Keywords

The twenty-first-century Caribbean women writers featured in Chronotropics: Caribbean Women Writing Spacetime deconstruct androcentric approaches to spacetime inherited from Western modernity. They turn to Hindu, Indigenous, Yoruba myths or West African folktales to restore a temporal connection and expand conceptions of space within and beyond the region. They promote social justice and collective healing through literary acts of archival disruption, radical remap**, and epistemic marronnage. We name this the chronotropics. Our volume connects the literary trajectories towards non-Western ontologies and epistemologies laid out by Julia Alvarez, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Vashti Bowlah, Dionne Brand, Erna Brodber, Maryse Condé, Nalo Hopkinson, Rita Indiana, Fabienne Kanor, Karen Lord, Kettly Mars, Pauline Melville, Mayra Montero, Shani Mootoo, Elizabeth Nunez, Ingrid Persaud, Gisèle Pineau, Krystal M. Ramroop, and Mayra Santos Febres.

Part I: Archival Disruption revisits the colonial archive and its systemic practice of exclusion. As Odile Ferly contends in relation to Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (2013) and Fabienne Kanor (2006), archival disruption ought to be regarded as an act of epistemic marronnage. The literary endeavours of the writers that make up Part II: Radical Remap** equally seek to break the thick chain of linearity (a matrix of colonialism, race, gender, and capitalism) by reconceiving territorial boundaries. Parts I and II thus validate Edouard Glissant’s claim that “Place is the seam of Time” (Glissant 2000, 233). The narratives examined in Part III: Epistemic Marronnage go beyond retrospective examination and territorial interrogation to promote forms of marronnage intimately connected to ways of knowing, in particular science and spirituality. These subversive works propose the “quantum level” (da Silva 2017, 110) in their revival of the roots of ancestral communities. The alternative Caribbean women’s spacetimes gathered in Chronotropics embrace metaphysical pluralism and the multiverse.

In her philosophical poem The Blue Clerk, Dionne Brand expresses a desire to live “in time like this, several and simultaneous” instead of “weighted” by the specificity and singularity of place (Brand 2018, 135). Echoing Santos Febres’s “uno y múltiple” (Santos Febres 2021), Brand’s “several and simultaneous” pertains to a chronotropic vision. Thus, upon visiting an Inca exhibit in Peru, Brand reflects on spatialities and temporalities underpinned by distinct epistemologies: “Conquest makes the life of the conquered seem brief … those the Incas conquered must have felt the shortening of their existences too.” Nevertheless, Brand implies, modern Euro-imperialism operates on a different scale: “When the Spanish arrived the thousands of years of the Inca collapsed into one earthen bowl. All their lives collapsed into one life. A summary” (199). The steamroller of Western expansion seems to flatten everything it encounters, just like the Peruvian museum (founded in 1926 at the height of the age of modernity) reduces pre-Columbian life to a collection of earthen bowls. Clearly, in its design and intent, the museum, the ultimate archive, is imbued with coloniality.

Many of the texts studied in Chronotropics likewise “violate” what Denise da Silva calls “the three onto-epistemological pillars (the theory of knowing, theory of being, and a theory of practice)—namely, separability, determinacy, and sequentiality—that sustain linear temporality” (2017, 83). Referencing Octavia Butler, da Silva (2017) echoes Erna Brodber (2014) and Mayra Santos Febres by proposing “a fractal figuring” (92). This approach to spacetime illuminates how linear temporality served to justify enslavement and the appropriation of Indigenous lands and how it further obscured “the creation of capital” through its entanglement with the colonial and the racial (95). The writers examined herein revisit the past or alternatively conjure up futuristic worlds precisely to break these patterns, to challenge such laws, and to demand reparations that can positively impact Caribbean realities, actual and anticipated.

