Mwen na rien, Msieu": Jamaica Kincaid and the Problem of Creole Gnosis

Abstract

When I asked the Caribbean critic whose manuscript on Black feminist themes I was reviewing why she had not included a discussion of Erna Brodber's work in her study, she told me she had run out of time. Later, when the constraints of my role as reviewer no longer mattered, she offered me another explanation: her good friend had committed suicide. It happened around the time that she had been trying to write about Brodber, trying to work out how to discuss Brodber's takes on madness in Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home and spirit possession in Myal. After the suicide, the evil spirits that had sent her friend plunging to destruction, like the biblical Gadare- nian swine, tried to invade the critic's body. She had wrestled with them nightly, swinging between a languorous attraction to the pleasures they seemed to offer and a lurching dread of the evil they represented. She identified with Brodber's views on spiritual renewal and cultural affirmation, yet she could not help feeling that Brodber, by invoking this spiritual world through the folk culture, was dabbling with forces of evil, allowing Satan's minions a space and power that could ultimately destroy her reader. The critic had prayed her way through the writing and emerged stronger, spiritually. But she had left out the chapter on Brodber. I went back to the manuscript after our conversation in search of the traces of this fearsome battle. There were very few. The critic was smart on theory, accurate on history. Her footnotes were in place, her analyses worked. But where was the passion that had been part of our conversation? Why hadn't she had it out with those demons on the page instead of arguing with Chodorow? Why didn't she spell out for her reader the spiritual striving that informed her readings instead of belaboring her texts' connections to the development of the European bildungsroman? Her struggle with the meaning of the spiritual forces around her mirrored that of Brodber's characters. Indeed, the very passion of her resistance to Brodber's text made her in some ways its ideal reader. But there was no gnosis, no sanctioned code for articulat- ing Caribbean systems of belief and knowledge, through which the spiritual battle she had experienced could be incorporated into her academic text, even though Brodber's novels take precisely this problem of articulation as their point of departure.