Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispnicos

The Spatial Self: Remembering the Caribbean Diaspora in Esmeralda Santiago, Jamaica Kincaid and Cristina Garca Author(s): AMANDA HOLMES Source: Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispnicos, Vol. 30, No. 1, LA CREATIVIDAD DEL YO MEMORIA, OLVIDO Y TEXTOS AUTOBIOGRFICO (Otoo 2005), pp. 109-128 Published by: Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispnicos Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27764039 . Accessed: 23/04/2013 14:07
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AMANDA HOLMES

The Spatial Self: Remembering the Caribbean Diaspora in Esmeralda Santiago, Jamaica Kincaid and Cristina Garc?a
Al incorporar a sus obras autobiogr?ficas una pol?tica intrincada de indivi duaci?n, Esmeralda Santiago, Jamaica Kincaid y Cristina Garc?a toman presta das estrategias narrativas ficcionales para convertir los sitios geogr?ficos de sus historias personales en met?foras de la construcci?n de identidad. Para Santiago

enWhen I was Puerto Rican, los contrastes de lugar desprenden una energ?a individualgenerada por la interpretaci?nnost?lgica de Puerto Rico y por una te naz diferenciaci?n del ambiente cultural de Nueva York. Las im?genes topogr? ficas en Annie Johny Lucy, de Kincaid, delinean los conflictosde poder entre los de "arriba" y los de "abajo," en los cuales la autodefinici?n surge de lafuerza de memorias personales y pol?ticas soterradas.Al crear un equilibrio en su narrativa entre varios escenarios geogr?ficos, Garc?a, en Dreaming in Cuban, representa una subjetividad m?ltiple que se desarrolla desde el potencial comunicativo de una familia dividida geogr?ficamente.El papel central del espacio en estas obras complica la trayectoria temporal de una historia personal para reflejar la di?s

pora de identidades caribe?as.

memories of this fruit,when the children harvest it, the unharnesses intricate elicited expressions by biting into themorsels, the correctway to eat it.As a final juicy record of her life in Puerto Rico, Negi remembers eating a guava on theway to the airportwhen she is about to embark with her mother and sib lings for theUnited States. Although the guava in this passage at first seems to serve the same function as Proust's madeleine, the emphasis here is not on in voluntary memory but on geographic contrast. That the guava appears on the shelf in theNew York "Shop and Save" trivializes the importance of this fruit forNegi, tainting the childhood memory with a dissociation based in spatial

In the opening scene of When I was Puerto Rican (1993), Esmeralda Santiago compares her childhood in Puerto Rico with her adulthood in New York through fruits:the guava belongs to her formerCaribbean tastes; the apples and pears to theUnited States palate. The passage begins with the short unremark able sentence, "There are guavas at the Shop and Save" (3), a phrase that then

dislocation.

REVISTA CANADIENSE DE ESTUDIOS HISP?NICOS

30.I (OTO?O 2005)

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110 This opening episode with Negi and the supermarketguava is an example of themanipulation of spatial elements in autobiography of the diaspora inwhich locative and topographical images intersect intrinsically with memory and his to of self definitions that match the tory generate complexity of the personal

experience. In the autobiographical works of Esmeralda Santiago (Puerto Rico, 1948- ), Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua, 1949- ) and Cristina Garc?a (Cuba, 1958- ), women authors of theCaribbean diaspora, spatial imagery is placed in the fore race and eth ground to explore intricate female identities defined by gender, as as to intimate histories available them well the personal nicity through the by in construc of of the While much has been made genre autobiography. gender tion of identity in women's autobiography, Susan Stanford Friedman has ar gued for the importance of spatial complexity inmapping theories of female subjectivity.The "geographies of identity" (Friedman 28) incorporate concepts such as the "contact zone" and "lafrontera" allowing for a fullerunderstanding

of subjectivity for feminist scholarship than that provided by the gender-based model:
Instead of the individualistic as an

telos of developmental the new geographies models, figures a a site, location, a standpoint, a ter identity historically positionality, It of multiply situated knowledges. rain, an intersection (even intersextion), a crossroads articulates not the organic unfolding of identity but rather the mapping of territories and embedded boundaries, the dialectical encounter. terrains of inside and outside (15) or center and margin, and the spaces of dynamic

andmetaphors for the construction of identity. Indeed, Esmeralda Santiago's When I was Puerto Rican (1993), JamaicaKin caid's Annie John (1983) and Lucy (1990), and Cristina Garc?a's Dreaming in Cuban (1992) have all been interpretedas both novels and autobiographies de While all threeauthors have pending on the theoreticalperspective of the study. admitted in interviews to the autobiographical characteristics of theirwriting, When I was Puerto Rican is the only work that follows closely certain conven tional characteristics of the genre of autobiography, such as an episodic narra tive, structured linearly and chronologically, with one autobiographical pro

appreciation of the identitynegotiations experienced by participants of the fe male Caribbean diaspora. Embedding this intricatepolitics of individuation in autobiographical works, Santiago, Kincaid and Garcia borrow fictional narra tive strategies to shape geographic sites of theirpersonal histories into symbols

This emphasis on geography in the definition of the female subject reflects characteristics of identity thathave been observed by theoristsof theCaribbean throughout the twentieth century, such as transculturation,hybridity and mes tizaje.1 Along with gender, awareness of these subject complexities, derived from the personal association with several geographic sites, allows for a fuller