A timely reflection on contemporary migration can be found in Megan Jeanette Myers’ contribution to this volume. Myers demonstrates that Julia Alvarez’s in-transit narrative Afterlife (Alvarez 2020), coupled with her position on Haitian Dominicans and their descendants’ right to citizenship, evince a pan-insular perspective on Hispaniola. This constitutes a radical shift in an intellectual tradition that has been dominated by ethno-nationalism since the mid-nineteenth century. Alvarez’s literary and grassroots engagement destabilizes Hispaniola (and U.S.) spacetime, insofar as it advocates for territorial elasticity and for solidarity across borders, race, nationality, and the diaspora: this is a clear manifestation of the chronotropics. Furthermore, contrary to scholarship that interprets works like Afterlife as intending to extend “the temporality of the dictatorship by exploring its afterlife” in the diaspora of the United States (Harford Vargas 2018, 10), Myers contends that the novel belongs to a new literary phase that moves beyond the trujillato. Afterlife thereby inaugurates a turning point in Dominican thought, a coming to an awareness, perhaps a new archipelagic mindset with an openness to the immediate neighbour and the rest of the region.

Erna Brodber’s fiction, scholarship, and activism, examined in A. Marie Sairsingh’s chapter, likewise prompt us to expand our notion of the nation by more fully embracing the diaspora (see Brodber 2020). Indeed, nationhood is frequently rooted in a narrow conception of spacetime; Brodber’s entire oeuvre reads as a meditation on how the two diasporic components, the African and the Jamaican, or the temporal and spatial dimensions, are fundamentally constitutive of both Jamaica (and by extension, the Caribbean) and the black people. Maryse Condé’s corpus, with its emphasis on the African and Caribbean diasporas, similarly posits rethinking spacetime as a precondition for equity and justice, an impulse that animates Fabienne Kanor’s writing too. As Valérie K. Orlando shows, the hyper globalized world of Condé’s later period has a very different tenor from the optimism of the earlier works, or from Brodber’s later fiction. In Les belles ténébreuses (Condé 2008) and Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana (Condé 2017), the Guadeloupean author cautions against the dire consequences of being disconnected from one’s spacetime, origins, birthplace, and history, especially for Afro-diasporic subjects. According to Orlando, it is precisely their ignorance and outright disinterest in Caribbean spacetime, both historical and geographical, that makes the young protagonists vulnerable and leads to their ultimate downfall. Sharing this palpable skepticism, the narratives by Rita Indiana (2015), Mayra Montero (1997), Pauline Melville (1997), and Elizabeth Nunez (2006) point to the destructive impact of the prevailing approaches to spacetime, as discussed by Joshua R. Deckman, Carine M. Mardorossian and Angela Veronica Wong, and Elaine Savory, respectively.

Several texts experiment with the chronotropics through spacetime travel. In Kettly Mars’s L’Ange du patriarche (2018), the physical and metaphysical worlds collide when the characters meet the spirit. Lethal as it may be (all characters except one meet their ends there), this collision site or spacetime corridor offers the protagonists an opportunity to radically remap the present and alter the future: Thus, a scene towards the end of the novel is recounted twice, with one change leading to a different outcome. According to Mars, embracing cohabitation, that is, remaining fully receptive to the coexistence of spiritual and ideological beliefs that are ostensibly contradictory or seemingly at odds with each other, empowers the protagonists Emmanuela and Couz to take full ownership of the past; as Robert Sapp argues, this enables them to have an impact on their present and future. As an ethical stance, cohabitation is applicable beyond Haiti: attesting to this are several of the authors studied here, notably Hopkinson, Indiana, Melville, and Montero.

For her part, in Fe in disfraz, Mayra Santos Febres (2009) resorts to a spacetime travelling machine that doubles up as a site of memory: the iconic dress that the eponymous character puts on every year at Halloween. Tailored for a free woman of partial African ancestry striving to assimilate into Brazilian white society, this dress encapsulates the structural barriers that Afrodescendants, especially women, have invariably encountered across space and time in the Americas. And yet Santos Febres suggests that a mask or disguise can only grant the illusion of achievement; it cannot truly attain it. Perhaps one of the most innovative approaches to spacetime, however, is found in Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé, where Alcide’s spiritual initiation to santería opens, in Deckman’s words, “a breach in the temporal fabric of Caribbean imaginaries,” a passage along which the reader can freely travel in time along with the protagonist. The use of multiple timelines in the novel underscores the reproduction of the pattern of exploitation, abuse, and violence at the inception of Caribbean coloniality; at the same time, as Deckman contends, the repetition of the pattern and the prominence of the theme of betrayal illustrate the missed opportunities to break the pernicious cycle.

