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5 Heterotopia of Old Age in Beryl Gilroy’s Frangipani House Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. —Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” In this chapter I explore the figure of the house as an exclusionary space where the allegedly burdensome and deviant aspects of social life are supposed to be safely contained. One such dimension of social reality is old age, which we—uncertain how to treat its gradual loss of productivity and social function—increasingly isolate. Homes for the elderly provide the space where visible traces of old age are conveniently kept out of sight. Through Beryl Gilroy’s Frangipani House (1986), I explore this marginalization of old age by means of heterotopia , a concept that allows us a critical view of the relationship between the space and identity of the aging and “unproductive” body as it loses its social role. In contemporary society age increasingly appears as a relation of oppression since “most old people are stigmatized as sick and unattractive, receive little deference, and find themselves pushed from positions of responsibility even if they want to work” (King, 49).1 The exclusion of old people from relevant sociocultural networks and from the labor market shows that the decline of the body constitutes one of the most significant problems in societies based on production and consumption . The human body and its spatiotemporal meaning thus require a critical examination of exclusionary social norms and their spatial configuration. In the Caribbean context this problematic of the body and its productive function is especially important because the reliance on slavery in Caribbean colonialism transforms the human body into a tool of wealth accumulation. Although the body is a key component of production , it also ceases to have any autonomous meaning. Hortense Spillers famously argues that the “New-World, diasporic plight marked a theft of the body—a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire (67).” 129 Heterotopia of Old Age By turning the body into “a territory of cultural and political maneuver ” (67), this theft produces the denial of gender differences and marks the captive body as an expression of absolute physical otherness—an “object” whose powerlessness serves to confirm the captor’s “subject” position. The actual treatment and symbolic interpretation of the captive thus annuls the very notion of the body. In Spillers’s terminology, the body becomes “flesh”: it is branded by unrestrained violence and so carries the physical and symbolic traces of objectification. The body is thus both essential to the practice of slavery and, paradoxically, through the impact of that practice, made irrelevant and replaceable. This dual effect of slavery—the reduction of a human being to his or her body and then the complete denial of that body’s specificity—clarifies why the question of corporeality emerges as one of the most prominent topics in Caribbean discourse. In Dash’s compelling account, “The body or corporeal images provide an insight into the psychic condition of the enslaved individual. The body—like the mind in the world of a slave—is numbed, impotent, inert, ultimately someone else’s possession. Consequently, self-assertion is inevitably linked to a sensuous physical presence, to an active body, to standing ‘upright and free,’ in the words of Césaire’s Cahier. Freedom for the enslaved is seen in terms of unrestricted physical movement” (introduction, xxvii). The recurring attempts at self-assertion through physical presence and unrestricted movement also organize the struggle for autonomy of Gilroy’s protagonist Mama King, “old, ill, but splendidly her own woman,” who is put away by her family in Frangipani House, “a Dickensian rest home on the outskirts of Georgetown” in Guyana (Salkey, 670).2 Made destitute by the concrete physical impact and abstract social interpretations of old age, Mama King foregrounds the relationship between the spaces of freedom and captivity on the one hand, and the corporeal experience of autonomy and subjugation on the other. Mama King’s story can thus be approached, as I intend to do here, as a salient example of corporeal objectification that provides a powerful link between two kinds of heterotopias: the heterotopia of old age and the heterotopia of spatial captivity. My ultimate purpose in this chapter is to investigate the alternative space and selfhood that emerge from Gilroy ’s critique...

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