Caribbean

Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community

mandy — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

When Tamara Mose Brown had her first child in 2004, she began going to different Brooklyn, New York parks on sunny afternoons. In each, she found dozens of West Indian nannies caring for the babies and toddlers of the largely White middle- and upper-income denizens who lived nearby. Questions about both the nannies' work and the race, class, and gender dynamics of their lives prompted Brown—the Canadian-born daughter of Trinidadian immigrants—to begin spending time with these women. Their conversations were eye-opening. For one, Brown came to realize the centrality of paid childcare to U.S. economic life. For another, she was shocked to find that employers who labor at home often require nannies to work outdoors, or in libraries or community centers, for upwards of ten hours a day.

What’s more, Brown quickly recognized that childcare workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, are routinely exploited—underpaid, and required to do household chores far outside their job description, from picking up dry cleaning, to cooking, to going to the pharmacy or market. Nonetheless, she also discovered that domestic workers have found ways to create social networks to make their work lives easier and more enjoyable. Often predicated on a common ethnic heritage, these networks enable childcare workers to share everything from food to gossip. By pre-arranging meetings in public spaces, they can watch the kids in their care while also socializing and breaking the monotony of their jobs.

But, Brown writes in Raising Brooklyn, as wonderful as these networks can be, there’s a down side. To wit, nannies in public spaces are easily observed. Take the website I Saw Your Nanny. In one incident, Brown reports that people with limited information logged onto the site and reported that a toddler had been lured away by a suspicious man while his caretaker—who was eventually identified as the child’s mother and not a nanny—was obliviously chatting. Turns out that the man was the child’s father, but, of course, the notice was posted before this fact was ascertained.

That said, Brown chronicles the ways nannies support one another, whether meeting on a particular park bench at a particular time each day or gathering for story hour at the local library. Cell phones have been a tremendous boon, she continues, giving otherwise isolated workers a way to connect with one another, an easy way to share news from home or strategize about ways to deal with a difficult child or a demanding employer. They’ve also enabled them to organize, and many of the workers Brown interviews are active participants in Domestic Workers United, an organization that successfully pushed the New York state legislature to pass a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010.

Brown has done a masterful job—as a participant observer—of reflecting the everyday world of female domestic laborers. While she, herself, straddles two worlds—belonging to an Afro Caribbean community that is victimized by racism while simultaneously having the financial resources to hire a part-time nanny to care for her two children—her ethnic identity allowed her access to an insular community. The result is both fascinating and compelling. Although Brown occasionally lapses into sociological jargon, Raising Brooklyn is generally accessible and insightful. Her own insider-outsider status is clearly presented; at the same time, her compassion for the twenty-five nannies she interviewed makes Raising Brooklyn a wonderful testament to the valuable contribution working class women of color make to life in the U.S. of A.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, March 7th 2011

Women’s Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engendering Social Justice, Democratizing Citizenship

farhana — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Nathalie Lebon, Elizabeth Maier

Rutgers University Press

One of the aims of the groundbreaking work Women’s Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean is the diffusion of the ideas of these mostly Latin-American scholars to a larger audience, thus the original 2006 Spanish-language volume’s translation and subsequent adaptation and expansion into English.

However, it seems contradictory to the spirit of the project to start reviewing it without mentioning the authors here. Besides excellent introductory essays by the editors listed above, this tome includes articles by the following Latin American and Caribbean academics who, for the most part, have been conscientiously translated from the original language: Myriam Merlet, Graciela di Marco, Norma Mogrovejo, Montserrat Sagot, María Luisa Tarrés, and Morena Herrera. The volume also includes interviews done by Graciela di Marco, and articles by scholars such as Karen Kampwirth, Ana Lorena Carrillo, Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Kia Lily Caldwell, Mercedes Prieto, Andrea Pequeño, Clorinda Cominao, Alejandra Flores, Gina Maldonado, Cathy A. Rakowski, Gioconda Espina, Fiona MacAulay, Marysa Navarro, María Consuelo Mejía, Virginia Vargas, Marta Núñez Sarmiento, Helen Safa, Alice Colón, and Sara Poggio.

