JOURNAL OF CARIBBEAN LITERATURES, VOL.4, N.3
DO I BELONG HERE? IMAGES OF--FEMALE--BELONGING AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY IN ERNA
BRODBER’S MYAL, VELMA POLLARD’S HOMESTRETCH, AND CARYL PHILLIPS’S
CAMBRIDGE
Marika Prezuiso
Birbeck College, University of London
The focus of this paper is the examination of three works of contemporary fiction by three West
Indian authors: Erna Brodber’s Myal, Velma Pollard’s Homestretch, and Caryl Phillips’s
Cambridge. I will be focusing on the concept of cultural hybridity, an umbrella term designating
those cultural practices that have stem med? out of the historical, political, and social
‘transculturation’ in the West Indies and that the three authors raise in different ways yet with
similar intents and results.
As Edward Kamau Brathwaite has pointed out, “to see Jamaica or the West Indies just as
a ‘slave’ society is as much a falsification of reality as the seeing of the island as a naval station
or an enormous sugar factory”.1 What was crucial there was indeed the coexistence of various
people, neither of them resident in the area, struggling to adapt themselves to a new environment
and to each other. This resulted in a complex situation involving assimilation as well as rejection,
complicity as well as subversion from both sides, a two-way process that, moving as it did from a
cultural clash, gave birth to different and creative models of interculturation.
Jamaican authors Erna Brodber and her sister Velma Pollard, together with New York based Caryl Phillips, have valued the significance of cultural hybridity in their narrative portraits
of the West Indies. Although their writings have highlighted different ‘shades’ of hybridity, such
as the ambiguous idea of home in cross-cultural societies and the experience of the miscegenated
child, overall they have tried to present it as a mark of strength rather than a weakness in their
search for Caribbean individual and collective identity(ies), unraveling its power to subvert what
has been called “the Manichean dichotomy ” that Western culture adopts when trying to make
sense of the multiplicity of Caribbean experience and history.
In this respect, Erna Brodber chooses to give voice to the mulatto outcast in Myal (1988),
her second novel that won her the Commonwealth Regional Prize the same year. The novel is a
succeeded example of multi-layered fiction, where beyond the level of narration, there is a dense
pattern of allusive imagery to be untangled by the reader. Right from the title, Brodber plays with
the ambivalence of the word ‘spirit’: Myalism is indeed the Caribbean art of spirit liberation; yet,
the novel deals also with the recovery of one’s lost spirit, in the sense of both individual and
collective voice, self-consciousness and agency. The protagonist of the novel, Ella, is an in
between girl, born of a light skinned Jamaican woman and an Irish officer, thus she looks like an
exotic stranger to her black folks, (the “alabaster baby in a sea of colours”2); nevertheless, her
hybrid state of ‘unbelonging’ gives her the chance to live without attaching herself to a specific
place and without reclaiming a fixed, secure identity. In fact, despite the opening scene, brings us
in the middle of a magic session aimed at healing the girl, Ella will eventually be the true catalyst
for change, a change that is constantly referred to and, to some extent, longed for throughout the
novel. Ella is indeed possessed by some negative forces affecting her body; yet in the end, she
will “possess” the force not only to recover, but also to actively help her folks in recovering from
their symbolical “evil spirits,” which Brodber identifies with the colonizing power.
Throughout the novel, Brodber seems to oppose hybridity to all violent superimpositions
of foreign cultures for the sake of some sort of ‘purity’. While all forms of hybridity open up to
many creative possibilities, the dichotomical oppositions centre/margin, white/black, good/evil,
and mind/body inevitably result in a rupture for those who are interpreted as the recipients of the
negative terms. In the novel, this attitude is defined as spirit thievery, the attempts at
whitewashing people’s identity, without even trying reconciliation between what they are and
what the colonizer wants them to become. Myal is, thus, a critique of Christianity in Jamaica, and,
above all, a critique of the way the various ministers used it to perpetuate the separation between
themselves and the others. Their mission was actually grounded on the assumption of the
inferiority and lack of sensibility of people of African origin. Consequently, they attempted at
draining their spirit, voice, and understanding of life and replacing these with new sets of ideas
validated as truths.
The author in fact borrows the image of ‘draining’ from the natural world to make it a
metaphor for the replacement of human lifeblood with a uniformed and serialized identity. When
Ella marries her American fiancée, she feels as if her mind were perpetually “draining,” as if the
man and the new life he has offered her were replacing the cozy space in her mind where family
and old friends had always been.
