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Postcolonial Ghosts

 | 
Mélanie Joseph-Vilain
, 
Judith Misrahi-Barak

Translational Ghosts

Reincarnating Legba: Caribbean Writers at the Crossroads

Prudence Layne

Résumé

For Caribbean authors exploring new ways in their work of navigating the various hyphens and margins they straddle in their experiences of travel, displacement and exile, and of moving beyond the processes of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, reincarnating Legba, a metaphorical correlate of ‘the crossroads, ’—the hybrid space of dichotomous experience— emerges as a mechanism through which the production of liminality and difference helps redefine and construct political and social Caribbean postcolonial identity. Legba’s reincarnates, these postcolonial ghosts, including the transvestite, transsexual, and the mixed ethnic, are emerging as haunting presences in contemporary Caribbean fiction. Like Legba, bridge between the powerful and the powerless, the aged and the young, the disabled and the strong, within these crossroads characters resides the power to mediate, regenerate, disintegrate and transform normalizing narratives of oppression into resistance strategies. As Caribbean subjects, both real and imagined, attempt to articulate and negotiate the relationship between territory/place, political structures, cultural traditions, and the national and cultural identity schisms that characterize the postcolonial experience, Legba becomes one of the primordial influences in the contemporary literary re-imaginings of these complex negotiations.

Texte intégral

1He is known as the bridge between the powerful and the powerless, the aged and the young, the disabled and the strong; his name changes across cultural pantheons—

  • 1 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Trans. J (...)

... he is the orisha Elegua, our old acquaintance from the Yoruba and Ewe-Fon West African cultures, creolized in Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean. You will recall that among his functions is the one watching over doors, keys, locks, and houses, and that in one of his principal avatars or ‘roads’ he takes the shape of an old Negro with a cane... In Cuba, this avatar is known by the name of Eshu (Exiu in Brazil), and the santería cult represents him sometimes as the devil... At other times, in Haiti, he is the greatest of wizards, who likes to live at night and in the darkest places; he is voodoo’s Legba-Carrefour....1

  • 2 Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994): 2.
  • 3 Dash, J. Michael, ‘In Search of the Lost Body: Redefining the Subject in Caribbean Literature’, The (...)

2Yet Legba’s functions as an interpreter, a conduit to history, nature, and the spiritual realm, a teacher of valuable lessons, and a unifier of opposites remain unchanged. For Caribbean authors exploring new ways of navigating the various hyphens and margins they straddle in their experiences of travel, displacement, and exile, and of moving beyond the processes of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, reanimating Legba offers limitless potential. The production of difference and the liminal in Caribbean literature is simultaneously the political and social definition and construction of the Caribbean. From the native peoples who populated her lands, to the Europeans who plundered them, and the Africans, Indians, Chinese, and others who toiled them, the region has always been the world’s ‘crossroads, ’ the confluence of Africa, Asia, and Europe, and the historic site for its human and economic experiments, among them slavery, indentureship, sugar, tobacco and rum production, and tourism. Homi Bhabha suggests that ‘it is in the emergence of the interstices—that intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, communal interest, or cultural value are negotiated’2. In contemporary Caribbean writing, not only does Legba undergo a ‘corporeal metamorphosis’, but his contemporary reincarnates become sites of ‘revolutionary potential’3, mediating, disintegrating, regenerating, and transforming normalizing narratives of oppression into social and political resistance strategies. As Caribbean subjects, both real and imagined, attempt to articulate the national and cultural identity schism that characterizes the postcolonial subject, Legba, the metaphorical correlate of the crossroads—the hybrid space of dichotomous experiences—becomes one of the primordial influences in the contemporary literary re-imaginings of these complex negotiations.

3Contemporary Legba, ‘Mèt Gran Chemen’ (Master of the Great Road), represents a syncreticism of colonization and migration. While contemporary reincarnations may not exactly replicate Legba’s traditional physical representation as an old male cripple, these figures, remapped in a postcolonial context, replicate and expand Legba’s functions. They offer perspectives that can sprout into what Antonio Benítez-Rojo calls ‘... a cultural sea without frontiers, a sea whose flows connects Hermes with Echu, with Elegua, with Papa Legba and Legba-Carrefour, Kingston with Akan culture and the cities of Bristol and Addis Ababa’ (Benítez-Rojo 1992: 285). The fiction experiments with the practical complexities of liminal spaces, and the crossroads characters—the transvestite (and more specifically the male cross-dressing nurse), the transsexual/transgendered figure, and the mixed ethnic/creole—are being re-conceptualized as metaphors and tools of Caribbean post-colonialism and nationalism. These efforts attempt to map the Caribbean as a space into which the mosaic of individual Caribbean experiences rooted in travel and migration—the constant flux, boundary crossings, and mediations of place, language, and culture—can function and flourish.

  • 4 Cacoullos, Ann R., ‘Hybridity in National and Sexual Identity: Some Conceptual Problematics.’ Natio (...)

4The paradigmatic shifts these counter-discourses represent may further be understood using the theory of hybridity because while ‘hybridity cannot dispel, in fact sustains, the uncomfortable condition of being at once inside and outside... [a]biding in this state of hybridity theoretically and experientially is... a necessary condition for developing radical, emancipatory, autonomous discourses and practices’4. Furthermore, hybridity helps articulate experiences of Caribbean subjectivity if one is willing to surrender heterogeneity to the interstices of hybridity’s confluent worlds: the public and the private. I use the term ‘public’ synonymously with political/national identity as it relates to the collective/group and the ‘private’ to represent the individual’s experience of being. While the public and private exist as distinctly different, the movement of the hybrid subject between selves is ‘never from one side to another; it is a disruption of sides, a changing, a new mapping, a reinvention of spaces’ (Cacoullos 1996: 46). For Caribbean authors engaged in exploring the tensions of difference in their work, examining the link between the personal and the political offers new ways of re-imagining the political and social definition and construction of Caribbean diasporic and postcolonial identities.

