The African-Caribbean presence in the United States can be read as a paradox of discrimination: “first, an invisibility (in Ellisonian terms) because the blackness of their skin color, which relegates them to classification as Afro-Americans, which leaves their special needs as immigrants relatively unattended; and second, a double visibility – as blacks to whites, and as foreigners to native blacks.”1 Literary representations of the dynamics between African diasporic populations in the US – from the erasure and/or collapsing of all cultural differences, to contention between US-born African Americans and Caribbean immigrants, to calls for social and political allegiances – will be the focus of this chapter. Particular attention will be paid to the works of Caribbean-American writers, such as Paule Marshall and Edwidge Danticat.
Within the black community, desires to fully participate in a supposedly superior US society while simultaneously battling against its ideology of white American superiority can significantly contribute to the erasure of a Caribbean discourse from the US African American one.2 Cultural elitism (on both sides of the ethnic fence) – outweighing the pull of potential allegiances between different cultural groups – can be witnessed in the historical antagonisms between migrant groups (Jamaicans and Trinidadians, for example), and US-born black subjects and the Caribbean immigrants who were believed to be, alternately: (1) economically grasping, cold-hearted people, intent upon viciously undermining black Americans by accepting lower wages; (2) primitive “monkey-chasers”; and (3) snobs who thought themselves intellectually and socially superior to African Americans.
This attitude is represented in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), as one of the minor characters exclaims “Scotch! That’s an ofay drink . . . And I’ve seen the monkey chasers order it when they want to put on style” (38). The Jamaican-born McKay, however, reveals the danger of such generalizations: Jake, the African American hero of the novel, whom “everybody liked and desired” (103), drinks scotch. Jake initially possesses a xenophobic prejudice against Caribbean people: he “was very American in spirit and shared a little of that comfortable Yankee contempt for poor foreigners. And as an American Negro he looked askew at foreign niggers. Africa was jungle, and Africans bush niggers, cannibals. And West Indians were monkey chasers” (134). However, these views begin to be abraded by his friendship with Ray, a Haitian immigrant who educates Jake about black Haiti’s independence movement, the false myth of the savage African jungle, and the destroyed ancient cultures and royalty of the Ashanti, Dahomey, Benin, Zulu, and Abyssinian kingdoms.
During much of the twentieth century, many Caribbean migrants did cling tightly to their national and ethnic identities in order to avoid identification with African Americans, whom they were socialized by US mainstream culture and European colonialism to see as lower-class and less ambitious.3 This separatism obviously increased intraracial resentment. The myth of “West Indian exceptionalism” in the United States – the so-called model minority willfully holding itself apart from and above African Americans – was more often perpetuated by the fact that African Caribbeans did not usually become citizens, as they recognized that they had greater rights as foreigners than African Americans had as citizens.4
Caribbean-American novelist Paule Marshall highlights the diversity of Barbadian immigrant opinion regarding the native African American population in her 1959 novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. One of the members of the World War I era Brooklyn Barbadian Association urges his audience to earn enough money to make their group’s voice heard at City Hall; he associates whiteness with power and luxury: “[T]hose big-shot white executives does play in their exclusive clubs – all the while drinking the best of scotch and smoking the finest cigars. No, we don have none of that. We ain white yet” (221). His proclamation of “we ain white yet” clearly sets forth his goals for joining the white American, and not the black American, community. Likewise, the protagonist’s mother, Silla, confesses that she has resolved to succumb to US individualism and the capitalist ethos: to “make your way in this Christ world you got to be hard and sometimes misuse others, even your own” (224). For her, racial allegiance is to be jettisoned in favor of rising in socio-economic status. Significantly, she suggests that even ties of national and cultural origin will be abandoned for success. In other words her struggle is not specifically with US African Americans; it is with everyone (including Deighton, her own husband) who stands in the way of her progress. In striking contrast, another member of the Association counters that the group needs “to strike out that word Barbadian and put Negro . . . We got to stop thinking about just Bajan. We ain’t home no more” (222). At the time in which the action takes place, however, his call for a diasporic community is shunned in favor of the individualism of the American Dream.
