Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature: Remitting the Text (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures, 29)

Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature

ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently) colonized areas, and will include material from non-anglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures. Series editors: Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney. 1 Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye by Brenda Cooper 2 The Postcolonial Jane Austen edited by You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan 3 Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style by Denisede Caires Narain 4 African Literature, Animism and Politics by Caroline Rooney 5 Caribbean–English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition by Tobias Döring 6 Islands in History and Representation edited by Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith 7 Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India, 1822–1922 by Anindyo Roy 8 Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: ‘A Hot Place, Belonging To Us’ by Evelyn O’Callaghan 9 Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the body by Michelle Keown 10 Writing Woman, Writing Place: Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction by Sue Kossew 11 Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence by Priyamvada Gopal 12 Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire by Terry Collits 13 American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination by Paul Lyons 14 Decolonizing Culture in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction by Susan Y. Najita 15 Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place by Minoli Salgado 16 Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary by Vijay Mishra 17 Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English by Neelam Srivastava 18 English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics by Pramod K. Nayar 19 Decolonising Gender: Literature, Enlightenment and the Feminine Real by Caroline Rooney 20 Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography by David Huddart 21 Contemporary Arab Women Writers by Anastasia Valassopoulos 22 Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire by Ben Grant 24 Land and Nationalism in Fictions from Southern Africa by James Graham 25 Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden by Sharae Deckard 26 The Idea of the Antipodes: Place, People, and Voices by Matthew Boyd Goldie 27 Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation edited by Sorcha Gunne and Zoë Brigley Thompson 28 Locating Transnational Ideals edited by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio 29 Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature: Remitting the Text by Kezia Page Related Titles: Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation by Bart Moore-Gilbert

Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature Remitting the Text

Kezia Page

NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, OX144RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, NewYork, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2011 Kezia Page This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. The right of Kezia Page to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now know nor hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Page, Kezia Ann. Transnational negotiations in Caribbean diasporic literature : remitting the text / by Kezia Page. p. cm.—(Routledge research in postcolonial literatures ; v. 29) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Caribbean literature (English)—History and criticism. 2. American literature—Caribbean American authors—History and criticism. 3. English literature—Caribbean authors—History and criticism. 4. Emigration and immigration in literature. 5. Displacement (Psychology) in literature. 6. Caribbean Area—In literature. I. Title. PR9205.05.P34 2010 810.9'3552—dc22 2010007760

ISBN13: 978-0-415-87362-8 (hbk)

For Matthias Andrew and Alexandra Grace

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1

2

3

ix 1

Creating Diaspora: Caribbean Migrant Literature in England and North America, 1930s–1960s

15

Migrant Bodies, Scars and Tattoos: Art as Terror and Transformation in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother I’m Dying and The Dew Breaker

43

“Two places can make children?”: Metaphysics, Authorship and the Borders of Diaspora

64

4

Rethinking a Caribbean Literary Economy: Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother and Beryl Gilroy’s Frangipani House as Remittance Texts 82

5

“No Abiding City”: Theorizing Deportation in Caribbean Migrant Fiction

103

Afterword: On the Edge of the World

126

Notes Bibliography Index

131 139 149

Acknowledgments

I benefited greatly from the NEH funded Scholar-in-Residence program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture which allowed me a semester to work on the manuscript. Colin Palmer and the other historians kept me on my toes, thank you. Sandra Paquet knew this project from when it was little. I thank her for her continued guidance and celebrate her indomitable spirit that has made Caribbean Studies at the University of Miami. Curdella Forbes, Donette Francis and Michelle Stephens have been very generous with their time and insights. I am deeply indebted to each of them for their careful prodding, their intellectual kindness and their calm. Because of the multidisciplinary nature of this study I received gracious help from random places: many thanks to Natalie Leiba at the Planning Institute of Jamaica and to Andrew Holness Esquire for the legal counsel. The Colgate University English Department has been an encouraging and giving academic home. I thank my colleagues for their generous support. Thanks to the folks who have been cheering for me in the bleachers: Pat Saunders, Rhonda Denise, Faith Smith, Alison Donnell, Nelia Watten, Hope Lovemore, Thelma Yvonne, Christine Hunter, Konrad Kirlew, The Fagons, Ellie and Nigel Bolland, Brian Moore, Amy Feinstein and Emily Sun. My parents John and Freddie Page were always very confident that I could do this. Thank you for the expert care over the chain of miles, for your love and prayers. Thanks also to my sister Sacha who I sometimes dream to be my personal librarian and chef. In the next scene, thank you Volnie for cleaning up after her. Andrew Fagon shoveled snow and washed dishes so that this book could get to the press—always with the baby monitor on his waist. Thanks for giving me the space to work while staying close. My deep love and gratitude.

Introduction

In undertaking this socio-cultural study of Caribbean migrant and diaspora fiction in North America and England, Remitting the Text responds to the general trend in migration discourse that presents the Caribbean experience as unidirectional and uniform across the geographical spaces of the region1 and its diaspora. I argue that engaging the Caribbean diaspora and the massive waves of migration from the region that have punctuated its history requires not merely understanding communities in migrant locations and the confl icted identities of second generation migrant subjectivities, but also interpreting how these communities interrelate with, affect and are affected by communities in the region itself. This book is therefore a rethinking of the Caribbean diaspora not in deterritorialized terms, but with attention to issues of regional sovereignty and national identity as much as issues of diasporan belonging. In adopting this “two placed” gaze, Remitting the Text avoids the imbalance by which the diasporan swallows up the “local” or the local and diasporan are seen as exclusive categories with the former as a disreputable (identified with colonial categories of nation or exile) or obsolete voice on the margins. In reading Caribbean migrant routes as border crossings which nevertheless re-inscribe distinct differences between diasporan spaces and the regional Caribbean, I focus specifically on how identity politics are configured according to different but related sets of dynamics in diaspora and the local space and also on how transnational alliances that inform diaspora identities, especially for second generation migrants, create gaps as well as dialogues between the local space and diaspora. I consider these propositions via a study of selected migrant fiction and a study of cultural, political and legal practices represented in texts and documents from the fields of history, sociology, economics and law. I join the two strands of my study by examining the socio-economic and political practices of remit/tance and deportation, exploring how they function as tropes in migrant literature, and as ways of theorizing such literature. In this light, Remitting the Text engages issues of authorship/authority (remit) as well as issues of return (remittance) within a political economy in which literature, monetary and other material

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Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature

outflows, and state sanctioned acts like deportation are seen to participate. I pay attention to how categories such as home and migrancy, region and diaspora, local and global, are layered by historical moment and the continuities and discontinuities of historical events and experiences. The concept of diaspora as used in postcolonial discourse has garnered a recognizable set of discourses intended to mark a distinct shift in the way issues of belonging and citizenship are understood. In that sense, and perhaps ironically, given the way diasporan thought invests in ideas of decentering, diasporan theory is built around polarities, chiefly between diaspora and exile, transnationality and provinciality, the global and the local. In the latter instance, as Alison Donnell points out in Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature, the local is evoked by its absence from discourse, as the late twentieth century turn towards the diasporan imaginary functions to erase those who remain within the geographical borders of the nation. Paul Gilroy’s 1994 Black Atlantic is emblematic of the arrival of diaspora as acts and spaces of empowerment. The ideal diasporan subject develops multiple subjectivities that cross boundaries of culture, nation and location. The territories of the center are destabilized by ideal postcolonial migrant subjects. At the heart of this understanding of diaspora are notions of fluidity, transit, negotiation by which the migrant (more especially the migrant writer) is able to own home or take up confident residence in new spaces yet remain ineluctably in transit. Diasporan discourse resists the perceived binaries of colonial discourse by which migrant writers saw themselves as being in exile from a singular nation home. In Caribbean scholarship, even theorists who did not directly address diaspora spoke or have been understood within this frame: Antonio Benítez Rojo in The Repeating Island articulates a poetics that privileges the Caribbean region as a geographical and cultural space, but does so drawing on theoretical constructs that resonate in diasporan discourse. Benítez Rojo places the Caribbean in the larger frame of a diaspora of “Peoples of the Sea;” in addition, he globalizes the Caribbean by reference to postmodernist theory. In Benítez Rojo’s presentation, the Caribbean appears as a prototype of the open borders and cross-border negotiation that gives diaspora currency. This allows his work, albeit dubiously, to be appropriated within hegemonic diasporan imaginaries. Stuart Hall’s theorization of diaspora, despite its nuancing of the ways in which identity is constructed between migrant and original home locations, has been read to privilege a diasporan perspective arguably because he writes out of diasporan space. Gloria Anzalduá’s celebration of “the new mestiza” has become a classic of the diasporan perspective since its publication in 1987, even though Anzalduá carefully localizes her poetics to a Mexican-Chicana frame that moreover emphasizes the trauma inherent in border crossing. In Caribbean feminist studies, articulations such as Carol Boyce Davies’ Migrations of the Subject and Belinda Edmondson’s Making Men argue that

Introduction

3

African diaspora and migrant Caribbean women writers, respectively, are able to develop migratory subjectivities within the ultimately equalizing migrant space. In Impossible Desires Gayatri Gopinath, writing from a queer perspective out of the South Asian context, notes that too often the nation is an “imaginary homeland frozen in an idyllic moment outside history” (4). Gopinath’s statement highlights the polarity imagined between nation and diaspora; she sets out to trouble this by arguing that “viewing the (home) nation through the analytical frame of diaspora allows for a reconsideration of the traditionally heierarchical relation between nation and diaspora, where the former is seen as merely an impoverished imitation of an originary national culture” (7). By setting out to redeem diaspora from its position of disprivilege in nationalist discourse, Gopinath reinforces the hegemony of diaspora rather than challenging the imbalance by which the geographical nation space is written out of discourse. Diasporan discourse deconstructs itself at the point where fluidity, multiplicity, relationality, in-betweenity and flux stop at the borders of the diaspora itself, the point where nation or place of origin has provenance only in its diasporan face; that is, where only its extension within diasporan locales is taken into consideration. Non-Caribbean as well as Caribbean scholars2 have celebrated the Caribbean as a cultural and geographical region that contributes something seminal to diasporan modalities, not only by way of its migrants but by its nature as an intrinsically postmodern society that thrives on multiplicities and negotiations among modalities. Yet what most diasporan perspectives that invoke the Caribbean have in common is a turn of the face towards the migrant location, with a corollary erasure of the Caribbean perspective as expressed in and from its geographical location. Such perspectives, inadvertently or not, defi ne Caribbean in purely diasporan terms, and moreover by explicitly or implicitly identifying the regional space with (obsolete) national borders, obscure the ways in which diasporan writers and transnational citizens constantly rehearse the relationship between diaspora and nation, the transnational and the local, and the in-betweenity of both the diasporan/ transnational and the national. A study of the literature shows that writers and citizens alike exhibit and practice not the ascendancy of diaspora but the mutual inter-dependency of the two locations; further, as Curdella Forbes has pointed out, they trouble the idea of diaspora and exile as conditions that are historically separate and diaspora as a seamless, ameliorative condition (From Nation to Diaspora). The imagined split by which writers prior to the 1980s were seen to write from a position of exile as opposed to contemporary writers who now write from a position of transnational accommodation, is also challenged by writers’ representations. Above all, the way Caribbean migrant writers turn their gaze towards the region, or what Donnell terms “the local” has as well been obscured. Obviously one reason for the shift to a diasporan perspective is that Caribbean communities have been planted in global cities somewhat in antithesis

4

Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature

to more isolated, tentative enclaves of individuals who in earlier times ventured to Europe and North America under specific restrictions such as the Canadian Domestic Workers Scheme; the Farm Workers Program; the colonial draft (soldiers for World Wars I and II); and the British Nationality Act of 1948. If global cities are characterized as the “combination of spatial dispersal and global integration [which] has created a new strategic role for major cities” (Sassen 3) it is arguable that as global control points, cities such as London, New York and Toronto automatically displace the geographical Caribbean as the site for cultural production. However, Neil Brenner and Roger Kell posit that “the identity and character of a global city is tied into the dominant mode of production: globality is defi ned by the scale of the world system—the large-scale framework of material, political and cultural life—in which the city is embedded. Cities are in turn connected in diverse, long distance relationships that are designed to maintain the world system as a whole” (20). Maintaining the world system as a whole within a city signifies contradictory forces at work. Whereas “ the world system” may be a euphemism for the cultural, political and economic hegemony of the West—that is, for centripetal forces within the city—the diverse long distance relationships that feed the city may fracture its monolithic identity, producing instead what Glissant calls “cluster[s] of [world] narratives” (102). It is the argument of this book that these centrifugal forces are ironically ignored in the diasporan gaze towards the metropolis. At the turn of the century a number of scholars have in various ways turned the attention back to “the local” while recognizing or utilizing the diasporan frame. Interestingly, their books all appeared between 2004 and 2006. Donnell’s Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature shifts attention from those in transit (diasporans) to those who occupy landed status (Caribbean subjects domiciled in the Caribbean region). Donnell turns attention to the writing and scholarship produced within the region itself; she reads this oeuvre to signify upon what she terms “critical moments” that have profoundly shaped Caribbean literature. For Donnell, these critical moments lead us to rethink the place of diaspora in defi ning Caribbean literature as well as the very defi nition of the literature itself. One hegemony that Donnell challenges is the imposition of diaspora poetics on Caribbean feminist thought (130–180). Forbes’ From Nation to Diaspora sets out to dismantle the malefemale critical binary that removed the male writers of what she terms “the fi rst generation” from gender discourse; in this way she troubles one aspect of the diaspora-exile divide. As Forbes also raises issues about the ways that the Caribbean is subsumed and swallowed within diaspora and postmodernist discourse, and the diasporan experience of gender presented in homogenizing terms (229–256). Forbes argues that in fact the “fi rst generation” Caribbean writers who have been exclusively associated with “nation” and “exile” laid the foundations for how gender is theorized in diasporan and postmodern locations and imaginaries.

Introduction

5

Shalini Puri, from a Marxist vantage point, returns to, critiques and revises ways of defi ning Caribbean established from within the region. Puri takes as her point of departure for her turn towards the region the irony by which the Caribbean is held up as the protosymbol of (transnational) hybridity yet is erased from the center of discourse in and of itself. She argues, “Caribbean discourses . . . undo the claim that hybridity and the nation-state are opposed to one another and enable a broader questioning of invocations of a ‘global village’ and the death of the nation state” (6). The strength of Puri’s analysis and her dougla poetics is that she includes Caribbean constituencies that are domiciled in diasporan locations but invents a tropological imaginary based in indigenous Caribbean cultural norms and practices. Like Puri, Brinda Mehta calls attention to ethnic modalities obliterated in globalized diaspora discourse. Mehta uses the title Diasporic (Dis)locations to turn the gaze on the history of Indo-Caribbean diaspora and diaspora writing from indenture to the present. Mehta brings together Indo-Caribbean women writers and citizens living in the region and those living in what is traditionally termed diaspora; she does so by invoking the Kala Pani, a term that references very specific local histories tied to the Indian experience of crossing the Atlantic to the New World. In figuring Indian arrival and identity negotiation in and outside the Caribbean in terms of a Middle Passage, Mehta adopts a vocabulary that draws on Afro-Caribbean tropes as well as Gilroy’s diasporan Black Atlantic, itself a refiguration of the Middle Passage. Mehta’s hybrid poetics, playing into postcolonial diasporan vocabulary but centering a Caribbean Indian experience and writers domiciled in the region, brings to the fore particularities of difference that are obscured in the diasporan perspective where it is the Afro-Caribbean diaspora that gains attention. What all these critics/theorists have in common is a perspective where a regional Caribbean location as a “speaking subject” is paramount. Remitting the Text also turns towards the local, not by theorizing the local but by theorizing how writers from the Caribbean diaspora have represented the questions raised earlier in this introduction, and how their representation radically shifts the relationship between the diasporan and the local. My focus is not on particularities such as gender, ethnicity, ideology or other categories of identification but on the wider complexities and modalities of this relationship. I show how, regardless of whether their politics are diasporan or nationalist, these writers turn our gaze back to the regional Caribbean as speaking subject. In considering the texts and contexts that form the basis of this book, I want to present the regional Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora not in terms of global/local, transnational/national, home/migrant space divides but with reference to their mutual negotiations and the contingencies by which they complicate each other. As stated before, I wish to place these locales within a more Janus faced two-way gaze.

6

Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature

I begin with the observation, made from other perspectives including those opposed to mine, that the local, or the regional Caribbean, has its own complicated ways of perceiving diaspora and diasporan subjects. The representations of diaspora within the region address the multiple modalities of a term that implicates the confluences and tensions among culture, identity and location. They draw attention to the difficulties of citizenship, placement, nationality, transnationality, displacement and uprootedness and recognize that these are not clear divides but issues and conditions that impact each other in states of shift and negotiation. Two terms that have currency in the Caribbean are “Kingston 21” and “The Tenth Department.” Both terms speak diaspora from a regional perspective, and are ways of presenting diaspora that recognize complexity but privilege the regional Caribbean in their conceptualization. On the island of Jamaica, the capital city of Kingston spills into the neighboring parish of St. Andrew; both together comprise the Corporate Area. This metropolitan area is organized by postal codes beginning with the tip of the southeasterly palisadoes, Port Royal, designated as Kingston 1, and ending with the Western District, Kingston 20. These zones, along with the Post Office districts in the rural areas, are one way in which the island is divided for civic purposes. Kingston 21, however, is not in the geographical space of Jamaica at all; rather it is a fictional classification used to refer to Miami and New York, metropolises that have swallowed so many Jamaicans that they now seem to be an extension of the island abroad. On the lips of Jamaicans at home “Kingston 21” is said with mock reservation: “almost Jamaica but not quite.” More broadly, “Kingston 21” represents locations outside of the islands and (South American) mainland countries washed by the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, with enough Caribbean denizens to make a noticeable difference to the face of the metropolis. The term was coined by Jamaicans in Jamaica to explain the “scattering” and “planting” of Jamaica abroad. Kingston 21 signifies Kingston expanded, Kingston come of age; that is, Kingston turned twenty-one. But the term speaks to a larger constituency: Kingston 21 focalizes the local within the global, turning inside out both diasporan discourse that erases the local, and nationalist discourse that has traditionally presented the Caribbean as the global within the local; that is, as a postmodern/cosmopolitan space where all the continents and cultures of the world meet (Hall, Lamming, Nettleford, Benítez Rojo). Haiti’s “Le Dixieme Departement” or tenth department was invoked and claimed by former president Jean–Bertrand Aristide for political reasons. Aristide during his presidential campaign published the “Lavalas Project” which sought to include all Haitian people in the political process wherever they might reside. The document states: “The Lavalas Movement, which has adopted a good project of government, supposes the participation of all citizens from all social classes. A special place will be reserved for peasants,

Introduction

7

women, all patriotic movements and all Haitians in diaspora” (qtd. in Caribbean Circuits 136). Aristide’s desire to recuperate and involve Haitians abroad was in direct opposition to the position the Duvaliers had taken in calling Haitian immigrants “kamoken, suspect and disloyal elements” (Caribbean Circuits 137). Aristide’s attempted inclusion of those marginalized from Haiti’s (mainstream) political process, his singling out of women, peasants and dyaspora 3 is clearly an attempt to redefi ne Haiti from the margins and to empower new constituents. Like “Kingston 21,” the tenth department is a way of conceptualizing diaspora in relation to the regional Caribbean rather than the reverse. They are terms that signify a different kind of locatedness, by restating the center not as diaspora but as the local. At the same time, these conceptual extensions signify upon a very complicated reality. Some migrants live poised for return, faces turned towards the original home location. Stories, not always apocryphal, abound of Caribbean subjects who have lived in the metropolises for many years, have even become citizens, yet keep under their beds a symbolically packed suitcase ready to return “home.” There are others, such as those who rushed to apply for citizenship only so that they could vote for Barack Obama as US President in 2009, who for many years remained permanent residents but refused the notion of naturalized citizenship. Yet these persons often perceive and enact their relation to the Caribbean “home” only by way of remittances—the sending and receiving of much needed goods and/or correspondence. This category of persons inhabit a psychological “two-ness” where the concept of home is constructed between two places/ spaces and between different criteria used to construct the needs of home that each space meets. The presence of such persons raises issues that go beyond concepts of fluidity and transit to issues about the relation among travel, transit and landedness, departure and arrival. The migrant space is also complicated by persons of the type that occupy a major place in Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. These include itinerant commuters, shoppers, traders and Informal Commercial Importers (ICIs) 4 and musicians, who treat the diasporan space as a trading center. Many of these itinerants come closest to modeling the fluid borderlessness that this study calls into question. Whether it is to purchase accoutrements that mark them as traveled, to live the warmer parts of the year in cooler climes or visit family or to sell their locally produced talent, none of these negotiators is purely diasporic. Each of them holds the Caribbean space as necessary: as the market for foreign bought goods or the space where their artistic products are inspired and authenticated. Their rootedness within the regional Caribbean home space is crucial to their diasporan circuits. To this picture we may add the Caribbean subjects domiciled in the region who exist in various relations to the diasporan space and who reconstruct the diasporan products—images, cultural texts (including food, money and clothing as well as literature) through local yet globally conditioned

8

Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature

lenses. These include writers, academics and critics as well as governments and general populace who live in the region. These often see themselves as co-producers, facilitators and judges of diasporan products. Equally complicated is the picture presented by diasporan writers themselves who take up a wide range of political positions ranging from Jamaica Kincaid’s and V.S. Naipaul’s rejection of Caribbean loyalties to Edwidge Danticat’s commitment to writing Haitian history to Erna Brodber’s envisioning of the Caribbean and African diasporas through Africanist poetics. While increasing numbers of writers now permanently live and write from within the region, historically most Caribbean writers have been migrants. Regardless of their political positions and whether their books are set in diasporan space or the geographical Caribbean, migrant writers craft subject matter, situations and characters that have made it possible to speak of something called Caribbean literature. It is clear that regardless of theoretics, one way or another these diverse groups who live in or travel through diaspora force our gaze towards the region itself and require a two-way vision of the relationship between diaspora and the region. Such a vantage point restores the region’s sovereignty as a speaking subject in diasporan space. Kingston 21 and the tenth department are just two examples that speak to this reality. How deportees are perceived from both locations adds another layer of complication to region-diaspora politics and the discourse of transnationality. The subjects of forced repatriation are proof that transnational negotiations have their limits and oftentimes fail. Their subjectivities are often complicated in ways others are not. For example, deportees often have no real connection with the geographical Caribbean, not being born there or having left at a very young age. If there is any connection, it is through cultural texts passed down from parents’ stories, tourist brochures or they themselves visiting as tourists. The withdrawal of legal residence or naturalized citizenship and the simultaneous imposition of another place of residence is a radical statement on subjectivity. Clearly citizenship is something that can be withdrawn and imposed especially when the state perceives security is at risk. For the deportable subject, the in-betweenness of diaspora is not something to be celebrated but ultimately feared. For deportees, the place that the repatriating state lists as home is not home at all, and indeed citizens of the country to which the deportee is “sent back” often do not perceive the deportee as belonging there. Instead, the deportee, particularly the criminal deportee, may be perceived as a foreign grown, foreign imposed product outside the borders of both Kingston 1–20 and Kingston 21, and Haiti and the tenth department. At the same time, diasporan space may not be truly “home” at all for the deportee, depending on the nature of the experience there. The figure of the deportee is the lowest denominator that tests the limits of diaspora as border crossing, even as it tests the limits of representing the Caribbean as a space without borders.

Introduction

9

As I discuss in Chapter 5, the deportee brings diaspora and region into a dialogue that subverts the hierarchical relationship between them. The notion of “remitting the text” allows me to theorize these issues in a particular way. Remit, in its many meanings and nounal as well as verbal extensions, always has to do with an issue of return. I am concerned with two of these meanings: fi rst, remit, one’s zone of authority or responsibility; remit, to refer or send back a matter to someone or some entity to whose zone of responsibility or authority it belongs; and remittance, something sent (returned) to a place or person elsewhere, usually as payment or economic support of some kind. From the negotiations that Caribbean writers make, it is clear that return is fundamental to their consciousness or ability to write. Apart from Naipaul, Kincaid is the writer most adversarial to the Caribbean, some would say to an identification with the Caribbean, yet she is one of the few migrant writers whose books are set almost exclusively in the region. Kincaid’s imaginative returns to the Caribbean make her writing possible. Indeed, neither exile nor diaspora can be considered outside of return, despite the different subject positions that drive return in each—in one, return functions as an antidote to displacement, in the other, a freedom is grasped to settle and grow in once alien places, but with the implicit understanding that there is an original family/nation tree in a specific other location to which one will eventually return or must return. Return may be performed in any number of ways: permanent physical return; commuting back and forth, so that one is able to own both places without relinquishing either; return as ideological and cultural imaginary, nurtured by cultural artifacts and exchanges (such as letters, visitors from “home” etc.); symbolic returns where the original home is kept alive through cultural practices. Psychological returns of the latter kinds are the example of diasporan “two-ness” or “in-betweenness” since they are inherently complicated by new psychologies and subjectivities that mutate the subject’s image and experience of the region. The fi rst set of meanings (remit) allows me to invoke the politics of writing as perceived by the writers discussed in this book. I discuss writers from different generations: George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Austin Clarke and briefly Claude McKay from the generation that most critics have identified with exile; contemporary writers Edwidge Danticat, Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid; and “half and halfer”5 Beryl Gilroy. All of them, from different perspectives, show the complications of writing from migrant space or diaspora. Each elucidates how “belonging to two places at once” produces anxiety around questions such as identity, audience and authority: how is the book to be identified, to whom is it directed, what are the terms on which the writer speaks and who judges the authenticity of literary speech? Most of the writers themselves explicitly or implicitly address these issues, directly evidencing the activism for which Caribbean writers are known. Equally as well, such issues arise from the writers’ attempt to

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Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature

negotiate the “in-betweenness” of diaspora, their consciousness of belonging to two constituencies at once, one in the regional Caribbean, the other in migrant/diasporan space. One argument I make is that the male writers of the 1930s–60s were as much involved in creating ideologies of diaspora as are contemporary theorists and critics, a far cry from the identification with exile that has become accepted wisdom in reading their work. (My argument highlights the doubleness of their attempt to speak directly to a Caribbean regional audience and to position their work as a form of cultural remittance (“product sent back”) to be authenticated in the region, while seeking to “plant” by infi ltration a Caribbean diaspora on foreign/imperial soil.) I therefore perceive the literary history between the early writers and contemporary writers in diaspora not as disjunctures but as intricate continuities and divergences. I examine the continuities and differences of the early writers’ project with the work of Edwidge Danticat, who writes from a subject position of nationality, transnationality and alienness, addressing identifiable audiences in Haiti, the Haitian dyaspora6 in the United States and communities of interest in the US as a whole. Danticat’s poetics of in-betweenness arise directly from the fraught history shared between Haiti and the United States and her awareness of how Haiti on the island of Hispaniola continues to have the most powerful impact on the dyaspora in the United States as much as the US and the dyaspora impact Haiti. Danticat also casts a searchlight on how remittances to Haiti, whether by way of cultural products or monetary returns, are received, judged and repackaged from a position of sovereignty within Haitian space by Haitian subjects. By directly addressing varied constituencies, Danticat highlights reading as a form of responsibility; she equally highlights the political nature of the artistic enterprise. Both she and Brodber employ a meta-narrative that explicitly brings art and artistic production into the ambit of issues of authority, author/ization and political responsibility. However, whereas Danticat emphasizes the role played by regional Caribbean subjects in individual artistic production in the dyaspora, Brodber emphasizes the role played by a larger African diaspora community that exists across borders and is able to meet in metaphysical spaces that transect material borders. But even Brodber’s diasporan, “post-nationalist” vision does not erase the regional Caribbean perspective any more than does Danticat’s, as her poetics of border crossing are based on cultural and spiritual conjunctures between the region and African-America, expressed in the equalizing phrase “two places can make children (17).” Even though the issue of remittance, something “sent back” from diaspora, is implicated in each writer’s exploration of writing and reading as forms of political remit, it is Kincaid’s and Gilroy’s treatment that shifts our attention to remittance in its fullest particulars. Remittance, as opposed to remit, allows us to view literature, beyond mere politics, as part of a political economy that

Introduction

11

exists between diaspora and the regional Caribbean. Remittance invokes the Caribbean diasporan practice of sending to the Caribbean money or goods to support family “back home.” Typically in economic discourse, remittance is viewed in terms of a dependency syndrome in which the sender occupies a position of sovereignty and the receiver as the dependent “other” consumes these goods without reference to any project of sustainable development. Economic discourses of remittance perpetuate center-margin hegemonic discourse by presenting remittance as a one-way street where the diaspora is implicated in positions at the center. I theorize how the literary text may become a form of remittance within such discourses and tease out the implications of this type of remittance for how the Caribbean region and its diaspora are viewed in the literary arena. The issue of deportation is largely silenced in migrant Caribbean literature. Yet as a caricature of return as well as a bone of contention between Caribbean countries and the countries that send deportees to the Caribbean, deportation plays directly into the issues of remit/whose responsibility, and remittance, the political economy that drives center-margin transactions and discourses. Deportation interrogates the purported silence from the margins. For these reasons deportation is central to the discussion of this book. The concepts that underlie the moniker “remitting the text” are explored around the startlingly original specifics of each writer’s contribution to Caribbean migrant literature. In Chapter 1: “Creating Diaspora: Caribbean Migrant Literature in England and North America, 1930s–1960s,” I trace the history of Caribbean migration literature, showing how the earliest fictions anticipate many of the key tropes and concepts, including diaspora itself, that are grappled with in contemporary texts. The early works I consider are George Lamming’s The Emigrants, Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point; they cover the three main sites for Caribbean migration—England, the United States and Canada. My argument that these writers were clearly concerned with creating an ideology that is distinctly diasporan is based on their treatment of sex; that is, sexual congress across nationality in migrant space. Sex is at the root of an emerging ideology of diaspora in all three novels. As the writers bring a variety of perspectives—phenomenological, ontological/ historical, psychological—to bear on sex as a way of re-ordering the world and migrant space, they suggest a radical yet “underground” Caribbean presence that will change the face of the receiving society and extend the identity of Caribbean beyond its geographical borders. Their diasporan discourse is the complimentary side of their nationalist discourse, as the two in tandem highlight acts, identities and vantage points that crisscross and are created between Caribbean subjects in England and Caribbean in the geographical region. Chapter 2: “Migrant Bodies, Scars and Tattoos: Art as Terror and Transformation in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother I’m Dying and The Dew Breaker”

12

Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature

is a reading of how tortured bodies, scars and tattoos in Edwidge Danticat’s memoir Brother, I’m Dying, and her novel, The Dew Breaker become emblematic of the torn national body impacted by migration traffic. I argue that Danticat’s memoir and novel are re-writings of the troubled Haitian nation within and beyond the borders of the geography of Haiti, keeping at the forefront the interactions and tensions between these distinct spaces as both the signature of tragedy and the possibility of transformation. I look at Danticat’s meta-fictive use of art as trope, the ways she brings literary art into dialogue with body art, including its parody in the systemized marking of the body of victims in state organized political torture. Finally, I consider how the aesthetics of violence are transported and transformed across border spaces, acquiring vastly differing significance within Haiti’s geographical borders and its dyaspora.Danticat complicates the discourses of transnationality and deterritorialization as she weaves among diasporan, regional Caribbean and United States official audiences, perspectives and players, showing how Haiti’s histories and national subjects are identified and judged differently in each; and how dysporan subjects painfully negotiate the material borders of each. Emblematically, her characters undertake physical journeys between Haiti and dyasporan space, in which it is the island that sets the terms of healing and transformation. Each writer being considered represents different forms of border crossing, overt or covert, arcane or more literalized. Each as well represents how migrancy is always a state of in-betweenness, whether as limbo state or space of creative tension or the variations in-between. Each questions or leads us to interrogate positionalities that fail to take into account the gaze from the region, or those in which border crossing is seamless or unquestioned. Chapter 3: “‘Two Places Can Make Children(?)’”: Metaphysics, Authorship and the Borders of Diaspora” explores how Erna Brodber’s Louisiana more than any of the other texts in my project recognizes the inescapable limits placed on diaspora by state policy and international policing of borders. In making this statement I address something of a contradiction, since Brodber’s recognition of these constraints appear as much in her attempt to circumvent them by her spiritualist/metaphysical poetics as in the gaps and silences by which she “forgets” their existence. In total, I argue that while Brodber’s spiritualist poetics celebrate diaspora as a kind of transnational and trans-cultural oneness, this concept does not preclude the physical constraints of nation, citizenship and geographical location, which are “presence/absences” in her spiritualist text, invoking the troubled terrain of border politics. Brodber recognizes other borders that trouble the terrain of publishing, authorship and readership; thus she attempts through a critique of these categories to signify her text as a borderless community text across the African diaspora. Yet the ways Louisiana has been differently received in the remits of the Caribbean and African-America testify to the ongoing difficulties of border

Introduction

13

crossing and the distinct differences between the regional Caribbean and metropolitan gaze. Chapter 4: “Rethinking a Caribbean Literary Economy: Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother and Beryl Gilroy’s Frangipani House as Remittance Texts,” as stated above, is a way of thinking about Caribbean literary texts written in diaspora and “sent back” to the region to maintain a kind of literary economy. I reflect on the production of literary works by migrant writers, arguing that the circulation of such products within the geographical Caribbean constitutes a literary transferal of capital, and is a political act which cannot be taken for granted. As economic theorists argue that monetary remittances harm the “receiver” space, I argue that literary texts have the potential to have the same effect on literary economies. I look at how the two texts that I term “remittance” texts are distinguished by the spirit in which they are sent back. Kincaid’s My Brother documents the care of her brother suffering from AIDS. In this non-fiction piece she catalogues the communication between the US and Antigua, between herself and her lost brother, and brings to the forefront the politics of a relationship founded on dependence. Similarly Gilroy’s Frangipani House explores communication between New York and Guyana, the sending back of money and gifts, but explicitly critiques the center-margin political stance of her New York based characters. Both texts serve to highlight how certain diaspora positions are invested in the maintenance of class and status hierarchies at home and how remittance serves to perpetuate this investment. The cultural exchange evidenced in the remittance text attests to the border politics Caribbean communities create even between the region and its diaspora. In Chapter 5: “‘No Abiding City’: Theorizing Deportation in Caribbean Migrant Fiction” I use the legal act of deportation as a socio-political tool to question and resist loose defi nitions of the Caribbean. Deportation as a non-egalitarian act challenges notions of borderlessness and fluidity in defi ning the Caribbean. Through the assessment of immigration policies which structure the relationship between the US and the Caribbean, I explore how legal and political borders ultimately challenge and supersede notions of transnationality and translocality. I use an integrative approach to discuss deportation from several kinds of textual locations: documents of court cases removing Caribbean nationals from the US; Paule Marshall’s fictional representation, in Brown Girl, Brownstones and Edwidge Danticat’s in “Night Talkers,” a section of The Dew Breaker; and two contrasting deportation narratives, CLR James’ non-fiction autobiographical Mariners, Renegades and Castaways and the newspaper narrative around a contemporary working class female deportee from Jamaica, Sandra Espeut. In reading deportation as a “strange” culmination of the migrant experience in a kind of caricature of return or parody of remittance, I highlight how deportation brings together most parties involved in migration; the sender and host communities and the

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Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature

sender and host governments; how it shifts the identification of who is sender and receiver in a politics of opposition that clarifies the distinct differences and ironic continuities between perspectives in the region and those in the metropolis. The deportee’s disorienting journeys confi rm the seething questions around defi nitions such as home and adopted home, Caribbean and Caribbean/diaspora, and around theories of borderlessness and the reality of travel today.

1

Creating Diaspora Caribbean Migrant Literature in England and North America, 1930s–1960s In this sense, most West Indians of my generation were born in England. The category West Indian, formerly understood as a geographical term, now assumes cultural significance (GeorgeLamming, The Pleasures of Exile 214).

Critical discourse has by and large made distinct separations between migrant literature of the Anglophone Caribbean published before 1970, and the literature published towards the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-fi rst. These separations have been along several parameters: the earlier work identified as male-authored, imbricated in the poetics of exile, conservative with regard to contemporary “hot” issues such as sex and sexuality (including alternative sexualities); the later publications identified as predominantly female-authored, celebrating diaspora, open, direct and iconoclastic on subjects traditionally seen as taboo. Typically too, the migrant writers of the pre-1970s generation are read as representatives of a colonial generation journeying to the motherland, as opposed to their female successors who are identified with the North American metropoles and an implicitly more “post/modern” sensibility and orientation. Edmondson (Making Men) posits a separation based on the idea that the male writers saw themselves as an exilic elite in the tradition of the Victorian gentleman dissociated from labor, whereas the female writers domiciled in the US are more closely identified with an immigrant labor force—implicitly, by extension, a more “democratized” writerly positioning. Yet the work of literary forerunners Claude McKay, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, and Austin Clarke anticipates much of the discourse associated with later works on Caribbean migrancy and diaspora by Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Dionne Brand, Michelle Cliff, NourbeSe Philip and others. Despite the differences in gender, location and historical moment, there are strong similarities between the writers at both ends of the continuum: not a sense of being identified with either an exilic or a diasporan condition, but rather a prevailing sense of in-betweenity, of constantly negotiating what it means to be Caribbean in another place, as well as constantly attempting to reshape the migrant space. While there is truth in the

16

Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature

traditional view that the earlier writers saw themselves as exiled, it is also true that their consciousness and view of themselves was mobile and multilayered. Not only did their self-perception as Caribbean sometimes shift, they also sometimes identified themselves—and did so simultaneously—as part of the (dynamics of) the host country as much as they identified themselves as Caribbean. Indeed, their work recognized the possibility and consciously sowed the seeds of a discourse of diaspora that has been overlooked in most traditional criticism.1 Equally, a wide range of responses to migrancy rather than a homogeneous celebration of diaspora exists among the present generation: from those literary artists such as Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison and Jamaica Kincaid who more consistently turn their faces towards the Caribbean, to those such as Brand and Danticat who maintain a “two place” gaze within most of their texts. It is instructive that George Lamming, one of the writers most quintessentially identified with writing from the colonial center, did not dissociate himself from Caribbean-US migration in the way that present day critics dissociate his generation. Writing in 1960, Lamming made the following declaration, “A vast number of the West Indians who flock to Britain might have sailed next door if America were confident enough to risk that entry; for it is still within America’s power to do so” (Pleasures of Exile 154). Lamming goes on to discuss Alexander Hamilton, C.L.R. James and Eric Williams and the contribution they made, as migrants, to US development in the areas of education and “constitutional literature.” Both James and Williams emigrated to England as well as the US. Lamming’s view of the US as the place to which he and others could have migrated had they been—or felt—allowed to, as well as his belief in an integral connection between the US and the Caribbean (discussed over the fi rst half of the chapter “Ishmael at Home” in Pleasures of Exile) suggests already a Caribbean sensibility receptive to the idea of traversing multiple spaces and being equally at home (“pleasured”) and equally in exile in each. Equally intriguing is the extent to which themes that we have come to associate with contemporary Caribbean writing were explored by the writers of the colonial generation. Curdella Forbes (2005) and Michelle Stephens (2005) have addressed the intensive treatment of gender and its ideological construction in the work of Lamming, Selvon and McKay; Jennifer Rahim (2006) and Ian Smith (1999) have discussed the critical blindsidedness towards sexual representations in fictions of the period and have done their own readings of lesbian love and homosexual desire in Black Fauns and The Lonely Londoners; Thomas Glave (2008), responding perhaps as much to the well-known secret of McKay’s homosexuality and the cloaked treatment of homosexual love in his novels, included a discussion of his work 2 in Our Caribbean, the fi rst “gathering” of gay and lesbian writing from the region and its diasporas; and Leah Rosenberg (2007) has revisited what Kenneth Ramchand (1970) refers to as the “precursor”3 generation in order

Creating Diaspora

17

to show that the psychology of “in-betweenity”—in this instance between the psychology of empire and the psychology of nationalism—pervaded the writing of the colonial generation that is largely seen as separable into one category or the other. This chapter examines the representation of Caribbean migrancy in three Anglophone novels published between the 1950s and 1960s: Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954), Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point (1967), showing how they create a poetics of diaspora that forms not only the inevitable disjunctions from the present discourses but also a distinct continuum with them on the issue of disapora. While these writers are known for their nationalist projects and their concern with migrancy as exile, I argue that based on their writing, it is also clear that they are concerned with creating a different ideology rooted in the early trends of Caribbean cultural settlement outside of the geographical space of the Caribbean. This ideology resembles what we call diaspora today. (By diaspora I mean the idea that nation states exist beyond their geographical boundaries as their nationals form migrant communities on other shores/within the geographical spaces of other nations. I mean also certain conceptual and epistemological (discussed later in the chapter) framings that come with this interpretation of migrant communities as extensions of nation boundaries. The concept of diaspora as this kind of extra-geographical boundary scattering/seeding of communities tends to come loaded with a celebratory ethos, as opposed to the concept of exile, which suggests that the migrant outside of the nation state’s geographical boundaries is in a state of displacement, alienation and dislocation; that is, exile evokes more of a sense of loss. Obviously there is overlap as diasporic discourse or the idea of diasporic consciousness does not preclude experiences of anomie, dislocation and loss, but “exile” as concept places more emphasis on these.) By “creation of diaspora” I bring to attention a number of important issues. “Creation of diaspora” implies both involvement in diaspora as a process and in the shaping of diaspora as an ideology. As well, the initiatory or precursory nature of the work done by these writers is emphasized. By the concept “creating an ideology” I mean to suggest not only that these writers were building their particular concepts of diaspora, but more so that they were engaged in a seminal process of laying the foundations of the very concept as we it know it in its various configurations today. This direction in the writing was based on an acute observation and radical representation of what I have termed the process of diaspora: that is to say, the ways in which Caribbean migrants colored the new landscapes with their varied hues and accents, and the ways in which their presence shifted these landscapes, and concomitantly the ways in which their own psychic landscapes were colored and shifted by the new terrain. Invoking the etymology of diaspora, I discuss how the process involved the scattering and planting of new seeds of a Caribbean community yoked

