Collins, Merle 1950–

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Merle Collins 1950-

Grenadian poet, novelist, editor, and short story writer.

INTRODUCTION

Focusing most of her writing on her native Grenada—especially the politics of its revolution—poet, novelist, and short story writer Collins combines the oral tradition of communication with the art of writing. Stressing the importance of voice and the need to preserve the oral tradition that helps define Caribbean culture, much of Collins's poetry has a rhythmic, energetic beat similar to the languages and dialects of the Caribbean islands. Gender concerns also play a prominent role in Collins's fiction and verse, reflecting her belief in the profound significance and value of Caribbean women, whose voices are often silenced amidst political struggle, yet who act as guardians of the oral traditions of their West Indian societies.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Collins was born in Grenada in 1950 to John and Helena Collins; she credits her mother and grandmother—both gifted storytellers—with inspiring her own dedication to preserving native Caribbean oral traditions through the use of language. Collins attended a Catholic high school in Grenada and then received her undergraduate degree in 1972 from the University of West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. She taught English, history, and Spanish at schools in Grenada and St. Lucia for several years before completing her master's degree in Latin American studies in 1981 at Georgetown University. Around this time, Collins became interested in the Grenadian revolutionary movement and the promises of social reform made by leaders of the leftist People's Revolutionary Government, which rose to power in 1979. Though the regime was later overthrown when the United States invaded Grenada in 1983, the period of revolution gave a voice to many artists who supported its cause, including Collins. Working briefly in Grenada's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Collins moved to England in early 1984, the same year she saw her poems first published in Callaloo: A Granada Anthology. A year later, she published her first poetry collection, Because the Dawn Breaks!: Poems Dedicated to the Grenadian People (1985), written to acknowledge the people involved in the Grenadian revolution. She also joined The African Dawn, a performance group that combined poetry with African music. Her novel Angel, which draws a parallel between the title character's coming of age and Grenada's coming of age, was published in 1987. Three years later, Collins completed her Ph.D. in government at the University of London, conducting her research on Grenada's history and politics from the 1950s to the 1970s. That same year, she also published Rain Darling, a collection of seven short stories based on West Indian folklore. Two poetry collections—Rotten Pomerack (1992) and Lady in a Boat (1999)—appeared during the 1990s, as did Collins's second novel, the nonlinear, epic narrative The Colour of Forgetting (1995). In 1995 she accepted a position at the University of Maryland, where she is a professor of English and comparative literature.

MAJOR WORKS

Among the significant themes in Collins's writings are the role of women as custodians of history and culture, the relationship between language and societal strength and progress, opposition to British colonialism, and the struggle among Grenadians to develop a nationalist, self-directed government. In one of her early poems, "No Dialects, Please," published in the collection Watchers and Seekers (1987), Collins emphasizes how language defines life. Inspired by that phrase, which appeared in the guidelines for a British poetry contest, "No Dialects, Please" makes apparent the elitist colonial motivations of Great Britain to homogenize its colonies. The novel Angel also treats language as an instrument of power. Written in response to the swift end to the Grenadian revolution occasioned by the United States' military invasion of the country, the novel traces the developing political awareness of three generations of Grenadian women who speak in a combination of dialects, including French Creole patois, Grenadian English, and Standard English. Interspersed throughout are proverbs, songs, folk tales, and poems that reveal a three-decades-long saga revolving around suffering, social status, race, gender, selfhood, and empowerment. The collection Rain Darling, too, turns on the significance of language and the pivotal role of women, while the verses in Rotten Pomerack move from Grenada, to England, to Ghana, and back to Grenada to explore such themes as West Indian migration to London, the slave trade, racial prejudice in England, and the sociopolitical situation of Grenada.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Critical discussion of Collins's writings centers on her use of language, her portrayals of Caribbean women who tell stories, and her support for Grenada's revolutionary cause. Her poetry has been favorably compared to that of revolutionary Caribbean poet Martin Carter, whose hopes for freedom from colonialism and subsequent disillusionment with the corruption of native leaders mirrors Collins's own sentiments. Many critics have commented on the importance of language in Angel. M. Keith Booker and Dubravka Juraga have stressed Collins's use of the conflicts between languages—contrasting working-class Creole with the more "literary" Standard English—to show that neither linguistic form has authority over the other, analogous to the fact that neither Great Britain nor Grenada are culturally superior to the other. Carolyn Cooper has focused on the novel's emphasis on powerful and effective storytelling and its premise that storytelling is related to the survival of native people. Suzanne Scafe has argued that Collins evinces an underlying concern with the silencing of the voices of marginalized women in Angel, demonstrating how the experiences of the older Caribbean women characters are negated and ignored, which, in turn, imperils social growth and advancement. According to Scafe, Collins's use of the language of women in Angel celebrates and honors their courage and spirit and makes evident their vital role as the backbone of a struggling society.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Because the Dawn Breaks!: Poems Dedicated to the Grenadian People (poetry) 1985

