Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. - book review

African American Review, Spring, 2002 by Geta LeSeur

Simone A. James Alexander. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: u of missouri p, 2001. 215 pp. $32.50.

Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro Caribbean Women is a major contribution to African Diaspora Studies, which has gained much literary and critical energy in the past ten years. It also examines an institution-motherhood--which is a major theme in writings by Black women writers, universally. Alexander's book is groundbreaking as it looks at postcolonial writers Maryse Conde (Guadalupe), Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua), and Paule Marshall (Barbados). Marshall's inclusion is especially interesting since she is actually a second-generation offspring of Barbadian parentage and claims, always, that "the Caribbean and the Atlantic are in all my writings." Even though I have some quarrel with the text chosen, Alexander does a magnificent job convincing the reader that she is the authority here.

Alexander's conception of motherhood in this book is not so much biological as it is about three writers and their protagonists' relationship with the mother/motherland, mother country, and often mother tongue. She also attempts to clarify early what are meant by "ideal," "real," and "imagined" societies, especially when she discusses Conde's Heremakhomun. Alexander often confuses mother country with the metropole. The mother country is cited as colonial Europe, and in other parts of the book, the United States/America is also called the mother country. But ought the book's focus not to be on Africa as the mother country or motherland?

In the Introduction, "Reclaiming Identities: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers Writing the Self," Alexander explains some commonly used but often misunderstood terms such as "Negritude," "Pan Africanism," "Caribbeaness," "West Indian," "Creolite," and "metis" by giving the reader the chronology, origins, and rationale for their usages. This is helpful for a deeper understanding of the study.

Chapter I, "Resisting Zombification," carries over the discussion of Maryse Conde's assertion that "Africa helped me to discover that I am not an African but a French West Indian living in the motherland." The inclusion of Negritude writer Senghor and pan-Africanists Padmore and Marcus Garvey are not sufficiently explained and/or defined. The spiritual, the racial, and the cultural, which seem to be the underlying grid of this study, are also emphasized.

The writers singled out for focused attention--Conde, Kincaid, and Marshall--and the books selected are good and work well in this triad of protagonists, countries, and literary examples. But some work better than others: Heremakhomun would have been better than I, Tituba, and The Chosen Place, The Timeless People would have been better than Praisesong for the Widow if, indeed, the focus is to be on the writers' relationships with their motherlands, rather than the characters' relationships with them. Marshall's powerful and ambitious masterpiece The Chosen Place, The Timeless People would have made a terrific centerpiece as Merle, the protagonist, "lands" on all three mother countries--Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Moreover, Alexander's use of the term fictional autobiography needs to be clarified and defended, especially in the case of the Conde and Marshall works chosen. I, Tituba and Praisesong are not fictionalized autobiographical works, but Annie John is. Alexander does, however, make a good point about Jamaica Kincaid's name change from Elaine Porter Richardson to Jamaica Kincaid as a marked rejection of the colonizer, attaching her name to Blackness and Caribbeaness, thus claiming the mother's land and motherland.

Chapter II, "I Am Me, I Am You," offers an interesting and good close reading of Annie John, but the study's theme of motherland disappears or is disconnected. Here the writer needed to remind the reader, somehow, that Annie John belongs in this triad. As presented here, it is, in effect, examined as a Bildungsroman. Perhaps less analysis of the plot and the mother-daughter conflict and more attention to the book's thematic meaning would have clarified the matter. A better connection and believable discussion is made with Autobiography of My Mother and the island (land) of Dominica and language (mother tongue). Jamaica Kincaid, for Alexander, surprisingly surfaces as being the most political of the postcolonial writers, and Annie John's journey into selfhood and consciousness of the mother country, "colonial" mother, and nation becomes the signifier for the other writers/protagonists.

Chapter III, "Imagined Homelands," begins with Jamaican folk poet Louise Bennett's poem "Back to Africa" in island patois. Although this is a "fresh" idea, I question its accessibility for the general reader. Yet Alexander uses the poem to her advantage by using selected lines to highlight the dilemmas faced by colonial/postcolonial subjects as they ponder the idea of returning to Africa (motherland). What Alexander hears in this poem is talk of imagined homelands, a romanticization of cultural and spiritual values, so that Africa appears not to be the ideal place for healing its lost children. There is no universal principle that permits bonding. Maryse Conde says her time in Africa led to her discovering "that Africa was not my homeland.... I was just a French West Indian living in the motherland." In the novel, I, Tituba, Tituba gets to the truth of the matter when she returns to Barbados and achieves wholeness. In other cases, such as Silla's and Selina's in Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, the spiritu al return is celebrated through the practices of the "old culture." The girls' Saturday morning kitchen talks, Caribbean cooking, and the West Indian Association meetings afford the Boyces their return, weekly.