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2. A Woman With Kaleidoscope Eyes: Erna Brodber’s Use of the ‘Kumblatic’

Bildungsroman in Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home

In 1968, the year of release for Memories of Underdevelopment, student protest

movements in cities such as Paris looked to Cuba as one of the touchstones for the

possibilities of transforming the socio-political status quo. The Caribbean island just

south of Cuba, Jamaica, which became a British federation in 1958 and gained

independence in 1962, also saw activist leaders such as Walter Rodney espouse a

revolutionary rhetoric grounded in pan-African Marxism. Even though Prime Minister

H. L. Shearer (1967-72) kept Cuban advisors out of Jamaica, Rodney and other radical

intellectuals visited Cuba in the late 1960s for guidance on how a similar revolution

might take place in Jamaica. i Under Michael Manley (1972-80), Jamaica shifted to the

left with the democratic-socialist People’s National Party (PNP). Akin to Cuba, there

was a mass exodus of the bourgeoisie. Among the middle-class artist-intellectuals who

stayed was sociologist, psychologist, professor, activist and literary author Erna Brodber.

In Reading Erna Brodber: Uniting the Black Diaspora through Folk Culture and

Religion, June E. Roberts notes that by 1968 the Mona campus of the University of the

West Indies had become a “hotbed of radical intellectual foment,” including the Black

Power movement, black nationalism, African-American neo-Garveyism, Rastafarianism,

afrocentric neo-Marxism and the New World Group (15). Brodber had taken all of her

degrees at UWI Mona and was a lecturer there in 1968. As Roberts explains, “such was

the crucible of radical politics and state repression that framed the perceptions of the

Mona campus almost a decade after the Cuban revolution, the failed Bay of Pigs

invasion, and the Cuban missile crisis,” a milieu that informed Brodber’s critical
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perspective and “burgeoning folk aesthetic” (15-16). Brodber’s move towards folk

communalism found an alliance with many of the student protests, which interrogated

European colonialism and its aftermath. At the Creative Arts Center at the Mona campus

of the University of the West Indies, for instance, students occupied the building in 1968

to protest the lack of folk or ‘indigenous’ art on display, even though a majority of the

extant Jamaica population is of African origin. ii As Roberts explains, “this emerging

indigenous afrocentrism, rooted in folk values, declared cultural war on reactionary

expressions of hegemony endorsed by the cultural apparatus of eurocentrism, whose

influence still haunted Caribbean politics and public life” (17).

Confronting the colonial ghosts in early post-independence Jamaica, Brodber’s

first novel Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980) narrates the childhood, sexual

awakening, education, mental breakdown and healing of its female “khaki” (i.e. light-

skinned Afro-Jamaican) protagonist, Nellie Richmond. Several critics read the

form/content relation of the novel’s fragmentary, polyphonic and non-chronological

version of the Bildungsroman as a mimesis of Nellie’s breakdown and subsequent

healing through a wholeness derived from reintegration with her ancestors and

community. iii Evelyn O’Callaghan’s “Interior Schisms Dramatised” observes that Nellie

“suffers a physical and mental breakdown, a fragmentation of self out of which she is

beginning to emerge whole as the novel ends” (89). In Ten is the Age of Darkness: The

Black Bildungsroman, Geta LeSeur connects this arc to narrative form, with the first

three of the four main sections of the novel “indicating the steps necessary to become

whole” (186). Joyce Johnson’s “Fiction and the Interpretation of History” also tends to

read the novel’s fragmentary polyphony as a process of psychological dissociation where

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the healing process moves towards reintegration and coherence. Hence, Johnson resolves

the four main sections of Brodber’s novel to a modified linear pattern of psychological

development within its non-linear form of the Bildungsroman. iv In “English is a Foreign

Anguish,” Gay Wilentz remarks that “Nellie’s movement towards psychic wholeness is

also one towards a less disruptive, more holistic languageat once Carib-centric and

feminist” (272). Critics such as these recognize the novel’s polyvocal and fragmented

plot and form but strain to resolve them to the standard developmental arc of a

Bildungsroman, where the protagonist emerges from an inchoate personality to become

an autonomous, coherent individual who begins to take up her or his place in society.

However, the relationship between the novel’s specific version of the

Bildungsroman form and a telos of subjectivity as a unified whole is far from clear. v

Pam Mordecai concedes that “psychic healing does take place in the course of the book”

but posits that it is “misleading to regard the clearer chronology and logic of the latter

part of the book as evidence of the reintegrated persona” (46). Mordecai adds that

Nellie’s healing is less about “discovering logical or chronological relatedness” than

“succumbing to history” (110). Noting that “there are still fragments at the end,”

Mordecai even broaches the topic of coherence as an assumption but then stops short of

following through: “One is tempted to question the idea of a coherent personality,

however defined, but this is not the place” (46). But the question of the idiosyncratic

subject’s coherence is integrally connected to both the Bildungsroman genre and

Brodber’s version of it, though, and warrants more attention: not simply to reiterate

theoretical catechisms about the dispersed subject but to explore Jane and Louisa’s place

within identity discourse.

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Roberts describes the critical consensus on Brodber’s oeuvre: “it is afrocentric,

calls for a reconnection to folk roots and to forms of indigenous rural, particularly spirit,

culture” (xii). I would add that scholarship on Brodber’s fiction tends to place the

fragmentation, division and decentering of subjectivity as a problem that emerges from

histories of colonialism rather than as a condition of subjectivity as such. Roberts, for

instance, reads “the extreme psychosis engendered by colonially split self-alienated

subjectivity that is atavistically passed down to…progeny” in light of Frantz Fanon’s

critiques of “Manichean delirium” and “lactification complex” (102-3). Roberts reads the

historically and culturally determined “structural binarism endemic to colonialism as the

cause of Nellie’s spiritual and affective split,” the “social nexus of her schizophrenia”

(93). Yet Roberts does not fully acknowledge Fanon’s cosmopolitan sense of pan-

African solidarity as a provisional means to “nothing short of the liberation of the man of

color from himself” and into “the universality inherent in the human condition” that

would un-stick racial identity as “sealed in” (Black Skin 8-10). vi Granted, Roberts sets

out a folk community that is both parochial and connected to the pan-African diaspora,

but her argument risks merely reversing the evaluative polarity of the “racist ideological

orientation that devalued everything black” while retaining its Manichean binary through

the encomium of a rural authenticity of indigeneity (Roberts 93). By positing an

idealized folk spirit culture as the telos and jouissance of “Nellie’s journey toward

coherence” and “into wholeness,” Roberts implies this authenticity is an actualization of

inner nature rather than an openness to redefining a core of identity in the Fanonian sense

(125, 136). Thus, along with my reservations about the fetishization of folk culture and
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religion here, I wonder if “wholeness” here is merely the much-critiqued bourgeois

individual reappearing in post-colonial disguise.

