Aisha T. Spencer: “Reshaping Girlhood, Reimagining Womanhood”: The Female Child Protagonist
and the Post-diasporic Condition in Jamaican Female-authored Children’s Literature
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“Reshaping Girlhood, Reimagining
Womanhood”: The Female Child
Protagonist and the Post-diasporic
Condition in Jamaican Femaleauthored Children’s Literature
Aisha T. Spencer
Lecturer, Language and Literature Education
The School of Education
The University of the West Indies, Mona
Kingston, Jamaica, W.I
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Abstract: The female child protagonist has always been a major figure in the
work of several Jamaican female fiction writers. More recently, however,
Jamaican female writers from across the diaspora have begun to reveal a new
kind of poetics through the presentation of their female child protagonist and
the situations they encounter. This paper will explore the use of an emerging
post-diasporic poetics in the work of Jamaican Children’s Literature author
Diane Browne, which introduces fluid female identities constructed through the
realities of globalisation and post-diasporic conditions. The female child
protagonist represents a newly emerging female sensibility and consciousness,
which enables readers to access both girlhood and womanhood through
realities and perspectives tied to the migrant experience across different periods
of time. Each protagonist portrays a self which exists beyond boundaries and
outside of the dictates of the social ideals framing femaleness and the female
migrant experience, embedded for so long in the Jamaican culture. Browne
challenges both traditional and to some extent postmodern models of
womanhood and female identity, through the way each of her female child
protagonists are portrayed as they move through a post-diasporic process of
navigation of both self and space in Browne’s texts.
Key words: girlhood, womanhood, postdiasporic, Caribbean children’s
Literature, Diane Browne
How to cite
Spencer, Aisha T. 2019. ‘“Reshaping Girlhood, Reimagining Womanhood”: The Female Child
Protagonist and the Post-diasporic Condition in Jamaican Female-authored Children’s
Literature.’ Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Issue 13: 121–146
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Aisha T. Spencer: “Reshaping Girlhood, Reimagining Womanhood”: The Female Child Protagonist
and the Post-diasporic Condition in Jamaican Female-authored Children’s Literature
“I have come
Without papers
To tell you
I am me”
(from “Third World Girl”)
The journey of Caribbean people can never be characterized as static and
linear. We have had a long history of moving across national borders and
immersing ourselves in communities other than our own with the hope of gaining
economic stability and social mobility. As Franklin W. Knight comments,
“[m]igration has been fundamental in the Caribbean experience” (7). As a
result, it has been common practice for us to navigate socially constructed
realities often alien to our own identities and cultures. Each journey has caused
us to constantly acquire new ways of accessing and adjusting to systems in ways
that would open doors of possibility for ourselves and our families. Tied to
migration is the factor of gender. Gender becomes deeply interwoven into the
context of migration because of the large number of Caribbean women who
have exited their local Caribbean spaces and entered foreign places with the
hope of offering “support [to] their weakened households” (Crawford 2012, 323).
The experience of Caribbean women who have sought to explore different
avenues through which to provide for their children through migration has been
well documented over the years. This reality has constantly situated motherhood
as being intricately associated with the experience of migration for, as
Charmaine Crawford asserts, “[w]orking-class African-Caribbean women play a
central role in their families, as both providers and caretakers of children and of
others, marking the interconnectedness of their productive and reproductive
roles” (324).
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It is important not to utilize the terms “migration” and “diaspora” synonymously
for though one has led to another, migration, Meredith Gadsby reminds us,
speaks of “the movement and dislocation, whether voluntary or involuntary, of
peoples of African descent, from one place to another” (13). The term
“diaspora” pulls much more into the equation. As Avtar Brah states in
Cartographies of Diaspora (1996), “at the heart of the notion of diaspora is the
image of a journey” (182). It is not, Brah explains, that every moment of casual
travel is to be associated with the diasporic experience but rather that it is the
historic framing of that journey that pulls into existence the concept of diaspora.
The concept of diaspora can be complex and contradictory, but through the
work of writers like Paul Gilroy, it is now being interrogated more fulsomely by
Caribbean literary critics and historians. What tends to remain scant, however, is
a representation of the emotional and mental dimensions of the immigrant
existing in the diasporic condition.
Many Jamaican female writers have presented the psyche and experiences of
the child protagonist as part of their own poetics in the exploration and
reconstruction of Caribbean female identity and experience in Caribbean
society. Diasporic explorations have been foregrounded in many of the short
story collections written by Jamaican writers such as Olive Senior, Velma Pollard,
Lorna Goodison, Alecia McKenzie, Curdella Forbes and Paulette Ramsay, to
name a few. For decades, these writers have been inscribing the condition and
experience of Caribbean women (and men) as they move away from the small,
cuddling embrace of the homeland to inhabit foreign spaces which often
complicate their identities, creating feelings of displacement and invoking a
sense of anxiety. Many of these stories have featured the “foreign mother”
whose relationship with her child is severed by the ocean between them but
restored through the barrel or the letter that is excitedly received in the local
space, especially because it has arrived as the main means of connection
between parent and child. There is a way then, that diaspora has always been
a felt, if not known, category.
