The Body of the Woman in the Body of the Text: the Novels of Erna Brodber

Abstract

Erna Brodber has written three novels to date;1 the first of these, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, was published in 1980, Myal in 1988 and Louisiana in 1994. Her prolific output is very much a part of the ‘boom’ in Caribbean women’s writing from the 1980s onwards and places her centrally in relation to what is now becoming a well-established Caribbean woman’s literary tradition. Brodber’s novels are notoriously ‘difficult’ to read and this ‘difficulty factor’ is perhaps exaggerated because of the predominant trend in Caribbean fiction for some form of realism to be the chosen mode of representation. While Caribbean women writers, as a group, have been described as taking more risks with style than their male counterparts, Brodber is certainly the most obviously experimental of these women writers. In this respect, her work has been compared to that of Wilson Harris, often inducing the same kind of (often bemused) respect.