Interestingly, although Brodber never directly addresses issues of power and
colonization, the whole novel is a potent metaphor of reawakening and healing of past colonial
wounds that are still affecting both the bodies and the minds of Jamaicans. Myal is set in an
unspecific, post-slavery, and pre-independence time (Jamaica obtained full independence in
1962), when free black Jamaicans were living side by side with white British. In such a context,
the colonizing presence acts no longer through the violence of slavery, but by exerting a subtle
leverage on the population, mainly at the level of spirit/mind, through either Christian religion or
imposing a set of negative representations that shape black people’s individual and collective
self-consciousness.
Myal is in fact also a celebration of cultural hybridity as a means to question the
essentialist representations of Caribbean people. As a sociologist, Brodber is extremely aware of
the complicity between cultural productions and colonization. Through Ella, she voices her
awareness on those images of the noble savage, the mindless zombie, or Kipling’s “half devil half
child” that still affect the construction of Caribbean identities. An example of that in the novel is
the children’s story dealing with a bunch of farm animals whose attempt to escape from men’s
control to go back to the wild ends miserably as they realize they cannot survive outside the
domestic, safe (although claustrophobic) environment created for them. Having now recovered
from zombification, Ella is able to see what is behind that apparently ‘innocent’ story: its author
has deprived the characters of their possibilities, inferring that their natural condition is to belong
to someone else, justifying in this way their captivity and co-opting them into silence.
Through Ella’s awareness, Brodber ultimately demonstrates how an in-between creature
can be entrusted with the revolutionary project of changing people’s mindset, offering them the
tools to dismantle Western colonialist ideology. Being herself an outcast, Ella cannot be
entrapped in either an essential Jamaican identity or in a distinctive African past to be reclaimed
at all costs. She seems to prove that only by stepping outside oneself and reaching for the other,
one can (put here, either one or she whichever meaning you have in mind) make sense of what is
behind the surface and consequently be able to, as the novel’s last lines suggest, “correct images
from the inside.”3
Different but complementary concepts of hybridity are those that both Velma Pollard and
Caryl Phillips explore in their novels, focusing on the migrant condition of their characters and
presenting a prism of cultural encounters.
Like her sister Erna Brodber, Pollard has inverted conventional migratory patterns and,
after being educated in Canada and in the US, has moved back to Jamaica. This same experience
of migration and later return seems to have inspired her joyful and unashamedly nationalistic
patchwork of stories all gravitating around the idea of homecoming. The first, introductory part of
Homestretch (1994) deals with the long awaited return to Jamaica of an elderly couple having
spent thirty years in the UK. The delightful story serves as the appropriate venue for the author to
present an optimistic picture of solidarity among Jamaican folks. The discovery of an unexpected
(yet wished for) sense of “belonging” in returning home after a long time is a major theme in
Pollard’s writing and especially significant in Homestretch.
A feeling of nostalgia combined with a hint of sadness, though, pervades the story. In fact,
the process that Stuart Hall has defined as the “Diaspora of the Diaspora” 4 always involves new
cultural clashes and the re-establishing of the bifurcated structure self/Other. What migrant
Jamaicans most resent is the blatant mismatch between how they expected England to welcome
them and the actual treatment they receive once they have arrived there. The novel conveys this
harsh disappointment through the constant reference to a real and metaphoric absent mother. The
same “mother country” that was calling her “children of the Empire” back home to help her with
the industrial expansion, had indeed cheated them from the moment they had crossed the sea,
luring them with the prospect of a warm welcoming only to treat them as “strangers” once again:
“What a mother!” David calls out remembering his story 5. Although the novel denounces both
class and racial discriminations, nonetheless Pollard’s intent seems less to criticize England than
to question the whole significance of “location” for diasporic people, that is the difficult issue of
reclaiming one’s “home. ”
Brenda, to whom most of the novel is devoted, is a bright Jamaican girl who has also
experienced migration, as she left in her early teens to join her father first in America and later in
the United Kingdom. She arrives back in Jamaica to write an article, and, after spending most of
her life abroad, the moment the plane lands on her native soil, very contradictory feelings
unravel: regret, anger, nostalgia, and fascination, which are indicative of her unsolved
relationship with “home.” Now an adult woman, Brenda is back to “test Jamaica,” to “come to
terms with this rock and to sort of claim it again.”6 Her growing enthusiasm and fascination for all
that she experiences, sees, and tastes (Pollard relishes in describing Jamaican typical food) make
her look at times like a tourist on an exotic holiday. Indeed the novel demonstrates how haunted
the idea of “home” can be as it explores the faint boundaries between being a “returned resident”
and a “dry-land tourist.”7 While tourists get exotic fascination and delight from Jamaica because
of its difference from their “homes,” returning emigrants are disorientated by that same
fascination as they feel (or even act as if they were) “placeless” in their own place, or, as Trinh T.
