Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature PDF
Preview Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature
MBLA 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. , :c r^’ ,.•^■:-^^^ ,'. I .,•■■/. -^ ‘ ■ '’, ' V • .'^ S’' •/■ ' . ' .*>. fx •{ \ ' » I-J 4 V 10 A, ^ ’ ' i’: ' • ,■ L»AY. ‘ J ^ iA«l? ^ • '.I ** ‘ • . t-' I ' ‘CU: «* '^,1 *''‘' «• f ^' * r *;\ '!• ij(i - • ■ • i'r.''* ■ ,*»'AV w . •'. ••-: ■ ■■:'♦] *|l( ' ^'V . v"'fcSK#/^l^ 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
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