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Ill
tagonist as the story's narrator. However, even Santiago's work has been catego

rized generically as a "novela" (Lagos 195), and the narratives of Kincaid and Garcia are defined most commonly as such. This generic ambiguity is compli cated even more by the scholars who characterize Kincaid and Garcia's texts as autobiography: Leigh Gilmore devotes a chapter in her work on autobiography to Kincaid,
in several

in which she argues that Kincaid pushes the limits of the genre "serial autobiography," or the revisitingof the same personal material through
volumes; Isabel Alvarez-Borland includes Cristina Garc?a as one of

three authors, along with Pablo Medina and Omar Torres, whose writing ex emplifies Cuban-American autobiographical texts.Although this generic ambi Sidonie Smith and Julia guity is not new to the definition of autobiography Watson identify with the concept of the "lifenar fifty-twogenres that intersect rative" - Santiago, Kincaid and Garcia make use of this obfuscation by incorpo rating reflections on the process of writing from their particular subject posi tions as Caribbean women writers living in the United States. Invention of identity for these authors includes the invention of a creative genre that is meaningful for their experience; self-reflexiveelements call attention to this By crossing generic boundaries, Santiago, Kincaid and Garcia are able to pick and choose elements of both fiction and history that best capture their works traverses this conceptual border by messages. The spatial imagery in their elements the personal histories of the authors from incorporating geographic each moved to theUnited States from theCaribbean in theiryouth - along with
metaphoric project.

spark an individual strengthgained from a nostalgic rendering of Puerto Rico and a stubborn differentiationfrom the culture of theNew York environment.

representations

of

these

aspects.

For

Santiago,

locative

contrasts

Topographic imagery in the works of Kincaid delineates power conflicts of "above" and "below" inwhich self-definitionarises from the potency of buried personal and political memories. Garcia's text renders a subjectivity that devel ops from the communicative potential of the family divided geographically, finding through her narrative a balance between environments that paves the way for a reconciliation of themultiple identity.The central role of space in theseworks complicates the temporal trajectoryof a personal history to reflect more appropriately. diasporic subjectivities
SPATIAL CONTRAST: ESMERALDA SANTIAGO'S WHEN I WAS PUERTO RICAN

The guava that sits in theNew York "Shop and Save" inWhen I was Puerto Ri
c?n serves a

perfectly round and hard, each $1.59" (4). Moreover, the juxtaposition between the name of the store, an oxymoron, and the fruit trees Santiago remembers from the island, underscores contrasting functions for a piece of fruitdepend While nostalgia enhances thememory of the "exotic" ing on the cultural setting.

purely

consumerist

function:

"a

stack

of dark

green

guavas,

each

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112 childhood island, the supermarket setting emphasizes the responsibilities and self-controlof adulthood, leadingNegi to push her cart away from the tempting morsel. Throughout Santiago's work, counterposed spaces map diagrams of identity forNegi, as she encounters and delineates differencesbetween herself and themembers of her community, be it in rural or urban Puerto Rico or in
New York.

the past tense verb in the title, When I was Puerto Pican, leads to the Rican remains a significant aspect of Puerto of whether the element question as been Carmen L. Torres-Robles and has noted both self-definition, by Negi's While

JoanTorres-Pou, the titlealso signals the dual importance of both temporal and spatial categories for the construction of personhood. Negi's move from Puerto Mir Rico to Brooklyn would spark a state of "crisis" for Susanna Egan, who in ror Talk argues that all autobiographies are inspired by such a life-changing
experience.

den, and especially the or?gano bushes in the yard, and the communal family space of the building of the house, inwhich the siblings sleep on hammocks with only a curtain to separate themfrom theirparents' bed. After a beating for with her sister, Negi seeks solace from her mother's punishment in the fighting womb-like natural enclosure of the spicebed: "I ran to the bittersweet shade of the or?gano bushes and wept untilmy chest hurt, each sob tearingoff a layerof the comfort built from my parents' love, until Iwas totally alone, defended only scent the the of cooking spices, and the dry, brushed dirt under my green, by feet" (16). That nature provides a thin protection forNegi's temporary solitude foreshadows the role of the island's geography in inspiring self-knowledge in

in the contrast between New York and Puerto Rico, but informs Negi's subject position from an early age. In the homes described in thework, Negi repeatedly locates a site separate from the communal building that houses her mother and siblings, effectively demarcating a physical boundary between herself and her family. In her first home in Mac?n, the space is divided forNegi between the free area of the gar

reenacted in the text" (Egan 5). Santiago presents this prescribed "balancing act" in Negi's character by pointing to an awareness of spatial demarcations from childhood. Identity construction through spatial delineation develops not only

In diaspora,

"crisis

has

become

permanent

state,

balancing

act

adulthood in theUnited States. The dual locations of her home life create a character capable ofmanaging two subject identities at once, a skill thatNegi later exploits in the balancing of more complex cultural identities once she has moved to New York. Expressed most explicitly in the depiction of her walk home from school in Santurce, a suburb of San Juan, Negi's division into two originates from an attempt to rec oncile her j?bara (a derogatory term for a rural inhabitant) identity with the In order to fulfill urban prejudice against the rural lifestyle. her personal curios

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113 ity for her surroundings without the oppression of a label,Negi splits herself into two girls at once:
In Santurce I had become what I wasn't inMac?n. In Santurce a j?bara was something girl the

no one wanted with

to be. I walked

to and from school

eyes cast down, and colors,

the home-cut to shoes.

beside myself, watching the j?bara hair, the too large gestures and the too loud voice, home while

feet unaccustomed the noise

I let that girl walk the pungent

themusic,

I took in the sights of the city, smells of restaurants and car exhaust. (39)

This physical distance between her two selves is the personal reflection of the spatial separations thatNegi has practiced beforewith her personal garden cave. While the firstpositioning of the self establishes distance between mother and - the first assertion of self in psychoanalytic terms Negi applies this daughter locative separation to her self in Santurce to counter the isolation she feels in
the new school

Awareness of cultural groups at school provides contrasts forNegi

increasing self-consciousness: from comparisons between "good" and

community.

in her
"bad"

walked the land from post to post trying to place myself within its borders" (46). Re-appropriating the boundaries of her formerhome also means remem bering the limits of activity, the gardens that are friendlyand those that are not.

families in her first school in Mac?n, to class divisions between rural and urban identities in Santurce and the complex categorization of children in her junior high school inNew York. Negi's first lesson about the difference between the native Puerto Ricans and theAmericanos derives from a clear physical demar cation. A return home toMac?n after her lonely experience at school in San turce is first welcomed by Negi by a scientific stroll about the familiar space: "I

was sour" (47). The fence clearly separates economic groups, but also through the neighbor's claim that the farm belonged to Rockefeller, the fence forNegi
differentiates between "us" and the Americanos.

For example, despite the plenitude of wasted grapefruitfrom the trees on "La lao's finca," which the neighbor claims belongs to "Rockefela" (55), the children are not permitted to slip into this ample property to collect them.Negi watches this injusticewith dismay, standing at the border between her family's property and the "Nueva Y or" farm "that spread to the horizon" (55-56): "I stood at the barbwire fence and stared at the fruits growing and ripening, then falling and rotting on the ground where they formed a pulpy wet mud, which I was sure

Attempts to distance herselffrom theAmericanos cause the young Negi to relegate this character to the space outside of the family,beyond the barbed wire fence, as belonging to the city far away, which enters her family space only in the form of gifts and letters from her grandmother who lives inNew York. When Negi begins to learn English and is given "nutritional" American break
fasts at her Puerto Rican school every day, the Americanos also infiltrate her

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114 educational sphere, but still remains distant from the home. In an outright re bellious response to the school's food, after spillingher glass of condensed milk, Negi screams at the teacher that "My mami and papi can feed us without your

dent, the teacher thankfullydoes not tellNegi's mother what has happened. When she has moved toNew York, Negi's perception of theAmericano ways as
outside of her family's codes allows her to advance her ambitions, even con

disgusting gringo imperialist food" (82). Distancing herselffrom theAmericanos serves her well and Negi consistently approaches these imposed ways of life aggressively:her mother prepares and serves the grapefruit thatNegi steals one day in a dare from the forbidden Lalao/Rockefela finca, and in the school inci

vincing the school principal in her United States junior high school to enroll her in the eighth grade rather than in the seventh when she firstarrives there.
In New York, the home, now an urban

school for fear of the Brooklyn dangers. That the restrictions in the summer months are just as stringentunderscores the isolation of the family through fear of the outer world. Although "people sat on their stoops" during thewarmer weather, "Mami insistedwe stay inside unless she could come out towatch us"

confining because of the threatof crime and violence. The children are not even allowed to cross the street to the neighborhood "bodega" in winter, because during the darker months they are only permitted to leave the house to go to

apartment,

becomes

even

more

(254). Through this distancing from theAmericano world outside the confines of the apartment, the family invents an independent nucleus that includes its own cultural construction in the form of the tellingof tales. Inside with her sib

The cultural expression develops from a spatial distancing from the outside world: locative contrasts force a comprehension of theworld that divides while it also generates new cultural identities. By rehearsing the complexities in her self-definitionfrom an early age Negi has prepared herself to balance the cul tural comparisons that discriminate and isolate her from her classmates and community in Brooklyn. Social definitions in her New York Junior High School do not suit her as she feelsmore courageous than the newly arrived Puerto Ri c?n immigrants to her school, but not "cool" enough to fit inwith the Brooklyn Puerto Ricans. Finally,Negi creates a cultural community from within her fam ily that includes the revision of fairy tales for the pleasure of her brothers and sisters, and, later, the production of this autobiographical work that tells the
story of her cross-cultural negotiations.

Negi becomes the storyteller,revising and embellishing fairy tales by in lings, corporating the names of her brothers and sisters as themain characters, an activity thatmakes the room look larger, the walls "higher and steeper, the ceilings furtheraway" (235).While the apartment grows in size and shape, the "sounds of the city" disappear "behind the clink of Mami's spoon stirring chocolate, the soft, even breathing of my sisters and brothers, the light thump each timeDon Juliosethis beer can on the formica table" (235).

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115 In the interpretation of Maria Acosta Cruz, Santiago's representation of Puerto Rico extends an unfavorable stereotype of the island's inhabitants, that of the uneducated country resident or j?baro who then finds success in the United States. That Santiago's self-reflexive literarychoice in the text is the revi sion of fairy tales - when Negi tells the stories to her siblings - appropriately parallels memories which, for Acosta Cruz, describe a limited perception of Puerto Rico, that of the preindustrialized island, "una presentaci?n retr?grada de la identidad puertorrique?a" (114). Embellishing fairy taleswith happy end ings befits the nostalgic description of Santiago's childhood while she also con structs an autobiography with a didactic purpose for an American audience

ventional episodic rendering of childhood memories follows familiar structural The concern for accessibility for the American Anglophone reader is less evident as an objective in theworks of Jamaica Kincaid and Cristina Garc?a. Indeed, Garc?a excludes aides such as a glossary, thereby forcing the reader to consult a dictionary to find unfamiliar Spanish words. Such an approach cate gorizes Garcia as a member of the "one-and-half-generation," in the Cuban sociologist, Rub?n Rumbaut's terms (61); while Dreaming inCuban, likeWhen I was Puerto Rican, also seeks to represent the balance between cultures,Garcia assertively challenges her readers tomake an effortin the comprehension of her
techniques for narrative.

evident in the inclusion of a glossary and the translation of Spanish phrases for theAnglophone reader. A primary concern for the propagation of her story is indicated also by the use of certain textual formulas prescribed by popular cul ture that build on the reader's sentimental engagement with the text.The con

Lot of Memory" 186-87). Since Annie John,Kincaid's style has become lucid and precise, a more exacting form for the expression of political and personal
anger. BELOW AND ABOVE: JAMAICA KINCAID'S ANNIE JOHN ANO LUCY

subject position. In Kincaid's work, the pedagogical element becomes progres more pointed as her narratives become more politically engaged: her first sively collection of short stories,At theBottom of theRiver, employs a hermetic writ ing style,one towhich Kincaid claims shewill not return: "My ideas have got tenmore complicated, so I need to express themmore clearly" (Ferguson, "A