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and the Post-diasporic Condition in Jamaican Female-authored Children’s Literature
The migrant experience is therefore not new to Caribbean literature but, without
attempting to provide a historical account of migration in the Caribbean, it is
noticeable that, as Brah documents, “there has been rapid increase in
migrations across the globe since the 1980s” (33). This is due to varied realities:
economic inequalities, the desire for better opportunities and political wars,
among other factors. The socioeconomic and political shifts brought about
through the constantly evolving presence of globalization have, in varied and
multiple ways, transformed the experiences associated with diasporic realities.
Already associated with notions of diaspora are such experiences as
displacement, loss and the never-ending search for an identity or set of identities
that will aptly reflect the Caribbean self and community. It is this never-ending
search and the need to adapt to constantly shifting time periods and changes
in societies across the globe, which has enabled the production of what Brah
has termed “new diasporas”. For Brah, our understanding of the diaspora needs
to accommodate an account of “a homing desire which is not the same thing
as [the] desire for a ‘homeland’” (189). This homing desire shifts the gaze away
from a longing to return to the homeland, to an acceptance of inhabiting
geographical spaces away from the homeland, but at the same time being
desirous of embracing and establishing in psychological and spiritual ways, a
clear set of images and experiences of the Caribbean self, individually and
collectively. Such an outlook eliminates notions of fixity and, according to
Ngong Toh, “disregards absolutism” in its varied forms (54). Additionally, by
moving away from focusing on the notion of the diaspora as a group of people
yearning to return at some point to their homeland, this homing desire of which
Brah speaks, seems to move us into an understanding of why the term
“postdiaspora” has become important. As is usually the case with anything
“post”, postdiaspora as a concept contains the foundation seeds of the
concept of diaspora but extends the boundaries to enable the inclusion of new
responses to new realities and new ways of being, within a space that continues
to transform and evolve.
The theoretical notion of postdiaspora follows the shifting patterns being
introduced by the structures of nations and states as they evolve and begin to
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create possibilities for immigrants who are no longer relegated, Michel Laguerre
argues, to an “outsider status” (2). Laguerre explains that “[p]ostdiaspora is the
latest phase in the evolution of the status of immigrants and their
descendants” (17). To speak of the postdiasporic condition then, is to engage in
discussion about a new experience for Caribbean immigrants as they are now
able to acquire citizenship, which enables them to combine and embody both
homeland and hostland identities and realities. The term postdiaspora can
therefore be used to speak of the experience of those who inhabit spaces that
are both away from the homeland physically and away from the feeling of
home psychologically. It speaks of the formation of a community of people who
have now begun to embrace notions of difference while at the same time
charting a course of and for unity and togetherness, regardless of the “away”
space they occupy. As it has been described by Ngong Toh, postdiaspora
speaks to a mode of existence where Caribbeanness is celebrated and
accepted, based on a system of the coexistence or merging of various cultures,
races and classes, to promote progress amongst members of the group. Such a
system would be used to enable the construction and/or reconstruction of what
he states is a “discourse suitable for Caribbean people attempting to negotiate
space in the global stage” (54).
These definitions of postdiaspora are significant because they enable a new
way of reading Caribbean literary texts which continuously fuse together past,
present and future realities as experienced or constructed not simply by the
protagonist in the texts, but also those connected to the protagonist, who must
also maneuver their way through the factors and processes resulting from both
the act of migration and the consequent changes in their modes of existence.
What has not received enough attention however, is the representation of girls
and women who experience postdiasporic conditions in Caribbean children’s
literature by female writers. Caribbean children’s literature tends to be
marginally recognized for the power it contains to articulate the constantly
shifting paradigms for children who have had to experience the region through
the eyes of globalization, where the foreign space and the local space conflate
in complex and ambiguous ways. The Caribbean children’s literature texts which
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and the Post-diasporic Condition in Jamaican Female-authored Children’s Literature
deal with this reality often highlight the journey of both the children and the
adults as they struggle to understand and survive the diasporic conditions they
encounter both in and outside of the foreign space.
In her short story “Girl”, Jamaica Kincaid details the expectations of the process
of growth from girlhood into womanhood and the painstaking ways in which this
occurs. Though this story is not about migration, diaspora or postdiaspora, what
we receive in this story, is a clear indication of the ways in which many
Caribbean females are socialized in the home space based on patriarchal
traditions and practices which relegated them to conditions of inferiority and
oppression because of their identities and experiences. As females, they are
constantly being subjected to and suffocated by dominant ideologies
emerging out of colonial spaces. The point here is that even when outside of the
foreign space, Caribbean women have been accustomed to having their
bodies and psyche read and interpreted by outsiders for more than a century
and have consequently been a part of a perpetual process of being
misunderstood and stifled. They, therefore, have often needed to navigate
between foreign impositions of identity and experience forced on them and
their own natural states of existence based on the environment and culture of
their own “lived reality” in their homeland (Forbes, 27).
The child character has always been an important one in Caribbean literature
because he/she was commonly used in literary production to symbolize the
growth of the newly independent nation at the end of the colonial period.
Caribbean female authors continue to use the child character to play
significant roles in their stories but many of these examples are housed within
texts that are written for the adolescent/young adult reader. Very few critics
have examined the experience of the child negotiating the diasporic and
postdiasporic spaces she occupies within children’s literature texts.
