Beyond the Limbo Silence.

Elizabeth Nunez. Beyond the Limbo Silence. Seattle: Seal P, 1998. 320 pp. $24.00.

Elizabeth Nunez's first novel, When Rocks Dance (New York: Putnam, 1986), explored the ways in which a synthesis of African, Indian, and Caribbean cultures shaped the history and society of nineteenth-century Trinidad. This interest in cross-cultural interaction also permeates, in a different form, her second novel, Beyond the Limbo Silence. Set primarily in the small Midwestern town of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 1963, Beyond the Limbo Silence broadens Nunez's scope to North America to examine the ways in which a group of sheltered white Midwesterners, a politically active African American from the South, and three Caribbean immigrants negotiate the racial and cultural differences among themselves amidst the backdrop of the Civil Rights era. Through this small but complex community of characters, Nunez considers sociocultural issues relevant to both immigrant and race relations in the United States, including patterns of immigrant adjustment, regional blindness during the period due to the magnitude of racism in the American South, and variations in perspective between native-born and non-native-born blacks concerning the stakes of the Civil Rights Movement.

The novel focuses on the experiences of Trinidadian immigrant Sara Edgehill, who has come to the United States in order to attend a small Catholic college from which she received a scholarship. The scholarship, offered by a "blue-eyed black priest from Mississippi" whom Sara describes as having come "looking for primitive people, savages to civilize," is received with little enthusiasm by members of Sara's family. Her grandmother fears that Sara's journey to the United States might lead to the type of tragedy that took the life of her brother-in-law by lynching in Georgia in 1950, and she warns:

"People think I say foolish things, Sara.... But I know what I say. Listen to me. America is like the sea. You think it's good. You think you can swim in it and you'll be safe. Yes, you can find food in the sea. Plenty of fish in the sea. But when you're not looking, not thinking about it, America can drown you like the sea."

Sara's father is no more optimistic:

"When you get to that college in America,... I want you to be careful. Don't let America fool you with its righteous words. Freedom, independence, the right to choose, justice--these are for them alone. Americans are sentimental. They cry and weep at the movies, at make-believe--but don't think real life moves them. Be careful, Sara. To them, you owe them everything. They owe you nothing. Your scholarship? They have paid for your silence and your friendship."

The early chapters of the novel, many of which address the local Trinidadian community's perceptions of the United States, contain some of the most salient political commentary of the text. Nunez uses the characters in Sara's family to provide insight into the cultural chasms that divided Caribbean nations from both British and American colonizers during this period of independence movements in the region. Sophisticated understandings of xenophobia, imperialism, and racism are given voice through the worries and common language of the folk, providing readers with a clear vision of how such abstractions play out in the daily dramas of ordinary lives.

Despite the admonitions from her family and friends, Sara elects to accept the scholarship and soon finds herself radically displaced in the Midwest. Into her dislocated life enter three pivotal players: Courtney, a scholarship student from St. Lucia who adheres earnestly to Caribbean and African cultural traditions, and particularly to obeah; Angela, a scholarship student from British Guiana who acclimates readily to the white world of the school, content even to be a "representative" of "the islands" for the local community; and Sam, an African American law student from Milwaukee who, over the course of the novel, becomes deeply involved with the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. Through the triangular friendship among Courtney, Angela, and Sara, Nunez probes differing patterns of immigrant adjustment to what turns out to be the most alienating of environments. Oshkosh is a wholly white town; the three women are the only black residents in the area since the one African American family that had lived i n the community prior to the girls' arrival moved away because of harassment. But because the foreign birth of the women distances them, at least in the eyes of the locals, from African Americans who are perceived as pursuing too aggressively the Civil Rights agenda, the women occupy a liminal status between being external objects of exoticism and internal threats to white hegemony. Nunez uses the disparate reactions of each character to this circumstance to illustrate a range of possible responses to the pressures and opportunities posed by migration.

The character of Sam, Sara's love interest in the novel, is used by Nunez to examine yet another dimension of intercultural interaction--that between native-born and foreign-born blacks. The relationship between Sara and Sam allows Nunez to consider the dimensions of cross-cultural allegiance as well as conflict that have shaped the black diasporic community living in the United States. Recalling the political commentary on Caribbean-U.S. relations that is laced through the opening chapters of the novel, conversations between Sara and Sam illustrate some of the more complex and understudied cultural issues surrounding the increasingly international climate of black America. In particular, through Sam, Nunez considers the ways in which the Civil Rights Movement had the potential to bridge intra- as well as interracial clefts. On one level, Nunez alludes to an attitudinal cleft about political strategies and approaches dividing urban from rural, as well as Northern from Southern, African Americans. On another level, she ponders the cleft dividing the fundamentally apathetic white residents of Oshkosh from the well-intentioned Catholic sisters running the college and from more urban whites in other areas of the country (the story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney plays a crucial role here). Finally, and perhaps most innovatively, Nunez scrutinizes the cleft dividing Sara from Sam that results from their being of a similar race and yet of wholly different national origins. By probing the ways in which race and nationality intersect in the lives of these two characters, Nunez makes a significant contribution to the body of fictional literature addressing the Civil Rights Movement; her consideration of this exceptional moment in American history through regional and international lenses adds a new and important dimension to our understanding of the period.

The strength of the novel lies in its engagement with the issues of immigration, intercultural interaction, and black political and social history. As was demonstrated in her first novel, Nunez is gifted with an ability to illustrate the ways in which cultural synthesis, and particularly a retention of traditional African and Caribbean cultural and religious practices, can sustain displaced blacks throughout the world. While reliance on the convention of a romance plot through which to consider these issues is occasionally jarring, this is a minor flaw in what is otherwise a provocative new novel. Like Alice Walker's Meridian or Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven, Nunez's second novel skillfully weaves personal and national narrative together to create a compelling and historically rich tale.