[In the following essay, Wilentz examines the writings of Caribbean authors who write in English in relation to the British canon.]

You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse.

Caliban, The Tempest

The issue of canon revision and reconstruction goes well beyond the selection of texts, for as Cary Nelson states in “Against English: Theory and the Limits of Discipline”: “The literary text is defended so as to distract attention from the real object to be protected—the profession of literary studies” (47). To examine Caribbean writers who write in English in relation to the British canon we must understand one of the basic tenets of this canon—that of colonialism and cultural domination. The authors of Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class comment that the whole construct of canon formation was developed “in the establishment of curriculum for imperial dominations. For ‘English Literature’ was born, as a school and college subject, not in England but in the mission schools and training colleges of Africa and India” (Batsleer et al. 23). This “academic terrorism,” as they call it, clearly defines literary canons “not just as selections but as hierarchies. … Beneath the disinterested procedures of literary judgment and discrimination can be discerned the outlines of other, harsher words: exclusion, subjugation, dispossession” (29-30). In relation to the Caribbean, add “colonization and imperialism.”

Bruce Woodcock, in examining Caribbean fiction's challenge to English literature, states that the “great” tradition of English literature ensured that these “emergent literatures … knew their place” and, moreover, that English literature itself constituted “powerful elements of ideological domination” (79). This cultural imperialism and domination came most forcefully in the form of language. Unlike the former colonies in Africa or India, for example, there was no language native to the Caribbean after the almost complete genocide of the Amerindians (the “nation” languages are creoles that blend European with African and other languages); literary language in the Anglophone Caribbean has been restricted, for the most part, to the use of English—the language of the oppressors. Barbadian novelist George Lamming calls the imposition of this foreign language “the first important achievement of the colonizing process” (109). But what we have learned from deconstruction (as well as from African and other philosophies before it) is that not only does a word contain its opposite but language can be the basis for its own opposition.¹

In this essay, I examine how Caribbean writers have disrupted the colonial language and adapted it as a language of opposition, with specific references to first novels of the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris and the Jamaican writer Erna Brodber; moreover, with regard to the question of canonicity, I explore the dialectical relationship between the Caribbean novelists and modernism and how these so-called third-world modernists are exploding Prospero's myth by creating language afresh.

Much of the literature from the Caribbean has been considered difficult because of the lack of linear narrative, the fragmented quality of narrative voice, and the apparent obscurity of the language. Since this essay focuses on the use of language as a way of dismantling the cultural hegemony of the former colonialists, I concentrate on linguistic complexity. To examine language as a profound manifestation of this cultural hegemony, I use, in Raymond Williams's view, the concept of hegemony as beyond the “abstractions of ‘social’ and ‘economic’ experience”; rather, it is “a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves” (Marxism and Literature 110; emphasis added). Moreover, this cultural hegemony “has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes [and races]” (110). For the Caribbean writer, the use of colonial English as linguistically dominant subordinates both the residual indigenous languages/cultures and the emerging “nation” languages/cultures. “Standard” English signifies a history of physical and intellectual servitude.

Certainly, one might conjecture that the difficulty of the writings from much of the Caribbean derives from a lack of knowledge of the Caribbean milieu. The imagery, the social history, and the divergent traditions of the Caribbean do not always offer easy access to the works for non-Caribbean readers, but that difficulty can often be allayed by study of the environment described. The oppositional difficulty of language interpretation in some of the writers, such as George Lamming, Jamaica Kincaid, Edward Brathwaite, and Derek Walcott, as well as Brodber and Harris, extends beyond access to this milieu to the basic contradiction in their use of English—a language, as the poet Marlene Nourbese Philip asserts, “which has sought to deny us” (“Earth and Sound”). John Guillory, in “Canonical and Non-canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate,” sees the issue of language at the heart of class domination: “The internal differentiation of language produced by the classical education system as the distinction between a credentialed and a non-credentialed speech reproduces the social stratification on the model of the distinction between the tribe or nation and its sociolinguistic other, the ‘barbarian’” (501). For the Caribbean writer, along with many other speakers of colonized English, there is complete identification with this dichotomy. They are the barbarians (well beyond class distinctions) who speak the noncredentialed language—these nation languages of pidgin/creole—and must, to be successful, write in the credentialed language of their oppressors.

