Diasporic Transnational Identity in Elizabeth Nunez’s Beyond the Limbo Silence

Like many novels by Caribbean women writers published near the end of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Nunez’s Beyond the Limbo Silence (1998) addresses conflicts surrounding identity and displacement in the context of European imperialism. Set in both Trinidad and a rural Wisconsin college town in 1963, it is also heavily invested in the US Civil Rights Movement and the cultural and political negotiations required of black West Indians living in the United States during this volatile time. The novel therefore engages with British colonialism, Trinidadian independence, and American neocolonialism in the construction of its heroine’s transnational identity.

Given the various and almost always problematic interpretations of the term transnational in current scholarship across disciplines, it is worth starting with a description of how I will be using it throughout this article. While transnational is almost universally understood to describe organizations, commerce, relationships, or cultural movements (among other things) that cross national boundaries and are not limited by national affiliation, this definition fails to address the power dynamics inherent in the processes that make such border-crossing possible. Without wading too deeply into debates over the potential perils of globalization, this article situates transnationalism within the broader historical trajectory of imperialism, from the conquest and independence movements of former European colonies to cultural and economic neocolonialism (which is indeed tied to the rise of multinational corporate interests during the second half of the twentieth century, when many of these independence movements took place).¹ In this manner, the transnational identity developed in Beyond the Limbo Silence reflects cultural agency without ignoring how it is problematized by hierarchies of power and privilege that were established and reinforced over the course of modern imperial history.

Moreover, with regard to postcolonial migration narratives published in the 1990s and early 2000s, diasporic transnationalism offers a productive model for understanding the way contemporary writers increasingly connect migration to global systems of oppression and resistance, as Nunez does in Beyond the Limbo Silence.² The first-person coming-of-age narrative begins when protagonist Sara Edgehill informs her grandmother that she is leaving Trinidad to attend a Catholic college in Wisconsin, and it covers about a year of her life in 1963–64, an eventful time in US civil rights history. The novel repeatedly returns to Sara’s childhood in colonized and independence-era Trinidad, adopting a recursive, nonlinear structure that forces Sara to confront memories that help her make sense of her experiences in the United States. At the same time, as she learns about and becomes increasingly invested in the US Civil Rights Movement, Sara better understands Trinidad’s complicated racial, social, and cultural histories. Consequently, she finds herself unexpectedly connected to African Americans in their shared histories of violence, slavery, oppression, and struggle for independence and equality. By adopting a narrative structure that juxtaposes the US Civil Rights Movement with Trinidad’s independence from Britain, and by accommodating both histories in its plot, Beyond the Limbo Silence represents the intersection of postcoloniality and US race relations in two important ways. First, while traditional narratives of development depend on the consolidation of individual identity, the novel deconstructs Sara’s identification as a colonial subject. Second, it reinscribes Sara’s identity vis-à-vis her experiences in the United States to foreground her Blackness so that she comes to understand herself as part of the African diaspora.

“Me? I?”: Unraveling, Madness, and Coming of Age

To better understand Sara’s unraveling, or the deconstruction and diasporic rein-scription of her identity, it is useful to examine her upbringing in colonial and independence-era Trinidad. The novel suggests that the canonical British novels Sara reads as an adolescent inform her expectations of the world and, to an extent, her self-perception. Louis Althusser’s terminology from “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)” (1970) proves instructive here because the collection at Sara’s local public library consists almost entirely of canonical Western texts and thereby functions as an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) by reinforcing colonial ideology through literature. Althusser argues that the state utilizes ISAs...