TY - JOUR
AU - Serna-Martínez, Elisa
AB - Abstract This article interprets Opal Palmer Adisa’s symbolization of the knee-scraper – a Caribbean woman whose suffering, sometimes unrealized and often unexpressed, gives way to the author’s emphasis on voicing the collective trauma of the region. Scraping one’s knee, in Adisa’s terms, is about recovering the past stories of pain and violence – rather than forgetting them – an act that offers the Afro-Caribbean community the possibility of healing from the symptomatic history of colonialism. Because “the past lives in the very wounds that remain open in the present,” it could be affirmed that Adisa reads her people’s history from their body language and translates it into text. By doing so, Adisa deflates the myth of the angry black woman, which according to Melissa Victoria Harris-Perry, assumes anger as an essential characteristic of black femininity. This essentialist stereotype has for long kept black women from showing their anger. In response, black and postcolonial feminist criticism (i.e., Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Sara Ahmed) promotes the exploration of anger, thus enabling black women’s pain to be recognized. Anger, according to Lorde, far from being stuck in the past, opens up the future, guiding life forward like a visionary. Adisa uncovers the source of this anger and then transforms it into narratives of reconciliation and hope. Drawing upon theories on textual embodiment, pain, scars, and anger, I read Adisa’s writings as illustrating pain’s inscription in cultural politics, and as resistance to structural relations of power. Jamaican writer Opal Palmer Adisa combines the realism of the storyteller with the cadenced openheartedness of the poet. In an interview with Jaqueline Bishop, she claims, “We have been taught to write one way and I am still fighting against that way, not simply out of rebellion, but because I don’t think the traditional narrative structures speak to the ethos of the Caribbean” (2). Born in Kingston, she moved to the USA at sixteen, and she now lives between Oakland, California, and St. Croix. She is a professor at California College of the Arts, and she writes and directs community plays, bringing forward the effects of cultural colonialism in the Caribbean. Adisa is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry and prose, including Tamarind and Mango Women (1992; PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award winner), Eros Muse (2006), and 4-Headed-Women (2013). She has also published two novels, It Begins with Tears (1997) and Painting Away Regrets (2011), and three short-story collections, most recently Love’s Promise (2017). She has co-edited Caribbean Erotic (2010), a significant compilation that renders visible the theme of sexuality as a site for freedom in Caribbean literature. Aware of the discriminatory biases based on gender, race, and class, Adisa engages with peripheral voices to explore their political implications. Her work is inscribed in the literary tradition of Caribbean women writers who explore feminist resistance within the context of slavery and globalization, such as Merle Collins, Grace Nichols, Lorna Goodison, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Edna Brodber, and Marion Bethel. Other than questions of race and gender, these writers also explore themes of folklore, place, and language. In her article “I Must Write What I Know so I’ll Know that I’ve Known it All Along,” (1995) Adisa asserts, “I am a Caribbean woman writer and I know that what I write about has been lived, has solicited tears, has punctured dreams. That is why I name things. I inscribe the history” (56). In the face of the imperialist politics that alienate people’s bodies and minds, Adisa attempts to restore the role of the narratives of intimacy in the articulation of cultural identity. Adisa’s cardinal essay “She Scrape She Knee: The Theme of My Work”1 (2008) gives shape to her own allegory: the knee-scraper, an outraged, refractory female subject located in her native Caribbean, a decolonizing force, yet oftentimes unacknowledged. Adisa’s themes are marked by the contesting presence of the knee-scraper: a wounded woman figure that conveys her nonconformity in spite of the shame projected onto her by a patriarchal society that judges her, condemns her, and discredits her. Other excerpts from Adisa’s work will help illustrate further the author’s assumptions of a Caribbean aesthetics of resistance. This article focuses on a number of poems and essays appearing in Tamarind and Mango Women (1992), Leaf of Life (2000), Eros Muse: Poems and Essays (2006), and I Name Me Name (2008), with discussion of relevant passages from her novel It Begins with Tears (1997) and her short-story collection Until Judgement Comes (2007). The following passage, drawn from the first lines of Adisa’s manifesto “She Scrape She Knee,” condenses the essence of the knee-scraper: As a girl I often scraped my knee, not because I had poor balance or tripped over my feet but because I dared to be more, or other, than what good girls were supposed to be. I was never a good girl . . . Nice girls never scraped their knees. . . . I see that there is much in common between the little girl who frequently scraped her knee, and has scars to prove it, and this woman, me, who must often walk stiff-legged in defiance of the scrapes that are inflicted, often by the insensitive, the blind, the upholders of norms, traditions, and antiquated values that I had no part in setting and by which I will not abide. I scrape my knee. (146) An undeniable aspect of writing from the body is the production of new memory spaces. The knee-scrapers as creative bodies in spite of (or because of) their anger, is a theme widely acknowledged by Adisa. In the above passage, she traces back to her early years and draws parallels with her current writing career, thus exposing the precursory patterns of behavior that shape her writing. When scraping her knee, Adisa is determined to dismantle inherited values imposed upon the members of her Caribbean community. She brings to memory what it is like to dissent and to fire up different ways of knowing and shaping the world. Following the motif of the knee-scraper, Adisa acknowledges that “to lack scars on one’s knees means one has lived safely” and has “accepted the prescribed rules.” This affirmation describes someone who is ready to face danger for the sake of personal integrity, and yet, in spite of the unwanted pain, she embraces it, and “make[s] marvellous discoveries” (146). The epistemologies of the affects are latent in Adisa’s creative use of language. This essay is concerned with embracing the affects not as isolated, individual experiences, but as political acts that can be rescued through bodily traces. In order to examine the figure of the knee-scraper as an element of resistance, I first review how painful emotions and scars contribute to the configuration of cultural identity. Thus, the first two sections will draw upon the theoretical work of Elaine Scarry, Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, and