ARRIVAL OF THE SNAKE-WOMAN
by Olive Senior, 1989

"Arrival of the Snake-Woman" is the first and longest of the stories in Olive Senior's Arrival of the Snake-Woman (1989). In the story, "snake-woman" is the name given by black Jamaicans to young Asian Indian women because of their litheness and hip movements: "They walk just like a snake and they don't wear no proper clothes just these thin little clothes-wrap, thinner than cobweb, yu can see every line of their body when they walk."

The story begins in about 1870 in Jamaica. Besides the tale about the woman herself and an interwoven story about the narrator, we are given a social history of nineteenth-century Jamaica. It is a history of radical changes in two contrasting places, each representative of different aspects of the island. There is rural Mount Rose, which is inland and poor, separated from the so-called Bay by a dangerous journey through a mountain range.

The Bay represents what is usually thought of as Jamaica. It is the region of sugarcane plantations, on which African slaves were imported to work and where the slaves were treated badly by the white owners. After slavery was abolished, the Africans were reluctant to remain, drifted off, and were replaced as workers by imported indentured Indians who were, and still are, known in the West Indies as coolies. The Indians were regarded as foreigners who would work for lower wages than the blacks would accept. At the time of the story a few younger blacks have started drifting in from the economically impoverished rural areas to work again on the plantations, where they can earn money. If the Bay represents a past of plantation slavery, it also is the future. It has a hospital and the first "brown" medical doctors. The professions are opening to educated blacks. By the story's end the Bay is a place of good schools and government jobs in a modern world unlike backward rural Jamaica. The narrator, now married and a father, lives there while recalling the events of his youth.

Mount Rose, where the story takes place, was originally a coffee plantation on which, unlike the sugar plantations, there was no clear division between whites and blacks. In rural areas the whites labored alongside the blacks and mixed with them, and they shared the same ways and often the same beds. Even before emancipation there was near racial equality, and there were also some mulattoes who were free and had their own land. The older whites eventually abandoned Mount Rose, and their property was taken over, although not legally, by blacks, who now fear the owners' return.

The snake-woman is also called Miss Coolie, for at first she knows little English and never reveals anything about her original name or history. We do not know how she came to Jamaica or why she allows herself to be taken to Mount Rose and become the common-law wife of SonSon, a cousin of the narrator. We are told that the Indian men treated their wives brutally, even killing them if they showed disobedience, so that the Indian women turned toward black men for refuge. In the story black society appears more casual, and family ties are looser. The black men have children by several women, the women are seldom married before they have children, and marriage results only when the men feel that it is time to settle down.

The early sections of the story, which consists of seven sections, contain much social anthropology that brings out cultural differences between the Indians and blacks. The snake-woman is hardworking, keeps to herself, and immediately starts to build a fire and clean the house, and she fetches water and cooks. She creates order where previously there was a careless disorder. Although her skin is as black as those of African descent, she has long hair and wears an Indian sari, which the churchgoers find shockingly revealing, and gold jewelry, which they regard as symbolic of vanity and evil. She plants and raises many new, Indian vegetables that no one has seen before, and she eats strange foods, especially roti and curry. She is a heathen, not a Christian.

To the narrator Ish, a young boy, the snake-woman is magical even before he has seen her. She represents the alien world beyond the enclosing mountains, a world he knows about from a few relatives who have traveled beyond Mount Rose but mainly from books, for he is the best pupil of Parson Bedlow. Bedlow and his wife are white American evangelical missionaries. They have "white" medicines, in contrast to folk cures, and can offer other modern advantages to those who attend their church. They have the only school until late in the story when the government starts one as well. The Bedlows plan to send Ish away for further education and eventually, they hope, a career as a "native" missionary, perhaps "to Darkest Africa."

When Ish becomes the snake-woman's friend and guide, he is faced by a conflict between his friendship for her and his relationship to the pastor, who sees the Indian woman in biblical terms as a heathen temptress, a "Daughter of Zion, Whore of Babylon." As the conflict becomes a crisis, Ish learns the ways of the world. Rather than give up either the snake-woman or his education, he starts to see the pastor as a human being. He sees the pastor's strange courage in coming to Mount Rose, as well as his obsessions, weaknesses, and prejudices. From the snake-woman the boy learns that it is best to dissemble if he wants to remain friends with her while attending the pastor's school, his passport to the outside world.

That Ish learns how to survive from the snake-woman is part of the feminism that shapes the story, which has several intertwined themes. One is about how an outsider is distrusted by others, is slowly accepted, and learns to adapt while retaining her own individuality. This theme might be described as being about creolization rather than assimilation, since the snake-woman retains her sense of Indianness and difference while putting aside what appears distinctive from the community. She does not so much assimilate as create a new form of identity that is neither Indian nor black. It is significant that her son has many children by the local black women. A new society is being formed just as in the past a West Indian society was created between Europeans and Africans, even though they may not have been aware of it.

Another major theme is the changing role of women. The snake-woman becomes a feminist role model who acts independently and who becomes the most important citizen in the community. When her sick son is refused medicine by the pastor because she is a heathen, she takes her child to the hospital at the Bay, becoming the first person to journey from Mount Rose to the Bay without company. While there, she makes a conscious choice to dissemble, becoming a Christian on her return to Mount Rose so that her son can go to school. She negotiates the sale of local produce to the coast and pinches pennies, becoming the first merchant, trader, and moneylender in the village. She eventually becomes the largest householder and the head of a large family that includes her husband's extended family and all of the children of her son. Throughout the story houses are used as symbols of belonging and of one's place in society.

"Arrival of the Snake-Woman" is full of texture, detail, and implied and stated significance. The narration is highly poetic, and there are long, varied sentences filled with local terms and idioms. The story assumes that the reader is Jamaican or is willing to accept dialect and local allusions without explanations. In this sense it is further along in the development of a national West Indian literature than, say, V. S. Naipaul's stories in Miguel Street. It also is more confident in linking the story to larger contexts. We are reminded that Jamaica and India were at the time both part of the British Empire, colored red on the boy's map, and that those of African and Indian descent were both taken to the West Indies to work on plantations. Neither the whites, blacks, nor Indians are natives of the region. To be Jamaican is to be a hybrid nostalgic for a distant, now mythic home, a foreign place of origins. As the story shows, the rural, isolated Jamaica of the late nineteenth century is now another place of origin for which the narrator is nostalgic. Using a few representative characters and a few locales, "Arrival of the Snake-Woman" is a small national epic that shows the sources of modern Jamaica in its various mixtures of people, food, religion, and culture from Africa, Europe, India, and North America as they have been transformed by local events and history.

—Bruce King