Keywords

Two decades into the twenty-first century, and on the cusp of irreparable human damage to multiple ecosystems and our environment, political inaction on climate change has calcified into a seemingly immutable drive to extinction. It is even more disheartening, then, to revisit novels and scientific knowledge from the 1990s that already recognized and detailed climate change. Published in 1995, Mayra Montero’s In the Palm of Darkness follows a US herpetologist, Victor S. Grigg, as he sets out on a quest for an elusive endangered amphibian in the mountains of Haiti.1 Weaving in Grigg’s search with the life story of his Haitian guide Thierry Adrien, Montero also includes details on the disappearances of multiple frog species since the 1970s across the globe. This accelerated disappearance in time of species from different spaces across the world evokes a four-dimensional spacetime that recognizes the union of time and space first proposed by mathematician Hermann Minkowsdki (1908). It also evokes through a triangulation between femininity, patriarchy, and imperialism the ways in which women become associated with the Haitian environment, in ways that are in turn oppressive and resistant, conciliatory, and revolutionary.

That Victor Grigg and Thierry Adrien’s intersecting stories seem at first to provide the novel’s main narrative thrust is remarkable for a woman author who has described herself as a “frustrated biologist” (Prieto 2000, 90). Why, we may ask, would a female writer whose yearnings overlap with the vocation of her two protagonists not have women play these main part(s) in the novel? Why have instead a recurring homosocial bonding between two men whose relationship seemingly reproduces the same mutually reinforcing masculinities present in her previous work? Indeed, Montero’s first novel La trenza de la hermosa luna [The Braid of the Lovely Moon (1987)] was also about the friendship between two men, a “houngan” or Vodou priest and a humble sailor, who, after many years, meet in Port-au-Prince during the days of the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier.

What is more, insofar as these male characters’ own relationships with feminine or nonhuman forms of otherness seems at best peripheral and at worst instrumental in the novel, one cannot help but think of the form of male homosociality which Eve Sedgwick (1985) defines in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Building on Gayle Rubin, Sedgwick (1985, 26) analyzes male bonding and male relationships through the schema of a triangle, where “man uses a woman as a ‘conduit of a relationship’ in which the true partner is a man.” Similarly, in In the Palm of Darkness, the representation of sexual otherness, alongside that of nonhuman alterity, not only brings the two male protagonists together but mainly plays backdrop to their personalized human tragedies in the book.

Yet the novel also suggests an alternative dynamic, one in which the environmental disaster, a spatial consideration, combines with the temporality of frog disappearances, to stand as the main narrative. And despite the protagonists’ desperate attempts to overpower the otherness of the world around them, it is this spacetime dimension that ultimately drives the human adventures and pursuits that constitute the plot. In fact, in In the Palm of Darkness, the two male protagonists’ instrumentalizing relationship with nonhuman and sexual otherness is neither naturalized through time nor obscured in space; it is rather made visible and exposed through their very attempts at normalizing their hierarchical ways of relating to what they see as destabilizing sites of uncontrollable difference in need of containment. The novel reveals femininity in particular as the embodiment of the othering processes and projections through which an anxious masculinity repeatedly and vainly seeks to assert its domineering foothold in an unstable world. It is important, in this respect, that two women characters in the novel are scientists.

Like the femininity with which they are associated, frogs in the novel function as a natural symbol of change and liminality: they live between water and land (space), in their different physical embodiments of life stages (time)—from tadpole to frog, and with the crucial role they play in multiple ecosystems as both predator and prey. In addition to their importance as barometers of biological conditions, they have also, however, long held a place of fascination in mythology and religion, often as symbols of fertility and promiscuity. Frogs therefore truly embody the novel’s creolizing impulses regarding the compatibility of a scientific and Afro-Caribbean cosmology insofar as they stand for the physical and material landscape on the one hand and for metaphorical and spiritualized considerations on the other.2 Montero thus joins a long line of Caribbean women writers whose fiction literally stages a juncture where a transnational, queer feminist and creolized ecology can develop which, as under threat as it is, is specific to the Caribbean.3 Ecocritics, in particular, have been particularly attentive to the workings of desire in relation to the environment and other-than-human species, in a way that epitomizes the entanglement spacetime represents.

