"Mwen na rien, Msieu": Jamaica Kincaid and the Problem of Creole Gnosis
2002; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cal.2002.0115
ISSN1080-6512
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean and African Literature and Culture
ResumoWhen I asked the Caribbean critic whose manuscript on Black feminist themes I was reviewing why she had not included a discussion of Erna Brodber's work in her study, she told me she had run out of time. Later, when the constraints of my role as reviewer no longer mattered, she offered me another explanation: her good friend had committed suicide. It happened around the time that she had been trying to write about Brodber, trying to work out how to discuss Brodber's takes on madness in Jane and Louisa Will Soon ComeHome and spirit possession in Myal. After the suicide, the evil spirits that had sent her friend plunging to destruction, like the biblical Gadarenian swine, tried to invade the critic's body. She had wrestled with them nightly, swinging between a languorous attraction to the pleasures they seemed to offer and a lurching dread of the evil they represented. She identified with Brodber's views on spiritual renewal and cultural affirmation, yet she could not help feeling that Brodber, by invoking this spiritual world through the folk culture, was dabbling with forces of evil, allowing Satan's minions a space and power that could ultimately destroy her reader. The critic had prayed her way through the writing and emerged stronger, spiritually. But she had left out the chapter on Brodber.
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