5As postcolonial Caribbean nations struggle to define their cultures within a constantly changing globalscape, individuals within those societies also grapple for a sense of belonging. Nationalist discourses that emerged in the post-independence era of the 1960s were tagged as both heterosexist and masculinist, especially since the struggle to break away from imperial centers had been led in most cases by black, educated males. In Beyond a Boundary, C.L.R. James argues that

  • 5 James, Cyril L. R., Beyond a Boundary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993): 46-47.

to be a nationalist, one must have a nation: the African had Africa, the Asian had Asia, but the West Indian had only this ‘system, ’ this code of conduct encapsulated in the play of cricket. And indeed, the West Indian cricket team, world-renowned champions, has become one of the most potent signs of Caribbean nationalism.5

6That West Indians from different islands were able to play together as a cohesive unit, defeating the team that was a symbol of British colonial power and nationhood partially provides the basis for James’s belief that as practice and metaphor, cricket could bridge the chasm between island territories. One of the central arguments of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991) is that nationalism is based on a sense of communal self-awareness or consciousness generated by shared values, concerns, and experiences. Caribbean citizens located outside of mainstream culture—women, gays, lesbians, creoles, and others—are also marginalized and hard-pressed to find points of identification in national landscapes that do not articulate their struggles or beliefs.

  • 6 Forbes, Curdella, ‘Tropes of the Carnivalesque: Hermaphroditic Gender As Identity in Slave Society (...)
  • 7 Forrester, Faizal, ‘Revolting Bodies: Homosexual Dream and Masculine Anxiety in Edgar Mittelholzer’ (...)
  • 8 Other works that craft ‘crossroads characters’ include H. Nigel Scott’s Spirits in the Dark (Oxford (...)

7The increase in the 1980s and 1990s of more frequent and complex portrayals of Caribbean nationalism signaled the transformation of the image of the national hero of James’s era. A number of texts began to appear in the 1980s that tackled issues of same-sex love, gender ambivalence, and the Caribbean’s homophobic and often violent reactions to such characters. This new hero (in), characterized by his/her migratory practices, militancy, and a desire to use traditional and non-traditional healing practices to change his/her own life and the lives of others, is represented fictionally in the figure of the hermaphrodite (transsexual), the transvestite, and the mixed ethnic. Speaking within the context of slave society, Curdella Forbes proposes that the ‘hermaphroditic presence, essentially a manifestation of the carnivalesque, opened the way for a gender-equal concept of social organization which has been constantly circumvented since Emancipation... by the society’s attraction to patriarchy’6. Early literary examples like Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) show that hybrid figures have always appeared in Caribbean literary works as peripheral, sexually deviant, and amoral misfits rather than as active political agents. One notable exception, however, was Edgar Mittelholzer’s A Morning at the Office (1950). Among its many characters, Mittelholzer’s text examines the homosexual fantasies of Mr. Reynolds, a biracial Trinidadian salesman. Prior to its publication, Faizal Forrester observed that ‘there has been very little artistic interest in exploring the political and social challenges posed by homosexuality—its practices, aesthetics, choices and desires—not only to those texts of empire that have sought to define and establish for the world the “essential” aspects of black male sexuality, but also to our own regional homophobia...’7. Mittelholzer’s groundbreaking text was pivotal in its acknowledgement that the representation of a non-heterosexual ideal merits consideration, a world that possesses significant implications for Caribbean politics, life, and writers. Yet, even this work did not open the floodgates for similar texts, especially since the push for independence was constructed upon a black, male, heterosexual iconography influenced by male Victorian principles and sensibilities.8

  • 9 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousnes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univers (...)

8Like the authors of the works that followed Mittelholzer’s, the critics also came to recognize that the survival of the nation is contingent upon its inclusion of historically ostracized groups into the nationalist discourse. In The Black Atlantic, for example, Paul Gilroy contends that ‘themes of nationality, exile, and cultural affiliation [have] been compounded further by the questions of gender, sexuality, and male domination, which have been made unavoidable by the struggles of black women and the voices of gay men and lesbians’9. Where music and cricket have been used throughout the independence era as metaphors for Caribbean nationalism, new symbolic systems are being created to reconsider how the patriarchal and imperial paradigms of old can be replaced to encompass all segments of society.

  • 10 Garber, Marjorie, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York and London: Routl (...)
  • 11 Cliff, Michelle. No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Plume, 1987). No Telephone to Heaven will be ref (...)
  • 12 Seidman, Steven, ed., Queer Theory/Sociology (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996): 12.

9Reanimating Legba in the form of the transvestite presents a feasible alternative for several notable Caribbean writers. The transvestite and the emphasis on modes of dress become politically charged sites around which the work of national and personal independence is conducted, embodying the relationship between sexual identity and national identity. In challenging and disrupting national and institutional boundaries of exclusion based on artificial constructs, he/she represents the vested interest of a people long garbed in oppression. The transvestite captures this ‘revolutionary potential’ and political agency by introducing choice as an important component in the fashioning of national and cultural discourses. Transvestitism creates culture and... that culture creates transvestites’10. Transvestitism questions binary thinking, introduces crisis, and opens up a liminal space of possibility on a political, cultural, and social level. In Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven11 and Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda, the authors’ evocation of the transvestite acknowledges the strategic relationship of Othered subjects to contemporary social and political imperatives of the Caribbean. The racial, gender, sexual, national, and other types of dysphoria which engage the protagonists of these texts on personal levels emphasize the contradictions between romantic and patriotic love, and expose on a grander scale the internal anarchy and uncertainty of a homophobic but revolutionary Jamaica at different times in her history. By exploring variant and liminal identities, the aim is ‘not to abandon identity as a category of knowledge and politics, but to render it permanently open and contestable as to its meaning and political role’12. Transvestitism becomes symptomatic of ‘a space of possibility, structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes not just as a category of crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself’ (Garber 1992: 16).

