Caribbean Women Writers

The past few decades have seen an explosion of writing by women from the Caribbean. From Antigua, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Trinidad - women of African, European, and mixed ancestry have explored and manipulated their complex matrix: of languages and subtle linguistic codes; of folk traditions and formal English schooling; of vital politics and tormented histories; of intoxicating natural beauty and devastating poverty. They have written of mothertongues and motherlands, of exile, of the boundaries of bodies, of the politics of owning and not owning themselves. Though worlds apart, writings as diverse as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966, and Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of My Mother, published 30 years later, nevertheless share a setting of shocking yet sinister beauty; a sense of the loss of a mother and the implications of this loss upon one's self; and a deeply resonant literary heritage. From Guyana's Beryl Gilroy to Haiti's Edwidge Danticat, Caribbean women are mingling the political with the lyrical in a quickly deepening new body of literature.