Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad

By Jennifer Donahue

Caribbean women have long utilized the medium of fiction to break the pervasive silence surrounding abuse and exploitation. Contemporary works by such authors as Tiphanie Yanique and Nicole Dennis-Benn illustrate the deep-rooted consequences of trauma based on gender, sexuality, and race, and trace the steps that women take to find safer ground from oppression. Taking Flight examines the immigrant experience in contemporary Caribbean women’s writing and considers the effects of restrictive social mores.

In the texts examined in Taking Flight, culturally sanctioned violence impacts the ability of female characters to be at home in their bodies or in the spaces they inhabit. The works draw attention to the historic racialization and sexualization of black women’s bodies and continue the legacy of narrating black women’s long-standing contestation of systems of oppression.

Arguing that there is a clear link between trauma, shame, and migration, with trauma serving as a precursor to the protagonists’ emigration, Jennifer Donahue focuses on how female bodies are policed; how moral, racial, and sexual codes are linked; and how the enforcement of social norms can function as a form of trauma. Donahue considers the relationship between trauma, shame, and sexual politics and investigates how shame works as a social regulator that frequently leads to withdrawal or avoidant behaviors in those who violate socially sanctioned mores. Most importantly, Taking Flight positions flight as a powerful counter to disempowerment and considers how flight, whether through dissociation or migration, functions as a form of resistance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jul 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781496828712

Jennifer Donahue

Jennifer Donahue is assistant professor in Africana studies at the University of Arizona. She has been published in journals such as ariel: A Review of International English Literature, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Studies in Gothic Fiction, and Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Conceived of as defective or deficient from male norms and as potentially diseased, women have long been embodiments of shame in our culture, and, indeed, the female socialization process can be viewed as a prolonged immersion in shame.

—J. BROOKS BOUSON

On October 15, 2017, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted, If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet. Milano’s call to action reignited Tarana Burke’s movement, a campaign founded long before the advent of social media. Like Burke, authors such as Edwidge Danticat, Michelle Cliff, and Margaret Cezair-Thompson have shed light on the magnitude and impact of sexual assault and abuse. Their work, and the work of the other Caribbean women authors that this project examines, frames sexual violence as a systemic issue warranting immediate attention. Caribbean women have been saying #Metoo for hundreds of years. More recently, truth tellers including Tiphanie Yanique and Nicole Dennis-Benn have utilized the medium of fiction to break the pervasive silence surrounding abuse and exploitation. Collectively, the works under study illustrate the deep-rooted consequences of gender, sexual, and race-based trauma and trace the steps that women take to find safer ground from oppression.

In these works, culturally sanctioned violence affects the ability of female characters to be at home in their bodies or in the spaces they inhabit. The protagonists, recipients of the socialization process that J. Brooks Bouson mentions, endure various forms of trauma and migrate to ease the resulting sense of shame.¹ Following protracted decision-making processes, the women leave home. In each case, the determination to move, oftentimes out of the Caribbean region, comes with great difficulty. Importantly, the choice to reject the site of trauma is rooted in self-protection in that characters embrace the unknown in the hope of having their physical and emotional needs met. As the texts discussed demonstrate, there is a clear link between trauma, shame, and migration, with trauma serving as a precursor to the protagonists’ emigration. The works continue the legacy of narrating black women’s longstanding contestation of systems of oppression, reference historical trauma, and draw attention to the historical racialization and sexualization of black women’s bodies.

Taking Flight takes a closer look at the immigrant experience in contemporary Caribbean women’s writing and considers the effects of restrictive social mores. One of the aims of this book is to better understand the complex relationship between social norms and trauma. This approach is based on a close reading of literary representations of Caribbean women with particular attention to how female bodies are policed, how moral, racial, and sexual codes are linked, and how the enforcement of social norms can function as a form of trauma. My argument defines trauma as a powerful indicator of oppressive cultural institutions and practices and hinges on the idea that body and sexual politics operate as sources of trauma in the works under study (Vickroy 4). The characters navigate oppressive and repressive systems in spaces that are built on exclusion, violence, and abuse. The difficulty of creating home in that space is compounded by national cultures that privilege shame and secrecy. In the works, gender and sexual norms function as a source of trauma as well as a significant factor in Caribbean women’s decision to relocate.

