The Daughter's Return: African-American and Caribbean Women's Fictions of History

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Heather Hathaway

Caroline Rody. The Daughter's Return: African-American and Caribbean Women's Fictions of History. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. 267 pp. $49.95.

The return to an ancestral past in order to move forward has characterized much of black writing since the Civil Rights era in the United States and the movement toward independence in the Caribbean. So, too, have explorations of both literal and figurative mother-daughter relationships. Caroline Rody's The Daughter's Return importantly links these two themes to provide a compelling examination of how recent African American and Caribbean women writers return to the past in order to rewrite it.

According to Rody, both sets of writers employ the figure of a "returning daughter" who revisits a "mother-of-history" to recuperate and transform the traumas of slavery and colonization. In creating what Rody terms these "fictions of history," contemporary women writers "recast" the "received narratives" of their people's past as a means of "reimagining" their complicated literary and political inheritance. This trend is, of course, part 01: a general pattern in ethnic literature and studies in which writers do not necessarily rewrite but certainly write themselves into a version of history that has long excluded them. But, for Rody, this is not simply an act of correction or revision on the part of the African American and Caribbean women writers she discusses: Rather, it is an important feminist and post-colonial political undertaking that ultimately redefines the authors' own literary, political, and cultural origins.

The "fictions of history" that Rody investigates are far from conventional historical novels. As opposed to the realism that dominates this genre, the contemporary narratives she examines rupture historical time in related but different ways. In the first half of the study, which concentrates on African American literature, Rody reads Toni Morrison's Beloved as the paradigmatic example of how contemporary women authors have created an archetypical and allegorical magic black daughter" (Rody's term) who transcends time to reclaim a matrilineage that has been lost or warped due to the exclusion of black women from the historical record. In resurrecting and reexamining this matrilineage, Morrison exorcises and replaces a haunting and haunted history from which mothers and daughters alike--not to mention exploration of the intensity of the complex bonds between them--have largely been either misrepresented or altogether absent. Rody goes on to trace various manifestations and functions of the returning "magic bla ck daughter" in works by Octavia Butler, Lucille Clifton, Julie Dash, Jewelle Gomez, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker. According to Rody, in positing history within a "symbolic structure of daughterly engagement with the maternal past," these works signify the arrival of a new type of historical novel authored by women who, through the very act of writing, define themselves as the legitimate heirs (and perhaps even arbiters) of group history.

In the second part of her study, Rody shifts her attention to Caribbean women writers who, she asserts, have similarly reimagined the past in a quest for a matrilineal heritage. But in contrast to African American writers who position the mother-figure "at the foundation of historical memory," the challenging task of rewriting a past shaped by both slavery and colonization leads Caribbean writers to represent the "mother-of-history" more as a "mother-of-forgetting." Caribbean literature, Rody claims, differs from African American literature in that it "reflect[s] a deeper sense of dispossession, even homelessness, and historyless-ness as well. The figure of the mother-of-forgetting precisely embodies this historyless condition, this sense of being 'at home' in a beautiful place that history yet makes it impossible to claim as one's own home." Although Rody provides neither enough historical nor theoretical grounding to establish this difference convincingly, she does illustrate clearly the contrasts between t he mother-figures portrayed by black women writers in the United States and abroad.

Rody argues that, due to the successive identification in the Caribbean of the mother-figure first with Europe during the colonial era, then with Africa during the rise of negritude, and finally with the islands themselves in contemporary post-colonial cultures, Caribbean writers portray "the mother" with considerable ambivalence. Presenting the "mother-island" as the common embodiment of maternal history for contemporary Caribbean writers, Rody describes the "children" of this figure as loving her "natural beauty" but despising her poisonous history of "abandonment and suffering." This vexing love-hate relationship with the embodiment of the maternal past, in Rody's view, leads to the development of "intimate plots that stress less the violated mother than the daughter's violated relationship with her mother" in works by Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys, Michelle Cliff, and Maryse Conde. Whereas the African American women writers studied seek to recover a lost past through a reunion with the mother-figure, Rody de monstrates how the Caribbean "daughter's return" is directed toward unraveling the contradictions of her history as colonial subject in order to imagine "new ways of inhabiting the world, in mastering 'placelessness' and living Caribbeanness as imaginative citizenship" in a diaspora.