The focus of this article is an exploration of the journey of the female child and
the female adults with whom she engages in their varied encounters of
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postdiaspora realities both in and outside the Caribbean. I examine these
representations in two Caribbean children’s literature texts written by Diane
Browne: the short story collection Every Little Thing will be Alright and the
chapter book Island Princess in Brooklyn. My critical attention is predominantly
on the world of the female child protagonists explored by Browne and all they
reveal to us about the internal and external conditions of postdiaspora and the
possibilities this space and experience offer in helping to reconstruct identity and
experience for the Caribbean female. Browne provides new ways of reading
the experience of the female child in the twenty-first century through a
seemingly calculated presentation of the female consciousness of the child
protagonist and through her, the female adults participating in her socialization.
This consciousness displays the complexity involved in the navigation of the self
as it participates in postdiasporic realities. It highlights the struggle of mothers
and daughters, mothers and grandmothers, granddaughters and
grandmothers, mothers and aunts and nieces and aunts in the postdiasporic
space as they all attempt to retain their own identities and sense of self-worth in
spaces which often reject and devalue both these characteristics and the ways
in which the female must participate to enable progress and growth at various
stages of her life. Significant representation is made of the grandmother figure so
commonly present in the historical accounts of the migrant experiences of
Caribbean women. Browne allows an exploration of the emotional and mental
challenges experienced by different generations of females as all attempt to
remain true to themselves and at the same time facilitate the necessary
processes that will enable a better life for all.
By presenting the female child in her stories, Browne creates two significant
effects. Firstly, she reshapes the way the Jamaican female child sees herself in a
world that has become dominated by globalization and as a result has
characterized her (her appearance, behaviour, cognitive processes) based on
“outside”, “foreign” standards, rather than those more naturally suited to her
based on her cultural traditions, beliefs and realities. Secondly, Browne portrays
the way the Jamaican woman has slowly reconstructed herself based on the
circumstances within which she has had to exist. By providing an intimate display
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and the Post-diasporic Condition in Jamaican Female-authored Children’s Literature
of the female child’s consciousness through her narratives, she reveals the
female psyche as it negotiates this diasporic/postdiasporic space and displays
the ways in which the Jamaican adult world surrounding the child plays a key
role in imposing continued classist, racist and sexist attitudes upon the child,
through the traditional perceptions being used by adults to guide the child. By
striving to become other than “other”, and to be deeply Afrocentric and
against all things European, some of Browne’s stories demonstrate the ways in
which the very same women, affected by prejudice and inequality in the
diaspora/postdiaspora, perpetuate age-old practices which are misunderstood
and ultimately rejected. What becomes more significant however, is the way
healing is enabled through the willingness of the child female protagonist to
position herself at a midpoint which enables her to fuse together generations of
experiences and emotions in order to chart a new course forward.
It is customary for Caribbean literature to provide models which counter or offer
an alternative to Western models, but it is noteworthy that this kind of example is
also present in Caribbean children’s literature. It is the structure of Browne’s
stories and the way she utilizes characterization with much more focus on the
mental processes of the individual and connects these beautifully with the
dialogue and action in the text, that enable us to comprehend the impact of
the social on the literary and vice versa. Browne’s characterization and narrative
technique allow for a practical understanding of the ways in which
postdiaspora produces and harnesses much more possibility for hybrid
formations of both self and community, which help to reshape patriarchal
constructions of girlhood and womanhood in Caribbean society. Additionally,
her use of the first-person narrative in many of her books and short stories
enables a thorough, intimate presentation of the female sensibility and
consciousness in ways that produce deeper understandings of the realities she
represents. Critical explorations of Browne’s work highlight three main factors
present in postdiasporic literature on the Caribbean, which are revealed to the
reader through the Caribbean female’s participation in and response to
postdiasporic conditions: 1) the ability to refashion her identity as Caribbean
and as female in both the local and the foreign space; 2) the act of rejecting
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Eurocentric patriarchal notions of motherhood and mothering which encourage
feelings of alienation, displacement and abandonment for both the mother and
the child in the act of migration, and replacing these with what has become
known as “transnational motherhood” (Crawford, 331); and 3) the process of
reinterpreting the female Caribbean experience within the postdiasporic world.
In her collection of short stories, Every Little Thing Will be Alright (2003), Browne
demonstrates how diasporic/postdiasporic experiences affect the Jamaican
female child in both subtle and overt ways. What is different about Browne’s
representation of these conditions however, is that it extends discussions on the
emergence of a new kind of response to diasporic realities which subsequently
pulls into the equation the postdiasporic condition and the extended notions it
offers of ways of negotiating identities and participation in foreign and local
spaces. Rather than focusing her stories mostly on the plot of the story, Browne
spends significantly more time presenting the thought processes and internal
reactions of the child protagonist as she moves through imposed negatives. This
introduces a critical principle on the navigation of the new generation of
females through the diasporic and into postdiasporic conditions. It is that rather
than being focused on fixed moulds shaping the response of black women in
previous generations, these female protagonists are choosing more fluid,
integrative responses to the challenges they face as citizens, receiving help from
immigrant parents or as immigrants themselves who are struggling to adjust in a
foreign space. The concept of postdiaspora becomes much more easily
comprehensible through the literary representation Browne provides of the way
her female child protagonists function within a new diaspora.
Identity has always been an important issue in any critical discussion on
diaspora. As Shalini Puri reminds us, “…the Caribbean has had to negotiate its
identities in relation to Native America; to Africa and Asia, from where most of its
surviving inhabitants came; to Europe, from where its colonizing settlers came;
and to the United States of America, its imperial neighbour " (2). Browne’s
female protagonists, who have been born into the twenty-first century, are not
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presented as victims of identity crises. They do struggle with understanding who
they are and how they fit in (both in the local space and the foreign space), but
Browne quite clearly places the root of this struggle on the shoulders of the
adults surrounding these female children. Additionally, despite the complexities
they face in attempting to negotiate an understanding of who they are and
how they fit in, this generation of female children in the text are insistent on
remaining true to themselves, no matter what. Although they may experience
the feelings of alienation and displacement so commonly associated with
diasporic realities, their responses stretch beyond those associated with the
women and men of previous generations. As a result of globalization and the
advancement of the information age, the Jamaican female protagonists in
Browne’s stories have often already encountered the processes and products
associated with the foreign space because of the occurrences intricately tied to
the parent-child relationship when at least one parent or guardian (usually the
mother) lives in the foreign space. They also have access to images, sounds and
experiences associated with the foreign space, which they are able to gain,
through technology. The main female character in Island Princess in Brooklyn for
example, constantly compares the reality she experiences in the foreign space
with the sensory details of the space she has encountered through what she
has watched on television while living in Jamaica. As she attempts to mentally
and physically navigate the foreign space she has only recently encountered,
she shudders to think of having to face weather that is colder than what she is
already presently experiencing. “It got colder than this? But of course it did. I
had seen it on TV; America covered in snow. When we found out that I was
really going to live with Mom, Granny and I had watched more American TV
movies than usual, searching for clues to Mom’s life, which would soon become
mine” (Smith 2011, 4). In an effort to help her adjust psychologically to what she
is currently physically experiencing, she uses the knowledge of the foreign space
she previously accessed through the media when she was at home.
Through the parent, relative or sibling abroad, the child is introduced to a kind of
postdiasporic experience long before she encounters the actual physical reality
of living in a foreign space. Her identity is already challenged by the absence of
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the mother figure and the deep yearning for that mother. Her sense of identity
and belonging are, however, intricately tied to both the local and the foreign
space, as though she is physically in the local space, her heart and mind are
constantly attuned to the need for the mother, who exists in the foreign space.
The female child therefore comes into contact with the psychological,
emotional and mental realities associated with the diaspora long before she
experiences the physical reality of this space. The diasporic/postdiasporic
conditions therefore become well-absorbed and internalized by children at a
very early stage in their lives. Though prior to migration they are still in their
physical “homeland”, they are often still not “at home” because of the
impositions being placed on them regarding how they ought to behave and
the kind of values they need to internalize in the hope that they might someday
enter the migrant space. An example of this can be found in Olive Senior’s
“Bright Thursdays” where, though the grandmother, Miss Christie, is “the lady the
female child now lived with” ( p.36), it is the son’s new wife who proposes that
the marvelous conduct and speech of the child are more closely aligned to the
foreign space than the rural, local space she currently occupies. A similar trend
occurs in Alecia McKenzie’s fiction, though what McKenzie presents is not
restricted to the female child. In her collection of short stories Stories from Yard
(2005) , both her adult male and female characters the adult male and female
struggle to place themselves in the migrant space and have a difficult entry into
life in the foreign metropolis, predominantly because of the narratives
embedded within them through their mothers’ voices from their childhood past
about what ought to be seen as acceptable sociocultural norms and practices.
There is the constant pressure therefore to align their conduct with certain
ideologies governing behaviour and appearances so that these individuals will
be seen as functional, normal social beings and not deviant, merely third world
participants in the foreign space who will eventually become alienated by their
inability to fit in to the society. This script is read and re-read to the child in the
local space long before she or he encounters the foreign space.
Though we observe the impact of childhood on adulthood and experience the
childhood realities of many female characters in Caribbean female-authored
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fiction, we are rarely able to completely access the sensibility of the female
child in a way that enables us to observe the mental and emotional processes
of the navigation of experiences of diaspora and postdiaspora for the
Caribbean child. Browne provides this kind of access by displaying the mental
and emotional journeys of her female protagonists as they attempt to
understand the identities of their parents and their own identity in spaces that
stretch them beyond the experiences of local frames of reality and pull them
into a reality marked by a fusion of experiences tied to different worlds within
which they must exist and learn to function.
This process of refashioning is evident in Island Princess in Brooklyn (2011) where
the reader is introduced to a young thirteen-year-old girl who has moved to the
United States to be with her mother. For the first half of the book, Princess, the
main female character, moves between both the local and the foreign space in
her mind, while she is at home with her grandmother in Jamaica, thinking about
her mother in Brooklyn. When her mother sends for her and she is about to
embark on her journey to Brooklyn, she suddenly experiences extreme anxiety
while at the airport bidding her grandmother farewell. She feels torn and
conflicted as she tries to determine to which space she is most strongly
attached and to which she ultimately belongs - with her mother in the foreign
space or with her grandmother in the local space. Her thoughts reveal these
feelings to the reader when in her mind she declares that “…all of a sudden, I
began to worry that a mistake was being made, I began to feel that I should
turn back before it was too late” (8).
