Jeffries is fully aware of the implications of the name “Hottentot”. In response to hearing Anna’s renaming he says, “I hope you call them something worse back.” Elaine Savory makes a strong connection between Anna’s renaming and her relationship with Jeffries, her eventual seducer. Whilst “not looking at Anna’s body in an obvious way, eventually the transaction between them is understood fully on his side to be a promise of sexual excitement from a white woman whom he perceives as having an extra thrill presumably from association with racist constructions of black females in his culture.”
Franz Fanon, in his book Black Skin, White Masks perceives these complex colonial relations as being in a state of flux rather than fixed or static. In his introduction to Fanon’s text, Homi Bhabha highlights this point, stating that the ‘familiar alignment of colonial subjects…Black/White, Self/Other…is disturbed…and the traditional grounds of racial identity are dispersed.’ So it is in the relationship between Jeffries and Anna. In transposing the colonizer’s stereotypical images of a black woman onto Anna he is disrupting and dispersing those ‘traditional grounds of racial identity’. Moreover, Anna is subconsciously enacting a mediated performance, aware of her impact upon him and the implications of her actions, in an attempt to adhere to his preconceptions of her. The relationship cannot be sustained on these fundamentally unstable preconceptions. Anna, both as a female and racial “Other” is penetrated by Jeffries and with the exchange of money is commodified. Without independent means Anna becomes that purchasable girl who is at the mercy of and eventually becomes dependent upon the upper middle class Jeffries. The relationship between these two characters reflects Rhys’s own location in the world where the West Indies was at the time still a commodity of the British Empire.
In another analysis of the colonial stereotype, Homi Bhabha challenges the ‘limiting and traditional reliance of the stereotype as offering, at any one time, a secure point of identification on the part of the individual,’ in this case Jeffries and Hester. Bhabha does not argue that the colonizer’s stereotyping of the colonized ‘Other’ is as a result of his security in his own identity or conception of himself but more to do with the colonizer’s own identity and authority which is in fact destabilized by contradictory responses to the Other. In order to maintain a powerful position it is important, according to Bhabha, for the colonizer to identify the colonized with the image he has already fixed in his mind. This image can be ambiguous as the colonized subject can be simultaneously familiar under the penetrable gaze of the all seeing, all powerful colonial gaze and be incomprehensible like the ‘inscrutable Oriental’. The colonized can be
“both savage…and yet the most obedient and dignified of servants…; he is the embodiment of rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child; he is mystical, primitive, simpleminded and yet the most worldly and accomplished liar , and the manipulator of social forces.”
In short, for Bhabha, the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies which, when imposed upon the colonized ‘Other’, cause a crisis of identity. So it is with Anna. Jeffries upon first meeting with the very young Anna can see that she is as ‘innocent as a child’ and is ‘most obedient’ sexually, but by her association with the Caribbean and the Hottentot as I have previously explored, she is subsequently attributed with being ‘the embodiment of rampant sexuality’ resulting in his taking of her virginity, abandoning her to prostitution but also leading to as Veronica Clegg observes ‘a loss of temporal referents’
Anna’s stepmother, Hester, also attempts to impose an identity upon Anna which not only conflicts with Anna’s own sense of identity but is also based around stereotypical perceptions. . Hester, whose ‘voice represents a repressive English colonial law’ believes that Anna’s father’s troubles resulted from his having lost ‘touch with everybody in England’ and that these severing of ties with the Imperial motherland is a signal to her that ‘he was failing’, losing his identity, reduced to the level of the black inhabitants of the island. This idea of contamination and racial reduction is explored by Paul B. Rich who explains that there was a belief in the early twentieth century that white people in the tropics risked ‘in the absence of continual cultural contacts with their temperate northern culture, being reduced to the level of those black races with whom they had made their “unnatural home”’.
