Nationalism in Cliff

7/27/2019 Nationalism in Cliff

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small axe 24 October 2007 p 5272 ISSN 0799-0537

Gendered Legacies ofRomantic Nationalism in theWorks of Michelle Cliff

Jocelyn Fenton Stitt

AbstrAct: This essay argues that Jamaican-American Michelle Cliffs writing should be under-

stood within a new interpretive framework which sees post-independence Caribbean literature

as inheriting gendered and raced legacies of Romantic nationalism. While Cliffs early work

shows the appeal of Romantic nationalism as a means of establishing national authenticity, her

later work demonstrates how these norms, when transmitted to postcolonial black nationalism,

displace more complex notions of national identity that take into account racial, sexual, and

cultural hybridity.

All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, and all are dangerous . . .

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather

Introduction

One o the central dilemmas o postcolonial subjects concerns the creation o national identi-

ties ater the trauma o colonialism. Tis essay approaches the vexed subject o Anglophone

Caribbean national identity through an analysis o the nationalist rhetoric contained within

post-independence literature, one o the central vehicles deployed in the attempt to create

I use postcolonial in this essay as a temporal, political, and literary demarcation. Michelle Clis home, Jamaica,1.became independent rom the United Kingdom in 12. Te political and literary attempts to conceive o a newnation and an authentic national culture in the wake o this decolonization, which Clis works participate in, arethus postcolonial. I also employ postcolonial in the manner now current in the academy, meaning works contain-ing an anti-colonial sentiment, or the study o the culture o colonial rule. I use West Indian interchangeably withCaribbean, meaning in both instances the Anglophone Caribbean.


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SX24 October 2007 Jocelyn Fenton Stitt |53

an authentic postcolonial identity. Contextualizing the work o Jamaican-American writer

Michelle Cli within this literary tradition demonstrates that many o the dominant orms o

rhetoric used to establish authentic national subjects contain within them the gendered and

raced legacies o Romantic nationalism.

Michelle Clis body o work provides an interesting perspective on the postcolonial

deployment o nationalist rhetoric, given her embrace o essentialist orms o black national-

ism in her early work and subsequent rejection o these modes o nation building in her 1

novel, No elephone to Heaven. Clis work shows both the appeal o Romantic national-

ism as a solution to the problem o postcolonial identity, as well as the problems this orm

o nationalism creates or resolving this undamental question. Clis writing oregrounds

themes central to post-independence Caribbean literature, including the struggle to establish

a national identity separate rom European inuence, and the project o rewriting colonial

history rom the point o view o the colonized. In addition, Clis work explores her heritage

as a mixed-race Jamaican woman who is also a lesbian. Te ctionalization o these compli-

cated identities has produced critically acclaimed novels and short stories: Clis work is read

around the English-speaking world.

Inuential Caribbean poet and critic Kamau Brathwaite glossed this mental decoloniza-

tion as trying to outline an alternative to the English romantic/Victorian cultural tradition

which still operates among us. However, as one scholar argues, the problem o dening

West Indianness, rather than being resolved through postcolonial writing, actually becomes

the central paradigm o West Indian discourse and narrative. In the work that ollows, I

suggest that the problem o dening Caribbean identity through nationalist rhetoric ails

because the orm o nationalism embraced in the post-independence period has roots in a

European ideology o authenticity that is divisive and unproductive within the multi-racial

Caribbean context.

I, as imothy Brennan observes, In Europe and the United States, or the most part,

the triumphant literary depiction o nationalism is Romantic, then we need to explore other

maniestations o this ideology and what possibilities this specic orm o nationalism creates.4

In other words, why do post-independence writers in the Anglophone Caribbean turn to

Romantic nationalism? While this essay suggests that Cli uses Romantic nationalism as one

means o establishing authenticity or her emale and mixed-race characters, (and potentially

Kamau Brathwaite,2. Roots(Ann Arbor: University o Michigan Press, 13), 2.Belinda Edmondson,3. Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Womens Writing in Caribbean Narrative(Durhamand London: Duke University Press, 1), 2.imothy Brennan, Te National Longing or Form in Homi Bhabha (ed). Nation and Narration (London andNew York: Routledge, 1), .


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54 | SX24 Gendered Legacies of Romantic Nationalism in the Works of Michelle Clif f

hersel as a light-skinned Jamaican living in the United States) I want to touch briey on some

reasons or its broader appeal. Te very qualities o Romantic national identity: the identi-

cation between national subject and his nations landscape, the valorization o the olk, and

the importance o the mother gure to guarantee identity were all sources to be mined in the

Caribbean context. In a colonized space, where one hundred years ater Columbus landall

the majority o Arawak and Carib peoples had perished, the resulting mixture o enslaved

Aricans, Europeans, and immigrants rom Asia had to look or sources o national pride

and identication outside o a literary tradition, powerul military, ancient buildings, or a

pre-colonial culture. While there are many instances o survivals o Arican languages and

customs in the Caribbean, this ragmented cultural history exists in spite o the policies o slave

owners who took great care to separate newly arrived slaves speaking the same languages and

to punish with impunity those ound practicing Arican religious rituals. Tus, intellectuals in

the Caribbean could not, or example, point to an ancient literary tradition in Sanskrit as in

India, or to autochthonous cultures, traditions, and languages as in Kenya or Ghana as points

o nationalist pride. Instead, enthusiastically representing the ormerly denigrated wildness o

the tropical landscape, honoring previously enslaved Aro-Caribbean olk, and celebrating the

Aro-Caribbean mother as central to the Caribbean amily during slavery became uniying

points. While landscape, olk and olk mother as are represented as culturally specic to the

Caribbean, it is intriguing that they are also hallmarks o Romantic nationalism.5

Indeed, one o the central insights to be gained rom reading Clis work lies in a real-

ization that the specic modes o nationalist expression inherited rom the Romantic period

create a barrier to the integration o a eminist agenda into the otherwise emancipatory

discourses o anti-imperialist movements.6 I will develop this idea more ully below, but as a

starting point, I identiy in Clis early writing echoes o black nationalist texts through her

veneration o the Caribbean landscape and her mythologizing o the gures o the mother

Readers might compare my argument about the deployment o the ideologies o motherhood, landscape and the.olk by men in the Caribbean to Barbara A. Moss account o womens empowerment through their status as moth-ers, custodians o the land and olk practices in Zimbabwe: Mai Chaza and the Politics o Motherhood in ColonialZimbabwe in Catherine Higgs, Barbara A. Moss and Earline Rae Ferguson (eds) Stepping Forward: Black Women in

Arica and the Americas(Athens: Ohio University Press, 22), 131.By emphasizing the importance o Romantic ideology or Caribbean nationalism, my work marks out a dierent.path rom Belinda EdmondsonsMaking Men and Kathleen J. Renks Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts:

Womens Writing and Decolonization (Charlottesville: University Press o Virginia, 1). While examining theinuence o the nineteenth century on Caribbean writing, neither work understands Romanticism as centralto the dilemmas o contemporary national identity. Victorian writers, by producing narratives o the emergingmiddle class, stand in marked contrast to Romantic poets and black nationalists o the mid-twentieth century whoconstructed authenticity through representations o the olk, olk mother, and landscape, what contemporary Carib-bean writer George Lamming calls, the peoples speech, the organic music o the earth. Te Pleasures o Exile(Ann

Arbor: University o Michigan Press, 12), .