Hélène Cixous, with examples drawn from the work of Adisa. In the last two sections, I argue that Adisa’s representation of bodies in pain entails a transformation of anger into intellectual agency: an act of textual embodiment that enables the building of alternative epistemologies, thus demystifying the negative stereotype of the angry black woman. In these latter parts, I examine Adisa’s writings following feminist insights as formulated by Audre Lorde, Ahmed, Julia Kristeva, and Alice Walker. I contend that Adisa’s work plays a significant role in the politics of postcolonial and feminist resistance. I focus on Adisa’s routes to dismantle authoritative discourses and colonial practices, specifically via her self-affirmation as a knee-scraper, because it blurs the arbitrary borders traditionally established between emotions and thought. The Nature and Materialization of Pain In her seminal study, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1987), pain theorist Scarry explores the nature of physical suffering in torture, concluding that pain is, by nature, inexpressible and, therefore, unshareable. The unshareability of pain, according to Scarry, is manifest in the case of injured individuals whose physical suffering leads them to a state of speechlessness (60). In this absence of speech, Scarry suggests that there is a kind of “immunity of the body to the state,” meaning that the body has an intrinsic ability to keep expressing itself and resist authority (346–47). The trope of the knee-scraper can be understood as the materialization of pain, an agent of resistance triggered by the speechlessness steered by the intense experience of pain. However, in the case of Adisa, the unshareability endorsed by Scarry seems only vaguely pertinent. Shown in her poem “Writing from Inside,” Adisa believes in the ability of translating the body’s visible expressions of pain into speech as a means to recover from the pain: no matter the severity of the wound words will sponge your blood up off the floor soothe your bruised tissues (30) Although others have also argued – along with Scarry – that pain is a lonely and private act, in The Cultural Politics of Emotions (2014), affect theorist Ahmed suggests that, whereas pain is a solitary experience, it can never be private. Her response to the apparent privacy of pain is that, because the experience of pain is a lonely act, we feel the necessity to share it with a witness, and secondly, that “the impossibility of inhabiting the other’s body creates a desire to know ‘what it feels like’” (29). This is what Ahmed calls the “sociality of pain” (28). Indeed, Ahmed represents the skin as something that mediates between inside and outside, enabling the movement of pain from the interior to the exterior (24). She suggests an intimate relationship between the materialization of pain – when skin enables “the effect of boundary, fixity and surface” (Butler, Bodies 9, quoted in Ahmed 24) – and the “intensification of pain,” which explains, “it is through the intensification of pain sensations that bodies and worlds materialise and take shape” (24). In Ahmed’s, advocacy bodies are created through their contact with other bodies that the idea of the knee-scraper – a female creative force that yearns to be recognized – breaks through and transforms pain and anger into creativity. Such connection of pain with creativity is not shared by Scarry, who believes that pleasure and pain are opposites, in that the former is creative and the latter destructive (“On Evil” 80). Whereas Scarry’s affirmation that pleasure is world-building—or else, that world-building is pleasurable—leaves pain outside of the equation; for Ahmed – and arguably for Adisa – extreme sensations of pain can lead to situations of world-building, which in the end turns into a pleasurable act. The sociality of pain implied by Ahmed is aligned with Adisa’s interest in the pain of others; not in order to appropriate it – what Ahmed calls “the commodification of suffering” (32), in which case Adisa would pretend/believe she feels exactly the same kind of pain, what Brown calls the “fetishisation of the wound” (States 55, quoted in Ahmed 32) – but in order to explore how pain works to affect differences between bodies. The mechanisms of empathy are thus activated in Adisa: there is a movement from the inside to the outside that attempts to approach the other’s unknown feelings (Ahmed 30). In Ahmed’s words, the “materialisation [of pain] takes place through the ‘mediation’ of affect, which may function in this way as readings of the bodies of others” (28). In her poem “Speaking the Truth,” Adisa affirms, “i write to keep from suffocating / to lament about children being killed . . . without ever knowing love” (11). She not only exudes empathy, but also delves into the nature of the others’ pain. Drawing upon Ahmed’s advancements, I interpret Adisa’s recurrent lower case ‘i’ to mean that feelings do not belong to or originate in the individual self ‘I’, but “move out towards others,” and hence they cannot be reduced to a subjective or personal act (208). In correspondence with Scarry’s observation of the ability of the body to disobey (346–47), Adisa’s knee-scrapers are also renegades, even though sometimes they unconsciously damage themselves. Approaching Ahmed’s sociality of pain, their pain is automatically emerges to the surface, trying to reach an external witness with whom to share the injustices they grudgingly put up with. In her essay “She Scrape She Knee,” Adisa remembers how Jamaican women scraped their knees “often without knowing why they were felled, and often not being allowed a moment to acknowledge the pain or massage the swelling” (147). This state of unacknowledged pain can be understood through what Butler calls “the violence of derealization,” by which she stresses the fact that being unconscious of one’s suffering unavoidably engenders more suffering (Butler, Precarious 33, 34, quoted in Spengler 189). Adisa hereby notices the vicious cycle lived by those who are unable to realize their pain and therefore they cannot verbalize it nor relieve it. The ability of the body to feel and express pain becomes the most loyal communication system to act on behalf of the individual’s integrity, a body language to be translated into anger and then into speech so that it can reach a broader public, which is one of Adisa’s main interests as a writer. Adisa’s figure of the knee-scraper – in its ultimate form as disavowed entity – seems to be aligned with Scarry’s review of the body in pain, a body stuck in the present: hopeless, negated, and left to be nothing else but pure presence. Adisa points out that “knee-scrapers are never allowed anything, that we seize the moment, the day” (“She Scrape” 149), an assertion that directs the reader to the understanding of the ephemeral nature of scraping one’s knee. This observation suggests that the expression of pain cannot be fully articulated outside the moment of suffering. In other words, when there is no injury, we lose our perception of the