Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text; Essays on Caribbean Women's Writing

By Cristina Herrera and Paula Sanmartín

While scholarship on Caribbean women’s literature has grown into an established discipline, there are not many studies explicitly connected to the maternal subject matter, and among them only a few book-length texts have focalized motherhood and maternity in writings by Caribbean women. Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text: Essays on Caribbean Women’s Writing encourages a crucial dialogue surrounding the state of motherhood scholarship within the Caribbean literary landscape, to call for attention on a theme that, although highly visible, remains understudied by academics. While this collection presents a similar comparative and diasporic approach to other book-length studies on Caribbean women’s writing, it deals with the complexity of including a wider geographical, linguistic, ethnic and generic diversity, while exposing the myriad ways in which Caribbean women authors shape and construct their texts to theorize motherhood, mothering, maternity, and mother-daughter relationships.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781772580273

Cristina Herrera

Cristina Herrera is professor and director of the Chicanx/Latinx Studies Program at Portland State University. She is author of ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature: Brown and Nerdy and Welcome to Oxnard: Race, Place, and Chicana Adolescence in Michele Serros’s Writings. She is also coeditor (with Trevor Boffone) of Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature, published by University Press of Mississippi.

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READING/SPEAKING/WRITING

THE MOTHER TEXT

Essays on Caribbean Women’s Writing

READING/SPEAKING/WRITING

THE MOTHER TEXT

Essays on Caribbean Women’s Writing

EDITED BY

CRISTINA HERRERA AND PAULA SANMARTÍN

DEMETER PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Demeter Press

Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Financé par la gouvernement du Canada

Demeter Press

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Printed and Bound in Canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Reading/speaking/writing the mother text : essays on Caribbean women’s writing / editors, Cristina Herrera and Paula Sanmartín.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-926452-70-8 (paperback)

1. Caribbean literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism. 2. Caribbean literature -- History and criticism. 3. Motherhood in

literature. 4. Mothers in literature. I. Herrera, Cristina (Chicano

studies professor), author, editor II. Sanmartín, Paula, author, editor

PN849.C3R42 2015 809’.8928709729 C2015-905625-X

To all Caribbean women

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction:

The Poetics of Motherhood and Maternity

in Caribbean Women’s Writing

Paula Sanmartín and Cristina Herrera

I.

ON BEING A MOTHER:

CHALLENGING MOTHERHOOD AND THE MOTHER

AS OTHER

1.

Accepting a Daughter:

Gisèle Pineau’s L’espérance-macadam,

Abigail L. Palko

2.

Or Not to Mother?

Astrid Roemer’s Lijken op liefde (Looks Like Love)

Doris Hambuch

3.

My Destiny Was to Come to this Island:

Maternal Rejection and Colonization in

Esmeralda Santiago’s Conquistadora

Cristina Herrera

II

MATRILINEALISM AND MATERNAL LEGACIES

4.

Memory, Myth and History in Shara McCallum’s

Mother/Daughter Poems

Adrienne McCormick

5.

From Australian Whiteness to Caribbean Self:

Maryse Condé’s Matrilineal Family Narrative of Identity Detection

Amy Lee

III

MOTHERLY, DAUGHTERLY VOICES AND HERSTORIES

6.

My Mama Had a Story:

Mothers and Intergenerational Relations in Andrea Levy’s Fiction Charlotte Beyer

7.

Palè Andaki:

Genre, History and Mother-Daughter Doublespeak

in Edwidge Danticat’s Fiction

Angeletta KM Gourdine

8.

Sharing the (M)Other’s Text:

Mother-Daughter Relationships in

Black Cuban Women’s Talking Texts

Paula Sanmartín

IV

TROUBLING MOTHERHOOD:

MATERNAL ABSENCE, REJECTION, AND VIOLENCE

9.

She Had Put the Servant in Her Place:

Sexual Violence and Generational Social Policing between

Women in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable

Amy K. King

10.

Loss of Mother, Loss of Self:

Orphanhood in Jamaica Kincaid’s

The Autobiography of My Mother

Daniel Arbino

11.