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and grandmother as a sources o authenticity: At her most powerul the grandmother is the

source o knowledge, magic, ancestors, healing, ood. She assists in rites o passage, protects

and teaches. She is the inheritor o Arican belie systems, Arican languages.7 How close this

ormulation seems, or all o its rhetoric o empowered Arocentric motherhood, to the role

ascribed to British women in the nineteenth century, as one historian notes: Motherhood

was to be given new dignity; it was the duty and destiny o women to be the mothers o the

race, but also their great reward.8 Although there are clear cultural and historical dierences

between the status o women in Victorian England, and women in postcolonial Jamaica,

and indeed their relationship to motherhood which I discuss below, these depictions portray

womens greatest contributions to the nation as coming through their role as mothers. Tis

position reinscribes an essentialized view o national identity as coming through biological

motherhood.9 Reerencing the (black) mother in Caribbean postcolonial discourse as the

point o origin displaces more complex notions o national identity, which take into account

racial, sexual, and cultural hybridity. I explore in the nal section o this essay how the norms

o Romantic nationalism transmitted to postcolonial black nationalism will later become

outmoded or Cli as she struggles to write a multi-cultural New World nation.

Ironically, the orms o nationalism embraced by many anti-colonial intellectuals con-

tained legacies o the nineteenth century. Nationalism, as it is portrayed in Caribbean litera-

ture, oten corresponds directly to the orms o nationalism developed and expressed in litera-

ture during the Romantic period, creating a paradoxical ideology: postcolonial nationalism was

supposed to create new orms o identity as a orm o anti-colonial resistance, while actually

drawing directly rom European modes o imaging the nation. Te new kind o nationalism

that arose in Europe during the Romantic period (113) oten deployed artistic depic-

tions o landscape and the olk to express the essence o the nation, thus using literature as

a vehicle o national sel expression.0 While it is true that most nationalisms make use o

Michelle Cli, Calibans Daughter: Te empest and the eapot,. Frontiers12, no. 2 (11): 31, .Anna Davin, Imperialism and Motherhood,. History Workshop Journal (1): 13.Angela Keane notes that discursive ormulations o nation construct women as nationalized subjects solely through.their amily relationships: Te aective, organic and oten biological discourse that characterizes nationalismparticularly Romantic nationalismhas particular repercussions or women, by restricting emale subjectivity tomaternal reproduction. Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2), .

Romanticist Marlon Ross states that two earlier notions o nationalism came together in the Romantic period to1.orm a nationalism that is recognizable to us today. Te concept o national development cross-breeds the notion oterritorial acquisition, born during the Renaissance, with the notion o historical progress, born during the Enlight-enment, and grats both onto the notion o the olk as an organic entity with a natural relation to the nurturingplace. Romancing the Nation-State: Te Poetics o Romantic Nationalism in Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo(eds)Macropolitics o Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism (Philadelphia: University oPennsylvania Press, 11), .


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reerences to origins or to essential characteristics o the people, Romantic nationalism as I

use it here, reers to modes o nationalist discourse which rely on an organic linkbetween the

landscape, the qualities o the olk, and perhaps most importantlythe gure o the national

mother.

Tat postcolonial Caribbean ormulations o nation have their roots in the Romantic

period has not been widely commented on, nor related to the ormations o the role o women

in nationalist rhetoric. While recent work emphasizes the importance o the nineteenth cen-

tury as a point o emergence or modern notions o nationalism, empire, and identity, ew

scholars have undertaken the task o connecting these earlier modes o discourse, particularly

Romantic ideology, to questions that concern contemporary postcolonial writers.1 Te

specic orm o national rhetoric created during the Romantic period proves surprisingly

transerable to the New World, as Michelle Clis writing demonstrates.

Motherlands and Postcoloniality

In attempting to represent the status o women in the Jamaican national imagination, Michelle

Clis rst novel, Abeng(1), enters into the dangerous territory o the deployment o

woman as mother o the nation, identied with the landscape and a symbol o racial or cultural

purity. Set in 1, on the eve o Jamaican independence rom Britain,Abengponders not

only the history and uture o twelve-year-old Clare Savage, but also the past and present o

Romantic nationalism as I use it here is but one orm. Other orms o nationalism, with roots in the French Revo-11.

lutions emphasis on non-essentialist citizenship and equality, do indeed exist. Cynthia Cockburn identies severaleminist nationalist movements: nineteenth century Italian, twentieth century Finnish, and several late nineteenthand twentieth century Asian anti-colonial nationalist movements in Te Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender andNational Identities in Confict(London: Zed Books, 1), . David Scott, or one, in Conscripts o Modernity:Te ragedy o Colonial Enlightenment(Durham: Duke University Press, 2) traces the inuence o ideologies oRomanticism as created through the French, American and San Domingo Revolutions, which would eventuallyimpact the creation o C.L.R. James Te Black Jacobins.

An important intervention into the roots o nationalism comes rom Paul Gilroys12. Te Black Atlantic(Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1993). Gilroy useully points to the importance o the racial ideologies o the Enlighten-ment to the creation o the discourses o modernity while largely ignoring the role o gender in the ormation o theideologies o race and nation. See also Ann Rigneys Imperfect Histories: Te Elusive Past and the Legacy of RomanticHistoricism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 21) or a contextualization o the rise o Romantic views o nationand history and their legacies or historians; Saree Makdisis Romantic Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998) or an analysis o Romanticisms aesthetics making possible the viewing subject necessary or imperialism;

and Ian Baucoms Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity(Princeton: Princeton University Press,1999) or his study o the importance o earlier notions o place and identity to contemporary British identity.For recent work on Cli see: M.M. Adjarian,13. Allegories o Desire: Body, Nation, and Empire in Modern CaribbeanLiterature by Women (Westport: Greenwood, 2); Simone A. James Alexander,Mother Imagery in the Novels o

Aro-Caribbean Women (Columbia: University o Missouri Press, 21); Isabel Hoving, In Praise o New ravelers:Reading Caribbean Migrant Women Writers(Stanord: Stanord University Press, 21); and Alred Lpez, (Un)concealed Histories: Whiteness and the Land in Michelle ClisAbeng,MaComre (21): 1313.


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the nation o Jamaica. InAbeng, Clare Savage identies rural Jamaica with her mother, and

more importantly with an authentic Jamaican identity outside o her urban athers theories

and whiteness and . . . needs.4 In the character o Clares mother, Kitty, Cli deploys sev-

eral very Romantic notions o national identity in order to create a sense o Kittys authentic

Jamaican identity.5

Te frst o these is an idealization o the purity o country lie and people: own was

evil, Kitty held (49). Kitty is aligned with an authentic Jamaican identity through her appre-

ciation o the Jamaican landscape. Te narrator oAbengcomments approvingly that Kitty

had a sense o Jamaica that her husband would never have (52), stating that, Kitty came

alive only in the bush, while Boy armed himsel against it, carrying newspapers and books

and liquor, and a Swiss Watch to mark o the time (49).Abengbiurcates the identities o

Clares Jamaican parents into an inauthentic and racist white ather, and a racially mixed

mother who honors the country traditions o Jamaicas past. Kitty, like the Romantic poet

William Wordsworth, unwillingly resides in town but lives or the times she can be in the

countryside.