18

Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature

between English and Caribbean; Canadian and Caribbean; and US and Caribbean. As the writers took note of these processes, they constructed new versions of the Caribbean that also implicated and affected the region itself. At this point I want to distinguish this writing of diaspora from the pan-Africanist version influenced by W.E.B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey and the various continental African ideologies and back to Africa movements that flourished in the Americas including the Caribbean, in the fi rst few decades of the twentieth century. I am positing instead a specifically Caribbean poetics of diaspora, not foundationally linked to an Africanist or racial perspective. My approach departs from the focus on the representation of cultural meetings, clashes and disjunctions as the ground on which the relationship between the migrant and the new country is played out. Instead, I discuss a common, generally unexamined thread that links all three novels together: the central place they give to sexual meetings as the basis of migrant and new/host country relationships. This is not to suggest that sexual relationships and behaviors are not culturally marked (indeed, in Lamming’s, Selvon’s and Clarke’s texts, the sexual performances that are brought to bear in reconfiguring the host country are imbricated in local Caribbean brands of masculinity that are exported in the bodies of the male actors). What I wish to emphasize is how sex stands out from other cultural negotiations and gains primacy in these novels; in other words, I show that the trope and thematics of sex are central to these early constructions of diaspora. In each novel, sexual congress forms the basis by which the ground of the host country is reconfigured and the migrant space molded and stamped with the presence and signature of the Caribbean actors, male and female. Reading the production and dissemination of these texts through the lens of remittance, I show how the writers imagined and enacted different modes of “sending back” based on the specifics and accidents of their different locations. I reflect on what the sexually marked message sent back to the Caribbean might mean. The writers’ representation of sexual behaviors engages the etymology of diaspora as the scattering of seed, and brings Caribbean, European and North American histories and cultural practices into discursive intercourse in such a way that the novels seem engaged in a form of colonization in reverse (Bennett 1966). The infi ltration of English space by Caribbean seed (sexual acts and seminal texts) is adumbrated in Lamming’s invocation of Caliban in The Pleasures of Exile, where he recognizes the political weight of Caliban’s exclamation “O ho! O ho! Would’t had been done! / . . . I had peopled else/This isle with Calibans.” Uttered in response to Prospero’s terrified rejection of Caliban’s attempt to mate with Miranda, this statement, Lamming notes, shows Caliban imagining “the [political] consequences of such intercourse” in terms of “a fabulous increase of population” that would undercut Prospero’s power not only because of the increased possibility of military resistance but also because that population would be “the result

Creating Diaspora

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and expression of some fusion both physical and other than physical” (102, italics mine). Selvon was not in the habit of writing manifestos about his work, but certainly the ways the boys in Londoners set themselves to infi ltrate the sexual body of London, some of them producing miscegenated offspring, recalls this view of Caliban’s project, in effect if not in conscious intent. Throughout all the sexual encounters around which The Meeting Point is structured, Clarke’s authorial voice, with almost crude pointedness, supplies textbook type commentary that points to sex as a battlefield of colonial intentions and reversals, and Estelle’s miscegenated pregnancy at the end inserts what, to paraphrase Clarke’s own terms used elsewhere, can be described as a “semicolon” 4 where the smooth simple sentence of Northern identity had stopped. 5 The semi-colon signals a pause in the trajectory; as well as a parallel yoking of separated identities. In the context of this discussion, it is important that the critique of Shakespeare’s play in terms of a central subversiveness of “Caliban,” including sexual moves, informs The Pleasures of Exile, the text in which Lamming sets out the blueprints for all his novels, including The Emigrants, and explores the significance of West Indian migration to London. It is also in this text that he refers to the West Indian migrants as “Columbuses in reverse” (Pleasures 155), and describes his own so-called exile in these terms, “the pleasure and paradox of my exile is that I belong wherever I am” (Pleasures 50). Like the statement about the US quoted above, the focus on fusion and “belonging where I am,” and the ontological juxtaposition implied in the relation between “exile” and “belonging” in the same sentence, bear echoes of later diasporan concepts of migratory subjectivity and border crossing. These echoes are clear even if the phrase “Columbuses in reverse” reveals a colonial viewpoint as opposed to the postcolonial “location” of later writings. Lamming’s statement of in-betweenity, though less expansive and sweeping, is nevertheless similar to the statement with which another writer, Claude McKay (who will be considered briefly here by way of comparison),6 ends his fi rst autobiographical work A Long Way from Home (1937): “All my life I have been a troubadour wanderer” (270). Emigrating from Jamaica in 1912, McKay lived variously in the US, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union, though he made his home principally in the US. Unlike the emigrants to Britain, McKay was able to fi nd and identify with a community based on blood: his writings show that he considered himself as much African-American as Jamaican, as much at home as torn in/ between the two, and yet, like Brathwaite’s “spade” (The Arrivants), both rootless and harborless. McKay’s position is as much postmodern as it is cosmopolitan. McKay never returned to Jamaica, except literarily in Banana Bottom (1933), A Long Way from Home, the posthumously published second autobiography My Green Hills of Jamaica (1979) and deeply nostalgic poems such as “Flame Heart,” “I Shall Return,” “My Mother,” “The Spanish Needle” and “The

20

Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature

Tropics in New York.” That is to say, Jamaica imagined through literature and idealized memory was a place that McKay could inhabit psychologically but in which he could not settle physically, any more than he could settle in any of the several places of his sojourn. For McKay then, exile and belonging were complicated among multiple places and spaces of which the country of his birth was only one variant. Clarke, emigrating in 1955 from Barbados “little England” to Canada, the other North American metropolis that began its modern life as a white settler colony, became a Canadian citizen and an active participant in Canadian politics (in 1977 he ran as a candidate for the Progressive Conservatives in provincial elections). Clarke perceived no anomaly in being both a passionately committed Barbadian and an engaged Canadian. In a 1986 interview with Terrance Craig, he spoke of his own comfort with inhabiting what might be seen as contradictory space. Clarke argues concerning the seeming mismatch between his political affi liation and his activist career as an organizer in the cause of civil rights, anti-racism and apartheid: “[being a candidate for the Progressive Conservatives] does not mean that I am conservative in my thinking, what conservative stands for now, a kind of anti-socialist reserve . . . my own politics would have stressed the ‘progressiveness’ in the title Progressive Conservatives so I do not see it as a dichotomy . . . My politics [are]socialist . . . But so far as organized politics and the dialectics of politics is concerned, I would have to say I have no politics” (Craig 120). Going beyond Selvon’s insistence on the “universal” intention of his work side by side with its West Indian identification (Fabre in Nasta 1988; Nazareth in Nasta 1988), Clarke makes it very clear that his continuing sense of a Barbadian identity is even in fact diluted by his Canadian identity: “ . . . if a man has lived here for ten years I think he ceases to be a West Indian” (Craig 126). This theme is picked up in a later interview with Frank Birbalsingh, in which Clarke states that he has grown away from Barbados in attitude as well as distance (Birbalsingh 101). Although these writings fall outside the 1950s–60s that I am investigating, they do raise provocative questions about how Clarke may have perceived “exile” earlier on. What is interesting here is the similarity in Clarke’s attitude at different periods after his emigration: an unequal doubleness, with the “West Indian” as the increasingly diminished side, characterizes both periods, ten years apart. His invocation of “ten years” also suggests that for him, any initial conception of himself as exile would not have been a prolonged or continuing state. His introduction to the short story collection, Nine Men Who Laughed (1986) placed beside this interview emphasizes the extent to which, at a point where Caribbean diasporan discourse had scarcely if at all begun to emerge, Clarke was already secure in a view of the Caribbean migrant as the hybridized denizen of a space that was as much his own as any other resident or citizen’s (in the introduction to the collection, Clarke emphatically refuses the term “immigrant”).

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In the Craig interview, Clarke goes on to argue that “West Indians are no different from Canadians. They may have a different colour, and they may come from a different climate, but they are both colonials. So I think that the West Indians who live here have less of a traumatic adjustment than is the case . . . of a European who comes from a country of a different language and culture” (126). This suggests either that by 1986 Clarke had revised his view of Canada, or that, as a privileged migrant who went to university in Canada, worked as a mainstream journalist and by the 1970s was a political candidate, he had never quite had to consider himself as an exile. In the interview, his discussion of the character Boysie in The Bigger Light, the 1975 second sequel to The Meeting Point (1967), indicates his view that the student, or “intellectual” does indeed encounter migrant space in a different way than (for example) the domestic workers in The Meeting Point. If for McKay his country of birth is equally a space of exile and belonging as are the other places he has inhabited, for Clarke the ability to belong in Canadian space is seamless at the level of a shared colonial culture, which supersedes race as well as local specifics of culture, even while “belonging” might be complicated across colonially produced lines such as class. Taken together, these writers reveal a great complexity and diversity in the discourse that has been flattened under the rubric of “exile;” as well, they reveal a range of psychologies of “in-betweenity” as varied as those found in the work of their successors. Despite the questionable seamlessness that Clarke fi nds between Caribbean and Canadian coloniality, his focus on colonial relations is a point of departure for examining the basis of this “in-betweenity” that is so variously displayed in the writers’ personal statements as well as deployed in the three fictions. As the beginners of the Caribbean novelistic tradition, the fictions and philosophies of Caribbean migrant writers in North America and England, though certainly influenced by the locations/contexts to which they journeyed, were predominantly honed by a common colonial imagination. Bill Schwarz’s “C.L.R. James and George Lamming: The Measure of Historical Time” (2003) and Winston James’ Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia (1988) argue that colonials were already influenced by anti-colonial thought and, even before they traveled and settled in the metropoles of England and North America, were already engaged as agitators and agents of social change in movements and ideologies such as the Caribbean Labour Movement and pan-Africanism in the Caribbean and abroad. Clement Payne and Marcus Garvey, among others, were concerned with educating and mobilizing the masses, thus the historical consciousness or imagination of the Caribbean migrant by the 1930s was not a blind adoration and desire to dwell in the mother country or “in foreign,” but often the result of laborious deliberation and/or the desperate need for what Lamming’s emigrants call “a better break”—usually economic for most. For writers, the economic imperative was

22

Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature

obviously extended by the need to publish and sustain a viable publishing career. Clarke points to what he terms “the solid foundation” in the Caribbean as (ironically) the reason for “the ease” with which Barbadians continue to live in Canada (Birbalsingh 101). On the face of it, James’ and Schwartz’s statements support the view that the migrant condition was then one of psychological exile, and may seem to be in opposition to Clarke’s statement. But the picture is complicated by several underlying implications of the observation that in the home space there existed a colonial imagination that became a dynamic part of how the migrant was later able to negotiate the diasporic space. First, this observation indicates that negotiation of diasporic space was necessarily a fractured and uneven process. Second, it highlights the fact that the Caribbean, through its attitude of political critique, had already begun to shape the diasporic space even before the migrant’s arrival. Third, it recognizes that Caribbean migrants therefore arrived abroad with a consciousness that was neither fully exilic, nor fully oriented towards the host country. That is to say, prior to and at the point of arrival, the migrant inhabited an in-between or transitional space that was in effect a form of journeying. This “common colonial imagination” then begins to signal some of the intricate means by which the writers of the period configured the discourse of diaspora, dismantling easy separations between center and margin, exile and at-homeness. It is important then that for these three writers the development of a diasporic consciousness has its foundations in in-transit or in transitional spaces. In The Emigrants it is the pier as the travelers wait to depart the French Caribbean port; for Selvon’s Londoners it is the Liverpool boat-train station; and in Clarke’s Meeting Point it is Malton Airport where Estelle submits to and resists a thorny interrogation. Transitional spaces become the literal and symbolic domain for conceptualizing diaspora, not only as they signal the change in cultural landscapes and what is understood by terms like “home,” but as they implicate the possibility and price of changing personhood and attaining economic agency, as well as the space to re-invent oneself in unfriendly territory. By centering the function of the transitional space in diaspora, the writers implicitly reject any idea of diaspora as a seamless border crossing: rather they highlight that the crossing is broken, mediated and fed by and within watershed spaces that are in various ways outside the host country itself. It is this positioning that allowed the writers to see their texts as remittances of will, the determination to yoke and send back their production in the host country to a transitional Caribbean in the making. The three novels describe emigrants in various locations: Emigrants and Londoners in London and Meeting Point in Toronto. That these three authors were themselves migrants indicates the extent of the actual scattering of West Indians abroad, and that these fictional portrayals fi nd their inspiration in real journeys.

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The in-betweenity that characterizes the texts relates directly to the authors’ conceptualization of their work as performances for two sets of audiences: the actual audience that was the buying public in Europe and North America, and the imagined community (Anderson 1991) that was sometimes but not always an actual audience in the Caribbean. Whether literally or in terms of a kind of longing, or homage paid, the writers envisioned their texts being remitted, or “sent back” to the Caribbean for judgment and validation. Indeed, when placed against the fact that British critics of the period saw the work of the West Indian novelists as quaint additions to British literature, made picturesque with spots of what one critic on Selvon’s work (and one Canadian newspaper commenting on Clarke’s work) referred to as “local color.”7 It is clearly the writers’ sense of their work belonging to the West Indies and therefore implying an imagined West Indian audience to whom the texts were being sent (despite their feeling that the actual audience did not as yet exist), that made it possible to speak of a West Indian literature. Their interviews as well as their subject matter and the ways in which they made themselves available to speak to audiences in the West Indies indicate that the “re/location” of their work in the Caribbean was never in question. This is true not only of Lamming but also of Selvon, although Selvon said he never consciously wrote with a West Indian or any other kind of audience in mind (Fabre 67). Even obliquely, Selvon’s concern with his Caribbean audience is evident in his view that the West Indian novelist “for some time . . . had among his major responsibilities, that of making his country and his people known accurately to the rest of the world” (Fabre 67). At the time of the interview, Selvon obviously felt that this responsibility had been fulfi lled and was no longer a necessary charge, but the voicing of the responsibility indicates an implicit understanding that the literary product would be (sent and) judged by fellow West Indians. In the contemporary period, writers who have long been citizens of the US and European states, and whose work is considered as US and European literature, continue to envision their work fi rst and foremost as Caribbean even though it is produced—and, in their view made possible—in their new country. Lamming and Selvon in fact remitted their work via the BBC radio series “Caribbean Voices” under the editorship of Henry Swanzy; Caribbean audiences became used to hearing these voices from home in their living rooms and local shops. What was entering their homes and shared public spaces was a complex, hybrid product consisting of an England mediated through Caribbean eyes; and a new Caribbean in which the various territories were no longer separate entities but part of what in Benedict Anderson’s terms was a community newly imagined through literary texts in which Trinidadians were representing Jamaicans and Barbadians and Barbadians were representing Trinidadians and Jamaicans. For most Caribbean people of the period, the voices and accents of someone from another territory were being heard for the fi rst time, despite the Caribbean’s history of intra-migration

24

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and the attempts at federation that had brought the West Indian societies into political dialogues with each other. The epigraph from Lamming resonates here: given that radio was (and still is) the most accessible technological medium of dissemination in the Caribbean, it seems logical to say that it was not only the migrant writer but also the people at home in the Caribbean who were being brought into a regional identity. Writers domiciled at home also sent their products to Swanzy; these were also edited, repackaged and remitted back to the Caribbean along with commentary by English critics. The remittances then circulated along several axes of triangulated flow in which several interlocking identities were being formulated and revised: not only a general West Indian identity but also a community of writers. This was a community of writers with two branches: those “abroad” and those “at home,” adding a further layer of hybridization to an already complex Caribbean space. Obviously, both branches shared not only a colonial but also an enabling relation with London, so that in these negotiations England’s identity too is not one-dimensional. Clarke recounts how he was influenced by the program and by Selvon in particular, even before he emigrated to Canada and began to publish. He tells Craig in their interview that Selvon’s use of Trinidad speech in Londoners opened his eyes to what was linguistically possible, and that “that was the fi rst time we heard, coming from this established medium of the BBC, things about ourselves, and so we said, well, this is another aspect of the revolution” (Craig 124). Certainly it is fair to say that it was Selvon’s invented pan-Caribbean Creole that fi rst gave the Anglophone literature its linguistic reach as a Caribbean literature. Lamming narrates in The Pleasures of Exile how the moneys paid to the writers at home were often in the form of remittances negotiated by Swanzy, who was sensitive to the fact that the processing of their literary products did not always keep pace with their need for cash. He explains how these remittances enabled a kind of wild spending spree that I read as a form of self-fashioning insofar as it was an enactment of their arrival and validation as authors. So, not unlike the multinational corporation that processes Third World products into manufactures, the BBC and its communication technology were engaged in the altering of space, place and identity through its processing of West Indian literary products, and the flow of literary and monetary remittances was performing another level of global relations facilitated partly by the scattering or gathering of migrants in the British and Canadian metropoles. But it is not simply in the overt speaking of remittance nor their involvement in remittance as discrete acts that these authors’ works can be seen through the lens of remittance. We could also consider the remitter (one who sends back—in this case from abroad) in terms of a particular psychology. The decision to send remittances involves seeing oneself in a particular relation of responsibility to home, even if one had not had this relation

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before migrating. Migration in other words alters the power and status relations between home and the migrant subject. There is also the sense that one is expected to show through the quality of the remittance that one has achieved something worthwhile, that one has in fact really inhabited “foreign,” has a proper care for one’s relatives/community, and is conscious of the kudos or fallout that will accrue to one’s relatives/community if the product sent back does not meet the best standards. The reputations and levels of attachment of both the remitter and the receiver then are implicated in the remittance, even as remittance plays upon the plasticity of identities. As discussed in my introduction, the locus of power and status in the politics of remittance is two pronged, whether the remitter admits it or not, since it is the response of the receiver that signals whether the product is acceptable or not. Again it is Lamming, the most theoretically reflective of the group, who voices this consciousness in multiple ways in Pleasures. His statement that it was the West Indian writer who “restored the West Indian peasant to his true status of personality” indicates his own assessment of his product, which he is directing his West Indian audience to share. The reiterated refrains of his migrant characters in The Emigrants, that they were going to England “to make a man o’ yuself” is a declaration that the texts sent back would be the texts of true (West Indian) men and not the vain musings of paltry boys who had made nothing worthwhile of themselves. Lamming also expresses his disappointment when a sixth form student in then British Guiana asked him upon his return to the Caribbean in 1956, “Mr Lamming . . . would you say that the praise your books, and all the things the English critics say about them are only due to the novelty of what you are writing about?” (Pleasures 28). The books had been remitted to the Caribbean, and the student had been reading them. The remitter, journeying back as temporarily returning resident, fi nds his product judged in the accents of Prospero, and clearly feels that the Caribbean segment of his audience has failed him. Clarke too returned to Barbados in 1975–76, at the invitation of the Barbadian government to head the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation. Amid much public controversy over his plans to “Barbadianize” television fare,8 he was unceremoniously fi red by the government. Clarke openly admits that the satirical novel The Prime Minister (1977) was an act of revenge on a people he had “trusted and loved” but who had “smattered and smashed” his psyche (Craig 124) with (implied) gross ingratitude. We may read in place of his psyche his remitted self, and perhaps the gift of his international literary reputation in which as Barbadians the people he had “trusted and loved” participated. The vernacular poet Louise Bennett expresses with exquisite irony the prevailing consciousness among the Jamaican populace that sojourn abroad was supposed to alter or expected to alter identity. In the two complementary poems “No Likkle Twang” and “Dry foot Bwoy”in Jamaica Labrish

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she contraposes in the voice of the folk who stayed at home, two satirical responses to migrants returning home. There is the one who has returned— as it were, remitted himself to the Caribbean—without anything to show for it in the form of a “twang,” a linguistic altering that would have been the signal that he has returned not fully Jamaican but partly English. That is to say, a major signifier of his ability to negotiate and claim English space was necessary. This perspective places a distinction between the Englishness of colonial Jamaica and the Englishness of England—Bennett’s persona is fully aware that to be colonial is not a “full” arrival within the political identifications conferred by empire. Then there is the persona who has returned carrying exactly the “twang” that the other has failed to acquire or achieve. This persona is equally castigated for losing his identity—in other words, for failing to employ the insignia of exile that would have shown his psychological strength and national, anti-colonial affi liation. The two poems work together to show both the people’s awareness of the complexities of claiming (reverse colonization), belonging (diasporization) and exile (home commitment) created by migrancy, and the ways they retained the right to judge the remitted products of all three. George Lamming’s 1954 volume The Emigrants, charts the journeys and experiences of a motley group of West Indians as they travel by ship from the West Indies to England. The vessel, The Golden Image, bears strong resemblance to the Empire Windrush, which docked at Tilbury, England on June 22, 1948. Prior to its 1948 voyage, the Windrush had been used primarily as a troop ship transporting Royal Air Force servicemen back and forth between England and the various locations of the British Empire: Up to that point, and in spite of the colonial linkages, passenger travel directly between the Caribbean and Britain was expensive, difficult and sporadic. The normal route would have been via New York and across the Atlantic. In the aftermath of the war, however, there were a number of former troop ships ploughing across the seas, taking up and depositing servicemen and civilians in various parts of the Empire. The SS Empire Windrush, by way of the Atlantic and Mexican Gulf, was the fi rst to pass through the Caribbean in 1948. (Phillips 46–47) The 1948 voyage was different from the previous journeys between Britain and the colonial territories. The booking company, in an attempt to abate serious losses in revenue, advertised to the general public the over 200 berths which would not be taken up by servicemen. This shortfall of potential revenue became an invitation to civilians who could afford the forty-eight pounds for a fi rst class passage or the twenty-five pounds for a troupdeck fare. As in The Emigrants, there were others on board who could afford neither; in fact the official number of 492 passengers aboard the Windrush did not include “the twenty or so stowaways” hidden in various parts of the ship (Lindsey

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97). Mike and Trevor Phillips argue in The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain that in 1948 the Empire Windrush “sailed through a gateway in history, on the other side of which was the end of Empire and wholesale reassessment of what it meant to be British” (Phillips 6). And while Lamming’s Golden Image is not exactly “the symbolic charting of a new multi-ethnic Britain,” there exists a consciousness aboard which suggests that the passengers have some sense of their impending impact, the ways in which they will alter the racial, political and cultural face of a stubbornly white England. This awareness exists even at a subliminal level, as evidenced in the irresistible subtexts of the Jamaican’s pronouncement that the Caribbean is made out of the “vomit” of nearly every race and continent under the sun. “ . . . and the great nations, England, an’ the rest, them went on stirring the mixture, them stir that vomit to suit themselves . . . till the vomit start to take on a new life, it was like ammonia, get too strong for those who stirring it. Now it explodin’ bit by bit” (The Emigrants 66). The Jamaican goes on to read the effect of this “explosion of ammonia” as the West Indian’s restless confusion about his identity, but inherent in the discourse is both the suggestion of Britain’s inability to control the consequences of colonial migration and the West Indian’s protean ability, born of his colonially produced imagination and experience, to settle anywhere. The journey as reverse colonization rather than mere exile is further emphasized by the obvious parallels between the name The Golden Image and The Golden Hind, the name of Francis Drake’s ship associated with England’s fi rst conquistador forays into the New World. The presence on board of two proto-colonials, the Governor and Tornado, engaged in a dialectical argument about the implications of their migrancy, brings together the symbolism of The Golden Hind (the Governor) and the Windrush (Tornado), associated with tempests and hurricanes, signifying this migration as an interpellative relationship (both confl ict and synergy) between colonial power and indigenous Caribbean ability to disrupt space. 9 This dialectic between the fi xity of colonial power that would keep the emigrants in their places, and the fluidity or capacity to disperse that is inherent in diaspora is pursued in ways that become central to the novel’s architecture. First, Emigrants begins with Lamming’s description of a pier, a physical landing place that frames the psychological space in which we meet the travelers. The emigrants are in transit, on a layover at a Guadeloupe seaport, on the journey but not traveling. “The Pier ended abruptly on all sides forming within the buildings that limited it an area free for the traffic between land and sea” (3). The space of transition, where the acts of embarking and disembarking create “areas free for the traffic between land and sea” is the place where the emigrants begin a series of conversations that are not only profoundly self-exploratory and self-making, but also profoundly engaged in creating new defi nitions of West Indianness in the context of the relationship between England and its colonies. The in-transit space then

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initiates exercises in cartographies of self and place that reverse and exceed those mapped by England’s colonial adventurers. The role that sex and sexual activities will play in this re-mapping is foreshadowed by the Governor’s sexual escapades on board ship with Tornado’s woman, described in images that link the sexual act to colonial rapine and subjugation. Thus, Lamming’s description of the Governor’s rendezvous with Lillian proves the writer’s concern with making connections among sex, migration and a colonial past that is about to be challenged: But in the dormitory the darkness had maintained its defences against that one shaft of light. The ship quickened its pace and the rumble of the engine grew louder. The quiet was routed, relaxation had given way to a new condition; the shaft of light had narrowed and stiffened, but the wind came stronger and the music of the engine joined the savagery that knew no restraint. The surge had grown into a leap and the fall was a plunge that changed the depth of this deep and intimate darkness. It cut cruelly through the water as though it had found a new pleasure in its power and possession. The rumble of the engine would not subside and waters opened to thrusting keel as the ship cut accurately through the receiving surface. Receptivity was strained to the utmost as though every nerve had been exposed to the invading pleasures for the ecstasy of a single moment held, and kept and squeezed till the energy had spent itself, and desire dwindled to a limp and harmless thing. Then as though it were the end of an explosion, the ship returned to its normal pace, and sailing sanely over the water, it seemed that it need not have hurried at all . . . The bell rang and there was scramble towards the dining hall . . . ‘I’ll go up fi rst,’ Lilian said, and relaxed under the Governor who kissed her deeply in the mouth. (92) As the ship inhabits the water in its cacophony of blaring engine and speed, so England invades the Indies, depositing other inhabited cargo to replace the decimated “natives;” similarly the Governor inhabits Lilian, and so the ironically named “light” attempts to inhabit Caliban’s “darkness” destroying its absolute peace. Though the waters open willingly and the sound of the engine intensifies and explodes etc., pleasure and ecstasy are never “pure.” The wind and the engine of the ship and the stiffened shaft of light join in “savagery” without “restraint”, the ship cuts the water “cruelly,” fi nding pleasure in “its power and possession,” and while a single moment of ecstasy is achieved, the pleasure is an “invasion.” The language used to describe the other side of this ecstasy is language of violence and conquest. But even in this description, colonial domination is about to encounter a new space of transition, as, symbolically through the Governor’s spent penis after climax, it may possibly “dwindle to a limp and harmless thing” (92). Further, the colonial power is already being challenged as there is a space below the deck

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in the dormitory where Lamming incorporates the subtle resistance of darkness over the invading light. Second, the narrative of the emigrants’ progress through the geographies of London is set in clubs, rooming houses, hairdresser’s shops that on one hand can be read as the sign of their outsider status and absence from settlement and home, but in another sense can be said to imply the provenance of the transitional space. These transitional spaces work together with the novel’s multiple subplots and meta-journeys to give a deconstructive meaning to the instability of “emigrant” (as opposed to “immigrant”)—an instability as protean and as powerful as the vomit that becomes ammonia. The emigrants’ journeys and the physical spaces through which they travel are marked by the presence of ubiquitous characters who either defy detection or are themselves “visionary,” or “seeing eyes:” for example the Strange Man, who appears to have been the stowaway (the unknown quantity of the domino effect) on board The Golden Image; Collis, the artist figure whose narration indiscriminately fractures psychological boundaries by traversing fi rst and third person as well as dialogic representation; and Azi, the shapeshifting Nigerian immigrant who seems to share a great deal with the trickster god Eshu. All of these journeys are in some way implicated around sexual meetings. These meetings become commentaries on the colonial imagination of both England and the Caribbean; as well, they adumbrate the profound altering of the English landscape by emigrants who already imagine themselves as separate from England yet in some sense part of a British and indeed global diaspora returning in Glissant’s phrase to “the point of [original] entanglement” (Poetics of Relation 26). This double consciousness that was already at work in the Caribbean and intensified in the conversations engendered by the act of migration, is part of what is now seeded into England. The presence of Azi among the Caribbean emigrants expands black space so that one could speak of the beginnings of a black (African) diaspora. Azi’s sale of his potion for the sexually challenged opens the black diaspora to include Frederick, a white British customer. The scene in which a group of white women gang up and trick Dickson (probably symbolically named) into exposing his penis to their titillated gaze not only replays the ways in which the English imagination is itself already “contaminated” by a common colonial imagination in which the women participate, but also the ways in which Miranda’s desire for Caliban admits him into the English national imaginary. If the women replay male conquistador rapine, they equally replay a reverse form of what Homi Bhabha refers to as mimicry, in which psychologically they have entered a space (of desire) that they themselves could not have foreseen.10 The fact that these women may be prostitutes (the narrative leaves this unclear, but throughout the novel the men often engage sex with prostitutes) suggests like Clarke’s Meeting Point and Selvon’s Londoners, the underground and insidious nature of the invasion by emigrant sexual

30

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subjects/objects. The prostitute’s invisibility in the construction of the nation makes her a natural site from which unsanctioned mixtures can spread. The emigrants—not only the Governor—indeed arrived with a sense of sexual potency so pervasive that the reader is aware quite early that that this is the novel’s central trope. Mis Bis, who occupies the central subplot of the novel, has fled from Trinidad weighed down with a heightened self-consciousness based on a soiled sexual reputation. The opening narrator’s acknowledgement of his penis as a powerful tool is at once an acknowledgement of his power and the limitations of his power. Through his penis, he articulates the length of his freedom, which is fi nally a privileged and gendered freedom; it is also for him “a private and personal acquisition which he uses as a man uses what is private and personal, like his penis” (Emigrants 8). The declaration of privacy and personal space is disingenuous, since from the outset this penis is showcased to the reader’s (public) attention and implicated in the colonially imbricated fantasies in which he imagines himself conquering Queenie’s body while the ship is on the pier. His journey to England began as a fl ight from Trinidad, a way station from his native Barbados. The fl ight from Trinidad was in part an attempt to escape his devolving lifestyle of sexual and other indulgences that allowed him to carry on “unrebuked in the small dark hours.” This lifestyle signified the lack of restraint characteristic of a child’s or a colonial’s freedom (8); his aim now is to learn how to be a man in the cold, prudish British climate. This is interesting because if to be fully a man means in some sense to cease being a colonial, one implication is that in England he will no longer be an outsider but an integral part of the landscape within which his sexual potency operates. From this early point, then, sex is highlighted as one way in which we will track the characters in their migrations, and make connections among characters and themes. The interlocking scenes, plots and journeys come together to form a quasidetective story in which the work of sexual relations in creating a potential diasporan face for England is hidden, or occult, and has to be deciphered by the reader as she unravels the mysterious relationships among the characters. At the core of this detective story is the story of Mis Bis and Frederick. The story begins when Miss Bis abandons her too black fiancé for Frederick, the English Russian Jew who is in Trinidad in the Colonial Service and who she believes will marry her. They sleep together, and with prize in pocket he abandons Trinidad and his island-woman without a word. When Collis fi rst meets Mis Bis she is aboard The Golden Image hoping to escape her soiled reputation made notorious by a winning calypso “No Love without Passport.” By the end of the novel, Miss Bis’ promiscuous lifestyle in England has so radically transformed her that Frederick the shape-shifter does not recognize her as the young woman he had fooled and abandoned in Trinidad, neither does she recognize him. Miss Bis’ remaking or unmaking of self has not sharpened her intuition; she discerns neither his impotence nor his past wickedness. And he, haunted by the memory of his deception, feels as

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though his impotence is due retribution. His plans to marry Una Solomon, whom he knows as a “fallen woman” in England but not as the former Ursula Bis, is Frederick’s attempt to save a woman who reminds him of the one he had wronged in Trinidad. The comedy of unperceived errors is ironic: Frederick also does not know that the person who has corrupted Una/Ursula is Peggy the English whore; he does not know that her migration and promiscuity are set in motion by his actions, and that Peggy’s worldly wisdom has already orchestrated Miss Bis’ salvation. It is only at the end that the reader learns who Mis Bis really is and is able to piece together the trajectories, or rather the circles of the relationship. The way in which all these characters are drawn together in sexual relationships refutes any idea of England as a completely white or Anglo Saxon country as well as any idea that the migrants will remain any less a part of its permanent landscape than its acknowledged citizens. England (in the figure of Frederick) travels, disseminates itself and brings or attracts back to English soil the fruits of its disseminations (Mis Bis, who as territory is also the ground of that dissemination). But interestingly, Frederick is not Anglo Saxon but Russian and Jew by birth. England’s hybridity as well as her infi ltration by diasporic communities (the Jew as the iconic emblem of diaspora) are therefore suggested. “Contamination,” that is to say the extension of England’s identity out into and by migrating others, is revealed in Mis Bis’ new identity, which has been facilitated as much by the presumably fully Anglo Saxon Peggy as by Frederick the English hybrid. It seems pretty clear by the end of the novel that Mis Bis is fully acculturated and interculturated into British society as both same and different: belonging but with a subversive Caribbean alienness, well-settled but eruptive. Frederick and Mis Bis are unable to reproduce because the former is impotent—Lamming’s derisive comment on the failure of the colonial machinery to control the terms of Caribbean identity or migrant settlement. Any acceptable offspring from the meeting of West Indian and British in this reordering of political relations will be Caliban’s, not Prospero’s. Set against Frederick and Mis Bis’ inability to reproduce themselves is the fact that the other characters appear free at the end of the novel to continue in their sexual peregrinations (with implied possibilities) throughout the city. A further layer of irony is added by the fact that the Nigerian Azi sells Frederick his potion for the sexually challenged. Azi’s presence within the communal space (boarding houses, bars and other border and transitional locations) adumbrates a multi-diasporan community and highlights how that community of future possibilities shifts Frederick from authoritative subject to a more uneasy place between object of power and his own self-destruction. It is through his use of sex as a trope that Lamming charts a radical concept of diaspora. On the surface, it would seem that the sexual encounters in Emigrants are uniformly negative, moving in cycles of destruction, exploitation and turning back upon the self rather than openings of diasporic community.

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Yet the novel’s tropological architecture, its plaiting of encounters around the sexual trope, signals an underlying aspect of Lamming’s project: for, like the ubiquitous, quasi-liminal presence of Collis, the artist-figure, it shifts attention from the characters to the process of artistic creation itself. In this sense, the novel as art/ifact functions as a simulacrum of the possibility of diaspora as a scattering that profoundly and intimately affects the being of the (erstwhile) migrant, the sender and the host nations. I speak of the “being” of characters and nations to draw attention to the philosophical as different from political aspects of Lamming’s representation. Throughout the novel, Lamming makes it clear that he addresses sex from a phenomenological perspective—as a phenomenon that is at the heart of human essence and with the capacity to alter states of being. Well into the emigrants’ arrival in England, the third person narrative voice (the all seeing eye) describes the places the emigrants inhabit as “a womb that the world . . . was not aware of” (248). This already invokes the idea of a silent semiology of new seed germinating in English soil. One of the most pointed indications of the importance of sex in phenomenological terms is where Lamming describes West Indian bodies in abandoned dance on board The Golden Image: The other had been annihilated. There was only the body which was the dance itself, regulated, informed, nourished and dictated not only by its blood, but by some pervasive, measureless source of being that was its own logic of receptivity and transmission, a world that could be defi ned only through the presence of others, yet remained in its defi nition absolute, free, itself. The body was part of the source of its being and at the same time its being . . . It was free yet subject to the compulsions of its freedom, it strained beyond the limits of its resources . . . Bright and quivering it stood showing itself . . . and then exhausted and broken by its own desire, it fell (93–94, emphases mine). In this passage of dualities, the body is subject to the (colonial) inscriptions of others yet transcends them by its “measureless source of being;” in a reverse phrasing of the conundrum, its freedom in its own essence is circumscribed by the power of others to mark it with defi nitions. Beyond this, desire brings the body into constant tension with its own self-sufficient power. Lamming makes clear that he is reflecting on the sexual body by repeating in this context the same (italicized) phrase by which he had described the Governor atop Lilian in their sexual climax on board the ship. In this way, Lamming signals that the dispersal of West Indian into English space is not a unidirectional or one dimensional phenomenon that is purely to be celebrated, but one fraught with the painful paradoxes that still belong to exile. The inarticulate sense among denizens of the host country that a profound phenomenological reordering may be taking place is indicated in the

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meeting between Collis and the Pearsons, the sister- and brother-in-law of his English friend Arthur, a welfare officer in Trinidad. Collis’ evening in the Pearsons’ drawing room reads as a microcosm of the West Indian in England in the 1940s. To the Pearsons, Collis is a strange hybrid: friend-of-thefamily and West Indian migrant. His presence in their home invokes Arthur, Mrs. Pearson’s brother, as well the new, migrant/employee whose trouble at Hargreaves Ltd., where Mr. Pearson supervises the conduct of the staff, is telephoned in and disturbs and destroys the visit. That the interruptive, (unwelcome) migrant employee becomes emblematic of Collis, and Collis an extension of the West Indian invasion, is highlighted in Mr. Pearson’s question to Collis “Why do so many of your people come here?” Lamming’s project on migration is accomplished not only by addressing issues of identity, colonization and ontology, but by addressing these issues through phenomenological processes: the tension between West Indian and English is even more powerfully indicated in the metonymic signifiers by which the living room and its owner transform into England itself: The room seemed a persistent rebuke to the rudimentary shelter which Collis had found at the hostel. It was not only a habitation, remote and warm as the womb. It was an entire climate. The conveniences were natural elements by which the life of the Pearsons was nourished. Mr. Pearson did not sit on the chair. He belonged to it. When he left it to serve the sherry, it was not only unoccupied. It became incomplete. (139, emphasis mine) Mr. Pearson’s presence in his drawing room—in England—is certain and settled. The drawing room is more than a room, it is a climate—the unwelcoming physical and social geography of the mother country. Its contents signify the ways in which Mr. Pearson takes for granted his (English) possessions not only as a function of his being-in-the-world but also as what makes his existence possible: the room’s contents nourish his very life. The room is the absolute certainty of English belonging and ownership: the chair without Mr. Pearson’s presence is “incomplete.” Yet against this certainty and settledness is placed the deconstructive underside: Mr. Pearson is forced at some point to leave the chair (to pour the sherry, to shift into a shared space demanded by the outward trappings of hospitality). The room “rebukes” Collis, and though this indicates Collis’ discomfort, the need to rebuke in itself also indicates the disturbance of the settled, authoritative subject. The morphing of inanimate objects into phenomenological signifiers reaches a kind of apogee in the image of the room as a womb into which Collis has penetrated. In the same way that the trope of sex creates the accomplished form of the novel by plaiting together migrant and citizen, Caribbean migrant and other migrant, across sexual activities and sexually imbricated conversations and

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encounters in intimate spaces (the psyche, the drawing room, etc.) and in transitional spaces (the ship, on shipboard at the pier), so in reality the sexual encounters that did indeed take place on English soil plaited together these various strangers from different soils and spaces, and created in each a different kind of being. The full reality of this demographic and cultural change has not yet come to pass in the world of the emigrants, since what Lamming is observing is only the beginning of the encounters. The book as a simulacrum of the full effect (the inescapable weaving together, the subversion of power relations, the semiology of arrival) that Bennett’s poem recognized, becomes prophetic, and the artist’s role as the man who sees (Prospero and Caliban alike) is fulfi lled. It is in this recognition of the novel’s tropological significance that we realize the importance of sex as trope in The Emigrants. Sex carries not only phenomenological significance as the foundational possibility of being, not only historical significance as the (re)production site of the colonial/modern capitalist economy that subjugated the African (body and self) and implicated the European master in an impossibly schizophrenic relation to the African “non-person” with whom he cohabited, not only (as represented by Lamming) a site of male self-identification: as artistic trope and metaphor, it becomes a way of reordering the world, of imposing and signifying meaning on the world. The book itself occupies a floating space between England and the Caribbean whereby through its discourses it disseminates a view of culture that reorders the language of English representation—that is to say, it claims for itself a certain kind of two way authority, or representational remit as both an English and a Caribbean product. This conclusion takes us back to the opening scene where The Golden Image lies on the pier, and the would be travelers on board are involved in dialogues with the men and women on shore in what Sandra Paquet calls “Lamming’s . . . cinematic overview and sense of simultaneity in his depiction of the emigrant experience” (The Novels of George Lamming 32). The involvement of the men and women on shore, whether through mutual gazing, curiosity or goodbyes, already sets up migration as a form of exchange between home and away. In this fi rst part of the novel as well, Lamming conveys the idea that the West Indian despite his dread of the unknown is acclimated to migrancy, fl ight and infi ltration, and is therefore at some level well-prepared to deal with the phenomenological and ontological in-betweenity by which he will be both at home and in exile, both in exile and establishing himself by the spreading of new seed, the potential to people the isle of Albion with Calibans. Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners begins on the other side of the Atlantic from Lamming’s The Emigrants in a parallel to Lamming’s departure pier. That the novel begins in a transitory space—the Waterloo station in England— prefigures the transitory nature of the boys’ lifestyle and its implications for their shifting within and infi ltration of colonial England. Ports, rooms, and implied bedrooms become their point of contact and arguably the spaces where they undress the carefully kept “purity” that is England.

