Keywords

While it is true that trickster figures pervade her fantastical tale, the true trickster in Redemption in Indigo (2010) is Barbadian storyteller Karen Lord. Substantiating that which Pascale de Souza calls “African continuities” with the New World (2003, 341), Lord’s debut and award-winning speculative novel Redemption in Indigo skillfully merges familiar folk gods and hero(ines) from different African traditions, for example Akan, Ashanti, Xhosa, and Karamba. Ananse, the spider-trickster and African god of stories, and Ananse texts such as “The Gluttonous Ansige” (1996) are particular concentrations. This chapter argues, however, that Redemption challenges masculinist versions of Ananse and traditionally male-dominated Anansesem; Lord’s antipatriarchal, anticolonial Ananse story by contrast employs a feminocentric web paradigm of concentric patterns, interweaving the past with the present, the ancestral African homeland with the Caribbean diaspora, to foreground feminine qualities and empowered female figures—the nonbinary storyteller, the heroine Paama, and the Indigenous goddess/djombi Atabey.

Though literary scholar Bibi Burger (2020) rightly suggests that African folktales and contemporary science fiction, Afrofuturism, and Africanfuturism (2) all fall under the rubric of speculative fiction, here I use the somewhat tautological term “speculative folktale” to better encapsulate the specific anticolonial, antipatriarchal vision of Lord’s Caribbean text.1 In the Foreword to her edited anthology, New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean (2016), Lord indicates that Eurocentric definitions of speculative fiction problematically often overlook Caribbean literary “icons,” like Erna Brodber and Nalo Hopkinson, despite the “richness of folklore, myth, parable and satire” found within their works (1). Scholar Linden Lewis (1990) likewise signals the political value of Caribbean folktales because they reveal the “ideological tricks” of conventional Western society, which erroneously claims “universality” and hegemonic status as “the official culture’s concepts of the world of life” in the region (Lombardi-Satriani as qtd by Lewis 1990, 86). Texts like that of Lord’s therefore productively expand the canon of speculative fiction while “transform[ing] ideas about what is considered valid knowledge” (Onoura 2015, 11) and laying claim to an alternative literary lineage, grounded primarily in Caribbean women’s writing. In recognizing the folktale as “resistant to any subordination by the culture of the mainstream” (Lewis 1990, 85) and as an important vehicle for combatting colonialism and patriarchy, Lord’s Redemption uses familiar genre features like “‘supernatural, fantastical, or futuristic elements’…[to] wonder about the future, the present, and the past, as well as the not-quite-real or-realised” (Burger 2020, 2) in relation to women’s lives. Specifically reworking the traditional Ananse folktales, Lord’s text speculates on a feminocentric future, an as yet to come, that might have been.

At the same time, Lord’s speculative folktale draws on earlier Caribbean women’s writing utilizing the framework of the web to convey the complexity of spacetime and women’s identities—especially the relation between enslaved foremothers and their female descendants, for example Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972/2015) and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Window (1983).2 A web is not linear, rhizomatic, or chaotic (three male-dominated theories of chronotopes in the region, e.g. Garvey, Glissant, and Benítez-Rojo, respectively) but rather an impermanent organic silk structure, which as Kathleen Gyssels suggests is a more “feminine paradigm” (2002, 178).3 Studying Schwarz-Bart’s and Marshall’s aforementioned novels, Gyssels (2002) confirms that “the thread and the canvas of Anancy … signify the need to constantly weave and reweave the Caribbean identity” (178). Like Lord, these Caribbean authors revitalize “the myth of Anancy,” (178) and “elect the horizontality and lateral and concentric character of the spider’s web” (178) to inform their gender-inflected narratives. Redemption’s feminocentric web approach therefore also moves away from privileging traditional masculinist notions of singularity, individualism, and linearity to emphasize multiplicity, reciprocity, and interconnectedness, for connection is necessary for the “survival of the individual, the family, the community, the nation, the region, and the world or worlds that we inhabit. Survival is more than mere living. We need to relate: to connect, to identify, to tell our stories, to draw lines from past to present and from each to each,” argues Lord (2016, 2). Lord’s speculative folktale, interwoven with several tale-tellers and simultaneously occurring plotlines, envisions a socially just and sustainable future from empowered women’s perspectives.

Redemption’s gendered approach is of course informed by the traditional spidery folk-teller Ananse—a simultaneous “hero, object of hatred, and scapegoat,” he is often “selfish, mean, hypocritical, vulgar, and sexually exuberant,” though he “helps focus attention on the nature and limits of the taboos he breaks, thus creatively regenerating them” (“Ananse” 2008, 84)—and the traditional African story, “Ansige the Glutton.” In this folktale, Paama, a chef-par-excellence, leaves Ansige, the eponymous gluttonous husband. After Ansige orders his servants to retrieve his wife, she quips: “don’t act as though I didn’t know you [Ansige]” (“The Gluttonous Ansige” 1996, 85). The text leaves a woman at a significant crossroads: whether or not to leave her domineering husband. Does Paama obey Ansige’s order to return home? The story concludes ambiguously, or rather ambivalently, thereby allowing the writer to seize the opportunity to reimagine the heroine’s life anew.