A point of navigation between critiques of the Cartesian subject and this notion of

“coherence” might be found in the nexus for various stances on Jane and Louisathe

central symbol of the kumbla. The word kumbla is literally a vine-bearing large hard-

shelled opaque gourd (calabash), or utensils made from it, but functions within the novel

as an enigmatic metaphor for the subject-in-process within a web of connections and

perspectives. Geta LeSeur simply translates the word as “community” (186). Carolyn

Cooper notes that this community is paradoxical since it can “define the locus of

transformation” and “safe passage” but also “symbolizes the seductive power of the

protective devices employed by Nellie and several other women in the novel,” which are

possible forms of entrapment (284-5). In the face of the paradoxical quality of the

kumbla, Roberts posits there are actually two kinds of kumblas: the negative “one leads

to effete destruction,” such as the fetishization of whiteness and bourgeois class

trappings, and “therefore must be destroyed” (112). The positive type, on the other hand,

is a “spirit refuge” that resides in ancestral linkages and the folk community, which

ensure survival (112). In its positive sense, the kumbla “even names the locus of

wholeness and identity in artistic, political, and psychic self-creation when it is released”

(97). Again, I am circumspect about this “wholeness,” though, and Jones’ bifurcation of

the kumbla places the Volk of the African diaspora into an untainted realm that must

perform an impossible extraction from and negation of Euro-American culture.

The question here becomes how to reconcile this sense of wholeness and

enclosure with the ramifications of the kumbla as a complex, mobile, pliable and ever-
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changing weave of familial, ancestral, historical, cultural and geographical connections

where “everybody is related” (Brodber 11). If read in a more expansive sense as

diasporan tapestry as well as local community relations, the multivalent concept of the

kumbla might be said to anticipate Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic, which

Roberts references but seemingly not as a reading of the kumbla, and the two terms make

for a productive theoretical interchange. vii The kumbla is, among other things, a strategy

of sociocultural navigation within the imbalances of power, a sense that comes to the fore

in the novel’s inclusion of folk stories about Anancya trickster character popular in

West African culture (e.g. Ashanti) whose tales were carried by slaves across the various

routes of the middle passage and incorporated into Caribbean folk culture. Anancy often

transforms into a spider-like figure whom Brodber’s novel connects to the kumbla:

“Anancy is a born liar, a spinner of fine white cocoons, a protector of his children. Not to

worry, they’ll survive. Anancy is a maker of finely crafted kumblas” (24).

Part of this spinning involves the protean exchanges of storytelling within the

larger webs of cultural-historical interconnection formed through the rhizomorphic lines

of flight, capture and transmission in the Black Atlantic. Based in Deleuze and Guattari’s

notion of the rhizome, Gilroy describes the Black Atlantic as a “rhizomorphic, fractal

structure of transcultural, international formation” that involves “cultural and political

exchange and transformation” (4, 15). viii Gilroy uses the term to replace “manifestly

inadequate theoretical terms like creolisation and syncretism” to get at “how both

ethnicities and political cultures have been made anew in ways that are significant not

simply for the peoples of the Caribbean but for Europe, for Africa…and of course, for

black America” (15). Contrary to Jones’s reading of Brodber, though, the Black
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Atlantic’s perpetually mobile intermixture and transformation complicates afrocentric

feminism or notions of unified communities that tend to be informed by “the image of an

integral, humanist, and thoroughly Cartesian racial subject” (53). The question is how to

conceptualize the kumbla in a way that reads the fracturing and decentering of the subject

inherent in colonialism as a debilitating amplification of subjectivization as such rather

than as the disturbance of an authentic, self-transparent and homogenous individual.

Here, thinking of the kumbla as a form of regulative framework helps to position

it as opening up to an interconnectivity of timespaces since the Black Atlantic is not

simply a condition of history but a dynamic that continues in the here and now. Rather

than a narrative (albeit rhizomorphic) teleology from local insularity to the global

proscenium of modernity, though, this interconnectivity simultaneously moves outward

globally and inward parochially. Indeed, getting ‘out’ of the kumbla is not into any form

of settled, unified wholeness but rather into an expansion of possibilities from a small and

restrictive weave of social relationships and identities to a larger more expansive dynamic

of a “webbed network” in constant motion that brings together the local and the

globalas well as the past, present and visions of the futureto challenge “neat,

symmetrical units” of culture and history (Gilroy 29). As the Jane and Louisa book

cover notes, the kumbla is both “native to its core” but also “capable of infinite

expansion,” akin to a fractalan irregular or fragmented shape that recursively replicates

at any scale. Based in the rhizome’s constant movement and transformation, a cross-

reading between the kumbla and Gilroy’s paradigm (without simply equating the two)

more accurately describes the novel’s form and, playing on the motif of dance, its sense

of non-linear and fractal movement within memory and history.

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In this relationship I am mapping out between the kumbla and the Black Atlantic,

the Bildungsroman genre is a useful site to think about the phenomenological experience

of memory and history since it goes beyond representing a specific life history to include

a negotiation between the idiosyncratic subject’s development and collective, historical

fields of transformation. The coming-of-age narrative arc of the Bildungsroman is a

paradigmatic regulative framework for developmental narratives of ‘Western’ identity-

formation. The Bildungsroman as a novelistic genre has its roots in late eighteenth/early

nineteenth century conceptions of Bildung (i.e. development, self-cultivation, education,

and enculturation) at both the individual and collective levels that resonated with larger

historiographical and philosophical trends. Hegel’s story of Geist as a World-Subject, for

instance, can be read as a (possibly beginningless and endless) universal quest narrative

and Bildungsroman that emplots a grand narrative of sociocultural maturation which,

common in its literary form, is a retrospective developmental narrative. Robert Pippin

aptly describes Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as the “history of human experience”

and a “collective self-education of the human species about itself” (Pippin 313).