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In Londoners, sex is both paradigm and performance that is intimately bound up with imperial expansion and colony, both of which recall and bear witness of histories fraught with plunder and variable power relations. The main contact that Selvon’s West Indian men (the boys) have with England outside of work is through sexual relations with women. The narratives of their exploits not only propel the plot, but is the main subject of Moses the narrator’s commentary. While Lamming’s emigrants develop relationships with immigrant women, none of Selvon’s Londoners have relationships with black women, “but as far as spades hitting spades it ain’t have nothing like that for a spade wouldn’t hit a spade when it have so much other talent on parade” (Selvon 107). In Londoners sex and the pursuit of sexual relationships becomes the space where the Caribbean and England interface, sex becomes the site where offenses are intimate and stereotypes are like declarations of love. It is as a result of the sexual interactions between Caribbean migrants and their English lovers that the fi rst seeds of diaspora are scattered, changing the face of the population, even adding a new curly haired demographic: Thus it was that Henry Oliver Esquire, alias Sir Galahad, descend on London to swell the population by one, and eight and a half months later it had a Galahad junior in Ladbroke Grove and them English people stopping in the road and admiring the baby curly hair when the mother pushing it in the pram as she go shopping for rations. (Selvon 35) Moses argues that unlike men like Cap, Galahad and Lewis, who are enthralled by juggling the Frauline, the Frenchie and the Austrian, he is convinced that these white women are “frowsy” and a “waste of money” (Selvon 59). In his experience these interactions are fruitless; they do not for him represent the kind of intimacy that is lasting, but instead indicate white women’s desire to be entertained by primitive, black men (Selvon 109). Moses’ comment draws attention to the tentativeness of race relations in England; but equally, this statement of rejection and censure points to the fact that the boys’ sexual forays function as border crossings that always require a negotiation of culture, difference and prejudice (juggling the Frauline, the Frenchie and the Austrian). Selvon’s succinct description of the ways in which Henry infiltrates the English bloodline on multiple levels is characteristic of the modes by which this novel operates. In its use of Caribbean forms of transgression, understatement and laughter, as well as its border crossing Creole register, the book itself contaminates the canon of English letters and literary culture. Similarly, Henry Oliver takes unto himself not only the title Esquire (English gentleman), but also an alias (suggesting the clandestine, the “underworldly”). As Sir Galahad, he inhabits the purest scion of English knighthood; unlike the canonical Galahad, however, he bears much resemblance to the Assyrian who came down

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like a wolf on the fold (“Galahad . . . descend on London”). Obviously too, in the eyes of the white women he attracts, he would have gleamed in baroque gold and purple rather than pristine white. Unlike his namesake, he is neither virgin nor without progeny. The baby, Galahad junior, with his curly insideroutsider hair, in a series of ironic transferences, replicates and extends his father’s unstoppable spread. The baby sets in train England’s serial and continuing pregnancy (the population is “swell[ed]” by “one”); reorders Englishness along the ontological axes of time (“eight and a half months later”), space (Ladbrook Grove, London’s open streets) and consciousness (“the English people stopping . . . and admiring the baby”). Although the image of “stopping” signifies this profoundly ontological interruption, the English people seem unaware that what they are admiring is a mixed race child—there is no evidence of questioning, consternation or reaction among them. One irresistible conclusion is that an occult slippage has taken place: despite his curly hair, Galahad junior looks exactly like a white child. Another is that baby Galahad’s infant beauty so invades English hearts that his admirers do not see his obvious alterity. In creating this wonder of the British world, Galahad as one of the boys, has, ironically speaking “made a man of himself” (Lamming) in and within English society. Selvon’s representation of this diasporic reshaping is not an “easy triumphalism:” the boys’ passage through London is consistently marked by loneliness, dislocation, angst and feelings of loss of which even their sexual escapades are ironically assigned. Moses’ complaint allows for a reading of the boys’ refusal to sleep with black women in terms of a Fanonian pathology of self-contempt (Black Skin White Masks). However, when viewed in the light of an infi ltrational politics of migration, it can be seen that sex with black women would deny the ambiguous pleasures of freedom that Lamming talks about as being inherent in the act of migration. As far as the boys are concerned, sex with black women, by tying them to familiar expectations, would have linked them inescapably to the authorities of home and cut off the possibility of self-expansion that they are now able to enact. “A spade would not hit on a spade when it have so much other talent on parade” highlights the economic currency of white women and what the boys see as the absurdity of coming all the way to England to remain circumscribed by the same political economy that existed in the West Indies. Indeed, by constructing white women as symbols of motility—that is, as transitional sites and accommodations (their reference to the women as “bird,” “craft” etc.), the boys proclaim their own freedom to roam, spread, disseminate. The postmodern character of the boys’ instability anticipates diasporan and postcolonial discourses (cf. Anzalduá, Gilroy, Boyce Davies) on space and border crossing. Further, if as Heidegger claims, “language is the house of being” and if indeed “those who create with words are the guardians of [the home of language]” “where man dwells” (Heidegger 217), the boys’ linguistic framing of women in terms of their sexual congress can be read in the same way as

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sex in Lamming. It is a profound alteration of the ways England’s identity is imagined; as well, it introduces new clauses in the terms of engagement between England and the migrant colony. The Meeting Point almost begins with the exclamation from a concerned citizen in the immigration line at Malton airport, “‘ . . . hope Canada don’t get like Britain!’” (60). Meeting Point (1967) is the fi rst in Clarke’s Toronto Trilogy which includes Storm of Fortune (1973) and The Bigger Light (1975). Apart from its publication date, the novel is very useful for this study because of its engagement with the fi rst significant black Caribbean migration to Canada. The exclamation is spoken by an impatient man in the immigration line behind the newly arrived Estelle, who has trouble fi nding her passport; the statement underscores the anxiety around the changing color of the face of an already immigrant Canada. Clearly, news of the arrival of the S.S. Windrush and the rising number of Caribbean migrants in England had struck fear and concern among white Canadians. The migratory movement between the West Indies and Canada began in the nineteenth century with a few Canadian missionaries to Barbados and Trinidad; the movement was less than equal as even fewer West Indians traveled to Canada as participants in the missionary enterprise. A small number of West Indian soldiers were recruited for enlistment in the Canadian Armed Forces, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and the Merchant Marines, increasing the number of West Indians in Canada between World War I and World War II. After the wars the numbers grew significantly: Immediately after the Second World War, the number of West Indians moving to Canada drastically increased (from the new highs of 2,936 between 1940–1949) to 10,682 between 1950–1959. The numbers however did not reflect ‘a change’ in Canadian overall restrictive immigration policy and Prime Minister McKenzie King’s often quoted statement bears this out. He is quoted in 1947 as indicating that Canadian immigration policy objectives should reflect the exclusion of persons who would ‘make a fundamental alteration in the character of our population.’ The Immigration Act of 1952 therefore reflected this orientation and provided for the exclusion of persons based on the characteristics of nationality, citizenship, ethnic groups and geographical area of origin. (Carmichael 138) However, Canada’s need for cheap domestic help was to be the catalyst that changed the nature of Canadian immigration policy as well the initiative that impacted the way large numbers of Caribbean people were introduced to Canada. The Toronto Trilogy presents Clarke’s own fictional engagement with what it meant to be Caribbean in Canada in the 1950s to the 1970s marked by the “1955 policy initiative allowing the importation of domestics from the West Indies to work in Canadian homes” (Carmichael 138).

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Clarke complicates the effect of this immigration initiative in his presentation of the lives and times of Bernice Leach the protagonist; her friend and fellow domestic, Dots; and Estelle, Bernice’s sister. In his rendering of these women and their impact on Toronto and Toronto’s impact on them, Clarke exposes the Canadian Government’s attempt to defi ne Canadian citizenry by ordering and policing the domestic immigrant program with very specific eligibility criteria. “The eligibility criteria for the domestics were carefully stipulated: single, female, in good health, a minimum grade eight education and between the ages of 18 to 36” (Carmichael 140). The implications of this policy are that the Canadian authorities wanted women who had no competing domestic commitments; they did not desire to import families, as well, the implications for sexual relations and integration are clear. Being single, these women would not reproduce in Canada—after all, white men were not expected to fi nd them attractive and there was no simultaneous importation of working class West Indian men. Women do not come with patriarchal authority and power, thus they are not a threat to the configuration of the nation. Along with the eligibility requirements, a booklet titled “Advice to West Indian Women Recruited for Work in Canada as Household Helps” was employed to inform prospective domestics of what to expect in Canada, and perhaps most importantly, to a produce the desired effect, good help. The effectiveness of the criteria was based, however, on similar readings of all terms across cultures, and an assumed monolithic privilege regarding the understanding of concepts such as the nuclear family. If for the Canadian authorities “single” implied, not in a common-law union and childless, “single” for Barbadian women seeking to apply for the domestic program could imply both a binding common law union and children. In simple terms, even the detail and specificity of these requirements could not be as prescriptive as they intended to be (how could they prescribe or prevent the unthinkable or the impossible? What kind of language was used, for example, to prevent sexual interest between domestics and their employees?) What is clear is that in accordance with Prime Minister King’s edict, every effort was made to prevent the immigration of anyone who would fundamentally alter the “character of [the Canadian] population.” At the airport, the point of ingress and transition, the immigration officer’s treatment of Estelle and the overwhelming support he receives from the citizens waiting in line behind Estelle underscores the fact that this gatekeeping is critical work. Estelle’s mislaid passport is a sign that she can at any moment be sent back (from this in- between space which is not quite yet Canadian soil). Her position is even more tenuous because she is a visitor, not an immigrant—it is her sister Bernice who is the domestic immigrant. The idea that Barbados has travelled with her as her place of habitation is signaled by the paraphernalia (valise tied with string, laden with exotic foods, underwear, and arcane

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emetics) that identifies her as “other” and countrified. This heightens the immigration officer’s contempt. But the dual possibilities are clear: as visitor Estelle has access to Canada without being subject to the restrictions of a contract to “stay in her place.” That Bernice, the one who was recruited as a domestic worker, is confi ned by such a contract is made clear by the way she often feels imprisoned in her room and also sees it alternating as her fortress. It is also confi rmed in the fact that Bernice is the one who despite her longing to, does not have sex. Estelle’s sexual exploits and invitational gestures provide the broad structure of Clarke’s novel. Divided into three parts—“The Experience of Arrival;” “The Taste of the Apple;” and “The Triangle is Smashed”—that track Estelle’s prodigal journeys through Canada, the novel enacts a lapsarian discourse around temptation, ex-contractual relations and the uncontainable fruits of mutual desire. Estelle is the major figure in a set of crucial sexual meetings in in-between spaces in the city. Meeting Point is as much an attempt to understand the burgeoning Caribbean migrant community in Toronto as it is an interpellation of the alliances and mésalliances of various scattered peoples in Toronto. Clarke represents migrant relations as a set of expanding and contracting “circles” of interaction—a series of meeting points that connect his characters. The fi rst meeting point is the city itself. Clarke explains in an interview with Frank Birbalsingh that it was after the novel was published that he found out “that the aboriginal word for Toronto is ‘meeting place’” (Birbalsingh 90). The nature of the meetings in Toronto is characterized by the fluidity and complication of the politico-cultural terrain. In so far as many of these meetings/alliances are motivated by sex, desire is a meeting point, a leveling ground where the characters share a common experience of lack, pleasure and the quest for satisfaction. Among Bernice’s desires is her longing for the means and the associations she believes will endorse her as Canadian; Estelle desires landed status; Mrs. Burrmann desires her husband’s attention and affi rmation to complete her image of wealth and poise; Mr. Burrmann seeks the strange/familiar of a black woman’s body; Henry and Boysie seek the same of white women’s bodies and the cultural currency they believe these unions imply. In the novel “desire” has meaning beyond the sexual even though it is sex on which all the other desires are expressed and exploited. All the characters are implicated in these networks of desire whether their desire to reinforces hierarchies or problematizes them. The party in honor of Estelle’s arrival in Canada can be read as a metaphor for the immigrant experience in the 1950s. Though the honoree and the hostess are Barbadian, the guests span continents and cultures. The layers and complications across race, class, sex, gender and ethnicity are revealed in Bernice’s small apartment on an occasion that becomes less of a fete and more like theatre. At its height Bernice’s celebration is ten people strong:

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seven black West Indians including her just arrived sister, Estelle; her fellow domestic, Dots; Priscilla, a registered nurse; Carmeeta, a student at the University of Toronto; Dot’s husband Boysie; and his friend Henry. The nonblack West Indian contingent includes Henry’s “friend” Agatha, a Jewish graduate student at the University; Debbie, her half Japanese friend; and Brigitte, the German domestic from across the street. The narrative of the party segues directly out of the journey from the airport with Estelle, and the shared experience of racial prejudice that the seasoned migrants, Bernice, Dots, and Boysie already have in common with the just-arrived Estelle. Estelle’s fresh eyes confi rm what the others have not spoken but what they know—blacks are an unwanted minority in Canada. Clarke, however, complicates the politics of race bias and prejudice by layering the migrant community. While Boysie is part of the collective distress and fear expressed on the journey to collect Estelle, the circle of distress narrows, excluding him once the party begins and white women become involved. Priscilla very quickly sums up the dynamics at the party, “all these black men after the white girls, child” (Clarke 95). Carmeeta further articulates the anger and distress of her West Indian sisters, “It seems that our lot in this country . . . is to watch our men dance with white women, take out white women, and spend their money on white women” (95). Clarke’s use of the Mighty Sparrow’s, “You ever eat a white meat yet?” as one of the featured songs at Estelle’s welcome party, a party where the black women are ignored and the white women are the featured attraction asks the “meat eating question” not only of the West Indian men, but of the women as well—at least in Estelle’s interpretation. Even within this gathering Estelle is a marked woman. She unsettles the trajectory of desire when she refuses Henry’s offer to dance, “And even so, Henry, I don’t dance with black men. You too black!” (Clarke 111). She refuses him a dance not on the grounds that she has been ignored and insulted, but because he is black—in other words she terms the men’s warped psychology back at them as a declaration of her own empowerment. As Bernice regularly complains Estelle’s life of ease, her journeys through racially unsanctioned spaces, and her relations with men transform her visit into the miserable undoing of Bernice’s rhythm and space. Estelle is responsible for a number of undoings that shock and shame her contemporaries. She accepts the business card of a white man who travels next to her on the airplane. Dots and Bernice immediately register shock at Estelle’s naiveté (especially as domestics who were warned about the dangerous attentions of white men); Estelle responds to their shock with fl ippant calm. It is unclear whether or not she understands the potential risk and reward in a white man/black woman alliance, but it soon becomes clear that, as far as she is concerned, “a spade does not hit on a spade when it have so much more talent on parade.”

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Estelle is trickster and shape-shifter. In one swift move she transforms from party wallflower into an agent who manipulates desire—both how she is desired and what she is expected to desire. In her treatment of Mammy (she puts her in the poorhouse without conferring with or telling Bernice), in her intention to extend her visit to become a landed immigrant, in her dealings with Sam Burrmann, and in how these three deceptions converge, she becomes what Wilson Harris calls a “trickster of limbo” (Harris 29). Estelle “stands at the heart of the lie of community and the truth of community” (29). Although Estelle does not share the intentions of Harris’ limbo artist, whose presence at this double place (“trickster gateway”) is a conscious attempt to build a more “compassionate society,” her effect on Canada will ironically be similar. Her misdeeds with Mr. Burrmann encompass several levels of transgression: racial, sexual, social, historical, as well as psychological; Mr. Burrmann falls in love with her and her pregnancy by him bids fair to effect the same emotional surprises as Galahad’s progeny, (“the white people stopping in the road and admiring the curly haired child”). In this space where she is both truth (the exposure of those ties of desire that bring people together) and lie (the self-interested deceptions through which exposes this truth), Estelle is Anancy on Bernice’s chesterfield. As trickster-shape-shifter she imagines herself as Bernice and with Bernice’s life, “(she dressed herself in Bernice’s uniform and body; and herself took over serving breakfast” (Clarke 188)). This embodiment of Bernice is enacted in the scene that precedes her and Sam Burrmann’s fi rst sexual encounter. It is in the uniform of domestic service that Estelle envisions herself empowered in Canada—albeit in a uniform that Bernice resents and through a means Bernice condemns. At the heart of the lie and truth of community, Estelle at once performs in spaces where Bernice desires to perform and where she would never perform. Bernice feels simultaneous admiration and condemnation for her sister’s freedoms; she loves her and hates her. As well, though Estelle seems unimpressed by Bernice’s life and struggles, it is precisely through Bernice’s life that she envisions her salvation. Sex in The Meeting Point, much like sex in Emigrants and Londoners, is central to any figuration of diaspora. The stiff regulations which organize migration to Canada in the 1950s are most unsettled by sexual agency that cannot be policed and patrolled. Some of the same pathology around sex in Emigrants and Londoners, presented in language that recalls colonial power and domination, is evidenced in Henry and Agatha and Sam and Estelle’s sex in The Meeting Point. These encounters connect weighty colonial histories with the systemic racial imperialism and subjugation of blacks across the border in the United States. Sex becomes one of the ways that we extend and complicate our vision of diaspora, with consideration of the connections between African-American and Caribbean/black Canadian struggles. Clarke evokes America south of the Canadian border in

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the jazzing cadences of Harlem that Henry ventriloquizes in describing his sexual relations with Agatha: I’ll tell you something ‘bout me and my chick, Agatha. Man, one night it was hell in this bed. I’m thinking of all those black people lynched and killed, all those black cats, murdered and slain, all those black chicks raped and dehumanized, demoralized, de-whatever-the-you-want-tocall-it, and dig! Man, I’m driving and driving baby . . . Goddamn, baby, she was thinking I was loving her. But man, I was repaying! (276) Henry’s and Agatha’s intimacy, the tussle of their white and black bodies, recalls for Henry the punishment for this pleasure/crime and the general oppression of blacks in the United States. The thought of this makes him violent with rage, as does the fact that his repayment is misunderstood by Agatha, who interprets it as love. Similarly, Sam and Estelle’s fi rst encounter is presented as highly politicized intimacy. However, it is Estelle and not the worldly, educated Agatha who understands the layers of political and historical tension in her affair with Sam Burrmann. Estelle, as well, is able to switch back and forth between victim of rape and imperial expansion and playing subject to her landlord lover’s lust to ensure her the currency and power she will use to stay in Canada. “And she was very happy that he said he wanted her: she was also a trifle embarrassed through conscience, because her own motives for giving him her gift of love, were to put him in a position to be exploited. She must not think of those things . . . because she had given him a gift” (224). Estelle brings a prismatic excitement and disruption to Canadian space as well as to her sister’s life under contract. This change is parallel to the Caribbean migrant community in Toronto establishing diasporic connections. Clarke’s diasporas include associating Caribbean migrants in Canada with the struggles of blacks in the United States, as well, the Jewish diaspora and the germinal Caribbean diaspora in Canada become more than thematically associated when Estelle becomes pregnant with Sam Burrmann’s child. Though the child is nothing more than an ill-fated fetus at the end of Meeting Point (the bleeding, semi-conscious Estelle is significantly reduced at the end of the novel), in the sequels Storm of Fortune and The Bigger Light we learn that the child is not aborted but has lived to become part of the Canadian citizenry. In direct contradiction to the immigration act which imported women, not the wielders of patriarchal power, Estelle’s child stands at the trickster gateway as hybrid Canadian invested with male power.

2

Migrant Bodies, Scars and Tattoos Art as Terror and Transformation in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother I’m Dying and The Dew Breaker

Living and dying bodies, wounds and scars, as well as tattoos and other body patternings by which one may attempt to phrase an identity are central to Edwidge Danticat’s representation of migratory Haitian subjects and the Haitian body politic in The Dew Breaker and Brother, I’m Dying. Through images of corporeality, Danticat crafts an intricate discourse on the ways in which (Haitian) art participates in history and politics as material process. In laying these bodies out to view as art, as history and as political statement, Danticat’s novel and memoir read as part of an archive of Haitian experience from the years of the Duvalier dictatorships to the present. Central to this experience is the forced migratory encounter, which Danticat graphically portrays not only in these two works but throughout her fiction through images of bodies fleeing across (often closed and forbidden) borders (the raped, pregnant female body in Breath, Eyes, Memory; ravaged, mutilated bodies in Farming of Bones). In the process they undergo profound, anguished, and enigmatic cultural transformations. In this chapter, I examine how Danticat’s self-conscious focus on the body and its artistic representations allows attention to be paid to the physicality of the migrant subject and the ways in which history has material impact on real persons. This focus on art and on the body itself highlights the patterns by which individual acts of (migratory) movement create histories, communities and lasting legacies and complicate the spaces among which such movements are made. The Dew Breaker, using art as trope, and Brother, I’m Dying with its focus on actual bodies, become part of this patterning as they enter the traffic between Haiti and the US. The Dew Breaker and Brother, I’m Dying function within the concept of remittance in several ways. First, in the context of Danticat’s always obviously activist intent, the texts are referred for consideration, judgment or

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action in Haiti, the wider Caribbean and the US, as they speak to Haitians at home, the Caribbean community and the Haitian diaspora about the limitations of transnationality as an option for Haitians, who are so often imagined as anathema in the Americas. For the wider US audience, The Dew Breaker and Brother, I’m Dying circulate as literary products carried by Danticat’s reputation; beyond this, as critiques of US immigration practice. Second, like the monetary remittance, the texts initiate a dialogic relation between geographic and geo-political spaces. I discuss this more fully by taking as my point of departure a quotation from Danticat’s introduction to the edited collection The Butterfly’s Way: The plane that took me from Miami to Haiti the day before Jean’s funeral seemed like a microcosm of Haiti. Crammed on a 727 for an hour and thirty-six minutes were young rich college students returning from Miami area-are college campuses for the weekend, vendors—madan and mesye saras traveling with suitcases fi lled with merchandise from abroad, three male deportees being expatriated from the United States, a cluster of older women in black, perhaps also returning for a funeral, and up front the former president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, returning from a speaking engagement at the University of Miami. That we were all on this plane listening to fl ight announcements in French, English, and Kreyòl, seemed somewhat unreal. . . . My country, I felt, was something that was then being called the tenth department. Haiti has nine geographic departments and the tenth was the floating homeland, the ideological one, which joined all Haitians living in the dyaspora. (Butterfly’s Way xiii–xiv) The idea of the floating homeland invokes the uneasiness and the shifting parameters of diasporic location. The fact that the Haitian diaspora is seen as suspect in Haiti highlights the problematics of how the texts and their activist intent may be received in Haiti. By stating her awareness of this, Danticat acknowledges and accepts the liabilities of her position of ‘privilege’ and in effect ‘defers’ to the voice at home, without relinquishing the right to speak and send. This is her self-appointed remit as writer. (Danticat recognizes that one needs privilege both to speak and to send.) Floating homeland conveys the paradox of anchoring and movement and the twoness of being both Haitian and American. But the further subsumed idea of ‘being afloat,’ in the sense of being unmoored, deconstructs the singular idea of diaspora as privilege. Indeed, the diasporan and the Haitian at home experience a continuing relation of shared terror. In Brother, I’m Dying, Mira speaks of his brother’s burial in a cemetery in Queens, New York: “‘He shouldn’t be here,’ my father said, tearful and breathlessly agitated, shortly after drifting off to sleep that night. ‘If our country were ever given a chance and allowed to be a country

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like any other, none of us would live or die here’” (Brother, I’m Dying 251). Mira’s statement is not only an epitaph for his brother but a statement on the collective Haitian body politic: it images the migrant body unable to fi nd a resting place even in death, and it starkly conveys the experience of torture at home that necessitated fl ight in the fi rst place. Yet Joseph, the dead brother, is not a diasporan body, and this is important: Joseph dies in detention before actually setting foot on US soil; in effect, by dying in this in-between space, between floating and a lost homeland, Joseph focuses how extremely narrow the line that separates Haiti and abroad often is. This is underscored in The Dew Breaker by the fragility of diasporan residence revealed in Claude’s deportation and the dew breaker’s uneasiness within the assumed identity by which he attempts to escape his past in Haiti. Inevitably we also reflect on the fact that Danticat’s position as a well-known Italian American writer as well as US citizen could not assist Joseph in his attempts to prove his legitimacy as aspiring immigrant. A third problematic of remittance in the quotation from The Butterfly’s Way is revealed in the catalogue of the plane’s contents. On the 727 are “vendors with suitcases fi lled with merchandise from abroad and three male deportees being expatriated from the United States” (Butterfly’s Way xiii). The body of the deportee represents the most extreme form of denudation, highlighted in the contrast with the suitcases of merchandise. He returns with nothing except the meanings marked on his body—meanings that show how torn he is between the two spaces. For the US, now in the role of sending country, the deportee is a Haitian body; for Haiti, he is an American body, and as such inimical to the country’s social economy. In other words, the dialogic relationship initiated by the remittance is qualified by differentials of power. The merchandise occupies a similar ambiguous space, but will obviously be desired in a way the deportee is not. With the merchandise, the face of the US shifts: America’s accommodation within Haiti’s socio-economic and cultural space as desire complicates the power dynamic. Danticat’s presence on the plane as observer/narrator/returnee in transit speaks to her own ambiguous position and the ambiguity of the texts she is remitting. The texts participate in a political economy in which, like the deportees and the merchandise, their contribution to Haitian culture is troubled by issues of origin, location and perspective. The symbols of motility—the plane and the sea—invoke the idea of passage, not in terms of Gilroy’s discursive black Atlantic crossing but more in terms that can best be described in images of bodies in transit. Wilson Harris’ limbo dance as body art reenacting the dislocation that is wounding across a chain of miles, but also seeking to transform the experience, “Limbo then reflects a certain kind of gateway to or threshold of a new world and the dislocation of a chain of miles. It is—in some ways—the archetypal sea-change stemming from Old Worlds and it is legitimate, I feel to pun on limbo as a kind of shared phantom limb which has become a subconscious variable in West Indian theatre”

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(Harris 19). Dante’s Inferno, which Brother, I’m Dying recalls in bodies in torment and in motion, is also relevant to this discussion. The Dew Breaker (2004), generally read as a novel, is a collection of short stories loosely held together by the actual or liminal presence of the dew breaker, Monsieur Bienaimé, a deposed high level tonton macoute who flees the Duvalier regime, which he once served with bloody faithfulness. We meet the reformed macoute in Brooklyn, New York; he escapes his past by changing his name, losing a considerable amount of weight, and transforming radically from a proud, heartless torturer to a gentle, self-effacing barber, effectively throwing off his trail many who may have had the misfortune of knowing him in Haiti. The nine stories uncover the mystery of the man, as well as reveal the sphere of his influence as macoute, as father, as barber, in Haiti and the US. The dew breaker’s influence on the lives of Haitians in the diaspora on a collective and individual level is revealed by women and men whose consciousness he haunts. Danticat’s choice of literary form reveals her concern with presenting a particular, historical Haitian experience. The nine stories may be read individually, but the histories, coincidences and characters that connect them disclose a symbiotic relationship between Haiti and her diasporan communities. The thematic implications of the form are clearly revealed in the presentation of Haitian communities abroad. These appear as a continuum of the wider Haitian experience; as emblematic of the disjunctions of the Haitian/ American experience; and beyond this, as emblematic of the torn national body of Duvalieran Haiti. Perhaps the most telling trope in this regard is the trope of the twinned body, or double, through which Danticat images the complex networks of relation that travel between Haiti and the US. The doubled body suggests a continuing haunting by the ghosts of a history that connects the two and replicates itself by the phenomenon of migration, the constant movement of bodies and the psychic baggage carried within them, insistently marking the cultural or political landscape of both locations. The memoir Brother, I’m Dying is the bitter extension of this portrait. It tells the story of the Danticats1 as an immigrant family, focalized through two central characters: Edwidge’s father Mira and her uncle/surrogate father Joseph. On a personal level, the occasion for speaking (Lamming) is the death of both brothers, one from pulmonary fibrosis, the other from extreme neglect at the hands of US immigration authorities while in detention awaiting trial for political asylum. The story of Uncle Joseph enters the public domain in a starkly different way from the fictional The Dew Breaker. Before the memoir, the circumstances of Joseph’s death had already made headlines in newspapers in Miami where he was incarcerated, and had formed part of a 60 Minutes special on immigrants in the US. Danticat herself participated in the feature by re-telling her uncle’s story. The interweaving of the personal and the public initiated in the 60 Minutes feature is extended in the memoir as well as in the way Danticat makes her family’s story a representation of Haiti’s life as a nation state. The similarities

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between the narratives of fl ight, torture and haunting in the two books are so striking that Brother I’m Dying could be seen as the factual fulfi llment of The Dew Breaker’s imaginary. And yet The Dew Breaker is so rooted in historical fact and the memoir so carefully crafted around a recuperative mythology that seeks to redeem the ravaged bodies of the two men that at a certain level any distinction between fact and “fiction” becomes meaningless. Part of what the grieving elegy of Brother I’m Dying does is to give flesh to what is imagined, as it instantiates the markings of history on living, breathing bodies and within living psyches. Brother I’m Dying is not only remitted for consideration in Haiti, it requests a resting place for Joseph—as it were, sends him home for burial. As the plane’s passengers coming from a funeral in The Butterfly’s Way may signify, the return to mourn the dead dissolves the distance between nationals in diaspora and those on Haitian soil. But also, Brother I’m Dying is more readily paid attention not only because of the currency of the memoir as a popular form among a wide US audience but also because as personal testimony on a factual event of national importance (insofar as it implicates foreign policy or at least immigration practices), it may be incorporated into their own remit by specific audiences beyond the literary (journalists, immigration activists, lobby groups). Near the end of the memoir, in recounting her uncle’s death in detention, Danticat’s style shifts into a cataloguing of figures and facts in officialese, blending it with a journalistic style strongly reminiscent of the newspaper reports—indeed a comparison of this section of the book with at least one such report suggests that Danticat was consciously and deliberately imitating these reports. The chapters “Alien 27041999” and “Let the Stars Fall” present a staccato of information where Danticat details the name of the airport Uncle Joseph and his son Maxo departed from, the fl ight number, departure time, etc. She also includes her uncle’s emergency room records: his pulse (80), temperature (97.0), and blood pressure (169/78) checked and noted (Danticat 237). These chapters are much like Jim Defede’s article, “Twice a Victim: First in Haiti, Then in the US” in the Metro and State section of The Miami Herald dated November 14, 2004, which includes quotes from The Associated Press on the state of Haiti that Joseph fled, from his attorney John Pratt, a statement issued by The Department of Homeland Security and a report from the MiamiDade County medical examiner’s office. Danticat’s shift in representational mode functions as a way of placing her uncle’s death squarely in the public domain, or reminding here audience of its place there; she is also signaling that she places it in the remit, or responsibility, of the state. Danticat’s concern with the relationship between art and the body and how they function to produce historical and political meaning is revealed in the exquisitely layered symbolisms of the two texts. Her invocation of visual art forms: the sculpture of the dew breaker’s body in “Dew Breaker,” the wedding dresses in “The Bridal Seamstress,” the family photographs on the cover of Brother, I’m Dying; of body art and body markings—the tattooed body of the deportee Claude in “Night Talkers,” the scarred face of the

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dewbreaker—creates thickly interwoven motifs that visualize Haiti’s transnational crossings. The epistolary exchanges between the two brothers in Brother I’m Dying, one domiciled at home and the other in the US, are also brought into a discourse on art. Danticat tells us that her father wrote “form letters,” carefully crafted between words and silence, as a way of keeping connection without revealing too much joy or too much pain: Later I would discover in a fi rst-year college composition class that his letters had been written in a diamond sequence, the Aristotelian Poetics of correspondence, requiring an opening greeting, a middle detail or request, and a brief farewell at the end. The letter writing process had been such an agonizing chore for my father . . . that this specific epistolary formula, which he followed unconsciously, had offered him a comforting way of disciplining his emotions. (Brother 22) The letters then become a form of art that aestheticizes the pain of separation in an effort to render it bearable. In effect, in their careful containment and their intention to protect a psychic resource, the letters mediate an emotional economy as they circulate between the two spaces. Danticat tells us that she longed for a more emotional abandon, “I remembered a time when I used to dream of smuggling [my father] words” (Brother 21). This highlights Danticat’s own role as writer to fi ll in the missing text, but constrained by respect for her father an unspoken family code that demanded (a certain kind of) silence, “The dispassionate letters were his ways of avoiding a minefield, one he could not have set off from a distance without being able to comfort the victims” (Brother 23). Danticat’s continuing sense of frustration here reminds us of the sculptress Ka, the dew breaker’s daughter, who ineffectually struggles to make up the distance between what she knows of her father in the US and what she does not know of his wellhidden past in Haiti. If the writer’s sense of impotence is apparent here, it is even more painfully realized in the fact that Danticat’s father never wrote directly to her (all letters were directed to Uncle Joseph) yet expected her to write personal replies. The family’s codes of silence are intended to nurture the bonds among them; in contrast, the dew breaker destroys Ka’s sculpture primarily for selfinterest. Yet in both cases—the constraint on Edwidge’s freedom to speak and Ka’s feeedom to create—familial action operates as a form of policing. The dew breaker’s action against Ka’s sculpture reminds us that it is a tonton macoute who has traveled from Haiti to the US, carrying within his body his violent history as a functionary in a police state that controlled its people through surveillance. In such circumstances, the dew breaker feels himself to be constantly under the threat of discovery. The words in which Danticat couches her sense of impotence equally move beyond the familial setting to suggest the idea of state surveillance, this time with reference to

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the US’s monitoring of its borders. Wanting to “smuggle” her father words reminds us that during this period of Danticat’s life her parents’ status in the US was illegal and so they could not afford to make themselves too visible. “Smuggling” in this context also invokes the idea of contraband in relation to artistic products—invites reflection on how art, especially in the delicate position occupied by the Haitian-American artist, achieves its political ends subversively or obliquely, rather than by direct means. Even the memoir in the end couches its critique of US immigration practice quite guardedly— there is never any overt indictment and in fact the style of the journalist or the official documenter that Danticat adopts in recounting her uncle’s ordeal in Miami functions partly to avoid overt comment. Uncle Joseph’s insistence that the letters from abroad be also publicly read—bodily performed—was not only a way of ensuring the transparency about his management of the money remitted to support the children, but also as a way of conjuring the bodily presence of the children’s parents. It is as though art as performance could give the illusion that Mr. and Mrs. Danticat were somehow present in person to oversee their children’s upkeep and participate in their upbringing. Danticat recalls that as she read her father’s letters, his words enacted themselves in her consciousness with a physical (bodily) manifestation: Along with this task came a few minutes of preparation for the reading and thus a few intimate moments with my father’s letters, not only the words and phrases, which did not vary greatly from month to month, but the vowels and syllables, their tilts and slants, which did. Because he wrote so little, I would try to guess his thoughts and moods from the dotting of his i’s and the crossing of his t’s, from whether there were actual periods at the ends of his sentences or just faint dots where the tip of his pen had simply landed. Did commas split his streamlined phrases, or were they staccato, like someone speaking to rapidly, out of breath? (Brother 22–23) Part of what strikes the reader is the extent to which the family’s private “culture” is being transformed by the creation of new communication codes and cloaking devices designed to keep the family together across transnational space. Equally striking is the way in which these artistic elaborations are built around the father’s monetary remittances. Indeed the letters themselves function as remittances in a two way flow that mutates not only family culture but in a larger sense Haiti’s cultural economy. All of these layers and permutations show Danticat’s concern with the dynamic nature of art in process; as well, she constantly weaves a dialectic between the possibilities and limitations of the artistic enterprise. In both texts she sets up what may be termed “cycles of displacement” between artistic representation of the body and “the body” itself. Thus in Dew Breaker the

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fragility of Ka’s sculpture (how easily the dew breaker is able to destroy it) is set against the dew breaker’s real body, which he has transformed from a gross “pig in a calabash” (Dew Breaker 184) to an unobtrusive slimness but which houses the power to destroy the sculpture and with it Ka’s artistic lifeline. Claude’s tattoos, which insist on his transnational relationality and boundary crossings (“his skin is a canvas of Chinese characters, plus kings and queens from a card deck. One-Eyed Jack, Hector, Lancelot, Judith, Rachel, Argine, and Palas, they were all there in miniature, carved into his nut brown skin in navy blue and red ink” (Dew Breaker 100) contrast with the image of Claude as a body marked for deportation, which he is unable to contest. The bridal seamstress’ beautiful creations made to adorn, transform and make bodies beautiful are set against the memory of her own tortured body as she flees from the dew breaker, “the soles of her feet . . . were thin and sheer like an albino baby’s skin.” She explains how they got that way, “He asked me to go dancing with him one night . . . I had a boyfriend, so I said no. That’s when he arrested me. He tied me to some type of rack in the prison and whipped the bottom of my feet until they bled. Then he made me walk home, barefoot. On tar roads. In the hot sun. At high noon” (Dew Breaker 132). In Brother, I’m Dying, the narrative of letters as a doorway to usher in the illusion of the father’s essentially healing, bodily presence, gives way to the brutal reality of Danticat’s uncle’s and father’s bodies ravaged by illness and disease. In every case the images of bodily anguish or rage or displacement supersede the attempts (the sculpture, the tattoos, the dresses) to render the body in artistic/aesthetic terms. By this shift in representation, the body which has been central in mediated forms by these “artistic figures” becomes highlighted in its own “being” as a living entity with its own patterned forms of expression (anguish, pain, rage). The body then exposes art as “mere imitation:” if art gives expression to experience, then it is experience which points the way for how art creates its patterns. The breakdown of the language of the memoir into the staccato facts and figures of officialese in the last chapters where Danticat recounts her uncle’s ordeal and death in detention, speaks not only to the emotional exhaustion of the experience or to the political expediency of language choice, but ultimately to the exhaustion, or inadequacy, that art encounters in its attempt to render the “truth” or “essence” of reality. And if, inevitably, the displacement effected by the body as the house of lived experience is a repeating dialectic since the body on the pages is only another representation, Danticat’s ultimate point—the refusal to reduce experience to mere discourse, is effectively made. ***** The unease that the texts encounter between the two locations within whose remit they attempt to speak is reflected in the unease of The Dew Breaker’s

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characters as they seek to negotiate that same space of dialogic crossing. The accommodations—or lack thereof—that the characters fi nd are not only diverse, they exist on the cusp of unresolved tensions that delay any arrival at an ideal transnationality, and are always mediated by the nature of their past histories and the particular location of the two (Haiti and the US) in which they ultimately fi nd themselves. In the case of the stories “The Dew Breaker,” “Night Talkers” and “The Bridal Seamstress,” Danticat presents characters who have roots in both Haiti and United States, yet they are unable to readily traverse both locations. That is to say, theirs is a brand of transnationality marked by the condition of being across place, torn in stasis at the border rather than comfortably acclimated in any creative “third space,” or any crossing so easeful that they are able to “redefi ne space” (Boyce Davies 1). Even Anzalduá’s concept of a self-renewing border crossing wrung out of the experience of terror fi nds no convincing resonance in Danticat’s presentation of the main characters in these three stories. Monsieur Bienaimé, the former high level tonton macoute, has fled to the US to escape the brutal regime that has now turned on him. For safety’s sake, he has remade himself in the United States—a remaking that is not only physical and ostensibly moral, but also social, economic and ideological. Monsieur Bienaimé is proud of his family accoutrements—his devout wife and dedicated daughter—which he displays as extensions of his newly invented self/image and which function as his credentials for entry into the US value system and the American dream. Indeed, his new body, in fulfi lling the American aesthetic of health and beauty, functions in this way as well, not merely as escapee’s disguise. Dany in “Night Talkers” testifies graphically to this reformation. He remembers “the large man with a face like a soccer ball and a widows-peak dipping into the middle of his forehead” as the man who killed his parents (Dew Breaker 105). But the man he knows in Brooklyn is his barber and landlord; the one with the devout wife and dedicated daughter. This man’s face is considerably smaller than the face of the man who singlehandedly destroyed Dany’s family. When the dew breaker reveals his past to his American-born daughter Ka he reminds her of the Egyptian roots and the meaning of her name: ‘[a] ka is a double of the body . . . the body’s companion through life and after life. It guides the body through the kingdom of the dead” (Dew Breaker 17). What is striking then is that Ka’s artistic imagination, nurtured in the United States, but inspired by the lies told to her (imported as it were, from Haiti) by her parents, does indeed craft a double of her father, a double that if he had been willing, might indeed have guided him through his new life in diaspora. What Ka believes to have been his years as a prisoner in Haiti provides the only subject material for her work. And it creates an appeal that is very frightening for the dew breaker. Gabrielle Fonteneau, the woman who attempts to buy the sculpture, is Haitian; as a television personality and art collector she is also famous and well-placed to circulate information about this piece

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of art, which she intends to buy because it is “regal and humble at the same time” and reminds her of her own father (Dew Breaker 11). Gabrielle’s intuition of the sculpture as ‘regal and humble’ speaks to the idea of the double that might have redeemed the dew breaker: in this sense, the transformative ability of Ka’s art to reveal an alternative ‘better’ self of the dew breaker. This submerged self fulfi lls its more perverse destiny when the dew breaker drowns it before it can go on exhibit. For, ironically, such associations are at the core of his discomfort. Ka’s sculpture, regal and humble though it may be, locates him too closely to where he actually had been. There is another irony here. Ka’s vision of Haiti is completely dependent on the lies her parents tell, yet her imaginative reconstruction from these lies is close enough to the truth to be dangerous. Ka might be her father’s ‘good angel’ but her distance from Haiti prevents her from seeing just how dangerous even art can be for a man like her father. Danticat underscores the power of art through her discussion of Emmanuel Constant. She uses six pages of the story “The Book of Miracles” to describe the Bienaimés’ response to Ka’s supposed sighting of Constant. What is fascinating is that in this fictional story about a reformed dew breaker, Danticat tells the factual story of a man, Emmanuel Constant, who actually ran a death squad that harmed many Haitian people. Here Danticat uses the art of the story itself to reveal the dangerous and delicate line that supposedly separates between fact and fiction. The man at the Christmas Eve mass could be the death squad man, just as much as Monsieur Bienaimé, dedicated husband and father, could be and is in fact the man who killed Dany’s parents. That Constant fled to New York on Christmas Eve makes this mass even more significant: the resonance of Christmas with the literal translation of his name, “God with us constantly” perhaps reveals the difficulty of his ever being other than who he had been in Haiti. Constant’s name as a kind of haunting identifies him as the dew breaker’s double even more closely than their shared history does. In the same way that the name suggests an inescapable tribunal of genealogy and memory, the dew breaker is haunted by inescapable nightmarish dreams and by the scar left on his face by his wife’s brother, the priest who was the last person he had murdered. The priest in effect constituted himself as the dew breaker’s doppelganger, his historical memory, when he marks the latter’s face at the moment of his death: “The wound on the fat man’s face wasn’t what he had hoped; he hadn’t blinded him or removed some of his teeth, but at least he’d left a mark on him, a brand that he would carry for the rest of his life. Every time he looked in the mirror, he would have to confront this mark and remember him. When people asked what happened to his face, he would have to tell a lie, a lie that would further remind him of the truth” (Dew Breaker 227–228). And tellingly, the scar never disappears. It functions as an important forensic signifier of historical crimes in the same way that Constant’s name suggests an immanent tribunal. Beyond this, the

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scar signifies the migrating body as a portmanteau in which, in a sense, other bodies travel across the dislocated chain of miles (History, Fable and Myth). Danticat weaves the dislocations into recognizable patterns through her use of doubling: in “Night Talkers,” Claude the deportee as a criminally marked body enters this equation. As part of her critique of discourses of transnationality that posit a seamless assimilation across borders, Danticat sets up a contract between the marked, or sanctioned body, and the acceptable, or politically sanitized body in “The Book of the Dead.” Gabrielle Fonteneau is beautiful: her beauty has been a large part of her success in the United States. Although we are not told anything about her past in Haiti a distinct impression of privilege untouched by the terrors and violations that have been transported in the bodies, body memories and manipulated psyches of the other characters is conveyed by Danticat’s portrayal. One unspoken implication of the seeming ease with which Gabrielle accommodates to the American Dream is that her ties to Haiti are less than visceral. The contrast between the ways in which Gabrielle and her parents, on the one hand, and the dew breaker on the other negotiate the floating “space” between Haiti and the US is quite startling. The Fonteneaus return to Haiti every year; the dew breaker has not dared to return in thirtyseven years. The Fonteneau’s go to the beautiful port city, Jacmel—a tourist city, known for its serenity and mansions. Mrs. Fonteneau’s rapture over the landscape suggests that the family inhabits an identity that glides smoothly between wealthy American tourists and owner of privileged Haitian space: she describes the signal pleasure of sinking their hands in “sand from the beach in [their] own country” (Dew Breaker 30). The tourist oasis of Jacmel reads as a seamless extension of the Florida the Fonteneau’s inhabit, “‘We’re fortunate,’ Mrs. Fonteneau says, ‘that we have a place to go where we can say the rain is sweeter, the dust is lighter, our beaches prettier’” (Dew Breaker 29). Even as the Fonteneaus’ Florida is far removed from the space occupied by many of the Caribbean’s political and economic refugees in Florida, as well as in Brooklyn where the Bienaimés negotiate their uneasy existence, so is Jacmel removed from the stark reality of the Haitian landscape denuded by hurricane and soil erosion. The family’s ironically dissonant geographic settlement within constructed spaces of privilege mimics their dismemberment from the Haitian body politic under the Duvaliers. This is the body politic represented by the images of drowning (Ka’s sculpture), grotesque wounding (the dew breaker’s scar), violent excess (the grossness of dew breaker’s “unreformed” body), unsanctioned markings (the deportee’s tattoos) and unannealed dreams of desolation (Dany’s and the dew breaker’s nightmares). The Fonteneaus’ representation appears as a form of re-writing as careful as the dew breaker’s fictions. And yet, significantly, Ka, newly disillusioned by her father’s revelation about his real past, suggests that from same sands that enrapture Mrs. Fonteneau, he would have gathered “a fistful of blood” (Dew Breaker 30). The