Ironically, Shakespeare put forth the dynamics of this relationship in The Tempest. In Caribbean writings, as Susan Willis notes, “the plight of Caliban … has come to be associated with all artists from the Third World who must grapple with the languages of their domination” (96). For Caliban, the gift of language is a noose that keeps him enslaved and eternally subjugated. For these writers, the “gift” of Standard English is an internal colonizing tool far more effective than the weapons used for “pacification.” Furthermore, the nation languages, emergent in the Caribbean, have been perceived solely as bastardized forms of English, not only by those who imposed their culture, but also by the colonial subjects who have been instructed by them. In The Pleasures of Exile, Lamming develops his case for Caliban as a symbol of the colonized, reading The Tempest as ideological construct. Clearly the gift that Prospero gives Caliban is no gift! Caliban “can never be regarded as heir of that Language, since his use of Language is no more than his way of serving Prospero; and Prospero's instruction in this language is only his way of measuring the distance which separates him from Caliban” (110). Furthermore, Lamming states that “we shall never explode Prospero's old myth until we christen Language afresh” (118; emphasis added). And this is precisely what Lamming and other Caribbean writers have attempted to do by disrupting the colonial language with its claims to linguistic and cultural superiority.

Marlene Nourbese Philip, born in Tobago, now lives in Canada. Her 1988 unpublished collection of poetry is dedicated to dismantling the colonial hold on her own and others' language, to “deuniversalize” the whole notion of literature, to discharge the canon. In the introduction to She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Breaks Softly, Philip refers to the poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language”:

The poem is sculpted out of the colonial experience—exploitative of people, destruction of mother tongues. … In “Discourse,” by cramping the space traditionally given the poem itself, by forcing it to share its space with something else—an extended image about women, language and silence; with the edicts that established the parameters of silence for the African in the New World, by giving more space to descriptions of the physiology of speech, the scientific legacy of racism we have inherited, and by questioning the tongue as organ and concept, poetry is put in its place. … The canon of objectivity and universality is shifted—I hope permanently disturbed.

(17)

In “Discourse” Philip pushes the colonial discourse of slavery, racial superiority, and language acquisition to the margins of the page, along with what has been formerly marginalized—the image of the mother cleaning her newborn child with her tongue. What is the center of the poem is Philip's own discourse—historically silenced by the cutting out of the tongue—now centered in the page, decentering the historical construct of colonialism and cultural imperialism:

English
is my mother tongue.
A mother tongue is not
not a foreign lan lan lang
language
languish
anguish
—a foreign anguish. …
I have no mother
tongue
no mother to tongue
no tongue to mother
to mother
tongue
me.

(24)

For Philip the lack of a “mother tongue” is related to the loss of a mother's love—witnessed in the tonguing of the newborn child. The silencing of this most primal voice (a mother's words) provokes profound anguish when learning to speak the patriarchal language of the colonial oppressors. Philip concludes this section of the poem, a painful attack on the dominance of Standard English, with the statement, “English / is a foreign anguish,” but tacks on at the end a multiple-choice test forcing us to answer to the physical violence as well as the emotional destruction that has been perpetrated in the name of Western “civilization.” One of the questions, “In man the tongue is—,” demonstrates in the rational mode of Standard British English how biased the answers always are and compels us to reconsider this “scientific racism” by equating “the principal organ of articulate speech” and “the principal organ of oppression and exploitation” with “all of the above” (27). For Philip, as well as for Wilson Harris and Erna Brodber (whose work I discuss later in this essay), the aim is to “interrupt the text and make it totally unmanageable” (“Earth and Sound”). In this case the attack on the hegemony of English language is oppositional; it breaks down the linguistic control that keeps the natives manageable.