In Hester’s eyes this apparent loss of identity is also experienced by Anna. She continually criticizes her speech, her relationship with Francine the black servant, and also insinuates degenerative behaviour on the part of her family, particularly Uncle Bo. Hester’s views reflect the growing disapproval in England at that time, of relationships between white people and the black population in the West Indies. Inter-racial relationships were discouraged for fear of contamination of the white ‘Self’. In voicing her disapproval of Anna’s friendship with Francine along with her continual use of the racist and derogatory term “nigger”, Hester is alluding to the fact that, in her opinion, Anna, especially through her speech, has indeed been contaminated and reduced racially and that Anna’s association with Francine thwarts her attempts to reconnect her with the colonizer’s ‘cultural contacts’. Hester rails that she finds it ‘impossible to get you [Anna] away from the servants. That awful sing-song voice you had! Exactly like a nigger you talked…and still do. Exactly like that dreadful girl Francine. When you were jabbering away together in the pantry I never could tell which of you was speaking.’ Hester’s constant criticism only serves to undermine Anna’s real identity and dislocate her further from the Caribbean world she once inhabited and the alienating London world she is now experiencing. Her accent sets her apart, drifting between two worlds.
Anna’s difficulties in negotiating these two worlds is a result of the ‘return of the diasporic’ to the metropolitan centre where ‘the perplexity of the living is most acutely experienced.’ This can certainly be seen in her response to the weather which, according to Bhabha, invokes ‘the most changeable and imminent signs of national difference’ The novel opens with;
“It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat and cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy. I didn’t like London at first. I couldn’t get used to the cold.”
And later upon arriving in England with Hester she describes it as being ‘divided into squares like pocket-handkerchiefs; a small tidy look it had, everywhere fenced off from everywhere else’ and then in London where the ‘dark houses all alike frowning down one after another’ Throughout the novel Anna continually experiences feelings of being enclosed. Many of the bedsits are restricting and box-like. On one occasion she remarks that ‘this damned room’s getting smaller and smaller…And about the rows of houses outside gimcrack, rotten-looking and all exactly alike’. The many small rooms between which Anna moves emphasize her disempowerment through enclosed spaces. These spaces, in turn, serve as metaphors for the consequences in voyaging into the metropolitan centre. She is at once shut inside these small monotonous rooms and shut out from that world which has sought to colonize her. It is perhaps ironic that the further she moves into the centre of the city, ending up as she does on Bird Street, just off Oxford Street , the more she is shut out and marginalized by that imperialist society.
Her memories of the West Indies are in sharp contrast to her impressions of England. The images of home are always warm, vivid and exotic, ‘Thinking of the walls of the Old Estate House, still standing, with moss on them. That was the garden. One ruined room for roses, one for orchids, one for ferns. And the honeysuckle all along the steep flight of steps’. When comparing the two worlds she remarks to herself that ‘the colours are red, purple, blue , gold, all shades of green. The colours here are black, grey, dim-green, pale blue, the white of people’s faces - like woodlice’. Her memory of home is experienced sensuously as she recalls the sights and smells:
“Market Street smelt of the wind but the narrow street smelt of niggers and wood smoke and salt fishcakes fried in lard’ and the sound of the black women as they call out, “salt fishcakes, all sweet an’ charmin’, all sweet an’ charmin’.’”
Anna attempts to convey this richness to Jeffries. His failure to appreciate the beauty she describes merely underlines the differences between the two. He expresses a preference for cold places remarking that ‘The tropics would be altogether too lush’. Jeffries’s reaction to the West Indies in fact reflects the colonizer’s view that the ‘ruined room for roses’ and ‘orchids’ portray a disorder, a garden of Eden complete with its implications of moral decay and as Bhabha states, a ‘tropical chaos that was deemed despotic and ungovernable and therefore worthy of the civilizing mission.’ Anna’s association with this world sets her up, in Walter’s eyes, as a figure representing a secret depravity promising forbidden desires. Anna, like the West Indies is something to be overpowered, enslaved and colonized, where the colonizer seeks to strip their identity and impose their own beliefs and desires. It is significant, therefore, that following this scene Anna loses her virginity to Jeffries and recalls the memory of the mulatto slave girl, Maillotte Boyd, aged 18, whose record Anna once found on ‘an old slave list at Constance’. Like Maillotte Boyd, Anna is now merely a commodity and Jeffries has no intention of ever seeing her as an equal. Her purity, in his eyes isn’t worth preserving as he already considers her the contaminated ‘Other’. By his actions he succeeds in maintaining that patriarchal imperialism which relies on institutional forms of racial and national separateness. Anna, as a twentieth century white Creole, is no freer than the nineteenth century mulatto slave. Just as Maillotte Boyd is, as racially mixed, suspended between two races, so Anna as a white Creole is suspended between two cultures, leaving her dislocated.
