It is not a question of relinquishing privilege. It is a question of
grasping more of myself.
—Michelle Cliff, The Land of Look Behind
Going Home to Teach, Anthony Winkler's autobiographical account
of a year spent in Jamaica, expresses the dilemma of a white Jamaican
marginalized by the black majority because of skin color. Winkler's
account is set in the mid-seventies, a time of heightened black
consciousness and racial antagonism in Jamaica. However, Winkler's book
makes it clear that his fight to prove his Jamaicanness has been lifelong.
Twenty-five years after Winkler completed his teaching stint in Moneague,
the legitimacy of the white Jamaican's claim to Jamaicanness still
seems very much unresolved. At election time in late 1997, as the press
recorded, the question of whether one's leader should be able to merge
with the crowd in terms of color became a key
[End Page 93]
issue.
1
Some months later Professor Don Robotham, in his Grace, Kennedy Lecture,
bemoaned the fact that while in the seventies the class struggle divided
the tribes, in contemporary Jamaica another division is being drawn in
terms of color:
Many people, especially light-skinned Jamaicans, perceive that there is
a not particularly subtle move afoot to sideline them, to make them feel
that they are not "true" Jamaicans and to promote a chauvinistic Black
Nationalism as the ideology of Jamaica today. Many people perceive this
with great bitterness in private but fail to denounce it publicly for fear
of being labelled racists or because they think serious public discussion
of the issue of race is taboo and not possible in Jamaica. . . .
On the other hand, the majority of Black Jamaicans in the inner
cities feel that they are stigmatized as violent, criminal and
worthless. . . . There is also the very strong sentiment in the Black
middle classes and Black sections of the business community that they
have been discriminated against all their lives in the establishment and
expansion of business activities of their own. . . . For many of them,
the whole point of having a Black Prime Minister is for the power of
the State to be used to right . . . historic wrongs.
2
Since then, white newspaper columnists such as Morris Cargill (recently
deceased), Christine Nunes and Diana McCaulay have been accused of
distancing themselves from the masses by their choice of subject matter,
3
but on the other hand they have indicated discomfort with (or in
Cargill's case, drawn attention to) their marginalized positions as
white Jamaicans—in a number of instances referring to
Going Home to Teach in support of their views.
4[End Page 94]
"Look! I am one of you," Winkler longs to say to the public in Going
Home to Teach.
5
The complaints of marginalization by white columnists bring to mind
not only Winkler's cry but similar cries heard over and over again
in white West Indian literature. We recall the defiant proclamation
of Brian Antoni's protagonist in Paradise Overdose: "I fucking
belong here!"
6
Meanwhile, the discussions persist about the white West Indian's location
within the West Indian literary canon. Such academic positions as Kenneth
Ramchand's seemingly grudging inclusion of white West Indians in his
1970 study of the West Indian novel,
7
or Kamau Brathwaite's controversial 1974 statement that "White Creoles"
cannot "meaningfully identify or be identified with the spiritual world
on this side of the Sargasso Sea"
8
have since been modified but not, it would seem, significantly;
hence such more recent dialogic crossfire as Brathwaite versus Hulme
in Wasafiri,9
followed by Evelyn O'Callaghan's outraged response in her 1996 conference
paper
10
—all in the continuing debate of "Where do we locate Jean Rhys"
and, by extension, other white West Indian writers.
If there is such a thing as a white West Indian identity, as expressed
in white West Indian literature, its characteristics might include not
only a sense of unbelonging and anger at marginalization but also guilt
over the colonial past, guilt at one's own racism and at the racism of
one's fellow white West Indians, guilt at one's privilege, a terrified
consciousness, that is, a fear of reprisals from the resentful black
majority, and a sense of the decay of one's social group—the
plantocracy (being smothered by witchbroom, for example).
[End Page 95]
Undeniably, history has burdened the white West Indian with his own
peculiar set of baggage: as past oppressor and present threatened
minority, saddled with collective guilt but still holding the reins of
power, resented but envied by the black majority, rejected but still
elevated and aspired toward by that same majority, visible but invisible.
In this scenario of dichotomies and contradictions, in this society
of confrontation and confusion, where race is a power construct, the
manipulation of one's identity may be, and most often is, an external
imposition, but to some extent it is an internal manipulation, a matter
of personal choice. This freedom to choose, to claim an identity,
is more limited the darker one's skin color is: the whiter the skin,
the more one's options are expanded. The choices that have been made by
a number of contemporary white or near-white West Indian writers then
become all the more interesting.
The Jamaican writers Michelle Cliff and Honor Ford-Smith may be classified
as near-white, or red ("a term which signified a degree of whiteness,"
says Cliff),
11
or as "Jamaica white." The fair-skinned Cliff and Ford-Smith are both
the daughters of a white man and a brown woman. Cliff has referred
in her books to the polarized realities of her Jamaican upbringing,
in which she was able to "pass" for white ("passing demands . . .
silence") and thereby benefited from many of the privileges accorded
to whiteness in contrast to the treatment of those with darker skins
around her.
12
"You're lucky you look the way you do," her mother tells her, "you could
get any man. Anyone says anything to you, tell them your father's white"
(Claiming an Identity, p. 47). As she observes, "Those of us who
were light-skinned, straight-haired, etc, were given to believe that
we could actually attain whiteness" (Look Behind, p. 72). "The
light-skinned person imitates the oppressor . . . [and] becomes an
oppressor in fact" (Look Behind, p. 73).
