Michelene Adams
Lecturer
College of the Bahamas

The Interrogation of History in the Works of Jamaica Kincaid and Erna Brodber: A Comparison

West Indians have long been engaged in what has been described as a “quarrel with history.” The formation of the West Indies and the complex racial and ethnic make-up of its societies have fostered multiple visions of the region’s experience that are consistently challenged and reconfigured, and since women have been contributing to the discourse, its scope has broadened. Jamaica Kincaid and Erna Brodber always grapple with historical concerns in their fiction, but because their interpretations of history and their aims in writing differ, their texts take separate trajectories.

In this paper I will map the differences between their approaches to history by considering their representations of Africa in the West Indies, their distinct conceptions of the importance of mythology and folklore, and their treatment of the figure of the female body. Ultimately, I intend to establish that where Kincaid writes against, Brodber writes for: Kincaid, aiming to dismantle the politics of power, gender, and race by producing decolonising fictions, writes always against the absorption of the disempowered by the powerful, but Brodber moves beyond a largely subversive approach and writes for a reconceptualisation of West Indian history.