Anna’s voyage into the imperialist metropolis leads to boundaries and codes of behaviour, language and dress being constantly imposed upon her. She is aware for example of the importance of clothes as a means of controlling her social standing and also her standing as a woman. Through her dress Anna almost becomes that elegant white lady, mimicking London’s female high society. For Jeffries, Anna represents the ‘menace of mimicry’, which , according to Bhabha is ’a difference which is almost nothing but not quite’ and which turns ‘to menace- a difference that is total but not quite.’ This mimicry serves to empower Anna as it ultimately destabilises the essentialism of colonialist ideology, resulting in Jeffries imposing upon Anna the identity of the West Indian ‘Other’ This in turn leads to feelings of loss, alienation and dislocation, a rejection of being white and a desire to be black. ‘I always wanted to be black. I was happy because Francine was there….Being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad.’ Anna’s association with Hester meant that she ‘hated being white. Being white and getting like Hester, …old and sad and everything.’ Yet the warmth she expresses in her memories of Francine are always tempered by her realisation that Francine disliked her ‘because I [Anna] was white.’ Her feelings of being between cultures and feeling dislocated are never fully resolved. Anna’s voyage in the dark, reflects Rhys’s own sense of exile and marginality as a white West Indian woman. Teresa O’Connor remarks that ‘Rhys, herself caught between places, cultures, classes and races, never able to identify clearly with one or the other, gives the same marginality to her heroines, so that they reflect the unique experience of dislocation of the white Creole woman.’
The language used to express feelings of exile and loneliness, destitution and dislocation is both sparse and economic. It is neither decorative nor contrived, devoid of sentiment or without seeking sympathy. In commenting upon an essay written by Rhys discussing gender politics, Gregg writes that ‘It is important to note her [Rhys’s] belief that writing has a subversive potential. Resistance…can be carried out through writing that exposes and opposes the political and social arrangements.’ Helen Carr, in her exploration of Rhys’s language believes that:
“Rhys in her fictions unpicks and mocks the language by which the powerful keep control, while at the same time shifting, bending, re-inventing ways of using language to open up fresh possibilities of being.”
Una Marson, another Caribbean to voyage into the metropolis, also experienced loneliness, isolation and a struggle with the complexity of identity. Like Rhys, Marson fought with these feelings throughout her life, resulting in long periods of depression. Her belief in women’s need for pride in their cultural heritage established Marson as ’the earliest female poet of significance to emerge in West Indian literature’. She not only ‘challenged received notions of women’s place in society’ but also raised questions about ‘the relationship of the colonized subject to “the mother country”’
There was a considerable amount of poetry emerging out of the West Indies around this time but most of it was dismissed as being ‘not truly West Indian’, the reason for this being partly because many of the writers were English but also because many of the styles used by these writers mimicked colonial forms. Many of Marson’s early poetry reflects this mimicry showing a reliance upon the Romantics of the English poetic tradition, particularly Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron. The poem Spring in England reveals this indebtedness to the Romantics, including as it does a stanza where, having observed the arrival of Spring in London, the poet asks:
‘And what are daffodils, daffodils
Daffodils that Wordsworth praised?’
I asked. ‘Wait for Spring,
Wait for the Spring,’ the birds replied.