Cliff's response to such a warped upbringing is, firstly, to experience
rage: "As a light-skinned colonial girlchild . . . rage was the last thing
they expected of me" (Look Behind, p. 15); secondly, to reject
whiteness and instead, to use the title of her poetry/prose collection,
claim an identity they taught her to despise: blackness. "To write as
a complete Caribbean woman," she says, "demands of us retracing the
African part of ourselves, reclaiming as our own . . . a history sunk
under the sea . . . or trapped in a class system . . . [dependent on]
a past bleached from our minds" (Look Behind, p. 14). In
[End Page 96]Abeng13
and No Telephone to Heaven,14
Cliff's first two novels and the only West Indian ones, the growth of
the protagonist, Clare Savage ("her name, obviously, is significant,"
Cliff says),
15
mirrors Cliff's own personal journey to racial, moral and political
self-awareness.
"You callous little bitch" [says Clare's father shortly after her
mother's death in No Telephone to Heaven]. "I suppose you have
more feeling for niggers than for your own mother."
Clare breathed deep. . . . "My mother was a nigger—"
His five long fingers came at her, as she had expected. . . .
"And so am I," she added softly. (p. 104)
For Clare's father, love for Clare's mother means respecting her enough
to raise her above the level of nigger. For Clare, love for her mother
means recognizing and foregrounding her blackness as her true identity. As
Cliff states in The Land of Look Behind,
It is not a question of relinquishing privilege. It is a question
of grasping more of myself. . . . To be colonised is to be rendered
insensitive. . . . The test of a colonised person is to walk through
a shantytown in Kingston and not bat an eye. This I cannot do. Because
part of me lives there. (p. 71)
This conscious decision to foreground her blackness is again symbolized
by the blackening of the West Indian mulatto Annie Christmas's skin in
Cliff's third, and first America-based, novel, Free Enterprise, in
which the author expands her identification with blackness to politically
embrace American blackness.
16
Cliff has now lived in the United States for over thirty years and has
not visited Jamaica since 1975.
17
But her recently published collection of short stories, The Store
of aMillion Items,18
indicates that the scars of her early warped upbringing are still present
in her memories: memories of social injustice and an indifferent middle
class ("We originated in a place where the sun never set and the blood
never dried. . . . Whatever
[End Page 97]
happened, we weren't to blame, nor were we to make any change" ["Stan's
Speed Shop," p. 59]); of an isolated, decaying plantocracy surrounded
by resentful blacks ("Contagious Melancholia"); and of the peculiar
loneliness of the white Jamaican. The latter is most hauntingly portrayed
in "Transactions," where a childless, white Jamaican traveling salesman
impulsively "adopts," or rather purchases, a dirty, animal-like roadside
waif—just because she is white. "Like is drawn to like" (p. 10);
"Now he thinks he'll never be lonely again" (p. 11). Warped motives have
warped consequences: the child turns out to be a vampire, sucking the
life out of him—perhaps just as his warped values have previously
drained him of an ability to find fulfillment.
Cliff's embracing of her black side is readily understandable, and not
only in terms of her political sensitivities and moral conscience. The
disparagement apparently accorded near-white people by fully white people
in her childhood may have urged her to go to one extreme or the other: as
Clare is warned, "Only sadness comes from mixture. You must remember that"
(Abeng, p. 164). Additionally, her formative teenage years would
have coincided with the blooming of the Black Power, Black Is Beautiful
and Caribbean socialist movements; also, living in the United States, as
she was from her early teens, she would inevitably have been categorized
in that country as black.
Honor Ford-Smith, on the other hand, grew up in Jamaica, and to date has
spent most of her life here. Yet her rejection of claims to the privileges
of whiteness is in many ways similar to that of Cliff. In her beautiful,
moving tribute to her mother, My Mother'sLast Dance,19
Ford-Smith relates her own rejection of what whiteness
represents—privilege, insensitivity—and this contributes
to the mother-daughter conflict so sensitively portrayed.
MOTHER
Formed by all I fought so hard to earn
She styles herself the opposite of me,
Says she's ashamed by privilege.
. . . .
The little boonoonoonoos who cried
When I went back to work in the afternoon
Has become Lady Bountiful of the suffering masses.
. . . .
DAUGHTER
She doesn't like my friends—wrong class.
. . . .
[End Page 98]
Wrong colour too.
. . . .
. . . Now, ask her what colour she is.
She can't say it. Afraid to say it.
Had to go to North America to find out.
. . . .
BOTH
Once our hearts beat in one body,
MOTHER
Now this strange white fruit has burst from my flesh. . . .
("Amputation for Two Voices," pp. 70-73)
Ford-Smith's embracing of blackness is, like Cliff's, primarily
political. Her rage at social injustice has caused her to reject the
privileged background that her mother represents (represented to Cliff by
her father) and to become "Lady Bountiful of the suffering masses." Like
Cliff, her rage develops through an understanding of history and, again
like Cliff, she explores much of this history by exploring her brown
mother's family background, as opposed to the unfamiliar one of her white
father, from whom, like Cliff, she has long been estranged. Again like
Cliff, Ford-Smith relates the trauma of a light-skinned person being
trained to pass for white: "They just kept her in the house, till she
took house colour. Till she learned she was different from them. She
was not to speak patwa like them. Not to bathe in the river like them"
(Last Dance, p. 40). One is taught to be ashamed both of one's
partial whiteness (due to miscegenation) and of one's blackness:
"STOP RUBBING UP YOURSELF WITH THE PICKNEY CROSS THE RIVER" (p. 41);
"Shame-mi-lady. Shame" (p. 40). One is also taught, as Ford-Smith
recollects elsewhere, that whiteness is not straightforward:
"You must remember" [her grandmother tells her], "you are not white;
you only look white."
