Abstract
This article proposes a situated reading of maternal love, loss and lovelessness in Donna Hemans’ novel River Woman, locating her text in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. I argue that the complex affects that her representation of ‘child-shifting’ produces, can be articulated both in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her, and in the context of the plantation, where ruptured ties at the level of community and culture continue to be reproduced in the personal, emotional and family spheres. I use the concept of marronage, developed in the work of Glissant and Depestre, to define strategies of survival that necessitated actual and imaginative flight or escape, to contextualise the complex affects of the plantation that are repeated and reproduced in the novel's present—the late twentieth-century Caribbean.
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Notes
Work that is the contemporary of Christian's and proposes an ethical reading include Walker's (1984) essay ‘In Search of Our Mother's Gardens’ and many of the critical positions adopted by Black feminist critics in the anthology Reading Black, Reading Feminist (1990).
I am paraphrasing Pearce's (1997: 49) concept of agency, where in ‘reposition[ing]’ her relation to the text the reader ‘engages in a ‘new relationship with it’ (ibid.: 215).
Foner (1986) notes that there were more women migrating legally to the United States between the period 1967 and 1979 because ‘it was easier for women to qualify for labor certification largely due to the demand for domestic labor in US cities’. In 1967–1968, it was 76/73 per cent. Fifty per cent of the women migrants who were sponsored privately were domestic workers and 50 per cent were nurses (ibid.: 138).
Frederick (2003: 50) argues that literature such as Eric Walrond's early twentieth-century short fiction re-imagines the ‘Colon Man’, pointing to possibilities of ‘agency, achievement and status’. Christine Checinska makes a similar point in her discussion of Olive Senior's poem ‘All Clear 1928’ (55–70).
V.S. Naipaul's early novels and short fiction, George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin: A female-authored text, Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey.
Colen (1986: 48) comments on the choices of her interviewees, West Indian domestic workers in New York City: ‘While to be a good mother means to leave one's children and migrate, taking care of someone else's children is often their first job in New York’.
For example, the award-winning film The Help; Carla's role in the award-winning drama Mad Men.
Valovirta uses Ahmed's (2004: 160) concept of ‘withness’/mitsein to define empathetic receptivity to difference in her affective reading of contemporary Caribbean women's fiction.
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Additional information
This term is used by Hyman Rodman in his study of Trinidad families to describe a person other than the mother who brings up a child: ‘the mother's mother, mother's sister or many others’ (Rodman in Senior, 1991: 17). Senior uses the term to refer to the practice of children being brought up by ‘perfect strangers’ (ibid.: 12).
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Scafe, S. ‘she found a way, left the child’: ‘child-shifting’ as the plantation's affects and love's paradox in Donna Hemans’ River Woman. Fem Rev 104, 61–79 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2013.1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2013.1