Table Of ContentMBLA
and Literature
BOSTON
PUBLIC
LIBRARY
Out of the Kumbla
Caribbean Women
and Literature
edited by
Carole Boyce Davies & Elaine Savory Fido
Africa World Press, Inc.
P.O. Box 1892
Trenton, NJ 08607
© Africa World Press, Inc. 1990
All rights reserved. No part
of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system or transmitted in any form
or by any means electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Cover design by Ife Nii Owoo
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-70199
ISBN: 0-86543-042-X Cloth
0-86543-043-8 Paper
To the many unsung Caribbean women
who write, sing, tell stories and struggle
to make their voices heard
and
to Tantie Olive who also
“lately danced and joined the ancestors. ”
111
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2017 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/outofkumblacaribOOdavi
Acknowledgments
Marlene Nourbese Philip is acknowledged for granting permission to
include “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became A Spy”
Fireweed (Toronto).
Sincere acknowledgments are offered to a number of friends who offered
support. We would like to identify Betty Wilson, Marilyn Desmond and
Clarisse Zimra who read versons of the introduction and offered useful
suggestions. Rafika Merini and Allison Thomas helped proofread galleys.
We will be eternally grateful for the patience of our contributors. The
Manuscript Center, SUNY, Binghamton and our copy editor, Patricia
Lx)ne are also acknowledged.
Finally our children are embraced with love. In particular: Austin Fido
and Jonelle and Dalia Davies are recognised for their understanding of their
academic mothers’ need for time and space to work.
Editors’ Note: This collection has been in the press for a substantial time, being completed in
1987. We therefore need to point out that although there is certainly enough validity in the
essays and bibliography contained here to more than warrant publication, they understandably
cannot refer to anything published after that date, nor do they reflect the development of
critical approaches since then in the authors of the essays.
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Foreword
Literature is the first of the disciplines. It seems to have grown, in many
cultures, from the ritual act of worship and there is therefore a sense in
which it may have preceded language since some theorists of the origin of
Language speculate that expressive sound probably came before defining
sound—cries of ecstasy and anguish before sounds of naming and identifi-
cation. Because it comes first, it may be regarded as containing all the other
disciplines, so that its burden is not only to describe all human experience
but also to employ all the possible ways in which that experience may be
thought about in order to do so.
This omnibus burden which literature carries has its analogue in any
responsible reaction to the work. As Elaine Savory Fido says in this
volume,
criticism . . . becomes the functional action of revealing the bases of
judgement and engaging with a work on all levels (after all form is
philosophy and as such politics and ideology as well).
The work of women needs to be a part of the literary account of human
experience and the critical response to it simply because the account is
incomplete without them and up to now they have not had a sufficient place.
This is one reason why, for a while at least, we have to have “women
writers” and probably also “women critics.” It may be, of course, that the
women, once admitted, prove to have something significantly different to
say and a significantly different manner of saying it. That is not my present
point, which is much simpler: women must have a place if the literary
account is to be complete; a complete account is, after all, what each
discipline strives for.
I am pleased, as doubtless many scholars of the island literatures will be,
that the term “Caribbean” here includes francophone and hispanophone as
well as anglophone writing. I am encouraged by the perspective that
includes and emphasizes the oral tradition, exemplified in Carole Boyce
Vll
Davies’s study of women in Caribbean oral literature and informing the
discourse of several other scholars in this collection. I am particularly
delighted that the contributors are not all women.
Above all I am excited by much of what is offered in these essays, by their
groaning towards the comprehensive vision of the “wind.” There are
metaphors—such as that of the^g.^mbla” in the title of the collection—
which are both resonant and intractable. They serve as symbolic devices in
the works and as critical points of convergence. “Kumbla” becomes the
calabash in Clarisse Zimra’s essay, ‘i’espace clos” in Elizabeth Wilson’s
consideration of women’s experience in the francophone Caribbean women
novelists, and “A-beng” in Lemuel Johnson’s commentary on Michelle
ClifT s work of that name. The metamorphosis is unintended but evident. A
thing turns into something else and at the same time retains its identity and"^
intactness. The association-in-disparity and capacity-for-being-confounded
both signify.
The fact of this refracting of perception and experience is represented in
the essays in many ways, most explicitly perhaps in Elaine Savory Fido’s
piece, “Crossroads: Textures of Third World Reality in the Poetry of Four
African-Caribbean Women”. But the social-status continuum along which
Mark Me Watt fits Roy Heath’s heroines is also a prismatic form. Me Watt
says, “The irony is that they (the women) are all in fact equal in terms of
their status as victims.” Perhaps we need a new critical vocabulary, for
irony is the beginning of the prism, the impulse to pluralities restrained by a
manner of knowing essentially linear: polarity, syllogism, dialectic.
Evelyn O’Callaghan’s analysis of the treatment of “mad” women in the
work of some female Caribbean novelists, and Lemuel Johnson’s study of
Michelle CMf’s A-beng are especially fine grist for the prismatic mill, as
in Clarisse Zimra’s essay in which nothing dubs up in all kinds of interesting
versions. If we are to find our way into “ontological security,” into an affili-
ation of “all the necessary disconnections and connections,” into some
statement-of-ourselves-through-time, we need a new way of knowing. If our
self-discovering is to take care of the fragments/facets, it cannot neglect one
half of the remembering. This book, edited by two women who both practise
the business of literature, is a significant contribution to the beginning of the
process of finding the necessary vision and including the other half.
Pamela Claire Mordecai
vin