I looked at myself in the mirror. . . . I peered at my nose—it was
dead straight. My lips were thin. . . . I checked my hair—it was
brown and long and soft. Yet I was not white. I concluded that white
was not a colour.
20
The confusion, pain and shame of the near-white person's position of
unbelonging cause Ford-Smith to relate, in that same piece, her outrage
as a schoolgirl at the othering of the Creole Bertha Mason in Jane
Eyre: "I couldn't stomach the way I had been relegated to the attic"
("Grandma's Estate," p. 185). (Cliff, in Claiming an Identity, also
relates directly to the Brontë figure: "To imagine I am the sister
of Bertha Rochester. We are the remainders of slavery—residue:
/white cockroaches/white niggers/quadroons/
[End Page 99]
octoroons/mulattos/creoles/white niggers" [p. 42]. And in her essay
"Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character"
21
she states that her protagonist, Clare Savage, is "an amalgam of
[her]self and others," "a crossroads character, with her feet (and head)
in (at least) two worlds" and that "Bertha Rochester is her ancestor"
[p. 265].)
Ford-Smith's many years of dedicated involvement with the Sistren
Collective of working-class women, as opposed to the life she could
have led (with a "a gun toting stockbroking BMW driving husband, / a
four bedroom house in Norbrook with two starched helpers, / a gardener,
security guard . . ." ["Dinner at the Apartment in Toronto," Last
Dance, p. 85]) is but one testimony to her commitment to a rejection
of the privileged but unbelonging Jamaica white lifestyle. This straying
from the path of expected behavior is a lonely one, causing anguish in her
mother ("when I see her coming / I have to take a valium. / I just start
to tremble all over" ["Amputation for Two Voices," Last Dance,
p. 72]), and anger from her family:
. . . it's all a lie.
And you know it.
Grandma never spoke patwa
and you know it.
Why do you have to keep on
calling your mother
a brown woman?
. . . .
Nobody would know.
But you have to keep on bringing it up!
. . . .
. . . you have it
like some ole cross to bear.
You are just obsessed with race.
You just want to be black.
That's all.
("Disputed Truths," Last Dance, p. 67)
The result is alienation both from her family ("Yuh can't even go back
to your risto yard. Yuh too soiled with the sex of old neaga" ["History's
Posse," Last Dance, p. 27]) and from some of those she is seeking
to assist, who will never accept her fully: "History say yuh can take
yuh chances, but yuh can't hide. . . . Your skin glitters bright in the
dark. . . . Dutty gal. Sodomite gal. . . . Yuh notten more than a mule"
(pp. 26-27). It takes much
[End Page 100]
strength to persist; but Ford-Smith shows that she is finally able to
overcome such disabilities and "head out for the open road" (p. 29).
Yet Ford-Smith demonstrates that such expansion of frontiers is precisely
what her mother herself achieved in her own time: she resisted the
restrictions imposed on a young woman of color and determinedly pursued
the unheard of goal of becoming a physician, thereby revealing that she
could "loom suddenly secretly at night, / a black flower white with rage"
("Aunt May at Carron Hall Orphanage," Last Dance, p. 7). Just
as Ford-Smith has in turn revealed herself to be a white flower black
with rage.
Ultimately, however, My Mother's Last Dance is not rage, but
resolution; in this tribute to and reconciliation with her mother,
the writer dissipates the rage generated by societal injustice and,
in coming to terms with her familial and personal past, also reconciles
with her own identity.
However poignantly or beautifully expressed, Cliff's and Ford-Smith's
struggles for identity as "white women of color" are weighed down by
anger, pain, conflict, sadness. A refreshing contrast is provided by
Pauline Melville. Self-declared Guyanese/British, the most white-looking
of the three women, Melville has no time for angst over her ambivalent,
indefinable status: "Pinning down my identity is not what interests me
most about life," as she says in her essay "Beyond the Pale" (Daughters
of Africa, p. 742).
22
Melville has a white English mother and African-Amerindian-European
father, and among her siblings is the "whitey in the woodpile"
(p. 740). In Guyana, no one calls her white ("You're not white. I know
your family" [p. 740]), but in England, where she is anonymous and judged
only by her appearance, the idea that she could be anything but white is
viewed as ridiculous: "You're not black. That's crazy. You're as white as
I am" (p. 740). Melville's situation, then, is different from Cliff's and
Ford-Smith's in that Melville passes for white more successfully in the
metropolitan environment; she does not have blackness thrust upon her;
she has more freedom of choice to claim whatever identity she chooses.
Such freedom of choice extends even to a decision as to whether she
wants to be included in an anthology of black women's literature.
I hesitate. "Do you think I'm black?"
"That's for you to say."
Well, it's an odd thing to have a choice about.
("Beyond the Pale," Daughters of Africa, p. 741)
[End Page 101]
An odd thing indeed. Melville eventually accepts, partly through "an
unwillingness to disinherit [her]self . . . mainly through fear of
betraying [her] father" (p. 741). Here, then, she is obviously faintly
uncomfortable with such attempts at labeling, just as she acknowledges
that she is "faintly uncomfortable when people insist that [she's]
white" (p. 741). She does not want to be identified with the oppressor,
or rejected by the black community. "And simply, for me, it does not
feel like the whole truth" (p. 742).