Readers versed in the canon of English literature that has symbolized the suppression of oppositional voices might notice a similarity to the modernist movement in Britain and America. And indeed there is a dialectical relationship between what the modernists were attempting to do and what these writers' intentions are. The modernists, through the disruption of narrative structure and often obscure language, aimed to deal with what they saw as a breakdown of culture and the emptiness of ritual. But Richard Poirier makes the point in The Renewal of Literature that some of the modernists saw English as an imperialist language (Joyce being the most obvious example). He comments further: “There is involved here something like a colonial protest against the shapes that language has assumed as it comes forth from England, still the seat of imperial cultural and political authority” (99). There may be a distinction between modernists like Joyce—whose impulse to write comes closer to those from other colonized environments—and High Modernists who bemoaned what they saw as a decline of cultural values. For Joyce, the language of colonial England was representative of the subordination of Irish culture under English control. But the historicity of the situation in Ireland belies easy comparison to imperialism in the New World, since the components of race and slavery do not enter into the colonization of European peoples. In any case, the High Modernists in particular wanted to express their reactions to the loss of culture in narrative structure and in language; the difficulty of modernist language comes out of their desire to “create language afresh,” to use Lamming's term (118). And although the modernists may not have intended it that way, this decentering of these structures led the way for the “potential for dissolution of hierarchy, of rankings of inferiority and superiority” (Drake 171). This potential was taken up in the works of Caribbean writers who translated the concerns of modernism in terms of their own struggle against colonial power. But the relationship is dialectical because, unlike the High Modernists, Caribbean writers did not use modernist structures in their writings because they suffered from the loss of tradition but because they were in fact seeking to overturn that same Western (read: colonial) tradition that sought to subjugate and deny their own cultures' validity. Here antinarrative and modernist language translate into counterhegemonic, anticolonial opposition.

In overturning the imposition of the dominant culture, the Caribbean writers face their most challenging goal in dismantling the language. The correlation between the language developed out of a culture and that society's accepted sense of reality is clearly marked. What better way to ensure that the hegemony of the dominant culture has reached the very depth of being? For the people of the Caribbean, the writers in particular, there is clearly a distortion in this correlation. The literary language available to them reflects the internal domination inscribed in it. For example, the use of “black” as a negative metaphor in the English language is well documented; formerly colonized black people have felt the need to de-Anglicize and deracialize English, as well as find “imaginative coinings of alternative metaphors” (Mazrui 81). This break in the correlation of language and accepted reality—which is at once isolating and subjugating—necessitates revisionist metaphoric activity. The use of metaphor for these writers is directly related to the desire to disrupt the cultural hegemony of the language in which they write: “Metaphoric activity in post-colonial writing is thus likely to be more culturally functional than poetically decorative, more self-consciously concerned with the problem of expressing the new in the language of the old, and more concerned with the importance of language, art, literature not just as expressions of new perception or paradox, but as active agents in the reconstitution of the colonial psyche, fragmented, debilitated, or apparently destroyed by the imperial process” (Tiffin 16; emphasis added).

Both Wilson Harris in Palace of the Peacock and Erna Brodber in Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home have chosen to use the novel, a bourgeois construct, as their medium to question the hegemony of the language in which they write. Like the modernists, they have chosen to disrupt the basic tenets of this genre, but with a difference: these novelists reflect the concerns of their non-Western, ethnically diverse and colonized cultures by rejecting the conventions of the novel in narrative structure, time/space relations, and the use of language. Harris, a Guyanese novelist, philosopher, and critic who has lived much of his adult life in Britain, is clearly a “Third World modernist,” as Sandra Drake terms it (6), who gathers up aspects from all the cultures that form the Caribbean and disrupts the hegemony of the colonizer's dominant ideology. His eclectic portrayal of the Guyanese landscape and society illustrates modernist attributes; he is considered a very difficult writer because his language, structure, and thematic concerns attempt to dislodge the hegemony of the European culture to expose what is “other” in the dominant ideal. In his critical essay “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” Harris states that “to a major extent, we are dominated by what I would call a homogeneous imperative. We are dominated by that, and therefore we fail to see that the homogeneous imperative very often masks or conceals from us the ‘heterogeneous roots’ of a community” (Explorations 57). By focusing on these heterogeneous roots of colonized cultures, Harris dislodges hegemonic discourse that attempts to “homogenize all differences” (JanMohamed 10). Moreover, he thrusts together the dominant, the residual, and the emergent cultures that make up the controlling and oppositional modes encoded in what Abdul JanMohamed calls “hegemonic colonialization” (8). Harris makes considerable effort in his writings not to project an emergent culture as the answer to hegemonic colonialism—a culture that would become yet another hegemony, denying its own heterogeneous roots.