The topographical image of the "pit" emerges as themost prominent spatial element in Kincaid's narratives.2 From Ar the Bottom of the River (1983), in which the closing storydepicts a house under water that represents the primor dial, original home, falling into a hole or emerging from the depths of a pit re cur as metaphors for retrievinga buried strength in both Annie John and Lucy, two short novels that recount Kincaid's childhood and move to the United States.Unlike Santiago who moved to Brooklyn with her mother and siblings in
search of improved economic conditions, Kincaid born Elaine Potter

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116 Richardson in St. Johns, Antigua in 19493 leftthe island to become an au pair inNew York City in 1965,where she later became a staff writer for The New see not and did her mother for Yorker, twentyyears. Kincaid claims she again

would never have become a writer if she had not broken away from the power of her mother and of the culture of Antigua, where West Indian residentswere not writers. In her novels, the emotional tensions and contradictions in the re lationship between mother and daughter,West Indian island and itsnative in habitant, are amplified to develop into a political allegory for the powerful and the powerless. As Moira Ferguson's title (1994) so felicitously discerns, "land meets the body"through Kincaid's tight association between "mother" and "motherland." The fertile land of Antigua parallels themother's body, while the "motherland" of Britain bears down on the islands of theCommonwealth. The daughtermust leave home in order to find her own identity:at the end ofAnnie New York John,shemoves toEngland; inLucy, she departs for While for Santiago, the contrast between Puerto Rico and theUnited States constructs an identitybased in distance, a spatial interpretationof Kincaid's works reveals characters - Annie and Lucy - who constantly return to the state of powerlessness in the bottom of the hole in order to unearth theirown power. Annie and Lucy's surrealistvisions of the "pit" recall three images of home from At theBottom of theRiver: the house built above a deep hole (57); themother's house and the daughter's house flanking two sides of a "dead pond" inhabited by poisonous invertebrates (58); the primal house buried at the bottom of an expanse of water (74-75). Aspects of childhood and the relationship between mother and daughter are generated by each of these spatial images: from the womb of themother; to the venomous, but welcomed deep hole as the fertile distance between mother and daughter during the daughter's adolescence rep resented by the invertebrates in the dead pond; to the image of the primal house, thememory of the paradise of childhood buried in the river. In order to assume personhood, in the final paragraph of At theBottom, the narrator sur

faces from inside the hole, leaving behind her entanglement with her mother: "emerging from my pit, the one I sealed up securely, the one towhich I have consigned allmy deeds that I care not to reveal emerging from this pit, I step into a room" (81-82). The narrator sees objects that representher identity in the a flute, her clothes: "I claim these things then room, books, a chair, a table, fruit, - mine - and now feel solid and up my myself grow complete,my name filling mouth" (82). Finally, the conflation and separation between mother and daughter leads to thepositive expression of thedaughter's individual identity. An interpretationof the spatial imagery inAnnie John and Lucy reveals a contradictory doubling with and rejection of themother, especially in the im ages of the pit that recall themetaphors constructed inKincaid's first collection of short stories.Despite the physical distance separatingmother and daughter, in Kincaid's work the daughter never fullyreleases herself from her mother's

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117 control, as does Negi inWhen I was Puerto Rican.4 The memories of Antigua, and especially of themother who lives there, evoke anger in Annie and Lucy (and Jamaica Kincaid),5 as they alternately seek to climb out of and to re-enter thehole thathouses this remembered space. As in Santiago's autobiography, Annie identifies private spaces outside of the confines of the house inwhich she is free from her mothers scrutiny.6 Un derneath the house, Annie hides her secret treasures:her marbles and her stolen librarybooks, representatives of two activities restricted for her by her mother. For a time every day after school, Annie meets the Red Girl on the forbidden of the lighthouse on the hill. The phallic structureof a lighthouse un territory

day unfolded beforeme, I could see the sameness in everything; I could see the - the ... I was present take a shape shape of my past. My past was my mother was not like I mother mother" With this terrible acknow my my (Lucy 90). ledgement, Lucy realizes that distance from Antigua produces the opposite of the desired effect; the "Ust of aU the things" that she hoped to leave behind if only she "could cross the vast ocean" only follow her to the new place: "I used to think that just a change in venue would banish forever frommy Ufe the things I was not tobe so" (Lucy 90). most despised. But that The home for Kincaid assumes cultural shapes in these works. While the body of themother and the space of the island of Antigua conflate into the "shape ofmy past," the form of the home is already a source of conflict in the relationship between Annie's fatherand maternal grandmother:
Chess once asked my father to tell her exactly what itwas he really did, and when he a house live in a house? All you she said, "A house? Why in the ground, so you can come and go as you please." (Annie John

nie's home. The symbolic geography of the mother/daughter relationship reaches an extremewhen Annie leaves home for England at the close of Annie John, a departure that sparks the next autobiographical novel, Lucy, about the experience of an au pair for a family inNew York City. The increasing distance between mother and daughter, from underneath the house, to the Ughthouse, to move from childhood to adulthood. across the sea, topographically reflectsthe However, the dramatic separation in themove abroad still does not consti tute a significantbreak from the potent presence of themother. Instead, while Lucy stubbornly attempts to avoid her mother's power leaving her mother's lettersunopened, and even adopting her employer,Mariah, as a new mother - recoUections impose themselves on her even in New York: "As each figure

derscores the new relationship between mother and pubescent daughter, who, freefrom hermother's gaze, relishes in the admiration of her friend,whose Ub erai parents allow her to remain in a state of dishevelment unheard of in An

Ma said need

that he was

off to build

is a nice hole

126)

