Babel and Babylon: Confronting Systems of Silence and Violence represented in novels by Cherie Jones and Kei Miller
Jacinth Browne-Howard, reading a book on the beach
Photo by Jannah Browne
Though contemporary Caribbean fiction is now brimming with women’s voices, the late 20th century painted a very different picture. Up until the 1970s there’d been a speculated “gap” in women’s novelized writings (15), according to Black studies professor Selwyn Cudjoe; a claim which Caribbean literature professor Evelyn O’Callaghan debunks in her seminal theoretical study on Caribbean women writers, Woman Version. This text, among other publications by O'Callaghan, became crucial in un-silencing women’s narratives in the male-dominated literary landscape of the time. Similarly, Gender professor Rhoda Reddock refutes the popular belief that Caribbean feminism originates as late as the 60s and 70s in her essay from Cudjoe's anthology, Caribbean Women Writers. More accurately, this period is defined as one where Caribbean women struggled “to define our womanness and our Caribbeanness” (62). Perhaps the subsequent increase in publications in the 90s interrogating these very subjects, including the much-celebrated anthology Out of Kumbla, emerged from the need to give Caribbean women voice.
The aforementioned works signal a collective bedrock of excavating hidden stories from the mid-late 20th century, making way for the West Indian genre of historical fiction to do the same with the advantage of hindsight. As a result, authors like Cherie Jones in How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps her House, and Kei Miller in The Last Warner Woman and Augustown, provide the means to make sense of these silenced narratives through the similarities in essential commentary on women’s voices, existences, silences and violent pressures, imposed by what I will sum up as “Babylon,” throughout the 1960s and 80s. The first novel deals with a Barbadian woman, silenced through domestic abuse at the hands of her violent husband Adan, and the second with a Jamaican woman who is abused and silenced by men in her life notwithstanding her terrifying gift to foresee and announce natural disasters.
The connection between silence and violence is inevitably established in a society built on the brutal history of colonialism and imperialism. Alongside monumental transitions such as adult suffrage, statehood and independence for many Caribbean territories, the mid-late 20th century also engendered violence against marginalized – usually poor, Black folk, who were ignored and vilified. As I consider Cherie Jones’s Lala, who experiences this on a domestic and communal level, I’m further reminded of the matrix which fosters this treatment. My mind goes to historical atrocities such as the 1963 Coral Gardens incident in which many Rastafarians were killed by law enforcement because of rising anti-Rasta sentiment in Jamaica. Several issues stand out to me considering this, namely the long-withheld reparations that erased the gravity of the occurrence, the double marginalization shared by Rastafarians in Jamaica and Caribbean Black women around this time, and the irony of Rastafarianism as one of the earliest manifestations of embracing Black identity in the face of colonial erasure. With these in mind, I suggest a credo to be derived from Rastafari beliefs in understanding and addressing the violence faced by women as illustrated in the selected novels.
Kei Miller’s Augustown gives an idea of the kind of framework I want to shape here. Along with its empowering effects on West Indians, particularly Rastafarians, scholars like Reddock see Garveyism as a core impetus for Afro-Caribbean women and their organizations in the 50s, primarily through the influence of Marcus Garvey’s first wife, Amy Ashford Garvey (77). Consequently, the notion of “Babylon,” shown in Augustown, embodies a joint enemy of Caribbean women and Rastafarians. Ma Taffey, a Rastafarian woman, substitutes every dialogue reference to law enforcement with “Babylon.” “Babylon System” for her, represents “all them things in this life that put a heavy stone on the heads of people like you and me – all them things cause we not to rise” (Miller 11). Her niece Gina and her Rastafarian friend Bongo Moody embody these people, sharing the pain of their friend Clarkey who is murdered by law enforcement. This shared helplessness resurfaces when Gina’s son Kaia’s dreads are forcibly shaved by his school teacher. Similarly, in The One-Armed Sister, Lala and her Rastafarian friend Tone share a profound solidarity, deepened by the pain of domestic abuse (Lala) and rape (Tone). As the only true witnesses to each other’s suffering, they gain courage by verifying and validating otherwise overlooked trauma.
Though these instances show the solidarity influenced by inherited Black self-empowerment, they more clearly show the diametric imposition of Babylon in the Caribbean and its complex effects. To further illustrate, Augustown presents Babylon in the 1800s as a simple dualistic construct of “white upper-class rascals. . . oppressing poor black folk” (Miller 113). But by 1982, when Gina tries to convince a white boy she loves that he is what her aunt calls “Babylon,” it becomes clear in their deepening exchange, that Babylon is more accurately an overlap of power structures including social, racial, gender, political and economic factors used to oppress the less fortunate.
The manifold layered nature of Babylon demands intersectional approaches to address its varying effects. What I mean to suggest is that realistically, as Black Cultures professor, Andrea Davis notes in response to a general call for intersectional, Caribbean feminist politics in Horizon, Sea and Sound, “Black experiences in the Caribbean are tightly bound up in histories of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the wider Americas, they cannot be fully understood outside of these historical and contemporary intersections” (89). In other words, Black experiences, especially in the Caribbean, cannot be read in a vacuum. Both novelists in question understand this often-erased complexity and account for it in their work. For example, in The One-Armed Sister, Mira Whalen’s mother (though white adjacent) is a descendant of “scorned Redlegs of St. John” (Jones 52), a penniless, ‘poor white’ despised by descendants of slaves and slave masters alike. Her lower-class status leaves her vulnerable to exploitation and abandonment by “an established black businessman like James Martineau” (54) who refuses to publicly associate with a woman beneath his station.
Race and gender, therefore, cannot be treated as strictly binary in terms of how Babylonian effects are deployed. In Augustown, Kaia’s mixed race does not protect him from the improvidence of his shorn head by his Black, male school teacher Mr. Saint-Joseph, who becomes an executor of imperial beauty standards via his position of power. Likewise, the central narratives of abuse in The One-Armed Sister and The Last Warner Woman surround Black women – namely Lala and Adamine, while also documenting by contrast the compounded reality of Babylon’s reach. For example, Jones tells the story of blue-eyed Janey’s “goodly” father Dr. Thompson who serves the Baxter’s community in Barbados but is still robbed by Adan – Lala’s prime abuser. During the robbery, Adan brutally rapes and beats Janey. It doesn’t matter that historically creole white women, characterized by women like Jean Rhys’s Antoinette, from her seminal novel Wide Sargasso Sea, are lauded because of their “pure and lily-white femininity” (173) as gender scholar Paula Morgan puts it in Writing Rage. Within the Babylonian matrix she is still subject to repercussive violence.
The effects of Babylon are cyclical, emasculating Adan who abuses Janey then Lala. Though Adan himself exhibits sociopathic tendencies, for which he should be held accountable, his own violence is rooted in Babylon. Here, Morgan’s analysis of Dionne Brand’s abusive, rapist character in her short story “San Souci” perfectly parallels Adan as a “parodic imitation of the patriarchal model . . . a Caliban-like figure who embodies an aggressive and brutal counterhegemonic masculinity” (186). Adan grows up in poverty, is beaten by his aunt with a frying pan and is practically raised by his thieving, criminal stepfather. Consequently, like Brand’s character, he develops a “perverted self-construction” as “violence is inherent to his expression of manhood” (Morgan 186). Inevitably, he exercises this most with Lala. Throughout the novel, he becomes enraged every time Lala tries to empower herself and support her family financially because he believes that “he is a man, and as a man he going and figure out how to pay for the [Baby’s] funeral” (Jones 139). We can compare this with Bruce Young, a British white man from The Last Warner Woman who regularly sexually assaults Adamine while she is confined to a British mental institution. Adamine defines him as “Satan himself” (Miller 239) but he never suffers consequences for his actions. A mixture of factors influences one’s place in Babylon, but as Jones shows in her novel, race and economic virility are not solution enough. Peter’s murder, for instance, is of higher priority to the police than Lala’s baby’s on account of his status as a wealthy, white, tourist man. Yet his status does not spare him from becoming a byproduct of Babylon’s retribution when Adan shoots him.