The foreword by Sonia E. Alvarez sums up succinctly why this book is so important to those of us studying questions of gender and activism in Latin America and the Caribbean. According to her reading, it is “brimming with compelling conceptual innovations, fresh empirical insights, and provocative political analysis, setting new parameters for future studies of feminist and other social movements in politics” in the region. There is no denying her expert judgment. However, the fact that this study provides a voice for the women listed above is what brings the innovative aspect, since many of these women have now been working in their respective countries for years in their own languages. Instead of all the “old regulars” working in the field in what the editors refer to as the Global North, this volume allows for an “inside look” into some (an infinite part, unfortunately) of the research that is ongoing in this region, at the same time as it allows for contrasting and/or other voices to come fill its pages. This achievement must be celebrated. Thus, for example, Graciela di Marco provides a voice for founding members of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Nora Cortiñas and Estela Carlotto, more than thirty years into their continued battle.

Although some countries’ movements are still not included in this type of volume (Bolivia, Panama, and Honduras come to mind), the attempt made to be as inclusive as possible is one which is on the right track with making visible research on gender-based issues, especially with regard to race, religion, sexual preferences and social classes. However, there is no way to ignore the magnitude of providing a space to the women’s indigenous groups from Ecuador (for example), given that they have only had the right to vote in their own countries for less than forty years. And, significantly, this is what this volume is about- taking a larger look at women’s activism in the region and appreciating the scope of what has advanced in the past years for the very diverse women’s movement, given the ebb and flow of the political, social and economic circumstances in the world.

Regrettably, the situation has actually gone backwards in some countries such as Nicaragua where the women’s movement has suffered significant losses in the past years, as Kampwirth argues in her chapter, especially with the still controversial therapeutic abortion debate which has been ongoing in the country. While some countries have moved from what were seemingly viable feminist movements towards what Kampwirth deems as “antifeminism” or backlash movements, some are only experiencing nascent incursions into this activist domain (what Lebon fittingly calls “activism with unexpected actors”) and still reject the “feminist” label.

Among the twenty excellent chapters, of particular note in the volume, given last January’s earthquake and more recent cholera outbreak in Haiti, is Myriam Merlet’s article on women’s citizenship in that country. It provides a remarkable glimpse into the leaps and bounds that were being made by women leading up to this disaster and, perhaps, provides some inherent insight into how some of the country’s problems could eventually be resolved from within.

Written by: Sophie M. Lavoie, January 11th 2011

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature

farhana — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

Duke University Press

Tinsley’s fascinating study of “women loving women” examines their colonial and postcolonial experiences in Dutch, French, and English-speaking areas of the Caribbean. This volume, in the Perverse Modernities series by Duke University Press, takes its title from the writing of Trinidad-born poet-novelist Dionne Brand, whose cane-cutter character Elizete uses the phrase “thiefing sugar” to describe her feelings for another woman, Verlia. The metaphor refers to the time when slaves could be whipped for selling sugar from the plantations for any reason; it embodies both transgression and forbidden pleasure. Tinsley points out that using the term is “stealing language itself” to evoke a “transformative desire” to change the status of women and challenge the injustices of society.

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature incorporates black, queer, and feminist theory into its analysis. It draws on literature, history, geography, anthropology, economics, and linguistics to paint a colorful, multilayered portrait of Caribbean women. Texts from Suriname, Jamaica, Haiti, Martinique, and Trinidad (along with occasional references to Cuba, Grenada, Aruba, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the region) are used to explore the history of sexuality and the complications of Creole traditions. Tinsley begins with love songs sung by black working-class women to their female lovers, along with accounts of birthday parties and erotic dances and religious ceremonies, as well as messages exchanged in the symbolic language of flowers, to show the intricacies of gender identities in the West Indies.