body; we become less aware of its limits and the place it occupies in the world (Ahmed 27). However, some people are unable to experience pain mindfully, in which case, the outcome could be dramatic, a state of emotional shallowness that can only cause more suffering. This is why Adisa insists on exploring in depth how pain is mediated so that it can successfully arise to the surface. But for her, bringing consciousness to the body does not mean that the pain can only inhabit the present moment. First because, as Ahmed puts it, “the sensation of pain is deeply affected by memories” (25), and second because there is hope, a vision to change the future, if we learn how to read and inscribe our pain or others’ pain; an affirmation that can be scrutinized further in Lorde’s notable work on black women’s criticism, Sister Outsider (1984), the particulars of which I refer to later on (127). What is of interest for the transgressive potentiality of the knee-scraper is that the intensification of pain renders the body more palpable to its holder. This body consciousness enables us to transcend the limits of what is lived as ordinary, that which one does not realize because of its customary condition. Under pain we are more likely to become aware of the place our bodies occupy in the world, to notice “how we live in relationship to the surfaces, bodies and objects that make up our dwelling places” (Ahmed 27). This realization of pain, far from disconnecting us from the world, brings us closer to it. Indeed, argues Ahmed, “the experience of pain does not cut off the body in the present, but attaches this body to the world of other bodies, an attachment that is contingent on elements that are absent in the lived experience of pain” (28). Those absent elements – not available in the present – are the histories of other bodies in contact with ours, which allow our reconstruction of a given apprehended feeling. In Adisa’s poem “Innate,” (2000) she reflects on the connection between her pain and the words that insist on telling the story of her ancestors, implying the existence of a cultural DNA: when I cut my finger the blood is written in words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . they are the treasures my ancestors bequeathed me and though I might pretend to forget they are there these memory words seeing as the pupils of my eyes (8) Whereas memories do not belong to the present, they play a significant role in our construction of the meaning of pain. So the story that inhabits the past is brought to the present when we remember how the surfaces of bodies came to be wounded, thus enlarging our reading of the world and allowing us to rethink the relationship between past and present. Therefore, for Adisa, the experience of pain is not an immediate one, but rather it is mediated by our lived experiences, our contact with other bodies. Put simply: emotions are thought, and they are even more likely to be realized under painful situations. The Knee-Scraper’s Stories The intensity of pain makes bodies noticeable, and the marks left on the body have the same function (Ahmed 28). The trope of the scar deserves closer attention to understand the figure of the knee-scraper. Adisa is a woman poet proud of her insubordinate, yet painful, attitude. She avows that, even today, “the nosy child is still around in the form of an inquisitive, eavesdropping woman so, alas, pussy scars always grace my knees” (“She Scrape” 146). This motif of the scar can be understood through Cixous’s and Scarry’s perspectives. Poststructuralist feminist theorist Cixous, whose early work focused on the relationship between body and language, considers in Hélène Cixous (1994), Photos de Racines, that the scar is something that bears the healed wounds of the past, and that women should cherish it as a trace. For Cixous, the wound is what one feels, and even though it might be painful, it evolves into a scar. The scar is charged with a positive meaning for Cixous, because it represents a story made available, thus she epitomizes in her simple, yet insightful language: “[l]a cicatrice, ce récit” / “the scar, this story” (26). Similarly, for Adisa the scars are the testimony of that unaffected, yet discerning, little girl who used to scrape her knee. Although the wound is caused by the imposition of norms and obsolete values, Adisa rates it highly, because the body marks it, leaves it behind, and allows the body to remember certain untold stories that could not be identified otherwise. In her poem “Writing from Inside,” (2006) Adisa insists on the risks that the writer must take, and she advises the prospective writer about the possible sores that extracting stories/pus can entail. She gives directions as to how unearth a story in the following verses: you must be a surgeon with a scapel open the abscess and drain the puss (sic)” (29). For Adisa the outcome of scraping one’s knees – which turns into an abscess before it becomes a scar – is a valuable trace for a suppressed story to be acknowledged and written. This recognition of the story may be carried out either by the holder of the scars or by a second person who is attentive enough to realize it and use her privilege as a writer to put it in words. Adisa positions herself in either role; both the writer and the injured person are knee-scrapers, inasmuch as they are taking risks and enduring hardship to express unaccounted feelings. Likewise, Adisa demonstrates her ability to enter the intimate realm of her characters’ pain and to challenge the worldview externally imposed worldview. In her polyphonic novel It Begins with Tears (1997), set in rural Jamaica, she locates the beginning of the stories in the act of shedding tears. In the following passage, that highlights the Caribbean oral tradition of storytelling, all the villagers were sitting together to celebrate the first street light, and then three of the women from the community went on to tell them a story. Ainsworth was a young boy at that time and now remembers how, after being prompted to think about their tears, everybody ended up crying: The story was their memory. The story was the pain that produced tears. . . . The story was the beginning of their lives that had been told them over and over, but out of embarrassment they hadn’t listened; so when the time came for those tales to be useful, they didn’t know the details and groped in self-darkness. The story was in the first drop of salty tear that was shed for them, that they shed for themselves. Ainsworth looked around at his mother and the other adults crying and felt cheated, until he found his own tears. Salty. Sticky. Inseparable from him, like the pain of birth. That was indeed the beginning. (139–40) These lines indicate that ignoring one’s story is pretending one knows oneself enough. Throughout the novel, the connections between the body and the story are made evident every time that a strong feeling affects a character. In the following passage, Adisa uses the phenomenon of shedding tears to probe into the story of Dahlia, an old woman who, together with other female friends, comes to assist Monica who has been tortured by another group of revengeful women. They had introduced pepper into her vagina because she was having an affair with one of their husbands. For Dahlia, the picture of Monica cannot be more distressing: The old woman who had buried her husband and daughter and single-handedly raised her grandson looked at Monica and all the anger and sorrow that she had felt thirty-three years earlier when first her husband then her daughter died, surged up again and the tears she had refused to shed in defiance and stubbornness then, came forth now like a hose turned on. (135) Crying is a relevant trace for Dahlia’s story inasmuch as it enables the pain to come to the surface. Dahlia cries not only for the torture inflicted upon Monica, but also because her tears bring to memory her own hardships. Ahmed reminds us that emotions shape the objects we are in contact with, and that these objects shape our emotions. Such objects, however, are not necessarily material; they can be imagined (7). Memories, therefore, can trigger a feeling. Whereas in the first place, the object of Dahlia’s feelings is Monica’s suffering (suffering that shapes her empathetic emotions toward Monica’s pain), not until her tears come to the surface do old memories reach her, opening her own contact with other bodies. At this moment, there is a switch of the object of her feelings: from Monica’s suffering to her own stories of grief and loss. Dahlia’s memories come to shape her emotions. These newly thought emotions prompt her to share her own pain. In this case, tears appear, rendering the body more visible. The following excerpt from the same passage serves to illustrate the mechanisms that transform pain and sadness into anger and then into action. Out of the group of women who came to the aid of Monica, Miss Cotton’s response is empathetic; she feels sad for Monica, but then she seems decided to take action: In the tub Monica started to moan. . . . Miss Cotton, . . . whose tears had not stopped flowing, stood up when Monica began to moan, stomped the ball of her right foot into the floor and beat her palms together. . . . Olive could see that Miss Cotton felt better now, her sadness turning to rage, so she left her and went into the bathroom. (It 135) Adisa is one of those scrutinizing writers who is able to recreate her community, not just as an unattached eavesdropper, but as an agent of the whole cultural process, who lives and understands gender, race, and class biases. She claims to have found inspiration in those Jamaican women who, living in “a very class- and colour-conscious society,” scraped their knees (“She Scrape” 147). Alongside her work, Adisa is successful in articulating these women’s personal ways to face adversity with a loving attitude and endless creativity, in a society that often neglects them. In doing so, the author is also reflecting on the discriminatory causes of Caribbean women’s hardship. Adisa’s Translation of Anger into Speech In Sister Outsider, Lorde encourages the necessity for black women to name their dreams and support each other. This will help them explore the potentiality of their angers and fears, and change their situation (153). Similarly, in “She Scrape She Knee,” Adisa encourages the production of constructive material out of anger. Knee-scraping serves not only to express her rebellious attitude as a woman, but also as a turning point to construct a more realistic picture of Caribbean life, and to encourage people to “create a world that is clean, safe, and open to differences” (147). She defines her own writing as a means to give a voice to the Caribbean community: “I attempt to illuminate the myths, to reveal a picture of Caribbean life that is too real for commercials, to reclaim our land and remove us from being simply the property of someone else’s dream vacation” (148). Adisa’s endeavor to recover a Caribbean tradition resonates with postcolonial literary strategies to rewrite the colonial past in order to “rediscover” the erased “cultural identity” of the “black diaspora” (Hall 393). She admits having learned from knee-scrapers how to be a writer: To be a writer is to be arrogant, to assume that your “truth” is more valuable, more insightful than that of non-writers; to write is to commit sin to print, pain to inspection, joy to the communal table. But this is one side; the other side of being a writer is to be humble, to have the desire to share a joy, a pain, a vision not yet realized, sometimes not even formulated. A writer is a person with vision, a seer, a mouthpiece for the voiceless, the mute, as well as an observer of the talker, the braggart, the fool. Writers all scrape their knees. (147) For Adisa, daring to articulate what has not yet been said is an act of self-assertion, as well as of deference, because the writer needs to pay close attention to unaccounted feelings and name them with determination. The writer knows that she is bringing into existence not only her own experience, but also the stories whose voices are silenced, thus acting on their behalf. As Adisa claims in “Speaking the Truth”: i write to give sound to the small voices shut out silenced denied access (11) The caesura splitting the last two verses allows a visual separation that may indicate the fracture between the subaltern bodies and their voices. This painful dismemberment, this amputation of the voice can be repaired through her writings: it can be re-membered. Adisa, the knee-scraper, is determined to take up the responsibility to speak on behalf of other individuals whose unprivileged social situation renders them invisible.2 Adisa is aware of the risks she is taking as a spokesperson; in her poem “Writing from Inside,” she warns her audience of the exposure that writing entails: first decide it’s worth the risk even before you understand what’s to be gained (29) Stepping into the ‘unknown’ is a distinctive feature of the spokesperson. In fact, in that poem Adisa affirms that she has to “surrender / kneel before / this god” (“Writing” 30). "[T]his god" stands for the word, which implies that there is a spiritual, intimate connection with language. Weir-Soley observes how in the Caribbean, as in West Africa, the sacred is expressed through art forms, like “literature and orature” (141).3 Surrendering to the word as if it were a deity implies that one is ready to embrace whatever language brings, however painful, and to accept it as if it were some kind of divine providence, a voice that is to reveal some truth. For the intellectual who writes on behalf of others, scraping her knee is a risk, as well as a must. The imperative to scrape her knee is rooted in her “desire to share a joy, a pain, a vision not yet realized, sometimes not even formulated” (“She Scrape” 146). I have already discussed the inexpressibility of pain, unless it is through the body. Indeed, although pain cannot be reproduced beyond the groans, limping, and tears, it leaves a trace. This trace is what triggers writers like Adisa to delve into the unsaid. For Adisa, then, writing is not a smooth path; finding the accurate words to voice one’s truth, or someone else’s truth, takes probing deep feelings that are too difficult – or too sensitive – to articulate. In “Writing from Inside” she warns: “words can contain / any sore” (29). The act of writing is, for Adisa, about accepting the pain one might encounter, and being confident that words, emerging from such soreness, are to be itching so they can heal: [words] will squeeze all the abusive memories through the pores and wash you clean (30) Pain must not dissuade the writer from writing. In fact, enduring hardship seems to be a necessary step in the act of verbalizing resistance. Note how in part I of her poem “Speak and Speak and Speak Again,” Adisa warns: silence offers no reward silence isnever silent the words not spoken give you headache a gnawing pain in your stomach knots in your shoulder blades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . silence leaves scars on your body (43) Adisa is warning about the violence of derealization mentioned earlier: Speaking is likely to be painful, but it will be even more painful to remain silent. The poetic voice is encouraging her readership to give voice to their memories, however painful they might be. The speaker assures that the act of writing will reduce the fear to speak and will enable writers to understand and heal from the past traumas, as well as to acknowledge their capacity to perform transgressive practices. In her comparable defense of poetry, Lorde – to whom this poem was dedicated – reminds her black sisters that poetry is the weapon they need to use in order to get rid of past hatreds, address the future, and make any possibility real: “we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas disparage” (38). A passage in Adisa’s short story “Trying Words” (from the collection Until Judgement Comes, Stories about Jamaican Men) illuminates the potentiality of words and the motif of the knee-scraper. In this story, words are personified as the transmitters of memory. All along the story, they chase Dr. Bowen, who, having moved to the USA, makes doomed efforts to leave behind his Caribbean heritage, of which he is ashamed. Throughout, Dr. Bowen eventually restores his Caribbeanness. At one occasion, his memory words take him back to his grandmother’s voice. She once tried to explain to him why the slave owners “clipped his great, great, great maternal grandmother’s tongue” instead of her feet, before she could be able to run away from the plantation. Dr. Bowen had wondered why it was her tongue they damaged, if “it was her feet that allowed her to escape from enslavement” in the end; to which his grandmother answered: “Is not only feet know path. Tongue does climb tree too” (151). Dr. Bowen’s ancestor speaks about the power of the word as follows: Me always did know words had power. When me was enslave, it was the only thing dat was free. It was words that led me to the path of freedom. It was words that kept me running, even when me did tired and blister cover me feet. And every time de overseer say how we no good, how we lazy, how we is savage, me pepper him wid me mouth; me use words fi give de others faith: me use words fi remind meself me free, always free. (157) First of all, Adisa’s representation of Jamaican nation language – a manifest strategy of Caribbean orature – is not arbitrary. Interposed with English, the inclusion of local language gives a Caribbean color, emphasizing the intention of the author to embrace the worldview she is trying to restore (Ashcroft et al. 41). The recognition of vernacular languages “reminds us that language is a human behaviour,” whereas the dominant version of Standard English generally considers language as a prescriptive model (46). The development and implications of vernacular languages in Anglophone Caribbean literature are further developed by Brathwaite in “History of the Voice,” where he coins the term nation language to explain how English has been influenced by African language structures (265–67). The above excerpt also reflects on the colonial use of torture: After having her tongue cut off, this slave managed to escape the plantation system by means of her feet. This speechless character, herself a knee-scraper, would not lack strength to flee colonial domination; on the contrary, she would gain it using her body scars as a location of memory and a precedent for resistance. The mutilated tongue symbolizes that the body remains the last agent able to lead into action what verbal language cannot. “Physical pain,” asserts Scarry, “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate revulsion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (Body 4). Adisa’s depiction of the mutilation of the tongue not only represents an amputation, bringing forth suffering and consciousness, but also implies the destruction of her character’s ability to speak, bringing her to an original state of linguistic absence. This state of pain that exists before language is what French feminist Kristeva, in her “Revolution in Poetic Language,” called the semiotic realm, or the maternal imaginary. For Kristeva, the symbolic, or linguistic state, emerges through the repression of the semiotic, or imaginary, nonlinguistic state. Through poetic language, the repressed (semiotic) elements are replaced: “In ‘artistic’ practices the semiotic – the precondition of the symbolic – is revealed as that which also destroys the symbolic” (103). The semiotic, therefore, can be represented in the less conventional symbolic representations, such as experimental poetry and peripheral literature (like women’s literature), with which the writers can transgress the limits of the symbolic realm. The embodiment of language is also included within the semiotic realm in Kristeva’s accounts; thus, the semiotic is not only exercised in creativity but also in intense, extreme moments that require a dynamic communication, such as unspeakable pain, fear, rage, or even during psychosis (103).4 Both Kristeva’s and Scarry’s perceptions of feelings as expressed through nonverbal language can be discussed in relation to Adisa’s statement as a writer. In terms of expressing the most intimate feelings of anger and pain, these theorists contend that pain can destroy verbal communication; however, for Kristeva nonverbal communication (the semiotic) is required as a prerequisite for symbolic communication to take place. Meanwhile, for Scarry, the repression of the symbolic is rather negative and hopeless. Adisa’s objection with Scarry would be, “I do not want to see anyone have to grit teeth, shrug off the resistance, and walk on stiff legs. But alas, even in my writing I find that both my readers and I scrape knees” (147). For Adisa, expressing pain through the body is not only ineluctable, but also a precursory act to further nonconformist articulations. Far from an ostensible acknowledgment of pain, Adisa affirms that pain and anger cannot be avoided, let alone erased, when personal integrity and a people’s self-determination are at stake. An appendix to Kristeva’s assumption of poetry