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Fonteneaus’ dual, unproblematized locatedness is part of their privilege; the dew breaker’s dislocation, his lack of place, is a result of the privilege he surrendered as torturer and murderer. His daughter, like her sculpture seems drowned, refugeed, caught in an in-between space that appears as homelessness. Ka as her father’s double appears in another light: as narrative space into which he writes the fiction of his reformed identity. As space, Ka is also the crossroads where the dew breaker attempts to effect a seamless crossing by erasing the boundary between past and present—the image he presents of himself now is purportedly the identity he has always had. The dew breaker’s fiction as contraband smuggled across psychic and historical boundaries is the absolute source of Ka’s idealism, and indeed of her only sense of Haiti as an imagined community: the face she sculpts when she sculpts her father is Haiti’s face, both its tortured history and its submerged but vividly real possibilities. Her father’s misdeeds in Haiti affect Ka at the core of herself, even her creativity. When he reveals himself to her she confesses that not only has he drowned the sculpture, but that she has “lost her subject, the prisoner father [she] loved as well as pitied” (Dew Breaker 31). By virtue of the close identification between her image of her father and her image of Haiti, this loss of her subject/father becomes a way of phrasing the loss of a country as well as a psychic and creative homeland. Indeed, her father’s revelation of himself unveils for her with categorical meaning the limits of her transnationality, and brings into sharp focus again Danticat’s recognition of the paradoxes of the floating homeland (The Butterfly’s Way xiv). Ka as creative and psychic refugee in Brooklyn, New York is a strange double of Claude the deportee in the story “Night Talkers.” Claude’s “art”— his tattooed arms—marks him as foreign in the remote Haitian village where he lives with family he had not previously known. The tattoos, like his foreign English and disturbing past (he murdered his father in a drug induced rage), would seemingly exclude him from a familial heritage in Haiti, and he himself confesses to Dany that if he had met any of his peasant family on the streets of Brooklyn he would not have owned them. Ka’s art as well marks her as foreign, ironically to both the US—her own country—and Haiti, for not only is its inspiration not drawn from the US, it is drawn from a Haiti she does not know and which in fact does not exist insofar as it is problematically imagined at the site of a singular, totalizing and “untrue” narrative. Any sense of transnational belonging that either character experiences is painfully limited: Claude because he cannot cross borders legally and Ka because after thirty years she discovers that her parents’ silences are borders that prevent her from claiming Haiti with the ease of her earlier innocence. And yet Claude’s deportation to Haitian space uncovers a fundamental difference between his situation and Ka’s, rooted in the cultural particularities of location. It seems that despite his tattoos, his English and his crime, his family sees in him important markers of belonging. He tells Dany, “I look at

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them and see nothing of me, man, blank, nada, but they look at me and they say he has so-and-so’s nose and his grandmother’s forehead, or some shit like that” (Dew Breaker 102). The emphasis on establishing genealogical belonging through physical features is a distinguishing aspect of Haitian/Caribbean culture2 from which Claude’s response shows him to be clearly alienated. Yet, arguably, Claude’s mother saves his life by connecting him with family, who seem to accept him totally. The issue of what allows for this acceptance is answered only in part by reference to genealogical proofs. Danticat’s consistent celebration of a larger sympathy, a rich hospitality and sense of community carefully nurtured in the face of political oppression (this nurturing often accomplished through the recounting of family histories, empowering mythographies and commemorative rituals) is also evidenced in the village’s acceptance of Claude and their warmth towards Dany. The extent to which remittances from Claude’s mother to the family may have played a part in his being accepted however becomes a tantalizing third possibility. While there is no overt mention of this in the laconic “ . . . then fi nally my moms . . . came to Port and hooked me up with some family here” (Dew Breaker 101), such a connection seems almost something the reader familiar with Caribbean/Haitian culture and practice might take for granted, and more especially because of the obvious inability of the villagers’ meager resources to provide for an extra mouth for an extended period. Such an interpolation by the reader is further invited by the intertwining of Claude’s story with the story of Dany, whose relationship with his Haitian family involves his practice of regularly sending home support money from the United States, and who is solicited for money by villagers when he returns to Haiti to visit his aunt. The space that Claude’s mother is able to negotiate for her son is then arguably produced from the meeting of the emotive, kinship-tie and economic requirements of community culture. The economic aspect, like his linguistic inability and his tattoos, marks Claude as a product of US-Haitian intersections with which he never becomes quite comfortable. At the end of the story, he is still rehearsing to Dany his unease between the acceptance he has found in the Haitian village, and his destabilizing sense of his difference. But whereas the community of possibilities exists for Claude in the small village location, Ka’s parents easily keep her apart from any intimate contact with the diasporan Haitian community, public gatherings such as masses and funeral notwithstanding. Dionne Brand aptly describes the diasporan condition that might make such isolation in the midst of “community” possible: “Our inheritance in the Diaspora is to live in this inexplicable space. That space is the measure of our ancestors’ step through the door toward the ship. One is caught in the few feet between. The frame of the doorway is the only space of true existence” (Map to the Door of No Return 20). That a deported, juvenile murderer would fi nd roots and home and the innocent daughter of a former murderer would be completely dislocated and un-homed seems to

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fit what Rolph Trouillot terms “the logic of the absurd” in his description of Haiti under the Duvaliers. Trouillot explains the root of this: Indeed, the use of force by the Duvalierists was rarely punitive, especially after 1965—hence its seeming senselessness. A tally of its casualties would count more scapegoats, more victims of sheer arbitrariness, of accidents of birth, or of presence at inopportune times and places than opponents who represented any real menace to the regime. But the very frequency of these accidents, the fact that they could befall anyone at any moment, engendered what local observers justly called “a climate of terror”. (Trouillot 169) In a real sense, the dew breaker’s violence against his daughter’s art was not punitive either: his destruction of her reason for living may be read as simply an “accidental,” yet necessary, fallout from his need to protect himself. Michel Foucault’s discussion of Panopticism in Discipline and Punish describes the essence of this powerful surveillance: “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (Foucault 201). Ka’s sculpture becomes the target of a surveillance that appears benign but is the very essence of terror: it devours people as it devours the creative spirit. Danticat’s description of the relationship between Ka and her father after the event renders this sense of an unnamed, vaguely apprehended terror in the starkest terms: “I pull the car away from the Fonteneaus’s curb, dreading the rest stops, the gas station, the midway hotels ahead for us. I wish my sculpture were still in the trunk. I wish . . . that I still had that to look forward to somewhere else, sometime in the future” (Dew Breaker 33). There is a surreal quality to Ka’s sense of dread: the regime travels with/within the dewbreaker and has a vested interest in making the artist impotent and invisible. “The Bridal Seamstress” takes the idea of art and visibility further. Beatrice Saint Fort is a victim of the reign of terror that was the Duvalier regime. She proves that the terrible absurdity of this regime has a stark emotional and psychological impact on its victims even outside of Haiti’s borders. Beatrice explains to the journalism intern, Aline Cajuste, that she is giving up her art, the business of making bridal gowns, to escape the shoukèt laroze (dew breaker) who tortured her in Haiti and follows her every time she moves in New York. The reader is unsure whether this pursuit is the figment of her traumatized imagination, but imagined or not, Beatrice’s terror is created by the regime and her awareness of the pervasiveness and occult capacity of its surveillance machinery. As in the two previous stories, the issues of diaspora and translocality are teased out through the discourse on art and how it creates meaning. While

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diaspora, to Beatrice, may mean freedom from state imposed terror and freedom to live and pursue her art, it never means escape. Beatrice’s wedding gowns could also be read as resistance. It is not strange that this woman whose love-life was interrupted by a self-seeking torturer, and whose life continues to be interrupted by the man (real or imagined), would make a career out of sewing gowns for an occasion that she was denied. Her dedication to ushering women down the aisle with the indulgence of a handmade wedding gown (and with self-acceptance) is a small act of order and affi rmation that would probably have been denied under the Duvaliers in Haiti. Each dress is emblematic of the survival of the creative spirit in spite of the regime. In the United States, she is free to create, and yet Beatrice seems totally aware that this is a conditioned freedom in more ways than one: she envisions herself as caught between two regimes—not only the Duvalier panopticon but also the tyranny of US capitalism, which she vigorously opposes. She explains to Aline that each dress is made with the bride’s body in mind, not a small feat in a society where ideas of beauty and body image are heavily commercialized and are dictated by Eurocentric ideals. It is her job, she believes, “to tell them, without making them cry, that they’re too short, too wide, or too pregnant for a dress like that, even if [she loses] money” (Dew Breaker 126–127). It seems one resistance feeds the other. Ultimately, despite being “nutty,” Beatrice inspires in the young Aline the importance of art(istic) meaning in a familial/communal and historical sense. The Aline who at the beginning simply wishes to (on her boss’s orders) “get the story and leave” and who resists “becoming too cozy with the natives” undergoes a metamorphosis initiated purely by the conversation with Beatrice who speaks her artistic philosophy of “spending some time” and making each dress special for her daughters/clients whom she makes call her “mother.” The gap between the Haitian American Weekly that is concerned with frivolities, and the desperate seamstress still running for her life is dramatically bridged by Aline’s thoughts at the end: [she] had never imagined that people like Beatrice existed, men and women whose tremendous agonies fi lled every blank space in their lives. Maybe there were hundreds, even thousands, of people like this, men and women chasing fragments of themselves long lost to others . . . These were the people Aline wanted to try to write about now, no matter what Marjorie Voltaire said. And if Marjorie didn’t like it, then she would quit and go work somewhere else. She might even return to Somerville and, at last, let her parents learn who she was. (Dew Breaker 137–138). In declaring her commitment to her writing as ‘truth’ rather than economics, and extending this ‘truthfulness’ out to the resolve to bring her own sexual body out of hiding, Aline focuses the figure of Beatrice as a bridge across dislocations; placed against the dew breaker’s fearful destruction of

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Ka’s sculpture, this throws into sharp relief the possibilities of artistic work and the multiple, contradictory ways in which Haiti, its diaspora and US metropolitan space crisscross and refashion each other. In Brother, I’m Dying, Danticat is much more concerned with how the US figures in the lives of Haitians in the United States, in Haiti and the fraught “borders” between the two. The relationship between the US and Haiti is long and entangled, dating back to the post-revolutionary sanctions imposed against Haiti at the beginning of the 19 th century, and signposted at intervals by dramatic markers such as the 1915 invasion, US involvement in the presidential debacles of 1994 and 2004, and politically driven moments of escalation in Haitian attempts to immigrate to the US. 3 This fraught relationship is a dynamic that Danticat has addressed in her previous fiction as she has consistently confronted the plethora of stereotypes attached to Haitians as a result of blindsided US encounters with Haiti: from Haitians being one of the three H’s that carry AIDS, to being imaged as desperate boat people on drowning dinghies or unwelcome refugees being turned away on Miami’s skimpy beaches. 3 J. Michael Dash in Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination traces the ontological roots of this relationship: The history of Haitian-American relations is fi lled with missed opportunities and tragic incomprehension. American intentions to reshape, control and dominate Haiti because of the latter’s threat to its interests, are sustained by an imaginative grid of stereotypes through which Haiti is fi ltered into America’s consciousness. Images of the rebellious body, the repulsive body, the seductive body and the sick body constitute a consistent discourse that has fi xed Haiti in the Western imagination: the “Haitianizing” of Haiti as unredeemably deviant. (Dash 137) Through Danticat’s portrait of her family we see the gamut of the imaginative grid which Dash describes. The reader knows that the sick body, the repulsive body, the body that rebels at all decent containment, are the bodies of the writer’s father and uncle/surrogate father; by extension, they signify her own body and genealogical line. Danticat’s narrative of her own journey to becoming a writer is woven into the narrative about her father and uncle losing their voices and each other. She presents the emergence of her artistic persona not as the journey into her own personal voice but as the acceptance of an unspoken remit, a responsibility as speaker, redactor and amanuensis for these “silenced” progenitors. Ultimately, the two men are immortalized in the familial mythological structures by which Danticat frames the memoir: the coincidence of her pregnancy and her daughter’s birth at the point of their death is elevated into Haitian mythologies of death as a form of transformation and return. This coincidence is as well as a signal of continuation, through genealogical

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succession and rehearsals of memory. In this case the “rehearsal of memory” is the memoir itself; its production as genealogical continuity and return is made apparent from the very opening lines, “I found out I was pregnant the same day that my father’s weight loss and chronic shortness of breath were positively diagnosed as end-stage pulmonary fibrosis” (Brother 3). Later, in the chapter significantly entitled “Transition,” Danticat tells us that she named the child Mira after her father, and photographed them both together while he was on his deathbed. In the narration she weaves together multiple strands of reference to the in-betweenity of states. “Transition” references her father’s dying and the child’s birth as twinned journeys: “There is a stage in labor called transition when the baby preparing to separate from the mother, twists and turns to pass through the birth canal. I am sure there is a similar stage for existing life, though it might be less defi nitive” (Brother 252). “Less defi nitive” has a particular resonance in the context of the father’s words as he sees the child, “Look at us, the two Miras . . . I’m really touched that you named her Mira . . . Now even when I’m gone—and we all can say that, even those of us who are not sick—even when I’m gone the name will stay behind” (Brother 257). The child’s journey into life is a journey of continuity and replacement: her grandfather’s departure heralds not the (defi ntively) closed circle of death, but the survival of the family circle. By bringing their marked, deracinated bodies into a circle with the concept of a perpetuity grounded in the new body produced from their line, grounded further in the redaction of their own acts and words by the writer that both have fathered, Danticat reorders the matrix between voice and perceived voicelessness, corporeality and its meaning, the US and the Duvalier regime as the writer of the scripts for bodily performance. Danticat’s representation is by no means triumphalist: even as Aline’s liberation in “The Bridal Seamstress” is played out in the context of Beatrice’s (unameliorated) bodily and psychological haunting, the memoir as tragedy is focused throughout by the portrayals of physical and mental suffering. Further, the memoir’s reflection on its own fragmentary and circumscribed nature, points to the ways in which the work of art traveling between different imperatives and locations inhabits not a free-floating border/home/land but its own intersection between voice and the inability to speak. Danticat recounts her mediations for her two fathers as she traces her journeys from childhood to adulthood, from Haiti to the United States and between both places in various states of psychological and emotional dis/ ease. The plaintive cry, “Brother, I’m dying” which titles the memoir, holds in the moment of its speaking much of what is at work in the memoir. It raises the question of language: speaking and writing, Kreyol and English, but also of fraternal and familial love, of Haiti and the United States and the borders that defi ne them. The moment is related in the second chapter of the memoir: Joseph Dantica’s fi rst journey to the United States is not for pleasure, but for the purpose of a radical laryngectomy. He travels alone after his wife

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is denied a visa, and he leaves Haiti half expecting never to return. Barely twenty-four hours after his arrival, he phones his brother in the middle of the night in pain: “Hello,” my father said, his voice creaking anxiously. No good news could ever come at this hour of the night, he told himself. My Uncle pressed his lips as close as he could to the mouthpiece to whisper these three words: “Frè, map mouri.” Brother, I’m dying. “What’s wrong?” my father asked. “Goj,” he replied. Throat. (Brother 41) This exchange between the brothers is their fi nal exchange before Joseph’s larynx is removed and he loses his voice completely. I will begin by looking at how this raises questions of language, specifically speaking and writing, for the Danticats. The problem Joseph Dantica voices to his brother is immediately about a pain in his throat, the cancer. By the time we are privy to this exchange we know as well that Mira has developed a fatal condition (pulmonary fibrosis) that has rendered his speech into gasps. However, in the paucity of their exchange, Joseph expresses to Mira a broader concern that will eventually handicap them both and that has implications for others dispossessed. We could say that their voicelessness is remade through their bodies. For their inability to speak has much to do with the limbo space they occupy between the margins of US society and the constant socio-political upheaval in Haiti that has separated them from their birth country. In the opening chapter, Danticat notes that the waiting room of the pulmonologist, a Dr Padman, is fi lled with others like her father, “Everyone in his waiting room, mostly Caribbean, African, and Eastern European immigrants, seemed to be struggling for breath (Brother 7). Implied in the immigrants’ struggle for breath is the struggle for words, speech and an articulated place in the US. The anguish of their migrancy is in their inability to root; the limbo of their experience; that is, the silence between languages, cultures and divergent, often irreconcilable experiences.4 In the moment that Danticat relates the brothers’ last conversation, it is evident that we are privy to this very personal exchange because she the daughter/writer is able to tell it to us. And yet the limitations on her role as writer, reader, interpreter and translator on behalf of her fathers that we saw in her account of her childhood are revealed here as well. The mark on the child left behind by migrant parents is indelible in adulthood. At the family conference held to discuss her father’s worsening illness, she is unable to look directly into his face from across a table and speak her thoughts. It is not strange that in this moment, in her mid-thirties, she recalls her desire as an eight year old to smuggle him words across the unbridgeable distance between Haiti and the United States. For Danticat, the distance is perhaps

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never properly closed and the emotional minefield of the transnational family never cleared. Even though her immediate family has long been reunited, she reveals the consequences of the process of transnationality and the serial separations it so often entails. Father and daughter embody the fear of the family being apart from each other and this somehow forces the expression of their emotions underground. Embedded within these personal constraints are the same family and Haitian cultural codes around politeness and reserve that Danticat acknowledges and strives to honor. She is then caught within a complex of seemingly contradictory actions—framing, telling, translating and keeping familial reserve intact. This sense of her art struggling at the site of a negotiation between the imperatives of a familial and cultural commitment and its own aesthetic urge to fulfi llment is suggested to us at the point where she explains her charter: “What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can’t” (Brother 26). The memoir is then as much about the brothers’ relationship, their living and dying, as it is about Edwidge’s role in their lives as shared daughter, speaker and writer. It is as well the story of how and why she became a writer. Danticat’s voice is very present in the memoir. As translator, she speaks each time her father and uncle speak. Indeed, while the exchange between father and uncle is crucial to the piece, it is really Danticat’s Kreyol-English translation that titles the memoir. This is consistent with the childhood she recalls for us, where she became necessary to familial dialogue and to conversations with the world outside. In the same way that she had deciphered her father’s scribble and taken over from her uncle in reading the letters sent from her parents in New York, she now, after Uncle Joseph loses his voice, translates his gestures into words, and as her father’s illness progresses she mediates and advocates on his behalf. As writer, she moves between oral and written cultures and codes, between Kreyol and English, between Haitian and familial history and the present. The result is a ventriloquist’s text as well as an oral script, which acknowledges many of the contradictions of writing such a thing. Because it is a story that is as well-concerned with voice and speech and what happens when these are lost, there is indeed already a marked place for reticence, reserve and recognition of the limitations of authorial voice, over and above any silences that the two protagonists or their culture might impose on the text. While there is reticence in how the Dantica(t)s negotiate the myriad emotional challenges of the transnational family, Danticat openly documents systemic injustices in Haiti and the US. In this regard Brother, I’m Dying is intended to “speak up.” In the telling of Uncle Joseph’s story in particular, Danticat logs a chilling indictment of those who chased him from his church

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and neighborhood in Belair, Haiti, and of the US authorities who because of their bias against Haitians failed to objectively consider his case, incarcerating him and denying him adequate medical attention. The starkness of the indictment is not diminished by the “distanced” journalese (discussed earlier in this chapter) in which she documents Joseph’s last moments; indeed, the journalese operates on multiple levels, one of which is to give the narrative the authenticity of the documentary as well as to call together into a juridical community the newspaper reporters whose style it imitates. In terms of its imagined5 remittance to Haiti, the text’s journalese automatically fi nds resonance with those who will hear in it an uncanny echo of the willed “accidents” perpetrated by the Duvalier regime. Brother, I’m Dying is haunted by the uneasy politics of voice for the writer who speaks for another (who cannot tell his/her own story), while inevitably accruing identity and kudos from the process. A writer as sensitive as Danticat, for whom this writing of her family and her birth country is a labor of love, cannot help but be aware of the economic quotient of her role as writer: in naked terms, writing Haiti earns her bread and butter and the international reputation that makes her visible; writing her fathers’ voice/ lessness as an act of homage brings her into voice and fortune. The choice not to write them is impossible, and Danticat makes her own peace with these complexities of “relation” and “in-betweenity.” As a naturalized American citizen and famous writer, she is able to travel back and forth between Haiti and the United States in a way that neither her father nor her uncle is able. She explains that while her father had been to Haiti only three times in the thirty-two years since he’d left, in 2003 when they returned for Tante Denise’s funeral, it was her twenty-fi fth return in less than a decade: After that fi rst trip in 1994, I returned often, not always to the capital but also to other parts of the country, to help teach a beachside summer abroad course for American college students. I also traveled with documentary fi lmmakers, went to interview artists for art catalogs, attended academic conferences and even went back for several weeks to write a short book on carnival in a southern city, Jacmel. (Brother 145) Here Danticat shows not only how her relationship to Haiti changes with her success as a writer, but also how her body accrues a different set of meanings from her father’s and uncle’s. Hers is neither sick nor illegal. It is not a body on a dinghy or raft; it does not seek asylum. Wherever she travels, it is marked and recognizable by one or other of her multiple occupations of power (college teacher, fi lm worker, art interviewer, invited guest at academic conferences) and always by her identity as Edwidge Danticat, whose photographs appear on the covers and inside flaps of her books. It is marked as well as by her identity as an international traveler with the “migratory” freedoms that Boyce-Davies ascribes unequivocally to Caribbean women

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writers in diaspora. The validity that the writer’s marked body accumulates at Customs both in its guise as diasporan-Haitian and American accrues as much to the text remitted in both locations—it is not likely to be searched for contraband or placed in quarantine. Of course this must be said with modification as “likely to be searched” often depends on the particular immigration officer’s level of knowledge, sophistication or entrenched prejudice, but the point is that this privilege exists. Her constant sense of the contradictions between the transnationality of privilege and her “other” historical and familial realities as a Haitian person puts a painful spin on Danticat’s view of herself as inhabiting a “floating homeland.” In associating her body with her father’s and uncle’s in the same way that she associates the script with their voices, she denies the privileges of the transnational body even as she must keep them in order to do her fathers justice. Reflecting on the almost ghostly haunting of the facts of Brother, I’m Dying by the fictions of The Dew Breaker (as if the one became the prophetic precursor of the other), we may read the Fonteneaus, who also travel to Jacmel, and the frivolous Aline who fi rst meets Beatrice, as cautionary tales that Danticat has constructed for herself against the seductions of an easy transnationality that could only reveal itself as a form of deracination. Both texts may also be read as examples of the unspoken side of remittance that is not highlighted in economic appraisals of its efficacy: the desire of the remitter for moorings and groundedness in the midst of the “open sea” between one homeland and another.

3

“Two places can make children?” Metaphysics, Authorship and the Borders of Diaspora I believe it necessary to the development of black people and therefore the development of the world if black people get together. There are large fi ssures between African Americans and African Caribbean people that need to be bridged. Erna Brodber, Personal Interview, February 2002

In this chapter I examine how Erna Brodber’s novel Louisiana redraws the boundaries of space and place to create areas of free movement for her characters. Brodber’s approach is interestingly different from those of Danticat and the writers discussed in Chapter 1. She shares their interventionist approach to writing history but does so in ways that attempt to transcend history and the problems of access, movement and relation that history poses. In this sense Brodber’s perspective could be called idealist, yet it presents itself as factual. In my discussion I consider how her approach engages particular ideas about areas of responsibility for the text, how the space of its remit is to be articulated and judged. Louisiana is the narrative of a young Jamaican-American academic, Ella Townsend, who is sent to southwest Louisiana to collect data from an aging black matriarch, Mammy King (Sue Ann Grant King). She takes with her a new technological advancement in data-collection for the 1930s, something akin to a tape recorder. Ella has difficulty obtaining information from Mammy King primarily because Mammy refuses to cooperate and tries to reverse the roles of ethnographer and informant. However, Ella’s original role as researcher ends abruptly when the old woman dies. In quick succession Ella’s boyfriend Reuben Kohl joins her in Louisiana and Ella’s role as information gatherer and funeral planner transforms into her role as a conduit between the dead and the living, the past and the present. Ella fi nds that the tape recorder, mysteriously infi ltrated by conversations between Mammy and the spirit of her long dead friend Louise Grant, has more information about Mammy King than she expected, and she is able to gather from the recorded conversations the role the venerable sisters (Mammy and Louise) have in her life.

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Inspired by this knowledge, Ella and Reuben move to Congo Square in New Orleans and stay with Madame Marie, a cultural matriarch and psychic.1 There Reuben makes connections with jazz musicians, makes his contribution to the development of the genre and is in turn transformed by the experience; Ella works with Madame Marie as a seer/psychic and eventually inherits her practice. Both Ella and Reuben leave their academic work to embrace their new lives fully. When Madame dies, Ella takes over her clientele and passes her days working for the psychic betterment of her patrons. After an illness during which her body deteriorates as her spirit enlarges and her mission is completed, Ella Townsend Kohl/Louisiana fi nally dies and leaves behind this manuscript, the story of her experiences that the publishers call Louisiana. Through this tale that renders in a matter of fact, taken for granted mode what some call the marvelous, 2 Brodber introduces her border theory, which is unique in migration literature. Louisiana addresses a relatively uncommon though not new or unexplored subject in Caribbean migrant literature, what Brodber terms the “getting together of black people.”3 But Brodber’s fictional portrayal of this “getting together” represents a shift in contemporary representations from a focus on the limited contact Caribbean communities in North America and Britain have with other ethnic communities, to an intensive exploration of the relationships and commonalities shared among the various branches of the black diaspora. Taking a consciously didactic approach, Louisiana employs cultural metaphors and ethnic similarities in religion, nomenclature and iconography to effect the unity of African, African-American and AfricanCaribbean people in the text.4 Migration and transmigration are central to this project of bringing connections to light and repairing the fissures which exist among these groups. 5 In terms that recall Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s metaphor of the “repeating island,” Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlanticism and Carole Boyce-Davies’ concept of migratory subjectivities created within translocal and transnational spaces outside the confi nes of place and territory, Brodber creates a cultural diaspora in Louisiana based on sameness and psychic unity. The fundamental difference between Brodber’s and these other perspectives lies in Brodber’s spiritualist epistemology; and less obviously, in how she simultaneously creates an alternative dimension of existence and posits that this dimension already exists, and is being brought to light through textual work. Louisiana effects its dual representation by a remarkably complex set of crossings and interweaving: religious, philosophical and disciplinary syncretisms; boundary crossings of nation and genealogy; and complicating of the issues of authorship and textual authority. It is Brodber’s vision of the “folk” or the return to the “folk” as a means to accomplish the unity of people in the African diaspora that requires the protagonist, Ella, to abandon formal ties with the academic world and locate for Reuben a folk/popular option to his interest in culture and music. This

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abandonment of the world outside of the frame set by the venerable sisters and the “getting together of black people” through spiritual connections posits a diaspora without the political and legal concerns of cultural nationalism. Brodber’s concept of diaspora moves away from the exclusions of nation and culture, and seeks instead an all inclusive option for the empowerment of blacks around the world. Transmigration, which is defi ned as the passing along of an individual’s soul after death to a living person, is also known as metempsychosis and in this project becomes metamorphosis, signifying psychic change. Transmigration reveals Brodber’s concern with the spirit world and the significance it has in her construction of a model for diaspora, a model which esteems psychic oneness across ethnic and national differences. Migration also plays an important role in Louisiana as the physical journeys of black people facilitate cultural interaction in the metaphysical world. Transmigration and migration are presented as independent movements but closely intertwined and equally central to the lives of black people in diaspora. Brodber’s spiritualist border theory is as problematic as it is radical and far-reaching. I argue that while it presents provocative options for a spiritual disapora and the acceptance of similarities across nationality and ethnicity, it is able to so only by ignoring the material restrictions blacks face in the diaspora. Brodber’s project fractures along the fault lines that she aims to transcend: law, access, nation boundaries and how these affect the free movement of even “spiritual products.” Indeed, Brodber seems self-conscious about these material restrictions in her presentation of characters such as Reuben and the venerable sister from Jamaica, Louise Grant. These characters are always conscious of their national differences not in the context of culture, but as these differences relate to their tenure in the United States. Similarly, Brodber’s use of the name Louisiana (the name of the Jamaican location of Ella’s antecedents as well as of the US state) intends to capture sameness across the diaspora, but the reader is not likely to privilege a small town in a rural Jamaican parish in the same way Louisiana, USA is privileged. The cultural prominence of Louisiana, USA over Louisiana in Jamaica is the same cultural prominence that makes the work in the US the central focus of the novel and the location through which all other stories travel. This chapter examines these issues—Brodber’s re/creation of diaspora through the use of transmigration and migration, and the fissures, or blind spots that trouble her project—in order to reflect on the panoptic scope of material power from another perspective. For if other worlds intersect the one we are aware of on an everyday basis, it is clear from the tensions in Brodber’s work as well as the contradictions in how the novel has been received, that the political and psychic systems of the latter can significantly inhibit the otherworldly. Brodber’s diasporan text fi nds a unique place in this reflection on how texts are remitted and authorized. As committed an activist as her predecessors discussed in Chapter 1, Brodber however takes a significantly different

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approach to the meaning of fiction, authorship and textuality. Kenneth Ramchand points to the importance of Lamming’s statement in The Pleasures of Exile, “it is the West Indian novel that has restored the West Indian peasant to his true status of personality” (Lamming 39, Ramchand 8). This statement is emblematic of the writers’ concern to carve out the space of their own remit as “the writers of the West Indies.” This meant not only the need to distinguish their work as belonging to the Caribbean rather than starting a provincial branch of British literature, but also to establish the claim of “writing the West Indies into being.” From such a perspective, the individual author possesses a singular and specific authority. Brodber in contrast, frames her novel as “a community text.” The narrative begins with the editor’s note that accompanies Ella/Louisiana’s story/life history, which is also the novel Louisiana. The note introduces the story as a polyphonic text and itself becomes part of the story. It also tells us that the manuscript came to the editor through Reuben. Later in the novel we learn that Reuben transcribed sections of the venerable sisters’ communication to Louisiana when she is too ill to do it herself. He also writes part of the manuscript, names the book “a community song,” “a tale of cooperative action” (Brodber 161), and adds the epilogue in which he says, “It is my wife’s story too. It is the story of the conduit, the scribe as much as that of the actors” (Brodber 165). The actors in this reference are the venerable sisters, Silas, Ben and the other seamen whose stories told to and through Louisiana are transcribed in their own voice. By referring to Louisiana the author-figure as a conduit, and making her story one among many (it is her story “too”), Brodber shifts authority from the individual writer to the folk community that the writer serves. Reuben’s naming the book as song references the jazz aesthetic that frames the book and which is one of the many tropes by which Brodber highlights the community text. Reuben, the one who fi nally sees to the publication of the manuscript, is a jazz man. Facilitating jazz rehearsals in the same space as Ella conducted her healing/singing sessions, the musical cross-fertilization that took place is commented on in this way, “Into my parlour come the organized sounds of professionals rehearsing and the barriers do break, for the royalty of the jazz world grace us with their presence every now and then and the singing in my parlour of the US-West Indian men has more than once been the inspiration for a jazz work” (Brodber 130). In drawing together publishers, editors, authors and textual characters, and moreover creating each of these as simultaneously subjects and producers of the text, Brodber radically rethinks the terms by which they become authentic. That is, the author(s)-publisher become subject to the manuscript because it is the people’s story; the people who are represented in the text, the characters, are now the producers of the text. Brodber’s use of philosophical crossings is seen in her close attention to a tradition of African and African diaspora ideas. Through an imbedded

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connection with this historical chain, or bridge of ideas, she emphasizes her concern with unity and unification. Her border theory, despite its focus in the spirit world, references the philosophies of Marcus Garvey, Pan-Africanism and Ethiopianism. In a seminal essay, “Re-engineering Black Space,” she discusses Ethiopianism and Pan-Africanism as philosophies based on the premise that the alliances of blacks of Africa and the diaspora are not limited by borders. These philosophies, both grounded in Atlantic crossings, are arguably part of the process of completing emancipation through their creation of a new discursive space for blacks, what Brodber terms “blackspace:” “To work towards emancipation is to work towards a new defi nition of the possibilities of our collective selves, is to re-engineer blackspace” (“ReEngineering Black Space” 73). Brodber’s argument presents the idea of borderlessness that she sees underlying Ethiopianism: Ethiopianism is politically significant. It has historically created a continent of consciousness. African Methodist Episcopalians in South Africa sang the same songs and had the same hopes as African Methodist Episcopalians in British Guiana and the USA. Padmore felt that Ghana was as much his business as Trinidad was and Dubois found his way to Africa to be gathered up to his ancestors. It created for the enslaved persons emancipated in 1834 and 1863 a physical space which transcended geographical boundaries. (80) Here Brodber uses space and place interchangeably, making way for the concept in the later Louisiana, that intellectual work around history and culture is a gateway to realms of freedom outside the ontologies of place and location. In this way of thinking, the issues of remittance (inequality, access, the problematics of in-betweenity) played out in the texts discussed in Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4 are made irrelevant. The crucial modes of travel are psychic, and the destination is also the point of departure: a circle of unity among African diasporans that pre-exists the journey in order for the journey to take place, but is also facilitated and expanded by the journey itself. Ethiopianism and Pan-Africanism have some of their earliest roots in South Africa, with Africans seeking independence from political and cultural bondage. Barry Chevannes in Rastafari Roots and Ideology discusses the ways in which Ethiopianism began in Jamaica as it negotiated a space between “the Idealization of Africa” (Chevannes 34) and the experience of loss and separation from home, more broadly conceived as identification with Africa. Part of the history of Garveyism is that despite its success as an inspirational ideology that was able to travel across the diaspora, Garvey found his personal movement restricted when he was arrested in the US, and was later deported. The founder and head of the UNIA and its related enterprises was ejected from the location central to their success and they

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soon collapsed. Furthermore, Garvey’s efforts to spread his message in his native Caribbean were less than successful because of the Caribbean’s suspicion of black ideology.6 Brodber seems to pay tribute to these precursors by linking her characters to them (Louise Grant, Sue Ann Grant King and Silas King). At the same time she uses her spiritualist world to suture the gaps in their ability to effect the unity of blacks in Africa and the diaspora. The most profound border crossing that Brodber effects is her attempt to fi nd a place/ space in which history has an “other” dimension that is not subject to the kind of laws that circumscribed Garvey and others. As text, Louisiana invites readings of history in ways that are outside what was previously imagined. Louisiana’s disciplinary syncretism simulates the crossing between the spirit world and the material world. It also introduces a vocabulary that changes the defi nitions, not just the boundaries of disciplines. Brodber uses the transmigration of the venerable sisters (Sue Ann Grant King of Louisiana, USA and Louise Grant of Louisiana, Jamaica) into the body of Ella Townsend, to address migrant experiences and the possibilities for black alliance in diaspora. Brodber presents this transmigration as the work of “high science,” a term used in Jamaican folk speech to refer to interventions that confound scientific explanations. But she presents the effect of high science using the language of social science from the Western academy. The science of Ella’s transformation is not only evident in the transferal of Mammy’s “soul” to Ella, but as M.M. Bakhtin’s model of metamorphoses advances in The Dialogic Imagination, Ella is transformed from participant observer to the more integral role of full participant.7 Ella Townsend Kohl, known as Louisiana, becomes the embodiment of the union among African-Caribbean, AfricanAmerican and African peoples 8 as she transmutes from budding anthropologist/writer to the field (blacks in southwest Louisiana) itself. Brodber uses this psychic migration as the link which connects seemingly unrelated characters and as the unifying factor for Africans in diaspora. Brodber’s essay “Fiction in the Scientific Procedure” is useful for understanding further how her literary craft is aligned to her redrawing of disciplinary boundaries. This essay somewhat preempts Brodber’s “next major academic piece” which she calls The American Connection, a sociological account of the cultural similarities between African-American and AfricanCaribbean people. She explains in an interview that Louisiana is the fictional process of “feeling [her] way to this project” (Personal Interview February 10, 2002; Kingston, Jamaica). In “Fiction in the Scientific Procedure,” Brodber shares some of the philosophical and academic motivations that contributed to the making of Louisiana. She discusses her personal crossing of disciplines, maintains that she still sees herself as a sociologist and explains her “fiction writing as a part of her sociological method” (“Fiction in the Scientific Procedure” 164). 9 Brodber also touches on the “activist intentions” which fuel her work and then makes a categorical intervention into how her work should be read: “It is my hope that this information will be a tool with which blacks and

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particularly those of the diaspora will forge a closer unity and, thus fused, be able to face the rest of the world more confidently” (“Fiction in the Scientific Procedure” 164). Louisiana then, is intended to be not merely a “diaspora text,” but also an “activist text,” with a designated mission that places it in the same category as testimony and sermon. Further, by aligning the way she fuses sociology, science, high science and fiction with the way Ella transmutes into Louisiana as anthropological field, spiritual conduit and written text, Brodber suggests an almost alchemical process in the meeting of disciplines. History is also involved as the book is based on very specific events in Caribbean and US history (Ella for example is presented as one of the researchers in FDR’s 1930s WPA program. FDR’s intervention in the US’s economic and cultural history is supplanted by and merged with the intervention by the venerable sisters). Conceptually, Brodber blurs national boundaries among people of the African diaspora; stylistically we are aware that her literary crossings are meant to initiate a new and different kind of text. Brodber’s text gains its authority as a community/activist/diaspora text from its close referencing of cultural practices and historical facts related to the African diaspora. In the same way the venerable sisters employ Ella to manifest themselves and continue their work, Brodber uses Ella’s “spiritual journey,” or the “coming to herself,” to mirror traditional ritual ceremonies of the diaspora. The structure of Louisiana can be read as the performance of a syncretic ritual ceremony. The six parts of the text, as suggested in the editor’s note, decode a message: “I heard the voice from Heaven say, [‘]fi rst the goat must be killed (and you get) out of Eden and get over (to be) Louisiana.[’] Den a who sey Sammy dead, (if this can happen)” (Louisiana 5). Here Brodber combines references to African and African-American religious ceremonies as well as Afro-Caribbean folk songs, which are often ritualistic in nature. “First the goat must be killed” is a line borrowed from Kamau Brathwaite’s poem, “The Making of the Drum”10 in Masks, the African third of The Arrivants trilogy. In Gordon Rohlehr’s Pathfinder, an exhaustive study of Brathwaite’s Arrivants, he quotes Marina Maxwell, who posits that “in Africa the goat is considered a barren animal . . . so [the killing of the goat and the stretching of its skin suggests that] the barren areas of our lives must be killed and the skin of our existence stretched” (qtd. in Pathfinder 122). The killing of the goat and the stretching of its skin is also part of Afro based ritual services in the Caribbean, though as Maureen Warner-Lewis underscores, “the poetry and the prayers associated with these rituals have largely disappeared” (122). Rohlehr also points to the function of the scapegoat of Hebrew mythology “whose death redeems the tribe” (122). He concludes that, “Out of this ritual slaughter and stretching of the rack, the voice is born (123). “Getting over” refers to a spiritual or psychic break-through; it may be during a religious ceremony as well as it might just be an individual coming

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to an understanding of something important. “Getting over” belongs to African-American vernacular and is evidenced in traditional spiritual songs such as “How I got over.” The central imagery of this song is useful in coming to an understanding of the term: “how I got over, over/my soul looks back and wonders how I got over/one morning I’m gonna wear a diadem/in the New Jerusalem/I’m gonna walk me some streets of gold/In the homeland of the soul/I’m gonna meet the host in white/who traveled both day and night/ coming up from every nation/ on the way to the great coronation.” The song speaks about the New Jerusalem or Heaven as the location of the fi nal and ultimate coming through. Ella is a second generation migrant, born in Jamaica and raised from an early age in the US. Like many other second generation children, she knows very little about her origins, yet she comes through with the early strains of a Jamaican folk song, “Ah who sey Sammy dead.”11 Through ritual refrains, the folksong tells the story of a village farmer, Sammy whose unexpected (gully) bumper crop brings about negative attention from his neighbors. Sammy, however, has more than a bountiful harvest; he is resilient. With all of the envy and bad feelings his neighbors exhibit Sammy still manages to maintain his life and livelihood. The teller of the story is a staunch Sammy supporter, and if we read the folk song literally that Sammy has indeed been murdered, then it is another version of Sammy who is alive and simply will not die.12 The last refrain which is sung as a question “ah who sey Sammy dead?” or as a statement sounding more like, who could really think that Sammy has died, has spiritist resonances. That is, Sammy in the last verse might indeed be Sammy’s duppy.13 Ella/Louisiana’s unconscious use of “ah who sey Sammy dead” signifies the resilience of Jamaican folk culture in a psyche that had for all intents and purposes killed that aspect of her life. Carolyn Cooper argues that the song “releases her psychic powers (“Science and Higher Science” 11). “Ah who sey Sammy dead” in the fi rst section of Louisiana appears as a ghost would, jarring and incongruent. When it is spoken or thought it further confuses Ella’s voice in a conversation that is already hard to follow. Cynthia James posits: “the subversion of the Jamaican folk song represents the dormancy of an undying spiritual connection still in existence in spite of the tendency to diasporic cleavages,” this spiritual connection maintains throughout the text, even when Ella/Louisiana is unaware of the meaning (“Reconnecting the Caribbean-American Diaspora” 164). “Ah who sey Sammy dead” is also typeset in bold black letters that stand out from the rest of the text. The penultimate time Ella thinks or speaks it Mammy criticizes her education. “Them teachers did teach you nothing ’bout living; they teach this one nothing ’bout dying or passing the lifeline” (Louisiana 28). The venerable sisters doubt Ella’s ability to see beyond her education and to connect with her cultural heritage. The sisters are concerned that their chosen “kid” is unaware of something intricately important

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to her function as part of the trio, “passing the lifeline.” Ella then is at the center of a ritual exorcism and re/possession (reclamation) similar to her namesake’s in the earlier novel Myal (discussed below). “Ah who sey Sammy dead.” The next time Ella Townsend uses these words she shouts them so loudly that she hears them from her semi-conscious state. The shout happens at Mammy King’s funeral when the spirit transfer or passing the lifeline takes place. Ella allows herself to be used as the chosen vessel of the venerable sisters. Sammy’s song, though outside of its specific national/cultural context tells of an immortal soul; in this case it is Mammy King’s soul. That is, even though they are burying the old woman, through Ella she still is alive. In “Fiction in the Scientific Procedure” Brodber discusses how Myal laid the framework for Louisiana.14 The earlier novel uses the African/diasporic belief in the spirit world to address specific socio-cultural anxieties in a local black Jamaican community, and how these anxieties extend themselves to transnational concerns facing people of the African diaspora. The specific examples of spirit theft in Myal range from the standard, local obeah, to the larger more dangerous types orchestrated by global systems such as neoimperialism and neo-colonialism. Both texts highlight the need for psychic healing in black communities. Both also highlight communal gatherings (versions of the black church or groups of likeminded individuals) as the psychic pulse of diaspora communities. In Working the Spirit, an examination of some traditional religious ceremonies performed around the African diaspora, Joseph M. Murphy acknowledges the role the black church has played in socio-economic and political concerns of blacks. Here he specifically references the Church of God in Christ in Memphis, Tennessee: The church of God in Christ, like all congregations of the black church, has provided more than worship services for its congregation. During the difficult years of legal or de facto segregation, the church functioned as a full alternative society offering education, fi nancial assistance, and health care to its members. (Murphy 156) In the above passage, Murphy uncovers a well-entrenched philosophy of religious movements in the African diaspora, the work of the church existing beyond the everyday and visible realm. Myal explores similar activities in a rural village in Jamaica, where several of the prominent community leaders and church members work to relieve two young women from the effects of spirit theft. One of the young women, Ella O’Grady, because of her near white complexion and easily straightened hair, is seduced by a white American and returns to the village mysteriously swollen with a false pregnancy. Her swollen stomach signifies for Brodber neo-colonial spirit thievery that is manifested in the form of the objectification of the native. Louisiana disperses the historical localization of the spirit work not only beyond a specific town or village, but beyond Jamaica’s national boundaries.

