Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory in their Introduction to Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (1990) write:
The concept of voicelessness necessarily informs any discussion of Caribbean women and literature... By voicelessness, we mean the historical absence of the woman writer’s text: the absence of a specifically female position on major issues such as slavery, colonialism, decolonization, women’s rights and more direct social and cultural issues. (1)
It seems not much has changed since the publication of this pathbreaking collection of essays three decades ago. Jennifer Donahue in her Introduction to Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad (2020), elaborating the scope of the book, writes:
In focusing on Caribbean women’ writing, the book draws attention to the fact that Caribbean women writers continue to be underpublished and underrepresented within Caribbean studies... Caribbean women are not a homogenous group; instead, Caribbean women’s literature and the voices of Caribbean women reflect distinct racial, cultural, and socioeconomic positions. (5-6)
This panel thus wishes to contribute to the decades-long effort of reversing this “un-voicing”/ “voicelessness” of Caribbean women writers by celebrating them within and beyond their literary landscape, following in the footsteps of crucial works such as Out of the Kumbla, Caribbean Women Writers, and most recently Taking Flight, especially taking into cognisance the Presidential Theme of “Working Conditions” and the historical erasure of women’s labour across all industries and fields, including Literature and Literary Studies.
To initiate the session, we will begin with Renata Pontes’s paper, “Landscape and Experiences of Knowledge in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother” where the speaker examines the protagonist’s personal narrative of self-discovery in a world of fractured identities to chalk out the political transformation of the spaces we are immersed in, from the Caribbean to beyond. This paper would open our panel by aptly exploring how the politics of identity and knowledge shape and create both the woman writer and the woman as text within the Anglophone Caribbean.
From this foundational understanding of women as text in Anglophone Caribbean fiction, we will move into the domain of maternal as text in Anglophone Caribbean poetry, with Wei Liu’s presentation, “Maternal I-magination: Lorna Goodison, M. NourbeSe Philip, and the Caribbean Poetics of Reattachment”. Drawing on NourbeSe Philip’s idea of “i-mage” that links the challenge of image-making in an alienating language to the difficulty of articulating identity, lineage, and spatio-cultural connectivity, the speaker would contend that the maternal figure is a central “i-mage” in Caribbean women poets’ reckoning with histories of slavery and displacement. The paper thus advances the discourse of the Caribbean history through the writing(s) of the Caribbean women by linking the individual maternal to the socio-political.
One of the objectives of this panel is to highlight the diverse linguistic and literary landscapes of the Caribbean and how women writers create and recreate each of these sites. Hence, moving out of the Anglophone and into the Francophone, we will proceed with Elise Finielz’s presentation, “Vocation and Literary Creation: The Case of Women Writers from the Francophone Caribbean”. This paper would provide a fitting concluding argument for this panel by looking inwards into the socio-historical reality of Caribbean women writers through an exposé of the very politics of writing and the literary, and the investigation of how it complicates their positionality, when it (un)masks itself as a vocation. The analysis will question the use of the term “vocation” in the biographical interviews of nine internationally acclaimed female authors from the Francophone Caribbean, to examine the class, gender, racial hierarchies prevailing in the French literary field, and how these women reassert the power of transgression of female voices in the literary landscape, beyond the category of the “engaged” writer.
Finally, we will open the floor to unstructured discussion, where we will further examine the socio-political reality of women writers within the Caribbean literary landscape, acknowledging their assertion of individual agency and collective voice. Resounding Out of the Kumbla one more time, this panel hopes to rekindle the discourse of “movement from confinement to visibility, articulation, process” (19) allowing for “a multiplicity of moves, exteriorized, no longer contained and protected or dominated” (19), allowing for the voices of Caribbean women writers to be heard loud and clear.