Angel (novel) 1987

Watchers and Seekers: Creative Writing by Black Women in Britain [coeditor with Rhonda Cobham, and contributor] (short stories, poetry, autobiographies) 1987

Rain Darling: Stories (stories) 1990

Rotten Pomerack (poetry) 1992

The Colour of Forgetting (novel) 1995

Lady in a Boat: Poems (poetry) 1999

CRITICISM

Carolyn Cooper (essay date 1999)

SOURCE: Cooper, Carolyn. "‘Sense Make befoh Book’: Grenadian Popular Culture and the Rhetoric of Revolution in Merle Collins's Angel and The Colour of Forgetting." In Arms Akimbo: Africana Women in Contemporary Literature, edited by Janice Lee Liddell and Yakini Belinda Kemp, pp. 176-88. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.

[In the following essay, Cooper evaluates Collins's use of folk stories, anecdotes, proverbs, and riddles in Angel and The Colour of Forgetting to examine the effectiveness of the oral tradition as a means of survival and as a way of preserving the truth of both the past and the present.]

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.

Suzanne Scafe (essay date 1999)

SOURCE: Scafe, Suzanne. "‘Versioning’ the Revolution: Gender and Politics in Merle Collins's Angel." In Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon, edited by Deborah L. Madsen, pp. 120-32. London: Pluto Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Scafe contends that Collins's emphasis on women in Angel represents a challenge to the insurrectionary political theories of Frantz Fanon, who, according to the critic, marginalizes the role of women in revolutionary politics in his The Wretched of the Earth.]

In Woman Version, Evelyn O'Callaghan (1993) formulates a theory of writing by women from the Caribbean, using ideas from Dick Hebdige's study of Caribbean music Cut'n' Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (1987). The ‘version’ of her title refers to the practice, begun in Jamaica in the late 1960s, of producing ‘new’ music by rearranging the tracks of the original reggae song. On the whole, this was done in two ways: by foregrounding the drum and bass sections of the original track, usually called the ‘dub’ version, or by overlaying the track with a commentary or ‘talk over’ by a DJ, a practice known as ‘toasting’ (Johnson, 1986, pp. 398-402), which effects a celebration of the original even while creating a space for parody, political or social commentary, or a general updating of the lyrics. The isolation of the drum and bass could be said to represent a revoicing of the emphasis, in African music, on rhythm and percussion, particularly since the popularity of the musical form coincided with the rise of the Black Power movement in the Caribbean and in the production of African cultural expression.

This period also saw a rise in the popularity of story-telling artists such as Louise Bennett whose use of Jamaican creole and oral story-telling traditions in her written poetry first won the recognition of the literary world in the early 1960s and popularized the transformation of written poetic conventions in Caribbean poetry (Breiner, 1998, pp. 172-73). The ‘dub version’ can also be seen as a self-conscious affirmation of practices of oral story-telling, where each ‘version’ of the story changes with the telling, and more significance is attached to the newest ‘version’ than the form of its original conception. Hebdige links the production of ‘dub’ to the dynamic, mixed and overlapping cultural heritage of the Caribbean, evidenced in creole language forms such as ‘Dread Talk’, a term used by Caribbean linguist Velma Pollard to describe a linguistic code in which ‘words have been subjected to a number of word-making processes drastic enough to give some words new sounds and others new meaning’ (Pollard, 1991 p. 239).