But Melville brushes aside such moments of discomfort, and generally
views modern society's preoccupation with the quest for identity as
somewhat extraordinary. "When questioned about my identity, I would wish
to echo Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind: 'Frankly, my dear, I
don't give a damn.' In my interior landscape, the South American jaguar
and the English chaffinch live easily together" (p. 742).
Melville compares her position to that of the Yoruba trickster god,
who loves to "cause confusion" (p. 739). "I am a champion of mixtures
and hybrids." "I enjoy Carnival because . . . it is a masquerade where
disguise is the only truth. . . . Death comes in the guise of uniformity,
mono-cultural purity, the externals of the state as opposed to the riot
of the imagination" (pp. 742-43). In her rejection of narrow labeling,
what Melville is celebrating here is the ambiguous, ambivalent,
multifaceted Creole identity, with its multiple masks, as referred to
by Benítez-Rojo.
23
Such a celebration is hinted at, more subtly in the content than in the
title, in Shape-shifter,24
Melville's first collection of short stories, which move from
hot, rotting Guyana to cold, crumbling England and feature black,
brown, white and anonymously hued protagonists and narrators. In
the Guyana-based stories, Afro-Guyanese characters are generally
depicted as especially corrupt or otherwise unpleasant—though
this may be explained, though not necessarily forgiven, by the fact
that the Burnham regime that was evidently for Melville a nightmare
was primarily supported by blacks. And to balance this observation,
her depictions of black, working-class Londoners are sympathetic,
insightful and poignant. Melville's perspective is primarily fixed
on life's victims, from the naïve, do-good English missionary
in Guyana to the cantankerous, lonely black Londoner with a disabled
child; and their pain, loneliness, frustrations and simple pleasures
are universal. Only in one story, "Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water,"
does she address her own racial ambiguity. The story suggests that
Melville's current comfort with
[End Page 102]
hybridity may not always have been there: as a child in Guyana, where
the narrator is both envied and resented for her white skin, she is
embarrassed when children taunt her by calling her "ice cream face";
but when she is in England she is also embarrassed by her brown father,
whose appearance subjects her to another type of taunting: "Mum, Keith
says Daddy looks like a monkey. And I think so too" (p. 157).
In The Ventriloquist's Tale, her first novel, Melville immerses
herself in an Amerindian Guyanese world, with its magic, lore and very
non-Western realities.
25
As with her first book, the title promises more than it delivers. By
far the most exciting, powerful moments in the book are found in
the prologue and epilogue, where the mischievous, irrepressible,
elusive narrator makes his voice heard: "Ah, secrecy, camouflage and
treachery. What blessings to us all. Where I come from, disguise is the
only truth and desire the only true measure of time" (p. 7). This may be
double ventriloquism, because although it is the ventriloquist speaking,
Melville could be projecting her own voice: "White present, black past,
a good position for breaking down preconceptions, stirring up doubt,
rattling judgements, shifting boundaries and unfixing fixities. I am also
well-placed to survey the ludicrous" ("Beyond the Pale," Daughters of
Africa, p. 740). This is precisely how the ventriloquist narrator
locates himself in The Ventriloquist's Tale, when he is allowed
to speak. Multiple voices, multiple masks, the Creole identity. What a
pity Melville opts to suppress her Creole voice thereafter; what a pity
she succumbs to the misguided notion that "sad though it is, in order
to tell these tales of love and disaster, I must put away everything
fantastical that my nature and the South American continent prescribe
and become a realist" (p. 9); for by comparison the rest of the novel
falls flat.
This is not to suggest that The Ventriloquist's Tale does not
make absorbing reading. It is engaging, in a somewhat static, linear,
conventional way—despite the unconventionality of the subject
matter. But it is in the brief encounter with the ventriloquist's
fantastical voice (reminding us of the fantastical narrator Lavren in
Witchbroom,26
the novel of Caribbean Creole complexity written by white Trinidadian
Lawrence Scott) that we catch a glimmer of the fantastic, explosively
rich potential of the Creole identity. It is in such displays of
multiple-identity, ambiguous Creoleness that Melville is most rewarding.
The fantastical voice returns, again too fleetingly, in the story "The
Parrot and Descartes" which appears in Melville's second collection of
short stories, The Migration[End Page 103]of Ghosts.27
Here again we taste the richness of the Creole experience as
we move from jungle to European palace, from century to century,
taking the perspective of a parrot whose cockiness reminds us of the
ventriloquist. The other stories are technically competent but, again
comparatively, creatively unexciting. Still, following the trend of
her first collection, Melville takes on many voices, in many settings,
crossing boundaries of geography, race and culture in ways that few
other writers do.
"The imagination," says Melville, "is where boundaries are crossed and
hybrids fertilised. . . . The imagination is effortlessly trans-national,
trans-racial, trans-gender, trans-species" ("Beyond the Pale,"
Daughters of Africa, p. 743). In her disclaiming of any narrowing
identity as expressed in her essay "Beyond the Pale," in her claiming of
hybrid Creoleness in that essay, in her tentative explorations of the rich
Creole imagination in her fiction, and especially in her unfettering,
all too brief, of this imagination in the ventriloquist's voice,
Melville fertilizes not only the hybrid Caribbean identity but also a
newly sprouting, potentially rich hybrid Caribbean literature. Thus her
work takes the journey in quest of self embarked on by Michelle Cliff
and Honor Ford-Smith a step or two further along the road from linear,
fragmented divisiveness to inclusive Creole cohesion.