A similar effect is produced by the chronotropic device deployed in Gisèle Pineau: the memory jail where asynchronous characters are thrown together and where “time is abolished” (Pineau 2007, 7). Here distinct eras are merged to underline social stagnation: things have changed and yet remain the same. The striking commonalities in the plights of these four women whose lives span over two centuries insinuate that for Guadeloupe’s black women of humble or modest extraction, progress has always been accompanied by setbacks. And indeed, several authors examined here show that, despite expansions of space, time seems to stand still. Literal and metaphorical imprisonment in Pineau’s memoir reifies the urgency of a chronotropic vision that addresses the sociopolitical spaces women do or do not occupy. Additionally, as Renée Larrier notes in her chapter, the psychescape of the memory jail, an archive of its own kind replete with the author’s foremothers’ memories and voices, begs the question of whether writing can free her and her ancestors from past and present violence. This resonates with what Outar identifies as “the tentacles of traumatic pasts that continue to haunt Caribbean peoples and their descendants” in Ingrid Persaud’s Love After Love. Undoubtedly, writing is a form of catharsis that empowers the Caribbean women in this volume to assume their traumatic history, as most evident in Pineau, Arroyo Pizarro, and Kanor.

Arguably, rewriting is another form of time travelling.1 It is especially effective with plays. Thus, the community play performed yearly in Woodside, Jamaica can be seen as a constant collective rewriting of the 1838 Emancipation by Brodber and the Blackspace participants. It stands as a living text whose adaptations and shifting interpretations are tuned in to the contemporary context every year. Through the play and other annual Blackspace commemorations, the continued relevance of history becomes real to the audience, as the link between past, present, and future is highlighted. The rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest by writers across the Caribbean and the way each version speaks to the moment of its inception and various productions is likewise a form of time travelling; Elizabeth Nunez’s novel Prospero’s Daughter belongs to this long line of palimpsest. The originality of Nunez’s version, Elaine Savory argues, lies in the couple Virginia and Carlos (Miranda and Caliban) whose alliance and respect for the environment undermine colonial dynamics (Prospero). Nunez intimates that these are two necessary preconditions to overcome the colonial predicament.

Its inherent flexibility should likewise grant the oral tradition timelessness and the ability to always speak to the moment; and yet, as demonstrated by Lisa Outar, it almost invariably reinforces social conservatism and patriarchal norms. Re/writing folktales such as Ti-Marie and the Devil and adapting figures from Indo-Caribbean folklore and Hindu legends allows Krystal Ramroop (2020), Vashti Bowlah (2015), and Ingrid Persaud (2020) to interrogate the sexism, outright misogyny, and gender normativity that characterizes the oral tradition and most religions. Because stories and elements of folklore serve a pedagogical function, it is imperative to revise them. Similarly, Zimmerman shows how in Redemption in Indigo Karen Lord (2010) puts her own spin on a Senegalese folktale, Hindu legends, and more broadly the conventions of Afro-Caribbean storytelling to push towards social change, notably regarding gender norms.

