In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival
  • Sandra C. Duvivier (bio)
Gadsby, Meredith M. Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2006.

Caribbean women writers, largely because of their race, gender, and ethnicity, have tended to be overlooked in the literary canons and their respective criticisms. In response, scholars of Caribbean women's literature, such as Carole Boyce Davies, have often called for the inclusion of these writers, many of whom remain underrepresented and marginalized, in literary/cultural writing and discourse. As these critics have argued, Caribbean women's literature problematizes and expands conceptualizations of not only race, class, and gender, but also ethnicity, nation, and migration. Caribbean women's literary criticism, then, takes scholarship on black and women writers into innovative trajectories.

Meredith M. Gadsby's Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival further enriches literary and critical representations of black and women's writings generally and Caribbean women writers specifically. Rather than locate her text within a preexisting analytical/theoretical paradigm, Gadsby provides a new framework by which to explore Caribbean women's writings: that is, in her theorizations of Caribbean women's sucking [End Page 632] salt, signifying both their adversity to and, very importantly, transcendence from marginalization based on race, ethnicity, class, and gender in their migrated environment.

One of the many strengths of Sucking Salt is Gadsby's literal, concrete rendering of "sucking salt" to complement its theoretical significance. Literally and symbolically, Gadsby notes, "sucking salt" exemplifies hardship because of its bitterness, inability to serve as sustenance when food (or economic prosperity) is not readily accessible, and allusions to saltwater/Middle-Passage imagery connoting involuntary migration and enslavement of people of African descent. However, its transcendent capacities reside in its consumers' preparedness for "bitterness" and adversity, as they find alternative ways to counter physical and metaphorical hunger (or, as Gadsby observes, drinking water for sustenance, rather than starving), and in resistance to involuntary migration and enslavement. On literal, metaphorical, and conceptual levels, then, Gadsby illuminates the significance of salt in Black Diasporic cultures.

Sucking Salt delineates the salience of salt, particularly as it relates to Caribbean women, in six chapters, a "postscript," and a "literature review." Setting an important framework and precedent for the book, the first chapter introduces "sucking salt," placing it within important theoretical, racial, ethnic, gendered, and literary contexts. Because "sucking salt" opens avenues for new theorizations of Caribbean women's writings and, thereby, advances scholarly works on their literature, Gadsby is careful not to ascribe to a "self-consciously academic pattern of theorizing, with its limitations and attempts at recolonization" (14). Evidencing her refusal to theorize "for theory's sake" is her merging of literary analysis with the self-referential, enacted in the text through anecdotal accounts of her family foremothers in relation to salt imagery.

Additionally, and very commendably, Gadsby contests conceptualizations of Caribbean identity that are confined by geographical location and acknowledges the ways in which Caribbean identity shifts and adapts in migratory settings. As Gadsby argues, "limiting Caribbean identity as something that only those living in or born in the islands can possess seems ridiculous. [ . . . ] identity does not just fall away or disappear when one leaves home. Identities are constantly shifting and adapting to new encounters" (11). In her challenges to the rigidity surrounding Caribbean identity, especially as it relates to "nation" and national boundaries, Gadsby refuses to operate within what Davies asserts is a "narrow particularity" at times accompanying the ethno-literary reception, or lack thereof, of black women's writings.1

Gadsby explores various configurations of salt and salt imagery in literature and culture, including, in the second chapter, salt's role in the "flying African" tale prevalent in black New World discourse. Particularly noteworthy is Gadsby's historicization and placement of salt within an important diasporic context, which helps evidence the ways black women's racial and gendered experiences (and both similar and varied histories based on race, gender, sexuality, nation, and socioeconomics) also heavily shape the imaginings and significance of "sucking salt." These women's histories and experiences vary according to their respective countries and/or nation-states, but they share certain characteristics as...

pdf

Share