Melville's claiming of hybrid créolité is similar
to that of another white-looking West Indian author: Robert Antoni. The
Trinidad-born, Bahamas-raised, French Creole Antoni is, like Melville,
irritated by the restrictive and, in his view, inaccurate labeling of him
as white, and is quick to point out his multinational and multiethnic
roots, which he says include African, Amerindian, Indian, Spanish,
Italian and a host of other constituents.
28
Robert Antoni has published two novels: Divina Trace and Blessed
Is the Fruit.29
Both take place in the fictional Caribbean island of Corpus
Christi. Divina Trace is a novel of creolization on many levels,
using "creolization" in the sense that depicts ambiguity, ambivalence,
multiple levels of meaning as well as multiple voices, multiple
identities. The mysterious Divina Magdalena is perceived in seven
different ways by the seven different narrators. Saint or whore? Black
or white? All of the above? As Jane Bryce notes, Magdalena is "the true
syncretic object embodying all the Caribbean's manifold
[End Page 104]
differences."
30
And as Benítez-Rojo observes in his essay "Three Words Toward
Creolization," the mirror playfully placed in the center of the book,
through which readers see a disfigured reflection of themselves, is
"part of the novel's double performance: in the mirror, the western
reader will read a joke or an irony or a mystery, but the Caribbean
reader will see any one of his/her multiple masks."
31
Benítez-Rojo continues:
These reflections, invested with the political and social ideas of the
observer, will never be coherent images, but rather distorted ones;
they will be images in flux or, rather, images in search of their own
images. Therefore, the mirror of Divina Trace . . . in the end. . . reflects an identity in a state of creolization, a reflection
that oscillates between history and myth; that is, a paradoxical mask
launched into the distance by the explosion of the plantation."
32
This vision of the paradoxical, imprecise Caribbean identity reminds us
not only of Melville's briefly encountered fantastical ventriloquist
narrator but again of the ambiguous, ambivalent, multiple-identity
narrator Lavren in Witchbroom, by the French Creole Lawrence
Scott. In both Antoni's and Scott's novels, the richness and complexity
of the authors' vision of Caribbeanness stimulates us intellectually;
but complexity sometimes tends to obscurity, intellectuality to
self-consciousness, and at the end of both one gets the sense that in
their quest for the elusive Caribbean Creole identity, the authors may
be trying too hard.
On the other hand, Antoni's second novel, Blessed Is the Fruit,
approaches the issue of identity from another direction, and the
results are intriguing. The story is related by two narrative voices:
the near-white but "highwhite" (p. 107) French Creole mistress of a
decaying colonial mansion, and her black servant. In the first half, the
voice of the white woman, Lilla, takes us from the present, where the
two women are together, back to Lilla's past. In the second half, Vel,
the black woman, relates her life story. In between these two narrative
accounts, in a brief section in the middle, the heart of the book, the
two voices interweave and intersect in stream-of-consciousness verse,
with the actual point of intersection marked by a sheet of plastic at
the center of this section, signifying the transparency of the division
between the two lives. Antoni at play again.
Despite such instances of postmodern playfulness, this structure is a
relatively simple one—unlike that in Divina Trace. Lilla's
and Vel's stories are also relatively straightforward, and the primary
concern of the novel seems unambiguous and indeed
[End Page 105]
possibly overemphasized: which is that despite their different skin
colors and their different backgrounds, Lilla and Vel have equally
tragic pasts and overlapping histories, with hope for a brighter future
(personified in Vel's unborn child, which has survived against all odds)
if they unite and work together. Lilla and Vel, in other words, possibly
unlike Antoinette and Tia (if one agrees with Brathwaite)
33
can indeed be friends. In fact, the echoes of WideSargasso Sea34
resonate frequently and determinedly throughout Lilla's narrative as,
surrounded by decay and disappointed by her lover, she too descends
into madness—though a much milder and seemingly more remediable,
and generally less interesting, type than Antoinette's.
What makes this novel intriguing is how unsatisfactory the first half
of this book is, and how much more successful the second. Lilla's
half reads as contrived (witness the Sargasso parallels),
self-conscious, stilted prose. The character of Lilla seems unclearly
defined and inconsistently portrayed, with early signs of reclusiveness
disappearing completely and inexplicably from the narrative voice when
she leaves school, to be replaced abruptly by a seeming superconfident
extrovertedness and strength, as shown in her spirited first encounter
with her future husband on the night of her debut:
"I've just realized," I said, "that you look exactly like my first love."
"And you find that comical?"
"Quite, if you consider that my first love affair occurred with a
chicken!"
(Blessed Is the Fruit, p. 116)
Dysfunctional behavior reappears again abruptly when her husband
leaves her, at which point her rapid descent into reclusive madness
seems extreme. Furthermore, her voice is irritating—especially the
constant emphases in her speech ("all her dresses hideously bosomy. . .tottots out to here! . . . All Vel's dresses hideously
short. The two of us giggling again at my insistence at
trying on her little minidress" [p. 16]). Not to mention her addiction
to masturbating as she rolls her rosary beads, an activity that moves
from curious to tedious after, say, the tenth occurrence.