Despite the seeming inevitability of the effects of intersectional factors on racialized women, the novels disclose ways in which, by contrast, poor Black women often have fewer potential means of escape and so these stories of their abuse are coded with oblique methods of self-rescue. These methods act as a point of agency or navigating a kind of Babel where the women encrypt languages via skills of diversion, survival and escape to disrupt the confining Babylonian towers of their circumstances. While examining how women encode methods of survival and escape, I recall reading “Caribbean/Anticolonial Feminist Methods for Analysing Talk and Text in Research on Gender-Based Violence” in which feminist and gender scholar, Halimah Deshong elucidates what I understand to be the importance of “discourse analysis” and “narrative analysis” in gender violence methodologies to give meaning to the language of personal accounts and to enable the expression of these specific stories (457). This reinforces my belief that storytelling and narratology themselves already act as countermeasures against Babylon both in fiction and reality.
To illustrate, in The Last Warner Woman, Kei Miller uses metafiction to have us ask ourselves, who does the narrative belong to? Mr. Writer Man and Adamine spend the duration of the novel debating who has the right to tell Adamine’s story as the Last Warner Woman of the last leper colony in Jamaica. It soon becomes clear that Mr. Writer Man can validate his perspective with a white adjacent identity, a respectable occupation as a researcher from Britain, and established, storied cliches like ‘Once Upon a Time.’ On the other hand, poor Adamine is relegated to a myth from a place that no longer exists. The novel is punctuated with “an instalment of a testimony spoken to the wind... shhhhh” alongside her speculated madness to signal her damnation to silence. Even when she receives fame in the newspaper for her powerful prophecies, Adamine is represented in blurred black and white photos. Her full story is never represented by traditionally respected means of documentation. She does not even have a claim to her “true, true name” given to her orally, as her birth paper dictates that she is “Pearline Portious . . . not the Original, . . . but the Second” (37) which complicates the validity of her existence further as her mother is dead.
As a result, myth becomes an important point of narrative reclamation. Adamine inverts the narrative hierarchy by determining that Mr. Writer Man should have used “Crick, Crack” to indicate his story’s status as “make believe” (Miller 37), centering her own identity, before taking control of her own story. She follows up with the repetition and reassertion of her own name and origins for the duration of the novel. She creates her own living legend as the last Warner Woman with terrifying, accurate prophecies and spiritual sensitivity to Christian/Yoruban spiritualities – leaning toward the African identity encouraged by Garveyism.
In The One-Armed Sister, Lala channels myth in a similar fashion to rescue herself from violence. Lala’s grandmother Wilma is determined to “beat her granddaughter full of good sense” (Jones 175) when she desires to rebel. Yet the local, eponymous folktale of the one-armed sister who lost her arm by entering the nearby Baxter’s tunnels after her mother forbade her is what Lala thinks about during the beating, for “it is because of that one-armed sister that she does not allow these lashes to deter her from escaping Wilma’s stone house whenever she feels like it” (175). Lala’s rebellion is a rejection of the Babylonian hegemony of her grandmother’s household. It is retribution for her mother Esme who, though subservient, was viciously raped by a stepfather that Wilma refused to evict at the expense of her daughter’s safety. It is retribution for the enforced silence Wilma applies by telling her own daughter “don’t tell nobody” (86) after she is assaulted. Lala consistently seeks to devise her own fate, to re-shape the narrative even when Adan directly and the police implicitly place the blame for Baby’s passing entirely on her. From the very beginning, when her grandmother demands that she respond to the birth name Stella, she is willful and courageous enough to face the fate of a hacked arm, if it means that she could re-create herself and answer “my name is Lala” (Jones 4).
