“Through some kind of veil”: Queering Race and the Maternal in Patricia Powell’sThe Pagoda

Abstract

AbstractPatricia Powell’s The Pagoda, published in 1998, is an aesthetic actualization of the in-betweenness of Jamaica’s purported self-definition as diasporic, hybrid, multiple. Jamaica, as with many countries in the Caribbean that withstood and resisted their respective European colonizing nations, is a site that makes visible its histories of Indigenous servitude and genocide, the importing of African slaves and subsequent indentured laborers from Asia, and the continuous presence of hegemonic systems of repressive and ideological powers. Taking place in 1893, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire but well before Jamaican independence, Powell’s novel harkens back to Olive Senior’s parrot that finds itself caught between what was, what is, and the unavoidable shifts wrought by the invasion that is the British Empire (Senior 2005). Inasmuch as Senior’s parrot can be read as a reflection of Jamaica’s diasporic, hybrid, and multiple self-definition, I turn to Powell’s characters—specifically her protagonists Lowe and Miss Sylvie—to consider what purpose such an in-between can serve. I begin by arguing for a reading of Lowe as one who brings to the forefront the tensions of colonial logic by virtue of his race, gender, and sexuality, none of which are easily categorized, or indeed, easily known. I propose that, by situating Lowe, a Chinese Jamaican, both within and outside expected codes of racialized, gendered, and sexualized behaviors, The Pagoda lays bare the ways in which colonial logic—manifesting as demands for purity and order—derails any move toward liberation. If Lowe functions as the primary conduit of this argument, I contend that Miss Sylvie, his wife, offers an alternative venue for radical possibilities that fall outside the rigid conventions of 1890s Jamaica, a Black maternal that is always already the queer maternal, what I call in this article the “Black queer maternal”—a maternal that does not rely on reproduction, either literal or figurative, as its raison d’être. Powell challenges the colonial logic of discrete identity markers and categorizations in Lowe’s adopted country of residence, not to reverse it but to illuminate the unexpected possibilities that arise from the space of refusal, and the space of the diasporic, hybrid, multiple that is Jamaica.