Motherhood by Default:

Rethinking the Patriarchal Family in Gisèle Pineau’s Novels

Florence Ramond Jurney

About the Contributors

Acknowledgements

Our collection has been the result of a long, arduous process, which included several calls for papers, as the project changed form due to the vast differences in the number of contributions we received addressing the different areas of the Caribbean. As we navigated the difficulties of trying to adapt to the limitations we faced, while remaining ambitious in our scope, we wish to thank our contributors for their work and patience with us throughout the editorial process.

The support we received from Demeter Press and her editor in chief, Dr. Andrea O’Reilly, was also crucial for the successful completion of this project: from the moment she believed in our book proposal, Andrea was a constant source of encouragement throughout the challenges we encountered. The editorial team at Demeter Press needs also to be acknowledged and praised for their expertise and professionalism, with a particular mention to Katherine Barrett’s copyediting skills.

As we have completed this collection while being faculty members at California State University, Fresno, we need to recognize the university’s support through the Provost Research/Creative Awards, which we both received in several continuous semesters in order to dedicate time to work on this project. In this sense, the two different Departments we belong to, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures and Chicano and Latin American Studies, also helped us to be able to do research for the collection as we were awarded course releases.

And finally, we need to thank our source of inspiration, those Caribbean women the writers we study write about. We hope to have shown how motherhood constitutes a fundamental theme in the work of Caribbean women authors, a theme that needs to be a further source of study connecting different areas of scholarship.

A different—but not least important—source of inspiration has come from our family members and loved ones, who also need to be thanked and acknowledged, as their support and trust in our abilities has been essential in leading this project to good completion.

Introduction

The Poetics of Motherhood and Maternity

in Caribbean Women’s Writing

PAULA SANMARTÍN AND CRISTINA HERRERA

The concept of voicelessness necessarily informs any discussion of Caribbean women and literature. It is a crucial consideration because it is out of this voicelessness and consequent absence that an understanding of our creativity in written expression emerges. By voicelessness, we mean the historical absence of a specifically female position on major issues such as slavery, colonialism, decolonization, women’s rights and more direct social and cultural issues.

—Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido,

Out of the Kumbla (1)

IN THEIR 1990 SCHOLARLY COLLECTION entitled Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, editors Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido documented the need to unearth Caribbean women’s voices within the racialized and gendered discourses of power that have silenced this group. More than twenty years later, this study’s goal resonates highly with our own collection’s aim, namely to expose the myriad ways in which Caribbean women authors shape and construct their texts to theorize motherhood, mothering, maternity, and mother-daughter relationships. Even as we are indebted to such an important collection, a telling aspect of Caribbean women’s lives, the role of motherhood, is mostly missing in Davis and Fido’s collection, with only one chapter dedicated to this theme. It would seem apt that in a project dedicated to undoing historical, social, and literary silences of Caribbean women, the voices and experiences of mothers would factor within such a scope, given that for most (if not all) women living in this region and in the diaspora, some relationship to maternity, be it as a mother, daughter, or surrogate mother, is an important element of their daily, lived experiences.¹ It is this still enduring theoretical absence that our collection seeks to address.

Academic emphasis on postcolonial and diaspora writers, (black) women’s writing, and Caribbean literature came to fruition in the 1970s and 1980s. In the decades since the appearance of Davis and Fido’s work, Caribbean women’s literature flourished into an established discipline, with the publication of several studies, such as Joan Anim-Addo’s Framing the Word: Gender and Genre in Caribbean Women’s Writing (1996); Catherine Davies’s A Place in the Sun? Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Cuba (1997); Janice Lee Liddell and Yakini Belinda Kemp’s Arms Akimbo: Africana Women in Contemporary Literature (1999); Claudette William’s Charcoal and Cinnamon: The Politics of Color in Spanish Caribbean Literature (2000); Emilia Ippolito’s Caribbean Women Writers: Identity and Gender (2000); Carine M. Mardorossian’s Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism (2005). Yet, while a search reveals well over four hundred titles related in some way to the study of Caribbean women’s texts, only a handful is explicitly connected to the maternal subject matter, and among them only a few book-length studies have focalized motherhood and maternity in writings by Caribbean women. Among the latter, we can highlight Susheila Nasta’s Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia (1991); Simone Alexander’s Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (2001); Caroline Rody’s The Daughter’s Return: African-American and Caribbean Women’s Fictions of History (2001); Verena Theile and Marie Drews’ collection, Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in the Twentieth Century (2009), and Paula Sanmartín’s Black Women as Custodians of History: Unsung Rebel (M)Others in African American and Afro-Cuban Women’s Writing (2014). As the titles showcase, these are mostly comparative studies with an emphasis on Afro-descendant women authors. In addition, the majority of the writers studied belong to Anglophone and to a lesser degree Francophone Caribbean literature, leaving the Dutch and Spanish Caribbean as underexplored fields of study.

