The Carriacou Shuffle

Despite the harried nature of these final weeks of the semester, I hope you found some pleasures and some interpretive riches in Praisesong for the Widow, a novel that seems to be powerfully capable of re-staging the issues (and, really, all of the texts) we've traversed this semester. Some of what I'll assemble here will likely be a kind of recap of last night's class, but it helps me, I guess, to try to articulate it in this way.

Marshall's novel certainly reinforces the importance of storytelling that was so prominent in Solibo Magnificent and the importance of mythic memory that was so prominent in No Telephone to Heaven; it uses both to contest and disrupt traditional historiographic understanding (which we've seen in every text this semester, seemingly), and finally fulfills Walcott's desire that historical memory seek out elation rather than recrimination and despair. After the death of Jay (who is "Jerome" at that point) and up through her crisis on the Bianca Pride, Avey falls into an almost amnesiac silence (though there's that "colossal cry" (133) that forms in her throat that nearly summons Christopher's howl in Cliff's novel), recalling the zombified state of Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, before gradually (through a series of minor awakenings and epiphanies) overcoming her North White Plains materialistic self by connecting with her Sea Islands self and the matrilineal inheritance that originated in her grandmother and then in her Aunt Cuney. It's a Clare Savage-like voyage of discovery -- at first unconscious but then finally self-aware (aided by that rum and coconut water in Lebert Joseph's church of a rum shop!); as it did for Clare, the voyage includes a reverse Middle Passage, an epic sickness, and the ministrations of the healing hands of maternal figures. Avey's increasingly dazed flight from the strip of the hotels as she wanders down the beach reminds us of Achille's sun-stroke induced passage into another time and place in Book 3 of Omeros; Avey's savior and guide, Lebert, joins Seven Seas, Medouze, and Solibo as carriers of a seemingly ancient wisdom (and how memorably Lebert is described, "the lines etched over his face like the scarification marks of a thousand tribes" (161)). Lebert's job, ultimately, is to make Avey aware of her connections to "the vast unknown lineage" (137), connections which are so strikingly metaphorized by "that myriad of shiny, silken, brightly colored threads [...] which were thin to the point of invisibility yet as strong as the ropes of Coney Island" (249); this sense of a global community, which finally unites the disparate geographical spaces of the novel (the northern United States, the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, the eastern Caribbean island of Carriacou, and Africa), makes us hear again the "many-tongued chorus" of Phillips's Crossing the River.

Early on, of course, we're reminded of Kincaid and A Small Place, especially as the Bianca Pride is described -- "huge, sleek, imperial, a glacial presence in the warm waters of the Caribbean" (16-7). When Avey becomes ill after eating that parfait, we realize, I think, that what she's sickened by is the gaudy excess of the tourism and Western materialism represented by that ship. It's interesting, too, to think about that skeletal tourist -- "the only thing to be seen on the deck chair was a skeleton in a pair of skimpy red-and-white striped trunks and a blue visored cap"; it's not until later, when Avey's transformation occurs via dance and movement, that we realize the symbolic import of that man's appeal to Avey to "have a seat. Take the load off your feet" (59) -- that advice represents the very opposite of what she needs. Somehow, as I noted last night, I can't help but juxtapose this tourist with that fleshy, impossibly irritating and condescending German tourist we saw in that film clip from Cannibal Tours; the latter, we suspect, is destined to become the former. Avey ultimately is physically reduced as well -- "she was as slow and clumsy as a two-year-old just learning how to undress herself" (151), but for her it's all a prelude to being re-filled and re-animated (remember Clare's "rebaptism" in NTTH); she awakens "like a slate that had been wiped clean, a tabula rasa upon which a whole new history could be written" (151). She becomes the opposite of that skeletal tourist, and thus makes even a Biblical reference freshly relevant: "Thus saith the Lord god unto these bones, Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live" (Ezekiel 37:5).

More to follow, I suspect, and, as always, I hope this post might induce a few of you to leave some of your own remainders, especially those of you who didn't get to weigh in much last night. In the meantime, continued good luck with your writing and with all of the pressures of the crazy endgame; I'll look forward to our last class meeting next week.