In contrast, Vel engages us from the first page. In fact, in the
bivocal middle section, which serves as a prelude to Vel's narrative,
we find ourselves skipping over Lilla's self-indulgent lines, which
only repeat what we just endured reading, and focusing instead on Vel's
lines, which not only provide new information but also sound a lot more
interesting. Vel's narrative is fresh, flows smoothly, develops naturally,
reads realistically; and Vel is three-dimensional, convincing—in
that we understand her motivation and purpose—likable, and most
of all, compelling:
[End Page 106]
Now begin the scourge and blight. The second session. I just look at
granny granny look at me. Wasn't nothing to say. We did know wasn't
nothing to say. Them few dollars that I had saving from the canes, them
dollars finish before the month out. Wash from my hands before the month
out. Wasn't no food left now. No more money and no more food. All we could
do is scrape by best as we could. (Blessed Is the Fruit, p. 299)
One wonders why a white writer, presumably with a plantocrat background,
should have such difficulty in constructing a white character of a
presumably similar background, and such obvious ease in constructing a
black one of a background of which he has no firsthand experience. The
observation that the book's dedication is to Lilla and Vel gives us a
clue to the fact (later confirmed in an interview with the author)
35
that these characters are based on real people. Is he too close to
the subject matter of Lilla, but with Vel has attained a distance that
enables? Surely this is not the full answer.
White West Indian fiction traditionally features the black female
servant as the only significant black character, because she
would presumably be the black figure with whom the white author had
principal contact—but usually the nanny portrayal lapses into a
cliché, be it of faithfulness (like Allfrey's Lally or Drayton's
Gip) or the ominous unknown (Rhys's Christophine). Antoni transcends such
limitations. He undoubtedly romanticizes the hardworking, fate-battered
Vel but also seems to have enjoyed creating her. On the other hand, the
creation of Lilla, in its studied deromanticization of the plantation
belle, its relentless subversion of the chaste devout Catholic, its
dogged revisiting of the Antoinette story, appears to have been fraught
with difficulty and discomfort.
Whatever the reasons, whether consciously or subconsciously, deliberately
or accidentally, in Blessed Is the Fruit Robert Antoni effectively
disengages from his white character and embraces his black one. In
so doing he subverts his own conscious agenda of promoting interracial
sister- or brotherhood and envisioning a new Creole, creolized interracial
unity, by privileging blackness. And so he claims an identity one
thought he, as white West Indian, as French Creole, as elite minority,
would have despised.
Such a privileging reminds us of the novels of Anthony Winkler. Indeed,
in the voice of Vel, Antoni achieves the freshness and spontaneity of
many of Winkler's works. And a consideration of Antoni's problems with
Lilla brings to mind Winkler's admittedly less severe problems with
The Great Yacht Race, the only one of Winkler's novels that
does not have black protagonists and is not told from a black point of
view. In particular, The Painted Canoe and The Lunatic
project poor, suffering black men as heroes of humanity in the face of
adversity—Zachariah the deformed, cancer-ridden fisherman, Aloysius
[End Page 107]
the lunatic. As Winkler notes in his autobiographical Going Home
toTeach, "I, who had been born white, had internalized a black
identity" (p. 79). Elsewhere, he says that his country's black heartbeat
is his own.
36
Winkler's position, however—his embrace of blackness in his
fiction—is unique, firstly among the "white" West Indian writers
being considered in this essay, since unlike the others he can lay no
claim to any "touch of the tar brush" in his ancestry, and secondly
within the body of white West Indian writing as a whole—probably
because his background is also unique. Coming from a family of Lebanese
traders rather than plantocrats, he spent most of his formative years on
the lower edge of the middle class, and he grew up mixing with poor black
people. Like Cliff, then, part of him lives there. And, being Lebanese,
he would have been excluded from the plantocrat mainstream. Whatever
his reasons, his affection for the black Jamaican, and Jamaican foibles
and eccentricities, is conveyed in his warm, hilarious, romping novels,
which generally read as fresh and unpretentious, not to mention "out of
order" and outrageous, and thus are immensely popular with Jamaicans of
all colors and creeds.
The exception to this rule, as suggested earlier, is The Great
Yacht Race. This, his least popular novel, reads as much more
self-conscious, stilted, and effortful than the others (and in fact
it was his most effortful, going through many drafts before the final
published version was arrived at). The first draft of this work was
Winkler's first attempt at a West Indian-based novel (although the
novel was finally published after two others, The PaintedCanoe
and The Lunatic); so its effortfulness may be partly attributed to
this fact. But one wonders, in addition, whether Winkler may be unable
to achieve the necessary distance from his subject matter because the
protagonists in this novel are mainly white and brown; or whether,
to the contrary, he is alienated, or has alienated himself, from his
subject matter. To quote again from Going Home to Teach: "There
were only periodic and welcome interludes of relief when I was not made
painfully aware of being clothed in a loathsome skin" (p. 111).
Winkler's description of his skin as loathsome is not merely his
projection of the assumed view of the black majority surrounding him. As
he says earlier in Going Home to Teach, "if I had been born black
and poor in one of Jamaica's mephitic slums, I too would have hated
the sight of a white skin and been just as inclined as [some street
urchins who attacked him] to kick and thump and abase me on the street"
(p. 16). His obvious endorsement of any hostility held by blacks toward
whites is evident in his negative depictions of white people in all the
novels other than The Great Yacht Race: for
[End Page 108]
example, the mad nihilist doctor in The Painted Canoe, the sexual
fascist Inga and the racist Busha and his wife in The Lunatic,
the narrow-minded American philosopher, the fanatical American students
and indeed the entire demented, racist white population of America
in TheDuppy. (One is reminded of the picture painted by Antoni,
through Lilla's narrative in Blessed Is the Fruit, of the bigoted,
racist "highwhites" of Corpus Christi.) Very often the adversity that is
fought against by Winkler's black heroes, who represent the compassionate
side of humanity, is embodied in these white characters: "This man was
the white man—the Backra, the Busha, the Boss—whatever name
you gave him, he was not the one who threw his body into the sea and went
after the coins. It was the other [black] one who did the diving—for
half the money" (The Lunatic, p. 310).
