Petrifyin’: Canonical Counter-Discourse in Two Caribbean Women’s Medusa Poems

Phillip Zapkin

doi:10.3390/h11010024

Abstract

This essay utilizes Helen Tiffin’s idea of canonical counter-discourse to read the Medusa poems of Shara McCallum and Dorothea Smartt, two female Caribbean poets. Essentially, canonical counter-discourse involves authors rewriting works or giving voice to peripheral/silenced characters from the literary canon to challenge inequalities upheld by power structures such as imperialism and patriarchy. McCallum’s and Smartt’s poems represent Medusa to reflect their own concerns as women of color from Jamaica and Barbados, respectively. McCallum’s “Madwoman as Rasta Medusa” aligns the titular character from her book Madwoman with Medusa to express Madwoman’s righteous anger at the “wanton” and “gravalicious” ways of a Babylon addressed in second person. Smartt’s series of Medusa poems from Connecting Medium explore the pain of hair and skin treatments Black women endure to try and meet Euro-centric beauty standards, as well as the struggles of immigrants, particularly people of color. Both poets claim Medusa as kindred, empowering Medusa as a figure with agency—which she is denied in the Greco-Roman sources—and simultaneously legitimizing both Caribbean literature and the poets’ feminist and post-colonial protests by linking them to the cultural capital of the classics.

Highlights

What does it mean for African/diasporic writers to reclaim Medusa? What does it mean for feminist writers to reclaim Medusa?In addition, perhaps more provocatively, does the verb reclaim problematically locate ownership of Medusa in a literary/mythic space controlled by authors who are white and male?Emily Greenwood writes, “A dominant theme in the existing literature is the appar‐ent incongruity of classics in the context of the Caribbean, where the discipline would seem to be on the wrong side of the racial, imperial, and political oppositions that have divided the region historically” (Greenwood 2005, p. 65)
Classics were taught in West Indian education systems, along with British literature, as part of a systematic imposition of British/European culture meant to overwrite the multicultural blending of various West African, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Indigenous traditions alongside Brit‐
This essay utilizes the idea of canonical counter‐discourse to read the Medusa poems of Shara McCallum and Dorothea Smartt, poets from Jamaica and Barbados, respectively

Summary

Introduction

What does it mean for African/diasporic writers to reclaim Medusa? What does it mean for feminist writers to reclaim Medusa?. This popularity is due to authors’ rewriting of classical material to challenge the hierarchical and imperialist as‐. Tiffin theorizes what she calls canonical counter‐discourse, which is a specific way post‐. This essay utilizes the idea of canonical counter‐discourse to read the Medusa poems of Shara McCallum and Dorothea Smartt, poets from Jamaica and Barbados, respectively. I am reading McCallum’s “Madwoman as Rasta Medusa” and a series of Smartt’s poems from the book Connecting Medium, arguing that these poems utilize the Medusa myth to challenge both imperialist and gendered structures of domination.. The poems utilize canonical counter‐discourse to promote a liberatory intersectional mes‐. This is followed by sections on how these poems utilize canonical counter‐dis‐.

Medusa’s Biography

McCallum’s Medusa

Smartt’s Medusa

Medusa Poems as Feminist Canonical Counter‐Discourse

Medusa Poems as Post‐Colonial Canonical Counter‐Discourse

Conclusions