Minh-Ha puts it, “not foreigner, yet foreign.”8
Pollard seems to suggest that homecoming in the sense of returning to one’s own native
land, can be an experience as unsettling and uncanny as seeing your mother after a long time.
.Brenda and her mother Joy, a sort of embodiment of Jamaica itself, have missed each other so
much that the recovery can only turn down their own expectations. Memories of places, smells
and sounds may help recapture part of her childhood but these are not enough to heal the rupture
of loss and abandonment. Brenda will eventually find her balance in the awareness that the
recovery of her past will never be total and that there is no such thing as being “authentically”
Jamaican.
In this respect Pollard’s analysis of Jamaican Diaspora parallels the inspiring essay by
Anglo-Egyptian Amal Treacher, aptly called “Welcome Home.” 9 Treacher uses her personal
story of dislocation and marginality—she was born of an Egyptian man and an English woman
and has lived between Cairo and England—to theorize on a “less strenuous way of maintaining
one’s identity, pride, and place,”10 whatever the individual stories or collective histories of
Diaspora. Both Treacher and Pollard see the acknowledgment of the past as one way of
overcoming feelings of betrayal and abandonment implicit in all migrations. Nevertheless, they
seem to envision the secret to reach a true balance, a wholeness of past and present, memories
and life in the famous sentence from “The Wizard of Oz”: There is no place like home, in the
sense that there is no place like it and that it doesn’t exist. Once Brenda manages to see “ home”
as more than a real place, but standing metaphorically for her emotional needs for security and
belonging, she is more able and willing to cope with her experience.
Another reflection on Diasporic “homes” comes from Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1991).
Set on an hybrid location – a plantation in the West Indies where free Negroes and slaves live
together with English overseers and destitute whites, as well as in an hybrid time – between the
abolition of slave trade (1870) and the emancipation, the novel offers a touching portrait of
slavery, but also a critique of the hypocrisies and the debauchery enacted by the English in their
Tropical Estates.
Part of the heterogeneity already occurs in the structure of the novel, as three narrating
voices recount the story: the English upper-class Emily sent by her father to look over his Estate;
the devoutly Christian and educated slave Cambridge, who eventually kills the brutal overseer;
and, finally, an unknown legal clerk reporting on Cambridge’s death overtly showing his racial
bias. The novel demonstrates how factual truths are always haunted by the subject’s location in
terms of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and culture and, consequently, it rejects the idea of a single
centre as well as of a single margin gravitating around it. As sociologist Patricia Hill Collins has
pointed out, “a matrix of domination contains few pure victims or oppressors,” 11 as different
forms of oppressions intertwine in contradictory ways to frame individual lives differently. In line
with Collins, Phillips confronts us with Emily’s ambivalent location in the Caribbean as, despite
embodying the privileged and civilized centre visiting the destitute and miserable margin, she
will still be subject of (white) men’s caprices and control, treating her like a nice ornament, but
never taking her seriously.
Phillips sets up Cambridge and Emily as potential opposites, only to soon knock down all
dividing walls: both disapprove of the immorality they perceive around them; yet, both are aware
of the impossibility of holding to an idea of morality that values the superiority of one race over
the other through sexual violence and corporal punishment. At the beginning of the novel,
Emily’s despising of the blacks forces her to call for ‘respectability’, a concept that stands
metonymically for all that is “English” at its purest and one that is opposed to the “wantonness
and debauchery”12she believes rife in the Negro race. In the end, though, her idea of
“respectability” changes into a wish for dignity and humanity as she realizes how misguided the
truth about colonization is or, rather, that there may be no truth at all, only a melting away of
distinctions and locations.
Emily’s journey takes place at this peculiar stage in which she is questioning the world
around her while still desperately looking for some reassuring truths to rely on, thus marking a
turning point both in her life and in her consciousness. Her bildung parallels Phillips’s
questioning of the presumptuous affirmation of Englishness over the others, showing that all
attempts at a fixed and adamant English identity are just symptoms of instability and disruption,
conflict and change. Indeed colonialist theories of racial purity that reject the Black race as
inferior and deem all miscegenation as forms of perversion against nature betray a profound
instability in the idea of Englishness which tries to mask a covert desire for the cultural “other.”13
Emily’s attempts at maintaining (a Victorian idea of) respectability and dignity in such a
transient world express exactly her fear of being contaminated, of losing that Englishness to
which she fiercely holds, but which will eventually collapse. Inevitably, this awareness will result
in feelings of disorientation and loss, symbolized in the novel by the death of her child: Emily is a
failed mother in the same way as England, used by Phillips here as a metaphor, has been a failed,
deceptive mother to Cambridge, allowing him education only to chain him as a slave once he is
back to the Caribbean.
