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5 Intimate Migrations: Narrating “Third World Women” in the Short Fiction of Bessie Head, Zoë Wicomb, and Pauline Melville
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5 / Intimate Migrations: Narrating “Third World Women” in the Short Fiction of Bessie Head, Zoë Wicomb, and Pauline Melville Third-world women, on the other hand, never rise above the debilitating generality of their “object” status. —chandra mohanty, “Under Western Eyes” Erna Brodber, in an essay ruminating on the stakes of realism in literature and beyond in the Caribbean, tells a brief anecdote of Alexander Bedward, a Jamaican man in the early twentieth century who purportedly tried to fly in emulation of biblical narratives of ascension. Her punchline (of the essay and the anecdote) echoes her genre-bending novel Louisiana’s insistence on the untranslatable, commidifiable nature of knowledge production and bleeds through to this chapter on postcolonial short fiction and the impossible task of representing “Third World Women” in the diaspora: “Magical realism gone too real, if this story is true” (2002, 23). No generic or epistemological play will keep you pure from the West (with its own brand of the marvelous), nor will it keep you safe from the expectations of social realism placed on peoples of the African diaspora both by Western institutions and by those of us attempting to correct their corrupt legacy. The previous chapter interrogated the discipline of anthropology as a study of race through the innovative , feminist ethnographic forms of Brodber and Zora Neale Hurston. But with the call for more and different stories, especially from women, coming from and through transnational feminist discourse, how might we consider the work of narrative and narrative representation in forwarding a heterogeneous feminist concept of diaspora? Does narrative and narrative culture have a place in this important work, and can it offer something different from social science interrogations of the material migrations of people—something close to but not quite the same as “realist” knowledge production about Third World Women? intimate migrations / 143 Late in the series of vignettes in South African writer Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost In Cape Town, the first-person narrator defends the act of writing, claiming, “But they’re only stories. Made up. Everyone knows it’s not real, not the truth” ([1987] 2011, 172). Wicomb calls our attention to the drama not (just) between the author and the audience in diaspora literature but between narration and the act of reading (and subsequently, interpretation), much as Hurston and Brodber do in their recombinant forms. But if Hurston and Brodber largely reckon with the absence of women from discourses of diasporic modernity, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, another set of writers such as Wicomb write through the difficult sign of the “Third World Woman” as a constant mark of tension between that which is marked as tradition (women and African diaspora societal roles for them) and that which is marked as modernity (Western feminist ideals of freedom and individualism ). Wicomb’s riff on Black Atlantic women’s fiction as just that— fictional stories that assume skeptical readers—calls out this tension as a false binary, asking, Who is the “everyone” reading and interpreting these texts—transnational feminist and African diaspora studies critics? “Subaltern” subjects? “Third World Women,” a construction I self-consciously employ throughout this chapter? The imagined Western reader? Wicomb’s challenge to this grouping challenges how we come to “know” or to recognize these fictions of “Women,” intimately enough to dismiss or defend them. This currency of Third World Women’s representation does not have to overwhelm interpretation of narrative form for African diaspora women writers such as Wicomb, Bessie Head, and Pauline Melville, as well as the critical body of work surrounding their fictions. Difficult Diasporas has thus far tried to take seriously what literary and cultural production can bring to the table next to the discourses of biography, natural sciences, history, and anthropology, to name a few of the fields that have a hold on knowledge production around the signs of women of and in the Black Atlantic. As the title of this chapter suggests, I read Head’s, Wicomb’s, and Melville’s work in intimate proximity with the term and the debates around “Third World Women”; instead of insisting creative fictions into the category of representative reality, this chapter asks what work they might do, otherwise, for our thinking around entrenched categories of identity, location, and the constitution of progressive academic practice around the subject and sign of African diaspora women. As Florence Stratton argued in 1994, for too long the figures of the Prostitute and the Mother have...