  • 13 Adisa, Opal Palmer, ‘Journey Into Speech: A Writer Between Two Worlds: An Interview with Michelle C (...)
  • 14 Comfort, Susan M., ‘Struggling for Wholeness: Postcolonial Resistance in Michelle Cliff ’s Abeng an (...)

10In writing about Jamaica and her citizens’ struggle to overcome their legacy of violence and oppression, Michelle Cliff reveals through her cross-dressing character that homophobia and its related violence are other burdens they must overcome. In an interview with Opal Palmer Adisa, Cliff explains that she wanted Harry/Harriet to ‘portray a character who would be the most despised in Jamaica, and show how heroic he is. The homophobia in Jamaica has always appalled me; I have often wondered what the source is. Why is it such a homophobic place?’13. She says Harry/Harriet is one who believes that he is a woman trapped in a man’s body; Harry/Harriet is ‘boy-girl, ’ ‘brother-sister, ’ ‘one that nature did not claim’ (NTTH 21). In one of his many counsels to Clare Savage, Cliff ’s creole protagonist from her first novel Abeng, Harry/Harriet says: ‘I mean the time will come for both of us to choose. For we will have to make the choice. Cast our lot. Cyaan live split’ (NTTH 131). Indeed s/he makes the choice to live as Harriet. Harry would be no more. Harry/Harriet finds wholeness in effacing and subverting his masculinity. Ironically, however, Harriet cannot complete his physical transformation because of economic constraints. S/he understands the ramifications of his decision to live as a transgendered subject, and knows that s/he may at any time be brutalized because of that decision. Susan Comfort suggests that Harriet’s decision to assume the signs of a female and to maintain a sexual preference for women ‘does not derive from a natural disposition or sensibility. Indeed Harriet makes clear that her identity is the result of a series of political choices that she makes in response to a history of colonial domination and oppression’14. Harry/Harriet’s self-determination echoes the struggle that must also occur on a national scale: Jamaicans, and all West Indians, must choose non-violence.

11Harry/Harriet manifests his/her resistance in performance. Susan Comfort suggests that ‘Harry/Harriet, as his/her name implies, is a performer who orchestrates his various signs of gender in a subversive parody. Nada Elia indicates three incidents in the novel that demonstrate this parody. The first locates Harry/Harriet at a pool party clad in ‘a bikini-bra stretched across his hairy, delicately mounded chest, panties cradling his cock and balls’ and dancing to ‘Hey, Jude’ (NTTH 21). The second places him at dinner with Clare, wearing ‘a proper dinner jacket, but his face bespoke his usual brave, glamorous self’ (NTTH 121). During the course of the evening, Harry becomes the focus of a married African couple, both of whom openly stare in astonishment at the imposing figure. Capturing his audience’s attention, Harry introduces himself as ‘Prince Badnigga’ and Clare as ‘Princess Cunnilinga, ’ all the while batting his eyelids painted in the colors of the national flag (NTTH 125). In the third performance Elia identifies, Harriet is dashing through the tenements of Kingston ‘in her uniform and carrying her bag, sometimes wearing a red cape, a dashing figure even in the heat, like Mary Seacole... None of her people downtown let on if they knew a male organ swung gently under her bleached and starched skirt’ (NTTH 171). In Trances, Dances, and Vociferations: Agency and Resistance in Africana Women’s Narratives, Elia characterizes Harry/Harriet’s performances in this way:

  • 15 Elia, Nada, Trances, Dances, and Vociferations: Agency and Resistance in Africana Women’s Narrative (...)

Ever aware of the potential of performance to channel her/his desires into untapped territories, even Harry/Harriet’s passing is not an act of capitulation, but a strategic ruse that admits her/him into ever wider circles, allowing her/him to practice her/his healing science among ever greater numbers of people. The performance put on by queers, who play a role in society even as they negotiate their sexualities, places them in a highly subversive field, as they cannot be designated/represented by the dominant discourse . . .15

  • 16 Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routled (...)

12Yet, Harry/Harriet’s performances are far more than acts of subversion. In Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler concludes that drag performance ‘is significantly related to the problem of unacknowledged loss... that reiterates a gendered idealization and its radical uninhabitability’16. Although Harry’s ideal is to be female, dressing and assuming the mannerisms of that sex, he does not inhabit the female body, but constructs a female persona by dispossessing all things male.

  • 17 Knutson, Lin, ‘Michelle Cliff and the Feminization of Space: No Telephone to Heaven as Female Limbo (...)

13In its drag performance, therefore, the metaphoric transvestite body situates national and personal crises of identification within contestatory sites of historical and cultural significations that allegorize the instability of family relationships, failed parental responsibility, and loss of homeland (s). Harry/Harriet refuses to define his/her subjectivity in terms of loss, but rather as choice. S/he, for example, categorizes his/her own rape as ‘Not symbolic, not allegory, not something in a story of a dialogue by Plato’ (128). Admitting that ‘the man’s brutishness made [his/her] journey hard, hard, ’ Harry/Harriet asserts that ‘that t’ing didn’t make me who I am’ (128). Harry/Harriet regrets only the guilt that the act of violation instilled in his young mind: ‘Ten years old and guilty that a big man in a khaki uniform, braided and bemedaled, in the garrison of Her Majesty, did to me what he did. What else to expect but guilt... or shame... whiteman Black bwai’ (128). Harry/Harriet ‘makes present that which is absent.’ His/her ability to recount the tale of his rape and his mother’s rape, makes him/her, according to Cliff, ‘the most complete character in the book’ (Adisa 1994: 276). Furthermore, as Lin Knutson writes, Harry/Harriet is ‘the one character with the power of self-definition, of choice’ (279). This choice manifests itself in Harry/Harriet’s transvestitism and his/her use of feminine attire to ‘open up physical and geographical spaces for historical recovery, reclamation, and passage’17, to maintain control over his/her decision to live as a female by camouflaging all things male, and to demonstrate his/her resistance to the atrocities inscribed upon his/her body.

  • 18 The Pagoda (New York: Harvest, 1999).
  • 19 Powell, Patricia, ‘The Dynamics of Power and Desire in The Pagoda.’ Winds of Change: The Transformi (...)

14Gender dysphoria (literally the conflict between gender and physical sex) is further dramatized in Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda18 through the characterization of Lowe/Lau-A-Yin, a woman trapped in a masculinist guise. To escape economic and social persecution, and the travel restrictions placed on women in China, Lau-A-Yin dresses as a man, and travels on board a ship to nineteenth-century Jamaica, becoming Lowe and concubine to Cecil, a union that produces a daughter. One appreciates the extraordinary measures Lowe adopts based on Powell’s own desire ‘to explore the conditions in China that impelled [Lau-A-Yin] to leave home: internal strife that exploded into violent clan fights and secret societies, wars and a hunger so severe it drove people to sign immigration contracts, to kill their children and sell wives, to imprison and sell their own people’19. Given her violation on board the ship during the crossing, Lau-A-Yin’s fears of life in China are transplanted to her new locale and prevent her from shedding her disguise once in Jamaica. She decides to live her life as Lowe, the Chinese shopkeeper. S/he assumes the masquerade for so long that s/he becomes enmeshed in a web of deceit that threatens a series of her/his relationships with Elizabeth, his/her daughter, Sylvie, his ‘wife’ of thirty years through an arranged marriage, and Omar, a black worker in the village. A series of catastrophic events in the village and nightmarish hauntings lead Lowe to out himself. About Lowe, the author writes: ‘All these years he had kept his life private, hidden, but there were things now he wanted [his daughter] to know, secrets he could no longer hide inside; besides his memory too was quickly eroding. He hadn’t gotten farther. He hadn’t mentioned the confused and tormented nightly cogitation, the dreams’ (Powell 1999: 6). Lowe’s life ‘is a story, full up of a lot of deception, a lot of disguises, all executed so [he] could live. All so [he] could be free. Have a life’ (8). Like Harry/Harriet of No Telephone to Heaven, Powell’s protagonist realizes that she has not been living as a complete social being. As a result, Lowe’s dream to build a pagoda (a community cultural center/gathering place in Chinese culture) is foiled because her personal struggles are connected to national liberation. Lowe suffers great difficulty in forging any significant bonds with the other Chinese immigrants in the community and with her daughter, all of whom know her ‘secret.’ Additionally, many of the villagers resent Lee’s financial success, and the fact that Lowe is not invested in their struggle for liberation. Lee remains in exile from both the Chinese and Black communities, from her family, and from herself.

15Lowe’s sense of personal alienation is heightened when racial tensions and conflict among the Chinese and Blacks on the island erupt, resulting in the burning of his shop and Cecil’s death. Powell renders a branch of history that is often ignored—the racial turmoil between Blacks and Chinese that has periodically plagued the region. Lowe realizes that ‘ [h]e was there only on sufferance. Himself and the other five thousand Chinese on the island. He resolved now how the Negro people must have secretly despised him and his shop and relationship to Cecil and Miss Sylvie, for here now was the proof’ (13). The bitterness that begins to consume Lowe’s heart is expressed in his disdain for his black son-in-law; ‘this man whose Negro people had worked hard to free themselves, only to see themselves replaced. This man was the enemy. This man’s people had burned down his shop flat to the dirt, had taken everything he had’ (77).

16The hatred that Lowe expresses for the Blacks is reciprocated in Omar’s disgust for Lowe and his people. Lowe did not ‘understand the dynamics of power. It was as if Omar hated them. Hated their helplessness. Their false groveling and subservience, and hated their poverty’ (121). The common experience of being forced into servitude does not bridge the gap that divides the two groups: ‘ [Lowe] didn’t know then that that was common accord, that not long before, the Negro people had met a similar fate’ (17). None of this knowledge stems Lowe’s hatred. The Blacks’ rejection of Lowe, in spite of his attempts to show them acts of kindness as he saw it, drove him closer towards the community of Chinese living in Jamaica. After the destruction of his shop, Lowe claims ‘he had to go and see his people, see Kywing and the community of Chinese that convened once a month in his house in Westmoreland. He had to rekindle his spirit, command his life, think up new dreams, fill up the deep bottomless gaps in his stomach. He had to start again’ (29). Lowe dreams of building a pagoda, but his attempt to do this is foiled because his struggles are linked to both China and Jamaica’s national liberation. Lowe is also rejected by his people; first, because he has abandoned and forgotten their rules and customs, and secondly because they all know his ‘secret’ that he is really a woman. Confronted with rejection from both the Black and Chinese communities, Lowe looks for solace in his family, and is forced to reassess his role as a mother rather than as a father.