The discovery of Mr. Brown’s brutality and the trauma of her unborn child scatter
Emily’s sense of home so much so that in the end we see her doubting whether to go back to
England at all. Profoundly committed to the reality of the Caribbean, Emily acquires a more
mature yet less gentle appearance. It is as if, having rejected her essential, core identity
crystallized in the idea of Englishness, she were finally ready to melt with that new reality, letting
herself be even physically “contaminated,” or creolized, by it. The very term “Creole” originates
from a combination of the two Spanish words “criar”– to create, to imagine, and “colon”– a
settler, into criollo, thus designating “a committed settler, someone identified with the settlement,
though not indigenous in it”14. In this respect, the white Englishwoman’s increasing cultural and
emotional sense of belongingness in the Caribbean seems to sustain the idea of the relevance of
cultural hybridity and “ creolization” over any racial essentialism.
As these three novels exemplify, West Indian authors have recently been willing to
reverse the racialist theories in their fiction, demonstrating that the definition of the Caribbean on
just the basis of race would not do justice to the social complexities of its society. Theories of
hybridity, in fact, stress on both the multiple relationships in the Caribbean and the complex
paradigms of complicity, mimicry, and rejection with the Metropolitan powers, setting frames of
reference that inevitably overshadow the essentialist focus on race as the only meaningful
criterion of identity. As Stuart Hall explains:
The fact is that “black” has never just been there. It has always been an unstable identity,
psychically, culturally and politically. It, too, is a narrative, a story, a history. Something
constructed, told, spoken, not simply found15
Through the images of the mulatto girl, the returned resident, and the white Englishwoman
“ creolized” in the region, Brodber, Pollard, and Phillips thus complicate the binarism
Black/White and Self/Other so forcefully applied to the study of non-Western cultures. Through
the exploration of such mobile identities, indeed, these authors comment on both the materialist
and the metaphorical meanings of race, showing its imbrications with categories of class,
nationality, gender and, finally, culture. No doubt the impact and consequences of cultural
hybridity have produced a far wider debate than my paper could encompass. Nevertheless, a point
of consistency on the issue seems to be the search for less rigid and monolithic definitions of ‘
home’, able to deal with cultural exchange and with boundaries always ready to be blurred and
reset, while maintaining people’s subjectivity. I personally believe that, however complex and
context-related concepts of hybridity may be, they remain one of the most valid strategies of
counter-discourse to value differences and contaminations over any essentialising idea of the
Other.
Brathwaite, Edward, “Creolization in Jamaica”, in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin
(eds), Routledge, London, 1995, p.204.
2 Brodber, Ibid, p.17.
3 Ibid., p.110.
4 Hall, Stuart, “The formation of a Diasporic Intellectual III”, in Empire Windrush: Fifty Years of Writing About Black
Britain, Onyekachi Wambu ed., Phoenix, London, 1998, p.205.5 Ibid., p.32.
6 Ibid., p.88.
7 Dry-land tourists are described in the novel as “People who either live here (in Jamaica) or who have recently
migrated but who are showing off and behaving as if everything is strange to them, as if they are foreigners. In other
words, tourists who are not from across the sea” (p.139)
8 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, “No Master Territories”, in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (eds), Ibid., p.216.
9 Treacher, Amal, “Welcome Home: Between Two cultures and Two Colours”, in Avtar Brah and Annie E. Coombes
(eds), Hybridity and Its Discontents: Politics, Science and Culture, Routledge, London, 2000, pp.96-106.
10 Treacher, Amal, Ibid., p.102.
11 Collins, Patricia Hill, “Politics of Empowerment”, in
Black Feminist Thought, Routledge, NY, 2000 (second
edition). First edition 1990, p.287.
12 Phillips, Caryl, Cambridge, Faber and Faber, 1991, p.63.
13 See also Young, Robert, “Hybridity and Diaspora”, in Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Practice, 1995.
14 Braithwaite, Edward Kamau, Contradictory Omens, Savacou, 1974, p.10, in Maria Cristina Fumagalli,
1
“Maryse Conde’s La migration des coeurs, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and (The Possibility of)
Creolization”, in Journal of Caribbean Literatures, volume 3 number 2, p. 85.
15 “New Ethnicities”, 45
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