Identity is tied to home and home for the female protagonist seems naturally to
be tied to a place and the people who occupy that place. Princess is at first
solely focused on trying to determine which space she ought to see as home.
She struggles with leaving her grandmother but believes she cannot stay
because “[t]here are just some things that you know you cannot do. I had to go
to my mother. I belonged to her and she had sent for me” (Smith 2011, 8). Within
moments, however, the reader sees her wondering if she has made the right
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decision by coming to live with her mother, when she exclaims, “Home! My new
home, and already something was very, very wrong… This was all a big mistake”
(9). Browne illustrates the initial struggle of her female protagonist to locate
herself and her identity. Towards the end of the story, however, the reader
encounters a much more mature Princess, who has slowly begun to survive
through use of her collected memories of Jamaica tied with the lessons she
learns from her mother and through her experiences at school in America. “And
I thought perhaps everything was going to be okay after all. America with mom
might be okay and there were little bits of Jamaica there for you when you
needed them” (111). Although she struggles therefore with maintaining a sense
of completeness about her existence, Princess, at the same time, comes to a
place where she realizes that she might belong in both worlds. Gradually
therefore, she moves away from the guilt surrounding her initial need to choose
one over the other and accepts that both now form an important part of her
female identity.
We find a similar situation in the short story “Jenny’s Great Gran” which forms a
part of Browne’s short story collection entitled Every Little Thing Will Be Alright.
Jenny, Browne’s main female character, is embarrassed that she takes her
grandmother for walks in the garden surrounding her house in England. Jenny
already struggles with being different in a foreign space. The story immediately
introduces us to the conflict she faces with having the other children see her
walk around with a gran who wears “a headtie” when no other grandmother in
the country, in Jenny’s mind, would do that. Such apparel she believes is
associated with “old time Caribbean people” (Smith 2003, 28). Browne, it seems,
inserts this form of apparel into the story to highlight its cultural value and
connection even in a contemporary, global space. Jenny has chosen to more
closely identify with the foreign space and the modernity of the apparel and
customs attached to it and so struggles to accept the local space as part of her
identity. The story also introduces the common situation of the young feeling
embarrassed by their associations with their older relatives due to peer pressure
and the need to fit in with a peer group.
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The reader observes as Jenny painstakingly takes her grandmother for walks,
based on her mother’s demands and is teased by her friends based on this
action. It is not that she does not love her grandmother, but Jenny’s struggle at
first is based on the notion that one cultural experience and place is superior to
the other. Through establishing the grandmother’s presence as central to the
story’s plot, Browne demonstrates the need for a balance through the
interconnection of both cultures, rather than the placement of one over the
other. Jenny becomes agitated by the idea of her grandmother being called
up to the stage at school to make a musical presentation at a school function
put on for Parents’ Day. This is because she is striving to fit in and believes her
grandmother’s cultural presentation will highlight how different she is from the
other children in the school. “This can’t be happening, Jenny thought. But it was.
There were Mum and Gran, and Dad helping Great Gran – slowly, ever so
slowly, up the steps onto the stage” (Smith 2003, 35).
Browne represents Jenny’s journey to the reader by allowing us to observe how
Jenny works herself through this problem. She also demonstrates quite clearly
that very often it is the adult’s response that helps to solidify the reaction and
feelings of the child. Through the teacher’s compliments about her
grandmother’s presentation, which highlight the value of Caribbean culture and
family life, Jenny begins to experience a sense of pride about the four
generations of women inhabiting her home. She comes to realize that choosing
one space or the other is not a feasible option for her because she is rooted to
both spaces – a postdiasporic reality. Eventually, the narrative states, ‘Jenny felt
very proud walking around the garden with her Great Gran’ (38): she even
manages to have a more positive response when she is teased because she has
come to the point of embracing the local space as part of her past and her
future in the same way as the foreign space has now become a part of both
timelines for her. As Ngong Tou insists, “for postdiaspora to be all it can be, there
has to be a negotiation of diasporic identity which bears the past in mind” but
which at the same time reconstructs itself to represent the differences which
have surfaced (54). Jenny is still able to preserve her difference; she is not like
her grandmother and does not associate with all aspects of the “old time”
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Caribbean culture out of which her gran has emerged, but she is also able to
arrive at a point of unity by embracing who her grandmother is through the
understanding she gleans about her from her mother and her teacher.
The last line of the story strongly exemplifies the new postdiasporic response to
the negotiation of identity when Jenny says “ …you can’t always change
people’s minds about things, but you can change your own, and sometimes
that is enough” (Smith 2003, 38). The mother-figure therefore plays a crucial role
in the construction and negotiation of the Caribbean child’s concept of self
and negotiation of identity, particularly in the foreign space. This relationship
deserves much more attention by Caribbean critics not simply as it relates to the
complexity of the characters’ existence but also as an element of Caribbean
female-authored children’s fiction which enables more in-depth depictions and
understandings of the paths navigated by the Caribbean female child
experiencing life in postdiasporic spaces. The mother-daughter relationship in
Caribbean female-authored fiction functions as an important signifier in any
discussion surrounding diaspora and postdiaspora as it reveals the slight shift
from an old diasporic mode of existence to an evolving postdiasporic mode
which places both mother and daughter in a new space as they negotiate their
own self-identities while at the same time crafting a new identity for their
relationship with each other. This is especially the case with Island Princess in
Brooklyn where we gain access, through the narrative technique, to an intimate
display of the mother-daughter relationship as both attempt to learn about
each other defensibly and carefully, each not wanting to be hurt by the other.