Accordingly, Lord adds a fantastical, supernatural storyline that foregrounds Paama’s post-Ansige life in a fictive Caribbean setting. In Lord’s alternative version, Paama encounters several djombis—Caribbean folkloric spirits unbeholden to space and time (e.g., Trickster, Taran, and Atabey)—and even comes to experience some of their power, before remarrying a tracker named Kwame (who is not a character in the original tale) and giving birth to twin sons (Yao and Ajit). The ingenuity of Lord’s text thus lies, in part, in its critique of Ananse’s worst qualities (violence, selfishness, greed, arrogance, and anti-social) as distinctly hypermasculine, evidenced by their correlation to male characters such as Ansige and Taran. Meanwhile, feminine characteristics (reciprocity, care, generosity, forgiveness, and communality), associated primarily with Paama, are privileged for their ability to transform phallocentric characters and to act as catalysts for social change. The respinning of Ananse folklore functions as a distinct antipatriarchal, Afra-Caribbean storytelling strategy in this postcolonial speculative folktale.

The African Folktale in the Caribbean

Lord’s novel joins an increasing number of contemporary texts offering antipatriarchal and anticolonial interpretations of Anansesem by Caribbean and African thinkers. Similar to Benjamin Kwakye’s Ghanaian novel, The Clothes of Nakedness (1998), for instance, Lord’s “art…goes beyond the intertextual incorporation of oral forms into…[her] novel and the appropriation of the structure of the African folktale…to re-enact the folkloric trickster as a metaphor of the web of social complexities in [a] postcolonial” setting, for example the Caribbean (Mwinlaaru and Nkansah 2018, 251). Redemption reminds us that in the late twentieth century in countries such as Ghana, Ananse not only regained importance “when the national policy of recovering traditional cultures led many… to include African culture in their” works (“Ananse” 2008, 84), but also “the disillusionment of the following historical phase” which used Ananse to symbolize a consumptive greed that undermined “the ideals of independence” (“Ananse” 2008, 84); this strengthens my reading of Ansige as a dangerous version of Ananse; he functions as a warning sign for when insatiability, masculinity, and individuality spirals out of control. Linking Ananse, literature, and consumption/corruption relates directly back to Lord’s Caribbean retelling of “Ansige the Glutton” and Redemption’s explicit inclusion of feminine qualities, epitomized by Paama, as necessary to achieving social justice in the region.

While African tales describe both storytellers as male and Ananse as a male trickster deity (Mwinlaaru and Nkansah 2018, 265; de Souza 2003, 344), New World depictions, such as Lord’s, play with the slipperiness of gender.4 For example, in his collection Mother Poem, fellow Barbadian poet, Kamau Brathwaite, “identifies the mother figure with Ananse” (Mackey 2018, 45); likewise, Caribbean critic Adwoa Onoura (2015) stresses the importance of mothers as tale-tellers. In Anansesem: Telling Stories and Storytelling African Maternal Pedagogies, Onoura highlights that though “Anancy stories are part of the historical memory of formerly enslaved Africans brought to the ‘new world,’” they rely on a skilled teller like Jamaican folklorist Louise-Bennett Coverly to transmit their living energy (4). Reading this chronotope through a gendered lens, Onoura argues that Caribbean accounts of Ananse’s crossing should be considered “as motherline stories to the extent that they allow the African child to tap into his/her African ancestral memory” (23). Onoura therefore hopes that her own daughter will “locate herself firmly within this motherline of storytellers and storytelling so that later she will, in learning about the herstory of Africans crossing the Atlantic, develop a sense of self and connectedness to her African identity” (23). Redemption’s metafictional weblike narrative taps into the power of (re)telling Ananse stories that Onoura identifies while reimagining the traditional African folktales through an antipatriarchal lens and challenging male-dominated scholarship on African-Caribbean storytelling and folktales.

Accordingly, the novel begins with the asynchronistic, nonbinary Ananse narrator preparing the reader for a novel that will indeed break the rules, challenge masculine authority, and defy conventional literary expectations. The narrator announces, “A rival of mine once complained that my stories begin awkwardly and end untidily. … All my tales are true, drawn from life, and a life story is not a tidy thing” (Lord 2010, 1). This statement directly contradicts African folk scholar Christopher Vecsey’s claims that “Before the narrator begins his tale, he will say that the story is not true” (1981, 162) and “All Anansesem, whether they deal with Ananse or not, are considered to be untrue stories” (1981, 162). Three important points should be noted: first, Lord’s narrator is never designated as a “he”; second, the narrator does not, as per the masculine tradition, absolve themself from responsibility for the text but rather implicates themself in constructing a narrative that, like life, is organic, complex, and weblike. Third, the narrator alludes indirectly to the original Karamba folktale of “Ansige the Glutton,” which in fact ends rather untidily.