In succeeding chapters she turns to Luminous Isle, an autobiographical novel by the white Jamaican woman writer Eliot Bliss, then to the erotic poems written in the 1920s by Haitian poet Ida Faubert, Mayotte Capécia’s novel I Am a Martinican Woman, Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff’s novel, No Telephone to Heaven, and, finally, Dionne Brand’s poetry collection No Language Is Neutral, in order to trace “their poetics of decolonization” and to point out how these texts suggest reconfiguring gender history to acknowledge the strength and beauty of Afro-Caribbean woman-identified women. Tinsley’s brilliant, sensitive explications, her frequent references to artworks from the area, and her descriptions of lush landscapes make reading her work a delight and a surprise.

However, I do wish that she had studied more than one Hispanic writer, Fidel Castro’s niece Mariela Castro Espín. But I understand that bringing in a substantial number of texts in Spanish would have enlarged her project’s boundaries to perhaps unmanageable proportions. Several references to U.S. interventions in Grenada also left me wanting more information on the effects of North American activities in the region. I hope that Tinsley herself or one of her readers will expand on the groundbreaking work she has done in this book. I highly recommend it to a cosmopolitan audience.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, December 3rd 2010

So Much Things to Say: 100 Calabash Poets

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:01:00 +0000

Edited by Kwame Dawes, Colin Channer

Akashic Books

Each May for the past ten years, poets from all over the globe converge in Jamaica for the Calabash International Literary Festival. So Much Things to Say: 100 Calabash Poets brings together the work of poets known and unknown who have read at the Festival or are Calabash Writer’s Workshop Fellows. The 100 poems in this vibrant anthology are organized into sections by length, and inspired by the editors’ intention that the book be enjoyed in a flexible manner, I took great pleasure in sampling poems at random and finding breathtaking imagery, emotional tone, meaning, and joy in each piece.

The voices of the colonized, the war-torn, the oppressed, and the hopeful shine in this collection of poems that are political, visceral, inspired, sorrowful, courageous, and essentially, beautifully human. In Li-Young Lee’s “The Children’s Hour,” Lee captures all of the above. With armed soldiers at the door, an elder narrator advises the children in shape-shifting ("Sister, quick. Change into a penny.") and gives forbearance to survive the assault:

Don’t listen when they promise sugar. _ _Don’t come out until evening, _ _or when you hear our mother weeping to herself.

“10 Haiku” by Sonia Sanchez is a prime example of the fluid, timeless, earthy rhythm of many of the Calabash poems:

as you drummed your hands kept reaching for God

One of the longer poems, Tim Seibles' “The Last Poem About Race” is a departure from the more organic imagery and tackles the complexity of being mixed race personally, in relationship, and as a society:

I never want to think being American is impossible, but the truth is

some silly mothafuckas still fly Confederate flags and maybe it’s all _ _too much for any one man.

In his sparkling introduction, Kwame Dawes most perfectly and poetically sums up the spirit of the Calabash Festival: “At once you are in a timeless place in which the spoken word represents an incantatory ritual that creates and affirms community... Imagine stories dropping like seeds into the ground and growing rapidly and wildly all around you.”

Fortunately for those for whom an annual sojourn to Jamaica isn’t necessarily possible, that enchantment is immediately accessible in this collection. Indeed the story of the festival and of this anthology coming together in just one month is a testament to the magic that is spun at Calabash each year, and I prize my Advance Uncorrected Proof of So Much Things to Say like a collector’s item.

Written by: Matsya Siosal, July 13th 2010

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

admin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:04:00 +0000

By Maryse Condé

University of Virginia Press

This fascinating novel, which won France's Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme, offers readers a vivid re-imagining of the life of a historical figure mentioned only briefly in the transcripts of the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials: a slave woman of Caribbean origins, accused of practicing voodoo. Angela Davis, in her foreword to the current edition, asserts the importance of “the retelling of a history that is as much mine as it is hers,” a story of great significance to Black women who are “Tituba's cultural kin.” The first person narrative gives Tituba an opportunity to recount her life as she sees it, to overcome the silence imposed on her by official histories of the period. Maryse Condé, herself born in Guadeloupe, begins by evoking the beauties and horrors of the West Indies—of Barbados in particular—where Tituba is born to an Ashanti woman “as lithe and purple as the sugarcane flower,” who had been raped by a British sailor. Little Tituba flourishes at first in her island home, but her mother comes into conflict with their master and is hanged for striking a white man. At the age of seven, Tituba is taken in by old Mama Yaya and raised in the traditional healing ways inherited from African ancestors. The growing girl learns to respect everything in nature, to make the proper prayers and sacrifices, to devise “potions whose powers I strengthened with incantations,” and to communicate with the spirits, including her deceased mother.