Concomitant with Kittys idealization o Jamaicas landscape is her connection to its

people: Te country people o Jamaica touched her in a deep placethese were her people,

and she never questioned her devotion to them. . . . She thought that there was no other

country on earth as beautiul as hers (2). Like Romantic poets, Kitty reveres the olk past,

as demonstrated when the amily witnesses a country uneral. Listening to an ancient song,

which the slaves carried with them rom Arica (), the normally stoic Kitty weeps, moved

that such things had survived (3). In a rejection o the writings o English colonists,Abeng

represents the landscape o Jamaica as having its own order and culture embedded in it. Rather

than being simply undierentiated bush, the country o Jamaica holds wonders:

Kitty knew the uses o Madame Fate, a weed that could kill and that could cure. She knew about

Sleep-and-Wake. Marjo Bitter. Dumb Cane. Bissy, which was the antidote to the poison o dumb

cane. . . . She was convinced that the cure or cancer would be ound in the bush o Jamaicawhich

would yield anything to she who would recognize such things. As a girl she had studied with the old

women around and they had taught her songs like the one the uneral procession had sung. (3)

Michelle Cli,1. Abeng(New York: Plume, 1), . Subsequent reerences to this work appear parenthetically inthe text.

One o the strangest examples o Clis valorization o an essentialized black identity in her early work is her gur-1.ing o Kitty as authentically Jamaican through her Arican heritage, at the same time that she is acknowledged tobe red. (Red denotes a light-skinned Jamaican who usually has recognizably Arican eatures, but who is also oEuropean descent.) Unlike a eminist writer like Gloria Anzalda who celebrates amestizaidentity, Cli does notlocate in Kittys hybridity an important source o knowledge and power about colonialisms disruption o boundarieso race which might lead to a dierent kind o empowered subjectivity; only her blackness counts. Gloria Anzalda,Borderlands/La Frontera: Te New Mestiza(San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1).


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In its portrayal o Jamaica, Clis narrative participates in a long tradition o (re)presenting the

colonized landscape.6 Cli creates a counter geography o the empires periphery by showing

how, with the proper olk knowledge, the land o Jamaica holds a source o national renewal.

Representing the landscape as a source o healing, the knowledge o which is passed down by

women in the oral tradition, marks a space in Abengwhere resistance to colonialism is not

necessarily about biological motherhood. Indeed, as I discuss in the section on Clis later

work, the landscape is a source o unity or an emerging Jamaican nation, even i eminized

and raught with memories o slavery.

Although women as such are not gured as active participants in the creation o the new

nation, mothers are held to be the progenitors o the essence o the nations identity. Repeat-

edly, these nationalist texts invoke the mother as resource, as inspiration (Proud was I that my

country bred / Such strength, a dignity so air as Wordsworth wrote in Te Sailors Mother),

by writers who were engaged in the difcult task o trying to orm a national and racial iden-

tity out o the legacies o colonialism and slavery. An excellent example o woman-as-mother

deployed to reinorce a sense o male identity occurs in Derek Walcotts poem Te Star-Apple

Kingdom, detailing Jamaica Prime Minister Manleys struggle to establish a democratic socialist

state (121), the early setting or Clis second novel, No elephone to Heaven. Walcott

imagines a mother gure who held [Manley], as she holds us all, / her history-orphaned

islands, she to whom / we came late as our muse, our mother / who suckled the islands

(2322).7 Tis mother is a black rose o sorrow, a black mine o silence, / raped wie,

empty mother, Aztec virgin / transxed by arrows rom a thousand guitars (112). Wal-

cott writes, her Caesarean was stitched / by the teeth o machine guns (11). Once

again the national subject with agency, Michael Manley, is constituted through the gure o

the mother, characterized by one critic as Walcotts gure o woman/mother-as-landscape

() who suraces as the medium o consciousness that draws a despairing Manley in his

meditative sojourn, back to the bonding o his roots as a son o soil, thereby helping to

strengthen his purpose in the ace o his ordeal ().8

Te national tale is at once travelers tale and anti-colonial tract, Katie rumpener writes, it sets out to describe a1.long-colonized country as it really is, attacking the tradition o imperial description rom Spencer to Johnson andconstructing an alternate picture. Te physical and cultural landscape o the periphery has its own beauty; as it arisesorganically rom specic historical and geographical circumstances, a national art must be understood on its own

terms, not orced into a prior aesthetic mold it can never t. Katie rumpener, Bardic Nationalism: Te RomanticNovel and the British Empire(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 13), 12.Derek Walcott,1. Te Star-Apple KingdomCollected Poems: 19481984(London: Faber and Faber, 12), 333.

All subsequent reerences to Te Star-Apple Kingdom will be to this edition and will be cited by line number inparentheses in the text.Patricia Ismond, Woman as Race-Containing Symbol in Walcotts Poetry,1. Journal o West Indian Literature, no. 2(1): 3.


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One solution to the difculty o creating a postcolonial Caribbean culture lies in a gesture

to origins, to the link between mother and child. As completely articial societies indelibly

stamped with the pervasive legacies o imperialism, colonialism, and slavery, the Caribbean

societies have had an inordinate difculty in creating and maintaining a strong, cohesive

national identity, Franklin L. Knight writes.9 Hortense Spillers reminds us that removal o

the black ather under slavery created a situation where the mother became the entire link

to culture and amily or her child: Te Arican-American woman, the mother, the daugh-

ter, becomes historically the powerul and shadowy evocation o a cultural synthesis long

evaporatedthe law o the Motheronly and precisely because legal enslavement removed

the Arican-American male not so much rom sight as rom mimetic view as a partner in the

prevailing social ction o the Fathers name, the Fathers law.0

Abengrecreates the slave amily described by Spillers by giving Clare a white ather and

a mother o European and Arican heritage. Clis own use o the mother as repository o

authentic identity shows her to be a reader not only o the texts o Romanticism, but also

the texts o West Indian nationalism. Tat she does so suggests that Romantic nationalisms

emphasis on mothers and landscape is strategically used in twentieth century Caribbean lit-

erature as a discursive method to ground the postcolonial sel. Her intertextual relationship

with the deployment o the olk in earlier Caribbean texts establishes or Clis writing what

the gure o the authentically Jamaican mother is supposed to do or Clare: give her a cultural

inheritance in opposition to the colonizers Englishness.

