroman, for the author measures the boy’s journey to adulthood in terms of another narrative: the development of political consciousness which characterizes a Caribbean community as it moves from colonial dependence toward Independence. Autobiography becomes depersonalized into raw material for the production of a collective, political identity within which the individual can safely situate himself. Lamming is insistent on this substitution of the individual “I” with the collective. In an interview with Daryl Cumber Dance, he explains the undergirding ideology as:

[V]ery central to a lot of the fiction in the Caribbean in which the ‘I’ of the writer is hardly separable from the ‘we’, even when the ‘I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction Kwik? Kwak! : Narrations of the Self.
• Chapter 1. Talking Back to the Bildungsroman.
• Chapter 2. Negotiating Exile: Take your Bundle and Leave and Go!
• Chapter 3 Slippery Tongues: Re/Claiming Orality as a Tactic of Intervention.
• Chapter 4. W/righting History: Locating the Traveling Subject.
• Chapter 5 Kwik? Kwak!: Infinite Chronicles of the World and the Word.
• Bibliography
• Index