as the most capable means to unsettle the symbolic order can be found in Adisa, who translates anger into speech through the prosaic, as well as the lyric. Indeed, peripheral writers belonging to oral traditions consider narrative as a source of knowledge, and not as an evil force to be resisted (Friedman ch. 9). In her attempt to challenge established literary genres, a common feature of Adisa’s writing is to include prosaic elements within poetry and vice versa. Black Women’s Anger Revisited Adisa’s writings explore the structures of power implied in the construction of the myth of the angry black woman. She attempts to legitimize anger, not as an essential feature of black women, but as a powerful tool that enables them to take up action and perform political change. Both the intensity of pain and the bodily marks bring what is inside to the surface (Ahmed 26). The trope of the knee-scraper enacts the bodily memory of women whose pain has been silenced but whose anger insists that their pain be recognized. For black feminists, feeling anger is a necessary step for black women to respond to sexist and racist epistemologies. In Sister Outsider, Lorde convincingly asserts: “My response to racism is anger. . . . My fear of anger taught me nothing. . . . [A]nger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification. . . . Anger is loaded with information and energy” (124, 127). Adisa, like Lorde, is aware of the creative possibilities for survival inherent in anger. Like Walker’s black women artists in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, who leave their marks in whatever materials and mediums they can afford (239), Adisa realizes in her essay “She Scrape She Knee,” that most of her female friends, whether they are artists, singers, writers, scholars, photographers, or mothers, are also “knee-scrapers”: women who keep doing what they want in spite of the fact that they will be wanted back to their assigned corners. The author is aware that: doing what we do, in the society in which we live, demands payment for our disregard of the law – Women, know thy place and thy place is often in the kitchen or horizontally disposed. Let me hasten to add that I find both positions appealing at times, but choice is the operative mode in this regard. So we scrape our knees. (146) The use of the archaic form thy – very common in church speech and canonical literary texts – reveals the kind of authority Adisa is subversively mimicking (Bhabha 85–92). Adisa claims that she not only has “great fun” but also learns about her “potentials as well as [her] limitations, and [she] experience[s] the Mother-God within [herself]” (“She Scrape” 146). The recognition of a goddess who is not male and lives not outside of herself, but within, produces a different possibility for the spiritual authority to exist. This possibility transcends both the location and the gender of an externally appointed Christian God. Adisa condemns the disposition of the patriarchal laws that unfavorably affect women. She demands that such social prescriptions of the passive woman whose power is limited to the domestic realm be reviewed; and that women be able to choose their place. Here, Adisa defies the “cult of true womanhood” of the Judeo-Christian tradition that provided salvation for the black woman only if she behaved piously, morally, and virtuously (Weir-Soley 22–23). Thanks to the work of writers who scrape their knees, anger moves forward and transforms pain into knowledge, creating spaces that have not been inhabited before. Adisa’s angry black woman, rewritten as the knee-scraper, does not get stuck in the present. To illustrate this point, Adisa brings the example of “Jamaican Queen Mother of verse and humour” Louise Bennett, one of the greatest influences in her writing: Louise Bennett stole the time, and this created space for me. . . . it was then that I decided to use our rhythms in my poetry, my stories, in the recording of our lives. It gives colour and flavour and validates our cultural ethos. Bennett allowed me to be brave and risk the surprised satisfaction of being myself. (“She Scrape” 149) The space created by Bennett implies that Adisa lacked a place from which to express herself. This absence of a fixed residence, argues Ahmed, implies that “gender permeates all aspects of social life” and that in its “worldly” status, feminism becomes “a critique that loses an object, and opens itself up to possibilities that cannot be simply located or found in the present,” thus bringing hope and change into the future (176). Adisa seems to suggest that, if willing to be an intellectual, the female Caribbean writer is doomed to experience adversity, but as Said writes, this is the only path “to advance human freedom and knowledge” (17). With the figure of the knee-scraper, Adisa vindicates the role of the black intellectual woman. According to Said, the colonized subject “must develop a resistant intellectual consciousness before he [or she] can become an artist” (16). In order to achieve intellectual agency, the artist must know “how to use language well” and “when to intervene in language” (20). Furthermore, Said sees the intellectual as a representative figure that is “publicly recognisable and involves both commitment and risk, boldness and vulnerability” (13). In this regard, Adisa labels Bennett as “a bold knee-scraper,” who “was allowed to flaunt her sassiness, her tenacity, her affirmation of herself and us” (“She Scrape” 149). For Adisa, nonconformist women can find a safe place to express themselves through writing; she remarks, however, that this place is not fully theirs, that it is stolen. Note that in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous describes her écriture fémenine with the verb voler, which in French means both flying and stealing. Cixous explains that women have only been allowed to exist as “he,” where they act conventionally and perform the received structures, whereas a woman as “she” is inevitably subversive, as she is “questioning the framework of institutions and blowing up the law, breaking up the truth with laughter” (888). For Adisa, subversiveness also consists of the disruption of a phallocentric worldview by means of a fearless and shameless female voice. Women who desire to take action for their own sake need to take up the word and make a different reading of it. Indeed, through her writing, Adisa raises consciousness and, like Bennett, creates a space of dialogue that enables women to exchange different experiences and feelings, so that they can examine the implications of such feelings and experiences in the construction of power relations. The creation of spaces for consciousness raising is of great significance for feminist resistance, because in order “to question legitimate institutions and authorities, most people need to know that they are not alone, crazy, or misguided” (Tavris 246–47, in Ahmed 172). Aware of this, Lorde suggests that black women must take the courage to acknowledge their dreams, so that they can shape a better future by scrutinizing the reality