The idyll in the wilderness ends abruptly when the adolescent Tituba falls in love with a merry rascal, a slave named John Indian. She soon moves to the capital, Bridgetown to be with him. John Indian jokingly calls her a witch, because of her special magical gifts, but others suspect her of commerce with the devil even though, as she protests, “Before setting foot inside this house I didn't know who Satan was!” In an interview published in the afterword to the present edition, Maryse Condé describes Tituba as “doing only good to her community” through her relations with “the invisible forces,” and therefore not a witch in the bad connotations of the term, but the bigoted people with whom she comes in contact—especially after she is sold along with John Indian to a Puritan minister, Samuel Parris—do not see her in a positive light.

One of the themes of the book is the unlikely (and, unfortunately, often temporary) alliances that can form between persons divided by race, class, or religion. When Parris moves with his household to Boston, a strong friendship develops between Tituba and Elizabeth Parris, the minister's wife, as well as with her child Betsey, It is one of the ironies of the novel that Tituba's efforts to amuse and aid the girls in her charge at Salem Village arouse the villagers' fears and turn them against her. The Caribbean folktales she tells about sorcerers and vampires titillate everyone and feed their fears of damnation and demonic possession. When Betsey tells her cousin Abigail about the secret magic rites Tituba has used to protect the frail little girl, the situation gets out of control. Condé locates the ultimate source of the hysteria that sweeps through the village as a combination of the repression of healthy sensual pleasures along with the accumulation of small-town jealousies and resentments among the populace, together with unacknowledged guilt at the mistreatment of Blacks and American Indians by the white settlers. The village girls accuse many local figures of magically tormenting them.

Arrested and interrogated in 1692, Tituba at first protests her innocence: she has done no wrong, has not hurt any of the afflicted children. Her husband John Indian advises her to play along with her accusers, to tell them what they want to hear. He even pretends to be possessed, himself. In a controversial sequence criticized by many reviewers, the novel's heroine encounters a character called Hester in prison, clearly based on the wholly fictional heroine of The Scarlet Letter. Certain historians have condemned this intrusion of Romantic literature into a historical novel, yet Condé in her interview defends it on two different grounds: a) that her work “is the opposite of a historical novel,” that her Tituba is an invented “female hero, ... a mock-epic character,” and b) that as a novelist, she felt “there was a link between Tituba and Nathaniel Hawthorne,” persons inhabiting the same region at times not too far apart for comparison. The conversation between the two prisoners gives Condé a chance to explore the social constraints on women and the difficult relations between men and women. Ann Armstrong Scarboro's afterword asserts that here Condé “parodies modern feminist discourse,” but it seems to me that Condé gets to play both sides against the middle in these passages by intermixing humorous and serious notes and leaving it up to the reader to decide how to interpret them.

While Tituba's testimony at trial is quoted from actual transcripts, the additional context Condé provides suggests that the accused woman is merely mouthing words that others are saying, going along with other people's superstitions. As a confessed witch she is sentenced to jail but escapes the death penalty. Thus she survives, while many of the people condemned for witchcraft are executed. The historical note to this edition of the novel states that in 1693 the slave Tituba was sold to pay her prison fees and the price of her chains. It is unclear what happened thereafter to the historical woman, but Condé chooses to have her Tituba purchased by Benjamin Cohen d'Azevedo, a Portuguese Jewish merchant whose wife had died. Benjamin and Tituba slowly become friends and eventually lovers. After a terrible house fire set by Puritan persecutors in which Benjamin's children are killed, he frees her and buys a ship passage back to Barbados for her. There she becomes involved with a group of maroons—wild Blacks who seem to be working towards freedom for the plantation slaves—but even there she finds betrayal and a revolt that fails. She is finally hanged by the British authorities. The epilogue finds the spirit of Tituba still active in the island, heroine of a popular song going about encouraging the slaves to fight for liberty.

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is a work I highly recommend to people interested in African-American and Caribbean literature, colonialism and post-colonialism, post-modernism and feminism, as well as to any reader interested in a colorful adventure tale. The additional scholarly materials provided in this edition make this book helpful even to readers familiar with the original French text.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, June 20th 2010

Anna In-Between

admin — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Nunez

Akashic Books

The premise of Anna In-Between is simple: Anna Sinclair, a thirty-nine-year-old editor at a big book publishing company in New York City returns to the (unnamed) Caribbean nation where she was born and raised in order to visit her parents, Beatrice and John Sinclair. While there, she learns her mother has advanced breast cancer, but refuses to go to the United States, which has better hospitals and equipment, for the operation that could save her life. Far from being melodramatic, Nunez's straightforward prose and subtle characterizations give the story a sense of truth.

Anna has always felt she is not good enough for her mother. Her failed marriage is a bone of contention between the two women—as is Beatrice's lack of physical affection towards her daughter—and her feeling that she is now an outsider in the land of her birth is a recurring motif. Afraid of disappointing her mother, Anna allows her to believe she is an editor at the large publishing company, Windsor, rather than at the small Windsor imprint, Equiano, which prints “urban lit” by and primarily for people of color. We get a glimpse of Anna's struggle with the ghettoization of her authors into racial categories and her efforts to promote serious works by authors of color to a wider audience.

In addition to exploring the complicated relationships between an adult child and her parents, Anna In-Between touches on issues of colonialism and collaboration. Anna's father became one of the top men at the British-run state oil company shortly before England granted the island independence. He is seen as a traitor by some, but explains his decisions towards the workers with dignity. We also see how his new job affected his wife and young daughter as they moved away from the neighborhood and people they knew, but were not accepted in their new surroundings, providing an incisive depiction of intersecting class and racial prejudices.

The Sinclairs' domestic help—Singh the gardener and Lydia the maid—are well-drawn, compassionate portraits. Anna feels that her mother talks down to them, but they protest that they are used to her mother's sometimes harsh tone. With Lydia, in particular, we see how despite her outward appearance of strictness and conformity Beatrice truly cares for her maid, going out of her way to protect her from an abusive ex-husband and providing school uniforms for her grandchildren. The message is clear: even the people we have known the longest may surprise us.

Beatrice's illness allows for an intimacy between mother and daughter that is much closer than they've experienced before and the two reveal aspects of their lives that were previously hidden. Nunez does not give these revelations too much weight; she allows them to shift the characters' feelings and viewpoints to a degree, but not to cause a complete seismic shift in the relationships. And not all of Anna's problems—her relationship with her mother or her struggle to better advocate for her authors— are solved in 347 pages.

Nunez has written a contemplative and absorbing examination of a woman standing in two worlds: the land of her birth and the country she now inhabits. While I felt I gained a new perspective on life in the Caribbean, the well-drawn characters are what ultimately make this story resonate.

Written by: Karen Duda, December 11th 2009

Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones

admin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:43:00 +0000

By Carole Boyce Davies

Duke University Press

Still unknown to many, the life story of Claudia Jones is equally inspiring and heartbreaking. Guilty of being everything she was labeled, Jones maintained many overlapping identities—feminist, Black Nationalist, Communist, and journalist—working in the early to mid-twentieth century on a wide array of equal rights causes. Her activism a precursor to much of the 1960s American counterculture resistance, for which we often remember recent history’s leaders of color. Jones’s political life in the United States and abroad is memorialized in Carole Boyce Davies’s new book that recognizes this astounding woman and her great achievements. With an excellent academic and personal balance, Davies thoroughly investigates and reveals the short life of a remarkable leader whom we could all seek to emulate for her work in radical, feminism, anti-racist politics.