Contextualizing Clis novels within Caribbean literature helps us to understand her

deployment o the tropes o the olk, landscape, and nationalized mother. Tese postcolonial

tropes place Clis work in an intertextual relationship with several important texts rom the

immediate postcolonial period. While Clis novels clearly utilize a eminist perspective in

their rendering o the slave past o Jamaica, Clis ormulations o an authentic Caribbean

identity ally her with the postcolonial imaginings o other writers such as Edward Brathwaite,

George Lamming, and Derek Walcott, who articulate the nation by drawing on Caribbean

olk culture and the olk mother. Marlon Rosss description o Wordsworths use o the olk

Franklin W. Knight,1. Te Caribbean: Te Genesis o a Fragmented Nationalism (New York: Oxord University Press,1), 3.Hortense J. Spillers, Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book,2. Diacritics1, no. 2 (1): .

See also Edith Clark or a twentieth century analysis:My Mother Who Fathered Me: A Study o the Family in TreeSelected Communities in Jamaica(London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1).I want to make clear however, that although there are similarities between the use o the gure o the mother in21.the work o writers such as Lamming, Brathwaite, and Walcott, they dier in their use o the olk and its relation-ship to an Arican past. Walcott, as is well known, has a much more ambivalent relationship to black nationalismthan Brathwaite. As important, what Arica meant in the imaginations o the black nationalists changed over time.Brathwaite enthusiastically calls or an investigation o the connections between Arican and Caribbean culture in


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as a mediating unction, enabling an organic-pastoral vision o nationality in which the natu-

ral attachment to land stabilizes a nation in the midst o rapid change and expansion might

also be applied to many Caribbean texts produced in the rst decades ater independence.

Te essential qualities o the nations olk, the holistic relationship between the olk and the

landscape, and the gure o the mother as identied with the landscape all embody emerging

Caribbean nations.

Clis writings dier, however, rom the works o many male post-independence writers

by ocusing on the search or identity rom a eminist perspective. Caribbean womens writ-

ing rom the 1s through the early 1s continues the project o male nationalist writers

by participating in the revaluation o the West Indian olk and landscape as guarantors o

authentic identity and culture. Tey take this nationalist project in a new direction, however,

by putting a eminist spin on this recuperation through their representations o olk mothers

as nationalist agents. Caribbean women writers, Carolyn Cooper notes, deploy a strategy o

reappropriating devalued olk wisdomthat body o subterranean knowledge that is oten

associated with the silenced language o women and the primitiveness o orally transmitted

knowledge.4 Writer and critic Olive Senior traces the relationship o Caribbean womens

writing o the 1s to earlier works by male authors, arguing that:

Te subject matter o Caribbean literature has [not] changed substantively over the yearsthere are

common threads running through the literature rom the orties and ties which are still there in

the work that is being produced todaythat is the search or an identity both personal and national

. . . What has changed, I agree, is the orm, the way in which some o us are exploring these issues;

or instance, the act that Caribbean women writers have now come to the ore is opening up to

us a completely new approach to the topic o the Caribbean motherone o our great literary

preoccupationsand oour relationship with that mother.5 (Emphasis added)

InAbeng, then, we can see continuity with earlier works in the oregrounding o the role o

the Aro-Caribbean mother and grandmother as producers o a rich cultural inheritance that

can be revived in the wake o colonialism.

his early work, but in 13 he critiques as romantic rhetoric the work o writers who do not know very muchabout Arica necessarily, although he reects a deep desire to make a connection, Roots(Ann Arbor: University oMichigan Press, 13), 211.Ross, Romancing, .22.

A dierent approach to post-independence Caribbean literature might highlight the disruptions caused by slavery23.

and colonialism within amilies and between the sel and the landscape as identity problems that cannot be resolvedthrough the gure o the mother or a return to rural roots. See, or example, the proound dislocation o Hyacinthrom the aunt who raised her and the landscape o Jamaica when she returns home in Joan Rileys Te Unbelonging(London: Womens Press, 1).Carolyn Cooper, Something Ancestral Recaptured: Spirit Possession as a rope in Selected Feminist Fictions o2.the Arican Diaspora in Susheila Nasta (ed)Motherlands: Black Womens Writing rom Arica, the Caribbean andSouth Asia(London: Te Womens Press, 11), .Charles H. Rowell, An Interview with Olive Senior,2. Callaloo 11, no. 3 (1): .


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Abengsdenitions o authentic Caribbean identity align it with the writing o other West

Indian women writers, but produced rom Clis own particular position, in her own words,

as a mulatto rom Jamaica, a colored immigrant to America, the child o a colonized society,

because I am a emale.6 WhileAbengand No elephone to Heaven were produced within the

context o the West Indian literary tradition(s), Clis identity marks a site o dierence rom

other Jamaican writers such as Erna Broder, in that she sel-consciously chooses to investigate

Jamaicas colonial past and national uture as one who, because o her racial heritage and exile,

is both insider and outsider to Jamaican culture.

Abengs attempts to come to grips with a cultural identity or Clare, as well as a national

culture or Jamaica, reproduces nationalist discourse that gures the mother as curator o

national culture without agency in her own right. Tis strategy clearly maps a method to estab-

lish cultural authenticity both or Clare, and orAbengitsel within the existing narratives o

Caribbean nationalism. Tis may be true or Cli as well. In an essay on contemporary white

West Indian writers, Kim Robinson-Walcott comments, Clis embracing o her black side

is readily understandable, and not only in terms o her political sensitivities and moral con-

science. Te disparagement apparently accorded near-white people by ully white people in her

childhood may have urged her to go to one extreme or the other.7 Clis own position within

Caribbean writing has been repeatedly questioned, most notably in print by Pamela Mordecai

and Betty Wilson, or her compromised authenticity in the rendering o Jamaican patois

and in her description o the Jamaican landscape.8 Clis eminism and claiming o a black

identity are considered suspect by some in the Caribbean context as a oreign ashion that

[Cli] has appropriated.9 Belinda Edmondson notes the discomort o several critics when

she points to Clis overtly eminist ideological project in provid[ing] an empowering history

or West Indian women by portraying Kitty and indeed all black women in this novelas

having a direct and unmediated linkage to a positive black history and consciousness.0 Since

Clis eminism and claiming o a black identity are considered suspect, this theme o the

mother serves to legitimize Clis work itsel within Caribbean literary tradition.

Michelle Cli, Sister/Outsider: Some Toughts on Simone Weil in Carol Ascher, Louise DeSalvo and Sara2.Ruddick (eds) Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, eachers, and Artists Write about Teir Work on Women (Boston: Beacon, 1), 31.Kim Robinson-Walcott, Claiming an Identity We Tought Tey Despised: Contemporary White West Indian2.

Writers and Teir Negotiation o Race, Small Axe1 (23): .

Pamela Mordecai and Betty Wilson (eds) Introduction,2. Her rue-rue Name: An Anthology o Womens Writing romthe Caribbean (Oxord: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1), xvii.Belinda Edmondson, Race, Privilege, and the Politics o (Re)Writing History: An Analysis o the Novels o2.Michelle Cli, Callalloo 1, no. 1 (13): 12. Clis own acknowledgment o Kittys status as red contradictsany easy essentialism in the text between race and culture. Clearly Cli valorizes Jamaicans Arican past, but as myargument should indicate, in distinction to critics such as Belinda Edmondson who note a racial binary inAbeng,the matter o origins and maternity is more complicated than that.Ibid., 1.3.


