Lives Written in Fragments: The Self-Representational ‘I’ in Caribbean Diasporic Women's Auto/biography

Abstract

This article examines a selection of short autobiographical narratives by Caribbean women writers Jean Rhys, Paule Marshall and Velma Pollard, arguing that this work resides at what Leigh Gilmore defines as autobiography's ‘limit’, writing that engages with self-representation but tests the limits of truth and the boundaries between truth and fiction. These narratives resist the production of a coherent racial, cultural or gendered identity, foregrounding instead the constructedness of the ‘I’ identity. These text occupy several geographical locations but claim connections to a Caribbean ‘home’ or are claimed by that connection: the narratives demonstrate the potential of the form to express the dislocations and important connections that the Caribbean diasporic woman writer reconstructs in the life that she represents.

Keywords:

• short story
• autobiography
• fragment
• affiliation
• gender
• class
• Jean Rhys
• Paule Marshall
• Velma Pollard

Notes

1. In this context Huddart is discussing Edward Said's autobiographical texts: Huddart's use of ‘filiation’ and ‘affiliation’ would seem to be a self-conscious echo of Said (Said 118).

2. I am using concepts of ‘affiliation’ rather than relational models of autobiographical identity commonly used in work on women's autobiographical writing to emphasise the cultural and political connections that these identities construct (Gilmore 12; Susan Stanford Friedman 39; Scafe 287–98).

3. On the front page of the story cycle it is entitled ‘On My Way to Somewhere, Of Course’ (111). In the ‘Contents’ it is listed as ‘On The Way To Somewhere, Of Course.’

4. See, for example: Sue Thomas, ‘Jean Rhys Writing White Creole Childhoods’; Lilian Pizzichini, The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys; Teresa F. O'Connor, ‘Jean Rhys, Paul Theroux and the Imperial Road’; Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work; Annette Gilson, ‘Internalizing Mastery: Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford and the Fiction of Autobiography’; and others cited in this article.

5. Molly Pulda (172) describes ‘My Day’ as an essay; it closes the American edition of Smile Please.

6. Thomas's analysis cited here focuses on the representation of the exchanges to which she refers in the unpublished Black Exercise Book.

7. These stories were anthologised in the following collections: Paula Marshall, Reena and other Stories (New York: Feminist Press, 1983) and Merle a Novella and Other Stories (London: Virago, 1985). The ‘Note’ from the American edition was used in the British edition and both editions contain the same stories, anthologised in the same order.

8. Berhard Melchior argues that the autobiographical aspect of Marshall's short fiction is mentioned by critics ‘more or less in passing’ (15). In his study the short fiction is used as a context for the autobiographical interpretation of Marshall's novels.

9. James Olney's assertion that identity in African contexts emerges within group and communal identities (Tell Me Africa 67) is reformulated by several critics and theorists including Sandra Pouchet Paquet who introduces her study by stating that her approach is one that uses examples of Caribbean autobiography to ‘illuminate[s] the regenerative lineaments of the…many ancestored communities’(5).

10. Indicated in a personal interview with Pollard at the 12^th International Conference of the Short Story, Arkansas 2012.

11. Senior describes ‘child-shifting’ as the practice of children being brought up by persons who are not their parents. She describes it as a common practice in the Caribbean where migration is often the only way that families can be supported financially (Working Miracles 12).