The concern of O'Callaghan's work is less with the cultural context of ‘dub’, as I have outlined it, and more with its use as a means of defending the uniqueness of Caribbean women's writing. Her reference to ‘dub’ music provides a means of interrogating ‘the whole notion of a hierarchical distinction between "original substantive creation" and the "version", a new form that has grown out of a process of altering, supplementing, breaking, echoing, mocking and playing with that original’ (O'Callaghan, 1993, p. 10).

In this [essay] I intend to use the principle of ‘dubbing’ in order to explore the ways in which the work of Caribbean writer Merle Collins uses and subverts the political theories central to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. My argument centres on the novel's representation of women in relation to two significant periods of decolonization in the Caribbean island of Grenada: the period immediately before and after the first post-colonial government of ‘Leader’ and the four-year period of the Marxist-Leninist government of Maurice Bishop. The use of ‘dub’ as a way of positing the relationship between the two texts allows an imaginative text by a Caribbean woman writer to be read as a critical challenge to a text which theorizes revolutionary decolonization. Her work reflects the insurrectionary politics of Fanon's essays but at the same time, in her own focus on the everyday experiences of a group of economically marginalized rural women, reveals as significant the absence of women in Fanon's work.

Better known as a poet, Collins wrote her first novel, Angel, in 1987 as a means of reflecting on the ‘trauma’ of events in 1983 when the Grenadian revolutionary government (the New Jewel Movement) of 1979 was brought to an abrupt end by an American military invasion. In an interview with Betty Wilson she describes her reasons for writing the novel:

I think Angel also came at a period when I was looking at, looking back at, that whole period of Grenadian history and kind of looking behind headlines at the things that were happening…. Angel is definitely the product of 1983 and of the crash of October 1983 … and about the whole of that trauma and my moving out and looking back at it all and feeling that, as so often happens the focus remains on the principal actors.
(Wilson, 1993, p. 102)

The novel recounts the story of the growth to maturity of one of its main characters, Angel, born in and around 1951, during the early phase of decolonization in Grenada. Collins charts the same historical terrain as Fanon's work. By foregrounding the inhabitants of a tiny village, however, and their exclusion from the revolutionary process, and by representing in fine detail the lives of the community's women, Collins uncovers in Fanon's representation of the colonized subject women as the hidden other; in the imaginative spaces cleared by her work, the narrative recovers the voices of generations of women who witness but are silenced in the political process.

My interest in O'Callaghan's formulation is that it offers a way of theorizing Caribbean women writers within a framework located and defined by Caribbean cultural forms and practices. The use of ‘dub’ as a literary metaphor makes possible an intertextual approach, where a foregrounding of language, orality, culture and politics is both the function of the critical framework and a feature of the narratives under consideration. For the purpose of this [essay], however, I am emphasizing not the text's ‘uniqueness’ in relation to Fanon's ‘master narrative’ but the extent to which Collins's novel, in its reconnection with Fanon's theories of post-colonial liberation, disturbs, revises and extends some of the fundamental assumptions of his text.

Maria Helena Lima discusses Collins's use of an autobiographical subject, Angel, but characterizes the narrative not as autobiography or Bildungsroman but as testimonio, a form which represents a ‘social model of self’ shaped by the multiple and often conflicting discourses of the immediate community (Lima, 1993, p. 45). It is a form marked by its oral quality and ‘by marginalization, oppression and struggle’. Collins's novel is dominated by her use of the creole form with its retention of some African words such as kata (headcloth). The narrative is expressed primarily in different forms of dialogue: as oral interactions, as letters, as songs and in the creole section headings which communicate directly with the reader. Her use of language is, Collins has said, a means of valorizing not only the culture and experiences of the women in her text, but their mode of expression (Wilson, 1993, p. 103). Significant historical moments in the island's recent history are represented from the different and shifting perspectives of the autobiographical subject and of other individuals from within a specific community; in this way the novel ‘cuts’ and ‘remixes’ the characters' subjective reconstructions of history in a fictional testimonio, with other narratives' privileging of historical ‘fact’, and of political theory.

