Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative (review)

Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative, by Belinda Edmondson. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. 229 pp. ISBN 0-8223-2263 paper.

This rich account of twentieth-century Caribbean narrative in the anglophone context begins by framing an earlier canon of (mostly) male writers--George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, C. L. R. James--in terms of the idealized Victorian gentleman-scholar who, claims Belinda Edmondson, provides them with a model of literary and intellectual authority. Edmondson demonstrates this with an incisive analysis of the discursive feminization of the Caribbean vis-à-vis Europe, the feminization of the nonwhite Caribbean male in particular, relative to both the nonwhite Caribbean woman and the European man, and the ways in which anxieties about these gendered constructions produce particular readings of revolution, the "folk," and nationalism. Given the us/(Afro- or Indo-Caribbean)/insider vs. them/(English)/outsider approach that structures so many discussions of the Caribbean, such that the colonial presence is structured as essentially and always other, a presence to be excised in the process of recovering some pure essence, this study's attempts to sort out Caribbean narrative in terms of a Victorian model will undoubtedly elicit groans and accusations of Eurocentricity.

This would be unfortunate because of the persuasive account here of how these us/them oppositions came to structure the discussion of Caribbean ideological positions, and of how such oppositions elide the fact that ostensibly oppositional, anticolonial narratives are figured through Englishness, and because this is just the beginning of Edmondson's project. She sorts out the acquisition of literary authority on the part of this earlier generation in order to figure out the relationship between these writers and the more recent generation of women writers. Given the current tendency to consign these two constituencies to separate spheres with seemingly no knowledge of each other--at conferences, in academic circles, and in the curriculum--the comparative readings here of Claude McKay and Paule Marshall, McKay and Una Marson, and Lamming and Michelle Cliff, to give just three examples, are enlightening.

Edmondson proceeds by careful space-clearing, so that one has the sense of different layers become unwrapped: the differences between feminine and feminist in the context of Anglo/French feminist theory leads to a discussion of essentialism in relation to various constituencies, and then to the relevance of womanism in the North American context to Caribbean women writers. Or again, the significance for early writers such as Naipaul of high modernist conceptions of the exile contextualizes the comparison between the status of the Caribbean exile in relation to England for that early generation, and the woman writer's relationship, as an immigrant, to the United States.

Edmondson's discussion of the vastly differing kinds of authority that each group of writers draws from its identity as writer-in-exile or writer- as-immigrant, and of how this structures their relationship to authorship as well as to Caribbean identity is well argued and supported by examples. It is as startling to hear Edward Kamau Brathwaite, so closely identified with an anticolonial, Afrocentric ideological position, arguing that to capture West Indian reality, "one has simply to be an 'old-fashioned' writer like Hardy, Dickens, George Eliot, or Jane Austen" (69), as it is to hear Jamaica Kincaid and Marlene Nourbese Philip say, respectively, "I never wanted to be a writer because I didn't know that any such thing existed" and "Books there were but others wrote them. I read them" (81).

Finally, this fruitful study raises questions for further investigation. Were there other models besides the Victorian gentleman that were available to various Caribbean writers (whether they chose to use them or not)? One thinks of various community leaders in Naipaul's Indo-Trinidadian context, or of French Creole whites in territories like Trinidad and St. Lucia. How do writers who are not so closely aligned...