“Does The Water Repeat?”

Abstract

This essay offers a reading of Maryse Condé’s The Story of the Cannibal Woman (2003) and Yewande Omotoso’s The Woman Next Door (2016). I argue that these contemporary imaginings of Black women’s Caribbean-South Africa travel disrupt our notions of literary categorization and the nation through productions of waterborne selves and community. Ultimately, I explore the ways in which the texts themselves push against land-based notions of Black being and belonging towards articulating transnational Black women’s unique roles in sea histories of commodification and capital.

KEYWORDS:

• Black belonging
• Caribbean-South African contemporary fiction
• Condé, Maryse
• Omotoso, Yewande
• rootedness
• waterborne selves

Notes

1 Benítez-Rojo argues that what the Caribbean shares is the plantation as a “machine” which produces the island space. The island therefore repeats, but differently.

2 Brand takes this from David Turnbull’s Maps Are Territories: Science is an Atlas (1989). Turnbull contends that maps are insufficient tools for way-finding without “cognitive schemas” to help us understand and use them.

3 For Spillers, “flesh” precedes the body. That is, the slave body.