Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsal and Imagining Caribbean Belonging

Introduction: Reading Caribbean Resistance through Feminist Rehearsal

Introduction: Reading Caribbean Resistance through Feminist Rehearsal Sunlight on the sea floor is a familiar image of the Caribbean , but the pages of the region’s history run red. “Drowned women’s bones fused to coral” underlies a history of the sea, one that subaquatically links the stories of the various territories of the Caribbean. The language of bones permits an examination of the structures of resistance and oppression even as they remind us of the flesh that once clung to them.1 They remind us of flesh that endured the unspeakable and the unimaginable—flesh, which in Walcott’s poem is held together by coral cartilage. Coral as connective tissue is more than a connection between the living and the dead: it interweaves environmental degradation with history. And while chronicles of the region may depict the Caribbean as a pawn in the plans of others, Caribbean people have rebelled, challenged, and undermined what western and northern hegemons have imposed politically and ideologically, most dynamically through culture—literature , music, spiritual practices, and rituals such as Carnival. While these forms of resistance have not substantively changed the relationship between Caribbean nations and imperial centers, they remain critical to the ongoing transformation. In this project, I explore multiple readings of resistance, rebellion, and challenge in the Caribbean context through a feminist analytical lens, using what I term “feminist rehearsal.” Feminist rehearsal is a methodological approach to reading texts that promotes multivalent readings and foregrounds gender, encouraging unity and consensus building through confrontation with overlapping histories of knowledge, power, and freedom. Emphasizing the feminist aspect of rehearsal reveals and confronts the ways in which national belonging has been imagined and privileged as a solely male enterprise. This method encourages the audience to become an actor; or, in the words of Brazilian dramatist Augusto 2 Introduction Boal, the audience becomes a “spect-actor,” meaning that it creates not just meaning but solutions.2 The transactional nature of national belonging has meant interrogating both the aesthetic and sociopolitical manifestations of cultural production that impact Caribbean bodies and bones. Each chapter of Bodies and Bones rehearses an event, archetype, or community to show how meaning has several reference points, not just one. In this way, by making the past tangible through repetition and revision, this book invites readers into its sociopolitical project of building more feminist, empathetic communities. The word “rehearsal” implies several events: (1) repetition until something is mastered, (2) constant reexamination of what has already been done, and (3) the suggestion of orality and physical presence, of the body engaged in rehearsal because of the added inflections, pauses, nuances, and bodily shifts resulting from each repetition or revision. The etymology of the word “rehearse” includes “hearse” for the carrying of a dead body, an important part of cultivating unrecognized archives and of understanding the bodily implications of Caribbean belonging.3 The symbol of the hearse emphasizes the effects of beating, torture, and mutilation on the body and of social, political, and economic factors . Caribbean identities have been tied to bodies—sexed bodies, racialized bodies, commodified bodies. I invoke bodies and bones as a vivid reminder of the ways in which Caribbean bodies matter; how the tensions that arise in and between those gendered, classed, colored, and sexualized bodies alter, sometimes disappear, and often are reshuffled, lost, and reclaimed. The process of becoming bone engages with both the silencing of the dead and the erasure of their experiences, while speaking to the contradictory hostilities that bind the Caribbean crucible. These bodies and bones were once tissue: sinewy flesh that has been silenced. As Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs remarks in Beloved, “they”— owners, masters, whites—“do not love our flesh,” though perversely they used it for pleasure. Ultimately, Baby Suggs advises her congregation that “we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. . . . Love your heart. For this is the prize.”4 These words, “they do not love your flesh,” resonate with me as they reveal that black bodies are never presumed innocent or valuable outside the means of production. The lack of love for black flesh has meant that those bodies have endured unspeakable violence, from birth to death. This flesh has been raped, whipped, lynched, burned, dismembered , and pierced by bullets. This flesh has endured forced sterilization and medical experimentation. 3 Introduction Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta...