Mothering and Matrifocality in Contemporary Caribbean Literature

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without a community of people to whom I am forever indebted. Firstly, I am extremely thankful to Lucy Evans for her careful and gracious supervision of my PhD thesis, where this book began. Lucy’s support was critical in developing my skills as a researcher, and I am very grateful. I would like to thank Zalfa Feghali, who acted as my interim PhD supervisor, and whose advice also helped in the creation of this book. To Joan Anim-Addo and Emma Staniland, who examined my PhD and offered comments about how to transform the thesis into a monograph, thank you.

Thank you to my academic friends, Janelle Rodriques, Furaha Asani, Hannah Robbins, Adom Philogene Heron, Bethan Fisk, Kelsi Delaney, and Emma Crowley. I am eternally grateful for co-writing sessions, for your support, feedback, and encouragement, and all of the opportunities to reason with you.

I owe so much to my mum, Juliette Renaud. Without you, this book would not be possible. To my paternal grandmother, Marie Renaud, thank you for your love of language and literature, and the many games of Scrabble shared in Grenada over the years. To my maternal grandmother, Linda David, thank you for entrusting me with the family tree so many years ago. Memories of sitting on the porch in Carriacou with you as we tried to make sense of our beautiful and expansive family shaped this book in the most profound way. To my brothers, James, Alex, Jordan, and David, thank you for keeping me grounded. To my nieces and nephews, thank you for the joy you bring. To Jes and Era, thank you for being my best friends. To my partner, Lovell Cadet, thank you for your love, your patience, and your unwavering support. To my stepdaughter, Talia, and my son, Lucas, thank you for your sunshine and for reminding me every day that, whilst mothering is the hardest work, it is also the greatest privilege.

INTRODUCTION ‘All Is Me’: Matrifocality and Mothering in the Anglophone Caribbean

In April 2022, I travelled back to Carriacou to introduce my then 96-year-old maternal grandmother, Mrs Linda David, to my six-month-old son, Lucas, and to bury his umbilical cord. Because of Covid and cancelled travel plans, it had been nearly four years since I last saw her. When I left her last, she was still able to walk to the beach next to her house and would potter daily in her flower garden. The Grandma I meet in April 2022 needs assistance to get from her bedroom to the porch and rarely travels much further than that. She has aged, and I did not think she ever would. Her hearing is beginning to fail, and her short-term memory is not as strong as it was. But Grandma’s eyes are still bright and full of life. Her laugh is loud, her voice commanding, and her long-term memory is as strong as ever. As she takes Lucas in, she remarks how much he reminds her of her second son as a baby. She tells us, ‘Bernard was the same. Not big, just round’. She thinks my son has the distinctive mouth of her youngest sister, who passed away many years ago. She enjoys watching Lucas and seeing traces of herself, her children, and her siblings in him.

Since I have known Grandma, she has lived in this house, and in many ways, her house feels like the centre of Carriacou to me. The house, like the island, can get too hot, so unless we are cooking or sleeping, we typically spend most of our time on the porch. The porch wraps around the front of the house, enjoying the best of the sea breeze, and it is where Grandma has always hosted her guests. There is a particular day during this visit when the porch is more alive than usual. My mum, Juliette, is halfway through a six-month stay, looking after Grandma and overseeing the final building work on her own house. My twin brother, James, is part way through a two-week holiday. Two of my six maternal uncles (Uncle Bernie and Uncle Harley), now living in Carriacou, have stopped by for a visit. My cousin, Lewis, is honeymooning with his wife, Rebecca, and their seven-month-old son, Theo. And then there is us: Leighan – the only daughter of Grandma’s only daughter – my partner Lovell, and our little Lucas. The porch hums, it vibrates with sounds of big laughter, engrossing conversations, and baby babbles.

Grandma is happy but quiet. She is trying to make sense of all the conversations, to choose one to contribute to, but it is hard for her to keep up. I notice. I catch her eye. We exchange one of our looks, a look imbued with mischief. She smiles and says,

‘So many people on this porch. And all is me!’

All is me. All of us, her. Four generations of a family sitting together with Grandma at the centre.

All is me. She could not have said it better. All. I think about this assertion often in the days after. All is me. A simple truth that positions Linda David, in her role as mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, at the centre of our family and at the centre of our world. In typical Grandma fashion, she finds a perfectly succinct way to articulate a very important truth: that whole worlds are built with a matrifocal core.

