Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad

253 Pages·2015·1.04 MB·English

by  Jennifer Lynn Donahue

Florida State University Libraries
Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School
2014
Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing
from Abroad
Jennifer Donahue
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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

TAKING FLIGHT: CARIBBEAN WOMEN WRITING FROM ABROAD

By

JENNIFER DONAHUE

A Dissertation submitted to the
Department of English
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded:
Spring Semester, 2014
Jennifer Donahue defended this dissertation on April 2, 2014.
The members of the supervisory committee were:

Candace Ward
Professor Directing Dissertation

Martin Munro
University Representative

Maxine Montgomery
Committee Member

Jerrilyn McGregory
Committee Member

Virgil Suarez
Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and
certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

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This dissertation is dedicated to my husband, Thomas. Thank you for climbing this (and every)
mountain with me.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I wish to thank Candace Ward for her feedback throughout this process. Her
insightful comments have propelled my scholarship in innumerable ways. I couldn’t have
finished this project without her support.

I would also like to thank Jerrilyn McGregory, Maxine Montgomery, Martin Munro and Virgil
Suarez for serving on my committee. Each of you has been an inspiration to me and has shaped
who I am as a scholar and educator.

To my family, I extend my gratitude for your love and support. Finally, I can never thank my
husband, Thomas, enough for being my cheerleader. Thank you for being with me every step of
the way.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... vi
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER ONE
The Ghost of Annie Palmer: Giving Voice to Jamaica’s “White Witch of Rose Hall” ............... 15
CHAPTER TWO
The Costs of Migration: What is Left Behind .............................................................................. 52
CHAPTER THREE
The Monstrous and the Beautiful: Physical and Emotional Transformation in the Works of
Pauline Melville and Elizabeth Nunez .......................................................................................... 93
CHAPTER FOUR
The Negotiation of Creolization and Transnational Identity in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and
Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise ..................................................... 131
CHAPTER FIVE
Traversing the Triangular Road: Reconnecting with Heritage and Ancestry in Paule Marshall’s
Praisesong for the Widow and Andrea Levy’s Small Island ...................................................... 175
CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 219
WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................... 230
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...................................................................................................... 246

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ABSTRACT

Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad closely examines Caribbean
women’s prose fiction published from 1959 to 2011. This project illustrates the power of the
diasporic voice. This study explores how flight serves as a recurring response to exile in
Caribbean women’s writing by transnational authors as diverse as Edwidge Danticat, Pauline
Melville and Michelle Cliff. In the works under study, flight serves as a vehicle for coming to
terms with conflictions of place and identity. While analyzing the transformative power of flight
in novels such as Breath, Eyes, Memory and Abeng, I read women in various states of exile.
Drawing distinctions between literal and figurative, or mental, flight, this project proffers
figurative flight as a form of resuscitation and healing for the protagonists. Moving beyond
traditional understandings of flight, Taking Flight asserts the centrality of figurative flight to the
transformative process for authors as well as the protagonists they depict. Rather than operating
in binary opposition, symbolic flight is facilitated by the most literal of flights, migration.
In the works under consideration, figurative flight functions as a rehearsal and
preparation for literal flight, offering a haven or temporary home to those displaced by the
process of migration. Drawing on women’s studies, post-colonial studies, and sociological
studies, I investigate the relation between gender, location and literary production in novels by or
about Caribbean women. With over 232 million migrants worldwide, this research not only
opens up a new space in the discussion of Caribbean women’s writing but also sheds light on a
growing cultural reality. By discussing these connections within the scope of this study, I move
beyond seeing these women simply as hybrid products of migration to appreciating the
contradictions their works present as not merely indicative or reflective of the Caribbean but of
the impact of migration on Caribbean women.
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INTRODUCTION
In an interview with Sandy Alexandre and Ravi Howard, Edwidge Danticat remarks, “my
favorite kind of butterfly is the monarch butterfly. It flies 3,000 miles each winter, from colder
climates to warmer ones. The butterfly that leaves the cold climate is not the same one that
returns the following spring. I often equate that to the immigrant experience” (113). Following
Danticat’s assertion, this project examines processes of transformation in a number of works by
or about Caribbean1 women and highlights the centrality of flight to emotional and physical
transformation. By reading flight as a literal act as well as a figurative one, and incorporating
sociological and psychological theories on migration, this project expands understandings of
flight while offering new readings on its various iterations in the novels under study. Departing
from an understanding of flight as “a symbol of transcendence, an escape from a disagreeable
situation,” I argue that flight offers a means of physical and psychic reconciliation (Wilentz 21).2
For the authors and the characters they craft, flight is not simply a response but is at times a
choice resulting in more than the act of “fleeing;” I interpret flight as affording the possibility for
authors to transform their characters as well as Caribbean literature itself.
While the Caribbean “has always had a romantic appeal to the imagination of the
outsider” (Gowricharn 1), scholars such as Pamela Mordecai and Elizabeth Wilson assert that “if
Caribbean writers have been generally neglected it is no exaggeration to say that Caribbean
women writers have been virtually abandoned” (qtd. in Donnell 140). Because I am not sure if