Both texts are concerned with a representation of violence; in Fanon's text violence is one of the key tropes of historical progress and change. In his essay ‘Concerning Violence’, he argues that the only means by which a colonized subject can effectively overthrow the colonizer is through violence. Of the colonial regime, he writes:

In capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counsellors and ‘bewilderers’ separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries on the contrary, the policemen and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action, maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge.
(Fanon, 1961, p. 29)

‘Decolonizing violence’—that is, the violent destruction of colonialism in all its forms by the colonized people—is not just a means of combating colonial violence, but of restoring to humanity the decolonized subject; it creates ‘a new language and a new humanity’; it is, he argues, the ‘veritable creation of new men’. Citing at length Cesaire's ‘Les Armes miraculeuses (et les chiens taisaient)’ with its poetic representation of decolonizing violence as a ‘baptism’, a cleansing and purging of evil, and a rebirth, he concludes:

For the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler … this violence … invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upwards in reaction to the settler's violence in the beginning.
(Fanon, 1961, p. 73)

The appeal of violence as a means of resistance is represented only in relation to a masculine subject whose physical freedom is constrained by colonial repression; and whose physical presence is literally diminished by colonial subjugation:

The first thing which the native learns is to stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits. This is why the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and of aggression. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing; I dream that I burst out laughing, that I span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motor cars which never catch up with me.
(Fanon, 1961, p. 40)

Violent resistance is the means by which the incarcerated body of the colonial subject is set free; it also ‘frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction: it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect’ (Fanon, 1961, p. 74). Figures of combat and aggression are also used to describe the cultural product of decolonization and liberation movements; he writes of a ‘fighting literature’ (Fanon, 1961, p. 177) and of music that is expressive of a violent strength and energy.

The narrative of Angel is enclosed within the depictions of the anti-colonial violence which open the text and the bombing of the invading American troops that herald the closing scenes. In the opening scene, the inhabitants of Hermitage watch with only partial comprehension as the most significant representation of colonial authority in their lives is being destroyed. The texture of the narrative, which immerses the reader in the minutiae of the villagers' lives without ever, as it were, lifting its head, emphasizes their exclusion and marginality. And in the opening scene of decolonizing violence it is Mano, a male member of the village who, unhampered by frightened and fretful children or the demands for care from the elders, is able, from his lookout in a distant tree, to tell the others that it is the bukan burning down and that the family owners, the de Lisles, might have been caught in the fire. Concealed within the more public, open expressions of jubilation are the women's more hesitant and private expressions of fear and unease. As Doodsie watches the burning described in the opening scene, her real focus is on the vulnerability of her dependent child, Angel. Even where one of the women expresses jubilation, she does so using metaphors of motherhood: ‘All you hear dat? Ah sure is me basket o cocoa an dem dat bawling dey…. No joke non, cocoa. Ah plant you, ah pick you, ah dance you, but you so damn ungrateful, you don even know you mudder … You tink ah wounta ketch you?’ (Collins, 1987, p. 3).

Ma Ettie, Doodsie's mother, waits back at the yard, fearful, hiding in her board house. Alone in the house, she utters a prayer: ‘Lord, let this tribulation pass from us. Let not our enemies triumph over these your children, Lord. Take a thought to the life and salvation for the little children in that burning house’ (Collins, 1987, p. 4). On the one hand, in its echo of the New Testament's ‘Love thine enemies’ her reaction demonstrates the power of colonial indoctrination through the agency of the church and the resulting inability of this character, as a colonized subject, to identify the agent of her own suffering and ‘tribulation’. A clearer articulation of the extent to which Ma Ettie has been shaped by subservience, to the extent that she prioritizes the care and safety of those who dominate her, is illustrated in a later altercation with Regal, her son and a union organizer, who is one of Leader's strong men. She expresses horror at the violence inflicted on the animals on the de Lisle plantation: ‘I hear all you cutting down people animal straight how dey stand up so in those people land … you can't go into their land an destroy all the tings they work for’ (Collins, 1987, p. 27).

Most of the women work, at some time or another as servants, caring for the children of the colonial middle classes; Ma Ettie herself had worked as a domestic servant for the de Lisle family and like all the other women was necessarily involved in the nurturing of those to whom she was also subservient. Her words express the doubleness of that experience; in the narrative they are used to represent the gendered character of colonial domination and, against a more uncompromising expression of truth in Fanon's text, a multiple, multilayered truth. To Regal, to Angel and other supporters of anti-colonial struggle, their unacceptability lies not just in the use of idioms rooted in a colonial and repressive past; enmeshed in both their overwhelming labour of maternal and familial care and in the narrow, grinding margins of unorganized labour their voices and experiences are discounted because they expose the limitations of the small spaces they inhabit.