Hegel’s Bildungsroman of the Geist also charts a linear, homologous and

interdependent relationship between individual and collective, world-historical

development. Likewise, in “Autobiography, History and the Novel,” Joyce Walker-

Johnson concludes that Jane and Louisa is “ostensibly the story of a single individual”

but “reflects phases in Jamaica’s social development” to “create a metaphorical

framework for projecting a view of history and society” (58). Roberts also reads Nellie’s

story as both idiosyncratic and allegorical, where Nellie functions as a “prototype” whose

life attains the “status of both political and feminist allegory” (116). ix Allegorical
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interpretations, however, risk making the figural subtext more ‘real’ or ‘true’ than the

literal, aesthetic and formal levels. In the relationship between nation and narration,

another danger of an allegorical reading here is that it can place too much of a burden of

representativeness on a single character and oversimplify the relationship between Nellie

as an idiosyncratic subject and the various forms of collective identity, intermixture,

transformation and cultural exchange within which she is negotiating. Indeed, both

Hegelianism and allegorization risk abstracting particularity in an all-devouring system of

dialectical reconciliation of internal contradictions to a higher unity of self-completion.

Nevertheless, Hegelianism and allegory usefully point to idiosyncratic identity as a

relationship between particularity and general patterns of cultural intelligibility.

Rather than seeking a resolution in an encomium of either difference or

universality, Brodber’s version of the Bildungsroman explores Nellie’s perpetual

negotiation between the particular and the general. By emphasizing abrupt shifts in

perspective, voice and syntax as well as the non-linear relationality of timespaces rather

than their sequentiality, Jane and Louisa’s exploration of logics other than dominance

and negation broaches the question of how a subject whose relationship to the ‘West’ is

asymmetrical constructs a self and a place in the world. x Without simply reinscribing the

dialectical dependency of the dominance/resistance paradigm, the “other logics” in the

metaphor of the kumbla attempt to imagine the relationship between the idiosyncratic

subject and collective history in post-Hegelian terms, where no Absolute or world-

historical Whole exists (either in the past or the future). Brodber reformulates the

Bildungsroman genre in a way that is resonant with the fragmentations and dispersions of

the subject within the theoretical orthodoxies of postmodernism, post-structuralism and

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post-colonialism. xi Beyond merely replicating these absurdly well-entrenched insights

about the fragmented and decentered subject, though, an interpretation Nellie’s Bildung

as ‘kumblatic’ critiques, salvages and reformulates the oft-maligned conceptions of

‘progress’ and ‘development’ for her and for Jamaica in the absence of a linear master

narrative. As becomes apparent in the jigsaw puzzle of the novel, both Nellie’s

subjectivity and her family’s genealogy are always split, relational and mixed—a

condition that reflects the criss-crossings, shadings and cross-fertilizations of colonialism

and slavery that complicate racial-cultural purity or a monolithic Self/Other dialectic of

colony and Metropole. Her family’s two patriarchs epitomize this ineluctably hybrid

state: the “one pale etchings of principle, invisible gifts of daffodils fluttering in the

breeze, Hamletian castles and wafers disintegrating on your tongue; the other black with

anger” (30). Nellie even critiques the putative ‘purity’ that hyphens of identity

retrospectively posit as having ‘always-already’ existed before racial mixture.

As I discussed in the previous chapter, Sergio in Memories negotiates his

bourgeois-artist-intellectual-playboy identity through an immanent critique born of

deeply conflicted ambivalence amidst the overlap of regulative frameworks inherent in

the Cuban Revolution. Nellie’s kumbla in Jane and Louisa exists as her own “locus

where the contradictions implicit in moments of historical transformation are permitted

free expression” in the shift from colonialism to postcolonialism, a dynamic of

immanently critical self-spectatorship that her coming-to-terms with sexuality,

community, race and nation amplifies (Williams 120). xii Instead of emphasizing

psychological integration and wholeness within a linear/cyclical tension, the novel

foregrounds both the self-regulation and dispersal of Nellie’s identity across a range of
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cultural-historical scales for regulative frameworks where no “true” or “whole” self (or

collective) is possible, though Nellie nevertheless remains as an idiosyncratic locus of

navigation within narrative webs. In its non-linear and polyvocal exploration of Nellie’s

life history, Brodber’s Bildungsroman thus critically reworks the category of ‘progress’

by resituating it within constantly-changing networks of increased connectivity and

juxtaposition rather than within a monolithic trunk-and-branches model of racial

‘evolution’ and global, colonial power relations. xiii Emerging through immanently

critical self-spectatorship, ‘progress’ involves both movement outward to the globe and

inward to local community, family history, and the idiosyncratic memory and perspective

of personal life history.

I. The Kumbla: Sexuality and Self-Spectatorship

Jane and Louisa’s central paradigm for Nellie’s individual self-narrative within a social

history and network of relations, the kumbla, may at first appear to be a hermetically-

sealed enclosure that is both protective and restrictive. However, it is never a unity but a

near-invincible and expansive nexus that operates via protean transmogrifications:

A kumbla is like a beach ball. It bounces with the sea but never goes
down. It is indomitable. [...] But the kumbla is not just a beach ball. The
kumbla is an egg shell, not a chicken’s egg or a bird’s egg shell. It is the
egg of the August worm. It does not crack if it is hit. It is pliable as sail
cloth. Your kumbla will not open unless you rip its seams open. It is a
round seamless calabash that protects you without caring. Your kumbla is
a parachute. You, only you, pull the cord to rip its seams. From the
inside. For you. Your kumbla is a helicopter, a transparent umbrella, a
glassy marble, a comic strip space ship. (Brodber 123)

Never settling into an ontology, the kumbla functions as a protean metaphor for

the resilient and malleable connections between space and psychology that

operate at both the local and global level. Providing shape and form to the
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idiosyncratic subject’s regulative framework, the kumbla operates within the

larger flows, drifts, waves and tides of power and immanent force relations

without being fully submerged in them or positing an autonomous individual’s

chimerical freedom outside of them through a direct opposition to top-down

oppression. “The sea never covers” the kumbla, which “never stoops to fight. It

takes no orders from the sea but neither does it seek to limit it” (123).