Feminist and queer reformulations by Greta Gaard (1997), Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (2010), and Nicole Seymour (2013), for instance, have provided a systematic exploration of the potential intersections of ecofeminist and queer theories. Our analysis follows these important theorists’ lead, albeit with a variation, namely that our queer reading is not anchored in any material or recognizable queer identity so much as in a queer reading that reveals the “unnatural” processes through which the norm constructs or reinstates itself as authoritative.

Victor opens the third chapter in the book by stating, “I began taping my conversations with Thierry when I realized that between stories, he was inserting important information about the frog” (Montero 1997, 18). The relationship between the two men which seemingly constitutes the main framing device in Montero’s novel is neither an equal one nor the main gist of the narrative: the American herpetologist dichotomizes Thierry’s tales and “information,” and Victor’s use of the term “stories” reflects his dismissal of Thierry’s way of knowing and telling in favor of what the scientist sees as “information” embedded in the latter’s life anecdotes and shared culture. The punctuated mode of delivery this revelation highlights is reflected in the structure of the novel itself, which interlaces objective (as defined by Western scientists) segments on global frog species’ disappearances with the hyperlocal human and subjective experiences that are infused with Haitian mythology and landscape. While seemingly incongruous, these dry scientific inclusions do, however, pull the story about the doomed adventures of a scientist in Haiti into a global, existential, and interspecies problem to establish a more geographically expansive scale, one that stands at multiple crossroads: between races, genders, and epistemologies. In this context, the kind of masculinist and triangulating homosociality that Sedgwick identified in Between Men (1985) is exposed as unequipped to deal with global phenomena the male protagonists can neither address nor comprehend. In other words, the novel does not place the environmental consciousness it evokes in the background of its human characters’ storyline, but rather foregrounds the eerie, unexplained mass frog disappearances through the natural world’s disenchantment with—and resistance to—human intrusion, one it also associates with a beleaguered femininity.

The bringing together of scientific facts about amphibians with the polyvocal narratives of the characters’ lived experiences also allows us to examine the implications of a Caribbean (that is to say, of a creolized) perspective for our understanding of scientific discourse in the novel, whose mode of inquiry has historically been associated with a masculinist and colonizing ethos. In the Palm of Darkness evokes science’s masculinist and colonizing history by repeatedly juxtaposing Western science and Haitian cosmology, self and other, male and female scientists, with the objective and subjective dimensions of the human experience. In fact, the traditional dichotomy between Western science/rationalism versus Caribbean/Haitian magic/Vodou gives way to a mutual entanglement through Victor and Thierry’s very gendered search for what could be the last specimen of an endangered species of frog in Haiti.

In so doing, Montero’s novel provides a powerful counterpoint to the more widely known but sensationalizing representation of the science/Vodou encounter in Wade Davis’s bestselling The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985). Vodou, Haiti’s African diasporic religion that emerged between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, developed out of a process of syncretism that brought together the traditional religions of West Africa and Roman Catholicism. It is what Montero referred to as “the most beautiful and sublime aspect, of our ‘mestization.’” She further explained:

[p]eople often ask me if I practice these religions and I tell them that I respect them profoundly and have a great aesthetic, even philosophic affinity, with these magicoreligious systems. That is why I have an altar in my house, a syncretic altar within a syncretic system; because on that altar, voodoo [sic] gods cohabit with gods from Santería and Madonnas, and Catholic saints. This wonderful mixture is what we are, what gives us depth and spirituality as a people. (Prieto 2000, 89)

Montero’s altar reveals how one side in the science/Vodou binary represented by the two men’s approaches to the natural world in In the Palm of Darkness is more open and welcoming of difference than the other. Indeed, perhaps in Montero’s understanding, Vodou is not only open to difference, but its syncretism invites an interchange between belief and knowledge systems.

Montero lays the foundation for exploring and defining what happens at the juncture between science and alternative knowledges even as she also exposes the grounds for our failure to find intercultural and indeed interdisciplinary connections to support any conservationist goal. The sinking of the boat at the end of her narrative (and with it, the deaths of the two men and “their” endangered frog) is evidence of this doomed encounter. This representation therefore echoes not the unceasing quality of the creolization process that is allowed to proceed unfettered in culture but rather a “halted” one, as described by the Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1974) in his pioneering observations about cultural and social creolization.

In The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, Brathwaite (1971) defined creolization as “a way of seeing the society, not in terms of white and black, master and slave, in separate nuclear units, but as contributory parts of a whole” (Brathwaite 1971, 307). For Brathwaite, “the friction created by this confrontation [slavery]” was not only “cruel” but also “creative.”4 He would later (1974) expand on his theoretical framework by highlighting the process of victorious “acculturation” that distinguished the assimilatory policy of the European Creoles from the halted “interculturation” that defined the post-slavery Creole identities involved in a process of resistant intercultural exchange. This “interculturation,” Brathwaite claimed, was stopped in its tracks because the Creoles failed to take “the culture of this black ex-African majority as the paradigm and norm for the entire society” (Brathwaite 1974, emphasis ours, 30).

Similarly, in Introduction à une Poétique du Divers, Édouard Glissant’s (1996) concept of creolization evokes Brathwaite’s (1971) as he too claims that when the cultural elements that are intermixing are not equivalent, that is, when the African element is demeaned and considered inferior as in the case of slavery, creolization “does not really take place. It takes place in a bastardizing and unjust manner … it does take place but leaves a bitter, uncontrollable residue” (Glissant 1996, 17–18). Glissant even compares the form of creolization that occurs in the plantation world to a bird that only flaps one wing (18).

These theorizations of a failed creolization are echoed in In the Palm of Darkness, in its fictional staging of an encounter between two dichotomous realities, Western science and Afro-Caribbean cosmologies. Their ultimate incompatibility in the novel strongly evokes Brathwaite’s (1974) process of “halted interculturation” (30) or Glissant’s (1996) “bitter, uncontrollable residue” (18), since the failure clearly resides in the Western character’s inability to heed the signifying processes and wisdom of alternative Haitian knowledges (represented by the two Haitian characters Thierry Adrien and Boukaka). At the same time, in having the US and Haitian characters share space and time in incurring the same fate, the novel’s staged intersection also suggests an alternative to the binary, one that we will invite the reader to consider at the end of our discussion. Propelled by the questions raised in Montero’s text, we are driven to explore what is potentially creolizable if not creolized in the Western scientific approach. We see as emerging a possible common denominator between traditions and forms of knowledge that could instill a cooperative humility in lieu of the colonizing hubris with which scientists like Victor Grigg conduct their business in non-Western cultural or environmental landscapes whose association with femininity is far from incidental.5 As such, it is important to take seriously the challenge posed by the text’s recurring association of scientific conclusions with the notion of an unsolvable “mystery.” This is a mystery with which both the environment and the female characters that inhabit it are consistently associated in the novel, in keeping with the triangulating structure we identified at the onset of our analysis.

The novel opens with a fictionalized representation of an easily identifiable process of scientific discovery and collection. American herpetologist Victor Grigg and his Haitian guide Thierry Adrien are lying in the Haitian underbrush on the Mont des Enfants Perdus, having just recorded the voice of the elusive Eleutherodactylus sanguineus, a tiny but real, that is, not fictional, endangered frog Victor was hired to find. The fieldtrip leads the latter to reminisce about his wife Martha, “a woman of science” (Montero 1997, 7), a marine biologist and “meticulous collaborator” (7) as well as about the circumstances that led his eminent colleague, the famed Australian herpetologist Vaughan Patterson, to hire him to locate a specimen of the elusive frog. Interspersed between the narrative chapters (which are told in Victor’s and Thierry’s respective voices and relate their subjective experiences and relationships), we are also given sections that detail various frog species’ extinctions in the detached and objective language of science. And ironically, these sections conclude with a sense of puzzlement and mystery rather than scientific answer or elucidation.

Throughout the novel, we are repeatedly reminded of how scientific processes of data collection, analysis, and “conclusions” fail to fully explain the frog die-off, whether it is spatially or temporally. Ecological processes are instead represented as interactions of multidimensional and multifactorial influences that are not amenable to a reductionist approach to understanding. Pollution may be deemed the most significant factor and still not fully explain the loss of a frog species in what is indeed, as science itself recognizes, a complex phenomenon. This is why scientists talk of “contributing” factors.6 There are often emergent properties within natural systems where relational processes between various organisms continue to affect the life forms in question. A statistical correlation between pollution and the disappearance of frogs therefore does not preclude other factors at play that have yet to be examined. This is also, then, how “mystery” remains part of the scientific approach to any life form’s development, and why the novel’s representation of the compatibility of science with a belief system like voodoo is not as far-fetched as may first appear. Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices, based on openness and adaptation, touch on and inform every facet of human life, and therefore step in to provide a metaphorical and embodied language for the mysteries that motivate scientific research.