The nonbinary Ananse narrator’s controversial and confrontational nature likewise suggests the suitability of the speculative folktale as the foundation of a contemporary anticolonial, Caribbean work that rejects the plot conventions of the novel, a literary form often claimed to have Western origins. As “an unpredictable liar who throws doubt on the concept of truth itself” (Vecsey 1981, 161), however, the Ananse narrator’s ability to subvert or expose seemingly immutable categories like gender proves invaluable. For in casting doubt on truth, the narrator, as do other radical Ananse figures like Paama, evidences that not only the traditional Anansesem but also patriarchal, colonial culture are fabrications designed to privilege maleness and/or Europeanness, and thus are subject to change. For instance, Lord’s narrator claims to have included an Epilogue to “round off the story according to my own rules” (2010, 182). The narrator declares the power of their voice to not simply regurgitate the old tales but meaningfully transform them. The narrator’s pen/spinneret therefore takes the original text(s) not as being static or linear (masculine, Western) but as fluid and reticular (feminine, Caribbean); hence, Anansesem must be rewritten or rewoven to better express the lives and voices of marginalized communities.

Lord’s self-aware narrator further alerts one to the social construction of texts and genders. An historical link between women and textile arts concretizes the feminine-spider-web metaphor: “Weaving threads, embroidering or sewing quilts was a household occupation in which women … put all their soul and all their ingenuity. The collection of small pieces, rags and tangled threads that constitute the patchwork metaphorizes the female artist-maroon,” writes Gyssels (2002, 178). These materials became an important mode for expressing knowledge and life experiences. Caribbean women have recrafted their artwork, like maroons, like Ananse, to subvert the phallocentric plantocracy in covert ways. Twenty-first-century Caribbean women writers, such as Lord, echo this undervalued textual work through reviving various pieces from different folk mediums as the narratological fabrics of their novels.

One of the most striking features of African-Caribbean storytelling methods that Lord adopts for antipatriarchal purposes, however, is the role of the Ananse narrator as an active participant in the telling. Contrary to the Western intellectual tradition, which has privileged disembodied masculine individualism or the omniscient third-person narrator, in Redemption there is a real sense of embodiment and collective solidarity. Redemption’s nonbinary narrator also manifests as the singular (I) in the plural (Ananses): “i is spiders weaving/away” (Brathwaite 1977, 99). The spider is in their own web, not outside of it; there is no outside of the text/web/world, so to speak. De Souza (2003) confirms that “as a masterful trickster,” and “[d]weller at the crossroads, inhabitant of nooks and crannies, Anancy is never in a specific enclosure yet never out” (340). Forgoing a typical linear metanarrative or master narrative, the reader, as if she were caught in the narrator’s “web of probabilities” (Lord 2010, 131), experiences the novel as an untangling of fragments or threads. In weaving a tangential tale, the teller, however, buttresses their position as an anticolonial Ananse, a spidery figure who embraces sexual-textual, as well as spatiotemporal, liminality.

The teller’s adoption of Ananse-like narratological indeterminacy as an anticolonial strategy is demonstrated again in these lines: “While Kwame is sniffing out the trail of Ansige’s wife, let us run ahead and meet her for ourselves” (Lord 2010, 3), and “I can hear some of you complaining already” (2010, 6). The narration shifts between subject/singular and object/plural pronouns (I and us) and first- and second-person pronouns (I and you). Such comingling instills both a false sense of readerly control or choice over the tale and a sense of readerly helplessness that draws from Ananse’s paradoxical qualities as potential perpetrator and victim. Likewise, that the Ananse-narrator’s playful interjections and indirections throughout the novel routinely ensnare the reader into the telling make the reader an accomplice trickster figure-teller. This approach mimics the style of African-Caribbean folktales in which a binary between I/you, teller/listener, subject/object is nonsensical (Pelton 1989, 21). Referencing the Akan tradition, Vecsey (1981) also notes, “Before there is ‘I’ there is ‘we.’ In short, the Akan person derives his identity from his people; without them he does not exist, he has no reality, no being, no meaning” (165). The implication for Lord’s text is that the presence of African folktales and figures, the “we” precedes and serves as a foundation for her Caribbean narrator. She also ontologically grounds her teller’s “I” as not only a “he” but also a “she or they” to recognize other genders, and thus productively expands the lexicon of tale-tellers.

