Abeng
the meaning of abeng:
"Abeng is
an African word meaning conch shell. The blowing of the conch called the
slaves to the canefields in the West Indies. The abeng has another use: it was
the instrument used by the Maroon armies to pass their messages and reach one
another."
the
intertexual relationship between Abeng and Wide Sargasso Sea
1. Cliff on Wide Sargasso Sea:
"Caliban speaks to Prospero, saying:
'You taught me language, and my profit on’t/ Is, I know how to curse.'
This line immediately brings to my mind the character of Bertha Rochester,
wild and raving ragout, as Charlotte Bronte describes her, cursing and
railing, more beast than human. It takes a West Indian writer, Jean Rhys, to
describe Bertha from the inside rather than from the outside, keeping Bertha's
humanity, indeed her sanity as critic of imperialism, intact,’ as Gayatri
Spivak has observed." ("Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character" 264)
2.
Antoinette and Tia // Clare and Zoe
Spivak on Antoinette and Tia--part of
the "thematics of Narcissus"--Tia as "the Other that could not be selfed
because of the fracture of imperialism" (243)
class and racial gaps between
Clare and Zoe--Zoe is award of Clare's privileges as someone with fair skin
and from the landed class--Zoe calls Clare a "town gal" and is afraid of being
thought of as "Guinea warrior, not gal pickney."--Clare is ignorant of the law
of property and ownership in the rural community (121)
Cliff on the protagonist
Clare Savage:
Clare Savage "is an amalgam of myself and others,
who eventually becomes herself alone. Bertha Rochester is her ancestor.
Her
name, obviously, is significant and is intended to represent her as a
crossroads character, with her feet (and head) in (at least) two worlds. Her
first name means, signifies, light-skinned, which she is, and light-skinnedness
in the world in which Clare originates, the island of Jamaica in the period of
British hegemony, and to which she is transported, the United States in the
1960s, and to which she transports herself, Britain in the 1970s, stands for
privilege, civilization, erasure, forgetting. She is not meant to curse, or
rave, or be a critic of imperialism. She is meant to speak softly and keep her
place. A knowledge of history, the past, has been bleached from her mind, just
as the rapes of her grandmothers are bleached from her skin. And this bleached
skin is the source of her privilege and her power, too, she thinks, for she is
a colonized child. She is a light-skinned female who has been removed from her
homeland in a variety of ways and whose life is a movement back, ragged,
interrupted, uncertain, to that homeland. She is fragmented, damaged,
incomplete."
Her surname is self-explanatory. It meant to evoke the
wilderness that has been bleached from her skin, understanding that my use of
the word wilderness is ironic, mocking the master’s meaning, turning instead
to a sense of non-Western values which are empowering and essential to
survival, her survival, and wholeness. ("Clare Savage as a Crossroads
Character" 264-5)
sexual identity:
1.Cliff on
lesbainism in an interview with Judith Raiskin
MC:But
for Caribbean women to love each other is different. It's not Vita
Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, it's not Djuna Barnes or Natalie Barney,
and it's not Sappho.
JR: You wanted Clare and Zoe. But then there’s the class
difference between them.
MC: Yes.... But it would be
taking lesbianism away from those who want to stigmatize it as simply a sexual
behavior between women that is seen as slightly decadent and upper class, or
uppermiddle class, or male imitating, or mannish (which was a word that was
used in my childhood). Putting it into a Caribbean setting as part of a
woman's self-definition, and as a way to value the female, which we've been
taught so much to devalue, really makes it different. ("The Art of History"
69-70)
2. the intimacy between Calre and Zoe in the bathing scene (119-120,
124)--interrrupted by Clare's memory of the "battyman" Uncle Robert
(125-126)-- Robert's suicide and homophobia in Jamaica
3. Cliff on Clare's
sexual identity--"...Clare can’t claim her sexuality. She's not in a place
where she can. It's a very interesting thing, because the lesbian subtext in
Abeng was unconscious, at least I think it was." (601)
4. Cliff's
internalization of homophobia and her self-censorship--"it's having grown up
in a society that is enormously homophobic and the fact that my mother
disowned me for being gay." (604)--an interview with Meryl F. Schwartz
Clare's divided racial identities:
presented through the oppsition between Boy Savage and Kitty
Freeman Savage
1. Boy--Anglophile--represents coloniial heritage
2.
Kitty
A. cherishes darkness (127-128)--Kitty's dream of setting up a local
school (129-130)--her distrust of British education and love of black
culture-- "Daffodils" vs the Maroon Girl (129)
B. Kitty's preference for
the darker daughter Jennie (129) and Clare's sense of alienation from the
mother (128)--Clare’s love for Zoe (131) is realted to this sense of
alineation
Grandmother Figure:
In Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven Cliff tries "to show the power,
particularly the spiritual authority, of the grandmother as well as her
victimization. Hers is a power directly related to landscape, gardens…. This
powerful aspect of the grandmother originates in Nanny, the African warrior
and Maroon leader. At her most powerful, the grandmother is the source of
knowledge, magic, ancestors, stories, healing practices, and food…. She is an
inheritor of African belief systems, African languages. She may be informed
with ashe, the power to make things happen, the responsibility to mete
justice." ("Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character" 266-7)
fragmented narrative form in
the novel
1. relfecting multiple perspectives”
2. Lionnet
Francoise--"small plot" vs huge plantations--"She has recourse to a textual
economy of 'small plots' that seems to correspond to the economy of 'small
plot farming' that maroon slaves used to engage in." (335)