of their present situation (153). Lorde offers that black women should stop hating each other and create a real sisterhood. In her essay “She Scrape She Knee,” Adisa takes up the notion of sisterhood by acknowledging the existence of Caribbean women who have inspired her to become the woman writer she is today: “I must admit that my examples were almost always women who never showed any diffidence in the face of adversity” (149). In connection with Adisa’s endorsement of a nonconformist woman’s writing, Lorde is aware that women’s emotions and feelings have not been accounted for in the construction of the world; however, she knows they exist in some places, which she qualifies as “dark because they are ancient and hidden.” Lorde insists that poetry has the gift to name those ideas that are first felt and later born in the poem, and she thinks that black women need to learn how to cherish and respect these hidden sources of their power (36–37). Similarly, Cixous impels the necessity for women to put themselves into the text and locate their role in history. For Cixous, the dark place relates to women’s oblivion and is therefore a marginal location. She thinks that, in the same way as Africa, the Dark Continent, is a colonized territory; women are also colonized by men (“Laugh” 875–77). Cixous is aware that women have been disciplined into thinking that this darkness – this horizontal position in Adisa’s excerpt above – is a good place for them: “we have internalized this horror of the dark,” she concludes (878). In her poem “Madness Disguises Sanity,” Adisa considers her writing as a space where she can express her anger safely, and as the most effective weapon for women’s voices to reach other people. She thinks that a black outraged woman protesting in a public space would probably be stigmatized with the stereotype of the angry black woman, which assumes anger as an essential characteristic of black femininity (for more on this topic, see Harris-Perry 88–93). In this poem, Adisa secretly wishes her anger could be acknowledged. The last stanzas of her poem read: To be one of those desolate men who lounge on stink alleyways forever talking to the wind their words bullets people shy from But I am woman conditioned to nurse my scream like a mute child So I write (102) The female poetic voice yearns to be one of those vehement, opinionated men who are often found in open spaces, careless about what others might think about their manners. In her view, society is not ready to acquiesce women’s anger. Angry black women are ethically disavowed; their madness is considered as an intrinsic pathology which they most likely will need to have looked at.5 This double oppression of gender and race is in agreement with Ahmed’s assertion that “the cultural politics of emotion is deeply bound up with gendered histories of imperialism and capitalism, in which violence against the bodies of subaltern women is both granted and taken for granted in the making of worlds” (170). This poem epitomizes the ill treatment that rebellious, indecorous women receive in a male’s world, and the ensuing difficulties they face to play a relevant role in their communities. The poem implies that women who desire to “speak out against the established ‘truths’ are often constructed as emotional” and hence, they fail the standards of reason that allegedly “form the basis of ‘good judgement.” Such denigration is the product of a prejudice constructed by and for the patriarchal structures of power. Considering women’s anger and emotionality as a trait of inferiority with regard to reason and thought is thus normalized by the establishment, that considers feminism hostile and as “an extension of the already pathological ‘emotionality’ of femininity” (170). This feminist remark can also be found in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel inspired by Charlote Brönte’s Jane Eyre (1847). Here, Rhys rescues the figure of Brönte’s madwoman in the attic, Antoinette, and unveils the entrapments of this Creole woman’s life and the causes of her voicelessness. By giving voice to the unvoiced women who lead a humble and silent existence, writers such as Rhys and Adisa bring up important questions regarding not only gender alienation but also race differences in the history of the Caribbean and the subsequent moral barriers established between what is normal and what is insane. Like the Greek mythical figure, Medusa, the angry woman who in Cixous’s cardinal text “The Laugh of the Medusa” releases her anger through a rejoicing, fearless laughter, Adisa’s knee-scraper channels her anger through her own creativity, an activity that makes her laugh and rejoice. In Adisa’s essay “Words Sculpting Self,” she asserts, “I write to realize the dreams left behind. When I write I seldom get angry, I have more energy and hope beams from my eyes” (19). Likewise, Walker refers to the intense spirituality and creativity of her forbearers. She makes public the histories of women who in the slavery period were forced to bear first and then lose their children. Walker argues that these women were “abused and mutilated in body” and had to “force their minds to desert their bodies” (232). In abandoning their bodies, these women reached a deep spirituality of which they were often unaware. Walker portrays them as a sort of “crazy Saints” or even “Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release” (232–33). Black women were deviant, resisting figures portrayed as madwomen in the patriarchal discourse (Boyce Davies 77). In the above instances, madness and anger are interchangeable inasmuch as the state of being mad/crazy can be interpreted as the effect of surfacing rage. Madness is connected to the scar, because the scar is the trace that renders visible the origin of madness. Such origin could be a repressed angry feeling. Indeed, both the expression of pain and the scars are the testimony of a story of violence that has been proscribed but struggles to survive. Through the trope of the knee-scraper – a resistant woman who harms herself out of rage because she is not allowed a safe space to demand her rights as a human being – Adisa observes that, whenever a woman tries to dissent, she is stigmatized as “womanish,” a woman whose independent ways are a threat to her community or family (150). Adisa claims to have written her collection of short stories Bake-Face and Other Guava Stories in memory of “those women who never have access to microphones, who carry their madness sewed into their skirt hems” (149). Adisa makes it clear that she is committed to “[g]iving voice to this madness that besieges us, . . . to our quiet fears and invisible tears, . . . to our struggles, our victories, our determination, I scrape my knee, she scrapes her knee, we all scrape our knees” (“She Scrape” 149). Adisa’s figure of the knee-scraper offers interesting possibilities for affective political resistance in literary practice. First, because it examines the ways in which other bodies/objects affect us in our understanding of our place in the world, and by extension of the world, and second, because it brings into value the potentiality of resistance inherent in the imaginary spaces created by literature. Aligned with Scheherazade,6 whose ability to tell stories saved her from being murdered, Adisa’s words aim to free herself and others from the inherent tragedy of life, which in this context can be read as the tragedy of the doubly oppressed voice of the black Caribbean woman. Works Cited Adisa, Opal Palmer. 