Lord’s approach to gender inclusivity dialogues with the region’s storytelling tradition, in which fluidity is not only encouraged but so too is “embroidering on the part of the teller” (Lewis 1990, 86)—that nook and cranny of the imagination where “spiders make patterns in her mind” (Brathwaite 1977, 25). Such a veritable “weaving of voices” (Gyssels 2002, 178) is demonstrated again by the narrator’s use of antiphony, an African and Caribbean call-and-response storytelling technique/pattern historically linked with resisting slavery (de Souza 2003, 345). For example, Redemption’s narrator asks themself and then replies, “Do I have more stories to tell? There are always more stories” (Lord 2010, 181). Antiphony functions as an antipatriarchal narrative strategy because the updated Paama and Ananse stories speak back to their African-Caribbean folkloric roots and to the European colonialism, which attempted to suppress and cut those ties. The outer-layers of the narrative-web thus symbolize the historical (dis)placement of African stories to the Caribbean diaspora and Lord’s attempt, via polyphonic and antiphonic feminocentrism, to reinvent those folktales for a contemporary audience committed to social equity.

The Western Assault on the Folktale

To this extent, Redemption suggests that Western epistemologies of science and secularism (history) are problematically replacing or converging with beliefs in the Afro-Caribbean pantheon and its folk heroes/heroines, including Ananse and Paama. For example, the teller asserts:

Once upon a time—but whether a time that was, or a time that is, or a time that is to come, I may not tell—there was a man, a tracker by occupation called Kwame. He had been born in a certain country in a certain year when history had reached that grey twilight in which fables of true love, the power of princes, and deeds of honour are told only to children. (Lord 2010, 1)

Lord’s revising of Ananse stories within an indeterminate spacetime therefore directly pushes back against de Souza’s claim that unlike European tales “African and Afro-American tales did not take place ‘once upon a time’ but rather unravel here and now with an ongoing call for response … to ensure full audience participation” (2003, 345). The lack of audience engagement in this time and place, however, is markedly present when Kwame, who internalizes a denigration of his Afro-Caribbean heritage, dismisses so-called Anansesem as nothing but figments of the imagination.

Prior to setting out on his quest to retrieve Paama for Ansige, Kwame comments to himself: “Fairy tales and nancy stories” (Lord 2010, 1). Lewis (1990) explains that in Barbados, folk culture nowadays causes some to “become embarrassed by [it], because of its unpretentiousness. Folk culture is the culture of the common people, the unlettered and unsung people” (85). The novel thus implicitly critiques contemporary Caribbean thought (when echoing a Western treatment of time and space as separate dimensions), in which such stories are no longer believed or recited: an occurrence directly linked with the history of exploitation—slavery-colonialism-imperialism—in the region. As scholars note, Ananse metamorphosized when he came to the Caribbean via the Middle Passage: “In the ruthless context of Caribbean plantations, Ananse sheds his godlike qualities and acquires more earthly features. His subtle cunning, the art of the weak, is used not only to ensure sheer survival, but also to deceive and overthrow the powerful” (“Ananse” 2008, 84). If in the African tradition Ananse tested and mocked but never dissolved the social order, then in the Caribbean he directly confronts oppression and seeks to overthrow plantation society (Maiser 2014, 31). Ananse’s historical association with resisting slavery through cunning and wisdom, in the Caribbean context, further marks him as a dangerous figure and explains his value to a twenty-first-century writer like Lord. Lord’s revival of the trickster-maroon-embroiderer as her anonymous, nonbinary narrator is therefore particularly fitting for an anticolonial, antipatriarchal novel. Redemption suggests that turning toward Ananse’s lesser-valued feminine qualities, in addition to his variance, trickery, and indeterminacy, offers a path to confront the West’s legacy of destruction including its hegemonic literatures and languages.

While slavery and colonialism attempted to eradicate and condemn alternative epistemologies and cosmologies, for example African stories like “The Gluttonous Ansige” (1996) or “The Story of the Glutton” (1886)—who, when transposed to a Caribbean setting, might be read as an allegory for greedy, insatiable European slavers/colonizers—analyzing the role of patriarchy reveals a nuanced attempt to specifically silence women’s knowledges and voices. The metaphor of the narrator as either a skillful mother or a nonbinary spider spinning an elaborate new narrative/web/world further strategically undermines the more familiar androcentric master narratives—both African (traditional folktales) and European (historiography), found in the region. Lewis elaborates:

The Barbadian male has, for sometime now, acquired a reputation for craftiness … Though this behaviour has more to do with Barbadian thriftiness than stealth, the identification of the male as a “smart man” is widely accepted in Caribbean circles. The phenomenon of the clever male is not a characteristic unique to Barbadian men. Each Caribbean island has within its lore a male “smart man” or a “con artist” around which several folk tales are developed. In a sense these add to the store of patriarchal myths and myth making which soothes the collective male ego of the region and offers the illusion of men taking charge of their own affairs. (1990, 87)

Lord’s spiderlike-narrator challenges these hypermasculine conceptions of identity by drawing on and updating African-Caribbean storytelling methods. Redemption relies on an African and Caribbean oral tradition, both folktales of the Gluttonous Ansige, and ones featuring Ananse, to not only undermine Western storytelling (e.g., masculine, chronological, progress, and teleological) but also centralize the smart woman and subvert the Caribbean’s traditional/cultural canon from a gendered perspective.

