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3. Coming of Age in the Tropics: Girlhood and the Making of the Colonial Body
- University of Virginia Press
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3 Coming of Age in the Tropics Girlhood and the Making of the Colonial Body When we think about childhood, it is above all our investment in doing so which counts. —Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction It is something of a critical commonplace to view childhood and the stories that return to it as occasions for introspection and psychological investment. As Jacqueline Rose puts it, “Childhood is something in which we continue to be implicated and which is never simply left behind.” From the point of view of psychoanalysis, “childhood persists as something which we endlessly rework in our attempt to build an image of our own history” (1984, 12). If what Western literary projects revisiting childhood most urgently seek is to reconstruct the formation of a personal story, postcolonial childhood stories seem to address the building of collective histories that are strategically channeled through the personal story of the child. Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the postcolonial childhood story is that it draws attention to itself as another form of history, providing a seemingly safe and safely emotional standpoint from which to observe the texture of colonial societies. That this emotional response is triggered by the same type of nostalgia that seems implied in most childhood reminiscence—a nostalgia that is further underlined by the notion of innocence that is traditionally associated with children—renders the postcolonial childhood story a particularly thorny genre through or by which to encounter the colonial past. By reading the story of a child who is immersed in a culturally if not physically violent situation, we naturally tend to want to side with the child-narrator, whom we cannot hold responsible for the state of affairs engulfing him or her. In and by the very foundation on which this genre is constructed, both the author and the reader remain in a safe 105 Coming of Age in the Tropics place guarded by the figure of the child-observer and the reader’s seemingly unproblematic identification with him or her. The affable nature of the reading contract it establishes with its public would alone seem to account for the genre’s popularity in the Caribbean today. Indeed, it is a curious fact that writers as diverse as Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Gisèle Pineau, Maryse Condé, George Lamming, Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, V. S. Naipaul, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas, and Magali García Ramis, to name only a few, should all have written childhood stories at some point during their careers. Several features that are constitutive of the genre help further explain the wide practice of the childhood story in the Caribbean region. In Éloge de la créolité, their manifesto on Creole literature, Martiniquan writers Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant—two authors who also happen to have written their own childhood stories—address the need to subvert a colonial mentality through three mechanisms: the elaboration of a local definition of beauty that centers upon Antillean bodies and cultures, the updating of collective memory, and, most important of all, the “breaking of the traditional gaze” [briser la vision traditionelle]. For this to happen, it is essential to develop a new, inquiring gaze, “somewhat like the child’s look, questioning in front of everything, having yet no postulates of its own, and putting into question even the most obvious facts” (1993, 84; emphasis in original). From the perspective of Glissant’s conceptualization of relation, the coming-of-age story can be seen as “naturally” creating a narrative space in which the reader may “experience ” the history of a community through the “uncontaminated” eyes of a child. From this point of view, the childhood story seems a convenient vehicle for the author to dig deep into a community’s intimate, domestic moments as sources of collective truth, a task that is intrinsically guaranteed to the author by his or her assuming a position marked by both the privilege and the license implicit in the (stereotypical) figure of the child. A parallel is also established between national literary traditions and the lives of the authors themselves and, more generally, between the life of a young nation and that of the child. The Caribbean childhood story occurs within the context of relatively young literatures and of peoples who are peripheral to the centers of power at a time in which globalization has only emphasized the center/margin division.1 From this perspective , the prevalence of...