I waited for Spring, and lo they came,
‘A host of shining daffodils
Beside the lake beneath the trees’
(The Moth p6)
Clearly there are echoes of Wordsworth’s Daffodils throughout the stanza, reflecting the drive by colonialism through education to eradicate the West Indian selfhood. Yet for Marson this harnessing of English culture not only posed few problems but indeed was, I would argue, a necessary step in her voyage of self discovery. As seen with Rhys, mimicry was a subversive threat to colonial ideology, especially through language. Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry seeks to explore those ambivalences of such destabilizing colonial and post-colonial exchanges.
“The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. …The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry - a difference which is almost nothing but not quite - to menace - a difference that is almost total but not quite. And in that other scene of colonial power, where history turns to farce and presence to a ‘part’ can be seen the twin figures of narcissism and paranoia that repeat furiously, uncontrollably.”
Bhabha’s essay in recognising the power, the play and the dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized offers an alternative to the pessimistic view held by V.S. Naipaul who believed that West Indian culture was doomed to mimicry, unable to create anything ‘original’. Marson’s mimicry of the Romantics could be seen as a preparation to enter the colonizer’s metropolis, and to attempt to assimilate into the colonizer’s world. In making that voyage to the metropolis, Una Marson succeeds in taking that step from ‘the copy’ to the ‘original’. By remaining in Jamaica Marson risked remaining in an environment too rigidly ingrained by colonial prescriptions.
Una Marson’s voyage into ‘the heart of the Empire’, however, resulted in intense disappointment. For the first time, Marson experienced open racism and according to Jarrett-McCauley ‘The truth was that Una dreaded going out because people stared at her, men were curious but their gaze insulted her, even small children with short dimpled legs called her “Nigger”…She was a black foreigner seen only as strange and unwanted. This was the ‘Fact of Blackness’ which Fanon was to analyse in Black Skins, White Masks(1952), that inescapable, heightening level of consciousness which comes from “being dissected by white eyes”.’
Unlike Rhys, Marson was finding it impossible to blend visually within London. Consciousness of her colour made Marson conscious of her marginality. This consciousness led her seriously to question the values of the ‘mother country’. Marson’s work moved from mimicry to anti-patriarchal discourse, seen in her poem Politeness where she responds to the William Blake poem Little Black Boy with:
They tell us
That our skin is black
But our hearts are white
We tell them
That their skin is white
But their hearts are black
(Tropic Reveries p 44)
The poem demonstrates Marson’s growing resentment at being alienated by the colonial power. There is an uncertainty in her desire to both belong and to challenge, echoing Rhys in her sense of cultural unbelonging. Those anti-patriarchal feelings are present once more in her poem Nigger where she communicates the anger she feels at being abused and marginalized as the racial ‘Other’.
They call me ‘Nigger’
Those little white urchins,
They laughed and shouted
As I passed along the street,
They flung it at me:
‘Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!’
She retorts to this abuse furiously with:
You who feel that you are ‘sprung
Of earth’s first blood’, your eyes
Are blinded now with arrogance.
With ruthlessness you seared
My people’s flesh and now you still
Would crush their very soul
Add fierce insult to vilest injury.
In its repetition of the shocking term ‘Nigger’, Marson is confronting the white colonialist’s use of the word to exert power over and oppress the colonized. The violence of its use reflects the violence of their shared history where ‘Of those who drove the Negroes / To their death in days of slavery,’ regard ‘Coloured folk as…low and base.’ In highlighting this history of violence, oppression and slavery, Marson is attempting to invert this oppression and dislodge the notion of white supremacy, whilst attempting to negotiate a position from West Indian to African and in doing so, fashion an identity. By writing the poem in the first person singular and moving from ‘They’ to ‘You’ when addressing the white colonizers, Marson succeeds in centralizing herself and reversing the binary system of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’.
