Island women visionaries: how women writers are enhancing the Caribbean literary canon.

TIMES HAVE CERTAINLY CHANGED IN THE YEARS SINCE ISLAND Voices: Stories From the West Indies--with its all-male roster--was published in 1970. Today, with the inventive works of both established and emerging writers enhancing the august history of Caribbean literature, contemporary women writers are important contributors to that rich collective and they are becoming the dominant voices on the Caribbean literary scene. You can sample them in the short-story collection Stories From Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad (edited by Elizabeth Nunez and Jennifer Sparrow, Seal Press, 2005).

"Unfortunately, public interest in literature by ethnic writers fluctuates at the same pace as fashion trends in clothes. Now seems to be the turn of Caribbean women writers outside their homelands," says Elizabeth Nunez, Trinidadian-born author of Bruised Hibiscus (One World/Ballantine, 2003) and Prospero's Daughter (Ballantine Books, 2006), and chair of the English department at Medgar Evers College, in New York.

"Indeed, there is a growing increase in the body of works by Caribbean women writers, but, more significantly, Caribbean women writers are experimenting with new literary forms and structures, rewriting stories from the Western canon to set the record straight about the lives of Caribbean characters, uncovering past histories of class, race, ethnic, color, gender and sexual exploitation, and offering hope in the possibilities for women," she says.

Jamaican-born Nalo Hopkinson, author of The New Moon's Arms (Warner Books, February 2007), says that in the broadest sense, Caribbean women write and have always written about everything, all the big and small concerns of life: love, death, aging, sex, money, war, power, politics, the spirit, relationships.

"Caribbean slavery and indentureship is a big theme, because it looms so large in our histories and still affects us deeply to this day. So is race," says Hopkinson.

"Nowadays, I see us being less confined by narrow ideas of what literature is. Some of us are writing popular fiction and genre fiction. We are writing more freely and explicitly about sex, gender and sexual orientation. We continue to be as experimental in form and content as we've always been. And as always, our palette is the world, and we draw on everything from contemporary Caribbean realities to Pushkin," Hopkinson adds.

Novelist Rosalind McLymont, who was born in Guyana and is the editor-in-chief of The Network Journal, the New York tri-state area's premier magazine for black professionals and business owners, says that some of the important themes that female Caribbean writers cover are no different from those covered by male writers: the pain and shame of slavery, colonialism and immigration, and present-day local politics. Women writers today, however, cover an even more extensive array of themes, which include corporate imperialism, neocolonialism, globalization, gender, race, sexuality and incest. matriarchy, romance and marriage relationships, myths and folklore. "But there is a uniquely female perspective of these themes that the women writers give," says McLymont, whose debut novel Middle Ground (Beckham, 2006), which is set in the U.S. and Congo, won this year's Best Fiction Self/Independent Publishing (S'Indie) Award.

"Caribbean women are participants in the elevation of women in free societies; they are traveling, meeting other women worldwide, reading the works of other women. As a result of these experiences, Caribbean women authors are giving us as comprehensive a body of literary works as you can find in any culture, covering the broadest possible array of themes and social issues," says McLymont. "By the same token, Caribbean women writers bring a unique perspective to the prevailing socioeconomic issues of their homelands that are edifying, entertaining and of interest to social scientists and policymakers."

"It may be convenient to say that women writers focus on domestic issues while men tend to write about topics that have broader social and political implications, but Caribbean women writers also write about social injustice and political exploitation, and about class and color discrimination," says Nunez, who immigrated to the United States from Trinidad when she was 19.

"The effects on colonialism have been and continue to be important themes in the works of Caribbean authors. In the past, women writers tended to focus on the exploitation of Caribbean people by the English colonizers. Now women writers are more likely to explore the 'psychic wounds,' as the Caribbean writer Marlene Nourbese Philip puts it, inflicted on Caribbean people as a consequence of the colonial experience and the adverse impact of this destructive legacy on the relationship between the sexes," adds Nunez.

Althea Prince, a native of Antigua who moved to Canada in 1965, where she teaches Caribbean Studies at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario, says, "Some Caribbean women writers include a focus on loving relationships, sensuality, lovemaking and sexuality. Again, this is very different from the writing of male Caribbean writers, who, although they sometimes alluded to sex, they did not explore sensuality, lovemaking and deep-loving relationships between people. I also observe that Caribbean men have not written erotica, while there is a growing number of Caribbean women writers who are doing so. My novel Loving This Man (Insomniac Press, 2002) includes erotica, and it is also identified as 'post-colonial literature,'" says Prince.

"Caribbean women writers are one of the most recent groups of writers (collectively) to emerge onto the international literary landscape," says Marie-Elena John, an Antiguan writer and the author of Unburnable (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2006). "Without discounting the works of the others before her who didn't get as much exposure, we pretty much have to start with Paule Marshall and Brown Girl, Brownstones (Chatham Booksellers, 1959). From what I can tell, in about fifty years, which is a fairly short "past," we still continue to write out of our historical experience, which is slavery and colonialism and immigration, as well as of a blending of cultures. Some would say "clashing" as opposed to blending, which means themes of alienation and identity--race and class. And with a violent and traumatic past, we also often write about violence, especially sexual violence.

"Also much of our writing has a spirit-centered component, and a sense of trying to uncover our past through this exploration, which sometimes involves looking to what's left of African spirituality in Caribbean culture. And part of what we often explore within this same sense of being 'fractured, more and more these days, is the additional component of immigration to North America. The word exile is often used. Again, it's not new, because Paule Marshall was writing about that back in 1960. But today you also have writers such as Edwidge Danticat and others expanding that exploration."

John adds, "Basically, I see the same themes in new writing as in earlier works, with an additional emphasis on the Caribbean immigrant experience to the U.S. as well as the U.K. In addition to Danticat, you also have a talent like Andrea Levy (Small Island, Picador, 2005) looking at this. Even the very popular Zadie Smith (White Teeth, Random House, 2000; On Beauty, The Penguin Press, 2005), whose work is never described as Caribbean, is drawing very heavily on her Caribbean roots to create an innovative literary experience that's wildly popular as some new kind of multicultural fusion. So I see the new generation doing the same as the pioneers did, just expanding the borders somewhat."