Although, in the narrative, they do not belong to the early labour movements, and tend not to be part of the workforce of the large plantations, the work of the women is essential to the well-being of individual families; during the prolonged strike organized by Leader, and during Allan's period of absence as a migrant worker, Doodsie maintains the care of her family through the produce from her family's land. In all Collins's work these women are represented as the foundation of a fragile economy. In ‘Gran’, a short story from her collection Rain Darling, one of the characters says: ‘Me mother well work a lot in she time already, yes. No wonder she could walk the streets of Grenada almost up to the end as if they belong to her. They belong to her in truth, yes. She work fixing road all over this country’ (Collins, 1990, p. 54). In the midst of insurrectionary violence and the promise of a better future, one of the Hermitage women complains: ‘Ah pickin nutmeg for the whole week an at the end of it ah could barely manage to buy the pound of saltfish’ (Collins, 1987, p. 10). And after Leader installs the first independent government, Doodsie, in a letter to her friend, writes her own account of post-colonial history, with a firm assertion that things are ‘changin' for the worse’. At the end of the novel, a generation on, she is still ‘under the nutmeg’ with her cutlass and ‘heavy boots’. For these women, revolutionary change does not alter the structures of their dominance; and, through their dialogue and storytelling, the narrative insists on the importance not of the moment of anti-colonial victory but on the effect to which that victory is put in the long years that follow.

The narrative recuperates their discounted voices and, like the drum section of the dub, their voices form the more subtle though insistent anchor of the narrative's rhythm. The more strident section of the rhythm, the bass, is effected through the bold type section headings that counter Fanon's progressive representation of history and change. Against Fanon's conviction that the cycle of decolonizing and post-colonial violence will produce a cleansed and fully liberated nation, these creole fragments, which frame both the early depictions of violence and those of social and political change, represent history as cyclical and suggest a more compromised, even sceptical view of progress: ‘Take win but you lose’ (Collins, 1987, p. 18); ‘Sometime you have to take de worse an call it de best’ (Collins, 1987, p. 64); ‘One day one day congotè’ (Collins, 1987, p. 22).

The clearest instances of the novel's utilization of elements from Fanon's master narrative are in its representation of the political centre. Fanon's description of the anti-colonial ‘leader’, stresses the ostentation accompanying the early figureheads of the post-colonial governments. Fanon argues that the ‘leader’ of a newly decolonized nation state tends to have been part of a process of liberation through violence, fuelled in part by the envy and desire which characterizes the struggle of the native peasant. As ‘leader’, however, he uses his power and privilege to fulfil his desire to take the settler's place, which he does with the complicity of the national bourgeoisie, a ‘company of profiteers’, and at the expense of the peasants. Doodsie's letter inscribes her version of their anti-colonial hero, the vainglorious Leader, whose government, as the narrative shows, heralds a period of internecine violence, nepotism and political corruption: ‘That man is the limit. He so like a show that he had the most biggest wedding possible. They say it had enough shampain to bathe in’ (Collins, 1987, p. 17).

Both Angel's cautious and critical response to ‘Black Nationalism’ as a revolutionary political strategy and the novel's construction of the revolutionary government echo, revise and overlap elements not just of Fanon's political theory but of political statements made by the leader of Grenada's New Jewel Movement, Maurice Bishop, on whom the character Chief is based. In Fanon's text the role of the intellectual is as one of a ‘highly conscious group … armed with revolutionary principles’, to contest the power of both the leader and the national bourgeoisie through whom he extends his power. He introduces his essay, ‘On National Culture’, an analysis of the means of contesting and progressing from what he describes as the ‘bourgeois phase’, with a quotation from Sekou Toure which identifies the key notes of Fanon's own argument:

To take part in the African revolution it is not enough to write a revolutionary song; you must fashion the revolution with the people. And if you fashion it with the people the songs will come by themselves, and of themselves … there is no place outside that fight for the artist or for the intellectual who is not himself concerned with the people.
(Fanon, 1961, p. 166)

Collins's novel represents the connection of the intellectual and ‘the people’ in her portrayal of the political meetings of the revolutionary period. She uses a creole register both in the title of these scenes—‘Everybody putting dey grain o salt!’; ‘We runnin neck and neck wid you!’—and in the representation of the dialogue of all the characters. In this way the narrative effects a closing of the social and professional distance between the organizers, a government representative, the university-educated intellectual Angel, and the members of the literacy group who, in one instance, perform poetry which expresses their personal experience.