Andrea O’Reilly defines matrifocality as ‘mother focused’ and ‘characteristic of a cultural cosmology that radically differs from the exaltation of the nuclear family as the most central building block of a society’.¹ A matrifocal family, for instance, is structured around the mother–child relationship, and this becomes the central building block for the wider society. O’Reilly also suggests that ‘[cultures] that allow for matrifocality tend to be much more communal in nature’.² Matrifocality differs from ‘matriarchy’ in that a family is not matrifocal simply because the father is absent, nor is there a replacement of patriarchal values with a maternal equivalent. Rather, in the simplest terms, matrifocality means that there is an emphasis on the mother–child dynamic within families, and fathers can be and are present within matrifocal families. By centring family and community structures around mother-figures and mother–child dynamics, matrifocality gives us space to think through the normative categories that determine nuclear reproduction, allows us to imagine non-hegemonic worlds, and provides the opportunity to interrogate the many forms of mothering that render these worlds alive. In my own family, Grandma was married for over fifty years before being widowed, and there are many ways in which patriarchal ideologies continue to inform the dynamics of the family. At first glance, one might suppose it a traditionally nuclear family, but Grandma’s declaration – all is me – offers a challenge to any such assumption. What does matrifocality teach us about family structures in the Caribbean? How does it broaden our understanding of the region more generally? And what happens when we start with a mother or grandmother’s centrality, and build our understanding of the world from this vantage point?

The anthropological study of and attitudes towards matrifocality, both in the Caribbean and globally, have evolved over time. More recent research into matrifocality has encouraged an appreciation of matrifocality as a unique element of particular societies, an organisational tool that supports forms of connections and kinship that exist outside of Western hegemony, and it supports the understanding that women are culturally central in societies wherein matrifocal families are prevalent. Though there has been continuing research on Caribbean matrifocality within the social sciences since the 1920s, there has yet to be a book-length study on literary representations of Caribbean matrifocality as it exists within both families and communities. Fictive engagements with matrifocality have the potential to extend the conversation in productive and imaginative ways; to take a phrase as simple as all is me and speculatively build entire families, communities, and worlds around it.

This book focuses on representations of mothering and matrifocality in twenty-first century-Anglophone Caribbean fiction. This book has two aims. First, it extends the study of matrifocality by focusing on contemporary literary articulations of the phenomenon that represent matrifocality as an opportunity for non-hegemonic world re/building. Through an exploration of the possibilities and limitations of matrifocality as an organisational tool for Caribbean families and communities, this study seeks to shift the centre of thought regarding the study of the family by highlighting and troubling existing assumptions about representations of the non-nuclear family. Secondly, this book seeks to complicate the figure of the Caribbean mother. The mother-figure often appears in Anglophone Caribbean fiction as a nurturing, strong, selfless, and independent archetype, and as the figure against whom the protagonist develops. The texts I explore portray a spectrum of mother-figures that disrupt these restrictive stereotypes, whilst also offering representations of matrifocal families and/or communities. By framing my analysis of these texts through an interrogation of matrifocality and the portrayal of acts of mothering, and by considering the way that the mother-figure functions within wider familial or community dynamics, there is an opportunity for an intervention that troubles some of the reductive representations of womanhood in the Caribbean. Simultaneously, it is important to note that matrifocality itself, as an alternative to the nuclear family, has several limitations. Thus, whilst thinking with matrifocality allows us to de-prioritise the nuclear family and call into question the ways that it has been accepted as a universal norm, matrifocality is not necessarily the only or best alternative. Therefore, whilst I position matrifocality as an opportunity to challenge both the pervading stereotypes of Caribbean motherhood and the Eurocentric patriarchal norms associated with family and community structures in the Caribbean, I also acknowledge its limitations as a method of non- hegemonic world making.

In the remainder of my introduction, I further explore the concept of matrifocality by tracing the evolution of thought regarding the family structure. I then turn my attention to existing literary analysis of the representation of families within Caribbean literature. Although twentieth-century writers have often imagined matrifocality in their work, most existing criticism about family dynamics has focused on the mother–daughter relationship rather than the wider implications of the non-nuclear family structure. I highlight some of the current scholarship on representations of Caribbean families before offering a breakdown of the book’s intended goals and structure.