17The issue of place, developed around the concepts of nation and community, is intrinsic to the constructed, performative nature of parenthood in the text, evinced in both biological and surrogate parenting. Lowe had never known his mother, who, according to him, had ‘always seemed so distant’ (76). Then ‘here was his father, who used to dress Lowe the same way he dressed himself’ (99). Lowe, then Lau-A-Yin, comes to associate China with an absent mother, a lost childhood, and repressed femininity. In Jamaica, the pattern continues. Cecil becomes both lover and father to Lowe, for ‘ [Lowe] so badly wanted to feel close to this man, who reminded him of his father, he was badly in need of community and love...’ (56). Lowe continues his masquerade as a man, and becomes father to his daughter. Yet, they are both disconnected from any sense of their history. Lowe ‘had never taught his daughter any of the stories and poems and songs his father had told him, had never taught her the languages of his clan, which he had been masterfully trying to forget’ (76). Both Lowe’s father and Cecil shackle Lowe with their dreams, and Lowe is never able to live as he chooses until he confesses his deceits: ‘All of a sudden Lowe felt exhausted. All of a sudden he felt burdened by his costumes, loaded down by his masquerade, by the labyrinth of lies, the excessiveness of his imagination, that self that no longer had inherent meaning and instead was just a completion of fiction’ (124-125). Even Sylvie, whose hybrid identity as a creole ties her ambivalently to the land, is implicated in a performance of parenthood. She ‘had given birth to babies and abandoned them on church steps, and murdered a man with the hands, so peaceful, so soft and feminine...’ (148). In light of this information, Sylvie’s role as surrogate mother to Lowe’s daughter is difficult to understand, unless we consider that the cloak of parenthood under which Sylvie performs helps her alleviate the pain of her unfathomable acts.

18In The Pagoda, Jamaica functions as a surrogate parent, but also represents failed parental responsibility and repressed sexuality. Powell does not construct the land as feminine, but as dualgendered, a place in which the heterosexual body is erased, and the protagonists are rendered sexually powerless in their attempts to forge significant bonds of community. Fertility, it appears, will only come through tending the nationalist landscape as Lowe begins to do, and through revolution, as the Blacks of the community realize. Lowe begins to cultivate his relationship to the landscape, and by doing so is able to unburden himself. Omar

knew the medicinal purposes of each bark and bush, leaf and stem. And each tree and shrub they passed, he called on their abilities to heal wounds and grow hair and pull down swellings and abort fetuses and beat back depression and cleanse blood and maintain sanity and regulate intestines and dissolve ulcers and ease murmuring hearts.
... He impressed in Lowe’s memory ways to recognize roots—the bittersweet smell, the acrid color, the jagged edge of leaf, the five-leaf cluster that looked like a clenched fist, the burnished Indian-orange color of the stem. (116-117)

19As Lowe becomes closer to Omar, and Sylvie abandons him, Lowe writes a letter to his daughter, confessing the fact that he is really her mother. Like Harry/Harriet of No Telephone to Heaven, the acquisition of an intimate knowledge of the land and its ability to heal promotes self-healing.

20Patricia Powell adds an additional dimension to the literary use of the crossroads character in The Pagoda examining the locus of power through the lens of desire. In ‘The Dynamics of Power and Desire in The Pagoda, ’ Powell writes that the transvestite self, as a space of desire, has

everything to do with characters’ bottomless longings, their insatiable cravings and fears, their feelings of helplessness, and power and powerlessness, their desires spurred on by their fantasies and dreams, their struggles with race and racism and the intersections of class and hybridity, or colorism and colonialism.
(Powell 1998: 192)

21In response to why she developed this character, Powell suggests that Lowe is a transvestophile whose ‘cross-dressed status [is] a fantastical construction that has little to do with who she really is’ (Powell 1998: 191). Powell concedes that the creation of a transvestite character was nothing more than a curiosity ‘about the ways in which memory and image and standards of beauty dictate desire, and how Cecil sees or cannot see her’ (191). More importantly, however, Lowe’s search for wholeness is linked to how she sees herself as much as it is to how others see her. Powell presents us with many layers of homoerotic desire through which Lowe must negotiate his intimate relationships with Cecil, Miss Sylvie, and Omar, and his roles as mother and father. Powell summarizes the complexity of Lowe’s transvestitism and negotiation of the liminal in the novel:

Lowe’s own fears, and her own sense of body—a body that transgresses space, a body with a foot in both a masculine and a feminine world, privy to both spheres and swelling with the complications of each. Hers is a body that cannot be one thing or another, but at all times must be wearing costumes and masks, a myriad of selves hiding the true form. It is a body full of psychic and physical wounds, a body tingling with memories, a body on which desires and fantasies are negotiated, a foreign body trying to create a wholesome self. (192)

22The Pagoda emphasizes the instability of relationships in the face of gender, racial, class, and sexual disorder but amidst the chaos, love remains. Powell’s protagonist states, ‘Love is leaving your heart in a place. No matter how far you travel, it still there in the place, knocking, beating, waiting’ (221). This definition applies to both romantic and patriotic expressions of love. Lowe had ‘locked up his chest, closed down his eyes, fused off his heart’ (53) for so many years that his alienation from self, family, and community rendered him unable to break the ‘silence and untapped desire between [himself and Omar]’ (226). In his own defense, Lowe asks: ‘How does one love some other person when the body you inhabit not even yours? When the body you inhabit has more to do with somebody else’s fantasy, the fantasy of somebody you love. But who it turn out don’t even see the real you, really’ (221). Do Lowe’s questions also apply to the body politic? If the Caribbean is to move beyond the marginalization and demonization of its non-mainstream citizens, can an exploration of liminal/hybrid experiences make the invisible visible, and can the members of this citizenry who have lived through the expression of other people’s fantasies learn to embrace and love their true selves?

  • 20 Janmohammed, Abdul R., ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Col (...)
  • 21 ‘Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization?’ in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished (...)