Charmaine Crawford introduces a crucial point through her exploration of the
situation of motherhood in diasporic/postdiasporic conditions. She argues that
one of the major struggles both mother and daughter endure is one that is
imposed upon them by a Eurocentric, patriarchal set of principles which
emphasises motherhood as being tied to physical presence and “exclusive
mother-child relations primarily within the nuclear family unit” (327). Browne
seems to be establishing a similar conceptual framework through her
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representation of Princess and her mother in Island Princess in Brooklyn. The main
question which plagues the female protagonist as she gets ready to leave the
local space and enter the foreign space at the very start: “Would my mother be
there?” (Smith 2011, 1). It is a question that also recurs throughout the novel as
she attempts to locate and comprehend herself and her environment. The
physical and emotional presence of her mother is, it would seem, crucial to
Princess’s confidence in herself and her abilities to negotiate the spaces she
occupies. She constantly fights the fear of being abandoned and rejected
throughout the early parts of the chapter book because of her memories of her
mother’s absence during her earlier years of childhood. Browne does not
pretend that this is not an important reality for the female as she grows and
matures. She does not make light of the complexity framing the motherdaughter relationship, but she also shows the two sides of that story, making it
clear that the mother also struggles with the idea that she will not be “good
enough” for her daughter or that she will not be seen as the central maternal
figure in her daughter’s life.
The reader notes how betrayed Princess feels when she relates the fact that her
mother “had promised to send for me forever, but it never happened” (17).
What Browne does bring to the surface though, is the fact that Princess’s fear
and lack of confidence chiefly occurs as a result of one main reality: her
grandmother’s negative vocal insertions and attitude towards her mother and
her mother’s act of migration. Her grandmother is introduced as meaning
everything to Princess and she therefore internalizes her grandmother’s
characterization of the foreign space and the situation of her mother’s presence
there, as being the only possible truth. Her grandmother’s words against the
foreign space (and therefore against her mother) become almost prophetic,
based on Princess’s experiences. She uses these words to affirm all she feels,
based on the situations she encounters. Each section of the narrative which
displays Princess’s emotional instability is preceded by a memory that is evoked
about something her grandmother has said or done in offering an opinion about
the migrant space and the departure of Princess’s mother. It is her
grandmother’s traditional assertions about the foreign space that results in
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tainting Princess’s perspective and creates an extremist type of outlook of the
diaspora for the teenager. The notions her grandmother puts forward are
fraught with the kind of gender essentialism that presents what Crawford terms a
“maternalist ideology” encouraged by Eurocentric, colonialist beliefs of
motherhood. These beliefs perpetuate the idea that mothers who “leave their
children behind” (328) are not fit to be mothers and have somehow deprived
their children of fundamental primary social and personal needs, which no other
human being is able to provide. Yet, apart from the damning expressions about
America and subtly about her mother, which were expressed by her
grandmother during Princess’s upbringing in Jamaica, Princess feels quite at
home with her grandmother and feels she has all she needs at home in Jamaica
with her. Her grandmother is the only real mother figure Princess knows prior to
her move to the United States. When she struggles through where she desires to
live, she describes not wanting to go to America to attain any of the things
everyone associated with America, she says plainly: “I didn’t feel I had lost out
on anything, really. I had Granny” (17). This is one of the most powerful
characteristics of Browne’s narratives – her ability to examine in a very precise
and direct manner, the way Princess’ emotions and cognition gradually evolve
throughout the chapter book. What Browne also demonstrates however is the
ambiguous, complex relationship between the grandmother and the child’s
mother. The grandmother’s negative statements help the reader to realise that
a part of the confusion the child experiences occurs because of the subtle and
explosive statements her grandmother has made in the past about the child’s
mother. Again, this “mother-grandmother” relationship issue is also evident in
McKenzie’s collection of short stories Satellite City and other stories (1993) where
McKenzie allows the reader to recognize that a large part of the child’s
negative impressions of her mother, which she received predominantly through
her grandmother, might be inaccurate or exaggerated.
It is through this close exploration of the female sensibility that we detect the shift
away from old ways of participating in the diaspora to new ways of living in
what has grown into a postdiaspora space and experience. Browne subverts
the notion that motherhood needs to be chained to a space of domesticity at
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all points throughout the mother-daughter relationship and demonstrates how
the Caribbean mother has from the very beginning of her journey, mapped out
a way to be with her child at a time when she feels the situation is now a healthy
one within which to raise her. Despite the alienation and isolation (so deeply
connected to diaspora living) experienced by Princess’s mother, she pushes on
nevertheless. She is a nurse’s aide, though her entire family at home believes she
is a nurse, and she has life a lot harder than her family members at home realise.