Spring-boarding off the Ansige and Ananse tales allows Lord to explore new possibilities for Caribbean gender dynamics. This explains the narrator’s preemptive interjection to imagined criticisms that her character Paama may not fulfil certain readerly expectations. One assumes that these comments are directed toward white Western feminists’ problematic tendency to universalize women and claim to be the dominant referent for which all women, including those in the Caribbean and in Africa, should be compared. For example, Lord writes: “Paama will be too tepid and mild a heroine for some, they will criticize her for dutifully caring for her estranged husband in his last days” (2010, 181). Paama emphasizes the power of maternal qualities for the good of humanity, the many as opposed to the one, rather than reinforcing allegedly stereotypical female behavior such as sacrifice and selflessness. Likewise, Paama’s kindness rejects a definition of the stereotypical, individualistic male hero who forgoes his path alone. Redemption’s African-Caribbean folk heroine shows compassion toward others, even those who have wronged her. Paama’s communing with and dependence on others is essential to her survival and is depicted as a moral strength and social good. Onoura argues that if African and Caribbean women or girls can “uncover [the] key survival tools and strategies used by their female ancestors” like Paama, then they can use those models to help them “navigate issues such as racism, classism and sexism” (2015, 22–23) in a contemporary context.

That Paama initially finds herself trapped in a marriage/web drives the novel’s plot and its insistence that toxic masculinity must be subverted. Consider the claim that the Ananse trickster figure can be duped: “his portrayal as a gullible glutton whose insatiable desire for food and meat blocks his sense of judgment and this gluttony leads him to become the victim of another trickster” (Mwinlaaru and Nkansah 2018, 251). Gluttony, as de Souza’s (2003) research shows, connects with the enforced food shortages those enslaved in the New World experienced (and possibly Western food colonialism in the region today), but it also functions rhetorically to refer to Ansige’s sexual appetite. Paama, in this context, symbolizes meat. The irony that an accomplished chef cannot satiate her husband’s desire is not lost on the reader. As a patriarchal figure concerned with his virility, Ansige objectifies and consumes his wife. Ansige therefore literally embodies corruption in different societal power structures, particularly marriage, in which husbands too often abuse their power. That Paama rejects her husband’s and society’s sexist ideologies toward women is at the heart of Redemption. Thus, Lord’s speculative folktale fully takes up the opportunities afforded by Ananse’s multifaceted aspects to challenge rigid gender norms and expectations that denigrate the feminine and/or maternal not only in the imagined past but also in its future foretold.

Lord Reclaims and Reworks the Folktale

Inspired by African-Caribbean folktales and cosmologies, Lord’s novel, in true trickster fashion, confounds common Western binaries and boundaries for example fiction/fact, religion/science, and male/female. Yet, equally important to Lord’s postcolonial reimagining is that Ananse takes the shape of animals and/or humans; interactions between these facile categories happen unproblematically (Mwinlaaru and Nkansah 2018, 251) as do the blurring of ontologies and species. Redemption depicts these exchanges primarily through the presence of djombis, called undying ones, who resemble lwas or orishas. Like the narrator, the djombis disrupt the main folktale narrative. Described as “discorporate entit[ies] standing at the interstices of time and space” (Lord 2010, 47), “beings outside of time” (69) for whom “time means nothing” (167), djombis appear to humans in three ways: “they may take the shadow of an animal or borrow the shadow of a human, or they may make their own shape from matter and illusion” (Lord 2019, 70). Lord reminds us that with respect to binaries and hierarchies such as time and space or corporeality “never assume that these categories represent boundaries that are never crossed or lines that cannot be re-drawn” (2010, 58). In fact, this claim encapsulates perfectly this trickster text’s aims: to promote an Ananse (African-Caribbean) and Anansesem that is feminine, complex, organic, and spiritual, that is to say weblike.