As Erica L. Johnson’s discussion of The Blue Clerk demonstrates, the preoccupation with the records found in many writers and artists such as Dionne Brand is another form of constant rewriting. Archival institutions as conventionally conceived in the logocentric tradition of the West are places dedicated to marking time. Consequently, to engage with them, to question their omissions, silences, or outright absence is to reconstruct spacetime. Each in her own way, Arroyo Pizarro, Kanor, Brand, Pineau, and Santos Febres, redefines the archive as the Afro-diasporic body and collective/family memory. In these authors (and in Brodber too), writing, researching, or simply remembering becomes a way to elaborate a counterarchive. Time ravages the physical records as much as the immaterial ones. The authors’ insistence on the ephemeral or the impermanent both reflects the absence of black Atlantic registers and artefacts and stands as an invitation to constant rewriting, to put the past, present, and future in Relation. As Kanor puts it: “Not knowing everything allows us, the heirs, to reinvent history [and to avoid being] in a state of eternal resentment” (Herbeck 2013, 975, translation Ferly’s). While the official record is taken to task by each of these authors, its fragmented nature still holds immense practical and symbolic value. Kanor, for instance, can reimagine her protagonists jum** ship in solidarity, thereby preemptively foreclosing a future of enslavement through their deaths. The text speculates what world-archive, geographies, and temporalities would we be inhabiting had there never been a Middle Passage.

A chronotropics paradigm thus insists on rupturing and breaking open the present through dismantling the master’s house of colonial records across several, interconnected geopolitical locations. Undertaking this knowledge translation work, Brand’s clerk, in a performative gesture, looks for History within its blank pages. Similarly, the Afro-Venezuelan researcher in Santos Febres’s novel tirelessly sifts through incomplete annals in Chicago to connect the disparate stories of women enslaved across the Americas. Santos Febres collapses the present and past, the diaspora, island, and continent, into a single spacetime, as Nicole Roberts’ chapter makes clear. Reflecting on these connections across decades and generations, Melville’s elusive narrator poignantly asks: “Do you think a man’s life is slung between two dates like a hammock? … It takes more than one life to make a person” (Melville 1997, 6). This recognition of interconnections leads Melville’s unconventional anthropologist Rosa Mendelson to defend racial and cultural hybridity between the Wapisiana Amerindians of Guyana and others. In fact, as a form of counter-discourse, she comes to ventriloquize the narrator’s belief that “disguise is the only truth and desire the only true measure of time” (10). Through unearthing the fragments of untold stories that echo each other, these authors evidence not only the sexual-textual politics of the archive but also the ethical stakes of rewriting the region’s historical and historiographic discourses.

Caribbean women’s writing therefore stresses the artificiality of Man’s time by reminding us that nature operates according to its own schedule. To the consternation of “measurers, collectors or enumerators” like Charles Darwin, “in the tropics … [s]ooner or later everything falls to the glorious spirit of rot” which, accompanied by “its herald angel, smell, announce most events” (Melville 1997, 7). In the same vein, texts by Hopkinson (2013), Mootoo (2005), and Nunez (2006) depict an overflowing, overgrowing tropical topography of multiplicity and fecundity intent on ruining and rebelling against the structured modern world. Hopkinson offers a particularly effective critique with her invasive kudzu plant, spreading out and across the urban landscape of Toronto. The fear of an untameable, alien plant/species not only implies hypersexuality or vulgarity but also calls to mind a specific kind of xenophobia. Alternative spiritualities and newcomers (construed as hyper-consumerists inattentive to the proper respect for nature) purportedly pose a threat to the Canadian landscape and the nation’s Eurocentric approach to ecology. Supposedly degrading the wilderness and introducing poisonous ways of thinking, immigrants must be effectively assimilated or contained lest they should destroy the chaste, Western subject like Darwin. This brings to the forefront Canada’s fear for its pristine image, that is, space spiralling out of control when allegedly unchecked, unregulated immigration jeopardizes the nation/environment with irreparable loss and contamination. Vivian Nun Halloran’s chapter notes that writing by Hopkinson, like Mootoo, directly addresses the hypocrisy of a country seemingly forgetful of its own diasporic origins, as its nationalism is entangled with sexuality, race, migration, and environmentalism.

A mirror to the unruly vegetation in Hopkinson’s novel, Nunez’s Prospero protagonist deeply desires to dominate others (including sexually) and master spacetime, hence his unethical experiments on the flora of the island. His eventual failure underlines his out-of-placeness. For Savory, however, the patriarch’s destructive behavior is offset by the budding relationship between the mixed-race couple. Virginia and Carlos gesture towards another way of being-with-others. Instead of dominance, coercion, artificiality, division, and force, the pair propose an alternative mode, between singularity and duality, to (re)map spacetime, a mode that entails a shared exchange or sympoeisis between species, people, and cultures; only this renewed relation of reciprocity and respect can offer a pathway for a sustainable future.