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I want to underscore the heavily raced and gendered nature o this rhetoricboth

within Clis work and in critiques o itwith its emphasis on origins and authenticity. Te

consequences o Romantic nationalism lies in the exclusion o certain women rom active

participation in nation ormation within the postcolonial literary imagination, (including in

ctions produced by women themselves) through a narrow denition o what constitutes an

authentic emale subject. Rhonda Cobham writes o the cultural cost o such representations

o mothers as they occur in In the Castle o My Skin, by another important post-independence

writer, George Lamming:

Within the parameters o his narrative [the unnamed mother] remains trapped, history-less and

ultimately peripheral in the role assigned her by her son. We know no more o her than what he

pieces together in his growing years o progressive alienation. She seems to have no identity beyond

her role as his mother: parentless, without spouse or sexual desire.

Cli also creates such a mother gure in Abeng, Kitty, who unctions as an anchor to her

daughters authentic Jamaican identity, but who exists without agency hersel. In this character,

we can see the collision o two ideologies central to Clis work, eminist empowerment and

postcolonial nation building, which creates an impasse the text cannot resolve.

I complicate this reading o Cli claiming an authentic Jamaican or black identity by

noting a brie moment inAbengwhich stresses hybridity that has not received much critical

attention: the intertextual use o Walter Scotts Ivanhoe, considered one o the ounding texts

o Romantic nationalism. In a crucial scene inAbeng, Clare tries to work through the con-

nections between race and amily alliances by discussing Walter Scotts Ivanhoewith her light-

skinned ather, Boy Savage. Clares understanding o hersel as a mixed-race character comes

into conict with Boy Savages use o absolutist racial categories that Ivanhoealso promotes.

Abengs intertextual deployment oIvanhoehas been largely overlooked by critics, but it is cen-

tral to understanding the problem Cli aces in trying to write a nationalist emale character

with agency. Clis deployment oIvanhoeas an intertext is at once ironic and strategic, since

Ivanhoepopularized nationalist modalities still in play two hundred years later.

In the English language literary canon, all o Scotts work, but Ivanhoein particular, unc-

tions as the rst novelistic representation o Romantic nationalism. Ivanhoeidealizes the olk,

using it to provide a narrative origin or the British nation by piecing the country together out

Rhonda Cobham, Revisioning Our Kumblas: ransorming Feminist and Nationalist Agendas in Tree Caribbean31.Womens exts, Callaloo 1, no. 1 (13): .It is widely agreed that Scotts novels were the rst historical novels in the way we now use that term. As one critic32.notes, Scotts concept o the historical novel dened the boundaries o the playing eld or both his contemporariesand those who ollowed him. Harold Orel, Te Historical Novel rom Scott to Sabatini: Changing Attitudes owarda Literary Genre, 18141920(New York: St. Martins Press, 1), . See also Ann Rigney, Hybridity: Te Case o

Walter Scott in Imperect Histories.


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o the separate peoples o England, Scotland, and Wales. Te idealization o the beginnings

o the nation, and o qualities considered essential to its citizens, may seem unremarkable to

modern day readers. However, this was a new development during the Romantic period.Abeng

engages with the nationalist discourses contained within Ivanhoe, specically in the sections

where English national identity is jeopardized through the threat o miscegenation.

Abengsreerences to Scotts Ivanhoecan serve as a template or thinking about the inter-

twinings o nationalism, Romanticism, and gender in postcolonial literature. Laura Doyle

writes that nationalism and Romanticism are connected through their joint concern with

the gure o the mother who produces and embodies racial patriarchies. Doyle denes racial

patriarchies as racialized labor hierarchies that are reproduced through stratied marriage

practices.4 Ivanhoe, Doyle writes, illustrates how racialized cultural productions . . . depend

on the manipulation o the marriageable and racialized bodies o women.5 Women must

be understood in racialized terms here, since it is only a specic kind o woman, the Saxon

Rowena portrayed in opposition to the Jewish Rebecca, who is t to become the wie o Ivan-

hoe and the mother o his children. Te idealization o the olk and the landscape emerged

in the Romantic period at the same time that women were increasingly upheld as the moral

and racial bedrock o their country.6 Scott insists on the creation o a hybrid national char-

acter taking strength and courage rom the Saxons, and civility and renement rom their

Norman conquerors. And it is just at this point in history that the Jamaicans o Clis novel

nd themselves. Tey are poised on the edge o political independence with a choice to make

about the creation o their new national culture.

Conronted with the issue o racial identity and emale agency, Clare argues that Jewish

Rebecca is Ivanhoes real heroine, but her ather maintains that the taint o Jewishness

excludes Rebecca rom such a position:

But Daddy, in Ivanhoe, it is Rebecca who is the real heroine, not Rowena.

Dont be silly, its Rowena whom Ivanhoe chooses in the end; that is the point o the story.

But its obvious that he really loves Rebecca; isnt it?

Gary Kelly points to Scotts importance to emerging nationalisms in the Romantic era: Scott demonstrated to more33.people than ever beorein Europe and America as well as in Britainthat the novel had literary potential o thehighest order and that it was an ideological discourse o the rst importance in constructing a new kind o nationalculture, one that comprised both national history and national culture. Gary Kelly, English Fiction o theRomantic Period 17891830(London and New York: Longman, 1), 1.

Laura Doyle,3. Bordering on the Body(New York: Oxord University Press, 1), , 3.Doyle, 2.3.Linda Colley argues that women during the Romantic era used the ideology o mens and womens separate spheres3.to legitimize their involvement in politics. Tey did this by using their position as the moral arbiters o the nation to

justiy their involvement in, or example, raising money or the war against France, raising subscriptions in supporto Queen Charlotte, and their protests against slavery in the West Indies. See the chapter entitled Womanpower inColleys Britons: Forging the Nation 17071837(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 12).


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Yes, he loves her, but Sir Walter Scott is showing that a Christian knight cannot be serious about

his love or a Jew. She is an indel in Ivanhoes eyes. She is dark and Rowena is air. Rowena is a

ladya Saxon. Te purest blooded people in the world. Rebecca is a tragic gure. You know that

great writers oten create their characters with tragic aws, so that no matter what happens, they

cannot succeed. Tey will never win in the end. Well, Rebeccas aw is that she is Jewishshe is

a beautiul awed woman; and Ivanhoe is rustrated in his love or her. O course she cannot help

what she is. (2)

Boy Savage, a light-skinned Jamaican married to a mixed-race wie, draws on ideologies o

race and nation rooted in the Romantic period. o be the heroine oIvanhoeis to occupy the

position o mother o the British nation. Tus, Clare and her athers argument over whether

Rebecca or Rowena is the heroine enters into the heart the role gender plays in national iden-

tity. Clares discussion oIvanhoewith her ather presents her with some particular problems

concerning identity. I Rebecca cannot be the heroine oIvanhoe, i she cannot be the mother

o the English nation because she is tainted by her Jewishness, then Clare does not know where

to place hersel as the mulatto daughter o a light-skinned Jamaican ather (who also has

distant Arican ancestry). Clare tries to question her athers assertions o control over her own

racial identity, but he retains the law o the ather in his power to name and dene. Clare asks

her ather what would happen i she married a Jew and is told that you would be an outcast

also (3). Clare probes his racial categories:

But what i I loved him?