Unbeknownst to the African-Caribbean subjects who pursued this Dream, however, throughout much of the twentieth century they were faced with the racial hierarchies usually hidden by notions of immigrant mobility. As they entered the States, they were supposed to be the “new ethnics” who could bring cultural “flavor” to the American melting pot, as well as compete for and garner social and economic success. They were pleased to be thrust into a schema of black identity that placed them on top: Caribbean model minorities proving that race is no barrier, unmotivated US-born residents obsessed by race, and Africans from the jungle and primitive tribes. They were, however, put into competition against white ethnics whose mobility was not so constrained by race, and thus subject to many of the same prejudices as the rest of the diaspora. As Caribbean migrants became enveloped in this oppositional discourse, mainstream images of them also became schematized: they were seen as either militant, Garvey-like black nationalists, dangerous inner-city gangsters and Rastafarian drug-runners, or upstanding citizens who are honored to assimilate.
The strategic placement of Caribbean characters in works by writers such as Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison suggests an ongoing literary engagement with the politics of cultural pluralism. In Ellison’s novel Invisible Man the nameless narrator finds himself in New York City, the contact zone for him and Ras, the Caribbean exhorter/destroyer, who urges Harlem crowds to rise up against their white oppressors. Ras urges for racial “consciousness” and begs the narrator and his Brotherhood comrade Tod Clifton to open their eyes to the realities of race in America. His unsuccessful attempt to stab Clifton, whom he identifies as one of his “own” (370); his lament over the violence and competition of black against black; and his call for black, yellow, and brown allies all resonate with Marcus Garvey’s visions of an international community of sovereign black peoples.5
Like Ellison’s Ras, Toni Morrison’s Soaphead Church from The Bluest Eye is a character whose Caribbean migratory history is often neglected in discussions of the major themes of the work. Church is a misanthropic Jamaican immigrant living in the small Ohio community of the novel. Along with the people who hail from all over the South – “Mobile. Aiken. From Newport News. From Marietta. From Meridian” (81) – Church represents the diversity of the black community: one that is grounded in the process of migration and must deal with the legacies of slavery and white supremacy, including their degenerative influence on black male sexuality. In striking contrast to Church, Morrison’s Caribbean horsemen in Tar Baby are highly ennobled characters. These riders, for whom the Isle de Chevaliers is named, are believed by the black islanders to be the spirits of one hundred former slaves who escaped captivity. Rejecting the powerlessness of slavery and the vulnerability suggested by their blindness, nakedness, and unshod horses, “they gallop; they race those horses like angels all over the hills” (306). As the US-born Son crawls, tentatively walks, and then runs to join them at the end of the novel, he signifies rebirth and the healing of some of the fractures in the African-diasporic community – the fractures that Morrison presages in her epigraph from First Corinthians 1:11: “For it hath been declared unto me of you, my brethren . . . that there are contentions among you.” These contentions include the failure of “Philadelphia Negroes” Sydney and Ondine to learn the names of the African-Caribbean workers on the island, or even to recognize their faces; it is therefore a hateful Thérèse, a local island resident, who refuses to speak to the African Americans. Despite the possibilities for pan-African alliances that Morrison suggests by concluding her novel with the imminent union of Son and the Chevaliers, however, the reader must wonder about the potential for these alliances within US society: is it significant that the narrative’s final action takes place outside the political borders of the United States?
In the past few decades, there has been expanding awareness of the literature that focuses on relationships between children of Caribbean immigrants in the United States and their parents’ home islands. Although the authors reveal the contradictions of dreams of “Return” to lands to which their characters have never been, in certain ways they still sustain the nostalgic yearning for a Caribbean “home” – a nostalgia that, in many cases, is a borrowed one. US-born children thus exhibit an aura of “ex-isle” as powerfully as their parents do. This can be partially explained by the fact that children from immigrant families often experience a schism of identity: they feel as if they belong partly to both societies, but fully to neither – a fragmentation even more pronounced if they are rejected by, or encouraged by their parents to reject, the US African American community.