In an interview with Chris Searle conducted just nine weeks before his assassination, Maurice Bishop, invoking Fanon in his emphasis on the importance of unity between the government, the intellectual and ‘the people’, described his government's achievements:

We have learned to develop a truly deep and abiding respect for the people of our country, particularly the working people, and have understood more and more their enormous creative power and ability to confront and solve their problems … we have attempted to involve our people in the planning and running of the economy.
(Searle, 1984a, pp. 9-10)

‘Disunity’ is figured as the ‘enemy of the revolution’ in all the texts to which I have referred. Searle writes: ‘While the Grenada Revolution preserved its imperative unity, it was unassailable…. When the breach in that fundamental unity came in October 1983 it [the US] struck out … mercilessly’ (Searle, 1984b, p. 2). In scenes such as those of Angel's arguments with staff members at the school where she teaches and with her own father, the narrative does reveal a more textured and discriminating representation of ‘the people’ than those of the political narratives cited above. However, specific representation of the kind of political disunity to which they refer is made in two distinct ways: through a domestic metaphor which recurs throughout the narrative and begins its closing section:

High up the chicken-hawk circled …
‘Caw! caw! caw!’ High up the chicken-hawk circled.
Doodsie threw more corn. ‘All you stay togedder!’ she shouted….
‘All you self too stupid,’ she said to the fowls. ‘Don run when they try to frighten you. Stay together an dey caan get none.’
(Collins, 1987, p. 289)

and through the fragmentary quality of the closing sections which describe the scenes prior to the invasion, where ‘disunity’ is represented as the split of the Party from the people. As Angel's brother says: ‘Any Party dat in Mars while people on earth is not no party we want to know about anyway!’ (Collins, 1987, p. 270). Taken as a whole, however, I would suggest that the text articulates a representation of ‘disunity’ which is foregrounded along the lines of gender rather than political affiliation and reveals that it is this exclusion and discounting of the experiences of the older women that threatens social and political change and progress.

Using the theories of psychologist Carol Gilligan I am suggesting that the narrative reveals, through its revoicing of the older women's experiences, not only the double character of their oppression and exclusion but also the extent to which their voices can be read as a challenge to political slogans of unity, courage and bravery. A number of critics of Caribbean women writers have used the work of Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow in their studies of fictional texts; the appeal of their work, in its emphasis on the extent to which a woman's identity is developed within the context of relationships and connections with others, is that it serves as a useful critical methodology for interpreting Caribbean women's writing, so much of which is seen to focus on a loss of identity as result of separation, through migration, from mothers, families, a homeland and so on (see de Abruna, and Dunn and Morris, both in Nasta, 1991). In this [essay], however, my focus is on Gilligan's study In A Different Voice and its representations of a conflict between a feminine defined and practised ‘ethic of care, nurturance and responsibility’, and the more masculine assertion of a principle of ‘right’. One of the examples Gilligan uses to illustrate this principle is an interview with a woman doctor, Nan, who, describing her motivation for becoming a doctor, says: ‘When I first applied to medical school, my feeling was that I was a person who was concerned with other people and being able to care for them in some way or another.’ And in response to another question, she continues: ‘By yourself there is little sense to things. It is the sound of one hand clapping, the sound of one man or woman, there is something lacking’ (Gilligan, 1982, p. 160).