Tat does not matter one iota.

Suppose he was only hal-Jewish.

It doesnt matter. A Jew is a Jew.

Ten how come you say Im white?

What the hell has that got to do with anything? Youre white because youre a Savage.

But Mother is colored. Isnt she?

Yes.

I she is colored and you are white, doesnt that make me colored?

No. You are my daughter. Youre white. (3)

Clares athers responses puzzle her, and she sits next to him wondering how she could be

white with a colored mother, brown legs, and ashy knees (3). For Clare, as well as the emale

characters in Ivanhoe, their racial identity is named and policed by men.

Te imperial nation exists not only as a racialized hierarchy, but also as a gendered one.

Te racial politics oIvanhoehelp us understand the boundaries o Clares pre-independence

Jamaica. Writing about this period in Jamaica, Cli states that: Tose o us who were light-

skinned, straight-haired, etc., were given to believe that we could actually attain whitenessor

at least those qualities o the colonizer which made him superior.7 Tis internalized racism

Michelle Cli,3. Te Land o Look Behind(Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1), 2.


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creates a society where rarely will dark and light people . . . achieve between themselves an

intimacy inormed with identity.8 Abengand Ivanhoe exempliy Romantic nationalisms

use o women as the touchstone o the nations past that must be careully managed through

proper marriages to insure the uture identity o the race.

Although embracing some aspects o Romantic nationalism, the space opened up by

Clares questioning oIvanhoes nationalist politics will lead Cli in a new direction. Clis

second novel, No elephone to Heaven, shows Jamaicas inheritance o nineteenth-century

modes o racial identity to be a signicant barrier to the ormation o the postcolonial nation.

Te invocation o the tropes o Romantic nationalism in postcolonial literature is thus a

double-edged sword. In its insistence on the possibility o the recovery o a peoples unadul-

terated origins, Caribbean literature attempts to create a cultural space outside o colonialism

even as it uses Romantic era tropes to do so. Nationalists use o racial rhetoric to establish the

culture o the emerging nation also relies on essentialist notions o women as territory to be

conquered or as mothers o the nation, reproducing some o the worst aspects o Romantic

nationalism. Tis quandary over how to establish a multi-cultural nation occupies Cli in

No elephone to Heaven, as the dangers o essentialist nationalism become apparent to her

character, Clare Savage.

Cyaan Live Split: Negotiating Essentialist Nationalism

When our landscape is so tampered with, how do we locate ourselves?

Michelle Cli, Calibans Daughter: Te empest and the eapot9

No elephone to Heaven describes Clares journey rom the inuence o her athers idealiza-tion o England as the mother country, to her acceptance o a hybrid identity that allows her

political agency without essentializing blackness. We come to understand that a rejection o the

politics o traditional nationalism allows Clare to conceive o a way to return to her homeland.

It also allows her to move towards resistance as she joins a guerrilla band determined to attack

an American lm set misrepresenting the Jamaican Maroon heroes Nanny and Cudjoe.40

Unlike Abeng, No elephone contains not only an acknowledgement o the difculties or

Ibid., 3.3.

Cli, Calibans Daughter, 3.3.As a point o plot clarication,. No elephonedoes not portray the guerilla group in much detail; the guerillas leaderis not even named. Te novel ocuses on Clares journey as a displaced Jamaican, rst as a child in New York andlater as a graduate student in London. Te chronological movement o Clares story is interspersed with short sec-tions describing the guerilla group in the present. Te novel cuts back and orth between the past and the presentuntil the ending where Clares story and the guerillas plot to destroy an American lm set come together to ormthe nal chapter o the novel.


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contemporary Jamaicans in crossing color, class, and gender divisions, but also an attempt to

create a new postcolonial identity.

Te very diversity o Jamaica poses a problem or a uniying political agenda. Te opening

paragraphs oNo elephonedescribe the necessity o the guerillas use o a common uniorm

to unite Jamaican men and women o dierent hues and backgrounds:

Tese peoplemen and womenwere dressed in similar clothes, which became them as uniorms,

signiying some agreement, some purposethat they were in something togetherin these clothes,

at least, they seemed to blend together. Tis alikeness was something they needed, which could be

important, even vital, to themor the shades o their skin, places traveled to and rom, events

experienced, things understood, ood taken into their bodies, acts o violence committed, books

read, music heard, languages recognized, ones they loved, living amily, varied widely, came between

them. Tat was all to be expected o coursethat on this island, as part o this small nation, many

o them would have been separated at birth. Automatically. Slipped into spaces where to escape

would mean taking your lie into your own hands. Not more, not less. Where to get out would

mean crashing through barriers positioned by people not so unlike yoursel. People you knew

should call you brother, sister.

Te people around her had a deep bitterness to contend with. Dressed as they were, they

might move closer.4

Te separation o amily members at birth, we come to understand rom this paragraph,

undermines the ormation o a national consciousness. Te legacy o colonial rule with its

insistence on the divisions o gender, class, and color continues to haunt the Jamaican amily.

As previous sections o this essay show, racial and gender ideologies o colonialism power-

ully aect the way the amily is conceptualized. White women within the British Empire

become the boundary o who is British and who is not through the regulation o marriage

and childbirth. Black women in nationalist West Indian writings are gured as mothers whoeither embody cultural heritage o the people, or who stand in support o the eorts o their

sons in establishing a more authentic postcolonial identity.

Clare and the members o the guerilla groups she joins internalize the colonial legacies o

racism and classism. Crossing over or Clare is no less raught than or the darker members

o the guerilla group: A light-skinned woman, daughter o landowners, native-born, slaves,

emigrs, Carib, Ashanti, English, has taken her place on this truck, alongside people who easily

could have hated her (). Clare internalizes the expected separation o her light-skinned sel,

adding to her list o regrets that she had not bucked her ather and joined a demonstration

decrying the murder o Dr. King. Tat she was not as dark as her sister, mother. Tat sheallowed the one to become conused with the other, and so lessen her (113).

Michelle Cli,1. No elephone to Heaven (New York: Vintage International, 1), . Subsequent reerences to thiswork appear parenthetically in the text.


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Given these divisions, an essentialist appeal to a single olk identity (typically constituted

as the black olk, as we have seen) to solidiy the nations identity must ail. In a nation com-

posed o hybrid subjects, where no one is racially or culturally pure, the claims o black

nationalists, derived rom the ideologies o Romantic nationalism, can only be divisive in

the New World context.4 Clis No elephone to Heaven represents a dierent intervention

into West Indian literature through its reusal to center the narrative on characters with a

xed identity. It enters into the difculty o orming a multi-cultural nation, as in Jamaicas

motto: Out o Many, One People, by reusing to assign xed identities to its characters.

In its most radical break with the nationalism oAbeng, No elephonegives a place o honor

to its character Harry/Harriet. WhileAbengidealizes the rural olk o Jamaica, No elephone

gives the voice o postcolonial resistance to an ambiguously-gendered man who comes rom

the urban middle-class.