23The creole figure in Caribbean literature—whose history as both victim and torturer ties her ambivalently across time and space in the quest to construct Caribbean identity and meaning, to reconcile the tensions between the varied and often competing cultural and ethnic inheritances of the region—is another crossroads character whose contemporary re-imaginings begin to address these questions. Colonial literary renderings of the white creole/tragic mulatta shape ‘racial difference into moral and even metaphysical difference’20. The white creole was constructed as an anathema to white, English sensibilities through some maligned relation to African Caribbean ethnicity and culture such as voodoo and obeah like Annie Palmer in Herbert G. DeLisser’s White Witch of Rosehall (1929) and Antoinette Cosway of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Yet, she also faced alienation from the Black community because of a perceived superiority and connection to the colonial master by virtue of her white skin. Caught between worlds, the creole’s torment in colonial literature is generally resolved by tragic means. As the Caribbean becomes more ethnically diverse and racially mixed, black and white definitions of race become more abstract. In ‘Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization?’, Harris argues that the creolization of Legba, within a tormented Haiti and Caribbean is ‘an issue of complex linkages and mixed traditions—transcending black, transcending white...’21. Legba is one of the spiritual incarnations of the limbo:

  • 22 Harris, Wilson, History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and the Guianas (1970. Wellesley, MA: Cala (...)

For limbo... is not the total recall of an African past since that African past in terms of tribal sovereignty or sovereignties was modified or traumatically eclipsed with the Middle Passage and with the generations of change that followed. Limbo was rather the renascence of a new corpus of sensibility that could translate and accommodate African and other legacies within a new architecture of cultures.22

24Harris conception of ‘creoleness signifies... a cross-cultural nemesis capable of becoming a saving nemesis... [I]t implies recuperative powers and vision within a scale of violence that is dismembering societies around the globe’ (Harris 1999: 239). As a subversive tool, the mixed ethnic as a ‘colonial hybrid is the ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire’ (Bhabha 1994: 112). The ‘mixed ethnic’ as a postcolonial ghost of the white, colonial creole is an amalgam, a reanimation of the tensions and power of Legba and his spiritual parallels. This character still faces death as a prospect, but its blood spilled into the Caribbean landscape becomes symbolic of an emerging revolutionary consciousness, and signals ‘a call for a new kind of novel where subjectivity is collective and history records female lives and resistance’ (Knutson 1997: 296). Writing the history of ‘subaltern resistance’ on the hybrid body of the mixed ethnic fashions a blueprint of survival that is rooted in a deeply spiritual journey to re-connect to all the varied cultural facets of the past (Amerindian, European, African, Asian), and to make sense of otherwise indeterminate and incomprehensible dualities and multiplicities.

25For example, speaking of the protagonist from her two novels Abeng (1984) and No Telephone to Heaven (1987), Michelle Cliff writes Clare Savage as a character who represents the loss of culture and history. She is:

a crossroads character, with her feet (and head) in (at least) two worlds... A knowledge of history, the past, has been bleached from her mind, just as the rapes of her grandmothers are bleached from her skin. And this bleached skin is the source of her privilege and her power too, she thinks, for she is a colonized child.
She is a light-skinned female who has been removed from her homeland in a variety of ways and whose life is a movement back, ragged, interrupted, uncertain to that homeland. She is fragmented, damaged, incomplete. (Cliff 1990: 265)

26For Cliff, the metaphor of the crossroads leads back to and through Africa—the place of civilization’s birth; it is a journey that ‘completes the circle, or rather triangle, of the character’s life’ (Cliff 1990: 265). Clare inherits her parents’ legacy of ambivalence towards place as her life is propelled along a triangular axis between Jamaica, the United States, and England. Leaving her father in the United States, ‘Clare began her life alone. Choosing London with the logic of a creole. This was the mother-country. The country by whose grace her people existed in the first place. Her place would be here. America behind her, way-station. This was natural’ (NTTH 109). London, for Clare, represents her rejection of her mother’s love for Jamaica, and her father’s tutelage ‘to be the soft-spoken little sambo, creole, invisible neger’ (NTTH 152). London, or so Clare thinks, signals a return to her ‘roots, ’ and her desire to shed the colonial education she received in Jamaica, and the yoke of America’s racially-engendered educational policies, claiming her place among England’s ‘enlightened’ ones. She chooses to study Renaissance art. Soon, however, through the trauma of her miscarriage, Clare realizes that she cannot leave these ‘bits and pieces’ of herself behind. The racism she experiences in England is no different than anywhere else. Amidst shouts of ‘KAFFIRS! NIGGERS! WOPS’ and ‘KEEP BRITAIN WHITE! ’ (NTTH 137), Clare is forced to acknowledge her blackness, and returns to Jamaica to join the revolutionaries in the fight for Jamaica’s independence:

There are many bits and pieces to her, for she is composed of fragments. In this journey, she hopes, is her restoration. She has traveled far. Courted escape. Stopped and started... She is the woman who has reclaimed her grandmother’s land. She is white, Black. Female. Lover. Beloved. Daughter. Traveler. Friend. Scholar. Terrorist. Farmer. (87, 91)

  • 23 Adjarian, Maude M., Looking for Home: Postcolonial Women’s Writing and the Displaced Female Self. d (...)
  • 24 Edmondson, Belinda, ‘Race, Privilege, and the Politics of (Re)Writing History: An Analysis of the N (...)
  • 25 Sheller, Mimi, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London and New York: Routledge, 20 (...)