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118 By defining a female house-shape, one that does not incorporate the need to build, this statement by thewoman Annie lovesmore than her mother under scores a rejection of the dominant male sphere.Digging a hole has already been adopted by the narrator in Ai theBottom as the appropriate way to build a house - "I dug a deep, deep hole. I built a beautiful house, a floorless house, over the deep, deep hole" (At theBottom 57) - that she thendestroys completely

inorder to displease hermother. The gendered significance reflected in the shape of the home becomes fur ther complicated in theUnited States by Lucys cultural designations ofwhat a home should be, most clearly brought into focus through the symbol of the daffodil. The forcedmemorization as a child ofWordsworth's poem "I wan dered lonely as a cloud" generates a hatred in Lucy for the daffodil, a flower that does not grow in the West Indies.While reciting the poem as a child, Lucy re calls that she vows to "erase it" fromhermind "line by line."Afterwards, in her dream, daffodils become a tangible symbol of oppression, a reflection of the culturalwounds left behind by colonization:

it seemed, that Iwas being The night after I had recited the poem, I dreamt, continuously street by bunches and bunches of those same daffodils chased down a narrow cobbled on that I had vowed to forget, and when finally I fell down from exhaustion they all piled was never seen was I of buried underneath them and until me, top again. (Lucy 18) deep

tion" (806). The daffodil incident in Lucy also calls into question themeaning of memory for individual identity: the disparity between the subject of the memorized poem and the geography that surrounds the school children of the West Indies underscores the foreignness of the English model of identity. Forced cultural memories collide with meaningful recollections, constructing subjects defined by contradiction. When these conflicts come into play again within a third geographic con text, that of theGreat Lakes summer home, Lucy recalls the imposed memori

West Indies through Lucy's in The representation of colonial policies in the termentby daffodils evokes the attempts of theCommonwealth government to impose a foreign cultural system on the island inhabitants,beginning with the powerful forceof education. In Ian Smith's interpretation, Wordsworth's poem is purposefully "mis used" in Lucy, and in theworks of other post-colonial writers, as other canoni West Indies - this has even been cal texts are "misused" in the literatureof the termed "the daffodil gap" (quoted in Smith 806). Smith argues that "Misuse West Indian style, becomes the classic gesture of creolization, of intertextuality where the English 'standard,' whether the language of canonical texts, is adapted, taken over, re-contextualized, barbarized and reproduced tomeet the current needs of a people shaped through a historical process of intercultura

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119 zation ofWordsworth's poem and cannot shareMarian's enthusiasm for the field of spring daffodils. While Mariah "enjoys an apparently seamless union of lifeand literature" (Smith 809), Lucy refuses to be buried again by the daffodils, deciding rather to explain toMariah the cultural baggage inspired by this natu

ral sight. This time, instead of finding herself interred by the daffodils, Lucy wants to cut them down with an "enormous scythe" (Lucy 29) and instinctively kill them all. Culture, flora and identity all conflate through the intertext in Wordsworth's poem, questioning the definition of the home as a cultural and geographical entity.As Ma Chess claims in her conversation with Annie's fa ther, the hole best represents the shape of the home, especially for theAntiguan woman, for both thewoman andWest Indian culture are buried bymale-cen

Mariah, mention Freud in response to Lucy's dream recounted at the dinner table, the cultural divide between them is again emphasized through a spatial analogy. Lucy has dreamed about the couple:
Lewis was which I was chasing me around the house. any clothes. The ground on with cornmeal. Lewis was chas paved and though he came close he could never catch up wearing catch her. Eventu snakes. (Lucy 14) I wasn't

tered society and colonial politics, respectively. Moreover, spatial categories represent the misunderstandings between Mariah and Lucy, emphasizing the cultural and political underpinnings behind Mariah and Lucy play geographic conceptions of the world. After a conflict, that have been their parts they given through respective histories: "She acted in her usual way, which was that theworld was round and we all agreed on that, when I knew that theworld was flat and if I went to the edge Iwould fall off (Lucy 32). Evoking in thisway the roles of colonizer/colonized, Kincaid empha sizes the differences that irreconcilablydivide Mariah, theNew York employer, and Lucy, her Antiguan au pair. When the New York parents, Lewis and

running yellow, me around and around the house, ing with me. Mariah stood at the open windows ally I fell down a hole, at the bottom

was

as if it had been

saying, Catch her, Lewis, of which were some silver and blue

West Indian river. the bottom of the While Lucy's dream after the recitation of Wordsworth's poem involves being chased by daffodils down a street,here it is the ground that is yellow, the color associated also with theNew York kitchen and withMariah herself:

of the opposing perceptions between au pair and employer, the psychoanalytical interpretationofMariah and Lewis of the hole in Lucy's dream leaves out a series of cultural implications:Ma Chess's assertion of the hole as a home, the poison of the invertebrates that have characterized the riftbetween mother and daughter in their opposing houses that flank the dead pond inAi theBottom, as well as the primal home, described in this same work, buried at Because

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120 from the sun came in througha window and fellon the pale-yellow theyellow light linoleum tiles of the floor,and on thewalls of thekitchen, which were painted yet
another shade

stood stillin thisalmostcelestiallight, and she lookedblessed. (Lucy27)

of pale

yellow,

and Mariah,

with

her pale-yellow

skin and yellow

hair,

head-kerchiefs" (87). Lucy explains that,

I did not know what the present water itself was,

In his pursuit of Lucy, Lewis follows the colonizer's road paved in the When Lucy falls into a hole in this dream, hegemonic yellow of the daffodils. she returns toMa Chess's idea of a home and to the union with hermother at the bottom of the river, symbolic memories that have been laid out for the reader through thevolumes of her autobiography In the final reference in Lucy to a dreamed-of pit, Lucy is not lucky enough to find her way to the bottom to encounter her mother's love, represented this time by a gift for Lucy wrapped in "one of [her]mother's beautiful madras

but

itwas

was that it layat thebottom of a deep,murkypool, exceedingly happy; theonly trouble

and no matter how much I bailed

something

that would

make

me

(87)

out I always woke

up before

I got to the bottom.