In examining Palace of the Peacock, Anthony Boxill misses the subtlety of Harris's vision by commenting that, while other West Indian writers are concerned with issues such as “racial prejudice and colonialism,” Harris takes “the time to think about the deeper meaning of human existence” (383). For him, the meaning of human existence is directly tied to the trauma of the Middle Passage and the cultures that disappeared under the oppression of the European colonists. In his imaginative fiction, Harris strives to break through the conventions of Western thought to unmask what has heretofore been suppressed. This apparent metonymic notion of what he calls “partiality” underscores the limitations of a unified vision.² By disrupting this vision and exposing the other, he reveals the potential for a “meaningful dialogue” between oppressed and dominant cultures.

In “The Complexity of Freedom,” Harris emphasizes the necessity of a new language within literature to begin a dialogue of mutuality between formerly hierarchized groups: “What is required at a certain level—if a new dialogue is to begin to emerge—is a penetration of partial images, not a submission to the traditional reinforcement of partiality into total or absolute institution; partiality may begin to declare itself for what it is and to acquire a re-creative susceptibility to otherness in a new and varied evolution of community within a fabric of images in fiction and drama” (Explorations 116). Harris's literary technique, mirroring his worldview, disrupts linear narrative and expresses through his language and imagery the possibility of a world in which no image is sovereign, no culture supreme, and no word a static fact.

Palace of the Peacock is Wilson Harris's first novel, and it was in writing this novel that he initially grappled with the problem of presenting the Guyanese landscape in the language of Britain. For the reasons discussed above, as well as the violent difference of the geographic world he hoped to write about, Harris found himself forced to disrupt and transform the imperial language of the colonizers. He explained during a seminar at the University of Texas in 1982: “I had to unlearn what I had learned. I could not just write ‘The river is dark; the trees are green.’ One of the tasks that began to haunt me personally is how to write that.”³ Here is an example of how Harris is relearning the language to convey the depth of this landscape and worldview he perceived within the rich Caribbean forest:

The solid wall of trees was filled with ancient blacks of shadow and with gleaming hinges of light. Wind rustled the leafy curtains through which the masks of living beard dangled as low as the water and the sun. … The whispering trees spun their leaves to a sudden fall wherein the ground seemed to grow lighter in my mind and to move to meet them in the air. The carpet on which I stood had an uncertain place within splintered and timeless roots whose fibre was stone in the tremulous ground. I lowered my head a little, blind almost, and began forcing a path into the trees away from the river's opening and side.

A brittle moss and carpet appeared underfoot, a dry pond and stream whose course and reflection and image had been stamped for ever like the breathless outline of a dreaming skeleton in the earth.

(Palace 26-27)

In relearning the language, Harris works out of a conviction that the sovereign notion of a nature that “man” can understand and control limits our vision. For Harris, metaphor is a force that mediates “with ‘unstructured’ intensity between all partial structures” denied in the dominant vision (“Myth and Metaphor” 2). The imagery of this scene described by the I-narrator (who is nameless and half-blind) reflects the very partiality of the ground on which we stand—partial because, like the narrator, human vision of the universe is necessarily limited and because the homogeneous imperative has further tunneled our vision. Harris disrupts our constructs of earth and sky as he writes of the ground growing lighter and meeting the falling leaves in the air. The hanging moss becomes “living beard” and takes on another life that the men of the crew must deal with, disturbing the order they have imposed on the forest. Furthermore, the lost, betrayed, and vanquished worlds remain imprinted—“the breathless outline of a dreaming skeleton in the earth.”

For Harris, this awareness of the partiality of nature mediates our vision and also shows us how to bear the beauty and the infinite terror that surrounds us. Much of the background and memory of the novel comes from Harris's own voyages into the Amazon basin as a surveyor. The landscape is excruciatingly beautiful yet treacherous; a small stone jutting above the water might conceal jagged rocks to tear a boat and its inhabitants to pieces. This affinity of beauty and terror led Harris to question sovereign views of nature and humanity. The conquistador presumption that nature is there to be ravaged is violently shaken by the river's response. In this world, clarity is deceptive; the conquering notion is turned in on itself, since it is the power of nature to ravage those who appear dominant. On a symbolic as well as a literal level, in the novel it is precisely the deceptive moment of calm—unexpected—that is most treacherous. In fact, the appearance of calm and the image of dominancy is only partial. This partiality reflects the gap in hegemonic colonialism, since “no dominant culture in reality exhausts the full range of human practice,” no matter how complete the appearance of hegemony (Williams, “Base and Superstructure” 386). Each one of the partial images, residual within the dominant ideal, betrays a world barely glimpsed and contains traces of vanquished cultures, since the reduction of nature coalesces with the domination and virtual genocide of the Amerindians. Undefined by either a sovereign view or a linear sense of time/space, the landscape becomes a lived resistance that maps out the potential for dialogue between oppressed and dominant cultures where before there was merely conquest.