In her discussion of morality and ethics, Gilligan suggests that for men truth and fairness are absolute, as are notions of equality, which depend upon an articulation of individual ‘rights’ around which concepts of justice and fairness are developed. Her own emphasis, however, is on the need for each principle to be modified by the other; absolute principles of right need to be modified by less absolute principles of care and tolerance; at the same time, the principle of care has to include the care and responsibility for the properly defined and safeguarded ‘self’:

While an ethic of justice proceeds from the premise of equality—that everyone should be treated the same—an ethic of care rests on the premise of non-violence—that no one should be hurt. In the representation of maturity, both perspectives converge in the realization that just as inequality adversely affects both parties in the unequal relationship, so too violence is destructive for everyone involved.
(Gilligan, 1982, p. 174)

‘One han caan clap!’ is in fact a subtitle of one of the sections of the novel which describes Hermitage on the night of the hurricane, when everyone has to shelter in the ‘wall house’ newly built by Doodsie and Allan. There are other numerous examples of the ways in which this small community protect each other, and it is almost a cliche to identify these instances as expressions of care, connectedness and collective responsibility. Their responsibility extends beyond the communal ‘yard’; women who have migrated, such as Ezra, who pays for Angel's operation and medical care in America after she has lost her eye during the invasion, continue the same tradition of care. In the novel's representation of community, its emphasis on collectivism and care as a gendered function is made more emphatic through its contrasting representation of the men such as Regal who, after a violent betrayal by Leader, migrates and simply disappears for a while before making a sudden reappearance.

The narrative's many other instances of the women's commitment to the care of others, however, leave the women exposed, vulnerable and compromised as individuals. Ma Ettie cared for her children, Doodsie, Regal and her others almost single-handedly; Allan's sister Christalene—to his disgust—cares for her five children on her own. Because of her commitment to her role as a mother, Doodsie makes the decision to tolerate her husband's affairs and even, as she confides to Angel, to help support his twins born, during their marriage, to another woman. In an angry exchange Angel, echoing Doodsie's own words in an earlier conversation, reminds her that her status in the house is like that of a servant, to which she replies:

If ah did take on a servant work without the wedding ring, Angel, ah still might end up gettin no money and youall might still have been there without the respectability. Bad as it is, ah manage to give youall an education. So climb down … You jus passin … you have to swallow vinegar and pretend it honey.
(Collins, 1987, p. 190)

The rhythmic refrains of the women: ‘Swallow vinegar an pretend it honey’, ‘Tek night an mek day’, are illustrative of the extent to which their identities seem only to be defined in discourses of caring and responsibility for others, and of self-sacrifice. The particular knowledge, which their words reflect, is formed by their experiences as women; because they are each dependent on the other they know that dependency necessitates tolerance of difference and compromise. Interpreted in relation to political action, however, they express a lack of commitment to or belief in the ‘right’ of an individual to personal freedom, or to individual agency in the political and social development of a non-dependent society.

Because a colonial system of government denies the right of a people to self-government, and therefore infantilizes its subjects, creating a culture of dependence, the claim of the ‘right’ of the individual to equality, justice and fairness has no tradition or authority of the kind evidenced in developed capitalist economies. There are a number of examples in the novel, which illustrate the ease with which the characters' claim to the right of equality is surrendered in favour of an acceptance of hierarchical, paternalistic structures.

To the comment: ‘People like you an me so, the harder we work in people kitchen and in people lan, the more we kill weself out and bring riches, the poorer we get while we sweat goin in other people pocket’, Ma Ettie responds: ‘Chile doh hurt you head. Is de way life is. Look at the fingers on you hand. God make them all different length. We can't all be the same in this worl. It mus have high and low’ (Collins, 1987, p. 28). The scene identified here is one of the narrative's many domestic scenes which mirror the broader social and po- litical complex of relations of power and powerlessness, and of dominance and resistance. Doodsie too has learnt to diminish herself, to conceal her aspirations for herself within her ambitions for her children. As the novel progresses and she witnesses the seemingly inevitable cycle of failure evidenced in the collapse of the revolutionary ‘Party’, she retreats back into the philosophy of her mother, Ma Ettie: ‘Look at the fingers of you han, chile. Some long, some short. You can't change the Lord world!’ (Collins, 1987, p. 286). In contrast is Angel's insistence on political freedom and equality as a right, even after the Party's collapse. Angel's coming of age is used to represent the island's coming of age, and, in the initial success of the revolution, its awareness of its need for real independence. Her personal identity, however, her developing sense of self and the right to that self, is not fully expressed in the narrative. Its hesitance or inability to clearly define her individual identity is an expression of the ways in which the personal identity of the individual, its autobiographical subject, is bound by the national identity of the post-colonial state. The state, Grenada, is, at the end of the novel, a neo-colonial dependency; the invasion by the Americans is accepted, even welcomed by a large number of its inhabitants.