In her introduction to Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), literary critic Carole Boyce Davies emphasizes the need for crossing borders, whether they be the lines between theory and literature, theory and practice, or actual physical national boundaries. Citing the first move of the conqueror as the drawing up of borders, Boyce Davies argues that diasporic African people, wrenched from their ancestral lands during slavery, are especially harmed by preserving rigid territorial lines because they are kept in a position of “dislocation” (4). Novelists such as Paule Marshall and Edwidge Danticat appear quite positive about the possibilities for crossing borders, spanning cultures, establishing a “Black Atlantic,” and finding a Self.
Paule Marshall is arguably the best-known US-born black author of Caribbean descent, and her narratives remain rooted in the spaces of contact between US and Caribbean communities. Her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, details the experiences of Selina Boyce, a Barbadian-American girl born and raised in Brooklyn and torn between allegiances to her father and mother. This conflict of affection corresponds to her conflicting alliances to Barbados and the United States. Barbados is the land romantically idealized by Deighton, her father, the classic dreamer who subscribes to a belief in the fast track to success. For him, Barbados is the “home” to which he claims the whole family will one day return. In contrast, the United States is the country in which Silla, Selina’s mother, the epitome of responsibility, strives to own property; she clearly perceives the US as a more permanent residence than her husband does.6
Silla’s and Deighton’s contradictory relationships to the States mirror Silla’s and Selina’s contrasting notions of space, place, and home. The maternal–filial discord is accentuated by the daughter’s sense of racial and cultural alienation in the land of her birth – the land that her mother reveres. Selina walks as an intruder in the glittering world of Fifth Avenue because of her race and economic class; she is also estranged from the white women of her college dance troupe because of her race and ethnicity. The young woman’s alienation strikes the reader as particularly acute when she peers into a jazz club called the Metropole and feels an affiliation based on the music. The bar can be interpreted as a metaphor for African American culture and community, and the contention between African American and Caribbean people fostered by some members of the Barbadian community in the novel thus seems to dissolve. However, Selina’s sense of belonging is problematic in that she is still standing outside the club and thus is physically isolated from the people inside. Notably, all of the Metropole’s patrons appear to be white: only the musicians are black. This detail, along with the name of the club, suggests that the position of all African-diasporic peoples in the American (and European) cosmopolitan “metropoles” is marginal, only seeming to be “sucked into that roaring center” (214) as Selina believes.
Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid provides a compelling parallel situation in her novel Lucy (1990). The US contact zone allows the protagonist to ruminate on her position as a member of the African diaspora and see the connections between oppressed populations and the colonial and neo-colonial powers that remain in ideological, if not official political, control. Lucy’s employer, Mariah, participates in a system that involves bringing poor, African-Caribbean women to the States to care for the children of wealthy white families. She does so without conceding to the racial implications of this transport of bodies, thereby ignoring the history of enslavement and its accompanying involuntary migration in many American societies.7 At the same time, believing that she is engaged in having Lucy “sucked into that roaring center” (Marshall, Brown Girl 224) of social and cultural privilege, she only highlights the resemblance between the US and British metropoles for Lucy: by insisting that the young protagonist focus on the surface beauty of daffodils (emblematic of the present) rather than on her painful experiences as a colonized subject (representing history and the past), she tries to supplant Lucy’s Caribbean experiences with her own North American perspective.
By the end of Marshall’s Brown Girl the reader comes to understand that even though Selina’s feelings of estrangement are fostered by her belief that her true home lies elsewhere, her voyage to a Barbadian “homeland’ is much more complicated than many critics have claimed. While growing up, Selina, her older sister Ina, and the other Barbadian-American children learn to call Barbados “home,” even though the island is an unfamiliar, abstract space. Marshall notably encloses the word in quotation marks to reveal that the concept must be interrogated. And although Deighton has steadily nurtured the illusion of a Barbadian homeland to which the family can and will return, and into which Selina will easily fit despite the fact that she has never visited there, in reality she will be viewed as a stranger and a foreigner. Selina cannot truly “return” to Barbados, a land to which she has never been. She cannot “begin again” (Afterword, Brown Girl 322); rather, she must continue along the road she has already begun – a road that began in the United States. The only origins that can be traced without question and complication are Selina’s experiences as a cultural creole in her New York City Barbadian community.
