Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative.

Belinda Edmondson. Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. 229 pp. $17.95 paper.

Once upon a time, Walter Benjamin insisted, storytellers were of two types: those who, like the farmer, cultivated the home soil, and those who, like the sailor, brought home treasures from far away. "Home" authorized their stories, and as Benedict Anderson reminds us, nations were made from the stories told at home by home people. All the stories in a postcolonial home, Frederic Jameson insists, are nationalist stories. Working in this by now familiar territory, Belinda Edmondson offers some remapping that emerges from her impressive and innovative analysis of Caribbean narrative, Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative.

Why this title, she asks, for a book acknowledged to be "about women authors as much as men, if not more so?" Her answer is that, "quite simply, because I believe that the founding moment for the anxieties of Caribbean migrant women authors over literary authority can be traced back to ... Victorian speculations on whether men could be 'made' out of black West Indian men." If stories make homes and make nations, they accomplish this because the storytellers are funded with the requisite cultural authority. Historically, Edmondson argues, the Caribbean was constructed as lacking this authority, always already "somewhere else," not Africa, not Europe. Its writers have thus, ironically, been compelled to look to the metropole to gain the cultural authority to write "home." The "anxieties ... over literary authority" are thus real indeed, however spurious their origins.

The book is divided into two parts. In the first, "Making Men: Writing the Nation," the earlier generation of Caribbean men writers is emphasized--Derek Walcott, George Lamming, C. L. R. James, and V. S. Naipaul. These writers, generally recognized as having shaped the canon of West Indian writing, allied themselves with the tradition of English letters, distancing themselves from their "folk" selves and fashioning themselves as intellectual workers in "exile." Their literary authority rested on their becoming, in the eyes of the metropole, "English gentlemen." Even when they return "home," Edmondson argues, they carry their exile within.

Part II is devoted primarily to more recent women writers--Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, and Paule Marshall among them--who have in outline made a similar removal, though to the United States rather than England, beset with "anxieties" similar to those of earlier writers. But this alliance with the writing of African American women is radically different in its particulars. These women are not "exiles" but "immigrants," a term that "carries with it a different, arguably feminized, status to the metropole; one associated with physical, not intellectual, labor." Working within this different alliance, the achievement of Paule Marshall, in Praisesong for the Widow, is a main character whose "folk self becomes the home community within the metropole." As this brief citation suggests, Edmondson argues that valorization of the "folk," female subjectivity, home, and community may coexist in Caribbean women's writing with a celebration of modernity. If men writers carry their "exile" with them when they return ho me, women writers, even or perhaps especially in the metropole, retain a sense of home.

Although marking this difference between men and women writers is crucial to her study, Edmondson does not claim that women's writing is "better" or "more progressive": "What I do wish to point out is that the one has inherited the concerns of the other, and must write within and against that prior tradition in order to be engaged in the process of national definition."

Edmondson is an engaging writer, with a dedication to clarity. In a relatively short book (less than 200 pages of text), she offers a coherent argument with considerable dexterity in setting out overlapping issues of history and culture. More than that, though, what makes the analysis unique in my reading experience is her inclusiveness. As she points out, various Caribbean writers have been read, sometimes almost exclusively, within other traditions--Jean Rhys as English, some more recent writers as African American. Naipaul, as an "East Indian-West Indian," gets set apart as a cosmopolitan, a view perhaps encouraged by Naipaul himself. The fragmentation of the islands alluded to in the study has been mirrored in the reception of Caribbean writing. The integrity of the study leads her, of course, into the controversial overlap between postcolonial and "minority" literatures in the United States--in my view, to good effect. It also leads her to distance Caribbean writing from "Africa," an alliance that she s ees as having narrowed the scope of the tradition. At the same time, however, she is careful to preserve certain boundaries. Her concern is with anglophone writing, and she carefully distinguishes between West Indian and Caribbean (and then moves gracefully between the two terms, with no quotation marks).

It is both a virtue and a shortcoming of Making Men that it left me wanting more. Derek Walcott seemed notable by his absence, for example. And the passing comments on Henry Louis Gates (with respect to his in her view misguided defense of the rap group Two Live Crew) and Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon) are spirited enough to suggest that she has important views to share as well on specifically African American writers.