Nigger marks Marson’s sharpened perspective on issues such as racism and identity. Her voyage into the metropolitan centre triggers those ‘emergent identifications and new social movements…[being]…played out’. It was a time in Marson’s life where she was made to feel inadequate, lonely and humiliated but it also roused her to ‘resist the corrosive force of her oppressive world.’ Nigger reveals this sense of belonging and not belonging felt by Marson, of being part of the empire but never part of the Motherland, yet it simultaneously challenges the very essentialism in which the colonial Self is rooted. Moreover, the hostility she experiences in many ways acknowledges the success of Marson’s performance as a hybrid. Marson’s frustration and anger was compounded by the fact that in being middle class and educated she possibly saw herself as ‘a notch above the poor, black working class women from the old communities in Cardiff, Liverpool and London’ Marson explores this question of how middle class West Indians negotiate being educated and yet marginalized and even considered inferior in her play London Calling. The play, based on the experiences of colonial students in London charts the story of a group of expatriates who, upon being invited to the house of an aristocratic English family, dress up in outlandish native costume and speak in ‘broken’ English. The play, a comedy, takes a light hearted look at the stereotypical images held by the British, at the same time countering the myth of black inferiority. There is, in the play, a curious twist as the students from Novoko are presented as black versions of the British in their dress and behaviour, ’mimic men’ and yet they themselves attempt to ‘mimic’ their own folk culture. They are eventually discovered by one of the family, Larkspur, who then proposes marriage to Rita, one of the Novokans. The play ends with Rita declining Larkspur’s proposal in favour of Alton, another Novokan. This rejection of Larkspur places Rita in a powerful position. Rita is no longer the undesirable ‘Other’, she has resisted the oppressive world of the colonialists and placed herself as the centralised ‘Self’. Rita is Marson’s fantasy where the black woman is recognised as beautiful and an equal.
Marson’s activities in the League of Coloured Nations gave her purpose, direction and the opportunity to advance her political education whilst introducing her to the Pan - African movement ‘a sort of boomerang from the horrors of slavery and colonialism, to which Una, like many of her generation, was being steadily drawn.’ Marson’s work around this time reflects a desire to reclaim and restore that ‘Other’ cultural tradition, a difficult task as the Caribbean was not an homogeneous agency and it was not easy to establish a pre-colonial culture. The ethnic mix was large and hybrid making the notion of ‘Caribbeanness’ less easy to define. The Pan-African movement provided links with an alternative body to European colonialism and offered Marson a platform to renegotiate and redefine her idea of ‘Caribbeaness’ and race, an option not offered to Rhys. Having established a sense of being a black person in a white imperialist centre, she now needed to make sense of being a black woman within this paternalistic centre.
The poem Little Brown Girl attempts just this, constructing a dialogue of sorts between a white Londoner, whose gender is unclear, and a little brown girl. The poem begins with a series of questions put to the child:
Little brown girl
Why do you wander alone
About the streets
Of the great city
Of London?
Why do you start and wince
When white folk stare at you
Don’t you think they wonder
Why a little brown girl
Should roam about their city
Their white, white city?
(The Moth, p11)
The questioning of the little brown girl’s presence in London suggests a linguistic imperialism. It may be construed as the speaker challenging her right to be in the city, establishing her as the nameless, black ‘Other’. Her feeling of difference is emphasized in the repetition of the word ‘white’ on the final line of the second stanza. The third stanza plays out an interesting reversal in notions of blackness. The speaker asks why she has left the ‘little sunlit land / where we sometimes go / to rest and get brown’ alluding to the desire of white skinned people to tan which for the white colonialist signifies wealth, for the black ‘Other’ being inferior and uneducated.
From here there is a subtle shift of speaker and London is seen through the eyes of the little brown girl. Her perception of the city is distinctly unattractive where ‘There are no laughing faces, / people frown if one really laughs’ and:
There’s nothing picturesque
To be seen in the streets,
Nothing but people clad
In Coats, Coats, Coats,
(The Moth, p11)
If the poem began with the strangeness of the brown girl to the white gaze, here it teases out those feelings of alienation felt by the little brown girl at being in such a cold, drab place, so different from her own home. Once more Marson creates a reversal in the stereotype as she seeks to objectify white people observing that ‘the folks are all white -/ White, white, white, / And they all seem the same.’ In homogenizing the colonizers, the hybridity of the West Indians are then celebrated in the many varied skin tones of ‘black and bronze and brown’ which are themselves homogenized by the label ‘Black’. The vibrancy, colour and friendliness of ‘back home’ where the folks are ‘Parading the city’ wearing ‘Bright attractive bandanas’ contrasts with the previous stanza of the dour images of London.