with hermother, Annie claims that "I would imaginemyself ing about her trials of incapable coming to harm if I were just towalk through this inferno. I could end with my mother and me; we were now a sight to see" (86-87). While over the course of the novels, the redness of the blossoms of the flamboyant trees shifts to the yellowness of the daffodils in the Great Lakes landscape, Lucy in her dream yearns to return to the love inherent in the first paradise with her mother, an environment that is lost to her as she, like Lucifer, has fallen from Therefore, the pleasure Lucy derives from her name when her mother tells her she has been named afterLucifer for all of thebothers she puts her through (Lucy 152), attaches her indelibly to the land of her youth with the fieryflam boyant trees,as well as her skinwhich is also depicted as red, "the red of flames when a fire burns alone in a darkened place" (At theBottom 79). Kincaid's es cape from the inferno allows her to reflecton it; she places herself in her own autobiographical novel, as the protagonist of her narrative, her name shiftingto incorporate the appropriate identity.The name change to Lucy in the second
grace.

In thisdescription of a new recurringdream, Lucy seeks her childhood relation shipwith her mother inwhich she felt she lived in a sort of "paradise," inwhich her mother did everything only for her (Annie John 25). When the daughter reaches adolescence, the environment that represents the relationship between mother and daughter changes to that of an "inferno,"as Annie imagines the red of the "flamboyant trees in bloom" (Annie John 86) as the fire of hell. Fantasiz

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121 with the painting of volume is anticipated inAnnie Johnwhen Annie identifies before While the she leaves Antigua, Annie, Young Lucifer (Gilmore 109). night claims that "my name was the last thing I saw the night before, just as Iwas fal ling asleep" (Annie John 130), Lucy proudly spells hers out, "At the top of the page I wrote my full name: Lucy JosephinePotter" (Lucy 163). Although name changes allow the protagonist a sense of ownership of her self-identity,the re currence of the image of the pit demonstrates that she never fully leaves behind her mother or her island, her surreal memories always returning her to the original space.
SPATIAL SAMENESS: CRISTINA GARCIa's DREAMING IN CUBAN

Citing the examples of US Latina autobiographies of the 1980s such as Getting Home Alive (1986) by Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales and Bor derlands/La frontera (1987) by Gloria Anzald?a, Lourdes Torres observes that contemporary women's autobiography by minority writers is characterized often by innovative narrative strategies.As Torres argues, this approach allows the author to separate herself from the master narratives of canonical male writers, forging a new textual form of expression for themarginalized group. Such experimentation, which might include collage-like structures that incor porate essays, poetry, letters, journal entries and short stories, defines the structure of the third Caribbean autobiographical work treated here, Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban. In Garc?as work, as in the autobiographies cited or lesser extent, there is no attempt to privilege any of a by Torres, "to greater various the genres. History public and private myth, fiction, and fantasy are all juxtaposed. As such, these collections are a fundamental subversion ofmain stream autobiographies' traditions and conventions" (Torres 277). Torres concern of points out further that the complex structure parallels the main these texts: the presentation of an identity that is "fragmented" or "multiple" (277). In subverting the standard male example for narrative, theseworks also undermine the conventional definition of personhood as Western, male and
uninational.

In Garcia's case, the narrative is structured nonlinearly, jumping between time periods and locations, from Cuba to New York and, briefly, to Miami. member of the Puente del Pino fam While each site tells the storyof a different numerous them between the emphasize the similarities between parallels ily, both familymembers and geographic locations. The strongest analogies are drawn from the characters' personal interpretationand adoption of the political ideologies of Cuba and theUnited States. However, Garcia also creates spatial in Cuba parallels between key events in the characters' lives Lourdes's rape - and of character and the sexual aggression of her daughter in Central Park traits such as the excessive passion of Lourdes in New York and her sister
Felicia in Cuba, or the comparison between grandmother, Celia in Cuba, and

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122 her granddaughter, Pilar inNew York, as the artists and communicators of the structure reflects the com family. In these ways, while the non-chronological two extremely plexities of a family identitygeographically separated between different spaces, the parallels between events and character traitsdelineates the
sameness between cultural sites.

Torres's generalization about textual innovation does not pertain to the works of Santiago and Kincaid, which employmore traditional narrative strate to the creativewriting gies thanGarcia, although all three authors call attention While from their self-reflexivity.7 positions through process particular subject own lifeas a her Annie her and for tales embellishes imagines family, fairy Negi story,finding the need to reinvent entirely the plots for her life to fit into the mold (Annie John 86-87), a sort ?f full-flown meta-autobiography emerges in

Annie John, when Annie composes a memoir as a school assignment inwhich shewrites, predictably, about the relationship between herself and her mother.8 These episodes emphasize the self-conscious element of thewriting process for both Santiago and Kincaid, who acknowledge the need to invent their unique women writers.Metatexts inDreaming inCuban subject positions as Caribbean Pilar's from emerge diary and the unsent lettersto her Spanish first love clearly Celia. her Adopting the role of communicators in the family, by grandmother, these two characters also serve as the artists in the text Pilar through painting and bass playing, Celia through dance and piano. While these self-reflexive elements call attention to the significance of the text and the process of writing from Garc?as subject position, the parallels between the artistic characters un
derscore similarities between the geographic sites, as Garcia reveals sameness

through spatial comparisons. Unlike Santiago who nostalgically underlines the differences between the United States and Puerto Rico, and Kincaid who employs topographical im agery to represent a buried political and personal Antiguan past, Garcia as a age of two presents a comparably distanced emotional connection to both US and Cuban spaces, using her characters, especially Pilar, to investigate the com The Cuba as perceived by Pilar, Gar plexities of theCuban-American identity. da's autobiographical protagonist, maintains both positive and negative ele ments, as does theUnited States. Both sites inspire an exaggerated ideological
one-and-a-half-generation Cub an-American she moved to New York at the

passion represented through the behaviors of particular characters: Pilar's mother, Lourdes, who owns a bakery in Brooklyn, fully embraces Uncle Sam's capitalism, even becoming a volunteer for the New York police force; Pilar's grandmother, Celia, who patrols the beach by her home in Santa Teresa del Mar, surveying the horizon forUS invaders, and serves as a community judge, fully supports theRevolution and Fidel Castro. Both Lourdes and Celia uphold their respective ideologies by aiding in the submission of the population