In the novel, the dialectic of conquest and potential dialogue is replayed. An ethnically mixed crew under the leadership of the conquistador Donne follows the Amerindian folk, the Arawaks (an ethnic group practically exterminated by the Europeans), upriver to force them to work as cheap labor on Donne's plantation. Throughout the treacherous journey, the crew, including Donne and his weakened half-brother, the narrator, are stripped of their imperialist desires, and they must search for spiritual self-realization and for the “other” that is in them. At the end of the journey is the Palace of the Peacock, a towering waterfall. In this section, “Paling of Ancestors,” Harris disrupts the hierarchical associations of dominant discourse by “miniaturizing” the symbols of European hegemony and elevating those of the vanquished cultures so that there is mutuality.⁴ His language is fluid and open-ended, resisting static interpretation. Symbols purported to be absolute in Western culture become partial images in the palace, toppling this false hegemony without replacing it with another. Seen through one of the waterfall windows of the palace is the carpenter Christ painting the world. In the next window are the madonna and child—but the language reconstructs and, on second look, the madonna is Donne's abused mistress, Mariella of the folk, as well as a venerable Arawak woman muse, both old and young, who is forced to guide the crew on its journey. This deity of Amerindian mythology shares the palace with the son of Christianity, as does Anancy, the West African spider figure (Anancy, whom I examine more fully in relation to Jane and Louisa, is an archetypal figure in West Africa and the Caribbean). What has hitherto been perceived as hegemonic becomes merely one strain in the heterophony of cultural discourse. For Harris, these symbols represent interrelationship of the dominant and the repressed inscribed in our language, and they are blended, breaking through the bonds of a hegemonic worldview. His language is not “hierarchized explanation but non-hierarchized parallel possibility”; through it he “seeks to ‘wrench the world out of its old status’” (Drake 178, 184).

It is of paramount importance to Harris to resist the linguistic impulse to allow a residual or emerging culture to become the dominant one—thus reformulating an imposed unity, replacing one hegemonic structure by another. By forcing the language to include not only its opposite but other variations of itself, Harris compels us to perceive our world (all our worlds) as partial, without a governing dominant ideal. This move toward mutuality, which Harris sees played out within a linguistic context, calls into question the Hegelian notion of the “unified spirit” as well as the dichotomy of subject and object.⁵ Implicit in this worldview, although Harris does not mention this specifically, is a total disruption of even the notion of a canon, since its hegemonic method of selection serves to hierarchize and to exclude.

For Harris, even the indigenous cultures of the Caribbean have encoded within them the possibility for another hegemonic absolute; therefore, his discourse is eclectic, expansive, and unresolved. But other writers, resisting the anguish of colonial imposition, see their opposition as centered in residual African culture and the emerging indigenous “nation” cultures. Erna Brodber, a Jamaican sociologist and novelist, has been compared to Harris in both the difficulty and significance of her work. “Probably no one else in the West Indies, apart from Wilson Harris,” claims reviewer Jean Pierre Durix, “has revolutionized the art of fiction as much as Erna Brodber in Jane and Louisa.” Brodber's work is grounded in the Jamaica in which she was brought up and still lives. Over a decade after Harris's novel was published, Brodber's examination of cultural conflict, the hegemony of European culture, and the reconciliation of self and society is more specific, less theoretical than his. Moreover, her own resistance to hegemonic colonialism arises from her identification with the indigenous Jamaican cultural milieu and its nation language.

Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Brodber's first novel, has similarities with others by Afro-Caribbean novelists, particularly women; it is semi-autobiographical and features a young woman narrator, Nellie, who comes to terms with the conflict of cultures through an understanding of personal and community history—in her case, through violently fragmented childhood memories. The novel reflects the feminist adage that the personal is the political, and Nellie's growth as a woman and sexual being mirrors the development of her identity, as Jimmy Cliff sings it, as “a true-born Jamaican.” Furthermore, this growth is connected to her throwing off the disfiguring mask of the dominant culture. Brodber, who is an activist, sees her fiction writing as “part of my sociological methods” (“Fiction”). She says that through her fiction she provides “information with which those of the diaspora can find out about themselves.”

The few critics who have written on Jane and Louisa point to the personal development of the character of Nellie in relation to the theme of “alienation and historical trauma” (Cobham 33). The novel is a layered bildungsroman that centers on the transformation of Nellie's confused sexual and cultural identity at the beginning to her growing understanding of her own, her family's, and her country's trauma of separation from the African aspects of their heritage and the glorification of the dominant European ones. Particularly at the beginning, the novel is extremely difficult to understand since it is narrated by Nellie, who is having a psychological breakdown. It becomes more coherent toward the end as Nellie begins to tie in all the strands of her past life with the help of her Rastafarian friend Baba's “folk psychiatry.” This movement toward wholeness, which reflects the changes in Nellie's personal development, also functions linguistically in terms of Brodber's disruption of the alien use of English as her medium for writing. Like the works of Wilson Harris and others, Brodber's novel lacks a coherent notion of chronological time. It makes extensive use of metaphor—especially the image of the kumbla, the cocoon of the august worm—and for the most part presents us with disembodied voices of the Jamaican scene that we as readers must unravel.

As Harris's work focuses outward to wrestle with the partiality of our universe by dislodging notions of cultural hegemony, Brodber turns inward and strips away layers of domination to reconstruct a language determined by cultures formerly denied. The opening paragraph of “Voices,” the first section of the novel, presents no specific characters and little of the narrator Nellie, just an undetermined “we” whose colors are metaphors for the class and race conflicts in Jamaica: “So we were brown, intellectual, better and apart, two generations of lightening blue-blacks and gracing elementary schools with brightness. The cream of the earth, isolated, quadroon, mulatto, Anglican. But we had two wiry black hands up to the elbows in khaki suds” (Jane and Louisa 7). As readers, we are unclear who the “we” are, and whether the “two wiry black hands” belong to one of the “we” or to a darker-skinned mother/grandmother whose hands wash clothes in dirty water the color of these children's skin (ironically, khaki is a name for the light-skinned). But it is evident, without our knowledge of who is speaking or where the scene takes place, that light-skinned children are privileged, on the one hand, yet their coloring is metaphorically that of dirty water, on the other. The disembodied “we” of the opening paragraph speak in Standard English, but much of the language of the novel is in Jamaican pidgin or “nation” language. It is one way the reader divines who is speaking, but it is also representative of the class- and race-bound society of Jamaica.

This linguistic spectrum, related to the class structures imposed by the former colonialists and the neocolonialists, illustrates Brodber's resistance to the dominance of Standard Jamaican English. The tension between the upwardly mobile khakis whose English is a source of pride and the darker-skinned folk who detest the pretension of these speakers, yet are painfully aware of their privilege, is played out in the narrator's consciousness. Here the incoherence of the language and the disembodied voices present English as an anguish to the narrator. Nellie's movement toward psychic wholeness also is one toward a less disruptive, more holistic language—at once Carib-centric and feminist—blending oral traditions and childhood memories, as Nellie takes her first tentative steps out of the kumbla.

The main character takes us along a spiral backward into her life—from her detached memories of Jamaica and overseas, to her breakdown while working with an activist Marxist group, and finally to her spiritual healing through the help of her childhood friend Baba. As readers we have to reconstruct the narrative as Nellie reconstructs the language. What has been learned—the privilege of “correct” English, which is also a curse—must be unlearned. And it is this unlearning that begins to free Nellie as it confounds the reader. Her childhood memories are metaphors that sift through disjointed scenes. The safety of the mother's love becomes evident although there is no mention of a mother: “Ever see a fowl sitting on eggs in cold December rain. We knew the warmth and security of those eggs in the dark of her bottom” (9). The image also calls forth the precariousness of their position, perched between two hostile cultures. Her awakened sexuality is twisted into horror by repressive Anglican values and her confused sense of cultural identity: “You feel shame and you see your mother's face and you hear her scream and you feel the snail what she sees making for your mouth. One long nasty snail, curling up, straightening out to show its white underside that the sun never touches” (28).