Significantly, when Selina first decides to run away with her boyfriend Clive, she makes very nonspecific plans to go “out of the country” (267). “Anyplace” will do; “it doesn’t matter” (279). When Selina eventually reveals her travel plans to Silla, she does not explicitly mention Barbados as her destination. She only professes her desire to emulate her mother: “Remember how you used to talk about how you left home and came here alone as a girl of eighteen and was your own woman? I used to love hearing that. And that’s what I want” (307). Selina’s repetition of Silla’s emigration entails leaving one’s home as a young woman; it thus becomes clear that Selina is not seeking a lost home in Barbados, but rather leaving a home in the United States in order to become her “own woman.” The narrative reveals that the protagonist accepts the land of her experiences as her home, but she must travel outside this often-alienating space in order to find her way. The themes of movement, im/migration, and ex-isle resound like the clang of the bangle that Selina leaves behind her: a not so “frail sound in that utter silence” (310).
Marshall sets up a similarly ambiguous situation in Daughters (1991). Like Selina, protagonist Ursa MacKenzie was born in the States, but unlike the principal character of Marshall’s first novel, Ursa was raised for fourteen years on the fictional Caribbean island of Triunion before being sent back to inner-city Hartford to attend high school. And although she has lived for the majority of her life in the United States, the adult Ursa conceives of Triunion as her permanent, “true” home for the first portion of the novel. Home is always “there,” far away, and even though Ursa visits as often as she can, it comes to represent lack in her life. This is despite the fact that her education, apartment, career, romantic partner, and best friend all appear to locate her permanent homespace in New York. The irony of Ursa’s feeling “away from home” while in the bosom of her supposed homeland is striking.
Ursa’s mother, Estelle, is an expatriate of the US. Rather than leave the country for political reasons, however, as in the case of many African Americans who fled US soil and racial policies in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, it is the painful sense of loss that Estelle feels after her parents’ fatal accident that prevents her from going back. Significantly, that country is no longer her home. And yet, even though she herself will not return, “she’s always made clear that this is where she wants her daughter to be” (256).
About halfway through the narrative, a letter drafted to her parents reveals that Ursa no longer views Triunion as home. She must make a mental note to replace the phrase “come down” with “come home” (250). She later alleges that New York has become “as much home as anywhere else” (254). This comment is loaded with ambivalence, however; it is not an emphatic, definitive identification of the United States as her homespace. The true turn comes at the end of Daughters, when Ursa must choose a place to recuperate – both mentally and physically. It becomes clear that the healing she must undergo will take place in New York, and not in Triunion. The night before her flight back to the States, the protagonist imagines the cab ride to her apartment as taking place during “dawn’s early light.” This phrase from “The Star-Spangled Banner” suggests her allegiance to this nation. At the same time as she anticipates the cab ride, she also looks forward to an herb bath in her New York apartment. The contemplated bath illustrates her incorporation of Caribbean traditional practices in her life; she recognizes the need to preserve the ways of her mothers, literal and figurative.
Amidst her cultural and national reclamations, Ursa realizes that there is no “perfect” space. The island of Triunion has its tensions, as does the United States. Her decision to base her home in the latter – physically, mentally, and emotionally – comes despite all of the troubles she faces there as an African-descended Caribbean-identified woman. Ursa realizes that a “home” of complete security and comfort is a mythological figment. Marshall highlights her message by mirroring Ursa’s decisions with Estelle’s: the latter has adopted Triunion as her new home despite the problems that she, too, faces as a foreigner.