Princess is home one evening when her mother’s husband has a mild heart
attack. She calls the ambulance and accompanies him on the drive to the
hospital in which her mother works. She searches for her frantically, asking the
nurses to locate her. It is at this point that she is informed that her mother is not in
fact a nurse, but a nurse’s aide. Her mother arrives just at the point that Princess
receives this shocking information. When the outbursts die down, Princess and
her mother stand together in an awkward silence. “She was looking at me. She
knew. Was she going to just try to get through it, pretend I hadn’t heard?” (120).
Princess awaits an apology from her mother, but her mother is in no hurry to offer
one. It is one of the strengths Browne highlights about Princess’s mother - she
accepts Princess’s struggle to acclimatize, but she also accepts her own reality
as an immigrant in a foreign space that regardless of its negativities, is also
providing her with the opportunity to become better and attain more, for herself
and her family. This stretches beyond the feeling of despair associated with the
diasporic condition and adds an entirely new dimension that does not merely
demonstrate the will to survive but also the will to grow and develop emotionally
and financially. This new dimension is therefore deeply connected to an outlook
of home as being based on what is inside and within her consciousness, rather
than that which is solely characterized by the physical space which she inhabits.
Even when she gets things wrong with Princess at the start (painting her room in
a colour she despises, observing Princess’s reaction to finding out that she is now
married to an Indian man, not being able to prevent Princess from missing
conditions “back home”), she still continues to pursue a bond with her daughter,
introducing her daughter to this new mode of existence which will allow her to
fuse together the pleasant experiences of both the foreign and the local space,
rather than needing to choose one over the other. As a mother, she accepts
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that she has made wrong decisions, but her motives all surround a positive focus
– the betterment of herself for the betterment of her child.
The climactic section of the text occurs when Princess explodes during a
moment of concern that her grandmother is ill and might not make it. “I don’t
know where the money coming from, but I have to go to Granny. Suppose she
die! Can’t you see, I have to go! I am the one to go!” And as if to explain fully, I
added, “She is more my mother than you, any day. Granny is my real mother,
not you!” (144) Browne allows the reader to be pulled into this exchange to
reveal the deep struggle the child experiences as she tries to come to terms with
how she has been taught to view her mother, how she actually views her mother
based on all her mother says and does, and the decisions she needs to make to
adjust her perspective based on all she has witnessed for herself. It is a significant
moment because it illustrates the deeply entrenched ways in which female
children (just as in Kincaid’s short story “Girl”) wrestle with a scripted
characterization of who they ought to be and who their mothers ought to be as
adult versions of themselves. This scripted characterization occurs in contrast to
who they see themselves as being, and how they perceive their mothers, as
these mothers strive to provide for their families regardless of the narrowed
pathways constricting their ability by Eurocentric, capitalist systems framing
perceptions of their identities as Caribbean female immigrants within the
diaspora.
Rather than an idyllic representation of all Caribbean mothers who migrate,
Caribbean female-authors have clearly demonstrated the variation which exists
in the way individuals choose to participate in the migrant space. To label all
immigrant mothers from the Caribbean as women who have abandoned their
children is horrifically false and misrepresents a large population of women who
have only entered the diaspora to secure the future of their children. As
Crawford affirms, “[m]igration has been a strategy for Caribbean people in
countering the unemployment, poverty and limited opportunities that result from
the structural inefficiencies of their dependent capitalist economies” (328).
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Migration is therefore a response of Caribbean mothers that forms a major part
of their efforts to raise the standard of living they are prepared to make
accessible for their families and children.
Browne’s stories therefore promote a rethinking of the female self and the
collective experience of females from childhood through to adulthood, through
the direct use of the female child and her journey in a postdiasporic space. The
newness of the diasporic condition aligns itself easily with the newness the child
brings to the space as a member of a new generation with a mindset that is
transformative and able to reshape how we read and respond to the situation
of migration and the experiences of diaspora. She shows, through the careful
details she provides of the main female character in Island Princess in Brooklyn,
how “lived experience tends to supersede ideology” (Forbes 2005, 27). As David
Chariandy argues in his discussion of migration and diaspora in contemporary
Caribbean literature, “secondary migrations…might consolidate or shift the ‘old’
diasporic identities and/or introduce a new array of diasporic identities into the
mix” (250). What needs to be monitored is the insistence of a traditional way of
being associated with old diasporic realities and the way this is consciously or
unconsciously imposed on the child’s reality as she enters a new zone of time.
The story “Louise Jane and the Street of Fine Old Houses” in Browne’s collection
Every Little Thing Will be Alright introduces both this kind of conflict and the
subtle hint that by reconstructing these mental processes, a new generation of
individuals might be able to more meaningfully participate in the postdiasporic
space. Essentially then, Browne seems to be encouraging a rethinking of ways in
which the self might be able to exist confidently through a modus operandi that
moves beyond colonial perspectives of what it means to be Caribbean, to be
black, to be from the working-class, and ultimately, to be female.
When Louisa Jane comes home from school to find her grandmother closing all
the windows, she recognizes immediately that something is wrong and assumes
that her parents had not sent money from England. This is a small insertion about
the migrant space placed in a story that focuses on the way modernization
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continues to destroy the lives of those in the homeland who are vulnerable and
seen as marginal. The connection is immediately made however with the
migrant space and the negative realities being experienced in the homeland.