Granted, the narration does talk about getting “out” of the kumbla. Rather than

the singular destruction and abandonment of a bounded container, though, this “out” is

the idiosyncratic subject’s spectatorial perspective, whose propulsive force generates a

perpetual opening up through the kumbla’s capability of “infinite expansion.” Rather

than remaining parochial or chained to social fields, the kumbla is a “pliable” and

continuous self-overcoming that forges connections to various cultural traditions and

regulative frameworks through movement in the sea along roots/routes: “Unlike the buoy,

it is not tethered” (123). Tellingly, the rapid metaphoric collage here brings together the

indigenous image of the calabash to various ‘Western’ technologies of transportation,

both real and imaginary (parachute, helicopter, comic strip space ship). The kumbla

therefore mediates the interweaving of internal psychological space (psyche) and the

social world (socius) in a way that brings together local environments and their

inextricable relationship to the global social imaginary and histories of cultural migration.

The kumbla also brings together biological objects such as eggs with plastic, human-

made ones (beach ball, umbrella), and the expansive SF realm of imaginary travel (comic

strip space ship). As a locus of paradoxes and navigation, Nellie’s kumbla is a site for the

expansive dilation of her critical self-spectatorshipa constellation of overlapping

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regulative frameworks that establishes positions for historical spectatorship and self-

understanding, such as around her attitudes towards and experiences of sexuality.

To begin with, the kumbla runs the risk of remaining too insular and

myopic if it only turns inward rather than forging and understanding larger

connections. As Nellie comments, “the trouble with the kumbla is the getting out

of the kumbla. It is a protective device. If you dwell too long in it, it makes you

delicate. . . .Vision extra-sensitive to the sun and blurred without spectacles”

(130). Wilson Harris notes that the “ambiguity of the ‘kumbla’ is its protective

armour that impoverishes vision” (Harris 88). He comments “how difficult it is to

dislodge boundaries except by a deepening of the intuitive imagination, of inner

space, by which to contemplate a psychical recovery from blindness” (88). While

in the kumbla, the maturing person “can see both in and out” of the “comic strip

space ship” yet “the light of perception becomes unnatural” (Brodber 123; Harris

88). The question here is if a ‘natural’ perception of the light and of oneself is

ever possible since the kumbla illustrates that psyche and socius are inseparable.

Indeed, as a regulative framework for the spectator of/in history, the kumbla

ineluctably filters self-spectatorship and the spectatorship of history but also forms the

conditions of possibility for the idiosyncratic subject to exist at all. Assumptions about a

‘true’ self trapped inside and behind the façades and interpellations of the kumbla risk

positing an autonomous and bounded individual who would be ‘whole’ and ‘authentic’ if

not for the kumbla producing fragmentation through colonial and bourgeois paradigms.

Evelyn O’Callaghan describes the kumbla as “a kind of protective enclosure, calabash or

cocoon, made up of layers of assumed roles and evasions, behind which the fragile self
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hides its vulnerability” (107). “Eventually,” notes O’Callaghan, “the self must emerge

into the threatening world or risk psychic fragmentation” (107). O’Callaghan seems to

place the psychic fragmentations of colonialism into opposition with a “quest for

identity” by a self-transparent bourgeois individual without any consideration of

fragmentation and decentering as the general conditions of subjectivity as such (104).

She reads the “mad” woman as “metaphor for the damaged West Indian psyche” during

the post-Emancipation period and speaks of a dangerous “lack of ontological security” in

the Caribbean as the source of madness (104). However, O’Callaghan’s investigation

elicits questions about what generates both the coherence and fragmentation of the

subject in the first place: is it still possible to use the language of a unified, “true,” or

ontological ‘self’ behind evasions and distortions, and if so, what does this entail?

Before the “withdrawal into fragmentation is irreversible,” the cure for

O’Callaghan lies in a “type of wholeness” within a “reconstruction of self” and a “secure

self-image in a given society” (105). O’Callaghan finds the source of madness in the

“outward directedness” of the “continuing regard for foreign culture” and the “reality” in

the metropolis of “imported models/ideals” (104). In light of the Black Atlantic, though,

is it still tenable to posit an authentic and bounded nativist culture, or is the discourse of

‘authenticity’ a reductive fetishization of being ‘true’ to one’s difference and

particularity: a reinscription of identarian logic? xiv Critics such as Johnson and

O’Callaghan recognize a relationship between the novel’s fragmentary aesthetic and

Nellie but seek a resolution for that fragmentation in unity and coherence.

Elina Valovirta adumbrates another set of assumptions. In “Into and Out of the

Kumbla: Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home,” Valovirta reads the
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process of identity building as “ongoing” and the novel as “far from a classic Western

Bildungsroman,” i.e. a fragmented and non-linear mixture of styles, narrative methods

and genres with a female Caribbean as the protagonist (333). She argues that the novel

shows the “Western literary tradition can be a kumbla which restricts,” a regulative

framework, but its critique is not an insular “turning to one’s own traditions only and

trying in that way to break the great narratives” but a “mixture of different styles,

narrative methods and genres” (333). Here Valovirta’s logic dictates, but her argument

elides, that Jane and Louisa is part of a long tradition of “classic” authors in the Western

literary tradition who revel in fragmentation, polyphony and genre play, such as Sterne,

Joyce, Woolf, Mann, Nabokov, Burroughs, Pynchon, Morrison and Rushdie.

Nevertheless, Valovirta usefully connects the formal construction of Jane and Louisa’s

text to the hybridity of Nellie, whose “psychic healing only begins after she has

recognized her diverse origins,” and positions Brodber’s novel as an immanent critique of

the larger regulative framework of the Western literary tradition’s restrictions that tries to

avoid a direct opposition that would reinscribe hierarchical binaries (333). Indeed,

Valovirta’s comments on the kumbla of the novel itself, which “prevents the reader from

taking the novel as something ‘whole’ or ‘complete,’” might be said of Nellie’s gradual

recovery from madness (333-4). Nellie’s healing does not establish “ontological

security,” as O’Callaghan posits, but rather interconnectivity to both her own life and the

larger relational webs of family, culture and history where no complete whole is possible

(O’Callaghan 104). However, Valovirta’s final urging that scholars avoid “creating new

kumblas” mismatches with my sense of kumblas as contingent and revisable regulative

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frameworks that give shape, form and cultural intelligibility to idiosyncratic subjects but

also involve the very “acts of negotiating and questioning” that she lauds (334).