Besides the border-crossings that occur in Brown Girl, Brownstones and Daughters, Marshall’s characteristic cultural alienation and antagonism, then conflict, bridging, and revelation take place in both Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969). In Praisesong, for example, protagonist Avey Johnson has no ties to the Caribbean, but she remembers and reconnects with her African American cultural roots in this space and becomes the emblem of the pan-Africanist subject.
Other more contemporary authors who extend Marshall’s paradigm include Elizabeth Nunez, whose novel Beyond the Limbo Silence (1998) charts the development of a young Trinidadian immigrant to the United States. Sara leaves her homeland to be educated in a Catholic college in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. There, she experiences the invisibility/hypervisibility paradigm discussed by Dominguez: her white classmates at first refuse to acknowledge her presence; soon after, they reveal their perception of her as a type rather than an individual, and a primitive member of an “uncivilized” society. Local white boys and girls call both the African-Trinidadian Sara and her Indo-Guyanese roommate Angela “niggers,” collapsing all racial, ethnic, and national difference under the slur. Intraracial cultural barriers are drawn by Sara’s African American lover, Sam, who will not believe that Sara can identify with the Civil Rights struggle – she is a foreigner to him above and beyond anything else. Her St. Lucian friend Courtney warns her: “American slavery lasted longer. Then Jim Crow dug his claws into them. They think no one else is capable of understanding that kind of suffering . . . To them, we’re happy, free island natives dancing in the sun to steel band music and calypso” (190). Sara, however, thinks of the five out of 200,000 Caribbean students who receive the opportunity to go to a British university each year, the environmental exploitation of the islands, and the psychological destruction of those who have lost their true identities by accepting the discrimination of colonialism as a natural state of being. In other words, she begins to see the ties between the oppression of African peoples throughout the Americas. Part One of the novel ends with Sara describing her arduous journey to self-realization. “It would begin with resistance . . . my reluctance to accept that I could not separate myself from what was taking place in America in 1963. That I could not be an outsider. It would be a journey that . . . would link me irreversibly to black America” (120). Readers again witness the ways that the migration scenario provides fertile ground for writers to interrogate the viability of a pan-African identity at the same time that they recognize and celebrate ethnic differences.
Interestingly enough, the site of Avey Johnson’s re-memory is Carriacou, a small island off the coast of Grenada, which also figures prominently in Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982).8 Linda and Byron Lorde, Audre’s parents, emigrate to the United States from Grenada in 1924. The emotional draw toward the home island is powerful for both of them; the narrator, like Marshall’s Selina Boyce with her father, learns: “This now, here [Harlem], was a space, some temporary abode, never to be considered forever nor totally binding nor defining, no matter how much it commanded in energy and attention . . . Someday we would arrive back in the sweet place, back home” (Lorde 13). The words leave Audre in a conundrum because the only place she knows, the land in which she currently resides, is not supposed to be able to define her. In addition, her sense of dislocation is enhanced by her inability to find Carriacou on any map: “so when I hunted for the magic place during geography lessons or in free library time, I never found it, and came to believe my mother’s geography was a fantasy or crazy or at least too old-fashioned” (14). Audre is able to discover Carriacou’s geographical location and latitude only after her twenty-sixth birthday, once she rejects the myth of Return. “I only discovered its latitudes when Carriacou was no longer my home” (256). In this moment, desire, outsiders’ views, and her own self-perception merge together. At the same time, the text ends: “[In Carriacou] it is said that the desire to lie with other women is a drive from the mother’s blood” (256). Thus, Audre’s lesbianism, her Caribbean heritage, and her relationship with her mother all become inseparably entwined and claimed as essential to her life and her identity as an African American subject.9
Similarly, in Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, the reader’s very first impression of protagonist Merle Kimbona embodies cultural amalgamation. A native of the fictional Caribbean Bourne Island, she wears a dress of an “abstract tribal motif . . . which could have been found draped . . . around a West African market woman” and silver earrings engraved with the forms of European saints (4). One learns that she has studied in England, where she married a Ugandan who presently lives with their daughter in his native country. The conclusion of the novel shows her flying to Africa, not by the usual route through the imperial “metropoles” of New York and London, but instead through Trinidad and Brazil, models of cultural creolization, and then Dakar and Kampala.