27At each stage in her travels and development, from Jamaica to America to England, and finally again to Jamaica, Clare exemplifies the rootedness and rootlessness in place, but her journey to self-love and determination, to write herself into the Jamaican landscape exemplifies the wholeness that her nation and the entire region seeks. In her discussion of No Telephone to Heaven, Maude Adjarian suggests, ‘For Cliff, Jamaican national history—indeed the nation itself—begins with the land’23. She further goes on to say that ‘ [f]or Jamaica to be an autonomous nation with its own identity, it would take radical reversal, as through the process identified by the Jamaican term rui-nation whereby the land and all its inhabitants would return to their “wild” state. This kind of collective return to innocence is impossible, since colonial influence... is a permanent part of all aspects of Jamaican life’ (Adjarian 1995: 105). While Adjarian does concede the importance of the individual experience to the national body politic, her feminist reading of the national body hampers the possibility of what she labels as a ‘collective return to innocence’ or a pre-colonial state. In her historical reformulation, however, Cliff asserts that such a return is possible because ‘all progress is backward... We do not speak of past here, but present, future. These things are connected’ (NTTH 195). Other critics agree. Belinda Edmondson argues that even as we are presented with evidence at the end of the novel that the revolution has failed, ‘it is the power of representation, more so than the physical manifestations of poverty and privilege, which is the source of power’24. Like Legba’s other reincarnates, the mixed ethnic furthers our understanding of this discourse of power by exploring ‘the very specific set of violent bodily relations through which the Caribbean was (and continues to be) formed [... through] travel, tourism, and infection’25. The literature of the region continues to interrogate systems of power and subversion, transforming the Other in a postcolonial context and embracing the haunting memories and traditions of its pasts, but not at the expense of its present and future generations. As a site of interrogation for the validation of hybrid spheres of identity and existence, Caribbean writers are creating genealogies of the liminal that complicate the landscape of Caribbean identity.

  • 26 Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (1967. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1 (...)

28The kaleidoscope of voices and narratives that attempt to write/right themselves from the margin to the center of Caribbean experiences continues to evolve, but the search for inclusion—being at home in one’s homelands— has not been reached. The characters emerging from these works have presented us with new ways of thinking about the uncomfortable position of living bifurcated lives. There is still much left to be resolved in the work of contemporary Caribbean literature. The goal of a peaceful, unified Caribbean society and world has only just begun to be envisioned ‘... through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self[;] it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world’26. As the postcolonial ghosts of Papa Legba, the crossroads characters of contemporary Caribbean literature are the conduits between the spirit world, nature and the past and a shared vision for a peaceful and sustainable future. For Caribbean subjects, the decision to live abroad does not strip them of their claim to be included in their countries’ narratives, but self-imposed exiles from territory and culture create a malevolent type of ‘freedom’ and fractured views of home. For others, national/territorial desire cannot be tempered even when threats of physical violence as a result of race, sexual orientation, gender, or class exist. These narratives form a part of the tapestry of the Caribbean’s wandering generation, inhabiting a space called ‘home’, but yearning for the embrace of the nations long left behind.

Bibliographie

Works Cited

Adisa, Opal Palmer. ‘Journey Into Speech: A Writer Between Two Worlds: An Interview with Michelle Cliff.’ African American Review. 28: 2 (Summer 1994): 273-281.

Adjarian, Maude M. Looking for Home: Postcolonial Women’s Writing and the Displaced Female Self. Diss. University of Michigan, Ann Harbor: UMI, 1995.

Adjarian, Maude M. ‘Michelle Cliff’s Fictions of Self and Fantasies of Return in Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven.’ Philological Papers 46 (2000): 70-76.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 1991.

Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Trans.

James E. Maraniss. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York and London: Routledge, 1993.

Cacoullos, Ann R. ‘Hybridity in National and Sexual Identity: Some Conceptual Problematics.’ Nationalism and Sexuality: Crises of Identity. Eds. Yiorgas Kalogeras and Domala Pastourmatzi. MELAAS: American Studies in Greece Series 2. Thessaloniki, Greece: Aristotle University/Hellenic Association of American Studies, 1996: 44-53.

Cliff, Michelle. No Telephone to Heaven. New York: Plume, 1987.

Cliff, Michelle. ‘Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character.’ Caribbean Women Writers: Essays From the First International Conference, Selwyn Cudjoe, ed. Wellesley, MA: Calaloux, 1990; 263-68.

Comfort, Susan M. ‘Struggling for Wholeness: Postcolonial Resistance in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven.’ Memory, Identity, and Exile in Postcolonial Caribbean Fiction. Diss. University of Texas at Austin, 1994.

Dash, J. Michael. ‘In Search of the Lost Body: Redefining the Subject in Caribbean Literature’ in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. London: Routledge, 1995. 332-35.

Dash, J. Michael. The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

Edmondson, Belinda. ‘Race, Privilege, and the Politics of (Re)Writing History: An Analysis of the Novels of Michelle Cliff.’ Callaloo 16: 1 (1993): 180-191.

Elia, Nada. ‘A Man Who Wants to be a Woman’: Queerness as/and Healing Practices in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven.’ Callaloo 23: 1 (2000): 352-365.

Elia, Nada. Trances, Dances, and Vociferations: Agency and Resistance in Africana Women’s Narratives. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2001.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1967. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1991.

Forbes, Curdella. ‘Tropes of the Carnivalesque: Hermaphroditic Gender As Identity in Slave Society and in West Indian Fiction.’ Journal of West Indian Literature 8: 2 (1999): 19-37.

Forrester, Faizal. ‘Revolting Bodies: Homosexual Dream and Masculine Anxiety in Edgar Mittelholzer’s A Morning at the Office and Caryl Phillips’ Higher GroundCaribbean Studies 27: 3-4 (1994): 311-330.

Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Harris, Wilson. Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays. 1967. London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Publications, 1973.

Harris, Wilson. History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and the Guianas. 1970. Wellesley, MA: Calaloux Publications, 1995.

Harris, Wilson. The Infinite Rehearsal. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987.

Harris, Wilson. ‘Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization?’ Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination. Ed. Andrew Bundy. London and New York: Routledge, 1999; 237-247.

James, Cyril L. R. Beyond a Boundary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

JanMohammed, Abdul R. ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature’, in Race, Writing, and Difference, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. 78-206.

Knutson, Lin. ‘Michelle Cliff and the Feminization of Space: No Telephone to Heaven as Female Limbo Gateway into History’, Journal of Caribbean Studies 11: 3 (Fall 1996-Winter 1997): 276-300.