Lord reinforces her feminine weblike narratological strategy by including an unsavory Ananse protagonist named Trickster—“the spider of Ahani,” and “the godfather of the troublemakers” (Lord 2010, 61). Trickster lurks in dark, shadowy places such as bars and markets. Signifying Ananse’s diminished presence in twenty-first-century folk/mainstream culture, he infamously appears, like a cobweb, in corners and abandoned, out-of-reach spaces: “The trickster’s web is symbolically constructed in the novel as liminal spaces, a number of locations associated with the socioeconomically marginalized …. Ananse … finds spaces at the edges of society that grants him easy access to his victims while allowing him a safe distance” (Mwinlaaru and Nkansah 2018, 256). Lord’s Trickster-Ananse protagonist thus begins by preying on the vulnerable and abusing his power; for example, from afar, Trickster observes Ansige traveling to apprehend Paama. From Trickster, we also learn that Paama has received a special Chaos Stick that once belonged to Trickster’s brother, Chance, another powerfully arrogant djombi. Capable of controlling “different possibilities in the universe” and “quantum fluctuations” (Lord 2010, 52) the stick is cleverly disguised as a domestic item—a stirring stick for cou cou, Barbados’ national dish.

The novel hones in on Chance’s attempt, with Trickster’s help, to retrieve his rightful property from Paama (echoing Ansige’s attempt to take back his wife, i.e., his property). The maternal goddess Patience, emblematic of Atabey, stripped Chance of his powers, however, because he became increasingly cynical and ruthless toward humans. The mark of Chance’s disdain for humanity and his hubris culminated when “he set his form and features to the zenith of perfection, and then, instead of choosing a subtle mark, he made his skin deep indigo” (Lord 2010, 58). The historical connotations of indigo resonate throughout this postcolonial text.5 For instance, the indigo plant, used for dye, was harvested on slave plantations in the United States and in the Caribbean (Fairbanks 1994).6 That Chance adopts the cash-crop’s color shows his heightened insensitivity toward human life and the legacy of slavery. Drawing on this important aspect of the Ananse-trickster figure, Lord’s novel brings attention to how “In the entertaining storytelling sessions among enslaved Africans, Ananse’s outwitting of bigger animals could be seen as a vicarious rebellion against slave-owners and overseers. …[yet] he also outwits weaker creatures; his cruelty could occasionally end up being identified with the overseer’s” (“Ananse” 2008, 84). The indigo lord, likened to a plantation master, is marked literally by the colour of slavery, and thus is unworthy of the spirituality, wisdom, intuition, and perception also associated with the color.

That the word “indigo” stems from the Greek word for India, where the crop was originally grown by Europeans, further emphasizes Lord’s syncretic approach, which combines Indigenous, Afro and Indo cosmologies, epistemologies, and the histories of slavery and indentured servitude in the region. The importance of other religions such as Hinduism is evident in Chance’s renaming of himself as Taran, which in Hindi means heaven or Lord Vishnu. In human guise, Taran is a composite of Hinduism’s blue-skinned, multilimbed Supreme Gods Vishnu and Shiva—the latter being often portrayed as a trickster figure tasked with destroying the world/web/text—whose numerous avatars visit earth in the guise of animals, humans, or a hybrid of the two. As a “nomad merchant prince” (Lord 2010, 76), “veiled and robed in ivory linen” (Lord 2010, 94), the apostate Taran arrives in Paama’s village in his Vishnu-Krishna avatar. By including Hindu elements alongside those from African cultures, Lord’s web marks a creolized approach to understanding Barbados’ past and present but simultaneously critiques these religions and leaders for their corrupted masculinity, arrogance, and violence.

Originally tasked with “the protection and improvement of humankind,” the indigo lord, for example, finds “himself dismayed and disillusioned by humans and their flaws” (Lord 2010, 102). Emphasizing Ananse’s hypermasculine, destructive aspects, the narrator cautions: “Remember what we mentioned to you before. This is a dangerous person. He [Taran] enjoys lulling the prey into a feeling of safety before killing it” (Lord 2010, 67). The spiderlike imagery is reinforced by extrapolating Taran to be a shortened form of tarantula. When Taran and Trickster meet Paama, however, the novel advances its venture into alternative epistemologies by introducing a theory of quantum physics, whereby other worlds and times can coexist outside of and in relation to human ones. For instance, Lord writes, “A bizarrely shaped figure loomed out of the stilled outside world and casually tore open their little bubble of time, holding the edges apart carefully with sharp-tipped, multiple, hairy legs. …It was half Bini [Taran’s human servant], half the trickster spider” (Lord 2010, 99). Trickster, the spiderman, intervenes when Taran cannot physically reclaim the stick from Paama’s outstretched hands because he is morally bankrupt.

Lewis explains such otherworldliness: “This is yet another level of the complexity of the [Barbadian] folk culture – its ability simultaneously to separate and homogenize the present with the past, and to incorporate the future into a dialectical unity which gives shape and direction to the lived experiences of a people” (1990, 94). The ability for djombis to simultaneously exist in more than one space and time again demonstrates the text’s gender-centric web-motif as capable of breaking free from a Western master narrative of linearity. That Paama is attuned to the djombi’s existence and their special abilities to bend spacetime further lends evidence that Lord places immense importance upon the agency of women and their ability to envision another society. For example, when Taran kidnaps Paama and takes her to alternative tragic pasts/presents, for example witnessing a plague-ridden town or a coffle of slaves, three Catholic nuns follow their movements. In fact, the sisters play a pivotal role in utilizing advanced technology to help Paama transform Taran from a vengeful, abusive djombi to a humble, kind deity.7 Paama’s engagements with the djombis, however, also mark her and other maternal figures’ unique ability to embody “Ananse…[who] assumes a role as link between the physical and the supernatural dimensions” (“Ananse” 2008, 84), for she communes with, transforms, and redeems both the divine and the earthly.