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In reading Caribbean literature, I apply Donald Hill’s understanding of the Caribbean cultural area as including
“all the islands between the Bahamas and Trinidad in the Caribbean, together with certain mainland countries in the
Americas where there reside minorities who share cultural features with the peoples of the Caribbean” (7).

2 Wilentz notes that Freud and Jung interpret flight as a “symbol of transcendence, an escape from a disagreeable
situation.” She goes on to state that “Jung makes bold assertions of how these myths work on the collective
unconscious, focusing primarily on the experience of the individual (which we know by now represents Western
white male” (21). She then applies this understanding of flight to a reading of the myth of the Flying Africans.

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Mordecai and Wilson’s claim holds true to the same extent today, especially with the recognition
of authors such as Edwidge Danticat, this study works against a romanticization of the Caribbean
experience. In revealing the darker reasons behind flight and exile, I offer a more comprehensive
view of the transformative process in these texts. By shedding light on a subset of writers, I do
not mean to suggest a “missing female perspective in postcolonial studies,” but rather strive to
develop a more focused study that examines the trope of flight from multiple angles
(Mardorossian 12). In doing so, I work off of Kezia Page’s observation of gender differences and
publication which notes the split between pre-1970s primarily male-authored Anglophone
Caribbean literature and publications of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century as being
“predominantly female-authored, celebrating diaspora, open, direct and iconoclastic on subjects
traditionally seen as taboo” (15). As such, my study celebrates the fact that “in the 50 years
between Cesaire’s and Benitez-Rojo’s respective conceptualizations of the Caribbean, women
writers of all different social backgrounds from across the region have emerged in growing
numbers” (Adjarian 3). In response to Myriam Chancy’s assertion that Caribbean women writers
“continue to be underpublished, as well as underrepresented in the general study of Caribbean
literature,” this study illustrates the relevance and vibrancy of Caribbean women’s writing (108).
By focusing on female “migrant authors” I do not mean to suggest that Afro-Caribbean
males do not experience flight or to deny their migratory experience, but instead I focus
exclusively on female authors to more thoroughly examine the contradictions and difficulties of
migration through the lens of gender and mobility. While migration clearly affects men as well
as women, I am motivated to focus on female authors representing the female migratory
experience because of the dualities their writing evidences. In fact, scholars such as Alison
Donnell note that “particularly in the post-1970 period with more women than men migrating at
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present, the migration patterns of women are different from those of men” (89). While early
Caribbean literature by authors including Naipaul, Lovelace and McKay often features a male
character leaving the islands for the metropole and presents a largely one-dimensional portrait of
the exilic experience, contemporary Caribbean literature by authors such as Marshall and Cliff
moves beyond a unidirectional flow. Works such as Abeng and The True History of Paradise
depict migration as motivated by economic constraints, aspirations of upward mobility, and the
need to escape political and personal violence. Thus, while earlier Caribbean writing often
presents the exilic experience quite literally, this project considers psychological exile as part of
the migratory experience. More specifically, I find that the narration of psychological exile is
largely gendered in Caribbean writing. Although the exilic experience is quite literal in works
such as Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom, female authors such as Cliff have offered a more
inclusive view of exile that is not often articulated by their male counterparts. In response to
Emilia Ippolito’s celebration that “women can finally let their voices be heard,” I further an
appreciation of the voices that complicate one-dimensional portraits of migration and exile (5).
In concerning itself with female migrant authors, this project directly engages with the
field of migration studies, which, as Nikos Papastergiadis notes, is “no longer confined to the
domain of sociology, demography politics and economics” (5). Likewise, he also notes that “the
modern migrant no longer conforms to the stereotypical image of the male urban peasant”
(Papastergiadis 10). As the United Nations reports, there are over 232 million people living
abroad today, a 33% increase from 2000. Of these 232 million, 48% are women (“Number”).
Viewing migration as a reflection of our increasingly interconnected society, this study moves
beyond a sense of “belonging in terms of an allegiance to a nation-state” to reading the fluidity
and flexibility migration offers (Papastergiadis 2). With more people living outside their
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