Originally from Trinidad, Jones moved to Harlem when she was eight years old and grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression. A strong young woman, she became active in the Communist Party and spoke all over the nation about an anti-capitalist agenda. Often persecuted during the McCarthy era, and arrested several times, she maintained a clear vision and held to her beliefs that the Communism she knew was practical and possible. After being deported from the United States in the 1950s, she settled in London and immersed herself in the British Communist Party.

Jones is often noted for having founded both the UK’s _West Indian Gazette _and the Notting Hill Carnival, a Mardi-Gras-like celebration of Afro-Caribbean talent that continues to this day. Working to make Caribbean heritage the active part of British identity it has since become, Jones found solidarity in many radical political circles doing allied work. Her work as a writer, activist, and political leader is on par with many of the greats we know by name today, and this sort of tribute writing should be only the beginning in better understanding her role in the marriage between modern Marxist structures and Black history.

How overdue this chronicle of her life and work truly is. As Davies points out in the introduction, Jones is buried next to Karl Marx—to his left, to be precise, “an apt metaphor…her location in death continues to represent her ideological position while living.” Without spoiling this sometimes-scholarly read, it is a must-have for activists and academics alike. Be prepared for a sad ending, but the tales along the way supplement hope when the unfairness of life can seem too much.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, April 8th 2008

Captain of the Sleepers

admin — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 23:12:00 +0000

By Marya Montero, Edith Grossman

Picador

Captain of the Sleepers is a tropical story of secrets and conflicts: familial, sexual, social, political, all intricately tangled up together in the Caribbean islands. It proceeds along parallel timelines, unfolding in the present day and in the 1940s and '50s, switching narrators at times, evoking disturbing events in which North American expatriates, tourists and Marines play key roles. It tells of love, death and a failed revolution.

The novel begins starkly: "I'm in the last place on earth I'd like to be. Waiting for the last person in this life I thought I'd ever see again." The narrator Andrés has come to St. Croix to meet a man he calls the "Captain of the Sleepers," an old friend and enemy from childhood. The two men are at odds over an incident that occurred some fifty years ago. There's a secret something that Andrés saw or did not see or seemed to see, that the Captain admits, but does not admit: "It never happened. . . . Not in the way you imagine.” The Captain, J.T. Bunker, is the son of a man who engineered the U.S. takeover of the Virgin Islands. His father later returned to Maine, but the Captain stayed, eking out a living by flying cargo and passengers around the region, including the small Puerto Rican island of Vieques where he got to know Andrés. Some of his passengers were actually corpses, being ferried home to be buried; bodies that the small boy's parents described to him as merely "sleepers."

The history of the islands will be unfamiliar, perhaps confusing, to many North American readers, but also fascinating. Montero's lyrical prose, full of colors, sounds and smells, brings the reader into close contact with the exotic setting. When the U.S. Navy begins to expropriate land on Vieques for a bombing range, the scene moves from the camp at Montesanto, where displaced women "who'd just given birth died like flies," to the hundreds of American paratroopers practicing their jumps on the beaches to the distressing waves of dead fish, mutilated sharks, even a smashed sea turtle, that wash up on the sands from naval maneuvers offshore.

Amid all the commotion, the novel centers on Andrés and his mother Estela, an enigmatic beauty who says little and never tells her own story in her own words. Readers must try to piece together the fragments other characters contribute, in order to understand Estela's complicated relationships with her son, her husband, her women friends and family, Bunker and Roberto, the doomed leader of a group of Puerto Rican nationalists. Montero’s use of male narrators preserves Estela’s mystery, which is perhaps the author’s goal, but, as a woman reading about a woman in a book by a woman, I felt more than a little cheated of a chance to know Estela from her own perspective. The book is nevertheless intriguing, whether you read it for pleasure on the beach this summer or as an introduction to postcolonial studies when you head back to school this fall.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, June 26th 2007