By outwitting and defying her husband, Paama echoes Ananse again: she takes “the opportunity to mock society’s authority. He [She] is able to do what the ordinary Akan cannot: act unscrupulously with relative impunity. By so doing he [she] calls the most sacrosanct of Akan institutions into question” (Vecsey 1981, 172). In Lord’s version, Paama not only breaks the societal rules/duties of marriage by leaving Ansige but also remarries. This antipatriarchal text thus imagines three new male characters, Chance, Trickster, and Kwame, who, in addition to the original Ansige, are lured into seeking out the cunning heroine, Paama. The spider’s web thus functions as a network of reciprocity, which connects its heroine with others: “The advent of West Indian femininity therefore consists of placing oneself in a network of two-way relationships: Caribbeanness implies going towards others, at the same time as welcoming one to the other,” explains Gyssels (2002, 189). Lord’s speculative folktale therefore revises Ananse protagonists like Paama to propose an antipatriarchal, spiritual path that embraces mutuality, empathy, and community; the collective in Redemption is the village of Makendha and Paama’s supportive family, prior to and after Ansige.

By reinventing the African folktale heroine for a contemporary Caribbean audience, Lord thus contributes to reconceptualizing gender identity in the region. Consider again the novel in relation to Gyssels’ reading of maternal imagery in Schwarz-Bart and Marshall:

[An] [u]mbilical cord connecting the African-Caribbean … to her mother earth, Africa, the spider’s thread is a marvelous realistic motif emphasizing the importance, for the quest for female identity, of a communication/communion with known and unknown, living and dead, people from here and there. It conveys the idea of a cunning resistance, barely visible, of a woven identity, that is to say, never fixed, but which must be patiently weaved, taking into account new contacts and exchanges. (190)

The narrator thus disentangles Paama from her marginalized position in both patriarchal storytelling traditions, for example African and Western, and emphasizes her critical pedagogical role in the new Anansesem.

After meeting Paama, for instance, Kwame’s thinking is transformed. Kwame tells the Trickster, “I am trying to find a part of myself, something that I lost on the way from childhood” (Lord 2010, 139). Presumably, this lost part is his belief in nancy stories, a belief in African-Caribbean derived religions, which can be interpreted as a loss of knowledge of his heritage. The novel, once more echoing the folkloric wisdom found in Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle and Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, suggests that knowing one’s history, knowing one’s ancestry, is critical to knowing one’s self, and that women play an essential role in contributing to and sharing this knowledge. The world of Ahani and its surrounding villages is increasingly turning away from its Afro-centric religious, folkloric roots to a more Western, secular, scientific urban society (e.g., the crime-ridden underbelly of the city, the setting of Lord’s sequel, Unraveling). A renewed belief in the Ananse stories and the divine is possible, however, as Kwame, under Paama’s guidance, comes to perceive Trickster as a good omen: “finding out that someone like you is at the start of it [journey to self-community knowledge] is oddly encouraging” (Lord 2010, 139). The novel emphasizes that it is not so much that African-Caribbean deities do not exist so much as that most humans have stopped believing in them and their power. Backtracking to the old ways and embracing the feminine thus become part of the protagonists’ journeys to locating the sacred within themselves and their world(s)/web(s).

Concretizing the power of female figures in this novel, the superior djombi, Patience ushers in the path toward spiritual redemption that the male djombis, Trickster and Taran, embark upon. While little is known of Patience in Redemption, in Unraveling Lord gives explicit clues to reading her as the mother earth goddess Atabey: “progenitor of the supreme being of the Tainos, mother of the Taino lakes and rivers, protector of feminine ebbs and flows, of the great mysteries of the blood that women experience” (Benítez-Rojo 1997, 14). Exhibiting her formidable power, Patience exclaims: “I am Earth, the Eldest and First-born of all that walks here. I make my children, I destroy them, and I remake them again’” (Lord 2010, 271). Atabey notably shares affinities with the Akan Mother Earth goddess Asase Yaa, Ananse’s mother. Ananse (the Trickster brought from Africa via slavery) and Vishnu-Shiva (Chance, the indigo lord brought from India via indentured servitude), as well as three Catholic nuns (also brought by/as European colonizers) are all subordinate to this precolonial indigenous Caribbean goddess. In this henotheistic divinity, the ultimate God is Caribbean and a woman. Lord’s novel therefore insists that indigenous women and indigenous cosmologies must play an invaluable role in reconceiving the anticolonial, antipatriarchal Caribbean future.