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The transmigration of the venerable sisters into Louisiana is described in the language of the African-American church, and explained by the fact that Ella is physically in Louisiana, USA. However, Ella’s experience with the transferal of the sisters’ souls into hers allows her access to the personal histories of those, including herself, who have experiences beyond the boundaries of the southern United States and the US. In general, while the actual science of the transmigration takes place in Louisiana, USA, the effects of the transmigration extend as far as the Caribbean. What Brodber attempts in Louisiana is another manifestation of the spirit world working with, yet beyond, the church in the black community. Ella’s actual experience of spirit transferal in Louisiana, USA is consistent with other kinds of spirit transferals throughout the African diaspora. It is helpful to examine the language used to describe this process in the various African diaspora traditions. Murphy looks at this aspect of “service” in traditional worship assemblies around the diaspora. He analyzes how a revivalist from the Revival Zion church in Jamaica describes her experience of receiving the spirit: Mrs. Williston draws the connection between the state of mind achieved in the shouting of the church service and that of her dream. Both are privileged states of awareness in which the self is no longer identified with the ordinary self of waking life, but with another faculty of the personality, a personal spirit which is capable of ‘journeying’ beyond the confi nes of the body and seeing what ordinary eyes cannot see. (Murphy 128) This separation of the ordinary self from the self which is capable of journeying beyond the self is very similar to the process Ella experiences, and still there is more. Murphy explains that the experience above is an initial experience, but after contact with the spirit world has been made the experience changes somewhat: A more dramatic way that a spirit may “convert” a person is by means of a trance, known as being “put on the ground” by the spirit or “slain in the spirit.” Here an initiating spirit takes full control of the individual’s consciousness and leads him or her on a spiritual journey. Each of the stations of the journey becomes a symbolic key for the traveler to understand his or her journey in the waking life. (Murphy 129) The experience in the spiritual realm as described by a revivalist in Jamaica is similar to Ella’s experience in the southern United States when she reaches her apotheosis via the song, “Ah who sey Sammy dead.” She explains the “high science” of this line when she begins understanding the work and purpose of the venerable sisters. “‘Ah who sey Sammy dead.’ They had placed that

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message in my head. It was my voice that kept saying it, though nowhere was that phrase in my consciousness at the time” (Louisiana 31). This separation of body and spirit remains covered in question until Ella “comes through.” The second and to some degree most public and thus significant experience is the actual transferal of spirits or “thought transplant” which takes place at Mammy’s funeral. Ella only remembers shouting “Ah who sey Sammy dead.” It is Reuben who informs her of her kicking, fighting, foaming at the mouth as well as her exceptional strength. The villagers’ explanation, which is the one that holds, is convincingly clear and historically supported. Ella is informed that her behavior “was quite consistent with the transfer of souls, I was being taken on a journey into knowing and was resisting as fi rst timers sometimes do” (Louisiana 38). Ella’s spiritual journey is here again highlighted as a hybrid exchange between the Euro-science of her northern education and the African “high science” that the venerable sisters will impart. Although the ethnographer is literally taken over by the field (Mammy King), neither Ella/Louisiana nor the venerable sisters completely discard anthropology. For the Jamaican revivalist, Mrs. Williston mentioned above, the journey in the spiritual world is important to understanding her waking life, and so it is for Ella. Many of the dream/visions she has are direct prefigurations of her life. The language used to describe the “science” of Ella’s calling and coming through resonates with traditional African diaspora religions; there is a noted absence of any specific form of worship, belief system or denomination, but rather a coexistence of various cultural forms. This unity and equality of cultures becomes important to the interaction of the venerable sisters and Ella before and after the spirit transferal. There are references to mounting and riding, but never to possession—an absolute take over of Ella. Joan Dayan in Haiti, History, and the Gods explores this: “As I have said, ‘possession’ is not the term used by practitioners. Instead, they describe the experience in active terms and, most important, as an interaction: ‘the lwa descends;’ ‘the lwa mounts the horse’ (monte chwal); ‘the lwa dances in the head.’ Although it has been said that the self must leave for the lwa to enter, the self is not erased. The experience of alternating attenuation and expansion prods us to envision a configuration of wills, recognizing each other through their relation” (Dayan 68). The semantic differentiation between possession and what Dayan deems more “active terms” suggests that in Ella’s case a mutual desire for the work of the spirit world exists. Indeed, Ella soon sees her place with the venerable sisters. Ella’s metamorphosis does not require that she abandon her “self;” in fact, the subplot of Louisiana is that she continues to perform her research and the appropriate documentation. The choice of name for herself evidences Ella’s claimed subjectivity; it is never imposed. The spiritual journey of Ella Townsend Kohl/Louisiana, from cultural amnesia to knowledge of herself, is the organizing chronology in Louisiana;

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the migration stories of parents, her grandmother, Reuben, Ben and the others that punctuate Ella’s life, like much else in the novel, are revealed like a prophecy or vision. Their depiction is crucial to the understanding of the text, for though these are physical journeys, they facilitate spiritual and cultural interaction; and most importantly, the coming together in a common location to effect psychic healing and wholeness. As they work in concert with Louisiana’s transformation, one obvious question they raise is to what extent is the full effect of transmigration dependent upon migration? For though Louisiana has spiritual access to the stories of others far beyond the shores of the US, it seems that she is able to heal their trauma only when the characters make physical journeys to her location. Similarly, Ella herself comes into her new role and identity only as she undertakes specific physical journeys towards a destination where she meets significant others who will play different roles in her life. Does this contradict the powers of transmigration, its ability to break the boundaries of space and time? In this section I examine how Brodber addresses these complex questions. Brodber is interested in charting the historical networks of crossing that make up the diaspora in the Americas. In the process she establishes Ella/ Louisiana as a child of diaspora, who is eminently suited to take on the higher level of crossing that the venerable sisters require. The physical journeys of Louisiana’s parents therefore are portrayed as integral to her biological and cultural genealogy. Ella reveals from her research into her childhood that her conception preceded her parent’s nuptials. She is therefore a product of a very typical African diasporan family. The well-buried marriage certificate also shows that while her mother’s address is recorded as Windsor Castle, Jamaica, her father was in Colon (69). The movement from Jamaica to Colon or to the general area of the Panama Canal was one of the earliest mass migrations from the Caribbean after Emancipation, and in this case to Central America. Mr. Townsend, like many other skilled and unskilled workers from as far as Barbados in the Eastern Caribbean responded to the call for work by the US Government and took advantage of the opportunity to leave the monotony of poverty and struggling postslavery agrarian economies. Irma Watkins-Owens in Blood Relations suggests that this migration, which began in the 1880s, followed ongoing inter-territorial migration (migration between Caribbean islands) that preceded migration to the United States. This movement out in ever widening circles is described by Watkins: From the 1880s through the 1920s, another phase of inter-Caribbean movement was characterized by emigration directed to increasingly labor-hungry foreign lands on the borders of the Caribbean Sea. This included migration to the Panama Canal project; to Cuban and Dominican Republic sugar estates; to banana plantations and railroads in Costa Rica and other Central American countries. (Watkins-Owens 12–13)

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Mr. Townsend’s migration to Colon is seemingly mentioned only in passing, but it establishes that Ella’s parents are in Central America when her grandmother dies. Though Brodber specifically establishes connections between Jamaicans and African-Americans, the scope of the African diaspora is significantly broadened because of the inclusion of these other journeys. The next move of Ella’s parents’ is to the United States. Here, as with their migration to Central America, we are not given any specifics. We know that when they arrive in the US Ella is still a baby, and we also know that they probably settle in the Northeast, specifically New York City. Again, this next stage of the Townsends’ migration is consistent with the patterns of other Caribbean migrations. Conditions in Colon are dangerously poor and the Townsends have to think of raising Ella. Much of the movement into the US was inspired by economic necessity as all around the Caribbean Harlem became the new location of choice. Watkins-Owens states that “An unknown but substantial number of Caribbean immigrants came to New York directly from Panama or financed their own or family members’ transportation to America with ‘Panama money’” (Watkins-Owens 14). Though we can speculate that Ella’s parents follow this migration pattern, their migratory routes are characterized by silence. Migration for Ella’s parents is presented to us as a tight-lipped movement towards a pre-picked, desired future for Ella and respectable prosperity for themselves. Ella’s own experiences with her parents are few and impersonal, yet she understands how they approach transnational cultural alliances or non-alliances. Ella describes her mother’s West Indian Episcopalian Church as the social and cultural location where many of her mother’s prejudices are evident: This Church, my mother’s church, was called by those around us the West Indian Church and West Indians were called King George’s Negroes. They were a funny lot. They kept themselves away from others on their blocks and formed their own clubs and societies, yet in these groups they seemed as apart from each other as they were from those outside them. (Louisiana 58) This West Indian Episcopalian experience is an example of the many nonutopian trans-cultural experiences of blacks in the diaspora. The state of these King George’s Negroes is not specific to Ella’s mother’s church, but is resonant of other Caribbean texts such as Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones.15 Watkins-Owens also documents the role of these churches and associations. She suggests that these communities were influenced by class, gender and ethnicity and documents how many of these societies and social orders extended beyond religious affi liation, to important places for social gatherings, as well as societies that helped with providing economic support (particularly jobs and housing) for their members.

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The fact of their migration works against the Townsends’ attempt at exclusivism, as seen very clearly in their daughter’s profi le. Ella’s story as a child of migrants is highlighted in Louisiana, for in her spiritual role as prophetess and seer, her doubleness is an asset. She becomes a cultural celebrity as she spans two cultures and sings two kinds of songs. However, in her physical life Ella has to choose. Her abandonment of the North and her academic career is an abandonment of her parents’ dreams for her and their desires to create a new life for her through migration. Her migration to the South symbolizes not only a movement towards understanding and becoming a part of the folk, but an undoing of her parents’ attempt at upward mobility. Louisiana notes that her parents answer none of her letters and she later details how they fi nalize their separation from her by returning to Jamaica without her knowing and leaving her inheritance to be parceled out by the family lawyer. This fi nal act of severing ties is notably sterile; Ella/Louisiana’s life-work of erasing borders is sharply contrasted with her parents’ desire to be separate from her. When her parents return to the US to settle in Connecticut, Ella/ Louisiana has already died. The barrenness and discontinuity of the Townsend line is given grave emphasis; the Townsends have returned home without their daughter and without any physical contact with her. Despite Ella’s efforts through Ben to locate them, the additional distance between parents and child confi rms the separation and the pain. Thus Ella gains the mothering of the venerable sisters but loses her own biological parents. The Townsends’ refusal to engage in a worldview beyond the traditional Euro-American standards of success prevents them from understanding and reuniting with their daughter. Brodber’s diasporic vision, which involves a cultural and spiritual metamorphosis, is revolutionary and radical; it comes with a high price. The Townsends’ journeys are aligned as well as opposed to those of others who play a more positive role in Louisiana’s life. The venerable sisters along with the seer Silas are Pan-African and Garveyite activists who describe various journeys between Jamaica and the US, and represent a genealogy of martyrs against segregation. Reuben, who like Louisiana belongs to two places, journeys from his native Congo to Germany, then to the US in search of his family and roots. He is supposedly a child with no known parents, but he is probably the child of an African woman and the German missionary priest whom he calls his father. Reuben, therefore, is the “African” connection in Brodber’s tale of the diaspora, though his color and his accent imply another connection. Through Reuben and the sisters, the geographies of places as twins are highlighted: the sisters hail from St. Mary in Jamaica and St. Mary in Louisiana respectively, and even as Ella discovers her new name in Louisiana, USA, Rueben Kohl, traveling to St. Mary, Louisiana from New York, discovers an uncanny resemblance to the dead activist Rueben Cole, whom he has never met.

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Though he does not have to leave the South entirely, his presence in St. Mary, Louisiana becomes dangerous because of this connection with another ghost from the past (“An who she Sammy dead?”). When the couple move to New Orleans, however, Reuben fi nds that the city is graced with place names such as Congo Square, substantiating for the displaced African/European Reuben the realization of home. Jazz is another sound of confi rmation for this displaced Congo man. The dissonant strains of jazz allow him to locate his place as a confl icted black man searching for roots. Jazz also provides a kind of explanation for the non-linear migratory routes that have landed him in New Orleans: “Jazz”, he says “the sound of the cymbals” and he says the word “Jazz” in a way that makes me hear and see two hands, two circles and a sound as they strike each other. I smile. “Soon you’ll hear the trap drums” and he tries jazz with all of him, voice hitting voice, had hitting hand, heel hitting shin, all in its own time, held together by one chord. (Louisiana 123) If the borders that Ella’s parents erect are surmounted by the fact of their daughter’s two placedness and the possibilities of transmigration, other borders involve a more complex negotiation. One such is Reuben’s uncertainty at the end of the novel about whether he has indeed found home. The rootless, family-less Reuben ends up where he begins for us, possibly dying in the Kasavubu/Lumumba struggles of the 1960s as stated in the Prologue. With his own hand in the Epilogue, he writes that he has thoughts of returning home to the Congo. He asks himself, widowed and without relation, “Is this my community? Have I any business in this? I am hearing of Kasavubu and Lumumba. I am beginning to think that I must put down my spade in the Congo where I was born” (Louisiana 166). After tracing his own triangular route Reuben Kohl returns to the Congo. It cannot be that he has not found his people and his music, yet he ultimately questions his adopted space in diaspora and heads home to his place of origin. Another complex negotiation involves the way African diaspora worldviews are received in a world that thrives on science, technology and sameness. Louisiana, the former Ella Townsend, who visits New York to return the recording machine and answer the summons of her parents’ lawyer, is a transformed being. The time that has passed and the differences that characterize her new self are symbolized and prefigured by the reception of the recording machine. Louisiana attempts to give it back to the department at Columbia University, but they have no memory of her or the machine, and she doubts that they remember the WPA project. The machine itself is outdated. A juvenile rehabilitation center denies her offer of the machine, stating that it is “too old,” and thus Ella fi nds herself and the machine which has defi ned her world for so long archaic.

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Yet these reactions are less telling than that of Mr. Lukas, the family lawyer. Louisiana explains his reaction: The lawyer’s fi rst glance at me told a tale. I was something the cat had deposited on the mat. A chewed up rat . . . There and then I understood that for this world that I had once inhabited and had had to leave, I was mad. Benignly so for those at the social research office in Columbia and the superintendent at the juvenile home close by it. (Louisiana 133) The difference in the way Ella is read, and perceives how she is read according to the difference in location, is apparent here. We have no evidence when she is in New Orleans that she might appear odd or mad, yet her appearance is the central concern on her visit to New York. Even within the US there are borders which are not easily negotiated. Despite her psychic powers, Ella’s migration to the South is like most migrations. It involves embracing something new and leaving something behind. One also wonders exactly how much time has passed: is there a Rip Van Winkle effect whereby the passage of time in the world of the spirits is so radically different from time in the everyday historical world that Louisiana’s physical body bears the marks of someone who has emerged from a time machine? If so, the passage between one world and another is itself fraught with borders, and is less seamless than appears on the surface. Ella’s own physical migrations end with her passing. At that time, questions about what should be done with her body, specifically where she should be buried, are paramount to how we think about Ella’s life. Though Ella/ Louisiana lives her life erasing borders, the question of location is once again crucial when she dies. Reuben’s deliberations about where her body should be buried are short-lived; his concerns are emphasized by the difficulty he has negotiating borders: “I thought of taking her body to Jamaica. I knew just how the break or perhaps it is a failure to bond—whatever—with her parents hurt her . . . I felt that her burial in their island and hopefully with them present would be the best gift I could give to her. Too much red tape” (Louisiana 165). Towards the end of the text, as Ella/Louisiana’s physical state worsens and her psychic activity slows almost to a halt, the borderless space of her mind gives way to the physical limits of her body. The close of a spiritual life characterized by the freedom to experience the African diaspora as a kind of limitless homeland, is in the end the physical remains subject to the “red tape” of borders and bureaucracy. Reuben’s return to the Congo and the difficulties of Louisiana’s postmortem repatriation exemplify the complications wrought by nationhood on cultural and spiritual borderlessness. Benedict Anderson defi nes nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson 6). Ernest Gellner’s double-pronged defi nition is in close dialogue with Anderson’s. Gellner posits that two men are in the

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same nation “if and only if they share the same culture” and “if and only if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation” (Gellner 7). Both Anderson and Gellner state that a nation is a community that is understood when people share an implicit connection. Another aspect of both defi nitions that is useful in this discussion is the use of the term limited. Anderson elaborates on his use of “limited” by explaining that nations have “fi nite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which other nations lie” (Anderson 7). These boundaries are explained in the second half of Gellner’s defi nition as “mutual recognition.” Borderlessness, in the context of these defi nitions, emerges as a form of nationlessness. Brodber’s conceptualization of an African diaspora complicates issues of a national identity in the characters in Louisiana. Even though the text is set in southwest Louisiana, not all the characters are American, and while they accept each other as parts of a community, the rules of the state imposed borders that cannot be ignored. Brodber’s explanation of how she perceives the role of nation adds another dimension to the problematic. She explains: “It is said ‘put your bucket down where your feet are.’ I can best make my contribution where my feet are, where I was born” (Personal Interview Feb. 10, 2002). Brodber’s equates location (where her feet are) with her “birth land” or homeland. This statement, I infer, speaks to Reuben’s and Louise’s motivation to leave the US and return to the countries of their birth, although as a second generation migrant Ella/ Louisiana fi nds the fulfi llment of her purpose in the United States—albeit with people of the African diaspora. James Clifford, in his discussion of diaporas in Routes, identifies the maintenance of the homeland by money and other remittances, and the possibility of return to a homeland as one of the markers of a diaspora community. One’s nation of origin then is never forgotten, but always remains a part of how individual identity is maintained in diaspora. In Louisiana, Brodber takes care to mention the cultural activities specific to national backgrounds, as well as the ones which intersect. In Brodber’s diaspora model, then, return is entirely possible. Sue Ann returns to the South to continue her work as psychic and political activist, Louise returns to Jamaica as a nurse and political activist, and Reuben answers the call of his native Congo, leaving behind the naturalized space he called home. These articulations of subjectivity are also articulations of the primacy of nation. Sue Ann, Louise and Reuben understand their cultural activism within the confi nes of a physical world limited by borders and boundaries. Their expressions of national pride and national identity subsist with expressions of diaspora pride. However, their contribution to the diaspora is fully realized through their contribution from a specific locality in the diaspora. It is from this specific locality “where your bucket and your feet are,” or where an individual fi nds his/herself, that one’s location with its unique cultural projections contributes to the concept of diaspora. Clifford classifies diasporic differences in this way: “Diasporic experiences are always gendered. But there is a tendency for theoretical accounts

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of diasporas and diaspora cultures to hide this fact, to talk of travel and displacement in unmarked ways, thus normalizing male experiences” (Clifford 258). Though I do not deal specifically with gender in this context, Clifford does make lucid through his examination of gendered experiences the danger of reading travel as “unmarked.” Whether the markings are of gender, class or nation they can not be ignored theoretically, and they certainly are not ignored in the literary presentations of diaspora. The shift to the discourse of national belonging that the text initiates through Rueben’s fi nal words of reflection on place shows Brodber perhaps reluctantly paying attention to the issue of borders into her and seeking to reconcile them into her space of freedoms. Each nation in the story has contributed important cultural products that circulate and are renewed both as they travel to different parts of the diaspora and as they are fed from dynamic local sources. Migration, travel and return act as a source of cross-fertilization. If the spiritual dimension that make unity and reconciliation effective appears limited in its reach by whether or not people are able to gather in one place, it also shows that community is at the heart of African diaspora religion, spiritualism and philosophy. In this sense Brodber’s Louisiana resists the borderlessness of other diaspora theories. The text captures the richness in transcultural interactions, and the cultural resilience of people displaced, enslaved, segregated and subjugated. Yet within these commonalities, specific experiences are marked by the physical, legal and political borders that distinguish nation from nation. The text does not suggest that black people within these borders are denied the fullness of the African/diaspora experience, instead it complicates and enriches the experience with difference. “Two places can make children! Two women can sire another?” (Lousiana 17) It is somewhat ironic then that the novel, which is offered as a cultural product specifically purposed towards unification, continues to be studied in pockets of separation, either as an AfricanAmerican or a Caribbean text. The diasporan remit that Brodber envisaged for her text eventually bows to the hegemony of national imaginings.

4

Rethinking a Caribbean Literary Economy Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother and Beryl Gilroy’s Frangipani House as Remittance Texts

So far I have been examining Caribbean migrant literature using the lens of the “remit” from distinct but overlapping perspectives. One is the overarching sense of responsibility towards a Caribbean “home” that has led migrant writers to intentionally cast their work in terms of a political economy of exchange. In this political economy, the Caribbean region or specific Caribbean countries are foregrounded as primary sources and at least equal subjects in the creation of both literary products and the diasporan and regional (geographical Caribbean) communities from which these products emerge. The issues of how the text gains its authority, what are the sources of that authority, what are the ways in which both writer and text commute among various diasporan locations to which they speak, what are the dynamics of struggle to come to terms with belonging to two or more places at the same time—that is to say, the ways in which migration is not a break with a past or a location but the acquisition of multiple alliances and new spaces of negotiation/remit—have all been the subject of the discussion so far. In this chapter I move from the concept of the literary remit to the concept of the remittance text, by which I mean, as stated in my introduction, the text that highlights, whether in celebration or critique, the inequalities of the exchange between Caribbean denizens of the metropolitan diaspora and Caribbean people who live in the region, traditionally separated as denizens of “First and “Third” world spaces respectively. So far the inequalities highlighted have been those imposed upon diasporan Caribbean people by the regimes, systems and societies in which they fi nd themselves as migrant people. The remittance text allows focus on the inequalities among Caribbean people themselves obscured in the tendency by most writers of migration. The latter focus usually directs the discourse towards relations with the diasporan society than towards relations with those who remain “at home” in the Caribbean.

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An earlier version of this chapter previously titled, “‘Send It Western Union!’ Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother as a Remittance Text,” invoked Western Union, a well-known remittance service used not only in the Caribbean but internationally. Western Union serves as material cultural evidence of the active interchange between Caribbean migrant and diaspora communities and their communities in the geographical Caribbean. Like its many competitors, Western Union offers a service which involves transferring money from migrant and diaspora communities, typically in North America and Great Britain, to the Caribbean. This service not only signifies in monetary terms the inequalities of the relationship of which I speak, but also implicates the direction of this exchange beyond the monetary realm and invites us to explore the inequalities underlying similar exchanges in other aspects of Caribbean culture, including literature. I focalize two texts, Jamaica Kincaid’s nonfiction memoir My Brother (1997) and Beryl Gilroy’s Frangipani House (1986). Kincaid’s and Gilroy’s texts show how monetary remittances or unilateral transfers to the Caribbean mirror other cultural transactions, such as literary remittances, that are themselves fraught with problematic social and political implications not brought out in the perspectives of the writers considered so far. Among the dynamics invoked are the tensions between margin and center that are crucially linked to postcolonial theorizing of regions such as the Caribbean which as independent subjects remain peripheral, even as they inspire and authenticate Caribbean diaspora center discourse. I begin my defi nition of the remittance text by describing it as a sub-category of Caribbean migrant literature that considers the relationship between the geographical Caribbean and the Caribbean in diaspora, and takes a critical position on this relationship. This position may also be described as an ethos, based on the interrogation or crude assumption of status quo inequalities based on geopolitical assignations. In My Brother Kincaid remits medicine and money to help her sick brother in Antigua. The dynamic she portrays of a poor, ailing, dependent at home relying on the relatively successful provider abroad, is for the most part the dynamic of this remittance ethos. The spirit of this dynamic is underscored in the question Kincaid wants to ask her brother’s doctor: “I wanted to ask him, if there was no medicine available, if people suffering did not have a sister who lived in the United States . . . what would happen then?” (Kincaid 36) The provenance of the concept of the remittance text as analogue appears clearly when we consider in real terms the significance of economic remittances to the Caribbean. Remittances represent a significant means of foreign exchange earnings or inflows to Caribbean nations. In Jamaica alone total inflows climbed from 968 million US dollars in 2001 to 1975 million US dollars in 2007. In Haiti they climbed from 890 million US in 2001 to 1,830 million US in 2007. These figures are noteworthy not just as they signify the intensity of the relationship between Caribbean diaspora and home

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communities but also as they impact other key economic indicators. For example, in 2001 remittances were 9.1% of the Gross Domestic Product of Jamaica and by 2007 remittances were responsible for 15.3% of the Gross Domestic Product. Indeed, remittance inflows to the Caribbean including Jamaica and Haiti more than doubled between 2001 and 2007.1 This information underscores both the volume and the significance of remittances to Caribbean economies. The statistics emphasize the extent of the influence transnational communities maintain outside of their original home space. However, much of the sociological and economic discussion about remittances is not simply centered on the volume of monetary and non-monetary remittances sent to the Caribbean; instead it involves a debate on the effect of these unilateral transfers on the receiving economy. The debate, what Sharon Stanton Russell in “Migrant Remittances and Development” terms the “consumption versus investment” debate (271), hinges on whether remittances hinder or help development. But if we read development in a wider sense than mere dollars and cents, remittances represent a facet of the ongoing relationship between Caribbean diaspora communities and communities in the geographical Caribbean. Indeed the concept of the remittance, money sent by post/the act of sending money, and other non-monetary transferals that engage this sender-receiver dynamic may be part of what James Clifford terms diasporist discourse. Clifford argues in Routes, “Diasporic discourses reflect the sense of being part of an ongoing transnational network that includes the homeland not as something simply left behind but as a place of attachment in a contrapuntal modernity” (Clifford 256). For Caribbean migrants this attachment is closely associated to relatives remaining in the Caribbean. Lamming terms these familial relations that maintain across transnational spaces “transnational families” and the kind of interdependence a function of “transnational households” (Coming, Coming, Coming Home 32). Lamming cites a specific example of how this might function: “They have created the phenomenon of the transnational family which does not allow a funeral in Barbados to take place for over a week after the death since the cortege would be incomplete until relatives have arrived from Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Toronto, Birmingham, Brooklyn” (32). Belinda Edmondson argues from a different perspective in which she distinguishes between exile and nationalism, and immigration and nationalism, by suggesting the exile is “preoccupied by the meaning of the native land” while the migrant is concerned chiefly with earning a living to support family members back home (Making Men 141). Whatever their differences, both perspectives serve to highlight the Caribbean migrant experience as active and interactive with the region itself. The remittance text/culture exposes the politics of these interactions. Fernando Lozano Ascencio in Bringing It Back Home: Remittances to Mexico from Migrant Workers in the United States defi nes remittances by adding

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a social dimension to the concept that is useful in the Caribbean context: “Remittances are a portion of the income of international migrants with temporary or permanent residence in the country where they work, and that is transferred from the country of destination to the country of origin. These remittances may be monetary or non monetary” (Ascencio 5). This sending of cash and kind to relatives at home that maintains social networks is what Ascencio terms unrequited or unilateral transfers. This simply means that remittances are not payment for services or goods. Ascencio further delineates what is meant by monetary and non-monetary remittances, the former denoting cash, money orders, etc. Non-monetary remittances are defi ned thus, “Within this second type there are three subgroups: consumer goods, such as clothing, appliances, televisions, gifts, etc, capital goods, such as, tools, light machinery, vehicles; and the skills and technological knowledge acquired by migrants during their stay” (Ascencio 8). These categories add a human dimension to the transfers conducted by migrant communities to home communities. The last category, which includes skills and technological knowledge or human capital acquired in the host country, begins to more accurately describe the culture of transfers/remittances that Caribbean migrants have maintained with their home countries. In sum then, remittances represent not only pure economic activity but complicated social and cultural networks that have helped defi ne diasporan and regional communities in the wake of mass migrations out of the Caribbean. From the given facts on the rates of migration evidenced in the volume of remittances sent to the Caribbean, many inferences can be drawn about the impact of remittance on the economies of Caribbean nations as well as on the social climate. Health and education are two areas that are directly affected by high migration rates, because there is a depletion of skilled labor. The absence of mothers and fathers also implies a disruption of the nuclear and extended family as well as other effects on the social milieu of a country. Generally, while the migrations that produce remittances may appear to benefit or improve economies they often have adverse effects on the social climate of a nation. It would be incorrect to suggest that this form of self and familial maintenance is at its core entirely unhealthy for the development of a nation. However, some researchers argue that remittances may not be as useful as they appear. Myron Weiner advises that remittances are wastefully spent on consumer goods rather than productively invested; in his view they nurture a consumer mentality, worsen imports, and result in a maldistribution of income and increase dependence (“International Emigration and the Third World” 192). This argument carries a fl ip side: the notion that the remitter in this context may over time construct the relationship in terms of the receiver’s dependency and unproductiveness, the remitter as its irreproachable other and patron. James Clifford’s discussion of diasporic communities in Routes questions this easy dichotomy of privilege and dependence. Clifford explores the

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extent of the relationship between original home spaces and diaspora communities and describes the setting `where dependence functions. His discussion and defi nition of diasporic communities involves the existence of more and more communication between migrant communities and those in the original home space, and highlights the dependence of the former: Diasporic forms of longing, memory and (dis)identification are shared by a broad spectrum of minority and migrant populations. And dispersed peoples, once separated from homelands by vast oceans and political barriers, increasingly fi nd themselves in border relations with the old country thanks to a to-and-fro made possible by modern technologies of transport and communication, and labor migration. (247) Communication between those at home and those in diaspora is important both ways. This includes forms of cultural communication, specifically how the original home and the memory of it is important to self-construction. The model of the remittance suggests that even where the transfers are unilateral, the effects are bilateral. Hence, as we have seen in the previous discussions, the issue of constructing self goes both ways. That is, a large community in diaspora must also have an effect on the self-construction of those in the original home space, and vice versa. The concept of the remittance provides insight into how this two way relationship may be obscured, particularly for countries with large numbers of their own living abroad. On the economic level the remittance is important to Caribbean societies, economies and by extension political relations; on the literary/cultural level a remittance text is a way of constructing home in one’s mind, preserving memories either by inventing new ones, or calling up old ones. This chapter questions the benefits and effects of the literary remittance. My Brother is Jamaica Kincaid’s second work of nonfiction. The narrative of her brother Devon Drew’s struggle with and eventual succumbing to the AIDS virus is also the story of Kincaid’s (a migrant’s) relationship with her birth home and family. As with Kincaid’s fi rst nonfiction piece, A Small Place, the paradigm of woman and nation is crucial to the understanding of Kincaid’s perspective in My Brother.2 Kincaid identifies herself as writer/remitter and sister in foreign. On one level she is the remitter of medicines and money to sustain her brother while he suffers in a hospital in Antigua without medicine and money, and on another level she is the remitter of memories and words through her text My Brother. Kincaid shares with us that she knew when she heard of her brother’s sickness that she would write about it. “I became a writer out of desperation, so when I fi rst heard my brother was dying I was familiar with the act of saving myself: I would write about him. I would write about his dying” (My Brother 196).3 Though this statement comes toward the end of the text, it helps us clarify the nature of this literary piece. Kincaid locates her writing as a kind

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of emotional response or working through of difficult situations, or a means of escape in desperate situations. More than this, My Brother clearly participates in a kind of literary economy, one that not only sustains the home economy, but also the remitter or the writer. Indeed, Kincaid’s choice of words suggests that the primary focus is Kincaid herself—her brother’s death provides the fodder on which her life as writer and emotional being depends. Our reading of My Brother is complicated by the problematics of its form, which traverses several overlapping genres: nonfiction, memoir, elegy and, in her mother’s phrasing, the Caribbean genre known as “old time story.” In the pages that follow I discuss the implications of each genre to illuminate various dimensions of the remittance text. Kincaid herself seems somewhat self-conscious about the form of My Brother. Early in the second half, after Devon’s death, she seeks to clarify what the text under her hands is becoming as she works through the dynamics of Kincaid and Devon as competing subjects: “What I am writing now is not a journal; a journal is a daily account, an immediate account of what occurs during a certain time. For a long time after my brother died I could not write about him, I could not think about him in a purposeful way” (91). She states her fi nal decision, which is to write the story, as she remembers it, of her brother. She explains, “I would write about him. I would write about his dying” (196). So at one level My Brother is unequivocally a nonfiction piece relating the events and significant issues of Devon’s death. From the photograph of Devon Drew on the jacket cover, to the names mentioned in the text, to the events chronicled, we can assume that these are Kincaid’s recollections of the dying and death of her brother. Reading My Brother as nonfiction allows us to examine some of the fundamental themes and concerns crucial to understanding the politics of the text. Since Kincaid tells a “true” story using real names and real experiences it seems fair that we would add the expectation of “truth-value” based on factuality. At the same time, however, the form of the book as memoir and moreover a memoir in the skilled hands of a novelist whose work has characteristically been based on her family story, produces within the narrative “borderless” encounters between factuality and the imperatives of story telling and self-invention, which are always to some extent fictive. These underlying dynamics create an intricate politics in which nevertheless the audience’s expectation of “truth” as factuality is inevitable and indeed uppermost among whatever questions or other expectations might exist. This immediately raises issues related to the relationship between public narrative and private experience, issues that are as much ethical as they are political and narratological. The facts as Kincaid presents them are these: her peaceful, pastoral Vermont world is disturbed by the news that her brother, Devon Drew is in the hospital dying of the AIDS virus. Kincaid travels to Antigua to visit him and fi nds her youngest brother in terrible shape. The stigma attached

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to AIDS in Antigua, along with poverty and a neglectful government, prevents Devon from being treated properly and effectively. Kincaid returns to the US and begins remitting AZT, an expensive drug cocktail used to treat AIDS patients. To her and her mother’s reward and relief Devon improves and is released from the hospital, but he returns to a careless, promiscuous lifestyle much to the opprobrium of his sister. This is cut short when he stops responding to the medicine and dies. Subsequent to Devon’s passing Kincaid is informed that her brother was a homosexual. She closes the text lamenting his loss and her not knowing him. My Brother is Kincaid’s version of Devon’s life and death. She admits to the distance that characterizes their relationship; she has not seen him for a long time. Kincaid shares with the reader her surprise when she realizes that she loves this brother whom she hardly knows and hardly tries to understand. The dynamics of their relationship are also presented straightforwardly. Devon is the poor, dying brother with nothing but needs; Kincaid is the sister in “foreign,” with a nice family and new name. She sends the medicine that is too expensive to be stocked in Antigua. Devon’s carelessness is in opposition to Kincaid’s carefulness; Devon’s fast paced Antiguan Creole is unintelligible to Kincaid, as her “funny talk” is unintelligible to him. For all intents and purposes they are strangers to each other, though still blood relations. How does this impact our reading of Kincaid’s representation of her family? Is this representation a result of her idiosyncrasies or are they otherwise motivated? In an interview with Allan Vorda, Kincaid explains why she changed her name. Not only did she dislike the name that her mother gave her, Elaine Potter Richardson, she also wished to maintain her anonymity as a writer: I wanted to write and I didn’t know how. I thought if I changed my name and I wrote and it was bad, then no one would know. I fully expected it to be bad, by the way, and never to be published, or heard from again. So I thought they’d never get to laugh at it because they wouldn’t know it was me. (Vorda 14) Twenty-four years later when My Brother is published, Kincaid is a prolific and prominent writer. Her concerns are no longer about anonymity; in fact the literary fodder that is her family’s life and her relationship with Antigua is celebrated and received as another from her oeuvre of literary brilliance. However, Kincaid’s telling of Devon’s story is intrusive on the deterioration and pain of his diseased body, yet we know that he does not have the option of anonymity. The reader is given the intricacies of his sickness from early in the narrative. She fi rst speaks of these when she describes her mother’s dedication to her ailing brother. Kincaid’s mother notices a sore on his penis; this sore is so embarrassing that Devon and his mother have a very limited exchange about it; still, this specific aspect of his pain is detailed in the text.

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Similarly, closer to his death a delirious Devon exposes his penis, the symbol of his life (albeit irresponsibly promiscuous) to his sister: [H]e suddenly threw the sheets away from himself, tore his pajama bottoms away from his waist, revealing his penis, and then grabbed his penis in his hand and held it up, and his penis looked like a bruised flower that had been cut short on the stem; it was covered with sores and on the sores was a white substance, almost creamy, almost floury, a fungus. (My Brother 91) We are also given detailed descriptions of the deterioration of Devon’s body because of the effects of AIDS, and with these little regard is shown for his pride or his privacy. Underlying these descriptions is the dichotomy between Antigua and Vermont. Antigua is the location where Kincaid’s brother lies sick and dying; Vermont is where the life-prolonging medicines are found. Vermont is where Kincaid’s healthy, loving family lives; in Antigua there is poverty, sickness and a dysfunctional family. This dichotomy and the intrusive nature of Kincaid’s nonfiction are fueled by her distance, and a kind of absence of respect for familial privacy for the family she had not visited for over twenty years. Antigua at arms length is configured as a dilapidated old colony run by thieves and populated by poor irresponsible black people. In the interview with Vorda, Kincaid also responds to a question regarding Antigua’s possible answer to A Small Place. Her answer captures a careless ambivalence also evidenced in My Brother. Kincaid suggests that the reaction to A Small Place would be violent. She expresses her fear of being shot and killed. So on one level she recognizes the gravity of her criticisms, just as she must be conscious that some of her revelations about her brother’s illness and the rest of her family might be intrusive if read as nonfiction. Yet in this same answer she reveals something quite private about her mother’s politics: I wouldn’t be surprised if they had henchmen who would do it because politics in the West Indies is very tribal. People take their colors very seriously. They divide themselves into people who wear red and people who wear blue. My mother is a blue. I’m nothing. When we were growing up we were reds. Then my mother joined the party that had broken away from the reds, and they are blue. She takes it so seriously. (Vorda 21–22) Kincaid conveys the ludicrous nature of political tribalism. Nevertheless she reveals her mother’s allegiances, even though her mother is not protected by distance as Kincaid is. And yet this picture that Kincaid presents is complicated by the issue of how even nonfiction responds to the demands of a

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constructed readership: Antigua is not known, indeed is singularly unknown for political violence, though other parts of the Caribbean are known in this way. Does the inveterate novelist fictionalize the extent to which her mother’s politics may be dangerous in order to produce a more “interesting” text? The question equally highlights the mother’s (and Antigua’s) vulnerability, in this case to a prejudicial representation in a forum where she (as well as Antigua) has no recourse to speak. Similarly, Kincaid understands the stigmas attached to homosexuality in Antigua (and these are not fictionalized), yet she reveals her brother’s sexual persuasion as though it might mean to everyone what it means to her.4 Indeed the politics of the remitter are much different from the politics of those receiving the text in Antigua. My Brother as nonfiction or “factual/true cultural remittance” is sent home bearing an image of Antigua that is in tandem with “First World” perceptions of the Caribbean. Kincaid’s portrayal of her relationship with Devon is in broader terms a version of the relationship between Antigua and the US. The terms of the remittance erase notions of cultural equality and instead enforce relations of “Third World” dependency. The other side of the dichotomy presents Vermont or the US as the cultural superior to Antigua/the Caribbean. There is no political tribalism in Vermont, there family relationships are positive, and in Vermont the almighty dollar is able to purchase the medicine that will postpone Devon’s death from the poor, promiscuous “Third World.” Sarah Brophy, in “Angels in Antigua: The Diasporic of Melancholy in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother,” underlines another aspect of the differences between the “First World” of North America and the “Third World” of the Caribbean as it relates to Kincaid’s reaction to Devon’s suffering from AIDS. Brophy compares the disparity between Kincaid and Devon’s responses to his lifestyle and the results of his lifestyle. Brophy cites statistics from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS which puts the rate of HIV infection in the Caribbean region second only to the rate in sub-Saharan Africa (Brophy 266). 5 Brophy suggests that this alarming rate in the Caribbean is connected to “neocolonial economic and social factors: poverty, intravenous drug use, the stigmatization of homosexuality, and economic reliance on tourism” (266). Here, as in the above example of political tribalism in the Caribbean, Kincaid is aware, and very personally so, of the social inequalities which characterize her old world—the world of her brother, and the new world of her privilege. Her awareness had previously, in A Small Place, produced spit-fi re venom at the oblivious tourist who perpetuates poverty and underdevelopment.6 However, as Brophy points out, in My Brother Kincaid seems strangely complicit: The power of the sadness that Devon inspires moves the memoir back and forth between, on the one hand, satisfaction with the sufficiency of empathy and help and, on the other, an emergent and troubling recognition of

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how much distance there is between brother and sister along with the way their lives are implicated in and mirror each other’s. (267) Reading Devon as a mirror of Kincaid encourages a parallel reading of Antigua and Vermont. Kincaid’s and her brother’s distance is not simply bridged by her visits and her remittances; in fact, it is in these contexts that they both seem most distant and different from each other. Part of the mourning of the text is expressed around these differences; they mark the self-reflexive moments when Kincaid sees herself as more of an insider than an outsider, and Vermont as much as Antigua appears as a space of isolation, even desolation. She describes the day of her brothers’ death in this way: The day was cold, it was the middle of January, the sun was shining. For me such a thing is a paradox: the sun shining yet the air is cold . . . I looked out a window and saw an animal, a deer, had eaten up some especially unusually evergreens . . . the sight of the evergreens, all eaten up in a random way, not as if to satisfy a hunger but to satisfy a sense of play, suddenly made me sad . . . (My Brother 102) My Brother is also what Mrs. Drew, Kincaid’s mother, calls “old time story.” By this she means a story that to her is better left in the past, or which should be forgotten, especially one with a bad ending. Kincaid explains what this means after an episode when she rehearses to her mother a memory that Mrs. Drew does not want to think about. “If I should bring it up, she says it is an old story (“e’ a’ ole time ’tory; you lub ole-time ’tory, me a warn you”), and for my mother an old story is a bad story, a story with an ending she does not like” (25). Kincaid’s memory and method of sharing stories are objectionable to her family members. It seems that her relationship to the past is different from theirs, though equally significant.7 In the unequal interplay between “my brother’s [family’s] story” and “my story,” Kincaid retains her commitment to self-invention and self-reflection as paramount. But what are the ramifications of Kincaid’s perspective (what her mother calls “old time story”) in a nonfiction/factual piece about her brother’s illness, her family and birth country? Kincaid’s mother treats this aspect of her daughter’s psychology with suspicion. After reminding her mother about an incident when Devon was a newborn baby and red ants almost killed him, Kincaid describes her mother’s reaction: “Her eyes narrowing in suspicion, she said, ‘what a memory you have!’” (6) Later in the text Kincaid shares with us the history of her suspicious memory: When I was a child, I would hear her recount events that we both had witnessed and she would leave out small details; when I fi lled them in, she would look at me with wonder and pleasure and praise me for my extraordinary memory. This praise made an everlasting mark and