What is more, the novel creates a distinction between the scientific process itself and its practitioners, suggesting an ironic intersection or “contact zone” between the humility that grounds science’s approach to “the mystery” of multifactorial, natural phenomena and the self-possession with which the novel’s Haitian guides appeal to alternative knowledges to explain the same (“the Law of the Water”). At the same time, in staging an encounter between Western science (via Victor’s collection of specimens) and Afro-Caribbean cosmologies (via Thierry’s alertness and ability to “read” his surroundings), In the Palm of Darkness exposes the profound ways in which the convergence and confluence of these two worldviews is only truly recognized by the Haitian cosmology that resides in the “palm of darkness.” By contrast, the Western scientist Victor remains resistant to the alternative realities and knowledges his guide tries to share with him.

Victor Grigg is determined, for instance, to see his research hover above the tragic and deadly realities that constitute the daily lives of the Haitian people and of women in particular, a perspective that is emblematic of the problem with his scientific worldview. Montero’s novel describes a 1980s Haiti where violence is a permanent presence, at times peripheral but too often central to day-to-day Haitian experiences. This violence compromises Grigg’s and other Western scientists’ determined searches for disappearing flora and fauna, which is the only self-interested reason for which they object to its ubiquity. Driven by the promise of his own research and success (in exchange for finding the frog, Patterson promises Victor funding for two years to travel anywhere and research anything), Victor embarks upon the mission to extricate the last “specimen” of grenouille du sang from the very environment in which the endangered animal would be most likely to reproduce, insisting that his knowledge should evolve independently of the people or environments at the expense of whom it acquires its authority. Unwilling to fully confront the human dangers, the scientists in the novel simply move forward with their searches, claiming these to be above the unpredictable but omnipresent violence that shapes human relationships in the book.

This compartmentalizing view is challenged by the mirroring Montero stages between the global frog disappearances and the human disappearances and oppression at the hands of the TonTon Macoutes, a reference that helps situate the time frame of the story in the 1980s. The novel rarely provides reasons for the Macoutes’s violence; it simply presents the fact of a person’s death, often through the reappearance of their lifeless, and appendage-less, body. Yet, unlike the scientific puzzlement over the frog disappearances, Haitians understand the violent deaths, and violence, as a transaction and the result of interaction between people. On Haiti’s Mont des Enfants Perdus, a mountain of lost children, Thierry and Victor discover buried human bones and remains. Thierry immediately alerts Victor to the danger around them but the latter refuses to believe Thierry, expecting them to stay on the mountain. When Thierry states that they will need to leave the mountain as they are not wanted there, Victor first pretends not to hear, and then recalls, “[Thierry] seemed sincere and yet I felt obliged to doubt, to deny the absurd danger that threatened to interfere with my work, to forget everything except the one thing that brought me to the mountain: Nothing very serious can happen to a man when all he looks for, all he wants, is a harmless little frog” (41).

Victor convinces himself of the inconsequential nature of his search and presence on the island, even the inconsequential nature of the frog itself in relation to Haiti’s sociopolitical reality, but from the outset Thierry has known of the importance and value of the frog. Within the novel, the frog portends the doomed outcome of the search. Describing his rejection of Thierry’s expertise and knowledge as an “obligation,” Victor ascribes his doubt to his training as a scientist. Yet, the frog proves throughout the search process not to be harmless at all, since the detached, scientific prose dividing the chapters demonstrates precisely how harmful the scientific competitiveness over the frogs can be, including to science itself. After all, the mysteries of the frog disappearances highlight what the science does not know or cannot declare understood.