The sexual metaphor of the snail is clear enough, but what adds to the linguistic complexity of this passage, whether what it represents is real or imagined, is that the underside of the snail also exposes another penetration—that of white domination. Throughout the novel, the adult Nellie and the child Nellie clash; only in the final section, which shares the book's title, does a strong, clear voice emerge. This section is Nellie's generational, historical recounting of her family's and her nation's past.

The central metaphor of the final section is the kumbla, presented in the traditional Anancy story “Go eena Kumbla.” Anancy, the trickster spider who shares Harris's Palace with Christ, has a powerful presence in the Caribbean. In “The Metaphor of Anancy in Caribbean Literature,” Helen Tiffin comments that for Caribbean writers, Anancy “becomes a very complex metaphor and archetype for the Caribbean experience” (17); on the one hand, Anancy represents “the fossilized past of the colonized,” and on the other, it is “a possible source of fresh creative energy” (35). The Anancy story of the kumbla creates a similar dialectic in Jane and Louisa. In the story, Anancy and his children are caught stealing fish from the powerful Dryhead. To save his children from being eaten, Anancy hides the others and takes only his eldest son with him to face their captors. Anancy calls forth his “children,” one at a time; each time the eldest son comes forward disguised as one of his siblings, and each time Anancy shouts a supposed curse, “You face favor … go eena kumbla,” which means for the son to “change colour” and disguise himself as yet another of the “children.” Dryhead finally allows Anancy to leave only with his eldest son, but in fact all the children are saved (123-30).

In the Anancy story, the kumbla works as a protective covering that fools the enemy. Nellie's kumbla, a symbolic rendering of the worm's white cocoon, is also a disguise; it is a “round seamless calabash that protects you without caring” (123). It is a metaphor for the way that Caribbean women protect their children against the pain of their existence—against the poor and darker, as well as the well-off and lighter. For young girls, the kumbla is also used as a way to protect them against the onslaught of male aggression (or even their own sexual yearnings). But while the kumbla protects, it can also “disfigure” (Cobham 34). After narrating the Anancy story, Nellie exposes the kumbla's limitations: “But the trouble with the kumbla is the getting out of the kumbla. It is a protective device. If you dwell too long in it, it makes you delicate. Makes you an albino: skin white but not by genes. Vision extra-sensitive to the sun and blurred without spectacles. Baba and Alice urged me out of mine. Weak thin, tired like a breach baby” (Jane and Louisa 130). The dialectic of this protective, yet disfiguring, device reflects Nellie's predicament as a middle-class Caribbean woman. As Yakemi Kemp notes, “Nellie wants both the oneness with the community and the affluence of the middle-class but cannot reconcile the conflicting values represented by the two” (26). And this conflict is most clearly played out in relation to language, and in some instances to the lack of words.

Nellie receives no valid explanation from her family about her noticeable growth into womanhood, protected by the kumbla of cryptic words. The silences of her family's past, particularly the half-told story of her Aunt Beca, who aborts her baby because it may come out too dark, weigh on her ability to communicate. The image of the snail, as noted above, evokes violent sexual objects—tongues and penises; the response to Nellie's sexual awareness is “Vomit and bear it!” (Jane and Louisa 28). All around her, Nellie witnesses the silences imposed by the conflict of gender, color, and class-bound language, determined by the standard dialect of schooled Jamaican English, and as she returns from abroad she sees people “waiting. Perhaps for language” (41). She is disturbed by these silences and by the lack of a language to represent her nation, a language that is not class and race bound. Even the words of liberation from her political group come in “an unknown tongue … words like ‘underdevelopment’, ‘Marx’, ‘cultural pluralism’” (46). The dichotomy of the community-born pidgin, informed by residual African languages, and the dominance of the colonial Standard English leaves no voice for Nellie to speak as herself. This dis-ease is most evident in her great-grandmother Tia who marries the white William, “spouting khaki children” (136). Tia represents the most damaging aspects of European hegemonic colonialism in that she “had built a fine and effective kumbla out of William's skin” (142). The kumbla, initially used to protect, becomes a symbol of deformed cultural identity. Tia helps develop a new hegemony—that of upper-class, light-skinned Jamaicans—from which she is excluded. She makes herself disappear so that her children (the khaki ones) can make their way into this dominant culture. The white, finely spun kumblas she builds for her children isolate them from her, and she rejects the one daughter who refuses to deny her maternal heritage. Tia's success in spinning kumblas around her children is evident in the use of language: “Tia wanted it so that with a snap of her fingers she could disappear and her children would loom large in their place in the sun. The stranger the words her children spoke, the happier she felt” (139; emphasis added). Their place in the sun, obviously the world of the aspiring bourgeois Jamaicans, has no room for the black Tia, thus severing the most primal bonding of mother to child as well as denying African heritage and community.