Te Harry/Harriet character is crucial to understanding the dierent political agenda in

No elephone. He chooses to live as a woman without having a sex change operation, locat-

ing his political and social identity through perormance rather than in an essential physical

maniestation. Te choice is mine, man, she tells Clare, emphasizing her agency by stating,

castration aint de main ting . . . not a-tall, a-tall (1). Working as a traveling nurse with

Kingstons poor, Harry/Harriet models or Clare a way out o the binary identity politics she

nds hersel trapped in, as when she conuses her light skin with her inability to stand up to

her ather and to protest Martin Luther Kings assassination. Harry, now Harriet, insists on

the perormativity o identity and activism:

None o her people downtown let on i they knew a male organ swung gently under her bleached

and starched skirt. Or that white powder on her brown ace hid a ve oclock shadow. . . . Had

they known about Harriet, they would have indulged in elaborate name-calling, possibly stoning,

in the end harrying her to the harborperhaps. And still she was able to love them. How was

that? (11).

Clare realizes that in order or political change to come, she must acknowledge the realities

o her privilege as a light-skinned Jamaican, so that she can ally hersel with those who easily

could have hated her ().

Clare meets Harry/Harriet during a visit to Jamaica ater her mother has died, and it is

she who is able to teach Clare about Jamaicas past o colonialism and slavery in such as way

that it is not locked into a paradigm o deeat and sadness as it was or her mother. Harry/

For a discussion o the intersecting claims to purity and hybridity in Caribbean nationalism, see Shalini Puri,2.Canonized Hybridities, Resistant Hybridities: Chutney Soca, Carnival, and the Politics o Nationalism in BelindaEdmondson (ed) Caribbean Romances: Te Politics o Regional Representation (Charlottesville: University o VirginiaPress, 1), 1.


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Harriet recalls or Clare the history o their island that she has orgotten. We areo the

past here, (12) Harry/Harriet tells Clare, pointing to the Romantic era roots o Jamaicas

present-day culture:

So much o the past that we punish people by ogging them with cat-o-nine-tails. We expect

people to live on cornmeal and dried sh, which was the diet o the slaves. We name hotels Planta-

tion Inn and Sans Souci . . . A peculiar past. For we have taken the masters past as our own. Tatis the danger (12).

Working to change the masters past occurs on several dierent levels in No elephone.

Te masters past includes a rigorous policing o the boundaries o gender and racial iden-

tity, primarily through the amily. Cannon Schmitt writes o nationalisms long and varied

involvement in the construction o normative (and also deviant) masculinities, emininities,

and sexualities. In addition to representing the nation itsel as a motherland or atherland,

nationalism has demanded o its male and emale citizens an appropriately gendered and sexed

national subjectivity.4 One o the most powerul maniestations o nationalisms construction

o gendered subjects, as we have seen, comes through its placement o women as mothers o

the nation who empower their sons without attaining agency in their own right. Harry/Har-

riet and Clare violate these norms through their common liminal identity: Harry/Harriet as

transgendered, and Clare as having Arican ancestry although she is light enough to pass as

white.44 While creating an empowered mother character would be one way to challenge this

ideological inheritance, Cli chooses a dierent route in No elephoneprecisely through her

rejection o the biological body, an appropriately gendered and sexed national subjectivity

as Schmitt puts it, as the guarantor o identity and political afliation.

Clare attempts to identiy with Harry/Harriet through their common liminality: hers

o race and his o gender. Clare names this by describing them as neither one thing nor the

other (131). Harry/Harriet tells her that while identity may be mutable, political activism

cannot be: I mean the time will come or both o us to choose. For we will have to make

the choice. Cast our lot. Cyann live split. Not in this world (131). We know rom Harrys

choice to become Harriet, even without surgery, that Cyann live split does not reer to a

biological essentialism, but instead to the choice to participate in political action rather than

accepting the status quo.

Cannon Schmitt,3. Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality(Philadelphia: Universityo Pennsylvania Press, 1), .For an important intervention concerning citizenship in the Caribbean context see M. Jacqui Alexander, Not Just.(any) body can be a Citizen: the Politics o Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in rinidad and obago and the Baha-mas in Catherine Hall (ed) Cultures o Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and wentiethCenturies(New York: Routledge, 2).


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In previous sections I read Abengwithin the context o its commonalties with both

Romantic nationalism and other West Indian literature in its deployment o the gure o the

grandmother or mother in order to establish a sense o identity and authenticity. Clis choice

in No elephoneto dispense with biological motherhood or Clare hints at another possibility

or identity. Upon returning to Jamaica, Clare becomes ill with an inection that leaves her

sterile. All that eort or naught, Clare thinks, Lightening up. Eyes or naught. Skin or

naught. Fine nose or naught (1). Te imperatives o heterosexuality emphasized to Clare

in her conversations with Boy about Ivanhoeare suddenly removed. Boys mandate that Clare

maintain her lightness and pass it on to children conceived in an appropriate marriage cannot

be ullled. Clares inertility signies another possibility or the ormation o a national culture

outside o the olk mother.

In a groundbreaking article, Adrienne Rich notes that compulsory heterosexuality has

become a model or every other orm o exploitation and control.45 Richs comments reveal

a new way to understand Clis choice o Harry/Harrriet and Clare as protagonists oNo

elephone. Clis early work, includingAbeng, concerns itsel with the intertwining o amily

and colonial ideology. By reusing to replicate the modes o heterosexuality, including biologi-

cal motherhood, No elephonecreates a space where national culture and resistance is enacted

outside o the biological amily. Te novel describes Harry/Harriet and Clare as becoming

lovers and setting up a home together beore becoming members in the revolutionary group.

Indeed, in doing so, No elephonepregures the work o the American activist group, Queer

Nation, described by Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman as utilizing a kind o guerilla

warare that names all concrete and abstract spaces o social communication as spaces where

the people live and thus as national sites ripe both or transgression and legitimate visibility.46

No elephoneactively rejects the modes o nationalism inherited rom the Romantic period

through its reusal to constitute the source o national culture and identity as coming through

the biological mother. Harry/Harriets relationship with Clare and their work with the guerilla

group become national sites enacting the creation o a postcolonial Jamaican culture.

One oNo elephones most telling moments concerning the impediments o essential-

ist nationalism occurs when Clare tries to establish her authenticity with the guerilla group.

When Clare nally becomes ready to join the revolutionary group, and to oer her grand-

mothers abandoned arm or their base, she rst seeks to establish hersel as a radical subject by

naming her alliance to her grandmother and her grandmothers land. I owe my allegiance to

Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience,. Signs, no. (1): .Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, Queer Nationality in Silvestra Mariniello and Paul A. Bov (eds).Gendered Agents: Women and Institutional Knowledge(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1), 2.


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the place my grandmother made, Clare tells the leader o the group (1). When questioned

by the dark-skinned leader i Clare believes hersel to be superior to someone o my color

(1), Clare at rst can only gesture to her origins: You are the color o my grandmother

(19). Te leader rejects her claim, saying: As you well know, that could be as nothing (19).