Throughout the novel, Victor Grigg makes quite a number of offhand comments that reveal his ingrained dismissive attitude toward Thierry’s knowledge of Haiti. Victor animalizes his guide by seeing him as a rare species that should be recorded before “it” disappears too. When Victor is in the hospital, after being attacked as a warning that he should leave the mountain where he was conducting the search, he has no interest in the spiritual laws that Thierry offers to share: “I can teach you the Law of Water” (65). The gulf that separates the two men’s ways of relating with each other and their environment is enhanced by the reader’s awareness that Victor had tried to replace Thierry, claiming “some people just don’t have the right chemistry and Thierry and I hadn’t taken to each other” (61). This was shortly before Thierry spent the first night in the hospital tending to his boss’s wounds and comforting him; Grigg recalls, “Neither of us really slept that night” (63). Despite this selfless devotion, Victor again conveys the idea that Thierry is not to be trusted: “He walked out of the room, not making a sound, and I was reminded of Bengali servants in the movies, the ones who always end up stabbing their masters” (66). The resonance with slavery and its association of racial difference with savagery is striking. One may also remember the unnamed male narrator’s objectifying view of the Caribbean environment and its people in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Evidently, Victor struggles to identify with his guide and what he represents. Nor does he respect or register the latter’s knowledge and expertise.

In a chapter tellingly entitled “Barbara,” Thierry’s words (in direct speech) are interrupted by Victor’s disconnected and interspersed thoughts (in indirect discourse), in what become competing perspectives that embody—via the narration—both the Haitian’s desire to engage and the Westerner’s inability to listen. Thierry’s attempts at sharing the Haitian spiritual laws he solemnly refers to as “the Law of Water” are consistently interrupted by Victor’s inner stream of consciousness about his wife Martha, who has left him for the “Barbara” of the chapter’s title. Again, the men’s unequal relationship is triangulated through Victor’s reference to gender and sexuality. The structure of alternating direct and indirect male speech in the later chapter echoes the narration of the first one, when we first encountered the two men in the Haitian underbrush and saw Victor’s thoughts similarly stray to his failing conjugal relationship. In both cases, however, the focus is less on his unrequited love and loss of a longtime partner than on his wounded ego. As evidenced by the title of the later chapter, he is more concerned about Barbara, his rival, than the loss of his better half’s relationship. It is his sense of masculinity that is at stake: “the fact that Martha ate ostrich with [Barbara] and not with me … a subtle blow” (138). At the beginning of the book, he introduced his wife as “what you might call a woman of science” (emphasis ours, 7) with a “very suspicious mind” (6) and a “perverse delight in trivial details that went beyond simple scientific curiosity” (7). The latter statement is particularly ironic in light of his own inability to remain focused on the professional task or professional relationship at hand without getting lost in thoughts about his domestic affairs. Tellingly, he refers to Martha crossing herself before going to bed as a “childish habit” (75), which shows that his disdain for spiritual matters is not only racialized but also gendered.

It is again and again through a triangulation between femininity, patriarchy, and imperialism that women become associated with the Haitian environment, which is in turn perceived by the protagonists as a mere backdrop to their homosocial tribulations. Victor’s paradoxically dismissive obsession, built on his unspoken feelings of emasculation, with his wife Martha’s lesbian relationship overlaps with his disregard for Thierry’s perspective and collection of the last specimen of an endangered frog. It reveals a condescending attitude toward women that somewhat veils his dismissal of Haitian alterity, an attitude which seems to reproduce a similar process of gendering. The novel, then, stages a rejection of a white phallogocentric science and society in favor of subordinated people and contexts that do not objectify the environment and humans, but it does so by making visible the gendered and racialized processes of othering through which any discourse will seek to normalize its self-proclaimed authority and superiority.

Accordingly, Montero parallels the Haitian environment’s resistance to Western and human intrusion with the gendered violence experienced by women. The violence enacted on, inscribed upon, and demonstrated through women’s bodies is racialized, though never explicitly so. Thierry surmises that Haiti causes white women to go crazy, as the women find themselves drawn to the dangerous mountains. The first story Thierry tells Victor about the last time he saw the grenouille du sang, which is also the first story in the book, associates the frog with a white woman who had apparently taken refuge in the mountains: “I was looking for a woman, sir” (20). Hired by a German man to recover his missing wife, Thierry sets out alone and overnight to Castaches Hill, where they believe the woman to be. Thierry tells Victor,

You can’t imagine how many women go out of their minds as soon as they set foot in Haiti, decent women who come for a little sun and end up on the burros with twisted hooves that go up to the Citadelle. […] after that, I don’t know why, they come back deranged, their clothes all dirty and their eyes popping out of their heads (5).

Thierry continues,

If they brought a husband with them, the husband drags them back to the ship or plane they came on. If they’re alone, and some of them are, the police pick them up and put them in insane asylum. Then the doctors get word to their families and before you know it, a brother, a father, a son shows up, it’s always a man who comes for them, and they’re handed to that man (26).