Powell, Patricia. ‘The Dynamics of Power and Desire in The Pagoda.’ Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. Eds. Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong-Leek. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1998: 189-94.

Powell, Patricia. The Pagoda. New York: Harvest, 1999.

Savory, Elaine. ‘Ex/Isle: Separation, Memory, and Desire in Caribbean Women’s Writing’, in Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, Adele S. Newsome and Linda Strong-Leek, eds. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

Scott, Lawrence. The Witchbroom. London: Heinemann Publishers, 1992.

Seidman, Steven, ed. Queer Theory/Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996.

Sheller, Mimi. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.

Notes

1 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Trans. James E. Maraniss (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992): 227.

2 Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994): 2.

3 Dash, J. Michael, ‘In Search of the Lost Body: Redefining the Subject in Caribbean Literature’, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. (London: Routledge, 1995): 332-35; 24.

4 Cacoullos, Ann R., ‘Hybridity in National and Sexual Identity: Some Conceptual Problematics.’ Nationalism and Sexuality: Crises of Identity, Yiorgas Kalogeras and Domala Pastourmatzi, eds. MELAAS: American Studies in Greece Series 2 (Thessaloniki, Greece: Aristotle University/Hellenic Association of American Studies, 1996): 44-53; 46.

5 James, Cyril L. R., Beyond a Boundary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993): 46-47.

6 Forbes, Curdella, ‘Tropes of the Carnivalesque: Hermaphroditic Gender As Identity in Slave Society and in West Indian Fiction.’ Journal of West Indian Literature 8: 2 (1999): 19-37; 34.

7 Forrester, Faizal, ‘Revolting Bodies: Homosexual Dream and Masculine Anxiety in Edgar Mittelholzer’s A Morning at the Office and Caryl Phillips’ Higher Ground’, Caribbean Studies 27: 3-4 (1994): 311-330; 317.

8 Other works that craft ‘crossroads characters’ include H. Nigel Scott’s Spirits in the Dark (Oxford: Heinemann, 1993). The novel tells the story of Jerome Quashee whose repression of his emerging homosexuality leads to his descent into madness. He must undergo a religious ritual to help him deal with his feelings. Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise (New York: Plume Books, 1999) renders a realistic violent social and political Jamaican backdrop against which all her characters —including Faye and Pat, the lesbian couple—must battle because of their sexual and racial orientation, political practices, and their gender. Wilson Harris’S The Infinite Rehearsal (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987) retells the story of Faust in this fictional autobiography told from the standpoint of Robin Redbreast Glass. Harris equips the author with the language for grappling with the hybrid subject in the form of Ghost, the hermaphroditic presence in the novel, and Calypso, a biracial woman. Harris challenges colonial accounts of history, space, and time, as he in his ‘creative rehearsal’ seeks to uncover the elusive ‘underpinning of all creation’ (12).

9 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousnes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993): 35.

10 Garber, Marjorie, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York and London: Routledge, 1992): 16.

11 Cliff, Michelle. No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Plume, 1987). No Telephone to Heaven will be referred to as NTTH.

12 Seidman, Steven, ed., Queer Theory/Sociology (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996): 12.

13 Adisa, Opal Palmer, ‘Journey Into Speech: A Writer Between Two Worlds: An Interview with Michelle Cliff ’ African American Review. 28: 2 (Summer 1994): 273- 281; 276.

14 Comfort, Susan M., ‘Struggling for Wholeness: Postcolonial Resistance in Michelle Cliff ’s Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven’ in Memory, Identity, and Exile in Postcolonial Caribbean Fiction (Diss. University of Texas at Austin, 1994): 143-144.

15 Elia, Nada, Trances, Dances, and Vociferations: Agency and Resistance in Africana Women’s Narratives (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2001): 62.

16 Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993): 234.

17 Knutson, Lin, ‘Michelle Cliff and the Feminization of Space: No Telephone to Heaven as Female Limbo Gateway into History’, Journal of Caribbean Studies 11: 3 (Fall 1996-Winter 1997): 276-300; 279.

18 The Pagoda (New York: Harvest, 1999).

19 Powell, Patricia, ‘The Dynamics of Power and Desire in The Pagoda.’ Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. Eds. Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong-Leek (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1998): 189-94; 190.

20 Janmohammed, Abdul R., ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature’, in Race, Writing, and Difference, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985): 78-206; 80.

21 ‘Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization?’ in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, Andrew Bundy, ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1999): 237-247; 247.

22 Harris, Wilson, History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and the Guianas (1970. Wellesley, MA: Calaloux Publications, 1995): 20.

23 Adjarian, Maude M., Looking for Home: Postcolonial Women’s Writing and the Displaced Female Self. diss. University of Michigan (Ann Harbor: UMI, 1995): 82-83.

24 Edmondson, Belinda, ‘Race, Privilege, and the Politics of (Re)Writing History: An Analysis of the Novels of Michelle Cliff.’ Callaloo 16: 1 (1993): 180-191; 190.

25 Sheller, Mimi, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London and New York: Routledge, 2003): 144.

26 Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (1967. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1991): 231.

Auteur

Elon University
Is Assistant Professor of English at Elon University in North Carolina in the United States, and Coordinator of the African/African-American Studies program where she teaches courses in African, African-American, Caribbean and South African literatures, postcolonial and women’s and gender studies, and narratives of confinement. In addition to teaching and publishing in these areas, she has been invited to lecture and present her work around South Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where she was Managing Editor for Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, and is currently a member of the journal’s editorial board. She is working on two book manuscripts Towards an Erotics of Hybridity: Bodies at the Crossroads of a Nation and From Martin’s ‘Mountaintop’ to Mandela’s ‘Tabletop’: Will We Ever Realize the Dream?

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