Nellie, a direct descendant of these generational kumblas, has to re-create language to be able to reintegrate into her culture without losing other aspects of herself. Nellie's reordering of language and history is the linguistic thrust of the novel. Her ability to feel comfortable in a language is like her first tentative steps out of the kumbla. She lets Baba guide her healing process because “I knew Baba's past. He knew mine. On this we shared a common language” (67). Her aim to have her language reflect her cultural identity and break away from the imposition of the dominant culture's loaded words echoes Caliban's. In response to Baba's prodding Nellie out of her kumbla, she reacts and curses at him. She stops and says, “I have been talking aloud. Is that me? with such expressions. Am I a fishwife?” Baba answers, “Yes it is you. You have found your language” (71). Nellie's growth is directly related to her ability to speak language anew.

By the end of the novel, Nellie is retelling her family history/herstory in her own personal/“nation” language. Unlike Harris, Brodber moves toward reconciliation, rejecting the idea that new ways of speaking may produce new hegemonies. The oral traditions of her African ancestors blended with the English (subdued, nonhierarchical) of her European ancestors produces a language and structure that is the most cohesive in the novel. But the readers have had to relearn the language as well to hear Nellie's story. “Vulnerable as a premature worm,” Nellie finds her story strengthened by the now known “wiry black hands” of her Granny Tucker (146). Nellie reconciles the khaki and black ancestors, moving deftly from Standard Jamaican English to the nation language of Creole. This movement toward reconciliation of the different aspects of her culture is inscribed in a language that has been feminized and Africanized. The end of the novel is chantlike, partial (to use Wilson Harris's term); and the last line, “We are getting ready” (147), implies an open resolution—a stepping out of the kumbla, not just for Nellie, but for her nation.

From Caliban to the Caribbean writers, the domain of language as dialectically encoded domination and resistance is of paramount importance. Whether returning to residual cultures to liberate the language, like Brodber, or drawing from the whole universe of inscribed meanings, like Harris, these writers present language as integral to the creation of emerging culture(s), counterhegemonic and nonhierarchical. Learning this language of opposition is part of the mandate of these Caribbean writers—language that is no longer Anglo-supreme, no longer supportive of empire. The power of English as a canonical language may have appeared as a kumbla with some protection and possibility of publication, but in fact it has been a suffocating cocoon that disfigured some and silenced others, marginality inscribed in its discourse. The language that so carelessly structures our ways of thinking and seeing—and my own words here—is transformed by the Caribbean writers so as to contain their own world(s) by disrupting the domain of Prospero. By questioning the hegemonic colonialism of the very language we write in, Philip, Harris, and Brodber, among others, force confrontation with the dominant structures of new-world societies and create language afresh as a way of dehierarchizing it.

Notes

1. See, for example, Jacques Derrida's “Difference” (129-60). For an excellent discussion of this opposition within the context of Igbo cosmology, see Achebe.

2. Although Harris's concept of partiality appears to be a form of metonymy, it actually deconstructs the terms since, for Harris, no “whole” exists.

3. I am extremely grateful to Wilson Harris for helping me formulate my thoughts on this novel through long conversations and two formal seminars at the University of Texas, spring 1982 and 1983.

4. For a more in-depth examination of this aspect of the novel, see Wilentz.

5. Like Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno, Harris implicitly critiques Hegel's dialectics and the notion of the transcendent. For a further examination of the constant sense of nonidentity in identity, the other in the dominant ideal, see Adorno.

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