The novel never identifies these women as white, but the implication is that Haiti drives white women to insanity.7 This “madness” rejects white European knowledge (which is masculinized in the novel), as well as the proclaimed superiority of scientific rationalism. What is more, the white women who go up the mountain, like the mountain itself, also cause fear in Haitians.

In the Palm of Darkness evokes, then, to borrow the Caribbean novelist Tiphanie Yanique’s words, the

long, unfortunate tradition in literature set in the Caribbean, written by Americans or Europeans, of crazy women. Either women from the Caribbean are crazy, or women go to the Caribbean and end up crazy. During the Victorian Era, the idea was that if the slave master goes down to check on his plantation in the Caribbean and he takes his wife, he is taking a risk because she might lose her mind. That was a real thing that people thought—white women were going to go crazy… But probably when you think about what was really happening, the women couldn’t stand the violence of slavery (Yanique 2014).

Yanique’s prescription of white women’s madness as a psychological rejection of slavery places white women, at least some of them, against the institution of slavery. Yet there might also be another way to consider white women’s “madness,” where they are not merely manifesting the conscience of the European colonizers, but rather confronting their complicity within the system as well. We may read Martha’s “competition” with Victor as a scientist herself along the same lines, when she does not accompany Victor on his trips, or when she ultimately rejects their heterosexual relationship.

Throughout the novel, women of color’s bodies are violated, albeit in a more sexualized way than their white counterparts’. In keeping with the slavery-derived stereotypes of black female sexuality as available, men’s sexual aggression or violation of nonwhite women is consistently recast as consent or agency. For example, prior to meeting Victor, Thierry helped another scientist, called Papa Crapaud (the French word for toad), search for frogs. One day, Papa Crapaud returned from a trip to Guadeloupe with frog specimens and a new woman, “the catch he had brought” (68)—Ganesha—who turned out to be an unfaithful, potentially murderous wife, likely of a South Asian background, which is suggested through her appearance (“she … wore a little ring in her nose and a blood mark on her forehead” (69)) and of course her name, which she shares with the elephant-headed, many-armed Hindu deity.

In highlighting Ganesha’s alleged dirtiness, which made the house smell like cow piss and cow dung, Thierry associates her racial and gender difference with a debased sexuality directly related to her spiritual belief system (69). In this, Thierry’s view of Ganesha rejects Montero’s altar of syncretism, which is open, and establishes the masculinist limitations of his alternative knowledge system. Papa Crapaud explains that “Ganesha wasn’t like other women, and the loas that came down to her table were the loas of other lands who liked cow piss and cow dung, cow dung and rice milk” (70). Ganesha’s cultural difference and her different spirits and gods seem to imbue her, however, with an intoxicating sexuality to men, who would line up outside her door and whom she would invite in when Papa Crapaud was out hunting frogs.

Despite his friendship with Papa Crapaud or maybe precisely because of it, as Sedgwick might argue, Thierry succumbs to his attraction to Ganesha, describing their sexual encounter as a moment of hunt and capture: “I came up behind Ganesha and put my hands around her. She twisted and tried to run away, I caught her at the door” (71) but eventually “instead of hitting me or running away she went down on all fours and offered her rump like a dog” (72). Where white women are driven mad in Haiti and rendered dangerously useless, women of color are identified with a sexual agency that, the male narrator asserts, they deliberately subordinate to white or black men’s will. Thierry claims that Ganesha’s sexuality (“She knew what each man needed” (72)) overpowers Haitian men, thereby absolving the latter of responsibility for their sexual aggression (72). The novel’s treatment of Ganesha, who is also framed as a vector of venereal disease, thus implies an antagonism between alternative knowledges through an engendering of racial and sexual difference that goes beyond any black–white binary. The troubling view among black men of South Asian women as submissive in the extreme can certainly be traced back to colonial attitudes, but it also exposes the very real divisions, prejudices, and antagonisms between Afro- and Indo-Caribbean communities.

