Cannibal Writes: Eating Others in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Women’s Writing by Njeri Githire (review)

This carefully researched, historically grounded, and theoretically strong comparative study of the francophone and anglophone Caribbean and Indian Ocean regions will find a valuable place in the growing number of interdisciplinary studies of these strategic archipelagoes and their rich literary cultures. Githire uses a rigorous approach, informed by a host of theoretical and scholarly explorations with which she is in continual dialogue. She develops productive metaphors of consumption and assimilation and demonstrates how women writers engage creatively with the paradoxes of hunger and (in)digestion, sexuality and language, colonialism and migration while also denouncing the excesses of global capital and “the newer forms of transnational consumer cultures that . . . construct [these] islands as sources of easily consumable goods, services, and bodies” (6). She provides a nuanced analysis of power, racialism, and the forms of intimacy typically associated with appetites—whether shared or stifled, satisfied or censured. Her attention to the subtleties of sociohistorical contexts make the book an indispensable resource for North American students who tend to know very little about Indian Ocean cultures, despite continued Western military presence and the renewed geopolitical significance of an area that shares similarities with the better known Caribbean but whose salient differences must also be noted.

Githire’s transversal approach puts the two regions into “minor transnational” conversation. She productively links minoritized peripheries in order to challenge hierarchies and thus destabilizes the oppositional logic of (post) colonial critical practices. Her title—Cannibal Writes—echoes another in which the goal is to study those who “write back.” But far more than a mere reversal of the stereotypical canis-caniba trope that constructs the native as depraved, this book is grounded in a salutary paradigm of lateral affinities and conversations about Creole life-worlds, their multiplicities and mobilities, the patterns of gendered resistance deployed around troublesome alterities, and the forms of erasure that (non)eating cristallizes. Close readings of Monique Agénor, Lindsay Collen, and Marie-Thérèse Humbert for the Indian Ocean and Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, Andrea Levy, and Gisèle Pineau for the Caribbean illuminate how local processes of identity formation are mediated by the small practices of everyday life emerging from the relational subjectivities of gendered agents who push back against power structures, be they imperial forces or oppressive family arrangements. Githire honors the creative power of migrant writers from insular regions and her analyses are consistently perceptive; the chapter that includes the lesser-known Agénor does full justice to this talented Reunionese practitioner of historical fiction. The minor quibbles I would have are that Reunion Island is mentioned as “the Reunion” (171, 175) instead of La Réunion (196); some critics are misidentified, e.g., Joubert is French, not Mauritian (19, 161); and the actual neighborhood of Plaine Verte (“Green Square” in Mutiny) is a bit distorted, as it indeed is in Collen’s book (150). But the overall historical and geographical knowledge Githire demonstrates is otherwise impeccable.

Studies of food and colonialism are hardly new, but the comparative thrust of this book opens new ways of approaching migration or border studies, area studies, and relevant topics of island studies that it tackles with clarity and cogency. This is a well-written, stylistically inventive, and meticulous exploration of writers whose sensibilities resonate with those of minority artists in continental contexts. Githire bridges linguistic, ethnic, racial, and geographical divides. She provides an important synthesis of cultural and literary matters. The book will be compelling for humanists and analytical social scientists interested in the gendered transformation of postimperial cultures caught up in the vortex of globalization today.