Do contemporary white or near-white West Indian writers need to escape,
in one way or another, from whiteness, from "being clothed in a loathsome
skin," in order to shed all the white man's burdens of guilt, angst,
marginalization and unbelonging that may be weighing down their works? If
so, is this yet another manifestation of our schizophrenic, polarized
Caribbean identity?
Yes and no. In the case of Blessed Is the Fruit, Antoni's
presumably unintentional subversion of his conscious agenda of
interracial unity by the privileging of blackness, in fact subverts
the subversion—because as we celebrate the white person's
celebration of the black one we inevitably celebrate the coexistence
of both—returning eventually and indirectly to the vision of a
Creole cohesion—one that we glimpsed briefly in Melville's writing,
one that was trying not to be submerged by intellectual weightiness in
Antoni's Divina Trace and Scott's Witchbroom, one that
may generally be in short supply in Caribbean works.
Brathwaite concludes his 1971 study, The Development ofCreole Society
in Jamaica, 1770-1820, with the following:
It remains to be seen whether the society will remain conceived of
as plural—the historical dichotomy becoming the norm—or
whether the process of creolization will be resumed in such a way that
the 'little' tradition of the (ex-)slaves will be able to achieve the
kind of articulation, centrality, prestige and influence . . . that will
provide a basis for creative reconstruction. Such a base . . . could
well support the development of a new parochial wholeness, a difficult
but possible creole authenticity.
37
By privileging the "little" tradition of ex-slaves, Antoni (however
unintentionally or perversely) in Blessed Is theFruit, but most
especially Winkler in nearly all of his works, may be helping to support
the development of this difficult but possible Creole
[End Page 109]
authenticity. And they may be doing this more successfully than Cliff
and Ford-Smith have done in their own privileging of blackness, during
their often painful, sometimes (in Cliff's case) labored quest toward
an understanding of their hybrid Creole selves; and perhaps more so
than Melville, the self-proclaimed "champion of mixtures and hybrids,"
has so far achieved in her multicultural yet slightly static fiction.
Kim Robinson-Walcott holds a Ph.D. in English from the University
of the West Indies, Mona. She is the coauthor (with Petrine Archer-Straw)
of Jamaican Art (1990) and author of the children's book Dale's
Mango Tree (1992), which she also illustrated. A number of her short
stories have been published in journals and anthologies. She currently
works as editor of books and monographs at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute
of Social and Economic Studies, University of the West Indies, Mona,
Jamaica.
Footnotes
1.
The People's National Party's 1997 election campaign highlighted the issue
of race by comparing the ability of the black PNP and white JLP (Jamaica
Labour Party) leaders to merge in terms of physical appearance with the
people they were supposed to be representing. This issue is referred to
by Peter Espeut in his election-eve column "Telling Believable Lies," in
which he says that "what we are getting is what Trinidadians call 'picong'
bantering about colour and race" (Daily Gleaner, 17 December 1997,
A4); and it is commented on by Morris Cargill in his postelection column
"Returning to the Battle" (DailyGleaner, 15 January 1998, A4):
"It is clearly and understandably against the wishes of a large number
of people that whites should be in a dominant public position. . . .
It should be obvious that we cannot any longer have a major political
party led by a member of a small and fast disappearing minority."
2.
Don Robotham, Vision and Voluntarism: Reviving Voluntarism in
Jamaica, Grace, Kennedy Foundation Lecture, 1998 (Kingston: The Grace,
Kennedy Foundation, 1998), 57-59.
3.
Diana McCaulay's column, "DB's New Girlfriend," Sunday Gleaner, 18
January 1998, 9A, was about her Dearly Beloved's newly acquired Cherokee
Jeep. This, as well as Christine Nunes's piece of the previous week,
"The Best Things in Life," Sunday Gleaner, 11 January 1998,
9A, resulted in an aggrieved letter to the editor ("Gleaner
Columnists," Daily Gleaner, 31 January 1998, A5) in which the
writer, E. H. Y., said that "every once in a while, Ms. McCaulay and
Mrs. [sic] Nunes seem to go off on a tangent and endeavour to
educate us about the finer things in life such as sipping tea from
real China teacups, skiing or DB's new 'girlfriend'. . . . I'd buy a
Jeep Cherokee tomorrow if I was earning the money they obviously are,
but I wouldn't feel the need to write and tell you all about it."
4.