Despite being subjected to processes of othering by Victor, Thierry reproduces these himself in relation to femininity, as seen in his animalization of Ganesha (a particular type of othering that happens, in the novel, in relation to South Asia) as well as the many revelations of men’s sexual dominance of women throughout the novel. Thierry is unable to recognize his own complicity with the forces that subjugate Haitian women and the Haitian environment, and whose triangulating dynamics cast women in the role of the “conduits” through which men’s homosocial bonds are enacted (Sedgewick 1985, 26). Also significant in this regard is Thierry’s sleeping with Froufrou, his father’s “wife,” in a seeming reenactment of the Oedipus complex. Thierry’s sexual relationship with FrouFrou functions very much as yet another form of the triangulation we have been discussing.

Such triangular structures are also true of the ways in which Western knowledges repeatedly reinstate their disciplinary and epistemological superiority, sometimes at a second remove. When faced with the herpetologist Emile Boukaka’s expertise and impressive data gathering, Victor reframes it as nonscientific by comparing it to music and art; he condescendingly dismisses the Haitian’s knowledge, which is based on the local fishermen’s or farmers’ observations:

I made an effort to handle with some grace the enormous quantity of data provided by Boukaka. I was amazed by his capacity for detail, his precision, I can even say his erudition. When we said good-bye he shook my hand; I was about to tell him that he reminded me of a famous musician, … Thelonious Monk … I remembered a composition of Monk’s that wasn’t played too often: ‘See you later, beautiful frog.’ (Emphasis ours, 96–7)

From Victor’s perspective, such association with music is, as with Thierry’s association with opacity, ultimately delegitimizing and belittling.8

While we are made aware of the many discourses contending for attention across time and space, and tradition and modernity in the novel (from Vodou to anthropological and scientific practices), racial and/or sexual difference clearly function as “metaphorical hinge[s] between scientific and anthropological discourses” (according to critic Ángel Rivera (2001)) on the one hand, and a nonscientific, religious world on the other. For instance, Thierry and Boukaka’s status as in-between is evident insofar as they both appeal to Haitian cosmologies at the same time as they are also referred to as “herpetologists” from the outset, a term that makes no sense outside of a Western scientific context. Thierry is both the local guide who facilitates Victor’s scientific data collection and recordings and a believer in the syncretic practices of Vodou. He insists on turning off the recorder to describe “the Law of Water” since: “The law [Thierry] was about to teach me could exist only in the mind and on the tongue of men” (74). Similarly, Emile Boukaka shares scientists’ “capacity for detail,” “precision,” and “erudition” (97) and gathers “enormous quantity of data” (97) while being critical of the limitations of Western scientific thought: “You people invent excuses: acid rain, herbicides, deforestation. But the frogs are disappearing from places where none of that has happened” (96). Neither man expresses the need or desire to choose between the various discourses that intersect in their lives, thereby suggesting the possibility of a creolized science that would benefit from alternative knowledges rather than stand in opposition to them. Boukaka states, for instance, that “[w]hat I’ve learned, I learned in books … But what I know, everything I know, I took from fire and water, from water and flame” (97). Boukaka’s division of “learning” from “knowing” creates another dualistic framework, joining Thierry’s “knowledge from experience” against Victor Grigg’s “knowledge from science.”

Similarly, despite his determination to compartmentalize life into disciplines and categories as well as genders and races, Victor is unconsciously susceptible to what he would (dis)regard as superstitious. As much of a scientist as he is, Victor’s revelation of his selection of science as a career is reminiscent of Thierry’s storytelling approach to reality. Indeed, the reader learns that Victor’s mother gave him a painting of a midwife toad (Alytes obstetricians), so named because the male frogs carry the fertilized eggs on their back and protect them until they hatch; she had begun painting it “when she learned she was pregnant and finished it on the day I was born,” a fact that convinced her that his life would be somehow intertwined with frogs—and it was (21). This is the kind of “old wives’ tale” or “midwife’s tale” we associate not with science but with a much historically maligned oral history. Paradoxically, the foundations of scientific practice for Victor lie in the same realms he would dismiss in the name of science. At the same time, the very mother who claimed to set his future trajectory in motion through her superstitious prediction also instilled in him the desire to become a scientist through an endorsement of science as we know it: “My mother always said you had to look at life as if it were the suspicious start of a crime: tying up loose ends, finding clues, following the trail coldly, as if it didn’t even concern you” (20–1). As with other women represented in the text, she is able to transcend dichotomies to espouse a more inclusive, syncretic view of the world.