When her friend suggests that instead of becoming troubled by the
government’s plan to destroy her grandparent’s house in order to erect new
town buildings, she should “go to [her] Mummy and Daddy in England”
because “lots of people go there” (65), Louisa immediately declares that she
has no desire to migrate. Like Princess, in Island Princess in Brooklyn, Louisa feels
indebted to her grandmother who has raised and nurtured her. The
grandmother’s decision to remain in Jamaica seems to indicate to Louisa that
England is an undesirable place. “It’s cold and it rains all the time and the
houses are closed up, not open like ours” (65). The reader realizes that these
descriptions are likely to have been offered by Louisa’s grandmother. Once
again, the conflict of an old, traditional way of viewing the migrant space and
experience comes into conflict with the possibility of a new perspective on the
diaspora. Louisa admits that “Mummy sends for us all the time but Granny does
not want to go” (65). Browne does not turn this story into one about the migrant
space but positions both the foreign and local realities alongside each other in
a way that encourages an interrogation of the fixed position or posture of the
grandmother who though having all good intentions for her granddaughter, also
forgets to “tell[her] to get ready for school” and forgets to make her porridge
(63). Browne subtly hints at the fact that although the grandmother verbally
encourages the child to go and live with her mother, the kind of relationship she
has shared with the granddaughter and the ways in which she has influenced
her granddaughter’s thoughts have complicated the situation further for both
herself and her grandchild. It is not a narrative that points out a wrong or right
way of viewing the migrant space, but it is one that prompts readers to question
the fixed, rigid and often linear perceptions that are held about diasporic
realities.
By the end of the story, Louisa’s parents make the decision to remain in
Jamaica, much to everyone’s surprise. It is not the ending the reader expected.
What becomes the focus, however, is not simply that there will be no migration,
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but that the option exists as to whether to remain in the foreign or local space.
This is a new reality and Browne introduces it subtly. It demonstrates that our way
of seeing ourselves in both spaces, as Caribbean people, is no longer bound to
traditional notions of needing to migrate, but of choosing to migrate. Those who
once existed in the diaspora and have acquired knowledge and experience in
that space, can also return home, taking with them all they have acquired
about themselves when living in that migrant space. Postdiaspora enables them
once again to do this. The focus is not on return but rather on a kind of
acculturation process which allows everyone (except the grandmother) to
accept and merge experiences for the benefit of all, rather than separate and
devalue.
This process of rethinking and reconstructing self-identity and the collective
experience of the Caribbean female in the migrant space is also evident in
Island Princess in Brooklyn, where towards the end of the chapter book, Princess
realizes that the statements she has made about her mother have deeply
affected her. When her mother pours out her heart to her, detailing all she has
sacrificed because of her love for her daughter and making it clear that those
on the outside, in the homeland, were not always allowed to know things
because of how negative they often were, Princess starts to reconstruct the
shape of her memories. Suddenly, the first-person narrative voice explains: “I saw
my mother perhaps for the first time as a real person…eyes like mine, eyes that
now held me in their grip” (171). This is a momentous moment in the text as
through Browne’s creative writing style, the reader gains entrance into the
delicate nature of a moment where mother and daughter meet each other in a
moment of truth, unmasked and without concern for the scripted codes
governing their identities and responses to each other. Princess makes this
evident when she admits: “It was then that I stopped watching the movie of my
life. I stopped listening to the voices of Granny and Sister that I played over and
over in my mind” (172). When these things are released, Princess freely expresses
exactly how she feels to her mother and explains quite openly that sometimes
she doesn’t “know what to do or how to feel” (173) but that she is acutely
aware of her love for her mother and she desires to remain with her. By the end
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of the novel, Browne has taken us through the journey of a mother-daughter
relationship which becomes infused with love and understanding by the
decision of a mother to place her child and her child’s desires above the need
to fulfill the dominant role of mother prescribed for her by her Caribbean society.
When she does this, Princess realizes that her mother is willing to send her back
to Jamaica because her mother believes being with her grandmother will make
her happier than being with her. Princess responds with deep emotion to the
possibility of being separated from her mother again and she pleads with her
mother to allow her to stay with her. “Then I felt my mother’s arms around me, a
real tight, deep hug, much bigger than any hugs I had got since I had been
here” (173).
Browne’s representation of the female child protagonist is key to an
understanding of how she positions the postdiasporic space as an important
space for a new generation of Caribbean children. She presents the female
child as constantly evolving and flexible, able to adapt to circumstances,
people and experiences, based on their deep levels of self and communal
awareness and their determination to participate in their societies (wherever
these societies are located) in ways that ensure balance and purpose. Perhaps
due to globalization, the children in Browne’s stories are not in any way as
pressured as their parents to see the migrant space as the main space for
financial opportunities and socioeconomic growth, but they are acutely aware
that they have options, which need not bind them to the physical space of the
Caribbean. They embody a kind of fluidity and flexibility characterized by
postdiasporic conditions and they demonstrate the value of embracing the
complexities associated with their journey as black Caribbean females who
embody an awareness of self and identity which remains unchained to distinct
spaces and which can thrive, regardless of conflicts and oppressive realities,
whether home or abroad.
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