Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Robinson-Walcott, Kim

Titel

Claiming an Identity We Thought They Despised: Contemporary White West Indian Writers and Their Negotiation of Race

Ist Teil von

• Small axe : a journal of criticism, 2003-09, Vol.7 (2), p.93-110

Ort / Verlag

USA: Duke University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2003

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION eBooks)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The test of a colonised person is to walk through a shantytown in Kingston and not bat an eye. Because part of me lives there, (p. 71) This conscious decision to foreground her blackness is again symbolized by the blackening of the West Indian mulatto Annie Christmas's skin in Cliff's third, and first America-based, novel, Free Enterprise, in which the author expands her identification with blackness to politically embrace American blackness.16 Cliff has now lived in the United States for over thirty years and has not visited Jamaica since 1975.17 But her recently published collection of short stories, The Store of a Million Items,18 indicates that the scars of her early warped upbringing are still present in her memories: memories of social injustice and an indifferent middle class ("We originated in a place where the sun never set and the blood never dried. . In her disclaiming of any narrowing identity as expressed in her essay "Beyond the Pale," in her claiming of hybrid Creoleness in that essay, in her tentative explorations of the rich Creole imagination in her fiction, and especially in her unfettering, all too brief, of this imagination in the ventriloquist's voice, Melville fertilizes not only the hybrid Caribbean identity but also a newly sprouting, potentially rich hybrid Caribbean literature. [...]her work takes the journey in quest of self embarked on by Michelle Cliff and Honor Ford-Smith a step or two further along the road from linear, fragmented divisiveness to inclusive Creole cohesion. [...]the mirror of Divina Trace . . . in the end . . . reflects an identity in a state of creolization, a reflection that oscillates between history and myth; that is, a paradoxical mask launched into the distance by the explosion of the plantation. [...]in the bivocal middle section, which serves as a prelude to Vel's narrative, we find ourselves skipping over Lilla's self-indulgent lines, which only repeat what we just endured reading, and focusing instead on Vel's lines, which not only provide new information but also sound a lot more interesting.