This lesson, however, is lost on Mayra Montero’s two male biologists in Tú, la oscuridad (In the Palm of Darkness) as Carine M. Mardorossian and Angela Veronica Wong’s chapter highlights. While the fatal conclusion of their insatiable quest for power at the expense of others, human and nonhuman alike, could offer a glimmer of hope, Montero’s novel is in fact suffused by a sense of doom that contrasts in tone with Nunez but resonates with Melville’s depiction of the ever-encroaching foreign oil companies in Guyana. Likewise, Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (Tentacle) ends on a pessimistic note. Given the irreversible damage done to “the kingdom of this world,” Caribbean and South American metaphysical spacetime—that is, Afro-Caribbean and Amerindian syncretic cosmogonies—appears to be the only source of comfort for Indiana, Melville, and Montero. Their respective use of santería, Wapisiana spirituality, and Vodou seek to reestablish the sacred link between humans, nature, animals, and gods. These writers together with Lord, Persaud and Mars further link their contemporary protagonists back to mythical and spiritual ancestors (such as Ananse and the kali mai cult) and to pivotal moments in history (such as the Bois Caïman ceremony) to remap not only gender but also the area and its intellectual traditions.

Finally, other writers in this volume return to powerful chronotopes (Olokún, churile, ladjablesse, Paama, Mayotte) from across the archipelago that signal the desire to confront and move on from the personal and political wounds of the past. This may manifest in revenge against perpetrators’ violence, as Lisa Outar’s work on Vashti Bowlah and Krystal Ramroop recognizes. Outar’s claim that “Folklore thus serves as an archive of women’s suffering” can be extended to many, if not most, of the writers included in this volume: domestic violence and abuse that cut across different axes of identity such as race, sexuality, and class are recurring motifs. Meanwhile, Kettly Mars’s novel, amongst others, reveals the long shadow of the fallible patriarch to indicate that we must find new ways to structure family and society; Tegan Zimmerman suggests that for Karen Lord, the feminocentric web of Ananse does exactly this: The web brings people together to disrupt traditional arbolic, patriarchal familial trees and lineages. As also illustrated in A. Marie Sairsingh’s reading of Brodber, nonlinear imaginings of kinship are not confined to a single spacetime but rather branch out in multiplicity and heterogeneity. While Indiana’s and Mars’s novels exemplify that destruction is certainly one aspect that may lead to radical change, a more hopeful side can be gleaned through a return to the spiritual and the powerful call of ancestors. Speculative spacetime or the anticipated land thus holds immense political potential in these texts.

Chronotropics brings to the forefront the gender-inflected multiverse with its epistemological and metaphysical pluralism. The chronotropic frameworks adopted by the women writers in this collection seek to carve out new spacetimes in which multiple worlds exist simultaneously, the one-in-the-many is possible, and the isolated, disembodied subject is toppled and banished once and for all. For some, a more just future can be achieved through creative acts that entail more openings, that is, more movement and fluidity, more Relation, as Glissant might put it, while for others it means respecting the borders or boundaries of an Other as a legitimate entity—a goddess, an island, a frog—independent of human being. While no single, definitive answer can be given, the political activism and literary endeavors pursued by each writer signal that in order to find a way towards an ethical future, we must collectively reject the old frameworks, the old worlds, and not only decenter Man but go beyond the human as Sylvia Wynter (2003) conceives it. We must instead elaborate/create other spacetimes. This is the imperative of a chronotropics that foregrounds women’s lives and voices in concert with, not in opposition to, the natural-spiritual worlds that we inhabit.

Note

  1. 1.

    This borrows from the argument Rachel Douglas (2022) makes in relation to CLR James as a historiographer of the Haitian revolution in his multiple versions of The Black Jacobins, both in the various editions of the history and in the different play adaptations.