For Fanon, the way forward in the cycle of violence, the inevitable by-product of a struggle for liberation, can only be figured in global terms, through the political alliance of the colonizer and colonized; the result of this alliance is a restoration of human values which reintroduce ‘mankind into the world’: ‘What it expects from those who for centuries have kept it in slavery is that they will help it to rehabilitate mankind, and make man victorious everywhere, once and for all’ (Fanon, 1961, p. 84). In his text humanity is the product of the exorcising violence of decolonization and of the total loyalty and commitment to a clearly defined set of revolutionary principles.

Collins's novel disturbs the completeness of Fanon's political vision, ‘dubbing’ into it the complexities of gender. One of the first successful exponents ‘dub’ poetry in Jamaica, Oku Onuru defines the ‘dub’ of his work as the process of inserting ‘but more fi put in’ the rhythms and linguistic features of a creole language and cultural expression:

Dub poetry simply mean to take out and to put in, but more fi put in more than anything else. We take out the little isms, the little English ism and the little highfalutin business and … dub in the rootsical, yard, basic rhythm…. [T]hat is what dub poetry mean.
(Morris, 1997, p. 66)

The novel Angel represents a ‘version’ of post-colonial freedom and independence which reveals as central to its project a problematic but necessary recognition of the distinct, contradictory, but interconnected principles of right, fairness and equality with those of tolerance, conciliation, care for others. Framed by images of circling, by her mother's voice and Doodsie's own return to Grenada some 30 years before, its closing scene enacts a kind of epiphany where, as Angel looks again at the land around her parents' house, she sees in the power and beauty of the landscape its potential for renewal and regeneration. In Angel's reconnection with Grenada and with her family's land is represented the narrative's own revoicing, recuperation and reconnection with the more difficult and perhaps dangerous, in its tendency towards regression, knowledge of the mothers.

Works Cited

Breiner, Laurence, 1998. An Introduction to West Indian Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Collins, Merle, 1987. Angel, London: The Women's Press.

Collins, Merle, 1990. Rain Darling, London: The Women's Press.

Fanon, Frantz, 1961. The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin, 1990.

Gilligan, Carol, 1982. In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hebdige, Dick, 1987. Cut ‘n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music, London: Methuen.

Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 1986. ‘Jamaican Rebel Music’, Race and Class, vol. xvii, no. 4, pp. 397-412.

Lima, Maria Helena, ‘Forms of Autobiography in the Fiction of Michelle Cliff and Merle Collins’, Ariel, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 35-58.

Morris, Mervyn, 1997. ‘A Note on Dub Poetry’, Wasifiri, vol. 26 (Autumn), pp. 66-69.

Nasta, Susheila (ed.), 1991. Motherlands: Black Women's Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, London: The Women's Press.

O'Callaghan, Evelyn, 1993. Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Pollard, Velma, 1991. ‘Mothertongue Voices in the Writing of Olive Senior and Lorna Goodison’, in Susheila Nasta (ed.), Motherland: Black Women's Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, London: The Women's Press, pp. 238-53.

Searle, Chris, 1984a. ‘Maurice Bishop on Destabilisation: An Interview’, Race and Class, vol. xxv, no. 3, pp. 1-13.

Searle, Chris, 1984b. ‘Grenada: Diary of an Invasion’, Race and Class, vol. xxv, no. 3, pp. 15-28.

Wilson, Betty, 1993. ‘An Interview with Merle Collins’, Callalou, vol. 16, no. 1 (Winter), pp. 94-107.

M. Keith Booker and Dubravka Juraga (essay date 2001)

SOURCE: Booker, M. Keith, and Dubravka Juraga. "Merle Collins: Angel." In The Caribbean Novel in English: An Introduction, pp. 172-78. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2001.

[In the following essay, Booker and Juraga offer an overview of Angel, discussing its plot, its classification as both bildungsroman and historical novel, and Collins's use of language—specifically Creole and Standard English—to debunk notions of Britain's cultural superiority over Grenada.]

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.