Marshall’s The Fisher King (2000) continues the theme of connections between populations of African descent around the world. The epigraph – “You got some of all of us in you, dontcha? What you gonna do with all that Colored from all over creation you got in you?” – applies to Sonny Carmichael Payne, the 8-year-old protagonist who is the quintessence of the African diaspora. Sonny is born in France of a Cameroonian father and French-born mother, Jo-Jo, whose own parents were US-born African American ex-patriates. Furthering the migration theme, Jo-Jo’s father’s parents migrated to New York City from the Caribbean and her mother’s parents migrated from the American South. Jo-Jo’s mother’s mother, Florence Varina, was named after the Magnolia Grandiflora tree from Varina, Georgia; her father had travelled north with the tree seed, which survived and flourished in a climate antithetical to its natural environment. The seed functions as a symbol for Sonny as well.
Besides Sonny’s lineage, his desire for connections between his antagonistic US and Caribbean kin makes him a perfect representative of cultural bridges. Interestingly, his foster mother, Hattie, can see some elements of the diaspora in him, but she willfully ignores others; she notes that his face “reflected them all: Sonny-Rett, Cherisse, Jo-Jo. A triple exposure . . . It contained all three of her loves; moreover, it restored them to her intact” (210). She recognizes those who share her American language and culture, as well as her experience as a US expatriate in France, but she erases the African presence of the baby’s father in her description.
Despite Hattie’s anxieties about losing Sonny and the connection to the past that she maintains through him, he cultivates relationships with his great-grandmothers, both of whom disapprove of Hattie – African American Florence on the basis of class, and Caribbean Ulene on the basis of ethnicity. Sonny also fosters individual emotional healing for both Florence and Ulene, as well as the possibility of a relationship between the two, where only discord and strife existed before. Florence asserts that the “flood” of West Indians has ruined the street (41), “[b]ringing down the block, the neighborhood” (70). And in the same way that she blames Ulene for birthing the son, Sonny-Rett, whom she perceives as taking her daughter Cherisse away from her, Ulene blames Florence for the same. The political is revealed as deeply rooted in the personal, but with the potential for birthing creativity and change.
The youngest writer examined here who addresses notions of New World identity through the dynamics of the US contact zone is Edwidge Danticat, who emigrated from Haiti to the States in the early 1980s at the age of 12. A similar migration appears in her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), which details a young girl’s journeys between the Antilles and New York City. Sophie eventually comes to view New York as “a place where you can lose yourself easily” (103) – both in the literal sense of getting physically lost among the buildings, traffic, and crowds of people, and in the metaphorical sense of forgetting one’s roots, culture, and identity, despite the fact that places for connection and reconnection exist. A generation later, Danticat revisits the themes first presented by Paule Marshall. Like Marshall’s Selina Boyce and Ursa MacKenzie, Danticat’s protagonist experiences what might be identified as a pull between the Caribbean, the home of the “soul” and the memory, and the United States, the home of the physical body and everyday life. Also, as in several of Marshall’s works, the sense of dislocation and conflicting ideas of “home” seem integrally connected to the protagonist’s relationships with her mothers, Martine and Tante Atie.