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123 through spatial control: the US policewoman patrols the city and the Cuban surveillance of the ocean, the lack of communication within the family and across borders is firstmentioned. Celias deceased husband comes to visit her at the "ocean's edge," but while his "jaw churns and swells with each word," she "cannot read his immense Hps" (5). Almost aU of the char acters remain isolated from each other, inventing their own identitieswithout placing themselves within their larger cultural heritage. The exceptions are Celia and Pilar, whose abilities to communicate with each other are so complete that the stories Celia tellsfrom her home in Cuba "about her lifeand what the sea was Hke that day" (28-29) reach her granddaughter inNew York before she goes to bed every day. These two characters attempt to link the family and to maintain the culturalmemories. In CeHa's final letter to her Spanish lover on January 11, 1959, she passes on the task of remembrance to her granddaughter: "The revolution is eleven days old. My granddaughter, Pilar Puente del Pino, was born today. It is also my birthday. I am fifty years old. Iwill no longerwrite to you, mi amor. She wiU remember everything" (245)^ This metatextual con clusion underscores the importance of Pilar's diary entries for the definition of the family's cultural identity. While writing the diary and telepathy represent twomeans of communica tion in the novel, Pilar's paintings serve as the principal strategyfor connecting
coastguard surveys the ocean.

With Celias

for her Yankee Doodle Bakery tomark the grand opening of the second store and the "200th Birthday of America" (143). RebelHously providing a punk ren dition of the Statue of Liberty, Pilar's version of Liberty has a torch that floats "slightlybeyond her grasp." Although Pilar attempts to create a background with an "iridescent blue gouache" that looks "irradiated, nuked out," she stiU does not like the effectthenext day:
So I take a medium-thick thorny around in the air around brush and paint black stick figures pulsing scars that look Hke barbed wire. I want to go aU the way with this, to stop and do what I feel, so at the base of the statue then carefully, very carefuUy, I paint I put my favorite punk a safety pin through

geographic sites. The counterposition of paintings records the association be tween the two sides of the family, as well as the effectsof the two ideological systems, embedded in spatial metaphors. Adolescent Pilar's explosive relation ship with her mother culminates in a painting her mother has commissioned

Liberty, mucking

A MESS. And raUying cry: I'M nose. (141) Liberty's

The blue that Pilar has chosen for the background to Liberty provides an artistic bridge to her grandmother in Cuba in her association with the ocean and the colour blue. This connection is solidified in the image that Pilar, now twenty

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124 one, has of Celia, when Pilar and Lourdes visit her on the island, after the death of Lourdes's sister, Felicia:
on a reef with tiny chrome fish Celia underwater, standing Her is in the tide and her eyes are her face like of hair flashes waving light. darting by wide open. She calls to me but I can't hear her. Is she talking to me from her dreams? I have this image of Abuela

(220) Here, rather than the paintings she has made of her grandmother in different shades of blue, Pilar sees Celia as similar to her version of the Statue of Liberty, with the chrome fish like the barbed wire stick figures and the blueness of the water behind her reminiscent of the blueness of the background of Liberty. Celia, like Liberty in the United States, has sought an ideal in the Revolution that cannot be realized. Communication between Pilar and Celia in thismo ment is disturbed; Pilar, who has always heard her grandmother without effort, cannot understand what she says - "she calls tome but I can't hear her" (220).
Later, Celia assesses Pilar's

tiful,Pilar. But do I really look so unhappy?" (233), indicating a break in the perceptions of Pilar and Celia: Pilar, the new recorder of the familyhistory,now views the world differentlyfrom her grandmother. Pilar finally realizes her preference for the United States, helping her cousin Ivanito leave Cuba, and then returningtoNew York herself.10 Garc?as task of balancing spaces, histories and cultures includes also the balancing of languages, English and Spanish, in order to capture best the com Garcia uses Spanish inmuch the same way as Jamaican plexities of identity.

paintings

of her

and

remarks,

"these

are very

beau

may be construed simply as noise' by an Anglophone reader" (331), the same might be said ofDreaming inCuban inwhich the reader does not even have the luxury of a glossary as do the readers of Abeng or When I Was Puerto Pican. The distance between reader and text needs to be subtly balanced in order to
maintain the American reader's attention in a work about a non-Anglophone

born Michelle Cliff employs Creole in her autobiographical novel, Abeng: to both attract and alienate the reader. While in Fran?oise Lionnet's interpretation of Cliff s autobiographical novel, "what is message' for a Creolophone audience

culture. Because Spanish is such a prominent world language,much more wide spread and culturally dominant than Creole, the incorporation of Spanish phrases inDreaming inCuban does not alienate as much as theCreole terms in Abeng, which is arguably the reason that Garcia gets away with excluding a Spanish glossary.However, it is through the omission of a glossary, that the text reaches a similar balance between clarity and opacity as Abeng. As Lionnet ob
serves:

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125
The presence text beyond reader an opacity that places Cliff s as an it speaker, appropriation, demarcating radically "other" for English on its based referential value. Hence, that any preventing simplistic understanding purely a a not it aim to function: has subversive does opacity suggest... specific doubly simply link to a more or less "authentic" cultural past, and it prevents the ideological adoption it stresses the distance because of a static form of humanism, between narrator and of Creole creates for the non-Jamaican reader, mining between insiders and outsiders, Creole speakers (334) and their others, while under

the reader's

belief in the value of "clarity."