Within Brodber’s ‘kumblatic’ Bildungsroman, Nellie does not move

towards wholeness or completeness but nevertheless exists as a locus of

negotiation within a protean self-narrative architecture that draws multiple threads

across points in space-time and memory to form a non-linear textual weaving in

constant motion and transformation. Nellie jumps around not only between times

in her life—the precocious Nellie skips between childhood time-spaces when she

is, for example, six, eight, eleven and sixteen—but also within voices and images

that emerge before Nellie’s birth. Often, the text presents these moments as if in

the first person timespace of ‘here and now’: “Today is a special day. My father

is very pleased with me. I am six and little for my age yet inspector says I should

be skipped to middle division, to a class of children at least five years older than

I”; “I am Nellie and I am eight”; “I’m hardly eleven”; and “But I am sixteen”

(Brodber 35, 86, 23, 16). These chronological ages do not appear in

chronological order in the text yet, appropriate to the Bildungsroman, often

position the “time perspective” of her ‘I’ in the middle of things.

As a regulative framework that shapes and informs subject-formation, Nellie’s

kumbla is a locus of contradictions that involves various familial and social pressures that

inform her place within normative patterns of identity. For instance, her mother and her

paternal Aunt Becca, who functions as another major caretaker in Nellie’s life, exert a

particularly strong influence over the development of Nellie’s gender and sexuality.

When she is “hardly eleven,” Nellie learns to feel guilt, shame and uncleanness around
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mature sexuality or “it,” where “to touch is to contaminate” (21, 23). Nellie listens to her

mother about forthcoming menstrual cycles and burgeoning sexuality: “You are eleven

now and something strange will happen to you” and “when it does, make sure to tell your

aunt” (23). Becca thus becomes the touchstone and framework for sexuality, and Nellie’s

word-play around “period” performs an ironic distance from the intricate link between

language and the body: “Period. End of sentence. I presume I am dismissed” (23).

Resonating with the vignette’s opening question, “How did it begin?,” the word “period”

connects language and menstruation with Nellie’s experience of beginnings and endings

in the stages of personal maturation (21, 23). “It” generates a public “message” that

“reverberated loud and very clear” and informs Nellie’s self-spectatorship, namely “That

is you. That’s what ‘it’ makes you” (120).

Amplifying the divide between her public and private spheres through an un-

homing where she becomes “strange and everybody knew it,” Nellie’s first period also

marks a moment where, for her, the security of her childhood kumbla is threatened by

something foreign, strange and dangerous: “An egg hole a rat make, oozing slimy yellow

around your nest. Building a strange raw-smelling barrier around your private world”

(119, 23). The social pressure that Becca puts on Nellie is an attempt to protect her from

negative social influences and teen pregnancy, though Nellie pushes against these

limitations. When Nellie is sixteen in Jamaica, she asks Becca for permission to go on a

date with Baba Ruddock, “the most popular boy at school,” to see the movie Jack the

Ripper, the 1959 film by Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman (16). In between Nellie’s

pleas, there is simply the word “Silence” twice to denote Becca’s silence, such as:

-You know the film that is showing at the Globe-

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Silence

As part of the propulsive outward force from within her kumbla, Nellie makes her case to

push for more independence and freedom: “But I am sixteen, a prefect at school and a

patrol lead. You let me go to evensong and speech festival by myself at night. I don’t

understand” (16). As the Law, Becca, in return, makes her ‘case’: “It is my

responsibility and girls so hard to grow up” [sic] (16).

Each of their silent moments embodies a mirrored form of exchange that reflects

the two as they attempt to come to an agreement (16). While normally in Jane and

Louisa exchanges of dialogue are marked out by hyphens and no spaces between lines,

Nellie uses a space here to perform and paradoxically give voice to her own silent assent:

-You have to admit I’ve been patient. Three years now and you’ve used
every trick in the book. Look at you now. Eating grass with the moon
about to mount the earth. You are purposely hanging back. What’s with
you. Hurry up.—You’ll miss the moment.

-You can’t help it. OK. I know. I’ve been pressing you too hard. I’ll
wait. It’s going to be all right. You’ll see. (18)

Even though Becca wants to help Nellie move towards independence, she recognizes the

constraints she had been placing upon her in her previous three years of high school as

her caretaker. Indeed, this idea of “pressing” embodies the paradoxical quality of the

kumbla—both restrictive and liberatory, both “pit” and “shelter”—since ‘pressure’ and

constraints give the subject shape and form (Brodber 13). Without this sociocultural

pressure with regulative frameworks, there would be no subject, only a completely

amorphous dispersion of language, sensation, image and identity.

In the shift between self-spectatorship and critical self-spectatorship, Nellie’s

kumbla is a locus of contradictions and pressures where her negotiation between

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idiosyncratic and collective identity plays out. In the next text fragment, seemingly a

continuation of this same conversation, Nellie asks Becca for guidance in how to exist

authentically as a Jamaica woman “when you live on a compound with eight hundred

men and women” and “they press you, Auntie,” foregrounding how others in the

regulative framework exert social pressure and try “to spoil your life” (18). “What can

you do?,” Nellie wonders aloud (18). Becca assures Nellie “You are safe. Don’t worry,”

but as Nellie remarks later in the conversation, “You must be right Aunt Becca. You

have to be so careful of those people,” she assents to a self-spectatorship mediated

through Becca’s bourgeois attitudes towards the common folk of the lower classes (18,

my emphasis). But in her narration of these episodes retrospectively, Nellie performs a

retrospective, ironic recoding of this rhetoric of authenticity. Repetition of the phrase “I

came home” performs a critical self-spectatorship within her negotiation between

idiosyncratic and collective identity. “I came home” is not to the safe and familiar but

describes her defamiliarizing un-homing that emerges as “coming home” expands

geographically from coming home from school, to returning to her rural village from

school in Kingston, to returning to Jamaica from university studies in the United States.

Neither rejected nor embraced, “home” is precisely what is open to critical dissection.

Nellie’s recounting of her graduate education in Philadelphia amplifies and

foregrounds this dynamic of critical self-spectatorship and the fragmentations of her

subjectivity. As an adult, her kumbla remains a locus of contradictions for an identity

play around sexuality. For instance, she self-consciously stages the scene of her first

sexual experience with “that bow-legged man” as a theatrical “play” of identity, telling

readers and an unnamed interlocutor to “Watch the scene” (27). Philadelphia is a radical
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shift from her regulative frameworks in Jamaica, and “she is excited” that her kumbla has

expanded to find a freedom in personal “isolation” and in being cast as “foreign” (27).