Scholars including Erica Johnson, Patricia Moran, and Melissa Harris-Perry have observed the link between femininity and shame. Although the characters’ reactions to social control vary, shame and silence predominate; the upshot is that migration is often rendered attractive. The silence surrounding trauma is influenced by cultural values and ideologies. It is therefore necessary to consider the relationship between trauma, shame, and sexual politics. I duly enquire into how shame works as a social regulator that frequently leads to withdrawal or avoidant behaviors in those who violate socially sanctioned mores. While shame often functions as a sociocultural reinforcer of behavior in the texts under study, and thus shapes women’s experiences as citizens, it is important to attend to how dissociation, a common response to trauma that disrupts the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or sensitivity to the environment, serves as a literary trope as well as a coping mechanism (Alayarian 151). In several of the works, this psychological defense mechanism precedes migration. Central to this book, then, is an attempt to position flight as a counter to disempowerment and to consider how flight, whether through dissociation or migration, operates as a form of resistance.

CARIBBEAN WOMEN’S WRITING

Taking Flight examines a selection of Caribbean women’s writing published since 1984. While psychological reactions to trauma have attracted scholarly attention since the late nineteenth century, the American Psychological Association did not formally recognize dissociative disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder until 1980. This selection of texts, published after the release of the DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 1980, narrates the effects of trauma after the condition gained increased visibility. One of the larger goals of this book is to expand understandings of trauma beyond war and sexual violence. Central to my argument is the belief that diversifying the clinical definition of trauma will shed light on other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, and homophobia.

In focusing on Caribbean women’s writing, the book draws attention to the fact that Caribbean women writers continue to be underpublished and underrepresented within Caribbean studies. While prior to the 1970s Caribbean literature was dominated by male-authored, bildungsroman-type tales, the growth of Caribbean women’s writing has expanded the field to tackle subjects that were formerly seen as taboo.² Early Caribbean literature by authors such as V. S. Naipaul, Earl Lovelace, and Claude McKay often features a male character leaving the islands for the metropole, but these texts present a largely one-dimensional portrait of that experience. By addressing migration and exile from a female perspective, the authors supplement the narratives advanced by their male counterparts. Contemporary works authored by women tend to consider psychological exile³ as an important but not necessarily requisite part of the migratory experience and employ the trope of flight to foreground the emotional difficulties that can accompany migration. While in the masculine or traditional bildungsroman the male character coming of age is often paired with a quest for education or self-improvement, in Caribbean women’s writing this negotiation is frequently associated with trauma and the subsequent migration of the female protagonist. Though, as Carine Mardorossian observes, the exiled (usually male) writer is often seen as more objective because of his alienation, the gendering of exile largely ignores the concerns of women (16). Perhaps in response, authors such as Elizabeth Nunez, Paule Marshall, and Andrea Levy reinscribe the traditionalist genre of the bildungsroman to center the experiences of Caribbean women.

The authors featured primarily reside outside the region and represent diverse experiences. Addressing the work of female migrant authors is not intended to diminish the male migratory experience, suggest that Afro-Caribbean males do not experience trauma, situate men as inherently more stable, or position these works as culturally or geographically representative of the Caribbean region or of all Caribbean women. Instead, this book seeks to complicate the relationship between gender, trauma, and mobility in Caribbean women’s writing and to shed light on the sociocultural forces that disproportionately affect women. Admittedly, the term Caribbean women can collapse difference and create a false sense of similarity. Chandra Mohanty, among others, has expressed concern that viewing literature solely through a gendered lens can result in an assumption of women as an always already constituted group, one that has been labeled powerless, exploited, sexually harassed, and so on (23). Following this, I utilize the term Caribbean women with the understanding that Caribbean women are not a homogenous group; instead, Caribbean women’s literature and the voices of Caribbean women reflect distinct racial, cultural, and socioeconomic positions.