Other than reclaiming their identities through foregrounding narratives, the abused and trapped women of these novels address their circumstances through craft. This reflects on the historical iterations of women’s movements, particularly self-help societies in the Caribbean. Rhoda Reddock talks about how central housewifery skills, needlework and other crafts operate as means to help poor women and to give upper-class women and racialized women ways to survive and “economic autonomy” (63-64). In The One-Armed Sister, Lala wields her craft for survival. Jones positions Lala’s craft in direct opposition to the hegemonic power that Adan represents. He tries to stop her from braiding, knowing it’s “the only thing that keep you sane” and that “you born to braid like he born to breathe” (26). When Adan demonizes Lala for Baby’s death, it extends to the entire community. This results in her loss of customers, livelihood and means to escape – especially after Adan takes her earnings and refuses to return them. Nevertheless, Lala continues to fight: she is the one who ends up paying for Baby’s funeral though the public narrative cushions Adan’s ego. Despite her doubts, shaking hands and self-blame, she focuses on the deftness of her fingers in her craft. The incantory “overunderoverunder” (150) of the braiding, helps her counter the public’s shaming gaze and the accusatory interrogation of the sergeant.
Needlework is a mainstay of survival in both novels. Wilma uses the “overunder” of threading to help her remain sane when her daughter is raped by her husband much like her granddaughter Lala does with braiding. Likewise, Adamine’s mother Pearline, in The Last Warner Woman, finds her rescue from poverty in sewing ugly, purple doilies which elicits the pity of a white, local priest Monsignor Dennis. He ends up purchasing the doilies weekly. Though these crafts don’t always bring these women the physical escape they need from the insanity they experience; it grants escape for their minds and hands. This in turn is an act against Babylon’s vices of violence to entirely erode and destroy them. For Adamine, her craft is as a seer, one who brings realities to life that others see as make believe or judge as insanity but is so powerful and precise that she can shape the world around her. Despite the silencing imposed on her by the government federal department, her first lover Captain Lucas, her abusive husband Milton, the British mental institution, and to some extent Mr. Writer Man; Adamine continuously resounds her narrative, name and origins. Beyond the spat between her and Mr. Writer Man, we eventually learn that whether through a prophet’s warrant or a writer’s pen, the final goal is mutual. In order to nullify the vices of Babylon, story must be told to foreground truth.
There is so much more to say about how these women demonstrate feminist consciousness by fighting for themselves in the worst and most dire situations. There are so many more credits to attribute to the authors of these texts whose use of narratology, both in fiction and nonfiction, activates knowledge and clarifies absences about women which remained hidden historically. One may question whether these women physically escape the torment of their circumstances. While readers of both novels know the answers, my hope is that the more important takeaway is that by acknowledging the modes of survival enforced by these women for themselves, and how scholars amplify these voices, we verify the unseen, unspoken stories of women throughout the Caribbean, especially since domestic violence is still a threatening reality. My hope is that we feel moved where we can, to act, to speak, to help, to protect and to change. Despite the temptation to look away, these narratives challenge us to pay attention, record and remember. The vices of Babylon can be chipped away at on an individual level, but the entire work will take interest and commitment on national and regional scales in support of the organizations who already labour tirelessly. These novels show that Babylon is a common enemy of all racialized Caribbean people and so, especially for the sake of the most vulnerable, it requires all of our voices to address.
Works Cited
Davis, Andrea. Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and Africa Cultural Critiques of Nation. Northwestern University Press, 2022.
Deshong, Halimah. “Caribbean/Anticolonial Feminist Methods for Analysing Talk and Text in Research on Gender-Based Violence.” Methodologies in Caribbean Research on Gender and Sexuality. Eds. Kamala Kempadoo and Halimah A.F. Deshong, 2021, 449-465.
Jones, Cherie. How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House. Little, Brown and Company, 2021.
Miller, Kei. Augustown. Vintage Books, 2018.
---. The Last Warner Woman. Coffee House Press, 2012.
Morgan, Paula and Valerie Youssef. Writing Rage: Unmasking Violence through Caribbean Violence. UWI Press, 2006.
O’Callaghan, Evelyn. Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women. 1993.
Reddock, Rhoda. “Feminism, Nationalism, and the Early Women’s Movement in the English Speaking Caribbean (with Special Reference to Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.” Caribbean Women Writers. Ed. Selwyn Cudjoe, 1990, 61-81