The dialogue is handed back to the white speaker who attempts to establish the origins of the little black girl but succeeds in once more re-establishing the homogeneic white gaze indicated in the speaker’s inability to distinguish between many distinct nations :
And from whence are you
Little brown girl?
I guess Africa, or India,
Ah no, from some island
In the West Indies
But isn’t that India
All the same?
(The Moth, p13)
More than anything the poem conveys that sense of isolation felt by the little brown girl in the city. She never answers the white speaker directly and is positioned in the middle of the poem, again centralizing the colonized. In asking the question ‘Would you like to be white/Little brown girl?’ there is a sense of the colonizer attempting to manipulate and dominate the colonized, to Europeanise, ultimately leading to mimicry. Yet the questioner responds himself with ‘I don’t think you would / For you toss your head / As though you are proud / To be brown’. Marson, here, signals a move away from being a ‘mimic man’ seeking to challenge that whole Eurocentric paternalistic world and centralise the black women, the most marginalized figure in society.
The themes central to Little Brown Girl’s themes echo Rhys’s own negative reactions to London seen in the opening page of Voyage in the Dark. Like Rhys, Marson succeeds in capturing that colour and warmth of the West Indies contrasting greatly with the misery of London, experienced by both and which reinforce that racial and national separateness. Those differences prove for both to be irreconcilable, making it impossible for both Rhys and Marson to integrate, leaving both women dislocated from the metropolis. Little Black Girl serves as a useful reminder that many immigrants were women. This encounter between the city and a woman (in Marson’s case, a black woman) echoes Anna’s encounter in Voyage in the Dark albeit as a prostitute. Both walk the streets of the city and as women-as-walkers encounter the metropolis, negotiating its spaces. Denise deCaires Narian suggests that certainly Marson could be considered as a flaneuse. Neither Rhys nor Marson, however have the confident panache of the flaneuse and neither fulfil the requirements of flanerie originally set out by Baudelaire. The flaneur, he asserted, saw the ‘crowd as his domain, ... His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd’. The flaneur and therefore the flaneuse is engaged in strolling and looking but most importantly merging ‘with the crowd’. For Marson this is impossible as she is a black woman in a white city. Moreover, Baudelaire expands upon the idea of the flaneur as having ‘the ability to be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world’. Again this is problematic for both Marson and Rhys as their wanderings around the metropolis seek only to reinforce those feelings of ‘Otherness’, isolation and marginality. For Marson these feelings of alienation gained her the reputation of being a ’true loner who didn’t exactly seek out company’ leading to a ‘heightened level of bodily consciousness’ which comes from ‘being dissected by white eyes’.
In her struggle with being marginalized as a black women always at the mercy of the white metropolitan gaze, Marson was always aware of that Europeanised sense of beauty being white. This idea of beauty was so entrenched, even within the black community that they themselves set beauty against the paleness of their own skin. The importance of popularly disseminated images is tackled in Cinema Eyes where a black mother in addressing her daughter attempts to challenge the idea that ‘Europeans still provide the aesthetic reference point’. The speaker urges her eighteen year old daughter to avoid the cinema fearing that it might reinforce the idea that white is beautiful causing the girl to lose sight of her own beauty:
Come, I will let you go
When black beauties
Are chosen for the screen;
That you may know
Your own sweet beauty
And not the white loveliness
Of others for envy.