Contemporary US readers might be tempted to read the initial separation between Sophie and Martine as evidence of Martine’s maternal apathy; however, Danticat sets up the novel to reflect the strong communal base of the rural village from which the family comes, the trauma of rape and childbirth that exist as a legacy of slavery in the Caribbean, and the importance of the black family. In other words, the novelist’s descriptions of various aspects of Haitian culture resonate with particular African American traditions and point to a common diasporic culture and its connections to Africa. “Othermothers” help rear children. Sugarcane fieldworkers sing songs in the call-and-response tradition (22). Patrons in a New Jersey Haitian restaurant play the dozens (54), and the van driver on Sophie’s first trip back to Haiti engages in “toasting,” or “speechifying,” revealing traditions of word play and emphasis on mental and verbal wit (93). Villagers express joy and the importance of naming and claiming one’s own body and one’s own children after slavery: “Foi, Hope, Faith, Espérance, Beloved, God-Given, My Joy, First Born, Last Born, Aséfi, Enough-Girls, Enough-Boys, Deliverance, Small Misery, Big Misery, No Misery (6).10 Storytelling holds an essential place in the culture, whether it be to pass down stories of family members and preserve history, unite the community in the “Krik? Krak!” call-and-response mode, reinforce connections to a cultural heritage and African ancestry, or teach morals and lessons. Sophie’s husband Joseph is also key to this theme in the novel; he speaks a Louisiana creole similar to Sophie’s Haitian Creole, and, as a musician, he pursues the links between US spirituals and Latin and island music. He describes spirituals as songs about “going to another world”: “home, Africa . . . Heaven . . . freedom” (215).
Sexuality is another crucial theme running through the novel, and, similar to its function in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, serves the purpose of unifying the black Atlantic. Sophie is severely traumatized by the practice of testing; the narrative thus calls into question the double standard by which sexually active, unmarried men are viewed as experienced while women are comparably perceived as “dirty,” unattractive, and defective. Danticat also explores the way that rape has become a devastating legacy for the black women of her novel. Martine originally tried to abort Sophie after getting raped and impregnated; strikingly, in the same way that Martine murmurs in her sleep during nightmares of the event, her mother Ifé mumbles at night (109), gesturing towards the legacies of sexual abuse. The inheritance of sexual trauma brings to mind more canonical African American novels like Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
Danticat’s protagonist constructs Haiti as a place to which she needs to return in order “to remember” (95). Her phrasing is quite important; she has not claimed it necessary to return permanently, but rather to return temporarily in order to remember her past and her culture. She travels to Haiti on several occasions in order to flee her sexual phobias, marital troubles, and her plagued relationship with her mother. Like the writers discussed before her, Danticat reveals the journey “home” as problematic in that Sophie uses Haiti as a panacea, a hiding place from her relationships. When she returns to Haiti for the first time since her childhood departure, she stays for only a few days. When she travels back to the States, she rejects Joseph’s offer to pick her up from her mother’s house in New York. “It’s better for me if I find my own way back” (186). Not only does the protagonist assert her independence, but she also insists upon her need to complete her journey. She must achieve the full cycle of her life’s voyage: from Haiti to the United States as a child, and now again, as an adult, from Haiti to the United States. Sophie’s migrations are necessary for her being, both as an Americanized Haitian and a Caribbean American.
On a similar note, Martine refuses to travel to Haiti during her life, wishing only to be buried there. The memory that the island prompts is one she struggles against: her return during life would mean being immersed in the reality of her past and living in the memories of rape. She, too, effectively refutes the romantic notion that all ex-isles need to return to the home island for healing, nurturing, and peace.
As the most visible symbol of the presence of Caribbean migrants to the US, public celebrations like the Brooklyn Labor Day Carnival, a lavish display of Caribbean cultural pride, were at one time perceived by US-born black residents as an antagonistic flaunting of ethnic separateness. However, exhibitions of cultural distinctiveness within the black United States need not isolate individual groups and be used to fragment a potentially powerful community. Instead of being read narrowly as a separatist reaction to US African American society, they can be perceived as opposition to the larger – and predominantly white – mainstream American society: the “annual step out of the melting pot.”11 Celebrations can simultaneously function as emblematic of continual self-creation: “a place where West Indian people create themselves: as foreign nationals, as proud citizens of newly decolonized nations, as striving new immigrants, and as black people. The various incarnations . . . have both responded to and created definitions of race, ethnicity, and nation.”12 Recognizing the multiplicity of cultures embedded within “black” America can only enhance our study and understanding of African American literature.