member everything" (245), claims her grandmother, an impossible task that nevertheless allows for the continuance of a family's culture.Mirrored by the non-linear structureof the text,and highlighted by disparate artistic and famil ial voices, geographic contrasts in Dreaming in Cuban underline a similarity between two sites; the spatial images emphasizing a sameness that is unified through family ties and the strengthofmemory. Spatial imagery, through its contrasts for Santiago, its topography forKin caid and its sameness forGarcia, reflectthreemeans of self-definitionfor these Caribbean writers. Each textual project acknowledges the role of themother's land in the "geographies of identity" that construct the diasporic subject posi tions.While in Santiago's text, the daughter accompanies themother in the move toNew York, maintaining tieswith the original Puerto Rican home that forge a distance from the new United States surroundings, Kincaid's protago nist leaves her mother in Antigua as the representative of an imposing power

"santera" and "hija" (159) without including the English translations. These linguistic signals also mark the geographical elements that compose the com plex cultural identityof theCuban American: the narrative structure is compli cated here through theweaving of different family voices that develop princi pally from thedisparate sitesofNew York City and Havana. That Garcia refers to certain aspects of Cuban geography and culture erro neously, despite thorough research on her Cuban heritage, points to her dis tance from the island in her perspective from theUnited States (Zubiaurre 6). Tempering the nostalgic portrayal of Cuba at the end of thework inwhich both Celia and Felicia, the two key representatives of the family in Cuba, die, and Ivanito escapes during a rendition of the 1980 exodus from Cuba, Garcia seeks a "truthful"depiction of both Cuban and United States spaces: Pilar "will re

Like Cliff,Garcia underscores the otherness of her culture through the play on language, incorporating verses by Federico Garc?a Lorca along with stanzas from Spanish love songs and words such as "machetero" (44), "guayabera" (89)

from which the daughter cannot fully release herself. Topographical imagery forKincaid symbolizes the buried memories ofmotherly love as well as a help West Indian woman as well as less powerlessness, inherent in the figureof the
the colonized territory. The dual maternal figures for Garcia, separated spatially

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126 between the grandmother in Cuba and themother in theUnited States, con structmirror images of cultural models for the new generation of Cuban
American.

Metatextual elements in each of the autobiographical texts point to the author s awareness of her identityas a woman writer of theCaribbean diaspora. Like Negi who finds a familial community through the personalization of fairy tales in theNew York apartment; or Annie who seeks the paradisiacal past of her childhood in her autobiographical school assignment; or Pilar whose art captures the intricacies of the ideological systems that divide the family geo graphically, Santiago, Kincaid and Garcia reveal diasporic identities in their autobiographical works. The spatial imagery points to the complexity of their subject positions as it symbolically parallels the temporal trajectories of their
lives.

McGill University

NOTES
A rallying cry for the value of autobiography for this region, Sandra Pouchet Paquet observes in her study of autobiography from the Anglophone Caribbean that this genre "illuminates many-ancestored 2 Although the regenerative communities lineaments of themultilingual, (4-5). multiethnic, of the Caribbean"

the protagonists of Kincaid's novels do not have her name, the events and own the characters are largely based on autobiographical experiences from Kincaid's as well as in the studies of several "A Lot ofMemory"), admission (see Ferguson, a to Kincaid's critics. Gilmore dedicates "se chapter of The Limits ofAutobiography rial autobiography." See Leigh Gilmore See also Ferguson (Jamaica 1-6) and Smith (806-07). for an interpretation of the name changes in Kincaid's work. and power: 252). John and Lucy, expresses her a system that inAnti problems This text serves as "Mami and I didn't

she isable to 4 When Negi dareshermother tohither at theend of theautobiography,

liberate herself from her mother's for days. But she never, ever, hit me 5 Kincaid's political maintains anger at the neocolonial theNorth American world aggression speak again" (Santiago work A Small Place, written between Annie project. oblivious caused

In this text, she ridicules to the severe economic economy.

gua and the developing

by the globalized

the narration for the 2001 film Life or Debt (Director, Stephanie Black) about the Bank policies in Jamaica. devastating World In a Kristevian of the that incorporates the idea of the abject, Gilmore text, reading claims that the "first place Annie knows is her mother's never body, and itspower in texts" (106). From there, Annie seeks to displaced, only written over in subsequent

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127
separate herself metaphors 7 from her mother's body, this first space, as is evident in Caribbean in the spatial literature as of

of the texts. ofmetatextual position techniques

Ian Smith finds the abundance characteristic of the political necessarily

West of the

Indies. He writes, colonial its own

"The process paradigms im on

textual production bricated in language interculturation, 8 Gilmore

reanimates

the contestatory

and, at the same time, produces creolized texts and of the autobiographical

self-commentary of dissocia

begetting

identifies drama

intertexts" (803). essay as a "moment

inAnnie John. By rewriting the nightmarish tion" (107) for Annie from her mother a a way to reconstruct the idealized mother into "the offers one, essay happy ending who is now available toAnnie only in autobiography" (108). 9 (168) argues that Pilar and Celia could be interpreted as two sides Josefa Lago-Grana the similarities of the same person, although she later qualifies this by underscoring are in the personas between Lourdes and Celia (169). The ambiguities precisely what make dent 10 is evi influence and genetic make-up full and believable. Celia's so - in both her and her granddaughter. daughter For an interpretation of the role of Pilar 's identity formation as a Cuban-American, see Isabel Alvarez-Borland, who argues that: "it is precisely Pilar's gathering of in the characters and realistically formation focus" (47). about the history of her ancestors in Cuba that brings her life back into

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