“Here,” she explains, “is a chance to experience what everybody else has experienced, a

foreign country where everybody else has studied; a foreign land” (27). Nellie moves

between the pronouns “she” and “I” to place herself as the lead actor in scenes where she

shifts between embodied experience and being a ghostly spectator or ‘monitor’ outside

her own body: “She is walking home from classes, free at last, through the streets with a

mop in her hand. No need to disguise it, no need to wrap it up. I am in a foreign

country” (27). This pronoun-shifting allows her to be a spectator to multiple facets of

herself in this new environment and imaginatively watch herself from both her own

experiential vantage point and that of American citizens who might observe her.

Nellie’s kumbla transforms and opens up in the shift between Jamaica and the

United States, producing a critical self-spectatorship where Nellie finds an odd sort of

freedom within a role, the lonely “foreign student,” that seems to her to be highly scripted

within a particular mise-en-scène: the setting of the “dingy, dirty flat,” figure behavior

and props. “It is the liberty of foreign students to be strange so walk through the streets

with a mop,” she quips (27). Nellie revels in her identity within Philadelphia, finding a

kind of flexibility inside the seemingly rigid regulative frameworks thatas the pronoun

shift impliesappear to be both internally and externally generated, written by herself

through available cultural scripts and commodities within this new country:

The script was writing itself. Sweater blouse, jeans, cigarette puffing, part
of the props even a quarrel with the land-lady. Just right. Foreign
students who wear sweater blouses and jeans, smoke and quarrel with their
land-ladies and who live in dingy flats are permitted to be lonely. (27)
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Thus, while the “script” seems restricting, her inhabitation of ‘otherness’ counterpoints

the sexual prudishness of her Jamaican kumbla that arose from her family’s attitudes: a

permission here in being “lonely” that opens a space where she can allow herself to feel

sexual desire because “foreign students…welcome male company” (28).

Appearing in the “Tail of the Snail in the Kumbla” section, “foreign” also invokes

Nellie’s simultaneous anxiety about the invading presence of male sexuality into the

protective ‘weave’ of her kumbla and the force of desire uncorseted in this new regulative

framework that overtakes, disrupts and troubles her previously ingrained boundaries and

limitations to expand the dimensions of her kumbla. When the scene shifts to an account

of her first sexual experience, something new or “foreign to her,” the text transforms into

the language and form of a play-script as a way of framing the experience as both general

and particular. “Enter the male. No need to be discriminating,” she explains, “all the

play calls for is a male” (28). While Nellie simply calls him “He” and herself “She,” his

“bow legs” set out a particular and concrete characteristic. Her place in the setting, too,

is oddly positioned as both general and specific, flipping through various possibilities:

“She, leaning, puffing on a column in the library or sitting under a tree or in any other

such place” (28).

The use of “He” and “She” implies Nellie’s critical self-spectatorship on certain

stereotypes of male and female behavior according to transindividual cultural scripts or

romantic masterplots for norms of behavior that include infidelity:

He: Everyone says you’ve changed but I’d know you anywhere.
She: Really (eyes falsely bright).
He: How about a movie?
She: Tonight if you want.
He: Not tonight. My girl you know … have to take my girl friend out.
She (thinks): Loyal to his girl! Even better.
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Shifting back to prose, Nellie adds the pronoun “you” into the mix as she describes her

first sexual experience, which begins in a “dark movie house and his hands going where

nobody else’s have been” and ends with her performing fellatio back in her room:

“Popped it out of its roots, stripped off its clothes and jammed my teeth into it sucking.

The first root of cane you’ve ever popped out. It feels good but it doesn’t taste good.

Premature but this is your effort so you eat it like it is sweet” (28). Rather than the more

conventional positions of the reader or an interlocutor, the second person address to

herself in this passage connotes a dissociative self-spectatorship as well as a critical

distance from the events and the underlying cultural narrative: “You ought to have torn

up the script and backed out” (28). In splitting from and turning towards herself with

critical distance in this form of self-talk, she recognizes in hindsight that she should have

“kicked this man out of your room” but fell into the logic of commodity and exchange:

“he paid the taximan what you knew must have been his week’s food, so you let him

touch you” (28). Nellie both desires and resists the normative social identity of

womanhood here: “You want to be a woman; now you have a man, you’ll be like

everybody else. You’re normal now!” (29). Resonant with Nellie’s later desire to

“Vomit up a scream” in the wake of Robin’s death, she tells herself, “Vomit and bear it.

Wearing my label called woman. Upon my lapel called normal” (19; 29). Her internal

resistance and submission to the bow-legged man’s desire through the lens of her own

prudishness negotiates a relationship to normative gendered identity.

Indeed, while Nellie has found flexibility in her identity and critical self-distance

in the shift between regulative frameworks across countries, Nellie’s Jamaican-informed

kumbla still informs her self-understanding and self-spectatorship in both productive and
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debilitating ways. In her student residence in the United States, the kumbla has expanded

drastically but seems to provide an ensconcement that is both beneficial and anxiously

constraining: a “piece of nylon fog suffocatingly dry settling over the housing scheme”

(27). Likewise, during her first sexual encounter, Nellie is far away from home yet

imaginatively watches herself through outside spectatorial perspectives that include her

mother and the controlling affect of shame: “Shame. You feel shame and you see your

mother’s face and hear her scream” (28). Describing the cultural regulation of gender

roles of “woman” and “normal” in her kumbla as an “ice cage,” Nellie asks her unnamed

male interlocutor to “dig” (i.e. understand, appreciate and perhaps a metaphor for

psychological ‘unearthing’) that her kumbla has begun to alienate her from her own body:

“help … please for under this nylon shroud, dry ice works my body to a bloodless

incision and my bounty into tasteless flesh” (29). Her body is the site for articulation and

disarticulation of the relationship between the microcosmic and macrocosmic, and a

culture of shame, particularly around sexuality, has rendered Nellie numb to her own

feelings. Akin Nellie’s mother, Becca and Alice signify the pressure of shame involved

in a community’s regulative framework: “Aunt Becca is a lady who feels shame. Plenty

of shame. But mostly from her family. Aunt Alice shames her” (92). In classic

Bildungsroman fashion, Nellie’s coming-of-age is a broadening her perspective, a critical

dilation that the novel explores through the trope of the kaleidoscope, which performs a

critical dissection that interrogates the “bloodless incision” of shame and isolation.

