Carnivalizing Imoinda’s Silence

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze Joan Anim-Addo’s libretto Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name (2008) and illustrate how its narrative poetry generates a speculative, gendered history around the slave past. Informed by Srinivas Aravamudan’s observation of parodic subversion in the afterlives of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), I return to Anim-Addo’s oeuvre in order to read Imoinda as a work that counter-writes the colonial gaze of “Western” knowledge. By centering on Caribbean carnival as the performance context for the libretto, I examine how histories of rebellion and survival carried out by enslaved Africans and their descendants unfold through the libretto’s narrative poetry. I argue that Imoinda, under the guise of artistic forms associated with “the West,” breaks from Eurocentric perspectives that misrepresented subaltern struggles while ushering forth the question of “who speaks?” in critical discourses. I conclude by aligning Anim-Addo’s Imoinda in relation to Sylvia Wynter’s conceptualization of “demonic grounds” to highlight a transformative epistemic space of Caribbean women’s literature.