(The Moth, p88)
By growing up with a ‘cinema mind’ the mother has allowed herself to be at the mercy of those tools used by the colonizer to marginalize and indoctrinate, promoting their own superiority. Once again the ’mimic man’ re-emerges when black women reject their own in seeking an ‘ideal man’. ‘No kinky haired man for me, / No black face, no black children for me.’ This rather melodramatic narrative within the poem tells of the mother’s ‘fair’ husband shooting her first suitor whom she had initially rejected for being too dark, and then committing suicide. The shooting scene, a re enactment of a gun fight in a western, presents the cinema as a racist and degenerate institution. By the end of the poem, the speaker acknowledges her mistake in rejecting the first lover and finds a sense of self, previously denied by the saturation of cinematic images. In shaking off the colonizer’s indoctrination, which seeks to marginalize her, she addresses the question posed by Franz Fanon which is ‘to what extent authentic love will remain unattainable before one has purged oneself of that feeling of inferiority?’ Black invisibility in the cinema results in white ideology being forced upon a black body and essentially commodifying it and it is this which Marson seeks to deconstruct.
Another poem which tackles the reconstruction of female identity is Black is Fancy, where the speaker compares her reflection in the mirror with a picture ‘Of a beautiful white lady’. The mirror serves to reclaim the idea of black as being beautiful and a rediscovery of self:
Since Aunt Lisa gave me
This nice looking glass
I begin to feel proud
Of my own self
(The Moth, p75)
The speaker eventually removes the picture of the white woman suggesting that black worth and beauty can only really exist in the absence of white colonialism. The poem ends in a victory of sorts as she declares that John, her lover has rejected the pale skin in favour of ‘His black ivory girl’.
Kinky Haired Blues represents Marson’s quest for a more effective and authentic poetic voice in its use of African American speech.. The poem explores the rhythms and musical influences found in Harlem and gathering momentum about this time. Kinky Haired Blues like Cinema Eyes and Black is Fancy criticizes the oppressive beauty regime of white colonialism which seeks to disfigure and marginalize the black woman. The poem opens with the speaker attempting to find a beauty shop:
Gwine find a beauty shop
Cause I ain’t a belle
Gwine find a beauty shop
Cause I ain’t a lovely belle.
The boys pass me by
They say I’s not so swell
(The Moth, p91)
The speaker seeks to Europeanise her black features in an attempt to make herself more attractive. Male indifference experienced in the metropolis forces the speaker to see herself as an aberration, thrusting her onto the margins of a society which is continually projecting the idea that ‘white ‘is ‘right’. The beauty shop contains all the trappings of the colonizer’s idea of beauty, ‘ironed hair’ and ‘bleached skin’. Yet she is caught between being left to ‘die on de shelf’ if she doesn’t change herself, or eradicating her ethnic features and therefore her inner self if she does. By using blues within the poetry she is able to communicate this misery felt within her, that male perceptions of beauty projected by the colonizers dictate that she must distort her own natural beauty in order to fit in and conform. The poem highlights the struggle Marson experiences in trying to preserve her selfhood against such oppressive cultural forces.
Marson defiantly attempts to stand against this patriarchal order. She proudly announces that ‘I like me black face / And me kinky hair.’ Inspite of this brave stand Marson eventually succumbs and admits that she is ‘gwine press me hair / And bleach me skin.’ She, like Rhys can only resist internally to the colonialist’s ideals imposed on them.
As writers voyaging into the metropolis both Rhys and Marson share in their writing a pervasive sense of isolation where, from the location of London, their particular voices and concerns are, at the time, not recognised. Both writers, from this isolated position on the periphery of the centre. explore issues of womanhood, race and identity,. Marson’s experiences bring about an acute awareness of her difference and ‘Otherness’ as a Black woman. Her work is a defiant voice against this marginalisation and isolation. She was, as Jarrett MaCauley claims ‘the first Black feminist to speak out against racism and sexism in Britain.’ She was a pioneer in a growing literary culture which was to become the new postcolonial order.
Rhys, by contrast, a white West Indian from Dominica was experiencing a declining white minority status against a growing black population, itself an isolating factor both at home and within the metropolis. Kenneth Ramchard suggests that the work of white West Indian writers is characterized by a sense of embattlement:
“Adapted from Fanon we might use the phrase ‘terrified consciousness’ to suggest the White minority’s sensations of shock and disorientation as a smouldering Black population is released into an awareness of power.”