Te problem, as the leader o this group reminds Clare, is that the hierarchies o color are so

deeply embedded in the Caribbean colonized subject that it is commonplace or members o

the light-skinned middle-class to distance themselves rom their poorer, darker relations. Te

denial o a hybrid identity on the part o the Jamaican middle-class should not be replicated,

No elephoneargues, by essentializing Arican identity. Te guerilla leaders rejection o Clares

claims to authenticity through her ties to the land and her grandmother buried on that land

show that it is actions, not essentialist identity politics that count. Te reality taken in with

[Clares] mothers milk is one o rigid class stratication within the amily (1). Color,

Cli writes in the Land o Look Behind, was the symbol o our potential. . . . We did not see

that color symbolism was a method o keeping us apart: in the society, in the amily, between

riends. Tose o us who were light-skinned, straight-haired, etc., were given to believe that

we could actually attain whitenessor at least those qualities o the colonizer which made

him superior.47 Te light-skinned middle class, epitomized inAbengby Boy Savages reading

oIvanhoe, essentializes their British heritage to the exclusion o their Arican ancestors: We

learned to cherish that part o us that was them [white]and to deny the part that was not.

Believing in some cases that the latter part had ceased to exist.48

Rejecting identity politics, Cli speaks in Calibans Daughter to the process o

ruination as a process o decultivation o the landscape, and a decolonization o the mind.

Ruinate, the adjective, and ruination, the noun, are Jamaican inventions. Each word signies the

reclamation o land, the disruption o cultivation, civilization, by the uncontrolled, uncontrollable

orest. When a landscape becomes ruinate, careully designed aisles o cane are envined, strangled,

the order o empire is replaced by the chaotic orest. Te word ruination (especially) signies this

immediately; it contains both the word ruin, and nation. A landscape in ruination means one in

which the imposed nation is overcome by the naturalness o ruin.

As individuals in this landscape, we, the colonized, are also subject to ruination, to the sel

reverting to the wildness o the orest.49

Te guerillas in No elephone take their rst steps towards establishing a new nation over

the imposed nation by recultivating Clares grandmothers ruinate land. Tey ound, in

the process o clearing the land, things that had been planted long beorebeore even the

Michelle Cli,. Land, 2.Ibid..Michelle Cli, Calibans Daughter, ..


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grandmotherwhich had managed to survive the density o the wild orest. Cassava. Au.

Fuu. Plantain (11). Although Cli moves away rom linking the olk with an essential

national identity, this still suggests a Romantic representation o the landscapea guarantor

o identity through an organic relationship with the nations territory. At its most undamental,

Colonization is an agricultural act, writes historian Frieda Knobloch.50 How then are we to

interpret Clis writing o the colonization, ruination, and recultivation o the land?

With the rise o modern nationalism in the Romantic period came a renewed interest in

the relationship o the living to the dead.5 We might consider the gothic ascination with the

dead and dying as more than an isolated ashion important only to that genre, but instead

as a recurring moti in Romantic works. Te dead are important ideologically or Romantic

nationalism because they unction, as Marilyn Butler writes, as the guarantee o our identity

and the source o our claim to belong to one soil rather than another.5 No elephoneinvokes

the legacy o these claims in its portrayal o Clare Savages return to Jamaica to bury my

mother and to reclaim the land o her grandmother. From a Romantic premise such as this,

the novel contains a surprising conclusion about the tenuous nature o such claims to land

and kin as the basis or the postcolonial nation.

Te relationship o the Caribbean subject to the landscape is not the same as or the

Romantics because slavery and colonialism disrupt any easy notion o identication. Unlike,

or example, Wordsworths visits to Lucys grave, where the poet perceives a sense o com-

munity and continuity, the landscape portrayed in No elephonecontains layers o vegetation,

ruins, and artiacts. Te graves o Jamaican ancestors are hidden, missing, and haunted. For

the postcolonial subject, No elephonesuggests, the xed relationship o citizen to land is not

linear. Ater returning to her grandmothers property, Clare describes the landscape:

Te ve croton treesdragons bloodmarking o the burial place o slaves, at the side o the

river, on a slight rise. Unquiet ground, thatchildren eared the anger o the spirits, who did

not rest, who had not been sung to their new home. Her mother had told her o the slaves. Her

people. Yes. And their sometime enthusiasm or death. Tey ate dirt, Kitty told her, when this

lie became too much or them. And who could blame the poor souls, she continued, who could

blame them indeed. (1)

Such a history can only be partially recovered and as such resists direct claims to origins. Even

Clares grandmothers grave, a much more recent human internment, cannot be ound: Te

orest had obliterated the amily graves, so that the grandmother and her husband, and their

Frieda Knobloch,. Te Culture o Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West(Chapel Hill andLondon: University o North Carolina Press, 1), 1.See Marilyn Butler, Romanticism and Nationalism: alking to the Dead,1. La Questione Romantica: RevistaInterdisciplinare De Studi Romantici1, no. (1): 3.Ibid.2.


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son who had died beore them, were wrapped by wild vines which tangled the mango trees

shading their plots (). Characters such as Clare cannot easily locate their national past in

such a landscape.

WhileAbengutilizes the gure o the mother to symbolize essential qualities o the land

and olk, in No elephone to Heaven the protagonists attempts to invoke a nationalism based

on connection to place, amily, and the olk cannot have the same meaning in Jamaica, the

novel suggests, as in Romantic ideology. Te racial and gender essentialism inherent in Roman-

tic nationalism excludes women rom nationalist agency and creates a divisive mandate or a

multi-racial postcolonial nation such as Jamaica.

One legacy o Romanticisms idealization o the landscape and the olk consists in its

conversion into an oppositional discourse in Caribbean nationalist novels and poems that

celebrate olk culture and the Caribbean landscape in an attempt to create a more authentic

and successul postcolonial national culture. Understanding this political agenda in No ele-

phoneis important, not simply to trace the legacies o Romantic nationalism in a display o

the semantics o a literary heritage. I am not arguing here that Clis later work reverses the

tropes o Romantic nationalism because it is an ideology that is bad or imperialist in and

o itsel, but because it clearly impedes an activism based on the multi-racial and diversely

gendered New World population. For Cli, the implications o the instability o national

identity are o necessity the rejection o the essentialism o Romantic nationalism. Te gure

o the mother similarly acts as an undeniable tie to identity and authenticity or postcolonial

subjects in the works I examine here, showing them as inheritors o this European mode o

thought, even as they resist European political control. I would suggest that a non-essentialist

approach to origins leads away rom the politics o rooting national and cultural identity

through the mother and to a eminized and exploitable landscape.

No elephoneoers a paradigm o national identity based on shared experiences rather

than on essentialist notions o race or landscape. Tis novel suggests something more risky,

more threatening to the traditional boundaries o nationalism than earlier West Indian or-

mulations: that all o us in the Americas are hybrid, creole subjects and that very hybridity

can be the basis or a politics o nation which is neither racially exclusionary nor complicit in

the maintenance o essentialist gendered identities.


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Nationalism in Cliff

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