Abstract
For the most part, the nation has been constructed and imagined as male and heterosexual. Women, on the other hand, are regarded as second-class citizens, constructed as pawns in the national discourse and not as key players. In this essay, I explore how Caribbean women writers, Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid, not only debunk the exclusionary practices in the nationalist/masculinist discourse but also rewrite the heteronormative structure of the nation by constructing alter/native spaces beyond the reach of the nation-state. In these alter/native spaces, the female protagonists, Tante Atie, Louise, Sophie, Lucy, challenge bodily (border) restrictions, forcing the nation to reexamine its citizenship policy, to rescript the narrative of heteropatriarchy and heteronormativity.
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Notes
- 1.
Martine’s migration is exemplary of the migrations of many real-life biological mothers who have migrated to America and other western countries in search of a better life for themselves and children.
- 2.
Throughout the essay, I use surrogacy and othermothering interchangeably.
- 3.
Martine’s “testing” of Sophie is akin to rape.
- 4.
More than likely the color of this sheet is yellow since we are told that Sophie’s sheets are yellow. Later I argue that yellow is the color of complicity and not transgression.
- 5.
Sophie’s migration to America, her bordercrossing, signals her transcending geographic spaces/borders.
- 6.
For a detailed discussion of Martine’s proverbial rape of Sophie, see my article “M/Othering the Nation: Women’s Bodies as Nationalist Trope in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.”
- 7.
- 8.
I discussed in detail the class dynamic of this relationship in my book, African Diasporic Women’s Narrative: Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship.
- 9.
Martine also envisions Sophie transgressing cultural and physical boundaries by achieving an education: “Your schooling is the only thing that will make people respect you. You are going to work hard here and no one is going to break your heart because you cannot read or write. You have the chance to become the kind of woman Atie and I have always wanted to be. If you make something of yourself in life, we will all succeed. You can raise our heads” (44, italics in original text).
- 10.
Donald Augustin rejects Atie, who is illiterate, and chooses Lotus, whom he marries later.
- 11.
Lotus reveals Atie’s secret at a potluck dinner.
- 12.
This term “outside woman” is used commonly in many English-speaking Caribbean countries, including Guyana, to refer to a lover, a mistress, engaged in a sexual relationship outside the marriage.
- 13.
I argue that Atie transgresses the nation’s definition of citizenship.
- 14.
The lotus flower is deemed especially sacred in religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. http://www.flowermeaning.com/lotus-flower-meaning/.
- 15.
Grandma Ife is aware of Atie’s contempt of the age-old tradition for she informs Sophie that Atie “cannot stay out of duty. The thing one does, one should do out of love” (119).
- 16.
Despite Grandma Ife’s disapproval of Louise and Atie “cast[ing their names] in stone”: “If a woman is worth remembering there is no need to have her name carved in letters” (128, 9), Atie nevertheless added both Grandma Ife’s and her name to the national archives (131).
- 17.
Sophie was about to begin college where she had planned to pursue a degree in medicine when she met and fell in love with Joseph who “dared [Sophie] to dream on [her] own” (72).
- 18.
After arriving in New York, Martine dressed both Sophie and herself in yellow; Martine drove “a pale yellow car;” the well-adorned doll she presented to Sophie wore “ribbons and barrettes that matched the yellow dress, Sophie’s sheets were yellow (41, 45, 46). In Sophie’s dreams, Martine was “wrapped in yellow sheets and had daffodils in her hair” (28).
- 19.
Unsurprisingly, Sophie buries Martine in a two-piece crimson suit with matching gloves and shoes.
- 20.
Joseph encourages Sophie to find her voice, to speak her truth. He dares her to dream: “You have to have a passion for what you do” (71). Sophie articulates triumphantly: “He even understood my silences” (72).
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Alexander, S.A.J. (2020). Reimagining the Nation: Gender and Bodily Transgressions in Breath, Eyes, Memory. In: Moïse, M., Réno, F. (eds) Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0_11
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