In this light, one can see how the novel’s title draws on its metafictional qualities and its African-Caribbean theological connotations: like the silk which the spider uses to spin their web, so too does the narrator write with their indigo ink. The redemption applies as much to the narrator and reader as it does to the divine who has been redeemed from ruinous error/evil by three powerful maternal figures: first, the Ananse narrator, whose labour respins Anansesem; second, Atabey/Patience, Taran’s immediate superior djombi, who punishes and exiles him but later forgives his transgressions; and third, Paama, who educates and mothers Taran—afterward he is reborn as her human son Yao. While, according to de Souza, “disharmony and disorder” (2003, 343) characterize the endings of Ananse trickster stories, and indeed the African Karamba story is inconclusive, Lord’s feminocentric Redemption continues to break the rules: it ends more or less happily: Ansige dies, Chance/Taran earns back his Chaos power, and Paama marries Kwame, with whom she has twin sons, Yao and Ajit (fulfilling the Glutton tale). That Paama as human mother to Yao and Ajit (respectively incarnations of Trickster and Chance) parallels the senior djombi Patience as divine mother to Trickster/Ananse and Chance/Shiva-Vishnu is no coincidence either: Redemption insists that the potential for feminine qualities such as care, solidarity, and compassion toward others to subvert patriarchal society cannot be overestimated.

Lord’s novel concludes with the narrator playfully asking readers to purchase the book, (which, of course they already have if they are reading it): “ladies and gentlemen, if you have at all enjoyed my story, be generous as the pot goes around, and do come back again soon” (2010, 181). The return, of course, will be the sequel, Unraveling, which like Redemption ends with an image of hope: mother and sons, on two different ontological planes, as human and as undying, demonstrating the powerful potential of trickster figures as capable of countering patriarchal-colonial discourses by offering feminine concentric retellings of African-Caribbean (folk) her story.8 Lord’s speculative folktale thus employs several Ananse trickster storytellers qua spiders spinning (a)synchronistic webs/texts. Centralizing a nonbinary Ananse-narrator, a female folk-figure, Paama, and an indigenous goddess, the power of marginalized figures to weave their own tales emerges. For Paama, it means bravely ending an unhappy marriage to an undeserving husband and becoming that folk-Ananse-heroine who survives: “one who relieves” not “his” but her “community … from power abuse and, in the process, brings new knowledge” (Mwinlaaru and Nkansah 2018, 253). Paama stands up to not only her husband but also a powerful male deity, both of whom exert violence and control over others. Colonial and patriarchal spaces and figures in Redemption are therefore inextricably transformed by female-maroon protagonists committed to social justice. As such, Lord’s text speculates that if the fabric of Caribbean society is to change, then women and gender must be prioritized: the old Indigenous, Indo- and African-Caribbean folktales must be rewoven in novel form.

Notes

  1. 1.

    In Engaged Queerness in African Speculative Fiction, Edgar Fred Nabutanyi argues that “African folktales are truly sci-fi texts … [T]he very concept of African sci-fi is queer, because it destabilises the popular conceptions of African literature as realistic” (qtd. by Burger 2020, 2).

  2. 2.

    In her notes, Gyssels likens the mangrove framework used by Maryse Condé in her novel Traversée de la mangrove (1989) to a web and suggests it constitutes another woman writer’s fruitful (re)consideration of Caribbean identity; the mangrove paradigm is also central to Odile Ferly’s work A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing at the Millennium (2012).

  3. 3.

    English translations of Gyssels’ article are my own.

  4. 4.

    Also resonating with Aunt Nancy in the African American context (“Ananse,” 2008, 84).

  5. 5.

    Marina Warner’s novel Indigo (1992) links the dye with the deceased witch, Sycorax, in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Resonating with Lord’s version of Miranda in Unraveling, Warner’s Miranda character lives in the twentieth century.

  6. 6.

    Jesslyn Shields (2020) discusses Moses Lindo, inspector general of indigo and importer of enslaved people from Barbados to Charleston. Lawrence Hill’s novel The Book of Negroes (2007) depicts Lindo and the indigo slave trade.

  7. 7.

    The nuns cannot be exonerated from their historical role in perpetuating slavery in the region, and this is a missed opportunity in the novel.

  8. 8.

    That Paama’s fraternal twins, Yao and Ajit, are human forms of the undying ones, respectively Trickster (Ananse) and Chance (Vishnu-Shiva) , harkens to another African tale, a Xhosa one, called “The Story of the Glutton,” (1886) which ends with the heroine’s two sons killing the glutton and freeing the villagers trapped inside him.