It is this ‘terrified consciousness’ which contributes to the struggle experienced by Anna in Voyage in the Dark . Located simultaneously both inside and outside West Indian socio cultural history, her journey to the ‘mother country’ seeks only to exacerbate these feelings of ‘in-betweenness’ and to suffer feelings of dislocation and alienation.
Both writers, therefore, in their voyage into the metropolis endure different kinds of anxieties in their sense of ‘unbelonging’ to either or both cultural worlds. Both use their writing to speak for the marginal, the hegemonic, the dispossessed, the colonized silenced female voice situated as they were within the cold, oppressive, hierarchical colonial metropolis attempting to impose an oppressive identity upon the exiled women.
George Lamming The Pleasures of Exile (London: Alison, 1960) p15
Palmer Adisa De Language Reflect Dem Ethos” in ‘The Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars’ ed. By Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong Leek. (New York: Peter Lang 1998 p23)
‘The Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars’ ed By Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong-Leek. (New York: Peter Lang 1998 p6)
V.S. Naipaul New York Review of Books 1992. Quoted in Helen Carr Jean Rhys (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 1996) p15
Helen Carr Jean Rhys (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 1996) p. xiv
Delia Jarrett-MaCauley The Life of Una Marson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) p51
Edward W. Said Representations of the Intellectual (London: Vintage 1994) p49
Molly Hite The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative Quoted in Joy Castro ‘Jean Rhys’ in The Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. 20, 2000. p6.Accessed 1 December 2005.
Elaine Savory Jean Rhys p92
Elaine Savory Jean Rhys p93
Gayatri Spivak ‘Three Women’s Text and a Critique of Imperialism’ in Henry Louis Jr. Gates Race, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) p269
Jean Rhys Voyage in the Dark (London: Penguin Books 1969)
Elaine Savoury Jean Rhys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998) p 95
Homi Bhabha ‘Remembering Fanon’, forward to Franz Fanon ‘s Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 1986) p ix
Homi Bhabha ‘The Other Question’ Location of Culture (London: Routledge 1994)p69
Veronica Marie Gregg Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995) p115
Sue Thomas The Worlding of Jean Rhys ( Westport: Greenwood Press 1999) p106
Jean Rhys Voyage in the Dark p53
Paul B. Rich Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) p19
Homi Bhabha “DissemInation: Time, Narrative and the margins of the Modern Nation” The Location of Culture p319
Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture p319
Homi Bhabha Location of Culture p85
Teresa O’Connor The Meaning of the West Indian Experience for Jean Rhys (PhD dissertation, New York University, 1985)cited in Caribbean Woman Writers; Essays from the first International Conference. p19
Taken from Rhys’s non fictional analysis of Gender Politics. Veronica Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination p47
Helen Carr Jean Rhys, (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 1996) p 77
Lloyd W. Brown, West Indian Poetry (London: Heineman, 1978) p 38
Denise deCaires Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making style (London: Routledge, 2002) p 2
Una Marson The Moth and the Star, (Kingston, Jamaica: Published by the Author, 1937) p24
Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994) pp85-92
Delia Jarrett-MaCauley The Life of Una Marson pp 49, 50
The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature ed. Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh (London: Routledge, 1996) p140-141
Homi Bhabha Location of Culture p 320
Jarrett-MaCauley The Life of Una Marson p51
Una Marson ‘Little Brown Girl’, The Moth and the Star. (Jamaica: The Gleaner. 1937) p11
deCaires Narain puts forward an interesting link between Marson and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners highlighting external identity in her book Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry p 21
Baudelaire The Painter and the Modern Life cited in Keith Tester The Flaneur (New York: Routledge, 1994), p 2
Laurence A. Brainer An Introduction to West Indian Poetry (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), p154
Una Marson ‘Cinema Eyes’ The Moth and the Star. (Jamaica: The Gleaner.1937) p87
Franz Fanon Black Skins, White Masks (London: Pluto, 1986), p4
Una Marson ‘Black is Fancy’ The Moth and the Star p75
Una Marson ‘Kinky Hair Blues’ The Moth and the Star p91
Kenneth Ramchard The West Indian Novel and its Background (London: Faber, 1870), p225