The Image of the Indo-Caribbean Woman in Olive Senior's "The Arrival of the Snake Woman"

Abstract

This paper looks at the portrayal of the Indian woman in the contemporary literature of the anglophone Caribbean. It attempts to examine the processes of readjustment and accommodation, acculturation, interculturation and indigenization in its attempt to explore Indo-Caribbean female experience: the psychosocial and spiritual growth and the quest for identity within the context of the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean. It explores the Indian woman's claim to a place as home in the multiracial, multicultural Caribbean vis a vis a tradition of colonial discourse which privileges European possession of the discovered lands of the New World while several culturally discrete groups, displaced by colonialism and indentureship, jostle for ontological space and identity in the colonial social reality. dominant transplanted group in the Caribbean can be seen to have a protest registered against disinheritance and dispossession in Caliban's now famous words of anger hurled at Prospero: island's mine, by Sycorax my mother in Shakespeare's political allegory Tempest. Many West Indian authors have portrayed various aspects of Indo-Caribbean female experience' and I have chosen to examine Olive Senior's short story, The Arrival of the Snake Woman2 because it seems to present a culmination of all the phases of readjustment and accommodation inherent in migration and displacement. It starts at the beginning of the process with the woman as an alien and works its way through the alienation and isolation of the exile, colonial victimization and racial exclusion to the conscious decision to integrate culturally and also to address the issue of her tentative hold on land and home. This paper also reveals that this short story is counterdiscursive: it depicts resistance to the colonial power base and questions the centre/ margin paradigm of dominant discourse in a manner which characterizes post-colonial writing. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin address themselves in Empire Writes Back (Routledge, 1989) to the question of the dismantling of the power hierarchy entrenched in colonial texts, the abrogation of European power and its false premises, the reappropriation of indigenous cultural forms and the recognition that hybridity and syncreticity are the most viable means to recuperation and selfhood in the semiotics of postcolonial writing and, although Senior's short story is not itself a rewriting of a colonial text, it is newer writing which intervenes in and resists dominant discourse about the other. It relates how the Indo-Caribbean woman manages in the colonial minefield. Senior's short story depicts a plural society in what is unmistakably colonial Jamaica, the temporal setting estimated at the first half of the twentieth century. At its heart, the work portrays racial antagonisms, cultural differences, alienation, exclu