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Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature nothing anyone could do made me lose this ability to remember, however selectively I remember. As I grew up, my mother came to hate this about me, because I would remember things that she wanted everyone to forget. (75)

Kincaid’s memories are met with resistance. The family does not question their accuracy; however, these confl icted recountings are mistrusted and become cause for concern.8 Baby Devon’s unfortunate experience with the ants, the burning of young Kincaid’s books, Devon’s conviction, arrest and release are all considered “old time story” and become part of the dispute about remembering and forgetting. Kincaid’s construction of familial identity seems to exist outside of communal memory, and by this I mean communal remembering and forgetting. Kincaid’s version is in tandem with her self-construction as outsider/insider, impatient and dissatisfied with her birth home. Mrs. Drew’s version is a rendering physically closer, understandably sensitive to a past that is very similar to her present experience. Kincaid’s intrusions and her proud recounting of “old time story” seem acute in the context of her self-imposed distance. From a distance it becomes easier to remember and tell what others at home try to forget. My Brother is also an elegy, and from this perspective reveals most fully the vulnerability of the remitter/authoritative writer. The book mourns the dying and death of Devon Drew and at the same time mourns Kincaid’s loss of country, home and language. Many of the metaphors used in My Brother betray a kind of decay. The text opens with Kincaid seeing Devon Drew sick on a bed in the Holberton Hospital in Antigua. She immediately thinks about his birth and parallels this event with two deaths, that of the six year old child of her mother’s friend and another older neighbor that dies of a heart attack. Devon’s dying conjures memories of his birth, which for Kincaid is associated with dying. Here she begins the lament, which by the above association of his birth with death colors her brother’s life. Her descriptions of the effects of the AIDS virus on Devon’s body, and later the effects of disease on other bodies, set the tone of the text to a steady lament not just of death, but dying. Kincaid describes her brother’s darkened skin, scarlet lips with gold crusted sores, his frailty and the carpet of thrush on his tongue and tonsils, the sore on his penis, the yellow liquid oozing from his anus and fi nally a smell that disappears only when Devon dies. In the seminar she attends conducted by Dr. Ramsey, the local specialist, Kincaid shares more metaphors of disease and decay; the fact that the decay seems to center around reproductive organs indicates a kind of looming barrenness consistent with Kincaid’s perception of Devon’s life, but also implicated in her portrayal of Antigua. Parallel to Devon’s dying is Kincaid’s sense of loss of country. She chronicles the changes in Antigua, the deterioration of a post-British colony left

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to its own devices. The state of the Holberton Hospital begins her descriptions of the decline of civic buildings and national monuments. Her detailed description of the dirt, rust and broken fi xtures which make up Devon’s room speak to the general decay in Antigua. Devon’s hospital room can be read as a metonym for what Kincaid sees as a crumbling Antigua. 9 She criticizes the health and education systems, and summarizes their decay in an apostrophe of loss, “In Antigua itself nothing is made.”10 The deliberate paraphrase of Naipaul’s in/famous statement on the West Indies “Nothing was created in the West Indies (The Middle Passage 25) and resonance with Froude’s “ There are no people there, in the true sense of the word” (The English in the West Indies 347) indicate not the adoption of a colonialist perspective but a ululation of grief. This is Kincaid’s way of saying that she no longer sees any virtues in her island home.11 Marie-Helene Laforest in Diasporic Encounters suggests that Kincaid straddles the worlds of her new home in the US and her old home in Antigua only by maintaining the Caribbean thematic in her literary pieces (Laforest 217): in other words, literary remittance for Kincaid functions as an imaginary—as opposed to Benedict Anderson’s “imagined”—lifeline between disconnected worlds, one of which is in effect no longer alive. The condition of being no longer alive is the basis on which Antigua becomes a source of sustenance, decay (in an ironically static form) feeding life. This is in marked contrast to the imagination of the Caribbean and the diasporan space as dynamic centers of interchange and mutual transformation that we have seen in Danticat, Brodber and the so-called “exile” generation. Kincaid’s loss is also evident in her loss of language. She explains from very early in the text that she has difficulty understanding the locals, “I had lived away from my home for so long that I no longer understood readily the kind of English he spoke and always had to have him repeat himself to me; and I no longer spoke the kind of English he spoke . . .”(My Brother 8). Kincaid’s “no longer” here reads as a conscious decision to forget or not to speak the nation language that she once spoke and that is necessary to communicate with her family. 12 She places the nation language she uses in parentheses, and provides an English translation. Setting the Antiguan Creole off from the rest of the text suggests that English and nation language do not belong on the same continuum. This is interesting, given that Antigua is one of the Caribbean countries whose language situation can be described in terms of a language continuum ranging from Standard (English) to various versions of Creole/demotic/vernacular, each of which exhibits different levels of mixture between English and African elements, and that speakers may switch among these with great facility depending on the occasion. This is the typical description of the Jamaican language situation, to which Antigua’s is remarkably similar.13 Kincaid’s use of parentheses clearly indicates who her audience is, and who it is not. Kincaid even in this respect configures the Caribbean as a place she has lost. The politics of the parentheses are telling: “Parentheses may be

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used to set off interruptions within a sentence. Parentheses, however, indicate that the enclosed material is of secondary importance” (Kriszner and Mandell 524). Kincaid seems to be suggesting that the language of her brother is not legitimate enough to exist in the text on its own; that it is secondary to her English and the English of her readers. She frames his speech in the same way that she frames Antigua—as a place which does not have enough, as a place which is not enough. Kincaid’s commentary on the death of her language continues a theme evident whether we read My Brother as nonfiction/memoir, elegy or “old time story”—the establishment of difference. To articulate this difference and loss she uses “her” language, which her brother deems “funny.” It is the treatment of difference and loss across all four faces of the text that establishes its remittance politics. Kincaid’s mourning of her brother begins before his death because of her coming to terms with their unchangeable differences. The similarities shared between her and her siblings are still not enough to bridge the gulf that separates them. For example, all four of them unite to hate their mother, yet there is nothing more than this temporary convergence, which does not bloom into a productive relationship among them. On the other hand, however, it is the difference between Devon and Kincaid that facilitates his sister’s being in a position to help him when he falls sick. For though she and her mother are healthy, and both she and her mother care whether Devon lives or dies, Kincaid’s mother does not have access to AZT. Kincaid is the only one who can take up this aspect of responsibility. Elaboration of the theme of loss is how the author reckons with her inability to recapture or save home/Antigua and her dying brother Devon. Inscribed on her brother’s body are the wasted years of youth, a young nation independent but with really very little choice to improve and develop. Kincaid’s multiple descriptions of Devon’s dying, stinking body, even as they parallel the deterioration and dilapidation that for her characterizes Antigua, ignore her brother’s perspective about his own sickness because of his carelessness, and her mother’s perspective because of its unseemly devotion.14 These counterperspectives (Devon’s and his mother’s) to Devon’s body and his illness can be read as counter-perspectives to the perception of Antigua as nation. Kincaid’s anxiety about her wasted island and her brother’s wasted life reduce the validity of Devon’s self-image as well as the possibility that viable local opinions exist. Similarly, in her fleeting dismissals which betray loss, “In a place like Antigua” where nothing is made and “I can’t do what you are suggesting—take this strange, careless person into the hard-earned order of my life,” she chooses to write epitaphs for both (My Brother 49). When she fi rst views Devon’s corpse she suggests that the body does not look like her brother. His hair is uncombed and his face unshaven. Both his eyes and mouth are wide open as if he had not expected what overcame him. Yet at the funeral service, the prepared-for-burial corpse with eyes sewn shut, mouth clamped shut, hair combed and face clean and shaven Devon

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still does not look like himself. Kincaid underscores how unreal his corpse seems to her when she suggests that instead of looking like the dead, Devon looks like an advertisement for the dead (My Brother 181). The image of Devon, his body without his regular features, himself but not himself, reads almost like the tourism poster image of an island flashed across the television screen. It is a place that looks like home, the view of the coast and the rolling hills are familiar, but the features are too calmed, too devoid of the intense aliveness to which one is accustomed. Kincaid’s loss of brother and country involves the sad recollection of lives that could never really be what she hoped them to be. Devon and Antigua, present mostly in her literary revisits and re-memories, seem always to be compared to her immediate family and Vermont and sadly, they are never enough. My Brother functions as a remittance text on two levels. One, it tells the story of the author maintaining her family, specifically her sick brother with cash and in-kind from abroad. Two, My Brother is written outside of the geographical location of the Caribbean, outside of Antigua, then sent home to Antigua. Undoubtedly, this involves a remembering and re-presentation of home from “foreign” eyes. Kincaid’s decision to call on memories and revisit Antigua is indeed a form (however akin to mummification) of preserving home from the outside. Even though this work of nonfiction may be construed as much more self-centered than a monetary remittance, it does play its part in a cultural economy. On the fi rst level Kincaid herself underscores the importance and necessity of the remittance. She constructs her brother, and by extension Antigua, to be in need and to be dependent on her. In a kind of mourning for her country she expresses the lack of necessities and then foregrounds her role as provider/sender. Here I foreground the quotation from which the title of the chapter is taken: I wanted to ask him, if there was no medicine available, if the people suffering did not have a sister who lived in the United States and this sister could call up a doctor who would write a prescription for some medication that might be of help what would happen then? (My Brother 36) Kincaid is very conscious of her role as remitter, provider and foreign-big-sister. Her articulation of difference and loss is also an articulation of privilege. Her remittance is something her brother cannot do without. Kincaid’s work is called Caribbean literature not only because she is from Antigua, but because her texts are all based on her memory of home and in many ways reflect her own experience as a Caribbean native and migrant. As is evident above, Kincaid associates herself as a part of the confl icted colonial past and postcolonial present of the Caribbean. She wants her children to know their grandmother, and she wants them to know where she is from. The text sent home is particularly strange then with her nation language

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parenthesized, and Caribbean life and society portrayed as on the periphery of Western civilization while Vermont functions as a bastion. Maria Helena Lima takes to task Kincaid’s movements toward “center discourse” in an article titled “Imaginary Homelands in Jamaica Kincaid’s Narratives of Development:” The longer Kincaid feels like an American, the harder it will become for her to continue to “express the voice of the decolonized subject [ . . . ] journeying back and forth between empires and colonies of the past and the present,” as Giovanna Covi posits, “always refusing to adopt the language of either the vanquished or the victors” (60). It will be more difficult for her protagonist (and for Kincaid) not to acknowledge both in herself and do away with the binary altogether—at least in her writing. (Lima 861) Lima with Giovanna Covi argues that Kincaid herself recognizes the difficulties of maintaining middle ground in the us/them binary. In pieces like My Brother the middle ground is shifting and unstable. The strangeness of the text cannot be explained simply in terms of poetic license; Kincaid’s rare moments of solidarity with Antigua do not represent her real opinions of the place. The long-term effects of these remittances are illusory. Devon can be read as representative of Antigua and the larger Caribbean. His sick body is a metaphor for the diseased economies and politics of the region. Kincaid’s remittances of AZT sent to help curb the effects of AIDS become an interesting way of evaluating the effects of this kind of remittance of the Caribbean. The effect of the remitted AZT is illusory; it provides a temporary feeling and appearance of health. This appearance is clearly more dangerous than it is helpful, for it is Devon’s illusion of health that fuels his deception and the infection of healthy members of his community. The remittance then is eventually quite destructive, for the illusion of health becomes a license for Devon to return to his promiscuous lifestyle. Kincaid records his behavior with disgust, “He said he did not believe he had the HIV virus anymore and he demanded that Dr. Ramsey test him again.”15 The facade of health is enough for Devon to forget the extent of his sickness. The long-term effects of the remittance are indeed more destructive than they are helpful; while they ameliorate some of the immediate problems, they are unable to solve any long-term concerns. Remittance texts represent a very active socio-economic concept in the relationship between migrant/diaspora communities and communities in the regional Caribbean. These texts whether overtly or otherwise allow the focalization of a crucial perspective that has begun to be marginalized and silenced—the Caribbean perspective in the Caribbean. The voices of Devon and Mrs. Drew cannot only be read as the voices of useless tradition, ignorance and poverty; they are still the voices of Caribbean people.

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They are not as receivers of remittances, secondary or less important; on the contrary they are important to an understanding of the experiences of migrancy and diaspora. Kincaid’s My Brother is arguably an obvious remittance text in subject and tone. As well, because Kincaid has constructed her career as writer through a series of oppositions, with mother and natal land often at the center of her quarrels, many of the themes and ideas captured in the remittance dynamic are common in her works. But remittance as it unearths the inequalities of place and politics are performed in other kinds of literary moments and from different perspectives. The us/them dynamic is not always as stark, and there are writers who seek to render other parts of the complexity and necessity of remittance culture. Beryl Gilroy’s Frangipani House, published in 1986, is an example of this more complex political stance. The protagonist, Mabel Alexandrina King, the matriarch of the King family, fi nds herself alone in Guyana. Her two daughters and their children live abroad in the United States. They care for their aging mother long distance by sending money for her upkeep. Mama King is the stubborn retort to Kincaid’s silenced brother, Devon. She resists her children’s long distance solution to her age and infi rmity—a bed in the expensive and highly reputed old age home, Frangipani House: The occupants of Frangipani House were the lucky few—lucky to escape the constipated, self-seeking care which large, poor families invariably provide. After much heart-searching, children who have prospered abroad bought what was considered superior care for their parents, when distance intervened between anguished concern and the day-to-day expression of that concern. Then admission to Frangipani House became an answer to prayer. (Gilroy 2) Even in the praise of Frangipani House the voice of dissent is never silent. In this portrayal of remittance culture Gilroy is less concerned with presenting an obvious margin/center dialectic and more concerned with the difficult terms of negotiation. The relationship between Mama King/Guyana and her children/abroad in diaspora is always framed in a discourse of power and powerlessness, but the novel is never categorical about how the dynamic will play out. Indeed even as Mama King’s complaints and her perspectives are at the center of the narrative, she is always delusional and forgetful. If in My Brother the voice at the margins is always sick, poor and unreasonable, and the voice at the center of the narrative is the necessary and guardedly selfsacrificing Kincaid, in Frangipani House the often demented Mama King is the voice of unpopular and complicated truth at the center. Beyond this, the perspective in Frangipani House is the perspective of the receiver (i.e. of the remittance) country, though the dynamics of fi nancial remittance and us/them separation are mostly the same. Except in three brief

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chapters where when Mama King’s daughters, Token and Cyclette, are actually in Guyana ostensibly to take their mother back to the US they are otherwise desperate voices on the phone, marginal presences or absent presences in the novel. Still their impact on Mama King is crucial. Their remittances that once funded dishonest relatives in the care of Mama King now pay for her residence as an inmate at Frangipani House, and become the catalyst for Mama’s mental unraveling, various shifts in social status for both Mama and the daughters, as well as a profound shift in the power dynamics between parent and child. Further, for Token and Cyclette, the fact that they can afford what is considered the best for their mother signals a clear adjustment in class status and respectability. They agree to pay 500 dollars for a single room for Mama King, and instruct Matron that they only want “white people care for her” (Gilroy 3). Token and Cyclette recognize that their US dollars buy Mama King into status she would not ordinarily have. The daughters’ self-construction also becomes clear: Mama King is to inhabit a status which is theirs by virtue of the power invested in their 500 dollars. The rather obvious symbolism of their names places them on the side of a stultifying culture of mimicry that objectifies Mama, the receiver of their remittances. Conversely, for Mama King, Frangipani House becomes the symbol of containment, sameneness and the end of her life; as well it signals the problem with remittances. In her opinion she has been abandoned by her children; she says to nurse Carey, “‘I wish they write me! They forget everything bout me. I old now. Just trash to throw out’” (Gilroy 7). And later when she escapes the prison of Frangipani House to live with a band of beggars, when asked who she belongs to she responds, “‘Nobody . . . Me picknie cross big water’” (Gilroy 60). The irony here is that Token and Cyclette’s mobility, their good fortune that allows them to “cross big water,” ultimately limits Mama King’s mobility. In Mama King’s mind, her children’s distance is confi rmed in their placing her in this eventide home, and their remittances steal her independence and her identity. Here again the remittance text documents differences between the migrant/Caribbean diasporan and those who remain in the original home space. The act that demonstrates care and sacrifice for Token and Cyclette is the same act that confi rms their off-handed distance for Mama King. Their remittances abandon her and they un-home her by “imprisoning” her in Frangipani House, thus removing access to life as she knows and enjoys it: “More than anything else she wanted to work. Her body needed it as it needed food and clothes. And now time and life, her daughters and the matron had all conspired to deprive her of her faithful friends, work and hardship” (Gilroy 19). Gilroy presents the remittance as not only a uni-directional sending of cash and kind, but as an unequal or difficult cultural exchange. While Mama King’s daughters fi nd it completely reasonable to care for their mother in this way—they support her in her old age, as they believe is expected of them— Mama King expects to be in the company of her children and she certainly

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does not imagine that their care will steal her identity or her independence or her sense of self. To some extent the disconnect is perhaps a generational one, the children inadequately comprehending the values of their mother’s generation, and this is quite possible in a poor society where day to day life is often eaten up in economic endeavors which become the overarching symbol of care for loved ones simply because issues of survival are paramount. But the fact that Token and Cyclette never express any unease or self-questioning about what Mama may want, or indicate that they are aware of her existence beyond the physical, speaks to an unsettling level of detachment. Their remittances and by extension their migrancy may then be read as a form of escape (from home and responsibility) or, like Kincaid’s, a sign that they themselves have been somehow lost in transition. The relative absence of Token and Cyclette’s interior thoughts can be read as a way of representing them as types or a way of representing how the remittance dynamic that they espouse is part of a larger alienation from self and home. The two seem to have become automatons whose consciousness revolves around money (even when they visit the hospitalized Mama after she runs away, symbolically, with beggars, whatever feelings they are experiencing express themselves in a fight over money—externals). The very concept of the old age home as a phenomenon that seems to have been made possible, or successful, because of demand from migrants seeking places of refuge for their elders, speaks to the issue of alienation. The old age home stands over against the Caribbean tradition of children taking their parents to live with them when the parents are too old to care for themselves. That Token and Cyclette experience a certain amount of guilt based on this knowledge seems apparent in the exchange with the proprietress, Miss Trask: There was a long silence after Miss Trask said, “ah well, four-five hundred a month . . . She could hear breathless calculations and even more breathless argument at the end of the telephone, and then just as she was about to ring off, Token cleared her throat and replied, “Very well. We will pay. But we want white people care for her . . . My mother is independent and determined. Treat her well—please treat her well” (Gilroy 3). The convolutions of thought and cultural loss portrayed in this excerpt are fraught with contradictions: the injunction to preserve Mama’s determination and independence by placing her in the hands of white people, the very symbol of domination and spirit robbery, is in tension with the obvious belief that Mama will see herself as somehow superior if white people are her caregivers, essentially her servants. Token seems to be addressing experiences in the US, and by extension her own personal self-fashioning, completely disjointed from any memory or understanding of Guyanese reality. If both the migrant and the stay-at-homer are implicated in the act of remittance,

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Gilroy seems to suggest the remittance ethos as a crucial form of damage to the remitter as well as the receiver. Mama King is associated with voices of judgment that recall Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt where Black interviews farmer after farmer whose livelihood is snatched from their hands by capitalist hegemonies from which their local government cannot protect them. These ageing farmers in the face of diminishing fi nancial independence and loss of their way of life voice a plea similar to Mama’s, “this is our country, our turf, give us back our market” (Life and Debt). The images of prison and entrapment, Mama feeling trapped, “like a bee in a bottle” (29), Miss Ginchi’s remarks to Mama’s grandson that “confi nement and do nothing destroy people” (48) and Markey’s response that “my grandmother is on a journey to limbo” (54), point to the difficulties of obligation created when aid is conceived as patronage and negotiated from the outside. The link between Mama’s individual story and the geopolitical arena is clear. Interestingly, in the same way that Devon Drew’s sick body becomes representative of a deteriorating Antigua, the ageing body of Mama King (which in the collective of Frangipani House is plural) is representative of Guyana. Token, Mama King’s elder daughter, face to face with Guyana and her mother, explains this conflation, “This place is the past—the painful past. Mama never wanted more than this. This is her life, not mine” (98). Cyclette confi rms her sister’s summation with hysterical sobs, “There is nothing here for me either . . . Nothing, nothing. Just pain and hatred of poverty, hardship and useless mud and dung, pain, mosquitoes and old age” (98). Like Kincaid in My Brother, Token and Cyclette perceive a disjunction between their diasporan location and their original home that makes a viable return impossible. For these two, monetary remittance occupies exactly the same space and achieves the same functions as the literary text does for Kincaid: a form of self-fashioning and self-sustenance that draws on a dead past. The grief the sisters experience when forced to set foot again in Guyana uncannily parallels Kincaid’s elegiac rejection and lament over Antigua. Their grief further undercuts the image they present of the progress, prosperity and civilization that they inhabit in diaspora. It equally undercuts their perspective on Guyana as a dead past disjunct from a living, dynamic present in diaspora. And indeed the difficulties of a negotiation of escape are tellingly highlighted in the fact that Token and Cyclette send their children home to Guyana and Mama King when they fi rst arrive in the US and are not yet able to manage on their own. The “floating homeland” is more than a corpse in the seaport: in a novel concerned with the meaning of cultural traditions and how they function in familial settings in the sender country and diaspora there is the suggestion that these cultural traditions, though distorted and deeply torn in particular scenarios, are not severed but spawn new negotiations when families are spread across different geographical spaces and exposed to other cultural behaviors.

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By the end of the novel Token and Cyclette and their families have returned to the United States and a single granddaughter, Cindy and her husband Chuck remain with Mama King. This Afro-centric couple is pregnant with twins whose impending arrival signals new possibilities for Mama King. Finally, it is the knowledge Chuck gains and brings back from his visit to Africa that provides precedent for Mama King’s new role and her place in their lives. The twins’ birth provides Mama King with a renewed role as caregiver and allows Cindy and Chuck to take care of Mama King. Africa/ the model of a traditional society, perhaps the ultimate past, connects the children of her diaspora in this crisis and questions the economic terms that situate the Caribbean in a negative remittance ideology. By reframing Mama King in the circle of a traditional African extended family, Gilroy places her novel in the early Pan-Africanist discourse that Brodber refigures in Louisiana. Gilroy’s novel somewhat predates the endemic celebration of diaspora as metropolitan border crossing heralded by publications such as Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, and seems interested in a literary negotiation between past ideologies and present realities. For Gilroy, the idea is highlighted that “black” may be defi ned in terms of African traditions holding Africa’s diaspora together. This ideological stance is not at all surprising as Gilroy, writing out of Britain more than 30 years after Lamming and Selvon’s hopeful satires on the sexual politics of diaspora, is confronting a society in which arguably no melting pot experience has really taken place and the image of Africa as a symbol of unity has more provenance than in the United States. Gilroy’s perspective is in its own way as troubling as Kincaid’s. Frangipani House clearly offers a critique and complication of remittance culture that is not present in My Brother. Gilroy’s privileging of Mama King’s perspective accomplishes this through its use of two distinct sets of voices: one set that creates the remittance dynamic and another set that resists it. Unlike Kincaid’s story of her brother’s life and death, the authorial voice in Frangipani House is clearly self-conscious about the remittance dynamic, especially from the privileged position of diaspora, yet this self-consciousness does not necessarily create an effect that is dissimilar from Kincaid’s. Part of the problem is in Gilroy’s “solution” to the family crisis. Chuck and Cindy’s desire to adopt Mama King, a desire influenced by their exposure to traditional African societies and the birth of their twins, arguably presents oversimplified answers to the questions the novel raises. In the fi rst place, the recourse to African systems is not necessarily attentive to the specifics of the Guyanese (Caribbean) experience. In the second place is Chuck and Cindy’s decision to bring Mama King to the US to live with them. The couple’s lack of awareness that there could be legal and immigration-related difficulties associated with this project, as well as their lack of engagement with how this larger transplantation may affect Mama, renders the solution a little too glib, a little too removed from reality, which is always less than ideal.

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Frangipani House like My Brother is concerned with the difficulty of fi nding a register at which the Caribbean at home in the region and the Caribbean (at home) abroad can speak to each other and achieve harmonious understanding. Mama King’s ultimate refusal of Token and Cyclette’s gift of a bed in the renowned eventide home and Token and Cyclette’s refusal of Mama’s demands to be an active and integral part of a family unit—not taken care of from afar—is reminiscent of Kincaid’s parentheses in My Brother. The narrative moment when Kincaid and Devon no longer speak the same language is similarly conceived in Frangipani House. As with Kincaid and Devon, there had been many months of silence between Mama King and her children: Mama’s letters were intercepted and un-posted and Token and Cyclette never wrote. While the words in parentheses in My Brother are a language Kincaid no longer understands, in Frangipani House it is two opposing ways of seeing that confuse and distress each party. This is not to say that Mama King understands Chuck and Cindy who seek to accommodate her. She seems doubtful of their Afro-centric altruism even to the very end when she suggests that they do not indeed need her. After Cindy’s insistence that she is needed, Mama accedes very cautiously: “‘I will do the best I can . . . [b]ut,’ she added fiercely, ‘my heart brittle—like eggshell. It easy to break’” (Frangipani House 109). Perhaps in the birth of the twin boys, Amos and Abel, diasporan children born in Guyana, there is the suggestion that in the next generation the parenthetical gulf may be bridged. In the end, Kincaid’s celebration of her remittances to Antigua and Gilroy’s critique of the remittances sent to maintain Mama King in Guyana underscore the inequities that characterize many of the relationships between Caribbean people at home and those abroad. Kincaid attempts no reconciliation with her family and in the end seems genuinely saddened by the fact that she did not really know her brother and that they did indeed live worlds apart. Gilroy’s novel on the other hand, in its attempt to begin to answer some of the difficult questions it raises, glosses over the realities it creates perhaps proving just how wide the gulf between the geopolitical locations has become.

5

“No Abiding City” Theorizing Deportation in Caribbean Migrant Fiction

In a project concerned with interrogating migration and diaspora in Caribbean literature and the constituent tropes that reveal and complicate historical and contemporary motivations and restraints for Caribbean travelers, as well as the material constraints that impact mobility and settling for Caribbean people, a discussion of deportation holds central place. Deportation, or the legal act of removing criminal and illegal aliens from a host country back to a sender country, may be read as a strange culmination of the migrant experience in a caricature of return and a parody of remittance. Deportation brings together most parties involved in migration; the sender and the host communities and the sender and host governments in a noteworthy complication/reversal of the terms “sender” and “host.”1 Indeed the various movements and migrations that constitute Caribbean subsume the disparate movements of diaspora and deportation, underscoring the tension between the two. Theories of boundarylessness that celebrate diaspora are problematized in this discussion, for in the legal act of deportation, borders and boundaries are enforced by governments whose legal and political weight overshadow the diasporic aspirations of cultural communities across different geographic locations, thus shattering the romance in which diaspora is always ultimately a state of power. The deportee adds another, contentious, strand to the issue of remittance as act and concept. From a contemporary standpoint, the deportee is most often perceived in the Caribbean as a species of particularly hardened criminal. In the United States this perception is more typically layered with a perception that the deportee is an illegal immigrant who has been found out. The difference in perception speaks directly to the variable effect of the deportee on the social and economic fabric of the countries (sender and receiver) involved. Further, as will be discussed in this chapter, while for the deporting country the main issues are issues of national security and national purity/purification, for many in the regional Caribbean, the deportee is a form of ironic remittance in which a foreign product (a criminal manufactured abroad) is

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being sent to the Caribbean not to facilitate development or survival but as a drain on the national purse and a threat to national security. This perception arises from the argument (often factually based) that in many cases the deportee has no connection with the Caribbean except by birth, having migrated in infancy or an otherwise very early age. Deportation features then in narratives of imperialism, political economics and social underdevelopment. The deportee functions as the fl ip side of extradition, the demand for which is often seen as an imposition of rich countries upon poor countries that are aid-dependent and therefore not in a position to say no. In a recent case, the Jamaican government refused to extradite a businessman wanted in the United States on criminal charges, thus setting off a new round of narratives of the kind stated above. Intriguingly, the government’s argument, as reported in newspaper accounts, was that the country could not afford the economic fallout from this businessman’s removal. 2 In the contentious narratives that frame deportation as remittance “manufactured in foreign,” the terms “sender” and “host” nation, which traditionally refer to “country of citizenship from which one migrates” and “country that accommodates one as migrant” respectively, are often reversed. For this reason my use of these terms in this chapter will vary to accommodate discussion of opposing perspectives. The terms “sender” and “host” as opposed to “diasporan and regional Caribbean communities” also highlight the issues of displacement in both locations for the deportee, as well as how the deportee may be dehumanized as a mere “remittance”—something (of an often implied parasitic nature) sent or temporarily accommodated. Keeping in mind the increasing number of deportees to the Caribbean specifically from the United States (even before September 11, 2001) and the corresponding global trends that imagine national security as a problem often exacerbated by the number of foreigners within a nation’s borders, this chapter is concerned with deportation and deportation policy in practice, as well as with how Caribbean literary artists treat this phenomenon. Ultimately, I examine how the relationship between the two (deportation in practice and in literature) allows for a theorization of Caribbean deportation literature and the socio-cultural space that the literature occupies. In this context, deportation is a literary question as well as a legal question. The literary question is constituted by what I call the absence/presence of the figure of the deportee: how has Caribbean migrant literature managed to explore a set of themes that ignore some realities of Caribbean travel? Is this because, by and large, the Caribbean literary imagination as represented in most of the fiction to date is a middle class imagination whereas deportation traditionally affects mainly the lower classes? Has the tradition in effect resisted the necessity of shifting to a more contemporary representation of “the folk?” (Who have been the staple “underdog” in Caribbean literature but have in many cases reconfigured themselves as various kinds of urban proletariat that the literature has overlooked.) The question also has relevance at the

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textual level: what kind of work do deportees in the literature do; what kinds of questions do they raise? How do they help us work through themes of trauma, citizenship, and transnational identity? Despite the increasing visibility of deportees and policies related to deportation in popular literature, very little attention has been paid to the phenomenon in mainstream Caribbean literature. Deportation narratives in local newspapers often accompany commentaries on immigration laws and/or transnational criminal elements; deportation and deportees figure in popular music and in Caribbean pulp fiction, and recent statistics suggest that deportees are becoming more visible in local communities in Jamaica, Guyana and Haiti. However, the figure of the deportee barely dots the Caribbean literary landscape. One reason is that the contemporary deportee is associated in the popular imagination with criminality and ghetto/inner city drug culture, which are not traditional subjects of mainstream literature. We could argue then that the almost total absence of the figure is indeed class inflected; as well, the absence might have ideological underpinnings as deportation does not fall into the types of themes and issues by which we have been used to talking about Caribbean literature. Two mainstream fiction texts on deportees exist: Paule Marshall’s 1950s Brown Girl, Brownstones and Edwidge Danticat’s 2004 rendering in “Night Talkers,” one of the narratives in her The Dew Breaker. Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here presents the plight of Elizete, an illegal alien in Toronto. Elizete is never deported, but Brand’s portrayal is relevant to this discussion as Elizete’s situation makes her a potential deportee. The infrequency of representation, particularly with regard to deportation in the contemporary moment, has implications for how migrant literature situates itself vis-à-vis the cultural and political processes that are creating a new Caribbean (diaspora). The deportee, like the remittance text, fractures the idea of a successful or ameliorative diaspora, and does so as much by absence as by the nature of his/her presence in Caribbean migrant literature. (I am not saying here that what writers write should be prescribed, but simply noting an absence and its possible reasons and implications.) The texts I am considering, though written and situated at different historical moments, and though different in perspective—Marshall’s Brown Girl is written from the perspective of the Barbadian diaspora community in Brooklyn, New York in the 1950s, while Danticat’s 2004 “Night Talkers” is set in the rural, mountainside village of Beau Jour in Haiti—are quite startling in the ways they foreground contemporary issues that are raised by the deportation policies of host nations. This suggests that between 1959, when Brown Girl was published, and 2004, when Danticat’s book was published, the issues have changed very little. The questions around community and citizenship in the fi rst generation text are consistent with contemporary renderings of these issues. The power and limitations of diasporan communities and communities in the geographical Caribbean on both ends of the deportation

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point to a certain continuity rooted in how the nations that host potential deportees perceive themselves in relation to the colonies/former colonies. In addition to the three fiction texts I include an analysis of the autobiographical narrative of literary and political icon C.L.R. James, one of the Caribbean’s most famous deportees. 3 James as a political deportee of the 1930s presents an important contrast to the contemporary image of the deportee in four ways. First, he was a political deportee and therefore, ironically, had status. Also, in his individual self as a Trotskyist, he represented a putative attempt at ideological invasion of state power by another state power, namely, the US by the Soviet Union. Further similarities and differences between James’ experience and the contemporary experience of deportees as inflected by historical moment and status must pose fascinating questions about change and continuity in the discourse and practice of deportation. Another important factor in the discussion is that James as a literary man was able to write his own story, and as autobiography his story shares some space with fictive representation. Finally, James theorizes his own case in ways that become very useful for my own theorization of deportation. I will place James’ narrative against a more contemporary, third person newspaper narrative of a deportee whose circumstances and story and the ways in which her story is told highlight the continuities between different moments, yet by foregrounding some differences, widens the map of the deportation landscape and consequently the territory it occupies in diasporic space. National Security, Migrancy and the Problematic of Deportation Deportation fractures the romance of diaspora as it questions and troubles the implicit celebration of extra-regional scattering of Caribbean peoples and how this scattering is imagined as seamless or at least triumphant across borders. The radical disavowal of criminal and illegal aliens, and occasionally naturalized citizens by the US Government contradicts the autonomy of the migrant to assume a diasporic identity when the state is free to renege or impose identity at will—on suspicion or conviction. Deportation functions as the lowest denominator that tests the limits of diaspora by holding supreme power over who enters and who remains in the US and thus ultimately who forms and maintains (diasporic) communities. Deportation also holds ideological significance. The act constructs the host nation through its politics and policies toward migrants; as well, deportation constructs the immigrant, the community to which she/he belongs and the sender country in passive or active response to the host country’s decisions. As indicated in my remarks above, the community to which the deportee belongs becomes a shifting category and a major point of tension in these constructions and responses; along the same axis, the categories of

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sender and host or, in remittance terms, sender and receiver, become equally ambiguous and shifting. The narrative of C.L.R. James’ deportation in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In is an analysis of Melville’s Moby-Dick as a way into an examination of American society in the 1950s. It is as well James’ engagement with the ideological significance of his plight and that of other deportees with him. In the last chapter, “A Natural but Necessary Conclusion,” James reveals to us that he is writing from prison on Ellis Island. James had become a public figure in the political and intellectual spheres of his time; it is believed that the controversy associated with his political activities caused his deportation.4 In the months preceding his internment at Ellis Island (November 1952–April 1953), James lived with constant harassment from the FBI (C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary 109). James had been a follower of Leon Trotsky and had sailed to the US on Trotsky’s request to promote the “Negro Question.”5 While there, he held meetings with workers across the states and soon became fascinated by the country and its culture. However, James’ fate was different from the fate of fellow Trotskyists and political prisoners who were hounded by the press and taken before Congress. His application for citizenship was denied and James the “undesirable alien” was deported. James’ narrative about his time on Ellis Island as political prisoner and deportable alien provides important insight on his politics on the government of immigration, as well as his critique of the (1950s) Department of Immigration that is uncannily similar to the critique of the Department of Homeland Security in our contemporary moment. James details the retrograde treatment of prisoners with health concerns (we are reminded that Danticat’s Uncle Joseph at the time of his death stood in a limbo space awaiting possible deportation) and uses his own privilege as connected political prisoner with legal representation to outline an incisive class critique of a system that is barbarous even for well-connected politicals. From the 1950s, James argues that the system of governing immigration is so fraught, so problem ridden, that the loopholes are beyond shameful. He alludes to the work of a fellow inmate and a communist, “M,” who acted “with the deepest conviction as the defender and champion of the people on Ellis Island against the cruelties and inhumanity of the administration” and single-handedly revealed the administration’s shortcomings (127–128). James uses M, knowing the anti-communist sentiments in the US and his own documented dislike of communists, to further underscore the ironies of American society and American justice: Under my very eyes, M had turned the Department of Justice itself into an arena where he struck hard blows for his side in the great struggle now going on for world mastery. He was using the American tradition against those who were supposed to be its guardians. On Ellis Island it

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M’s story is the prelude to and is intrinsically linked to James’ story, where he specifically critiques “national arrogance” and “the attitude to aliens in the U.S.” (140, 137). As an internationalist on assignment for Trotskyism, James’ fi nds his internment on Ellis Island, in-waiting to be sent back to Trinidad, of particular offence to his sensibility. The clipping of his wings, so to speak, the policing of his mobility because of his ideologies and the inhumane treatment he receives when he is ill, all inform his scathing criticism of the US Department of Immigration: Mr. Shaugnessy said that I could leave any time I wanted and ‘go drink my papaya juice.’ I was not being detained; I could leave any time I pleased. The legal theory behind this is that my status in the Courts in a case of this kind is one of grace and not of right . . . But I ask the average American to consider. The law provides that an alien should have a hearing; then the decision, if unfavorable, can be appealed to the Attorney-General. Then if the appeal is rejected, the matter can be taken to the District Court. What theory of law is it which cannot see that such a procedure could have originated only in a country where the traditional role of the immigrant and the tradition of civil liberties, are such as to have created for the alien every possible opportunity to make as good a case for himself as possible? Isn’t it obvious that the only interpretation of such procedure is that it was intended to break down barriers and not set them up, to declare to the alien, and to American citizens, and to the whole world that the United States took upon itself the responsibility of seeing that as far as possible he was treated as a potential citizen? (141) James’s battle with the Department of Immigration is at its root a concern with state imposed authenticity and an over-simplification of his license to move or his freedom to assume resident privileges, he “could leave at any time” and “go drink [his] papaya juice.” His rights as a legal resident of the US and as a potential citizen are minimized or ignored because of Mr. Shaugnessy’s insistence that he could simplify his life by returning to Trinidad; James takes to task Shaugnessy’s ignorance (and the America he represents). He describes it as an ignorance not only of the role of the immigrant in American society but of civil liberties as well. At the same time the terms of the protest (addressing the relative “freedoms” James “enjoys”) foreground the nature of detention as a political prisoner as distinct from other prisoners, and the ways in which James’ status as political prisoner complicates the popular conception of a deportee. His crime had nothing to do with guns and drugs but with ideologies and words. His work

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on the “Negro Question” with Trotskyists in the US confi rms the positive impact he had on specific Americans, and by the same token his deportation caused disjuncture in the organizations he left behind. Secondly, the deportation of James, the deportation of Marcus Garvey for mail fraud and the deportation of Claudia Jones for her communist associations establish a pattern of deporting migrant Caribbean political activists from the US. The deportation of a Trotskyist, a Pan-Africanist and a communist has spoken volumes for the decades following. Indeed, the ships carrying Garvey, James and Jones were trafficking in a kind of “dangerous” ideological commerce akin to Danticat’s contraband. I shift here to the newspaper story of Sandra Espeut, a Jamaican lesbian in Britain facing deportation “after her sexuality was questioned on the basis that she has children. Espeut, who lived in the volatile Kingston 13 area before going to Britain, bears scars she said she received during several beatings she suffered in her community” (Sandra’s Story Jamaica Gleaner, June 13, 2004). She was granted asylum in Britain under the 1951 Geneva Convention.6 Espeut’s impending deportation as explained in the newspaper article raises some obvious ideological questions. Her body is placed as evidence in both the case for her asylum and her deportation. Her asylum in Britain is granted based on her scars and the preconceived notion by the authorities that Jamaica is a dangerously homophobic society. On the other hand, her deportation is based on the fact of her four children and the knowledge of desperate if not criminal means some Jamaicans might employ to leave the island space. How do we negotiate the space of meeting between Espeut’s body as her own construction and as a construction of the state? What does it mean to read the body as evidence from location to location? How does the evidence of Espeut’s sexuality differ from nation state to nation state? Certain ideological underpinnings remain constant between the James and Espeut cases. Both James and Espeut resist the imposition of the Caribbean as their only possible home. James and Espeut claim the US and England as possible places of residence precisely because these locations provide context and shelter for their politics and persuasions that they believe to be alien in the Caribbean. But Espeut’s case presents some contemporary contradictions in which the migrant may be caught: gender and sex both liberate her (lead her to believe in the possibility of a diasporic refuge) and imprison her (lead to her deportation). This is because of the contradiction of postmodern values, which seem on one level to give preference and privilege to personal choices, yet allow for increased state policing of those same choices. Thus, sexual difference is allowed in the US and England and reputedly persecuted in the Caribbean, but national security in the former warns that this difference can be performed or fictionalized.7 Espeut’s body contradicts her rhetoric. Yet it is her body that she enters as evidence in her own defense. Interestingly, while in the deportation scenario her scars do not prove her

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lesbianism, her children are used to prove her heterosexuality. This example points to the confl ict between the insignia that the state uses in its policing and other terms of reference that are nebulous because they are not easily quantified. The state’s emphasis on the seen, the visible, “the straight line” is evidenced in its view that it is impossible for Espeut to be bisexual, and its attempt to use children to prove sexual orientation. Espeut’s case also highlights a collective rather than an individual threat. She is one of many poor Caribbean people infi ltrating migrant space for economic or other personal reasons who in their numbers and in their powerlessness are both a cultural and economic threat to the state. Another point of contrast is the narrative perspective of the James and Espeut accounts. As a writer, James has the means and the talent to tell his story; he might be expelled from the US, but eventually his narrative is circulated around the world. James has the power to make deportation work for him because he traffics in ideology, which can cross borders with a pen and connections. As well, James’ deportation from the US does not end his diasporic ambitions, perhaps it extends his options—Britain and the USSR continue to be options for him. On the other hand, Espeut’s traffic in ideology is not successful; she has neither class status nor pen, and certainly no other government support. Her powerlessness shows in her narrative being told by journalists. Apart from the Jamaica Gleaner report, the only other narratives of her story are in online newspapers, Caribbeannetnews.com, and SHOUT! Yorkshire’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender paper. These narratives fi ll in some of the silences in Espeut’s story such as the ages of her children (4, 7, 11 and 21), and the fact that none of the four was born in the UK. While she is removed from diasporic space, the purveyors of gay ideology—SHOUT!, etc.—benefit from her case, which circulates for them in a political economy; she is used as a case in point. And if what is gained from her case, like what is gained from James’, comes to layer the ideological fabric of the erstwhile host society, the mismatch between her absence on the one hand, and the presence of her story as a part of diaspora on the other, is another bizarre irony of deportation. 8 The differences of status and historical moment even in deportation as the lowest denominator appear also in James’ greater access to options for alternative homes (shortly after deportation he re-migrated to England, of which his native Trinidad was still a colony). In addition, James was an intellectual traveler, not a refugee immigrant; moreover for him identity was not a matter of life and death as it was for the lowly placed Espeut. Like McKay, James might have seen himself as something of a troubadour wanderer, as he reserved the right to simultaneously claim several identities that worked for him in global intellectual and political arenas. Despite claimed residence in the US and England as well as his Soviet affi liations, James never stopped seeing himself as a Caribbean man, among his other chosen identities: his nationalist classic The Black Jacobins as well as the Trinidad yard novel Minty