It is not for lack of literary works that include the subject of mothering and motherhood in Caribbean women’s literature that this subject is still vastly overlooked in recent scholarship. As the chapters in our collection show, motherhood has been a consistent theme in writings by Caribbean women, even in texts where motherhood and mothering do not appear in their most overt sense, as in the case of works that feature non-biological mothers engaging in radical acts of (other)mothering.² One seemingly simple question thus arises: if indeed Caribbean women’s writing is wrought with maternal imagery, why have so few scholars investigated this worthy subject? Could this lack of scholarship be a result of secondwave feminism that theorized motherhood as an impediment to full female agency and autonomy?³ We pose this question to encourage a crucial dialogue surrounding the state of motherhood scholarship within the Caribbean literary landscape, to call for attention on a theme that, although highly visible in writings, remains understudied by academics.

Reading Caribbean women’s texts through the specific lens of motherhood and maternity demonstrates how the authors engage in critical dialogues that are pertinent to several other fields, such as Diaspora Studies. In this sense, one of the most explored subjects in the analysis of Caribbean women’s literature is the revision and rewriting of official discourses, in the context of postcolonial studies and/or gender studies. Indeed, as Davies and Fido argued, Caribbean women’s writing … has to be understood first within the context of the various imperialist discourses and then against them as a rewriting of those discourses (2). A Caribbean daughter’s relationship to her mother, according to Simone Alexander, determines her relationships with the motherland and, to a lesser extent, with the mother country (18), and in fact, this Caribbean maternal relationship can be classified as a colonized relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in which the (powerful) mother fits the profile of a colonizer and the (powerless) daughter is the colonized (Alexander 19).

However, as our collection shows, discussing Caribbean women’s literature as merely a rewriting of imperialist discourses that deal with the relationship between the colonizer and the empire would be an oversimplification. In this sense, for example, Haitian and Jamaican female writers present a different conflictive relationship with the colonizer than Cuban women authors in the island show in their texts: in the latter case, nationalistic debate often discusses Hispanic versus African heritage in Cuba rather than the concept of an imperialist Spanish motherland. Such instances demonstrate the need to be more specific when using the term Caribbean to refer to the West Indies. Despite the commonalities in the islands’ past histories of national formation in connection with the African diaspora, our collection demonstrates the need for awareness when dealing with the dialectic of unity and diversity that characterizes the Caribbean archipelago. In this sense, the collection has attempted to showcase the texts’ original languages and racial characterizations while also identifying each author’s national origin.

Another area of exploration for Caribbean women authors is their formal experimentation through the search for a language that can adequately convey their thoughts. Susheila Nasta posits that motherhood and maternity feature prominently in Caribbean women’s writing out of a need to demythologize the illusion of the colonial ‘motherland’ or ‘mothercountry’ and the parallel movement to rediscover, recreate and give birth to the genesis of new forms and new languages of expression (xix). Unlike most book-length studies on the subject of Caribbean women’s literature, which have focused on one genre (usually fiction),⁴ the chapters in Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text include genres ranging from fiction to testimonio, from historical novels to fictionalized memoirs and poetry. A common thread apparent through this diversity of genres is the authors’ efforts to revise history through their literary works. Regarding this issue, Rody argues that the maternal relationship holds great significance for Caribbean women writers seeking to reimagine and reclaim the past:

Caribbean women writers figure their creative relationships to the past by means of the unconventional, feminist story of a daughter’s return to repair a severed matrilineage. Asserting daughterhood to history in the form of a feminist family romance, these writers claim a most intimate, authoritative relationship to a maternal past, declaring themselves history’s legitimate heirs. (6)

With regards to the theoretical background behind the chapters included in the collection, it is obvious that seminal texts such as Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) and Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978) are still staples highly employed in the study of this subject, for instance helping scholars discuss differences between motherhood and mothering, patriarchy and the mother’s role, and the mother/daughter bond. More recent names, like that of Andrea O’Reilly, are also appearing as part of the conversation, while poststructuralist theories often used in gender studies, such as Julia Kristeva’s, and postcolonial and race theories, such as those of Edouard Glissant and Henry Louis Gates Jr., are applied to the analysis of several of the works. Finally, African American and Afro-Caribbean women scholars (Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Gloria Wade-Gayles, Carole Boyce Davies) are mentioned frequently throughout the collection in an effort to appropriately consider the inclusion of gender, ethnicity, and race in the study of this literature.

As the previously named studies by Nasta, Alexander, and Rody suggest, the maternal relationship foregrounds complex discussions around identity, motherland, history, memory, and voice. These multifaceted representations of motherhood and maternal relationships—(dis)empowering, problematic, violent, silenced, prejudiced, loving, nurturing, or ambivalent—are at the core of the literary works explored in this collection. The tropes of motherhood and daughterhood thus become the means by which to legitimize the legacies of Caribbean women that have been silenced, erased, hidden, and untold. Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text has sought to broaden previous scholarship by offering not only a more expansive view of motherhood that encompasses a wide variety of thematic concerns, but also a far-reaching geographical scope that includes the understudied regions of the Dutch and Spanish Caribbean. However, despite our desire to showcase these two regions, the lack of contributions we received demonstrated the strong need for more maternal scholarship in the two latter areas, and led us to revise our initial goal of dividing the collection into sections based on region. While certainly it could be argued that the majority of well-known writers originate from Anglophone and Francophone islands, we insist on recognizing writers from across the Caribbean region to demonstrate the diversity and fluidity of women’s voices that may serve as a point of (dis)connection among the writers.

In addition, when studying the diversity and wide range and scope of writings by women of the Caribbean region, it is also necessary to take into account the new diasporas: where are many of the most recent authors writing from? Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text presents chapters on authors who have either emigrated to or were born in Great Britain, France, or the United States, a fact that has sometimes been reflected in the language used in the texts, causing debate over the (self)identification of some of these writers. As a consequence, while our collection presents a similar comparative and diasporic approach to other book-length studies, it deals with the complexity of including a wider geographical, linguistic, ethnic, gender, and generic diversity in its exploration of Caribbean women’s literature, while focusing on the subject of motherhood.

READING/WRITING/SPEAKING THE MOTHER TEXT:

ESSAYS ON CARIBBEAN WOMEN’S WRITING

This book is divided into four sections, each containing chapters that demonstrate the ideologically and theoretically complex and broad approaches to mothering in Caribbean women’s literature. Section One, entitled On Being a Mother: Challenging Motherhood and the Mother as ‘Other,’ engages in texts that not only complicate the reductionist myth of motherhood as biologically rooted but also those that challenge the ways in which Caribbean mothers of colour are reduced to the category of other. Chapter One, "Accepting a Daughter: Gisèle Pineau’s L’espérance-macadam by Abigail L. Palko, exposes the limitations of defining mothering within a biological discourse. In her reading of Guadeloupean writer Pineau’s 1995 text, Palko suggests that Pineau’s novel shows how authentic maternity (as she terms mothering that fulfills maternal theories proposed by scholars such as Sara Ruddick and Patricia Hill Collins and stands opposed to biological reproduction) is an emotional—rather than physical—state, and that blindly privileging biological ties harms daughters, and thus, this text offers a more nuanced view of Guadeloupean women’s mothering practices. Following this discussion is Chapter Two, entitled ‘Or Not to Mother?’ Astrid Roemer’s Lijken op liefde (‘Looks Like Love’) by Doris Hambuch, who reads Surinamese Roemer’s 1997 novel as a text that reconfigures motherhood detached from a physical delivery and nursing of infants for Roemer’s main character, which gives the mother text a most prominent role. Borrowing Adrienne Rich’s concept that the mother is there … in childless women as well, Hambuch examines the possibilities of othermothering. Chapter Three, ‘My Destiny Was to Come to this Island’: Maternal Rejection and Colonization in Esmeralda Santiago’s Conquistadora, by Cristina Herrera, which serves as the concluding chapter of this section, analyzes the 2011 historical novel written in English by Puerto Rican author Santiago, featuring a character who rejects the only acceptable" role for a woman of her social standing, maternity, in her efforts to align herself with a patriarchal family lineage and declare herself a conquistadora (female conqueror) of Puerto Rico. Herrera’s reading of the novel unearths the rather taboo beliefs held by a nineteenth-century woman who defies motherhood in her quest to cultivate her identity as powerful colonizer.

