Revisioning Our Kumblas: Transforming Feminist and Nationalist Agendas in Three Caribbean Women's Texts

Abstract

Caribbean women share with feminists and nationalists a number of literary agendas common to modernist writing in the twentieth century. These include the search for an identity that acknowledges or transcends the fragmentation and alienation of modern life, a concern with origins, and a questioning of the psychological needs and cultural myths which drive such searches. Like their feminist sisters elsewhere in the modern world, Caribbean women frequently have turned inward to examine their personal experience as a way of naming the issues they deem pertinent to their search for a language and an identity. Like male writers in other postcolonial cultures, Caribbean women writers also look beyond themselves to the indigenous cultures of their region as a rich source of metaphor. This essay explores the ways in which three novels by Caribbean women transform and destabilize orthodox strategies of representing the female and/or colonial subject in feminist and nationalist texts. Such an exercise creates seductive opportunities for establishing new orthodoxies. I have tried to mitigate this tendency by naming at various points in the essay the ways in which other feminist or nationalist writers have arrived by different routes at transformative strategies similar to those I ascribe to Caribbean women writers. Conversely, in my conclusion I examine the extent to which the transformative power I ascribe to the work of Caribbean women writers is peculiarly constrained by class agendas within Caribbean society. One of the with many forms of feminist critical praxis is that, in their attempt to extricate themselves from dependency on a male-dominated literary discourse which retards our progress in solving our own theoretical problems (Showalter 246-47), feminist writers sometimes fail to challenge the assumption that the literary project, renamed and revised in the image of woman, is somehow purer, somehow closer to essential humanist ideals than the discursive traditions of men. This reduction of the agenda on a given issue to what seems an inevitable polarity between self and other is a familiar paradigm in many forms of Western discourse. As Donna Haraway comments in her essay Manifesto for Cyborgs: American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formulations and physical artifacts associated with 'high technology' and scientific culture (Haraway 70-71). Haraway critiques both groups for having allowed themselves to run aground on Western epistemological imperatives to construct a revolutionary subject from the per