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Alley were published in the 1930s as well. For Espeut, in contrast, the Caribbean was never a possibility. Yet the differences between the two deportees may be more apparent than real. James as an individual poses a political threat to US national security because of his link to another powerful state, the Soviet Union, that can compromise the superpower status of the US. One would think that his status as writer, intellectual, and well-connected Trotskyist would mean that he would be treated differently as a deportee, yet there are ironic parallels: James like Espeut is another black body from the “Third World.” This identification above all else marks them as unworthy of serious attention. James catalogues how his illness is not taken seriously perhaps because of what immigration officials believe to be his option to “go home to Trinidad and drink papaya juice” and the British authorities are clearly unwilling to consider the nuances of Espeut’s situation. Their lobby groups vary significantly in pull and influence, yet neither is granted a stay of deportation. The C.L.R. James and Sandra Espeut deportation cases in their divergences and convergences prove that there is no seamless diaspora. The negotiation of borders is class inflected, it is inflected by what is trafficked, and it is inflected by who is the deportee’s sponsor or buyer. Yet in every case deportation causes pain and suffering and in every case the individual story is seen as potentially inimical to national security. The Costs of Deportation Deportation also has social and economic quotients for both the host and sender nations. The steady waves of migration to the US in the 1970s and 80s are directly parallel to the passing of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996 in response to the rising number of foreign-born criminals on US shores. As well, the amalgamation of immigration reform under the iron umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security after September 11, 2001 marks another moment in US history where security and immigration pair productively. Lauren Berlant in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City suggests that “every crisis of immigration in U.S. history has involved the claim that something essentially American is being threatened by alien cultural practices” (193). This xenophobia is closely linked to the number of immigrants in the United States at these periods. According to a publication by the Office of Immigration Statistics in the Department of Homeland Security titled “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: January 2006” there were estimated 8.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the US in 2000 and 11.6 million in 2006 (2). These numbers explain much of the anxiety in the United States around immigration reform, and deportation is one of the ways policy makers propose to reassert power over US borders. In the Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: 2006, a table titled “Deportable Aliens Located” (the statistics for the actual number

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of illegal and criminal aliens deported were not available) reveals that in 2000 1,814,729 were located (the highest figure in the fiscal years 1925–2006) while in 2006 1,206,457 were located. While these last two figures represent the US Government’s commitment to enforcement of immigration reform, when juxtaposed with the number of unauthorized immigrants in the US, they prove just how serious the crisis is. The most comprehensive immigration law that directly affects the status of legal and illegal aliens in the US is the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. 9 This law mandates that all nonexpedited removal proceedings begun on or after April 1, 1996 take place through one unified proceeding. This new process is called “removal proceedings,” it consolidates the former exclusion and deportation proceedings and narrows the grounds for relief from removal (US Department of Justice INS Institutional Removal Program). Deportation, then, has become quite topical; it has been used as one of the main solutions to the problem of illegal and criminal aliens who may be residents of the US, and may or may not be undocumented. The 1996 Act seeks to clarify the difference between those who are US-born, those who are naturalized citizens, and those who have made the US their home and not become citizens. The Act enforces legal punishment, that is, deportation, of specific members of the US populace. The law applies to legal resident aliens of the US regardless of the time spent in the country. Furthermore, the law is retroactive; it applies to crimes and wrongs carried out prior to 1996. Some of the classes of deportable aliens listed in Title 8 Section 1227 of the US Act include those: 1) Inadmissible at time of entry, present in violation of the law, in violation of non-immigrant status or condition of entry, in termination of conditional permanent residence, engaged in smuggling (except for legal permanent residents who attempt to smuggle a spouse, parent, son or daughter), engaged in marriage fraud. 2) Who commit criminal offenses. These include crimes of moral turpitude, multiple criminal convictions, aggravated felony, high speed fl ight, violation of any law concerning controlled substances, drug abusers and addicts, certain fi rearm offences, miscellaneous crimes, crimes of domestic violence, stalking, violation of protection order, crimes against children. 3) Who fail to register, who falsify documents, or falsely claim citizenship 4) Who are charged for security and related grounds, terrorist activities, assisted in Nazi persecution or engaged in genocide 5) Who become a public charge. Any alien who within five years after the date of entry has become a public charge from causes not affi rmatively shown to have arisen since entry

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6) Who engage in unlawful voting. It is clear from some of the general clauses of the law such as “aggravated felony” and “criminal convictions” that this act is meant to be open enough to encompass a multitude of crimes. Because of its retroactive nature, naturalized citizens of the US would be vulnerable to the Act’s extensive reach as well. Indeed, depending on the judge, an “aggravated felony” might be relatively minor. The relativity of the term “aggravated felony” heightens one’s awareness of the leeway a judge might have in pronouncing judgment. After the institution of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996, numerous court cases have been litigated dispossessing not only illegal and criminal aliens, but permanent residents as well. In Wright v. Ouellette, which appeared before the US Court of Appeal for the First Circuit, Wright appealed the order to deport him. The facts of the case are as follows: Joshua Wright is a native of Jamaica who has been a lawful permanent resident of the United States for over twenty years. He is the father of several children, whom he supports and who are American citizens. Wright is also a felon: a decade ago he was convicted of possessing, with intent to distribute, 2.8 grams of cocaine (worth $150.00) he served two years in prison and deportation proceedings were started in 1992. (Wright v. Ouellette)10 Despite Wright’s appeals for “discretionary relief” in 1993 and further appeals for the staying of the motion to deport him, including the fact that he had sired two more children, Wright was still deported after his appeal for discretionary relief was denied in 1996. Wright’s familial ties in the US were not sufficient, neither was the fact that his crime was comparatively minor and that he served two years in prison because of it: The case of Neil Jean-Baptiste v. Janet Reno presents another version of the same plea: Plaintiff Neil Jean-Baptiste is a 27 year-old national of Haiti who became a legal permanent resident of the United States in 1972 at the age of two. In 1989, after pleading guilty, he was convicted in New York state court for criminal possession of a controlled substance in violation of N.Y. penal law. Based on this conviction, the immigration court ordered him deported on August 9, 1996. (Baptiste v. Reno)11 In this case the plaintiff had very little experience with his own native land— Haiti. The very fact that he has been a legal resident of the US since he was age two should complicate the burden of the responsibility for his reform.

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These two defendants represent a large number of individuals from various nations in the world who have been directly affected, some would say negatively and unfairly, by the passing of the 1996 Act. Both Wright and Jean-Baptiste resided in the US for over twenty years, many of which were formative. In addition, the deportation of Joshua Wright suggests that the two years he served in an American prison were ineffective and that the only way to solve the problem of “Joshua Wright” was to send him back to Jamaica. Despite Mr. Wright’s use of fatherhood as a model of US citizenship, by showing that he was an active, supportive father and that this could possibly discontinue when deported, his appeals were denied. Bernard Headley in Deported: Entry and Exit Findings Jamaicans Returned Home from the U.S. posits that the passing of the 1996 IIRIRA was as closely related to Americans’ need to feel more secure as it was a response to the fiscal burden prison complexes became for the American people. Sending foreign-born criminals home after full or partial completion of their sentence would significantly ameliorate a rising budgetary crisis in the US. Synchronously, the steady waves of forced returnees like Wright and Jean-Baptiste to the Caribbean, particularly after the passing of the 1996 Act, resulted in marked concern over a new demographic of Caribbean returnees. In Jamaica alone, between 1997 and the fi rst few months of 2003, more than 12,000 of its nationals were sent home (Headley 20). Recent figures from the Planning Institute of Jamaica reveal that in 2007, 1,329 people were deported from the US and in 2008 that number grew to 1,476. With similarly staggering figures around the region, Caribbean policy makers were forced to create and revisit national and regional approaches to “returning residents” and to crime.12 Many Caribbean nations tabled the same concerns as the U.S, Government around the cost of rehabilitation and reintegration, and soon, with the absence of any social policy to accomplish the above, the result was rising and changing crime patterns. Considering the change in the nature of criminal activities in Jamaica for example, (crimes have reportedly become more advanced; praedial larceny and other simple thefts have given way to car-jacking and bank robberies), politicians and those working with and for the security forces have had to look again at the effects of deportation on the region. In an article titled “Nation at risk” in the Jamaica Gleaner the Criminal Intelligence Unit of the Jamaica Constabulary force disclosed that between June 1997 and January 1999 deportees were involved in numerous crimes including: “600 murders, 1,700 armed robberies, 900 rapes, 150 cases of shoot-outs with the police, 200 cases of extortion, 30 cases of murdering witnesses, and 10 cases of arson” ( June 21, 1999). Implicit in this news article is the belief that deportees are criminals educated abroad. Not only is there a prevailing “foreignness” about deportees, but also this distance acts as a abjuration, suggesting that the type of criminal activity they engage in is not “Jamaican;” it is different, it is “foreign.”13 The rules of citizenship dictate that these individuals are

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Jamaican. The rules of the street, however, mark them as “foreign.” This kind of “in-betweenness” or hybridity is a little different in these cases, because with deportation the deporting state forces or imposes a legal defi nition of authenticity and identity despite how an individual and the receiving community may defi ne the deportee. Many criticisms of the IIRIRA have been specifically concerned with the responsibility put on sender countries (countries of origin) in the reform and reintegration of high numbers of deportees over short periods of time. Criticism of the Act includes: 1) The IIRIRA takes advantage of the unequal relationship between the US and developing nations, by dumping deviant residents for whom the US no longer accepts responsibility; 2) the Act also denies responsibility for the formative years and various forms of cultural education and places it onto other nations.14 Communities that have had to deal with the direct influence of a deportee on their everyday existence have also reported their concern about deportees and their effects on the nation. Underlying these criticisms is the perception that the US and in fewer but significant cases, Britain, is the real sender country and the Caribbean nation the new host in a kind of unjust reversal of roles. Perhaps it is specious to suggest that Caribbean people have been corrupted by American crimes, or that they have become educated into criminality abroad. In the case of Jamaica there is evidence of Jamaican posses who were able to effect terror even before they left Jamaica. However, the significant number of criminal and illegal deportees returned to the region in only a few years has had a debilitating effect on Caribbean societies. Local communities and governments around the Caribbean region have consistently expressed their concerns about the number of deportees being sent back to the region. The rate of deportation—that is, the actual number of deportees arriving in Jamaica on a weekly basis—also has a negative effect on individual communities, and on the already struggling Jamaican economy.15 Headley’s Deported takes a controversial position on what he calls the “official mythology” of “the deportee” (5). He argues that there is no evidence that links the number of deportees sent to the Caribbean with a disproportionate rise in crime: “University of the West Indies, Mona economists Madjd-Sadjadi and Dillon Alleyne (2004) used advanced statistical formulas to estimate impact of deportees from the US on crime in Jamaica. As regards crime—murder in particular—the authors conclude that, ‘criminal deportation is likely responsible for, at most 4% of the total murders committed in Jamaica each year”. Which means, “For every 1,000 criminal aliens deported, we can expect to see 28 murders” (8). Headley cites similar fi ndings in Barbados and Trinidad, with the Barbados study making specific reference to “sophisticated” crimes. Many of these statistics still do not address the gaping holes that are the questions and allegations Caribbean governments and societies have made on deportees. The statistics are very narrowly based on criminals who are

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caught and polled. Notably, the statistics out of Jamaica do not address the types of crimes committed by deportees and whether or not they have become more sophisticated. What is evident is that Caribbean societies imagine deportees negatively. Deportees in public opinion are always criminal aliens who, having lost their chance to make it in the US, have returned home hardened deadbeats. The distance this resentment facilitates allows the sender society to draw very clear demarcations about who is a citizen and what are the terms of citizenship. Despite the power of the US Government to return criminal and illegal aliens to their sender country, the sender country often classifies deported individuals as “foreign” or as outsiders. The socioeconomic effects of deportation on both host and sender countries prove that deportation has the power to reorder the fabric of social relations. Deportation is not fi xed; it changes in the moment. The impact of September 11, 2001 and the amplification of existing immigration law by the subsequent Patriot Act prove this in the transformation of criminals and illegal immigrants into terrorists. Title IV of the Act, “Protecting the Border” and subtitles A, B, and C: ‘Protecting the Northern Border,’ ‘Enhanced Immigration Provisions’ and ‘Preservation of Immigration Benefits for Victims of Terrorism’ underscore how regulating politics, power and security are in every instance the marker of image and ascendancy. The Patriot Act and the IRRIRA in their investment in the policing prerogatives of the nation state confi rm the fragility of diaspora as new spaces of transantionality and subversive border crossing. Michel Foucault’s “Governmentality,” originally titled, “Security, Territory and Population” argues the centrality of population control to government and the implications of dwelling in a nation without or with limited governance: “Population comes to appear above all else as the ultimate end of government. In contrast to sovereignty, government has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.” (100). Foucault’s argument that population control is the chief function of government underscores the importance of the direct connection between the government of population, the maintenance of resources and comfortable levels of national security at the borders and within the borders of the nation state. When we apply this theory of government to the discussion on immigration and specifically deportation, Foucault’s statement encourages us to think about governing immigration as, in essence, governing population. To speak about the governance of population as seeking the health and well being of the populace begs the question, who is considered part of the populace? The government of the nation, in this case, the US, becomes either the government of citizens, legal and illegal residents, or the government of select groups, possibly citizens only. Or perhaps it means governing different groups differently. Seeking the well-being of immigrants, legal and illegal, is increasingly

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difficult for the US Government; indeed attempts at managing the 13 million illegal aliens has nearly become a national crisis. Undocumented (illegal) aliens as well as criminal aliens create such a predicament for the US Government because they elude surveillance and thus threaten the security of its citizenry. There exists none of the traditional means to keep illegal aliens in check, no social security number or alien card, no approved application for residence with health and education records, none or very little information to assist in their governed presence in the US. Aihwa Ong in Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality discusses an important figure in modernity, the multiple passport holder. Ong argues that “the multiple passport holder is an apt contemporary figure; he or she embodies the split between state imposed identity and personal identity caused by political upheavals, migration, and the changing global markets” (2). The multiple passport holder is analogous to another figure in modernity, the holder of the expired passport. The limited flexibility of the out-of-status migrant is the performance of another kind of modernity or perhaps is beyond modernity. Illegal aliens live on the limits of diaspora, always susceptible to imprisonment and deportation; as well, they never fully enjoy the possibilities of diaspora. At the same time, there is expansiveness in the detachment from defi ning legal ties and documented, state regulated identity. This freedom, dubious and fragile on the one hand, from the perspective of governments and sender/receiver countries (which can be interchangeable identities at any given moment at either end of the transaction) can be a source of power almost occult in its ability to escape surveillance. The story of the criminal deportee who soon after landing, purchases another identity complete with passport and re-circulates himself into the system of the deporting country, is a well-known one. In the Caribbean, the deportee is also often a form of undocumented alien as the police and other local authorities do not always have the resources to keep track of deportees’ activities or whereabouts. The deportee as a remittance statistic and as the dark overflow of the enterprise of citizenship pose some of the most complicated questions facing the modern state in the context of migration. The Deportee in Caribbean Literature While there is certainly much to say about the absence of the deportee from Caribbean critical discourse, the limited presence of the deportee in the fiction, in particular how the deportee is present(ed) in Caribbean migrant literature is of equal and significant import. The deportee figure provides the occasion to rethink the tensions and assumptions implicit in the relationship between Caribbean communities in the region and in the diaspora. Also, the figure refocuses crucial attention on the reality behind fictive presentations of migrancy. At the core of these discussions are not only the challenges to

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celebrations of transnationality and diaspora with which this book is concerned, but also the interrogation of how communities defi ne themselves, the spoken and unspoken rules that create and recreate Caribbean across different locations. Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones visits the issue of deportation through the case of Deighton Boyce, an illegal alien, who removes himself from his family and community and is removed from the US by his wife with the support of the migrant community. Deighton becomes an estranged husband and father after a series of failures at educational pursuits, business enterprises and fi nally an accident at work that causes him to lose the use of one of his arms and take the hand of fellowship at the Peace Movement.16 Interestingly enough, Deighton’s personal and public lives converge to effect his removal from the US. Deighton has been in the country for over twenty years, but it is only after he abandons his family and the Barbadian community that he is deported. 17 His wife, representing community values, joins forces with the state to punish Deighton for his abrogation of the duties of a good citizen, in this case the performance of normative family manhood, community participation and effective industry. It is intriguing that in this rarely represented case of collaboration, US national security collides in mutual interest with Silla’s, and by extension the migrant community’s view that the national ideals of the country they have left behind should be practiced in the country of their adoption. The in-betweenity of diaspora as a form of negotiation between mutual interests is very interestingly suggested here in a way it has not been suggested by any of the other texts discussed. Even the deportee then it seems participates beneficially on more than one side of this transaction of political economy. And though Deighton is not a criminal, the migrant community’s disapproving response to him, like the anxiety of Caribbean residents discussed earlier, brings to attention that the issue of national purity/purification is equally important to the Caribbean countries. It is useful to trace the series of events and situations that lead up to Deighton’s deportation. Deighton is known throughout the Barbadian community for his lack of “ambition” and “forward thinking.” While the chief focus of many of the Barbadian households in Brooklyn is to “buy house,” Deighton spends his time studying.18 Silla explains her take on the situation to Virgie Farnum, “[F]or years now I been trying to put little ambition in that man but he ain interested in making head-way. He’s always half-studying some foolishness that don pan out” (32). Evidently Deighton is different from the typical Barbadian man; he explains to Selina after he has fallen in love with a new project, a bright brassy trumpet: “Once I get started I gon make enough money that these Bajan’s with their few raw-mouth houses will see what real money is! But I wun get like them. Not me!” (85) Here Deighton pronounces declaratively that he is not and will never be like the other Barbadians in New York.

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On the other hand, Silla’s views are very much in tandem with those of the other Barbadian women in the novel and New York is the typical US city during this period—racist and stratified. Deighton is kept by both from the success he desires in both the public and private spheres in which he exists. His situation embodies the kind of deportation being theorized here. First, he is clearly an illegal immigrant; he explains to Selina in response to her questions about his being drafted in the war: “I mean if they don have some kind of record or something so on you, you don exist. You can be walking bout like other men, breathing like everybody else but not existing fuh true. That’s a funny thing, nuh?” (66) Deighton explains here what being illegal or undocumented means in America. He highlights the paradox of his life by suggesting that while he is on all counts “human” he does not “exist” in the US. Deighton establishes the contradiction of identity and the illegal alien. He nuances the fact that cultural identity is separate from legal existence and that his position as unidentified does not, in fact, affect who he is. He realizes that his presence in the US subverts the legal system and can be read as an affront to national security. Deighton believes that his statelessness offers complete freedom. He saunters around Brooklyn without having to worry about being drafted or about work. He has become an outsider in his community and a figure of ridicule. The standoff between Deighton and Silla concerning the land willed to him by his sister, his subsequent joining of the Peace Movement and leaving his family to live and work at the Peace Café confi rm him as a lunatic to most of the Barbadian community. However, his chief “sin” is committed against his wife Silla Boyce. She feels the greatest pain, the greatest shame and she reports him to the authorities. Silla is less concerned about Deighton’s spiritual well-being than with the opprobrium his life at the Peace Café causes her family. She does not feel that he deserves to be in the US; she also feels that she must save him from himself and his mistakes. Part of what Silla does by reporting her husband to the authorities and having him deported is condemn his “worthless” behavior as undeserving of living in the US. Even after Deighton has been arrested and carried away, Silla shouts in the street, “[l]et him go back where he come from if he don’t count his own. Let him go back!” (183) Silla gives Deighton up to the authorities not because he is an illegal alien (he existed successfully in that capacity for many years) but because he has in essence forsaken his family and his migrant community. Deportation to Barbados becomes a weird irony: as punishment for forsaking (what) Barbados (stands for), he is remitted to Barbados. This caricature of return is amplified by the personal meaning of Silla’s act. She accepts and extends the boundaries Deighton has erected by breaking off all relationship to him: as far as she is concerned, he no longer belongs to her. Sending him back is both a severance and an acknowledgement of belonging. In terms of the latter, he belongs within her responsibility (to save

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him from his errors) as much as he belongs to Barbados, even though in both his relationship to her and his relationship to his homeland he is marked by the insignia of unbelonging. The bizarre contradictions of location that attend the deportee are succinctly highlighted here. The community’s attention to its own self-interest in collaborating with Silla (or at least not attempting to dissuade her) can be analyzed from another perspective here. Evidently the legal act of deportation can only be carried out by the state; it is the state which makes the laws and the state which wields the power. Deportation however, becomes difficult when an illegal or criminal alien is being sheltered and supported by a migrant community or vice versa; it is easier when these safe spaces do not exist. But in addition, the community that is discovered to be sheltering illegal immigrants may be negatively perceived by the state and suffer certain consequences. When the returns from the illegal community member are no longer viable, the community is not prepared to take that risk. So while deportation may be state enforced, it may also be community or family endorsed or motivated. In some situations, both of these operate together, one catalyzing the other or working because of the other. From another perspective then we see that where there are shared values between state and migrant community, the symbiotic relationship between state and migrant community functions to regulate the migrant community, as well as to decide the contours of transnationality. Dionne Brand’s Elizete is an illegal immigrant in Canada. She does not exist as part of any real community (she lives in a room with four or five illegals—transient, itinerant, down-and-out and sleeping in shifts), especially not one comparable to the army of upwardly mobile Barbadians who surround Deighton Boyce. Elizete lives suspicious and on the margins of Canadian society; in and out of group rooms, her poor living includes subsistence on scraps from restaurants in the neighborhood strip mall. She invests her energies in becoming invisible, attempting to look like a locally grown crack head instead of a wandering, homeless illegal. Elizete obviously belongs in the paradigm of deportation since her attempt at becoming invisible is an attempt to avoid being deported. Elizete and others like her encourage a rethinking of Deighton’s statement of privileged invisibility, “you can be walking around like everybody else but not existing foh true” (66). This “not existing” for Deighton prevents him from being drafted in “the white man’s war;” it facilitates his arrogance that assures him a place in opposition to his wife and the rest of the Barbadian community. In contrast, not existing within a community makes it difficult for Elizete to perform as though she is citizen. It exposes her to the policing of the state without the protection of the state. Elizete and her roommates Jocelyn and Miryam present a notably feminized picture of the illegal alien. For them, existing without landed papers in Canada means dangerous visibility and vulnerability directly based on

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the fact that they are women. In one heartbreakingly tragi-comic scene, the three women reminisce on their experiences trying to ameliorate its tragedy through laughter. Elizete is raped by someone who knows of her illegal status and therefore is unable to report him to the police; a false alarm, someone crying “Immigration!” causes Miryam and the pregnant Jocelyn to jump through a window; in the fray, Miryam breaks her leg and Jocelyn loses the pregnancy she had incurred in the hope that the father would help her “get her papers.” Brand’s rendering of the scene in which the women commiserate with each other is especially poignant: “Jocelyn pregnant for papers and Miryam in Jocelyn’s mouth losing her leg through laughing and she, Elizete, losing her hearing, every part of the body put to use like a hammer or a bucket, every part emptied like a shelf or a doorway” (Another Place 82). The physical and psychic dislocation, indeed disfranchisement of Jocelyn, Miryam and Elizete is evidence of the violence and trauma these women undergo as illegal aliens. The high price for this kind of illegality is paid with their bodies. They are used (“like a hammer or bucket”), damaged, and then discarded (“emptied like a shelf or a doorway”). The newspaper story of Sandra Espeut emphasizes the nonfictional nature of this kind of experience: arguably, a man could far more easily have evaded detection as the father of children than Espeut could, since motherhood is always marked on the body. The narrative of Elizete’s rape compounds the extent of the women’s victimization. She cannot and does not seek help or justice because she does not “exist foh true;” hers is a bitter silence: “[s]he knows that in the house she’s just left the man has not moved. He is sitting on the velveteen sofa or perhaps looking at sand out his window. He does not fear her, he knows she will not tell anyone . . . He knows she will not go to the hospital. He knows she will not go to a police station . . . Perhaps she’ll move” (92–93). The rapist’s choice to stay at home, couch comfortable with his crime, is in clear contrast to Elizete’s pained journey away from his home (where she is promised domestic work), and her thoughts of moving. Leaving for another place is her only response, her only retort. Before he is deported, Deighton lives a full life as an illegal alien, even if his personal choices keep him on the margins of the Barbadian community in Brooklyn. However, Elizete barely ekes out a living always suspicious and always on the run in Toronto. Deighton’s power and privilege, limited and even illusory as they are, may be compared in principle if not in substance to those enjoyed by James as a political prisoner; this privilege (what they have) may also be viewed in terms of what they do not (have to) suffer. Deighton, until his deportation, is protected by female care (his wife’s); conversely, Elizete, Jocelyn and other female illegal aliens have little power and suffer direct abuse by men. Ultimately, Deighton and Elizete’s illegal status makes both of them vulnerable to their communities and to the state. Deighton’s deportation is orchestrated by his wife and Elizete is taken advantage of by

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men who guess or know her status. What stands out in the end is state power and policing and the state’s imperative to protect its borders. In the context of illegality and deportation, it is clear that the state has the last word in qualifying the terms of diasporic scattering and settlement. As seen in the psychic terror of Brand’s illegal women and the crossing of the public and the personal in Marshall’s deportee narrative, the state’s borders do not stop with the physical containment of bodies; they are able to extend into psychological terrain and affect migrant subjectivities. Danticat’s “Night Talkers,” already discussed in different ways in Chapter 2, is a sensitive rendering of a criminal deportee returned to his sender country—Haiti. Danticat takes us back to the Caribbean to consider the issue of deportation. Her focus on Beau Jour, Haiti shows that even in a rural mountainside village deportees have become a notable part of the landscape. When Dany, the New York based protagonist, returns unannounced to Beau Jour to pay his old Aunt Estina a visit, she asks if he has been sent back, contextualizing her question with facts on a new socio-cultural reality in the village. “We have a few boys here in the village who have been sent back. Many don’t even speak Creole anymore. They come back because this the only place they have family” (96). Danticat charts new ground in Caribbean literature here not only in her contemporary rendering of a deportee, but also by presenting the phenomenon from a Caribbean perspective. The discussion so far has shown how in the Caribbean as in the North American context, deportation and deportees are similarly constructed around questions of citizenship and community. That the state revokes the deportee’s legal right to live within its borders, and in Claude’s case, that his family in the United States rejects him for his drug-induced patricide, is clearly in contrast to how his family and community in Haiti treat him. The magnanimity of his Haiti based family, who on Claude’s mother’s request forgive him and welcome him into their midst, is the theme of his conversation with Dany: These people don’t even know me, man . . . They still took me in, after everything I did . . . I look at them and I see nothing of me, man, blank, nada, but they look at me and they say he has so-and-so’s nose and his grandmother’s forehead . . . It’s like a puzzle, a weird-ass kind of puzzle . . . I’m the puzzle and these people are putting me back together . . . Man, if I had run into these people back in Brooklyn, I’d of laughed my ass off at them. I would’ve called them backward-ass peasants. But here I am. (98) In this monologue Brooklyn and Beau Jour are distinct from each other based on how the rules of citizenship apply. Claude’s version is arguably an oversimplification of these rules and is merely entertainment for Aunt Estina and a show of long-winded self-indulgence for Dany. Yet he

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emphasizes two important issues here: (1) the significance of the region/ the sender country to the diasporic subject even if unacknowledged by the subject, and (2) the significance of blood to the creation of communities, and the ways in which considerations of blood may in fact nuance disapproval and the impetus to reject the returnee, which are undoubtedly also part of the scenario of response. The emphasis on blood (relations) has resonance beyond Claude’s story. In Dew Breaker it is through blood that a number of communities of belonging and (un)belonging are created. The deportee notes that his family accepts him despite his heinous crime (shedding his father’s blood) because he is their blood. It is not ironic then that Dany returns to Beau Jour to visit his Aunt in the belief that the man who killed his parents and caused his Aunt’s blindness is his landlord and barber. When he fi nds himself seeking the man’s blood he decides to consult his aunt to corroborate his suspicion with evidence from her memory. When Aunt Estina dies while Dany is visiting, Old Zo rationalizes Dany’s presence as “blood calling blood.” It is here that Danticat’s intent is revealed. While Aunt Estina does not reject Claude and other deportees like him, she understands that this version of Haitian “does not even speak Creole” (96). Her inclusion of Claude in the Beau Jour community is not at all naive. It is an inclusion attended by her simultaneous exclusion of him, instanced in her reference to his linguistic alienness, and her recognition of the limitations of the flexibility of community. It is noteworthy that, awake or asleep, Estina says nothing that convinces Dany to abandon his course of vengeance; it is instead her construction of a fabricated community between the two “American boys” that convinces Dany and moves him instead towards a posture of forgiveness. The community that Estina signals without speaking, indeed by her deliberate silences, is a community of mutual recognition based on shared pain and shared guilt. Estina knows that Dany and Claude have more in common than their “clang clang” English and the experience of living in America. She knows that they live the terror and the horror of loss and how completely these impact their lives. The death of their parents (Dany’s are shot by the dew breaker and after Claude kills his father his mother disowns him) and their “un-homing” of them from Haiti and the US are parallel. Dany is sent away to New York by his Aunt Estina and Claude is forcefully returned to Haiti. Implicit in this loss of place is their loss of home: Dany returns to Beau Jour a stranger of sorts; as well, he is clearly not at home in Brooklyn but emotionally captive to the dew breaker, this doppelganger of his parents’ murderer. Claude cannot return to Brooklyn and he confesses that he is a stranger to Haiti when he returns unwilling and languageless. Claude and Dany personify different aspects of the terror of diaspora in their homelessness, but Claude clearly has fewer options; that is, unlike Dany he does not have the privilege of movement.

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By the end of “Night Talkers” the larger significance of nocturnal conversation is revealed. Aunt Estina’s death is very possibly connected to the unspeakable things Dany asks and tells her in his dream. In her dream she reveals how difficult it is to remember; like the dew breaker himself, she attempts to undo the Duvalier regime and its legacy through willful forgetting and forgiveness. Her only explanation for why Dany’s parents were attacked is that it might have been a case of mistaken identity. Claude too talks through the night about the painfulness of his crime. His story carries Dany through the night of pain after Estina’s death to the dawn of another day. Dany explains that “in spite of his huge muscles and oversized tattoos, Claude seemed oddly defenseless, like a refugee lost at sea” (118). This observation from Dany emphasizes how much deportation is about placelessness. As well, Danticat makes a connection between the deportee and the diasporic subject—Dany, their night talking and nightmares, their negotiations of Haiti and the US make them brothers of a similar loss. That Dany’s pain and his ghosts have become transnational is what worries Estina. He carries the dew breaker of Port-au-Price from Brooklyn back to Beau Jour. It is in this interaction between Haiti and the US that Danticat performs a series of transnational ironies through her presentation of characters and through the structure of the collection. At the level of character, she presents the dew breaker as a motif connecting the stories. Once a henchman for the Duvalier regime, as a high level tonton macoute, the dew breaker flees Haiti and a regime about to turn on him, forever scarred by one of his victims. For the ex-dew breaker, diaspora is an investment in shape-shifting. Indeed much of his work in concealing his past identity has to do with the tinkering with his image: he loses weight, becomes a gentle, self-effacing barber, covers his scar with his oath-taking hand, but most of all waits for time to swallow whole the memory of him as torturer and murderer. Much of the irony has to do with the limitations and disappointments in his transnational investment; with all of his efforts in image tinkering, it is in diaspora that he is recognized. It is outside the geography of Haiti and instead within the walls of his very home that he boards a victim without knowing it. Structurally the ironies are even more evident. The dew breaker functions as a true transnational duppy who haunts the imaginations and the realities of Haitians in Haiti and New York. He is present from story to story, in the present and in the past, in Haiti and in the US. His own past haunts him, yet it is in the space that he is remade as husband and father, that he is recognized. Dany’s recognition of the dew breaker prompts quick action. He rents the barber/dew breaker’s basement with two other friends, he gets a haircut and shave anytime he can to stare unrestrained into the accused’s face, and soon he fi nds himself in his sleeping landlord’s bedroom poised for revenge, but restrained by the fear of hurting the wrong man. The reader knows that Dany has correctly identified the dew breaker as his landlord and barber, yet the story ends with Dany more likely to forgive

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the man than avenge his parents’ murder. Aunt Estina is instrumental in this outcome: she emphasizes the danger in mistaken identity and she introduces him to community forgiveness through her acceptance of Claude the deportee, another senseless murderer. For Danticat, national forgetting, that is the forgetting of national trauma, is bound up with deportation. Beau Jour’s forgiving Claude helps in a larger psychological reconstruction of the nation based on reconciliation. This is a radical departure that marks Danticat’s work as revolutionary. She imagines a new Haiti, a new generation of Haitians attending the problems of the past through reconciliation and forgiveness. National purity/ purification involves not so much outcast(e)ing those who have transgressed but acknowledging “this thing of darkness [as also] mine.”19 In “Night Talkers” she shows Haitians in Haiti leading out with this mandate. The title of this chapter, “No Abiding City” is taken from a line in the track “Deportees” on Buju Banton’s 1993 album Voice of Jamaica. Buju’s song “Deportees” or “Things Change” hit the charts a few years after the major posse “flare ups” in the US and right about the time when many Jamaican-born criminal aliens were being removed from the US and returned to Jamaica. The song is an incisive critique of a Jamaican national in the US who lives large illegally, but never takes care of his family and friends in Jamaica. When he is sent home, Buju makes his displeasure and disappointment clear: “rememba one time/how yu use to brag/ Benz and lexus a weh yu did have/Clarke an Balley weh yu got inna bag/now yu crash up and yu mash up/yu neva did a plan.” “Deportees” can be read as a communal taunt at this deportee’s wasted opportunity. The songwriter’s commentary does not include criticism about the deportee’s behavior in the US, but rather how this behavior might affect a fellow countryman’s chance to “land in the camp.” Buju’s mention of the deportee’s crimes functions simultaneously with the communal disowning of the deportee. The songwriter gives the expedited Jamaican up to the system—the ultimate repayment. Buju chants: “send him back Uncle Sam/ ’im deh deh an’ a ramp;” that is, he agrees that the US should remove the deportee because he has wasted time in what is supposed to be the land of opportunity. “No Abiding City” is a Biblical reference from Hebrews 13:14 (American Standard Version) which underscores the placelessness of the pilgrim on earth and the hope of a heavenly home. Buju uses the religious weight of the line to evoke a moral standard broken by the deportee, but he interprets “no abiding city” differently. Buju on behalf of Jamaica rejects the deportee, knowing full well that he no longer has the privilege and status of life in the US; he is saying, “America doesn’t want you and neither do we.” Deportation indeed complicates how Caribbean people imagine themselves in diaspora and as the chapter shows, it also complicates how Caribbean people imagine themselves in the Caribbean.

Afterword On the Edge of the World “It wasn’t like dealing with Yard women who would never go to the police” Victor Headley, Yardie (127–128)

In the global imaginary the Caribbean region has always been seen as an outpost. From pre-colonial times when Columbus sailed to the edge of the world to fi nd the Indies and instead found the archipelago; when Spain’s fl ag flew for the fi rst time on the edge of strange shores and recruits from the margins of proper society were brought to populate the islands, the Caribbean was configured outpost. Centuries later, George Lamming celebrated the pleasure and paradox of elsewhere for Caribbean writers as he suggested that the trend outward, away from the edges of the literate world back to the center—England—was often a necessity for the West Indian writer. This view of the Caribbean continues today in this postcolonial moment of intensified globalization, when Caribbean theorists often, and writers sometimes, overlook the centeredness of the region—indeed its centrality to their own discourse. This study has problematized the dominant trajectory of border and diaspora theory which assumes a kind of ease in the transformative scattering of Caribbean people across borders, and the centering of Caribbean discourse away from the region. In my analysis of migration, diaspora, transnationalism and postcoloniality, I question the governance of immigration and citizenship for “Third World” travelers. Ultimately, I highlight the fact that the study of the diaspora is not complete without the perspective of Caribbean people in the region. This book adds to the small but growing body of scholarship that brings contemporary literature and early literature into diachronic relationship. Most of the work in this area has been on particularized aspects of migration such as gender politics. This study engages the generalized field of migration politics as a whole. By its focus on remittance and deportation and its linkage of these with literature, the study’s interdisciplinary reach engages economics and practical politics in ways not previously addressed. A major and perhaps surprising similarity between the early texts, which are traditionally read as nationalist, and the more contemporary literature considered diasporan is that both maintain a two placed gaze, keeping both the diaspora and the nation in focus. In different

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yet related ways, Caribbean texts within these two historical moments serve to highlight the “discontents” of transnational crossing and question celebratory theoretical constructions. As a fi nal meditation I turn my attention to a novel which belongs to a wave of Caribbean pulp fiction published out of Britain in the 1990s. The X-Press1 novels, as they came to be known, began with the maiden journey of Victor Headley’s Yardie, the title from which the epigraph is taken. Yardie, originally produced from a desktop computer and marketed in unusual locations (tube stations, hairdressing parlors, outside night clubs), created quite a stir among working class Jamaicans in England. It is a translocal novel that traces the interchange among Kingston’s inner city drug rings, the local streets of London’s Caribbean settlements and the Caribbean dominated communities of Miami and New York. Arguably, Headley in his representation of the Jamaican underworld in Britain turns the status quo on its head by making Jamaica the center of this criminal world and the streets of Britain the outpost. Yardie offers a unique view of the transnational discontents I have discussed in the previous chapters. Beyond Kingston 21 and Le Dixième Département, the “yardie” concept centers and extends the Caribbean on foreign soil as both national territory and personal fiefdom. This extended territory is literary as well as geographical and geopolitical, as Yardie’s protagonists are outside the mainstream of Caribbean literary treatment and pulp fiction a new arrival on the Caribbean diaspora scene. Moreover, in direct contrast to forms of unease such as the floating homeland, the unsettled tensions of the transit point/limbo space “between land and sea,” the harborlessness of deportation and the confl icts between metaphysical and legal territory, Yardie addresses the issue of settlement through the idea of refusal. The yardies have no wish to cross borders in terms of assimilation, hybridization or even infi ltration, but rather to impose their dominance on the transnational “host”—diaspora (scattering, conglomeration) without settlement, if you will. The novel in essence reveals and emblematizes the breadth and diversity of trans/post national discontents. Yardie fictionalizes a moment of radical flux and the transformation of Caribbean diaspora communities in England. The change from immigrants to yardies signals the historical, socio-cultural and economic shifts in the establishment of migrant communities in England. Among the yardies (this term is used to refer to people from “yard” or Jamaica met abroad) are citizens, residents, legal and illegal aliens, a different community than Lamming’s West Indian subjects in The Emigrants. In Headley’s complicated community of settlement and transience there are those who create and participate in traditional communities and those who are traffickers; that is, regardless of their legal status, the latter consider the multiple metropolises in their reach as territory to be subdued. In Yardie, white Britain is only a marginal presence and the Caribbean migrant experience has been distilled

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into the ubiquity of a very Jamaican Brixton. Victor Headley’s presentation of diaspora, much like the novel itself, is in shocking disregard of middle class respectability, the derivative of colonial consciousness, that Lamming’s text and its context invokes. For D., the protagonist in Yardie, England is merely an extension of “his” Jamaica, an expansion of the territory he inhabited in Jamaica. England is a pretty girl in a dance; he embraces her as a rare opportunity, but he does not wish to know her history; she is territory to be claimed and conquered. In England, D. not only upsets established hierarchies in black Jamaican Brixton but he and other new arrivals like him live without fear of the powers that be: The high proportion of newly arrived Jamaican youths in the area had adversely affected the local hustlers; the competition was now tougher. Furthermore, the newcomers didn’t operate by the same principles as their UK counterparts. They were totally ruthless; they didn’t respect the established hierarchy, and were not prepared to allow anything like friendship or allegiances to stand in their way. They were hungry, and wanted money. (27) Headley’s diaspora is not only the extension of the ruthlessness of Kingston’s (sometimes via Miami and New York) inner-city criminal territory with the kind of seamlessness that disregards established borders and hierarchies. It is as well a diaspora, where the power relations with the host country are seen as a one way street, that whatever the yardies bring is superior and even inspirational. The yardies’ hegemonic privilege is a bizarre twist to Louise Bennett’s poem Colonization in Reverse. The importance of fiction to Headley’s presentation of diaspora is evident from the very circumstances of his protagonist D.’s arrival in London. D. arrives in London a transnational contradiction. With another man’s passport and British residency in tow, he rehearses his adopted biographical information to the immigration officer. His illegal crossing is almost seamless with the aid of a fiction, and he is welcomed to England by two “friends” who are part of the same international drug ring and who eagerly await the kilo of cocaine strapped to his body. At once D. is a drug mule, whose body space, like his British resident identity, is borrowed only for a set time, a body space that has no rooted or resident identity, a body and an identity that are primarily for courier—for hire. D. knows this, and when he confi rms that his use expires once he delivers the drugs, he runs with half of the cocaine to the address of a girlfriend he knows from Jamaica. D. makes quick success out of 500 pounds, half a kilo of cocaine and good connections. This causes him to believe that England is territory he controls on his terms. The quote above describes the fearlessness and hunger of recently arrived men like D., which enables them to far surpass their British

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counterparts in daring and ambition. However, the fiction that is D. is unraveled by his slackness (by this I mean D.’s unrestraint and his ruthlessness). Headley begins to signal this trouble for D. as he presents different cultural negotiations that D. does not cue into. Jenny, D.’s current girlfriend and babymother-to-be, is British-born and does not understand his ritual infidelity; she refuses to put up with it, while Sweetie, a Jamaican, and Charmaine, a convert, explain that is “so things go,” and that no matter what Jamaican men take care of and respect their family. D.’s donship (the respect he garners and fear he engenders as co-leader of the drug smuggling ring) seems to be the litmus indicator for the weight of these varied perspectives. His ruthlessness and the acumen of his partner, Charlie, put their operation on top and soon the pregnant Jenny is pushed to the side because of her British expectations of D. Yet it is precisely D.’s underestimation of the complexities of the cultural landscape and perhaps his misunderstanding that England is not merely an extension of Jamaica that gets him in trouble. He avenges the murder of his big brother, Jerry Dread, by raping another don’s, Blue’s, girlfriend as a vicious payback for Blue’s brother’s murder of Jerry Dread. What D. does not anticipate is exactly what his partner, Charlie, warns about acts such as this one (especially that D. rapes a British Jamaican woman), “Charlie, on the other hand, knew that such rash action could bring some heat on his friend. It wasn’t like dealing with Yard women who would never go to the police” (128–129). The novel ends with D. arrested for rape and we assume that the fiction of his resident status is uncovered. The satisfying irony in such a conclusion is significant. Throughout the novel, D., while clearly in need of women for sex and the convenience of shelter, refuses to complicate his life with the demands of a civil relationship. D. advises a young man in a domestic dispute thus, “‘Hear wha’, I don’t feel seh it’s worth it to do time for a girl, seen?!’ Nough more ah dem out deh, star. Make she gwan, don’t waste your life over dem t’ings deh, man’” (84–85). D.’s misogynist dismissal of women as objects not worthy of his time and energy, his use of women’s bodies as the receptacles of his vengeance and lust, is duly undercut and punished when a woman’s body becomes evidence of his crime and the reason for his arrest. The ultimate discontent for Headley’s D. is that he does not anticipate the differing codes of social conduct and governance that operate between Jamaica and England. Jamaica remains his center: it is the root of his brand of criminality—a brand that allows him to quickly dominate in England—and it is there that his passions and grudges originate. Yardie suggests that in pulp fiction as with the early and more contemporary novels there are hitches in a seamless transnationalism. In Yardie, however, we see it from another vantage point: D.’s centering of Jamaica from his outpost in England can be just as dangerous an elision as the reverse.