The novel repeatedly challenges what Caribbean novelist Wilson Harris identified as “the break which occurred between science and art, science and an imaginative psychological, even magical apprehension of the universe, [which] entailed a cultural fragmentation that impoverished the European tradition and was to culminate in the Enlightenment and a constricted rationalism” (Maes-Jelinek 1998, 41), and it is maybe in the violent subjugation of women that it articulates the costs of such a break (which is itself a fraught representation). This being said, while rationalism as the sole way of knowing is certainly questioned, it is also not outrightly condemned as a way of knowing. Indeed, the text also seems to suggest that scientific rationalism and magical apprehension, in Harris’s words, do coexist—maybe that the one can be found in the other, even if it does not actually provide an alternative path forward from this “break,” except partly through the Haitian people’s storytelling, or women’s worldviews, which reveal an uncanny ability to reconcile the two.

Montero’s novel shows the limitations of “science” by undermining the Western habit of polarizing worldviews and epistemologies while she celebrates Vodou and Haiti’s openness to different ways of seeing. As the quote that gave the novel its original title—Tú, la oscuridad—puts it, “You, darkness, enfolding the spirit of those who ignore your glory” (181). In other words, Thierry and the alternative Afro-Caribbean cosmology he represents “enfold” other realities and knowledges that Victor’s Western and hierarchical worldview is more likely to dismiss, yet both are taken to task for the triangulating structures through which they may seek to project their own authority. Both are shown capable of a violent erasure of femininity in their anxious attempts at making sense of an unstable world. Maybe, then, the form of “creolizing science” the novel schematizes would best be seen as one that recognizes usually opposed dimensions of human existence as compatible, creolized forms of knowledge that do not melt difference so much as “enfold the spirit of those who ignore your glory” (181).

Notes

  1. 1.

    Mayra Montero is a Cuban-Puerto Rican writer who was born in Cuba in 1952 and has lived in Puerto Rico since the mid-1960s. In Puerto Rico, Montero has had a successful journalistic career, which, she has claimed, provides “excellent training for anyone who wants to become a writer” (Prieto 2000, 89). Tú, la oscuridad (1995, In the Palm of Darkness) is a precursor in twenty-first-century ecocriticism and sets the stage for the biological theme that runs through her creative and journalistic writings.

  2. 2.

    The coquí, a species of frog endemic to Puerto Rico and belonging to the family Eleutherodactylidae, is the national symbol for the island, which Montero has made her home since the 1960s.

  3. 3.

    Other Caribbean women writers who have similarly fictionalized the imbrication of gender, ecology, and postcoloniality in their work include Edwidge Danticat (2013), whose Claire of the Sea Light also portrays the frog as a hybrid symbol that represents the environment as well as its transcendence (Mardorossian and Wong 2020).

  4. 4.

    As Chris Bongie (1998, 55) noted, however, this statement could be somewhat self-contradictory, since Brathwaite’s argument presupposes the existence of two separate identities in conflict with each other.

  5. 5.

    This is not to say that the intermixing of cultures, languages, and races embodied by “creolization” can just be transposed onto the nonhuman, environmental, or scientific world. We are not implying that the data-driven systematicity of science is amenable to mixing with alternative sources of knowledge such as religion or Vodou. By “creolizing science,” we do not mean to challenge either its processes or the novel’s condemnation of its imperializing applications.

  6. 6.

    Since the novel’s publication, it has been determined, for instance, that the chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) was a contributing factor in the global decline of amphibians. It was not previously something that was in the scientists’ frame of study because it required swabs followed by molecular and DNA tests to discover the fungal pathogen (Manke 2019). The emergence of another piece of the puzzle neither delegitimizes previous studies per se nor constitutes a failure of science, however. Neither does its discovery explain the cause of the fungus’s predominance at that moment in time. This example reminds us that scientific knowledge too is an unceasing process but no less meaningful and legitimate for being so.

  7. 7.

    Again, the trope of the mad Creole woman here may be an intertextual reference to Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys’s twentieth-century response to Charlotte Brontë’s nineteenth-century British classic, Jane Eyre.

  8. 8.

    As Rivera notes, Monk’s jazz style is characterized both by silence as a central compositional element and by a strange angular quality that is not easily assimilated. The strangeness is due to long periods of silence punctuated by his bebop jazz compositions: “In the Palm of Darkness is constructed on one of Monk’s key musical elements (i.e., silence) … The reader … will be able to read silence from a new point of view” (Rivera, 2001).