In his column "On Obesity, Dogs and Party Problems," Sunday
Gleaner, 14 December 1997, 9A, Morris Cargill said of his dog
Peanuts, "He is highly intelligent and I often think of getting him
into politics but he is white, and as we all know, few people seem
to think that whites can be rated as true Jamaicans. Indeed, as I
have noted before in this column, Jamaican whites, like coneys and
green parrots, are a fast disappearing species. By the middle of next
century I don't think any will be left." Christine Nunes, in her piece
"Looking at the Caribbean From Outside," DailyGleaner, 9 December
1997, A16, says, "Increasingly I am feeling like an outsider in my own
country. Anthony Winkler, in 'Coming [sic] Home to Teach' conveys
this feeling very well. . . . Increasingly, because my skin is white, I
am rejected by my countrymen, yet I have no other passport, nor do I have
permission to live and work elsewhere." In her Gleaner column of
28 August 1995, titled "Real Jamaicans" (9A, 10A), Diana McCaulay said,
"I have a friend who insists that I am not a Jamaican . . . because
I am white. Growing up, I soon realized that I would never enjoy what
Anthony Winkler described as that 'most fundamental of freedoms in my
own country, anonymity in a public place'. . . . I often feel Jamaica
has never accepted me . . . they conclude that if you criticize the
cruelty, incompetence and corruption . . . you should emigrate. What
is meant but not usually said is: you don't belong here anyway." (It
should be noted that this column appeared shortly after the writer was
hauled over the coals for an unfortunate reference in a previous column
["When a Man Cleans House," Daily Gleaner, 30 July 1995, 4A] to
running out of clean underwear because she was without a domestic helper.)
5.
Anthony Winkler, Going Home to Teach (Kingston: Kingston
Publishers, 1995), 162. Subsequent references to this work appear
parenthetically in the text.
6.
Brian Antoni, Paradise Overdose (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1994), 105.
7.
Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background
(London: Faber and Faber, 1970).
8.
Edward Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity
andIntegration in the Caribbean (1974; reprint, Mona, Jamaica:
Savacou Publications, 1985), 38.
10.
Evelyn O'Callaghan, "'Jumping Into the Big Ups' Quarrels': The
Hulme/Brathwaite Exchange," 15th Annual Conference in West Indian
Literature, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, 1996.
11.
Michelle Cliff, The Land of Look Behind (Ithaca: Firebrand Books,
1985), 59. Subsequent references to this work appear parenthetically in
the text.
12.
Michelle Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise
(Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1980), 6. Subsequent references to
this work appear parenthetically in the text.
13.
Michelle Cliff, Abeng (London: Penguin, 1991; first published
by The Crossing Press, 1984). Subsequent references to this work appear
parenthetically in the text.
14.
Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (1987; reprint, New York:
Vintage International-Random House, 1989).
15.
Michelle Cliff, "Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character," Caribbean
Women Writers (Wellesley, MA: Calaloux Publications, 1990). Cliff
expounds on the meaning she attaches to the name: "Her first name means. . . light-skinned, . . . and light-skinnedness in the world in which
Clare originates . . . stands for privilege, civilization, erasure,
forgetting. . . . Her surname . . . is meant to evoke the wildness
that has been bleached from her skin. . . . A knowledge of history,
the past, has been bleached from her mind. . . . She is fragmented,
damaged, incomplete," 265.
16.
Michelle Cliff, Free Enterprise (London: Penguin, 1995; first
published by Dutton, New York, 1993).
17.
Michelle Cliff, personal interview, St. George's, Grenada, 21 May 1998.
18.
Michelle Cliff, The Store of a Million Items (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1998). Subsequent references to this work appear parenthetically
in the text.
19.
Honor Ford-Smith, My Mother's Last Dance (Toronto: Sister Vision:
Black Women and Women of Colour Press, 1997). Subsequent references to
this work appear parenthetically in the text.
20.
Honor Ford-Smith, "Grandma's Estate," Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of
Jamaican Women, Sistren with Honor Ford-Smith (London: The Women's
Press, 1986), 181.
21.
Cliff, "Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character," 263-68.
22.
Pauline Melville, "Beyond the Pale," Daughters of Africa: An
International Anthology ofWords and Writings by Women of African Descent
from the AncientEgyptian to the Present, ed. Margaret Busby (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1992), 739-43. Subsequent references to this work appear
parenthetically in the text.
23.
Antonio Benítez-Rojo, "Three Words Toward Creolization,"
Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of
Language, Literature, and Identity, ed. Kathleen M. Balutansky
and Marie-Agnes Sourieau (Gainesville: University Press of Florida;
and Kingston: The Press, University of the West Indies, 1998), 61. See
chapter 1.
24.
Pauline Melville, Shape-shifter (1990; reprint, London: Picador,
1991). Subsequent references to this work appear parenthetically in
the text.
25.
Pauline Melville, The Ventriloquist's Tale (London: Bloomsbury,
1997). Subsequent references to this work appear parenthetically in
the text.
27.
Pauline Melville, The Migration of Ghosts (London: Bloomsbury,
1998).
28.
Robert Antoni, personal interview, Kingston, Jamaica, 29 April 1998.
29.
Robert Antoni, Divina Trace (New York: The Overlook Press,
1992); Robert Antoni, Blessed Is the Fruit (New York: Henry Holt,
1997). Subsequent references to these works appear parenthetically in
the text.
30.
Jane Bryce, "From Carnivalesque to Carnival or Who Foolin'
Who?—Robert Antoni's Divina Trace," 12th Annual Conference
on West Indian Literature, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica,
1993.
31.
Benítez-Rojo, "Three Words Toward Creolization," 61.
Copyright
© 2003 Small Axe Incorporated. All
rights reserved.![[Project Muse]](/images/b_muse.gif){kind=small}
![[Search Page]](/images/b_search.gif){kind=small}
![[Journals]](/images/b_journals.gif){kind=small}
![[This Journal]](/images/b_thisjournal.gif){kind=small}
![[Top]](/images/b_contents.gif){kind=small}
[Access article in PDF]
![[Top]](/images/b_top.gif){kind=small}