Notes

Notes to the Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

I use the following terms interchangeably throughout the book: geographical Caribbean, the region, regional Caribbean, the local, the local space. See Bénédicte Ledent and Shalini Puri. See Joanne Hypolite’s defi nition of dyaspora in the Danticat edited collection, The Butterfly’s Way. “Trader” is the term used in the Eastern Caribbean; ICI is a Jamaican term. I discuss Beryl Gilroy’s Frangipani House (1986) with contemporary Caribbean Women’s Writing, though Gilroy born in 1924 is arguably part of the precursor generation. “Dyaspora” is diaspora in Haitian Kreyol. See Danticat’s introduction to The Butterfly’s Way and Joanne Hyppolite’s chapter “Dyaspora” in the same collection.

Notes to Chapter 1 1.

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

Brent Hayes Edwards in The Practice of Diaspora sees African diasporic people creating diaspora, or more specifically a diasporan archive, through documents, discourses, correspondences, newspaper and journal articles, etc. Timothy S. Chin “‘Bullers’ and ‘Battymen’: Contesting Homophobia in Black Popular and Contemporary Caribbean Literature” (76—90). In this article Chin re-reads McKay’s Home to Harlem, Banjo and Banana Bottom as “constructions of “un/natural sexualities.” By precursor Ramchand means that they heralded the themes and concerns that later writers would follow. These themes would create the canon that came to be labeled West Indian Literature. “In the Semi-Colon of the North” is the title of a section in Clarke’s second book of memoirs The Colonial. See Canadian Literature 95 (1982): 181–185. Though the book ends with the reader thinking the baby spontaneously aborted, the sequel, The Bigger Light, shows it did not. McKay has become recognizable to diaspora scholars without their acknowledging that he does not just function as an individual, but that he was part of a cohort of writers who saw the Caribbean as an imaginative center. In a review of The Meeting Point titled “Local Colour” in The Montreal Star (May 27, 1967).

132

Notes

8.

See for example the following: “Will CBC survive the crossing?” The Nation, Sunday, September 21, 1975; “There’ll never be another Tom Clarke” The Nation, Sunday, February 13, 1977; “The Public should be able to enjoy CBC program” by H.A. Parris and “Ode to Mr. Tom Clarke by Laurel Brown, Thursday September 18, 1975. 9. Kamau Brathwaite in History of the Voice posits that in the Caribbean the accents of the hurricane have come to displace the accents of pentameter, “the hurricane does not roar in pentameters” (Brathwaite 10). Brathwaite cites Caribbean writers who have broken out of “the pentametric model” and chosen a “system” which more “intimately approaches our own experience” (Brathwaite 12). 10. In Bhabha’s essay “Of Mimicry and Man” in The Location of Culture he posits that the colonial subject’s mimicry of his colonizer does not produce an exact replica of the colonizer, rather this mimicry produces something that the colonizer does not anticipate. The colonial takes into himself the colonizing image and merges it with his Africanness or Indianness and becomes something new and different—a hybrid creature that subverts the colonial project.

Notes to Chapter 2 1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

Edwidge informs us that the family name is really Dantica but that because of a spelling error on her father’s (Mira) birth certificate he became Danticat (with a “t”). Edwidge also points out that despite this variation in spelling, that both names are pronounced the same. See pages 209–210 of Brother, I’m Dying. I do not mean to suggest that this is a practice exclusive to Caribbean culture. I refer here to two U.S. led interventions in Haiti’s political History. Operation Restore Democracy which was used to return Jean Bertand Aristide to office in 1999 and another U.S. led intervention that removed Aristide from office in 2004. See Danticat’s fi rst novel Breath, Eyes, Memory and “Children of the Sea” a story in the short story collection Krik? Krak! See Édouard Glissant on the middle passage in Poetics of Relation, “The Open Boat.” Brother, I’m Dying, like all of Danticat’s work, is written in English not French or Kreyol. Most Haitians do not read English.

Notes to Chapter 3 1.

2.

Brodber’s Madame Marie patterns the life of Marie LeVeau, a well-known hodoo doctor who lived in New Orleans in the 1900s. Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men describes Marie LeVeau and her practice. Both LeVeau and Brodber’s Madame Marie are creole women, and both have a marked influence on the culture in New Orleans in their day. Hurston writes: “She has her house on St. Anne Street and people come from the ends of America to get help from her” (201). Similarly, Ella inherits Madame Marie’s practice with clients from far and near. In the Prologue to The Kingdom of this World (1949), Alejo Carpentier describes the marvelous as the “bringing together objects ordinarily never found in the same place.” Some critics, for example Shalini Puri (2004), have read Brodber’s work as marvelous realism.

Notes 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

133

Brodber is not the fi rst to address the cultural interaction of African-American and African-Caribbean people. Pan-Africanists and Negritudinists held as central to their ideologies the importance of these cross-cultural connections. There are other literary renderings: Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and to a greater extent Banjo are 1920s and 1930s fictional explorations of the relationship between African-American and African-Caribbean men. Banjo, Ray, and Jake’s friendships involve the interaction of the American South and West Indies as they negotiate sex and survival. Paule Marshall’s The Fisher King explores the tensions between a migrant Caribbean family in New York and an African-American family across the street as they play themselves out in three generations of children and grandchildren. Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones addresses this same confl ict from a community level as the Barbadian American Association refuses to allow participation from any other ethnic group, Silla and her friends seem especially prejudiced against their African-American neighbors and tenants. See also Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise and Marlene NourbeSe’s Philip Harriet’s Daughter. Cynthia James argues in “Reconnecting the Caribbean-American Diaspora in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones and Erna Brodber’s Louisiana” that: “Louisiana is not just a fiction of the West Indian-American relations between the two World Wars. It uses this period as a paradigm for centuries of unnoticed West Indian and American collaboration, communication, and family connections (165). Carolyn Cooper posits in “Science and Higher Science: Transmigration in Erna Brodber’s Louisiana” that “Louisiana is as much about migration as transmigration” (10). See Rupert Lewis’ work, Marcus Garvey, Anti-colonial Champion (1988), Garvey, His Work and Impact (1991) Edited with Patrick Bryan. Also see Horace Campbell’s Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney (1987). There are important parallels between the form and structure of Brodber’s text and Bakhtin’s discussion of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass in The Dialogic Imagination. Both Brodber’s and Apuleius’ protagonists experience magical or mysterious transformations. Ella’s transformation like Lucius’ is humbling; Lucius descends from his position as respected nobleman to the shape of an ass, while Ella changes from graduate student-researcher at Columbia University to the spiritual receptacle of the soul of Mammy King from southwest Louisiana. Ella like Lucius, is able to satisfy her curiosity and desire for information by actually living the life that she once researched. However, The Golden Ass and Louisiana differ in their resolutions. Lucius the ass becomes “Lucius purified and enlightened;” he reclaims his position as nobleman and experiences a fi nal transformation back to his human form (119). Ella, on the other hand, experiences her spiritual transformation without returning to her fi rst self, in fact she remains a stranger and outcast to her parents and those who knew her when she was simply Ella Townsend. Ella herself is arguably both African-American and African-Caribbean. She also becomes psychically one with Sue Ann Grant King and Louise Grant African-American and African-Caribbean women respectively. Reuben Kohl, Ella’s husband is the African connection. Carolyn Cooper, in an essay titled “Afro-Jamaican Folk Elements in Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home,” discusses Brodber’s crossing of disciplines

134

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Notes or what Cooper calls her “experiment in form.” Cooper suggests a category for Brodber’s experiment: “But, Brodber’s “faction” can be categorized within a Neo-African folk aesthetic of functional form: literature as wordhoard, the repository of the accumulated wisdom of the community, the creative medium through which the norms of appropriate social behavior can be elaborated metaphorically” (Out of the Kumbla 279). The fi rst stanza of the poem reads, “First the goat/must be killed/and the skin/ stretched” (The Arrivants 94). A version of this folksong appears in two poems in Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants. In “Ancestors” Brathwaite tells the story of his grandfather’s prosperity and the ill-fate that befalls his property at his death. The poem ends with the refrain of song his grandmother sings: “come-a look/come-a look/see wha’ happen/Sookey dead/ Sookey dead/Sookey dead-o” (239–240). Another version of the song follows in a poem titled “The Stone Sermon.” This poem describes an animated church service that ends in versions of the same refrain, “Keep ya Christ/Keep ya Christ/keep ya nun dem” and “water dark/water dark/ water dark o,” as well as, “Sookey dead/Sookey dead/ Sookey dead o” (256). These refrains maintain an overtone of loss and sadness, and Brathwaite’s use of the same tune and the same words in two poems suggest that the song has no specific context except for mourning. However in both “Ancestors” and “The Stone Sermon” there are verses that suggest the difficulty and even the unfairness of life: “Him a-wuk/him a-wuk/till’ e bleed-o” and in second poem “God a shark/God a shark/Lord-bite him” (240, 257). This theme is consistent with the portrayal of Sammy’s death. The lyrics of the folksong are useful for this discussion: Sammy plant piece a corn down a gully/an it bear ‘til it kill poor Sammy/Sammy dead, Sammy dead, Sammy dead oh. A nuh tief Sammy tief mek dem kill him/An nuh tief Sammy tief mek dem kill him/ but is grudgeful dem di did grudgeful mek dem kill him. The Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage defi nes a duppy as “[a] harmful, invisible, supernatural presence believed to be raised from the dead” (Allsopp 2003). Its root is a Fante word adope ‘a species of ape . . . said to be so fierce as to kill 20 men at once’” (Allsopp 2003). Patricia Saunders suggests in “The Project of Becoming for Marlene NourbesePhilip and Erna Brodber” that “Ella Townsend is a literary descendant of Ella O’Grady” and that Louisiana is “an important historical sequel to Myal” (Caribbean Cultural Identities 152). The Barbadian American Association described in Marshall’s text, though not grounded in religious affi liation, had a similar foundation to Mrs. Townsend’s West Indian Episcopalian Church. Both were exclusively for the benefit of West Indian immigrants, though one more specifically exclusive than the other. Both the Association and the Church succeeded in keeping specific immigrant populations separate from the general throng of Negroes in New York in the early twentieth century.

Notes to Chapter 4 1.

The Inter-American Development Bank, “Remittance Inflows to Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Notes 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

135

I parallel Kincaid’s fi xation on the paradigm of woman and nation with her fi xation on her relationship with her mother. Where Kincaid explores one relationship she explores the other. Both modes of exploration are concerned with a strange dynamic of love and hatred, expectation and disappointment. In an interview with Kay Bonetti Kincaid recounts how she began writing the “Talk of the Town” column in The New Yorker. She describes how George Trow befriended her and how she became his “sassy black friend.” Writing “The Talk of the Town” became a bread and butter issue for Kincaid. She explains, “I was so grateful, because I was very poor. Sometimes the only meal I ate was those little cocktail things” (An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid, April 1991, 135). Kincaid makes it clear that her work at The New Yorker, or her writing, literally saved her life. I am not suggesting that Kincaid keep these facts about her family secret; however I am arguing that her revelation of these private things projects a marked difference between what Kincaid views as sensitive information and what her family views as sensitive information. I am also suggesting that these differences are a result of their different locations. See Chapter Four, “Sexing the Subject” of Alison Donnell’s Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature for a discussion of the AIDS pandemic in the Caribbean and Caribbean AIDS narratives. A Small Place is Kincaid’s 1988 nonfiction piece which among other things passionately explores the ill-effects of neo-colonialism on Antigua. Her criticism of tourists and the long-term adverse effects on an economy like Antigua’s in many ways positions itself as much more caustic than My Brother in relation to “First World” visitors. Louise Bernard argues that “Kincaid’s invocation of memory is positioned as defiance, fi rst against the constraints of a colonial history that sought to silence her and all who look like her, and second against her nemesis, the mother” (“Countermemory and Return” 124). Bernard’s perspective on Kincaid’s memory or “old time story” suggests that it exists outside of communal memory because it functions as resistance. Though My Brother is a personal narrative, by virtue of the title and Kincaid’s explanation of why she writes this nonfiction piece, “I would write about him. I would write about his dying,” the reader expects that Kincaid’s expressions of loss and partial reconciliation are to be read in the same way the factual retelling of Devon’s story is read. The mistrust Kincaid’s memory is met with and by extension the mistrust that the text is met with are not concerns over legitimacy, but rather how her family members in Antigua view the perceptions of an estranged member in Vermont. If Kincaid’s expressions of loss are legitimate then her mother’s mistrust of her expressions are legitimate. Sandra Paquet makes a similar connection between Devon’s disease and devastation and the dis-ease and dilapidation of Antigua in Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation: “Despite the recurring cycle of rejection, her troubled relationship with her mother and with Antigua endures in the elegiac rhythms of identification and dissociation that characterize the abjection of this mourner’s relationship to the dead, the past, and her native place” (249). Kincaid’s mourning and confl icted feelings towards her brother are directly parallel to her emotional response to the island of her birth.

136

Notes

10. This statement by Kincaid is resonant of V.S. Naipaul’s notorious criticism of the West Indies in The Middle Passage. Naipaul argues thus, “The history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies” (25). Naipaul’s nothing and Kincaid’s nothing are punctuated by a sense of loss. Both “nothings” are used against the backdrop of history, and with the ambivalence of the end of colonial domination. 11. Marie Helene Laforest, Diasporic Encounters: Remapping the Caribbean (Napoli: Liguori 2000), 217. 12. Nation language is a term coined by Kamau Brathwaite to refer to “the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in by the conquistadors” (History of the Voice 5–6). 13. For furthering reading see Velma Pollard’s, Dread Talk (1994), and Exploring the Boundaries of Caribbean Creole Languages (2006), Edited by Hazel SimmonsMcDonald and Ian Robertson. 14. Kincaid suggests hat her mother’s love for her children in somehow warped. She cites the fact that Devon will return to their mother’s house when he is discharged from the hospital so that Mrs. Drew can care for him as the “extraordinary ability of her love for her children to turn into a weapon for their destruction” (53). Kincaid argues that her mother’s love is only evident when her children are in desperate need of her care and that in other circumstances it is destructive (28).

Notes to Chapter 5 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

Mimi Sheller’s essay, “Creolization in Discourses on Global Culture” in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration supports this claim. Sheller argues, “[t]there is another way in which the Caribbean experience complicates theories of home and migration, due to the significant degree of ‘remigrations’ and returns. Caribbean ‘migrant streams’ are in fact constituted by swirls and eddies such that migration is not a one-way trip, but a way of life . . . Duval argues that Caribbean patterns of return migration require a more dynamic theorization of home, and of the links between visiting and returning” (277). Presley Bingham is wanted in the US on drug trafficking charges. More can be found on his case in the Jamaica Gleaner dated January 22 and 26, 2010. Other famous Caribbean deportees include: Claudia Jones, Manuel Noreiga and the recent Abdullah al-Faisal. See “The American Years: The Political Dimension” by Kent Worcester in C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies. “The “Negro Question” was the term used to refer to the political condition of African-Americans in post slavery, pre-civil rights America. Though there were few if any Trotskyists in the southern United States, Trotsky soon realized that the question could not be ignored. See “C.L.R. James and the American Century” Kent Worcester’s contribution to C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies. (173–190).

Notes 6.

137

Under the 1951 Geneva Convention, asylum seekers are allowed refuge when one demonstrates a well-founded fear of persecution because of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. 7. All Caribbean nations are not equally homophobic and though it may be difficult to tell the gradations from society to society, Jamaica stands out—in the media at least—as dangerously homophobic. Buggery is still illegal in Jamaica and increasingly local and international gay and lesbian and human rights groups have detailed and documented the dangers of being homosexual in Jamaica. Excerpts from the Human Rights Watch Report titled, “Hated to Death: Homophobia, Violence and Jamaica’s AIDS epidemic” published in the Jamaica Gleaner in November 2004 is useful evidence. There are a number of articles that reveal how homophobia in Jamaica directly impacts and is impacted by government, politics, popular culture, etc. See Special Feature on “Gays in Jamaica” June, July, and August of 2001 and “London Pressures Dancehall Stars” by Andrew Clunis, June 27, 2004. Interestingly, many Jamaicans in Jamaica insist that while Jamaicans talk homophobia, it is not practiced. 8. Interestingly, while the community of Sheffield is given voice in their pleas and defense of Espeut and her children, the Kingston 13 community from which she comes is noticeably silent. Espeut’s story becomes news because of her impending deportation and it is because of her deportation that the host and sender countries as well as the migrant and Kingston 13 communities share a platform on the big issues. If the communities in the different countries are speaking from behind a wall (they share no dialogue or interface though they are equally interested in the case) this simply instances another almost now clichéd kind of anomaly in the relations among the citizens of rich and poor countries. 9. Subsequent to the 1996 Act several other Acts addressing issues that may affect the scope and enforceability of the 1996 Act and the issues the Act did not address particularly after September 11, 2001. In 1997 and 1998 respectively, the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act and the Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act were passed. In 2001 the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, commonly known as the Patriot Act was passed. Most recently the Homeland Security Act of 2002 was passed. These Acts all have some bearing on how legal and illegal residents and naturalized citizens are managed in the US, but none is fully dedicated to illegal and criminal aliens as is the 1996 IIRIRA. 10. United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Joshua Wright Petitioner Appellant v. Jean R. Ouellette, Acting District Director. No. 97–2064. 11. United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Neil Jean-Baptiste Plaintiff-Appellant v. Janet Reno Attorney General of United States of America. No. 97–6062. 12. Lloyd Williams in an article in the Jamaica Gleaner titled “Deportees major problem for the region” reports on a conference held in Georgetown, Guyana in February 1999 to assess the “deportee problem.” Williams’ article discusses the problems deportees pose to the region: “[d]eported Caribbean nationals, especially those banished from the United States, Canada and England after being imprisoned in those countries for violent crimes, are increasingly seen as posing serious problems for the region.” The conference which involved the

138

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Notes top detectives from several countries in the Caribbean—including Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Bermuda, Belize, the Cayman Islands, Dominica, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Maarten, Trinidad and Tobago, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and the US Virgin Islands—sought to discuss “the problems of deportees and tried to devise ways of combating them” (“Deportees”). Basdeo Panday, the former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, speaking in his capacity as Chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), said “the deportees bring with them a frightening level of criminal professionalism and callousness which may have been acquired or developed in the U.S.” (“Caribbean Concerned”). Thompson, Panday and K.D Knight, the former Minister of National Security for Jamaica, have all confi rmed their concern about the undermining of security by deportees. That is, a child leaves Jamaica at age two and lives legally in the US for twentytwo years and then commits a crime; his removal from the US makes another nation responsible for the deviance in his American education. K.D. Knight, former Minister of National Security in Jamaica, locates one effect on the local economy as the cost of fighting crime, “it is time it be understood by developed countries that in solving crime in their countries, the deportation of hardened criminals to our shores stretch our crime-fighting capacity to the outer limits” (“Rising Crime”). The Peace Movement in Marshall’s story recalls many actual churches that sprung up around Harlem during World War II. One of these churches was led by a similar Father Divine figure who was eventually found out to be a fraud. We know from Deighton’s conversation with Seifert Yearwood that he arrived in New York in 1920 and we also know that he was deported just prior to the end of World War II in 1945 (38, 185). Donette Francis argues that Deighton’s position on homeownership is misrepresented. She posits that both Sill and Deighton “equate possessing property with self-authority and self-actualization. The difference is where they want to own land rather than a question of landownership” (“New Accents on Immigrant America” 22). While Silla sees Brooklyn as the place to prosper, Deighton views Barbados, his homeland, as the location that will “accord him the rights of a fi rst-class citizen” (22). Paraphrase from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest Act 5 Sc1 lines 275–276.

Notes to the Afterword 1.

X Press is the name of the main publishing house in Britain that popularized black pulp fiction.

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Index

A access 64, 66, 68, 73, 75, 98 activism 9, 20, 43–4, 47, 66, 69–70, 77, 80, 109 “Advice to West Indian Women Recruited for Work in Canada as Household Helps” 38 Africa, Africans 8, 10, 29, 34, 90, 101; as non-persons 34 African-Americans, and African-Caribbeans 69 Afro-centrism 101, 102 “Ah who sey Sammy dead” 70–2, 73–4 AIDS 13, 58, 86, 87–9, 90, 92, 96 alienation 17, 99 alienness 10, 31 aliens: deportable 112–13, 116, 118–20, 123; illegal 106, 121, 127 Anderson, Benedict 23, 79–80, 93 anomie 17 anthropology 69–70, 74 Antigua 13, 83, 86–96, 100; Holberton Hospital 92–3 Anzalduá, Gloria 51; Borderlands—La Frontera: The New Mestiza 2 Apuleius, The Golden Ass 133n Aristide, Jean-Bertrand 6–7, 44, 132n Aristotle, Poetics 48 art: body 12, 43, 45, 49–50; and politics 49 The Associated Press 47 asylum 109 Atlantic Ocean 6, 26 audiences 23 authorship/authority 1–2, 12, 65 AZT 96

B Bakhtin, M.M, The Dialogic Imagination 69, 133n

Banton, Buju: “Deportees (Things Change)” 125; Voice of Jamaica 125 Barbadian American Association 133n, 134n Barbados, Barbadians 20, 22, 23, 25, 30, 37, 38, 39, 75, 84, 105, 115, 118–20 BBC, “Caribbean Voices” series 23–4 belonging 1–2, 8–10, 19–20, 21, 23, 26, 31, 33, 54–5, 67, 80–1, 82, 119; and unbelonging 120, 123 Benítez Rojo, Antonio 65; The Repeating Island 2 Bennett, Louise: Colonization in Reverse 128; Jamaica Labrish 25–6, 34 Berlant, Lauren, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City 111 Bernard, Louise 135n Bhabha, Homi 29; “Of Mimicry and Man” 132 Bingham, Presley 136n Birbalsingh, Frank 20, 39 Black Atlanticism 65 Black, Stephanie, Life and Debt 100 “blackspace” 68 blood, significance of 123 body art 12, 43, 45, 49–50, see also tattoos body/ies: images of 58, 59; marked 45, 50, 53, 62–3; migrant 45; sanctioned and acceptable 53; tortured 12, 50; twinned 46 Bonetti, Kay 135n border crossing 1, 2, 8, 10, 12, 19, 22, 35, 36, 51, 65–70, 101 border theory 64, 66–8 borderlessness 13–14, 14, 68, 79–81, 87, 103 Boyce-Davies, Carole 62, 65

152

Index

Brand, Dionne 15, 16, 55; In Another Place, Not Here 105, 120–2 Brathwaite, Kamau 136n; “Ancestors” 134n; The Arrivants 19, 70, 134n; History of the Voice 132n; “The Making of the Drum” 70; “The Stone Sermon” 134n Brenner, Neil, and Kell, Roger 4 Britain 19, 24, 109, 110, 115, 126–9, see also England British Guiana see Guyana Brodber, Erna 8, 9, 10, 93; The American Connection 69; “Fiction in the Scientific Procedure” 69–70, 72; Louisiana 12–13, 64–81, 101; Myal 72, 134n Brophy, Sarah, “Angels in Antigua: The Diasporic of Melancholy in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother” 90–1

C Canada 11, 20, 21, 22, 24, 37–42, 120 Canadian Armed Forces 37 Canadian Domestic Workers Scheme 4 Caribbean: and hybridity 5; as outpost 126–7; perspectives on 3 Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation 25 Caribbean Community (CARICOM) 138n Caribbean Labour Movement 21 Caribbean Sea 6 Caribbeannetnews.com 110 Carpentier, Alejo, The Kingdom of This World 132n Central America 75 Chevannes, Barry, Rastafari Roots and Ideology 68 churches, black 72–3, 76 cities, global 3–4 citizenship 2, 6, 7, 8, 12, 37, 104–5, 107, 112, 114–16 Clarke, Austin 9, 15, 20–1, 23, 24; The Bigger Light 21, 37, 42, 131n; The Meeting Point 11, 17, 19, 21, 22, 29, 37–42; Nine Men Who Laughed 20; The Prime Minister 25; Storm of Fortune 37, 42 Cliff, Michelle 15 Clifford, James, Routes 80–1, 84, 85–6 Colon 75, 76 colonial imagination 22 coloniality, seamless 21

colonization 33; reverse 18–19, 26, 27, 128 Columbia University 78 Columbus, Christopher 126 communication, cultural 86 communism 109 community text 67 Congo 77 conquistadors 27, 29 consumer mentality 85 consumption versus investment debate 84 contraband 49, 63, 109 Corporate Area (Jamaica) 6 Costa Rica 75 court cases 13 Covi, Giovanna 96 Craig, Terrance 20, 21 Creole 24 criminality 104, 105, 112–16, 128–9; in Jamaica 115–16 critical moments 4 critics 8; British 23–5; Canadian 23 Cuba 75 cultural exchange 13

D Dante Alighieri, Inferno 46 Danticat, Edwidge 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 64, 93, 107, 109; “The Book of the Dead” 53; Breath, Eyes, Memory 43; “The Bridal Seamstress” 47, 51, 56, 59; Brother I’m Dying 11–12, 43–50, 58–63; The Butterfly’s Way 44, 45; The Dew Breaker 11–12, 13, 43–58, 63, 105; “The Dew Breakers” 51; Farming of Bones 43; “Night Talkers” 13, 48, 51, 53, 105, 122–5 Dantica(t) family 46–50, 58–63 Dash, J. Michael, Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination 58 Davies, Boyce, Migrations of the Subject 2–3 Dayan, Joan, Haiti, History, and the Gods 74 death 45–60 decentering 2 Defede, Jim, “Twice a Victim: First in Haiti, Then in the US” 47 dependency syndrome 11, 85–6, 90 deportation 1–2, 8–9, 11, 13–14, 45, 50, 53, 103–25, 127; appeal against

Index 113; enforced by state 120, 122; as literary question 104–5; political 106; and remittance 117 deportee, in Caribbean literature 117–25 deracination (uprootedness) 6, 63 desire 28, 29, 32, 35, 63, 74, 77, 101, 119; homosexual 16; networks of 39 deterritorialization 12 dew breaker 45–57, 123–4 diaspora: Afro-Caribbean 5; as concept 2; creation of 17; as form of negotiation 118; Haitian 7, 10, 12, 43–63; hegemony of 3; Jewish 42; nation and 3, 6; perspectives on 6, 17; poetics of 17 diasporization 26 disease 50, 84–5, 92; metaphors of 92, 96 dislocation 17, 36, 45, 53–4, 57, 121 displacement 5, 17, 69, 81, 104; cycles of 49–50 Dominican Republic 75 Donnell, Alison, Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature 2, 3, 4 doubles 52 draft, colonial 4 Drake, Francis 27 drugs 128–9, 136n Dubois, W.E.B. 68 duppy 71, 124, 134n Duvalier, François and Jean-Claude 7, 43, 46, 53, 56, 57, 124 dyaspora, Haitian 7, 10, 12, 44, see also diaspora, Haitian

E Edmondson, Belinda 84; Making Men 2–3, 15 education 38, 71, 72, 93, 115, 117, 118; and high migration rates 85 Ellis Island 107–8 emigrants, as opposed to immigrants 29 empire, psychology of 17 Empire Windrush, S.S. 26–7, 37 empowerment 2 England 11, 16, 21, 24, 25, 26–31, 33, 126, see also Britain Episcopalians 68, 76, 134n Espeut, Sandra 13, 109–11, 121 Ethiopianism 68 Euro-science 74 Eurocentrism 57 exile 26; and belonging 19–21; diaspora and 2, 3, 10; elites and 15;

153

generation 93; and nationalism 84; psychological 22; and sense of loss 17; sense of 16 extradition 104

F “faction” 134n al-Faisal, Abdullah 136n Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin White Masks 36 Farm Workers Program 4 “Father Divine” 138n felony, aggravated 112–13 feminist studies, Caribbean 2–3, 4 floating homeland 44, 45, 63, 100, 127 fluidity 2, 13, 27 “folk” 65, 104 folk songs, Afro-Caribbean 70–2 Forbes, Curdella 16; From Nation to Diaspora 3, 4 Foucault, Michel: Discipline and Punish 56; “Governmentality” 116 France 19 Francis, Donette 138n Froude, James Anthony 93

G Garvey, Marcus 21, 68–9, 77, 109 Gellner, Ernest 79–80 gender discourse 4, 16, 81, 109, 126 genealogy 58–9 Geneva Convention 109 Germany 77 “getting over” 70–1 Gilroy, Beryl 9, 10–11; Frangipani House 13, 83, 97–102 Gilroy, Paul, Black Atlantic 2, 5, 7, 45, 65, 101 Glave, Thomas (ed.), Our Caribbean 16 Glissant, Édouard 4, 29 global village 5 globality 3–4 globalization 126 The Golden Hind 27 Goodison, Lorna 16 Gopinath, Gayatri, Impossible Desires 3 Guyana 13, 25, 68, 97–102, 105; Georgetown, conference on “deportee problem” 137n

H Haiti 6–7, 8, 10, 12, 53–63, 83, 84, 105, 113; Beau Jour 105, 122–5;

154

Index

Port-au-Prince 124; Tenth Department 6–7, 8, 44 Haitian American Weekly 57 Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act (1998) 137n Hall, Stuart, theorization of diaspora 2 Hamilton, Alexander 16 Harris, Wilson 41, 45 Headley, Bernard, Deported: Entry and Exit Findings Jamaicans Returned Home from the U.S. 114, 115 Headley, Victor, Yardie 127–9 health 51, 72, 85, 93, 96, 107, 116–17; and high migration rates 85, see also disease Hebrews, Epistle to the 125 Heidegger, Martin 36–7 hierarchies, class and status 13 high science 69, 70, 73–4 home: Caribbean as 7, 8, 11, 14, 24–5; as term 22 home ownership 138n Homeland Security Act (2002) 137n homophobia 109 homosexuality 3, 16, 88, 90, see also lesbianism hurricanes 27, 132n Hurston, Zora Neale, Mules and Men 132n hybridity, hybridization 20, 23, 24, 25, 31, 42, 74, 115, 132n; and Caribbean discourse 5

Indians, Caribbean 5 inequality 68, 83 Informal Commercial Importers (ICI) 7 interventionism 64, 70 intra-migration 24, see also migration itinerants 7

I

Kala Pani 5 Kasavubu, Joseph 78 Kincaid, Jamaica 8, 9, 10–11, 15, 16; My Brother 13, 83, 86–97, 97, 100, 102; A Small Place 86, 89, 90; and “Talk of the Town” column 135n King, William Lyon Mackenzie 37, 38 “Kingston 21” 6, 7, 8, 127 Kingston, Jamaica 6, 109, 127, 128 Knight, K. D. 138n Kreyol language 44, 61, 131n, 132n

idealization 68 identity 4–5, 23, 24, 31, 33, 37, 43, 105, 9.11; loss of 26, 119, 120; national 1, 16, 20, 80; politics of 1; West Indian 20–1, 24, 27, 67 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (1996) 111–17 imagination, colonial 21, 22, 27, 29 immigrants: illegal 103, 105, 111–12, 111–17, 118–22; immigration reform 112; invisibility of 120; as labor force 15, 37–8; as term 20 Immigration Act (1952, Canada) 37, 42 immigration policies 13, 37; US 44, 107–9 imperialism 104 in-betweenity, inbetweenness 3, 8–9, 12, 15, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 34, 68, 115, 118 indenture 5

J Jamaica Gleaner 110, 114 Jamaica, Jamaicans 6, 13, 19–20, 23, 26, 27, 68, 72, 77, 79, 83–4, 93, 109, 114–16; Constabulary, Criminal Intelligence Unit 114; and deportation 105, 113, 125; in England 127–9; and extradition 104 James, C.L.R. 16, 106, 107–11; The Black Jacobins 110; Mariners, Renegades and Castaways 13, 107; Minty Alley 110–11 James, Cynthia 71 James, Winston, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia 21, 22 jazz 67, 78 Jean-Baptiste, Neil 113–14 Jean-Baptiste v. Reno 113–14 Jews 42 Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS 90 Jones, Claudia 109, 136n journalese 62 journeys, physical/spiritual 74–6

K

L Laforest, Marie-Helene, Diasporic Encounters 93 Lamming, George 9, 15, 16, 24, 36, 46, 84, 101, 126; The Emigrants 11, 17, 19, 22, 25, 26–34, 41, 127, 127–8; The Pleasures of Exile 16, 19, 24, 25, 67

Index language 28, 34, 59, 60, 88; breakdown of 50; of church 73–4; continuums of 93; loss of 93–4, 102, 122, 123; nation 93, 95–6; and sexuality 36–7, 38, 41 “Lavalas Project” 6–7 lesbianism 16, 109–10 LeVeau, Marie 132n Lima, Maria Helena, “Imaginary Homelands in Jamaica Kincaid’s Narratives of Development” 96 limbo 45, 107, 127 literature, Caribbean migrant 11–13 Liverpool 22 “local color” 23 local space 1–2, 4, 5, 7 London 4, 22, 24, 29; Brixton 128; Waterloo station 34; West Indian migration to 19 loss, sense of 17, 26, 93–4, 102, 119, 120, 122, 123, 136n Louisiana, Jamaica 66 Louisiana, US 66, 73 Lozano Ascencio, Fernando, Bringing It Back Home: Remittances to Mexico from Migrant Workers in the United States 84–5 Lumumba, Patrice 78

M McKay, Claude 9, 15, 16, 19–20, 21, 110; Banana Bottom 19; Banjo 133n; Home to Harlem 133n; A Long Way from Home 19; My Green Hills of Jamaica 19; poems 19–20 Madjd-Sadjadi, Zagros, and Alleyne, Dillon 115 Malton Airport 22, 37 Marshall, Paule: Brown Girl, Brownstones 13, 76, 105, 118–20, 121–2, 133n; The Fisher King 133n marvelous realism 132n marvelous, the 65 Marxism 5 Maxwell, Marina 70 Mehta, Brinda, Diasporic (Dis)locations 5 Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick 107 memoir, as form 47 memory/ies 52, 59, 86, 91–2, 95 Memphis, Tennessee, Church of God in Christ 72 Mendes, Alfred, Black Fauns 16 merchandise 44–5

155

Merchant Marines 37 metamorphosis 66, 77 metaphor 19, 34, 39, 65; of sickness 92, 96 metempsychosis 66 Methodist Episcopalians 68 Miami, Florida 6, 46, 47, 49, 127, 128 The Miami Herald 47 Mighty Sparrow 40 migrant communities, as extensions of nation boundaries 17 migrants: routes 1; second generation 1; streams 136n migration, intra-territorial 75–6 migratory encounter, forced 43 mimicry 29, 98 misogyny 129 money, transferred to Caribbean 11, 24, 49, 55, 80, 83–6, 95, 97–100 multiple passport holders 117 Murphy, Joseph M., Working the Spirit 72, 73

N Naipaul, V.S. 8, 9; The Middle Passage 93 nation language 93, 95–6 nation states 5, 17 nation, as term 79–80 national identity 1, 16 national security 103–4, 106, 111, 119 nationalism 3, 5, 6, 11, 110, 126; cultural 66; and exile 84; psychology of 17 nationality 5, 10 Nationality Act (1948, UK) 4 negotiation 2, 5, 6, 8–9, 24, 35, 61, 82, 97, 101, 118, 124; of borders 111; cultural 129; of diasporic space 22; of escape 100; and sex 18 Negritude 133n “Negro Question” 107, 108–9 neo-colonialism 72, 135n neo-imperialism 72 New Orleans 78, 79 New York 4, 6, 13, 26, 127, 128; Brooklyn 105, 119, 121, 122; Harlem 42, 63; immigrant community in 118–20, 121–2, 123 New Yorker, “Talk of the Town” column 135n newspapers, online 110 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (1997) 137n Noriega, Manuel 136n

156

Index

North America 15, 21, see also United States of America nothing, concept of 93, 136n

O Obama, Barack 7 obeah 72 “old time story” 87, 91–2 Ong, Aihwa, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality 117 ontology 33, 34 Operation Restore Democracy 132n oppression of blacks 42 otherness 38–9, 69 outpost, Caribbean as 126–7

P Padmore, George 68 Pan-Africanism 21, 68, 77, 101, 109, 133n Panama 76 Panama Canal 75 Panday, Basdeo 138n Panopticism 56, 57, 66 Paquet, Sandra 34; Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and SelfRepresentation 135n parentheses 93–4, 96 passports, multiple or expired 117 Patriot Act (2001) 116, 137n Payne, Clement 21 Peace Movement 118, 119 penis: exposed 88–9, 92, 28.29; as symbol of power 30 pentameter 132n “Peoples of the Sea” 2 Philip, NourbeSe 15 Phillips, Mike and Trevor, The Irresistible Rose of Multi-Racial Britain 26–7 placement 6 Planning Institute of Jamaica 114 political economics 104, 118 political prisoners 107–8 politics, tribal 89, 90 population control 116–17 possession 74 post-nationalism 10 post/modern sensibility 15, 109 postcolonialism 2, 83, 95, 126 Pratt, John 47 precursor generation 16–17 presence/absence 12 Progressive Conservatives (Canada) 20

prostitutes 29–30 provinciality 2 psychic healing 72–5 psychic unity 65, 66 publishing 12 pulp fiction 127–9 Puri, Shalini 5, 132n

R Rahim, Jennifer 16 Ramchand, Kenneth 16, 67 readership 12, 90 regional identity 24 regional sovereignty 1 remit, remit(t)ance 1, 9, 10–11, 13, 22, 23, 24–5, 43, 58, 63, 66, 68, 80, 83–6, 95–7, 97–102; deportation as parody of 103–4; letters as 49; literary 83, 93; medical 83, 86, 95, 96; non-monetary 85 remittance texts 82–102 removal proceedings 112 repatriation, forced 8 repeating island 65 return, as concept 9 Revival Zion church, Jamaica 73 revivalism 73–4 rituals 70 Rohlehr, Gordon, Pathfinder 70 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 70 Rosenberg, Leah 16–17 Royal Canadian Air Force 37 Russell, Sharon Stanton, “Migrant Remittances and Development” 84

S St. Andrew, Jamaica 6 St. Mary, Jamaica 77 St. Mary, Louisiana 77–8 sameness 65, 66, 78 scapegoat 70 scars 12, 43, 53, 109 Schwarz, Bill, “C.L.R. James and George Lamming: The Measure of Historical Time” 21, 22 second generation migrants 1 self, journey of 73–4 Selvon, Samuel 9, 15, 16, 20, 23–4, 101; The Lonely Londoners 11, 16, 17, 19, 22, 24, 29, 34–7, 41 semi-colon, metaphor of 19 sender and host countries 103, 107, 115, 117, 122–3

Index Senior, Olive 16 sex, sexualities 11, 15, 109–10, 129; and colonial domination 28; in fiction 16, 19, 28–32, 33–4; interaction between Caribbean migrants and Canadians 39–42; interaction between Caribbean migrants and English 35; phenomenological perspective 32; as trope 31–2, 34, see also homosexuality; lesbianism Shakespeare, William, The Tempest 19, 29, 31 Sheffield 137n Sheller, Mimi, “Creolization in Discourses on Global Culture” 136n shoppers 7 SHOUT! 110 60 Minutes 46–7 Smith, Ian 16 smuggling 49, 63 South Asia 3 Soviet Union 19, 106, 110, 111 Spain 126 spirit theft 72 spirit transferal 73–4 spiritualism 65, 66, 69, 73–4 Stephens, Michelle 16 subjectivity 8, 74, 80; migratory 19, 65, 122 surveillance, state 48–9 Swanzy, Henry 23, 24 syncretism 69

T tattoos 12, 43, 50, 53 television 25 “The Tenth Department” 6–7, 8, 44 “Third World” 90, 111, 126 Thompson, Dudley 138n thought transplant 74 Tilbury 26 tonton macoutes 46, 48, 51 Toronto 4, 22, 38, 39 tourism 8, 53, 90, 95 traders 7 transgression 35 transit 2, 4 transition 59 transitional spaces 22, 27–8, 29, 34 translation 61 translocality 13, 56 transmigration 65, 66, 69, 73, 75

157

transnationality 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, 13, 51, 61, 63, 65, 72, 76, 84, 118, 126, 129 tricksters 41, 42 Trinidad, Trinidadians 23, 30, 31, 37, 108, 111, 115; speech 24 Trotsky, Leon 107 Trotskyism 106, 107, 109, 111 Trouillot, Rolph 56 two-ness 7, 9 “two-place” gaze 16

U underdevelopment, social 104 UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) 68 United Kingdom see Britain; England United States of America 10, 11, 12, 16, 19, 42–3; American dream 51, 53; and Antigua 13, 90; deportation from 104, 106–9, 111–25; and Haiti 43–7, 51–63; immigration practice 44, 46–7, 49; migration to 76; as sender country 115; and sexual differences 109; and Soviet Union 106 uprootedness 6, 63 US Department of Homeland Security 47, 107, 111; “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: January 2006” 111; Yearbook of Immigration Statistics: 2006 111–12 US Department of Immigration 107–8 US Department of Justice 107; INS Institutional Removal Program 112

V Vermont 87, 89, 90, 96 violence: aesthetics of 12; language of 28 Vorda, Allan 88

W Warner-Lewis, Maureen 70 Watkins-Owens, Irma, Blood Relations 75–6 Weiner, Myron 85 West Indian 20; as cultural term 15; identity 20–1, 24, 27, 67 Western Union 83 Williams, Eric 16

158

Index

Williams, Lloyd, “Deportees major problem for the region” 137n women: English, sexual relations with migrants 35–7; as illegal aliens 120–1; migrant, as domestic help 37–8; and nation, paradigm of 86; relationships with 129; as writers 5, 15 wordhoard, literature as 134n world system 4 World Wars I and II 4, 37 WPA (Works Progress Administration) 70, 78

Wright, Joshua 113, 114 Wright v. Ouellette 113 writers: “first generation” 4; male 10, 15; migrant 8–13; women 5, 15

X X-Press 127 xenophobia 111

Y yardies 127–9 Yearwood, Seifert 138n Yorkshire 110