4-Headed Woman . Tia Chucha P, 2013. —. Bake-Face and Other Guava Stories . Kelsey St. P, 1986. —. “ I Must Write What I Know so I’ll Know that I’ve Known it All Along.” SAGE  9.2( 1995): pp. 54– 57. —. “ Innate.” Leaf of Life . Jukebox P, 2000, p. 8. —. It Begins With Tears . Heinemann, 1997. —. Love’s Promise . CaribbeanReads, 2017. —. “ Madness Disguises Sanity” Tamarind and Mango Women . Sister Vision, Black Women and Women of Colour Press, 1992, p. 102. —. “ She Scrape She Knee: The Theme of my Work.” I Name Me Name . Peepal Tree, 2008, pp. 146– 51. —. “ She Scrape She Knee: The Theme of My Work.” Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference . Edited by Selwyn Cudjoe. Calaloux Publications, 1990, pp. 145– 50. —. “ Speak and Speak and Speak Again” I Name Me Name . Peepal Tree, 2008, pp. 43– 46. —. “ Speaking the Truth” Leaf of Life . Jukebox Press, 2000, p. 11. —. “ Trying Words” Until Judgement Comes: Stories about Jamaican Men . Peepal Tree, 2007, pp. 142– 60. —. “ Words Sculpting Self.” Eros Muse: Poems and Essays . Africa World P, 2006, pp. 15– 20. —. “ Writing from Inside.” Eros Muse: Poems and Essays . Africa World P, 2006, pp. 29– 30. Adisa, Opal Palmer, and Donna Aza Weir-Soley, editors. Caribbean Erotic: Poetry, Prose & Essays . Peepal Tree, 2010. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion . Routledge, 2004. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Friffiths, and Helen Tiffin, editors. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures . Routledge, 1998. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture . Routledge, 1994. Bishop, Jacqueline. “ Yemoja Sits on My Head: An Interview with Poet Opal Palmer Adisa.” The Jamaica Observer , 5 Apr. 2015, pp. 2– 3. Boyce Davies, Carole. Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject [1994] . Rpt. Routledge, 1999. Brathwaite, Kamau. “ History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry.” Roots . 1993. Rpt. Ann Arbor Paperback, 1996, pp. 259– 304. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre [1847] . Edited by Stevie Davies. Penguin Books, 2006. Brown, Lesley, and William Little, editors. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles . Thumb index ed. Clarendon P, 1993. Brown, Wendy. States of Injury, Power and Freedom in Late Modernity . Princeton UP, 1995. Burton, Richard Francis. The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights . Modern Library, 2004. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.”  Routledge, 1993. —. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence . Verso, 2004. Cixous, Hélène. “ The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs , vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875– 93. Cixous, Hélène, and Calle-Gruber Mireille. Hélène Cixous, Photos de Racines . Des femmes, 1994. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter . Princeton UP, 1998. Gärtner, José Luis. “ Las mil y una noches: Viaje a los territorios de la imaginación.” Garnata, Historia y Actualidad , no. 11, 1st fortnight November 2010, pp. 90– 97. Hall, Stuart. “ Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader . Edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. Columbia UP, 1994, pp. 392– 403. Harris-Perry, Melissa Victoria. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America; [For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn’t Enough] . Yale UP, 2011. Kristeva, Julia. “ Revolution in Poetic Language.” The Kristeva Reader [1974] . Translated by Margaret Waller. Edited by Toril Moi. Rpt. Blackwell, 1986, pp. 89– 136. —. “ Stabat Matter,” in Tales of Love . Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia UP, 1987, pp. 234– 63. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider [1984] . Rpt. 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Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS   Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “ Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader . Edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. Columbia UP, 1993, pp. 66– 111. Travis, Carol. Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion . Simon and Schuster. 1982. Walker, Alice. In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose [1983] . Rpt. Mariner Books, 2005. Weir-Soley, Donna. Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings . UP of Florida, 2009. Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS   Footnotes 1 Adisa’s essay was originally published in Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference (1990). Thanks to this first encounter, the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS) was founded on 21 May 1994, in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Adisa’s piece was later included in her 2008 collection of poetry and prose, I Name Me Name. 2 Questions on accepting one’s privilege to speak for the subaltern subjects have been largely addressed by postcolonial critics, such as Said in Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (1994), and Spivak in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1993). 3 The term orature was coined by Ugandan linguist and literary critic Mr. Pio Zirimu, to defend the richness of oral tradition in East Africa (Ngũgĩ Homecoming 70; Decolonizing 15). Brathwaite discusses forms of Caribbean “auriture” in “History of the Voice” (267). 4 According to Kristeva, it is in the domains of holiness, madness, and poetry that the semiotics is released and is able to disrupt the symbolic order of language. See Kristeva: “Stabat Mater,” in Tales of Love (235). 5 Elaine Showalter’s work on madness and hysteria in women’s literature and in the portrayal of female characters must be addressed here. In The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (2009), Showalter defines women’s madness as a deviation or contradiction from the traditional female role. 6 In The Arabian Nights, Scheherazade’s storytelling is represented as a response to the agony caused by the certainty of her death. The implications of survival and resistance of the imaginary spaces created by Scheherazade can be read in Gärtner’s “Las mil y una noches: Viaje a los territorios de la imaginación” (96). © The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)
TI - The Affective Politics of Resistance in the Work of Opal Palmer Adisa
JF - Contemporary Women's Writing
DO - 10.1093/cwwrit/vpx016
DA - 2018-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-affective-politics-of-resistance-in-the-work-of-opal-palmer-adisa-WdYDLdCvaJ
SP - 11
EP - 30
VL - 12
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
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