1. Virginia R. Dominguez, From Neighbor to Stranger: The Dilemma of Caribbean Peoples in the United States (New Haven: Yale University Antilles Research Program, 1975), p. 32.
2. Many Americans, for example, do not realize that NBA stars Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Patrick Ewing, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, activist Malcolm X, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, musicians Monty Alexander, Grandmaster Flash, and Grace Jones, actors Sidney Poitier and Cicely Tyson were either born in the Caribbean, or are of Caribbean descent.
3. For a good number of these highly educated, solidly middle-class migrants, however, scorning African Americans for their lack of social status and schooling was not a matter of ethnocentrism and cultural elitism, but rather of socio-economic class. They would likely have scorned lower-class people from their own island societies as well.
4. In the 1920s, organizations such as the West Indian Reform Association and the West Indian Committee on America encouraged Caribbean immigrants to become citizens, even though for many this move entailed a frightening potential loss – of culture, of a particular history, of homeland, and of possible escape.
5. Like Ras, Garvey was a Jamaican activist who emigrated to the US in the early twentieth century, and, during the 1910s and 1920s, attempted to organize people of African descent and foster an awareness and pride in their African cultural roots. Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was founded to mobilize African Americans to resist racial oppression and fight for political and economic self-sufficiency, and general social equality. During the Harlem riots at the end of Ellison’s novel, Ras urges the local residents to stop looting and destroying their own property and take up armed resistance. The carnivalesque atmosphere of the night is epitomized by Ras’s appearance on a stallion and reflects the image of Garvey in fieldmarshal’s uniforms, plumed hats, and scarlet and blue academic robes during public rallies and demonstrations. Garvey’s attempt at signifying an ennobled black race was read as ridiculous and absurd by many, especially those of the black elite. His showiness was praised by Claude McKay, who stated: “Negro art, [certain] critics declare, must be dignified and respectable like the Anglo-Saxon’s before it can be good . . . Happily the Negro retains his joy of living in the teeth of such criticism; and in Harlem . . . in Marcus Garvey’s Hall with its extravagant paraphernalia, in his churches and cabarets, he expresses himself with a zest that is yet to be depicted by a true artist” (Home to Harlem, [Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987], p. xii).
6. The fact that the couple’s perception of Place marks their opposition is crucial. Place is fundamental in the literary tradition of people of the African diaspora, for enslaved ancestors were considered to be property and thus, as critic Sabine Bröck states, “quite literally not allowed to inhabit, let alone own, any physical space.” “Transcending the ‘Loophole of Retreat: Paule Marshall’s Placing of Female Generations,” Callaloo 10.1 (Winter 1987): 79–90, p. 79. For an extended discussion of the subject of Space and Place in Marshall’s novel, see Giselle Liza Anatol, “‘I Going Away, I Going Home’: Mothers and Motherlands in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones,” in Mango Season: Caribbean Women’s Writing, 13.1 (Spring 2000): 43–53.
7. In “Rock-A-Bye Niño: Confessions of a White Mother With a Brown Caregiver,” Mother Jones 16.3 (May/June 1991): 73, Anne Nelson expresses her doubts regarding the possibility of an ethical relationship between “white mother” and “brown caregiver.” She labels any relationship between a white family and an immigrant caregiver of color as “a social relationship that, by its fundamental inequality, presents a dreadful example to the child who is its reason for being” (73).
8. While Zami is categorized as a “biomythography” and not a novel, I would argue that its hybrid form, combining biography, myth, the collective stories of a community of women, and geography, allows for its inclusion here.
9. Audre’s lover Afrekete’s name itself resonates with Africa. In this final relationship, Lorde conveys a strong pan-Africanist message. She is thus able to reject the prejudicial statements against African Americans she heard as a child, when her mother would disdainfully distinguish between Grenadians and “other people.”
10. This scene resonates with one in Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust (Kino International, 1992).
11. Ransford W. Palmer, Pilgrims from the Sun: West Indian Migration to America (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), p. 21.
12. Rachel Buff, Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 117.