Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

IAN ANTHONY BETHELL
Glissant describes this challenge:
Because the Caribbean notion of time was fixed in the void of an imposed
nonhistory, the writer must contribute to reconstituting its tormented chronology:
that is, to reveal the creative energy of a didactic reestablished
between nature and culture in the Caribbean. 74
In this way, Jean Rhys can give a voice to one of history’s silenced lunatics,
by telling her side of the story. Similarly, Edwidge Danticat in Breath, Eyes,
Memory and Krick Krak! can deconstruct the seamless narrative of control
by articulating the Haitian woman’s suffering, not as a sexualised exotic,
but as a mother or grandmother, wife or sister, who must face the torture
of dictatorship in order to save herself and her family. 75 Likewise, Jamaica
Kincaid in works like ‘Girl’ and Lucy presents narratives of women who
fight against the constraints imposed on them by colonialism and Victorian
mores at the risk of being seen as ‘BAD’, ‘LOOSE’ women and, by
so doing, attempt to break down the culturally centric closure that is so
restrictive and ultimately destructive for them and their own cultural nuances.
76 These modern Caribbean women, write realities that disavow the
silences so much a part of 19th century anti-slavery narratives. This moving
away from the plain truth as they lived it was, evident in many anti-slavery
narratives, arguably, because so much of history was so overwhelmingly
negative for the oppressed that some would rather circumvent the unpleasant
descriptions of sexual exploitation and silencing in the name of tact or
good taste. 77 This, unfortunately, allowed for the continuation of erasure,
furthering the projection of its paradigm of Caribbean female exoticism.
It is then the job of the newer generation of Caribbean women writers to
grapple with the monster of ‘Otherness’ and redirect the way the discourse
works so that the flow no longer delimits them to a monolithic image of
alterity, but illustrates the misrepresentations that history had hoisted upon
them. Bertha Mason can become Antoinette Cosway and have her own
space on the printed page to discuss the image Rochester presented of a
deranged, savage, alter Caribbean. And ‘Girl’ can assert herself in the face
of a mother’s foreshadowing that she will be a slut. Caribbean women illustrate
that ‘Otherness’ is merely difference and not inferiority as Froude
and Long so gallantly proclaimed it.
74
Glissant (1989), op. cit., p. 65.
75
Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York, Vintage, 1994); Krik
Krak! (New York, Soho, 1995).
76
Jamaica Kincaid ‘Girl’ in At the Bottom of the River (New York, Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, 1983); Lucy (New York, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1988).
77
See: Moira Ferguson’s ‘Introduction’ The History of Mary Prince.
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