II. Kaleidoscopic Transfigurations: Robin, Baba, Alice and Demos

Connecting the kaleidoscope, spying glass and kumbla, Roberts points out that the spying

glass in Jane and Louisa is a likely allusion to Zora Neale Hurtson: “Brodber’s
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intertextual appropriation of Hurston’s famous Boasian metaphor for anthropological

work creates kaleidoscopic uniquely beautiful representations that provide infinite

permutations of new perspectives. These form the kumbla of psycho-cultural memory

for Nellie” (Roberts 98). While Roberts posits the anthropological metaphor for Nellie’s

psych-cultural memory, she nevertheless finds value in the ironic appropriation since the

“scientific disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, or psychology” are the problem,

even though Boas’ methodological goal was a deep understanding of cultural context

(111). Roberts’ solution is Nellie’s “resurrection” in terms of a “folk regentrification”

that begins with “Nellie avoiding distancing techniques” and returning “to the state of

enclosure, security, and peace of her early childhood” (111). I agree with Roberts that

Nellie must interrogate her own spectatorial position as an ‘I’ within scientific disciplines

and discover new perspectives but not to foreclose considerations of social sciences,

class, race and gender in favor of the “prelapsarian Eden” that makes way for a

“grounded identity” and a “secure place” in the “folk community” (110).

I would argue, instead, that the kaleidoscope, spying glass and kumbla form a

network of metaphors that explores how Nellie, much like Sergio, comes to terms with a

‘people’ not as a fixed or essential aggregate but rather a protean overlap of idiosyncratic

subjects and collective identities. Nellie’s ‘people’ includes dead ancestors and ‘race’ in

all its historical meanings. Once again, Nellie’s kumbla is a locus of contradictions

within a constellation of regulative frameworks, and the kaleidoscope and spying glass

function as two modes of immanent critique through critical self-spectatorship. Instead

of finding a “prelapsarian Eden,” an innocent and undisturbed unity and “shelter of the

folk community,” Nellie both experiences herself within her ‘people’ through larger
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cultural narratives-in-process and holds the lenses of family, romantic relationships,

communities, gender, race, nation and history up for inspection (Roberts 110).

In relation to Nellie’s kumbla, the kaleidoscope and spying glass are literally

different but figuratively blend together. Connoting a productive interchange amongst

Nellie’s various cultural-historical perspectives, including her child-like ones, the spying

glass slides between being a child’s toy kaleidoscope and the standard sense of a spying

glass as a telescope. In regard to the latter, Nellie says “Look in that spying glass as you

used to as a child. You see red, you see green, you see purple flowers. Shake it and you

get hibiscus, shake it again and you get roses. People say it is the crystals that form

flowers” (34). The spying glass also transforms into a metaphor linked to its standard

literal meaning: “Now the spying glass is a totally different affair” (131). In its

appearance as a telescope, key here is its relationship to the kumbla’s outward and inward

mediation of vision: the telescope is a marker of both time and perspective. “Now” is a

marker of time, “nearly a quarter of a century in my kumbla,” which might mean Nellie is

either twenty-five or that the moment is twenty-five years since sexual maturation (131).

Along with marking time, “Now” contrasts the spying glass with her characterization of

the kumbla on the previous page and connotes Nellie’s sense of willful critical self-

spectatorship and distance (131). “If you dwell too long in it” without critical distance,

Nellie explains, the kumbla makes “vision extra-sensitive to the sun and blurred without

spectacles” (130). Juxtaposed to this fuzzy myopia is the increased visual acuity of the

spying glass, which “magnifies like a pair of two-way bifocal spectacles,” as well as an

emotional sharpness: “You see and feel everything twice as acutely” (131). In the critical

dissection of her kumbla, Nellie thus adjusts her eye, ear, and heart to finer and finer
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subtleties, and the spying glass is “two-way” because it sharpens both perspective and

how one is seen, and emotionally sensed, by others: “You are seen and are felt twice as

acutely” (131). The “two-way” function of the telescope as a mediator of critical dilation

implies movement toward both microscopic and macroscopic psychologies.

Nellie’s ambivalent spectatorship of and participation in her ‘people’ emerges in

contrast and comparison to Euro-American versions of collective identities but not as an

in toto negation of them in favor of a ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ alternative. In the negotiation

between Nellie’s idiosyncratic subjectivity and various collectivities, the ambiguity of the

kumbla’s self-spectatorship—the feedback loop of observer and observed filtered through

various media technologies and the metaphors they generate—serves well to establish a

link between Nellie’s sexual initiation and her two major romantic relationships, Cock

Robin and Baba, who provide two paths for critical negotiations with her ‘people’ and

Caribbean’s putative ‘underdevelopment.’ Robin and Baba establish two narrative arcs

of aspiration, fragmentation and resurrection in relation to how a ‘people’ is understood

and what its social ‘progress’ might entail. Aunt Alice Whiting provides a third choice.

As Nellie describes with ambivalent praise, Robin is a left wing politically-

oriented community activist who “gives half of his salary to his people” and “talks in an

unknown tongue” with “words like ‘underdevelopment’, ‘Marx’, [and] ‘cultural

pluralism’” (Brodber 46). As Roberts points out, Robin is likely a fictionalized version

of Walter Rodney or, at the very least, embodies pan-African neo-Marxism in its

relationship to the Revolution in Cuba and the Black Power movement in the United

States. Robin is an up-and-coming leader who vows to move his ‘people’ away from

socioeconomic underdevelopment within the frame of cultural pluralism, which maps out
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the productive co-existence of many cultures but, as Ross Posnock points out, tends to

believe “in ethnic or racial or religious group solidarity as valuable intrinsically” as a

kind of shared ‘spirit, “not merely tactically or provisionally” (Posnock 23). As Nellie

describes, Robin has “got the black spirit and it’s riding him hard”: “Lead on Robin.

Lead on” (Brodber 46). Robin inspires Nellie to engage in an imagination of Jamaican

development through Marxian cultural narratives of progress and class conflict and

Marx’s materialist inversion of Hegel’s historical grand narrative of a world-historical

Geist (spirit/ghost), though she retains a deep ambivalence to these theoretical

frameworks and language. Nellie’s description of Robin here also seems to occur before

her graduate sociology studies in Philadelphia, where should be well-acquainted with

these theoretical frameworks, although she and Robin seem to carry on a long-distance

relationship before his death: “my neck is getting cricked with this looking backwards

and talking to you by tape and telephone […] I want to face you” (29).