As scholars such as Donald Hill have explained, transnationalism refers to the ties linking people across borders and is the result of globalization whereby a group of people, with their own special culture and folklore, are spread out over several countries or continents and continue to act as a unit (8).⁴ Hill is invoked here to highlight the role of folklore in homemaking. Folklore is central to the characters’ journeys through personal unburdening and historical unlearning. In many of the texts explored in this book, home is a contested and problematic space and folklore provides comfort in unfamiliar environments. In works such as Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!, home is far from ideal and it is the process of escape that allows the protagonists to place themselves in new material realities. The works address issues of identity and belonging and foreground the relationship between violence and citizenship. In her study of the relationship between mother and motherland, Simone Alexander claims that the absence of an ideal homeland intensifies the imagining and the inventing of home spaces or homelands (10). The authors of this selection of texts write in order to carve out more ideal places for their characters, but flight is not without adverse effects. The titles of works such as The Migration of Ghosts and Small Island, for instance, suggest that migration and exile, like trauma, are haunting influences that do not immediately vanish following departure. Characters continue to grapple with feelings of shame and disembodiment and face prejudice and exclusion in their new environments. The title of Pauline Melville’s The Migration of Ghosts, in particular, positions migrants as already deceased and warns of the danger of becoming a ghost of yourself abroad. What the narratives illustrate is that migration does not inherently equal escape; there is no guarantee that the new location that migrants arrive to will offer a substantial improvement over their previous conditions. Collectively, the works point to migration as an essential component in the process that negotiates lived experience and idealized portraits of home.

Reading flight as a process provoked by conditions that adversely affect personal wellbeing foregrounds the impetus for migration. Migration is far from an easy process for most of the characters but offers the protagonists the ability to reinvent themselves much in the same way that the experience affords the authors a means of creative genesis. As a result of their own migration, writers such as Cliff and Dennis-Benn are perhaps better able to critique their homelands from a distance. Although migration can be understood as bitter and frustrating, the selected texts counter that view with a rich portrait of cultural hybridity. While the process can mean displacement for many, it offers an avenue for liberation for some. Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise and Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, for example, situate the protagonists as recipients of ancestral knowledge to counter the dominant historical narrative.

The authors discussed herein craft characters who are often forced to leave home in order to escape personal and political violence. The women in these works constantly reconfigure and reinvent themselves, often in ways that incorporate a multitude of historic and cultural influences. This is seen in texts such as Nunez’s Boundaries and Anna In-Between wherein Anna Sinclair reconstructs home amidst her mother’s illness. In many of the texts, the transformative process is not simply one of coming of age or embracing cultural reconnection, but of coming to terms with one’s role as a postcolonial subject, woman, and daughter, among a host of other identities. Because, as Beth Tobin points out, most postcolonial work on the Caribbean is so focused on what the colonizers did that the islands’ inhabitants never register as fully human subjects, it is important to center the experiences of Caribbean women (147). Through its interdisciplinary approach and female-centric reading of Caribbean literature, Taking Flight intervenes in a series of conversations about the narration of individual and collective trauma.

TRAUMA, SHAME, AND SOCIAL NORMS

This project joins Caribbean studies and trauma studies to assert that the perpetuation of repressive social mores⁵ is often linked with trauma in contemporary Caribbean women’s literature. Social norms serve as a catalyst for forms of trauma as varied as the distress related to Clare Savage’s negotiation of her biracial identity in Cliff’s Abeng and Susan Hay’s struggle with anorexia nervosa in Melville’s The Sparkling Bitch. It is worth noting that the term trauma can be traced to the Greek word for wound. For Sigmund Freud, this wound is one that is inflicted on the mind rather than on the body (quoted in Caruth 3). Cathy Caruth describes trauma⁶ as painfully disruptive experiences that are like a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available (4).

Focusing on the narration of various forms of trauma highlights how literature reflects the relationship between trauma, shame, and social norms. Taking Flight reads the body as a medium for the transmission of cultural meanings with emphasis on the control and surveillance of women’s bodies. Germane to my discussion of social norms is the function of sexual politics, or the moral, sexual, symbolic, cultural and political codes in which individuals, families and the nation are linked (Wieringa and Sívori 14). In examining the connection between Caribbean women’s sexuality and their political realities, I understand gender and sexual norms as being socially constructed and read the trauma associated with repressive gender/sexual norms as having significant consequences for Caribbean women’s physical and emotional health.

