Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones by Carole Boyce Davies (review)

In a recent interview, Maryse Condé, attempting to show how difficult it was not to pander to the taste for exoticism among readers of Caribbean literature, likened herself to a “cook who doesn’t add any salt, who doesn’t add any spices or pepper” (Britton 173). Ever wary of the stereotypes of eroticism and magic that are associated with Caribbean literature, she felt the need to lessen the oral pleasure of consuming her novels. This is definitely not the case with Carole Boyce Davies’s eminently readable and often entertaining Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from the Twilight Zone. Instead of going easy on the spices, Boyce Davies provides us with a savory feast of experiences, memories, and reflections on her personal and professional life. Evidence of a highly spiced narrative can be seen as much in reports of her mother’s dalliances to declarations that “polygamy is as natural as breathing air for Caribbean men” (54). As much as anything else she is quite literally interested in food and sees cooking as an essential ingredient in a Caribbean identity. Who else remembers Claude McKay’s “poetic uses of food” or that Austin Clarke’s autobiography was entitled Pig Tails ‘n Breadfruit: A Culinary Memoir. We have no doubt that when she says she “was always making a pot of rice and peas” when she lived in Washington, DC, she was not just improvising a dish known throughout the Caribbean but performing as much as anything else a ritual that reconnected her to home.

This study of Caribbean migration, as Boyce Davies says from the outset, is not about “poverty and pain” but assertively upbeat in its tone as it moves back and forth between Caribbean diasporas across the Americas and the author’s family in the West Indies. It is at times so grounded in personal experience and family history that it could have been called “My Caribbean Spaces.” In her words, this project “attempts a move between the autobiographical and the conceptual, the experiential and the theoretical in order to disrupt the logic of exclusionary academic discourse that often denies the personal” and is meant to be “read with ease” by a non-academic audience (6). Its narrative strategy then allows us to follow an invaluable testimony by a major female scholar in Africana Studies in the United States, from her beginnings in Barataria, Trinidad, to her to coming of age in the 1970s during the Black Power movement of that decade. I must confess to a personal interest in her story, since I too grew up in Barataria and left Trinidad in the very same year. Our paths then differ as she went to Howard University and I to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. We would come across the same people in very different circumstances. For me, Sylvia Wynter was my lecturer on the plays of Garcia Lorca, Walter Rodney was just beginning his career as Professor of African history at Mona, and “The Wailers” was a local reggae band that played at fetes put on by the students union. We learn little unfortunately about her early years in Barataria, which surely can be constructed as a Caribbean twilight zone of “recreation and joy” (12). Indeed, how different is this town on the Eastern Main Road with its notorious steelband, its hybrid population, and its bustling “croisée” (crossroads) from the village of Felicity celebrated in Derek Walcott’s Nobel lecture.

Coming of age in the seventies in the US “in the midst of Black Power activity” determines the routes she travels, the people she encounters, and ultimately her career choices. Her mentor at Howard University was the negritude poet Leon Gontran Damas, her doctoral work was done at the University of Ibadan, and a fellow Trinidadian Stokely Carmichael became her role model. Her twilight zones are invariably rather grim sites in upstate New York, department meetings at her university, and the marginal spaces occupied...