Section Two, Matrilinealism and Maternal Legacies, examines texts that are concerned with preserving the maternal line and the legacies of motherhood. In Chapter Four, Memory, Myth, and History in Shara McCallum’s Mother/Daughter Poems, Adrienne McCormick suggests that juxtaposing poems from the Jamaican author’s first and third collections, The Water between Us (1999) and This Strange Land (2011), illustrates McCallum’s abiding concern with the traumatic fissures between a distant, silent, or absent mother and a daughter yearning for knowledge and affirmation. Rather than idealize the union between mother and daughter, McCormick exposes the fraught and tense relationship between women, dramatically departing from a romanticized image of the mother-daughter relationship. From ‘Australian Whiteness’ to Caribbean Self: Maryse Condé’s Matrilineal Family Narrative of Identity Detection by Amy Lee comprises Chapter Five and reads Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé’s fictional autobiographical narrative, Victoire: My Mother’s Mother (2010) (Victoire, les saveurs et les notes, 2006), as a woman’s search for maternal lineage which, in turn, is intricately connected to the formation of her own self-identity. Lee’s discussion focalizes lineage and history in terms of maternal relationships and maternal knowledge.

In Section Three, Motherly, Daughterly Voices and Herstories, the chapters engage with the theoretically complex terrain of maternal (her)stories that are often silenced. Chapter Six presents Charlotte Beyer’s analysis of novels by Andrea Levy, a Black British writer of Jamaican descent. In ‘My Mama Had a Story’: Mothers and Intergenerational Relations in Andrea Levy’s Fiction, Beyer argues that Levy’s novels trace the gradually unfolding text of black Caribbean mothers, and her portrayals of mothers and maternal figures foreground their importance and development as characters in British Caribbean and diasporic contexts. For Beyer, retrieving the mother’s story overturns the erasure of Black Caribbean, diasporic women’s voices. In Chapter Seven, entitled "Palè Andaki: Genre, History and Mother-Daughter Doublespeak in Edwidge Danticat’s Fiction, Angeletta KM Gourdine examines how Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat’s novels advocate for a female-focused approach to Haiti’s national imagining through her framing of mother-daughter relationships. Unearthing maternal history beneath masculine-inscribed versions of Haitian culture and history is crucial to the study of Danticat’s work, according to Gourdine. Chapter Eight, Sharing the (M)Other’s Text: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Black Cuban Women’s Talking Texts" by Paula Sanmartín, presents a comparative study of several works by contemporary Black Cuban women authors: Golpeando la memoria: testimonio de una poeta cubana afrodescendiente (Striking Memory: Testimonial Narrative of an Afro-descendant Cuban Woman Poet; 2005), coauthored by specialist in oral history Daisy Rubiera Castillo and poet Georgina Herrera, together with Herrera’s previously published poetry on motherhood and Rubiera Castillo’s 1997 testimonio, Reyita, sencillamente, testimonio de una negra cubana nonagenarian (Simply, Reyita [Testimonial Narrative of a Nonagenarian Black Cuban Woman]), written/transcribed from interviews with her mother. Drawing on African American critic Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s theories on the dialogic character of black women’s writing, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s concept of talking texts, the chapter shows black women writers reading/writing other black women writers reading/writing black women to examine how these Black Cuban women’s voices share the (m)other’s text to showcase the intertwined experiences of motherhood and daughterhood, while presenting themes such as Afrocentric mothering, the complex links between motherhood and women’s (sexual) independence, and finding self-identification through maternity.

Finally, Section Four, Troubling Motherhood: Maternal Absence, Rejection, and Violence, problematizes idealized forms of motherhood by reading texts that feature maternal abandonment, rejection, and even violence between women. Chapter Nine, "‘She Had Put the Servant in Her Place’: Sexual Violence and Generational Social Policing between Women in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable by Amy K. King, examines gendered violence and the problematics of women’s inability to mother and nurture each other through a reconsideration of the ‘imperial mother’ as a woman of a higher class who uses her social position to—by all means necessary—keep her rank intact. As King contends, in Antiguan-American Marie-Elena John’s 2006 novel, the imperial mother’s capacity for violence reveals her efforts to maintain a rigid social, economic, and racial structure of power. The inability to be part of a community as a result of orphanhood and lack of motherland is the subject of Chapter Ten by Daniel Arbino, Loss of Mother, Loss of Self: Orphanhood in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother. Arbino questions the theoretical concepts of Creoleness and the imagined community to offer a more complex analysis of the Antiguan author’s 1995 text. Finally, Chapter Eleven by Florence Ramond Jurney, Motherhood by Default, or Rethinking the Patriarchal Family in Gisèle Pineau’s Novels, discusses what she terms problematic motherhood," or the women’s complex relationships with their motherhood and the difficult questions raised by maternal violence, abandonment, or rejection. Jurney insists on centralizing antagonizing forces, such as patriarchy, violence, and race as they relate to motherhood in the Guadaleoupean writer’s novelistic work.

As our collection’s chapters reveal, motherhood should be at the forefront of Caribbean women’s literary scholarship despite the overall absence of this viable field of inquiry. Contributions in Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text range from chapters focusing on the work of widely recognized writers such as Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat, to others studying newer authors such as Marie-Elena John, or still under-analyzed texts by well-known writers as is the case of Maryse Condé’s Victoire: My Mother’s Mother, Esmeralda Santiago’s Conquistadora, and Daisy Rubiera Castillo and Georgina Herrera’s Golpeando la memoria. Although, as mentioned earlier, we tried to keep the differences among Caribbean writers visible, and therefore contributors were asked to use original texts with translations, this question was not always addressed when dealing with works more commonly studied in English than in the original French. Another point of distinction we wish to highlight is the terminology with which contributors have referred (or not referred) to the ethnicity of the author and/or her characters: from Caribbean to Black Caribbean, Afro-Caribbean and Black Cuban, scholars have chosen to make a point to signal or left unsaid the matter of racial identification in the texts.

The main commonality suggested by the chapters in the collection is that writers from the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch Caribbean are concerned with representing mothers, othermothers, and maternal figures that challenge narrow conceptualizations of Caribbean women. The texts engaged in this study do not idealize or romanticize motherhood; instead, they reveal the often-problematic ways in which motherhood and maternal relationships are informed, unsettled, and even dismantled by the daily and historical challenges faced by women in a region that bears the violent mark of colonization. If writings by Caribbean women work against historical, social, and cultural erasure, as Belinda Edmondson argues (108), then it is imperative to explore how maternal voices and experiences factor within this literary project to undo the tradition of silencing experiences of womanhood and motherhood and offer different critical interpretations of Caribbean women’s lives.

¹With regards to this issue, in her famous work Black Feminist Criticism (1986), African American scholar Barbara Christian pointed out that since a woman, never a man, can be a mother, or a daughter, that experience should be hers to tell and since we all come from mothers it is striking that these stories have remained secondary in a world literature (212, also qtd. in Nasta xx).

²For a critical discussion of African American othermothering see Patricia Hill Collins, Shifting the Center: Race, Class and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood, listed in the works cited. Collins defines othermothering as the work of motherhood performed outside the individual relationship between the biological mother and child, by sisters, aunts,