In each of the texts, social mores operate as a form of social control that shapes behavior and conveys cultural meanings. The works respond to and reflect the expectations that govern Caribbean women’s lives. Michelle Balaev’s work is helpful in understanding the social dimension of trauma. Balaev finds that if the self is conceived as both a product of culture and individual idiosyncratic tendencies and behaviours, then it follows that the meaning of trauma is found between the poles of the individual and the society (155). Although the protagonists experience shame for a variety of reasons, shame, rooted in misrecognition and the fear of negative evaluation, is intertwined with trauma and is a wound in and of itself. In fact, psychotherapist Aida Alayarian indicates that shame is the most direct psychological defense against overwhelming traumatic experiences (153). The driving forces behind women’s trauma in the works under study are the conventions that favor silence and invisibility over the narration of truth. The fear of exposure and evaluation, in several of the works, drives female characters to internalize harmful beliefs about their identities and their bodies and to seek refuge far from home.

Shame, as numerous scholars have noted, is a common effect of sexual abuse but can also have an impact on those who do not conform to social norms. As a result of the gender socialization process, particular types of expression are viewed as socially acceptable while others can provoke censure. The resulting sense of shame, for characters who cannot or do not follow proscribed norms, is interpreted as evidence of personal failure. In Sister Citizen, Harris-Perry summarizes shame as the sentiment that assumes that the room is straight and that the self is off-kilter. Shame urges us to internalize the crooked room (105). In the works under study, shame occurs when characters experience abuse or break a social boundary. The social element is key; shame, the tension between the perceived and ideal selves, rises when characters feel the need to withdraw from a real or imagined audience capable of judging them.

In a number of the texts, the psychological consequences of trauma are most visible through the characters’ subsequent use of dissociation,⁷ and it is through migration and dissociation that the women preserve selfhood. The trope of the split personality often appears in Caribbean and postcolonial women’s writing and plays a central role in works including Breath, Eyes, Memory. For Danticat’s protagonist, dissociation, often referred to as doubling in Caribbean literature, works as a survival strategy that allows the mind to break from the physical body during traumatic occurrences. To be clear, not all responses to trauma are pathological, nor is there necessarily a causal link between trauma and dissociation. For some of the women in this collection of texts, though, dissociation serves as a haven during or following a traumatic event. In several of the works, dissociation operates as a form of imaginative flight and is a key component in the process of migration. While dissociation often affords emotional healing for the protagonists, it is not a replacement for but instead prefigures emigration. That is, the practice of dissociation prepares characters to distance themselves from the location of trauma because they have the space to process their experiences. As my readings of novels such as Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow demonstrate, the dissociative state works as a protective space that bridges a painful location and another new and potentially frightening one.

Central to the characters’ search for identity is the attempt to regain control of their bodies and to cast off shame in favor of recognition. In works including Yanique’s Land of Love and Drowning, trauma changes how characters understand themselves and illustrates the indelible effect of trauma on their psyches. For the characters, dissociation and migration share the common goals of safety and affirmation. As Danticat observes, There is a lot of flight imagery in the myths of people who have been enslaved. As soon as you try to put limits on people, their imagination takes flight. Even madness, psychosis, is a kind of flight (Alexandre and Howard 162). Danticat’s claim speaks to the range of emotional responses to trauma and positions dissociation as a process that allows characters to parse the feelings and memories associated with trauma. For the protagonists in these prose works, dissociation and migration serve as means of distancing themselves from the physical reminders of pain. In each of the works under study, trauma functions as the catalyst for physical or psychic flight; put simply, trauma, perhaps driven by the tension between the real and imagined homeland, works as the activating event that propels migration.

MIGRATION

In turning to literature to explore the complexity of migration, I apply Nikos Papastergiadis’s understanding of migration as a process that initiates mutual transformation.⁸ Papastergiadis asserts that migrants are often transformed by their journey, and their presence is a catalyst to new transformations in the spaces they enter (10). This observation regarding the regenerative property of flight rings true in each of the works as the authors employ the trope of flight to bring their protagonists to a space of change. In Caribbean fiction, the motif of flight is frequently associated with restrictive conditions, and characters often migrate to gain independence. That is, flight is directly related to issues of confinement and indeed may be influenced by rigid gender and sexual norms. Through fiction, migrant authors such as Cliff and Dennis-Benn narrate the difficulties of leaving home and respond to repressive conditions, including racism, sexism, and homophobia. By writing and rewriting history, they reproduce the struggles of migration and counter romanticized portraits of the process. This book is as much an examination of the motif of flight in Caribbean women’s literature as it is a celebration of women’s voices and a commentary on the conditions that necessitate the need to find expression.

In the works discussed in each chapter, flight serves as a