Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

WOMEN OF COLOUR: RECONTEXTUALISING ‘OTHERNESS’
fit into. This further ‘Othering’ is seen in Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My
Horse:
In Jamaica it is a common sight to see skinny-looking but muscular black
women sitting on top of a pile of rocks with a hammer making little
ones out of big ones. They look so wretched with their bare black feet
all gnarled and distorted from walking barefoot over rocks. The nails on
their big toes thickened like a hoof from a life time of knocking against
stones. All covered over with the grey dust of the road, those feet look
almost saurian and repellent. Of course, their clothing is meager, cheap,
and ugly. 71
While Hurston does elucidate the polemics of black female subservience
and her role as talking mule, she also falls into the pattern of re-imbricating
the Caribbean woman in a realm of ‘Other’ where she, as an outsider,
does not see the inequality of the situation. She does not realise that she
is looking at these women from a distinct cultural gaze and also a position
of relative superiority. She still insists, as she does at the end of the quote,
that their clothes are ugly, trivialising the women labourers, in this instance,
to the level of their clothes, as other anthropologists have done before her.
Joan Dayan sees perpetuations similar to Hurston’s as ‘the binaries fundamental
in much of Western thought’, and suggests that ‘those compelling
oppositions (virgin/whore, peasant/lady, beauty/hag) embedded in the
lexicon are difficult to break out of, especially for writers representing
places least known but most appropriated as symbols.’ 72
Therefore, Hurston’s closing comment to the paragraph re-deploys the
tools of representation. She simply groups all women together by stating:
‘And everywhere in the Caribbean women carry a donkey’s load on their
heads and walk up and down mountains with it’. 73 Obviously then, from
Hurston’s conclusive tone, only upper class women of the region do not fit
into this group. Even the upper-class women are viewed as different from
those in the United States. The West Indian woman is thereby disallowed
full agency or voice because she is proven to be ‘Other.’
REDIRECTING THE FLOW, REWRITING
MISREPRESENTATION
Alongside the social historian, the Caribbean fiction writer then takes
up the struggle to articulate a story, assert an identity and reclaim a history
upon which colonial history and imperialist discourse have foreclosed.
71
Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse (Philadelphia, J. R. Lippincott co., 1938),
p. 59.
72
Dayan (1995), op. cit., p. 127.
73
Hurston, op. cit., p. 59.
310
Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 • HOMINES •