As an alpha male figure, Robin fashions himself as a leader of the community,

remarking to Nellie, “Yes I have seen the light and I shall lead my people” (43). The

speakers and context in this conversation, as is common in Brodber’s fictional works, are

not explicitly named in the text. Yet, the scene (chapter three of “Miniature”) seems to

involve Robin and Nellie talking, partly implied by Nellie’s later comment a few pages

later, “Lead on Robin. Lead on” (46). Robin is from “the City” (presumably Kingston)

and, if this is Robin’s voice, comments to Nellie that he has visited a small swimming

spot near her rural home-village: “I’ve seen your Blue Hole. It really is one of the

wonders of the world. Perched on top of that very high mountain out there in the

wilderness! You can hardly believe it” (42). Robin is shocked that Nellie does not know
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how to swim and defamiliarizes Nellie’s perception of her village by referencing tourist

brochures’ construction of rural Jamaica: “I must also believe that you haven’t enjoyed

what the brochures say you all enjoy. That you don’t know how nice it is to sit under the

coconut tree and break open your own coconut?” (42). Nellie says “You are perfectly

right,” adding that she does not know how to use a machete even though she grew up on

a farm (43). Robin thus helps Nellie with her own critical-self-spectatorship of her rural

community, preventing it from becoming an idealized and simplistic image, and his

questions also help her to see her own cloistered insularity since Nellie’s father can swim

but the children are not taught how because “We would have drowned” (42).

By responding to the interpellation of Robin’s play with idealized images of rural

Jamaican culture, Nellie is ambivalent to both the organic “rhythm” of rural life and the

higher learning of the colonial education system: “We do have rhythm but that was

yesteryear. Now we have learning. We were brought up to take learning. To take to

Plato and Moses” (43). “Cock Robin,” as Nellie nicknames him, appears to be well-

educated in the Western tradition, which forms part of the source for his proudly

masculine ostentation. As a symbol of Christ, the rooster is perhaps an indication that

Robin will ‘wake up’ Jamaica from its ideologically colonized slumber, ironically

perhaps to another utopian dream of progress informed by Marxism and Western theory.

However, if the lines of dialogue alternate in this vignette between Nellie and Robin, then

it seems it is Nellie who actually speaks the line “Yes I have seen the light and I shall

lead my people,” recalling Moses and Exodus. Hence, Robin is the one who responds

incredulously “Lead?” (43). If this reading is persuasive, then Robin acts as an impetus

for Nellie to move towards a more active role in her imagined Caribbean community, her
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“people,” in her own way. The role of leader and the direction of change are ambiguous:

“So who must lead whom? Who must teach whom?” (45). The direction is open.

Daryl Cumber Dance argues that Robin is actually a figment of Nellie’s psychotic

imagination: “Robin never existed outside of Nellie’s dissociated mind, which fashions

varying descriptions of his end that reflect her current sense of her own disintegration”

(25). Whether real or imagined, Robin nevertheless burns to death in Nellie’s narrative

account of him, triggering an intense wave of sadness and mental breakdown in Nellie as

well as a desperate reflection on spirit, transformation and the body. As Nellie

comments, the “night my young man got caught up in the spirit and burnt to grease like

beef suet caught upon in a dutchie pot, I wept so hard, my tears no longer held salt. Such

a frightening and humiliating way to die” (52). Pondering the fact that “Robin had once

had a body too,” Nellie links Robin’s death to Biblical masterplots and the transformation

of Christ’s crucified body into the holy spirit within human history or the

“transfiguration, of how Elijah and Christ became one” (52). Available cultural

narratives provide a framework to process the trauma within a symbolic language that

renders meaning within history and the cosmic order. In contrast to this Christian idea of

transcendence, Nellie’s friend Errol grounds the meaning of Robin’s death in a worldly

sacrifice for the movement forward of their ‘people.’ He tries to comfort her by

explaining “in detail the significance of the prefix demos” to illustrate the idea of a

‘people’ (52). Hence, Nellie acknowledges that Errol is trying to argue that, from any

angle, “the people were destined to come into their own” and Robin “had not died in

vain” (52). In both cases, the insertion of Robin’s death into a transindividual meaning-

making apparatus, one tied to an ineluctable collective progress, functions as a

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psychological coping mechanism in narrative form but threatens Nellie with her own

figurative disintegration as her own body sits in between the micro- and macroscopic.

While grieving from Robin’s death and, as she explains, “losing my grip on

myself,” Nellie meets a childhood friend whom she dated briefly over twenty years

earlier, (Baba) Harris Ruddock, who also comforts her and embodies another hope for the

future of Jamaica to come into its own. Baba is another confident leader future—“a

bubble-burster, a wet blanket, one-who-would-not-let-you-dream, a know-it-all” who

“knew where he was going; he was right” (59). The ultra-confident Baba, another alpha

male whose “thoughts were facts,” comes to Nellie’s activist meetings and carves a doll

of a child, which he eventually breaks into pieces (59). The toy “doctor’s kit” Baba had

as a child now takes on resonance as he whittles pear seeds to make the doll. Baba “had

affected whittling now,” wearing down Nellie’s kumblatic defenses—much like Becca’s

gift of the straw bag to perhaps “whittle down” Nellie’s prepubescent “world” (26).

Drawing together the personal and the collective, “applied to us singly or as a

group,” Baba’s “cracked up doll” implies movements of disintegration and reconstruction

through a community’s dialogue with itself: “Baba’s point was that we should stop hiding

and talk about ourselves” (Brodber 61). Valovirta comments that “as a post-colonial text

the novel does not simply break the master narratives but creates a new site for struggle

and liberation” (“Into and Out of” 327). Indeed, linking Christ’s humanity with

sexuality, Nellie portrays Baba as a kind of Christ-like Rastafarian figure, “wearing Jesus

sandals with straps twisted at the ankles and obviously going further up his leg to where I

could not see” (Brodber 63). Baba helps to bring Nellie back from the depths of

psychotic depression and aids in a process of reintegration with her community. He says
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to her “Welcome back you lucky creature. You know what the resurrection is like. You

have a clean slate, you can start all over again” (67). This “shameless rasta-man” helps

Nellie eventually be able to say “I was no longer alone. Baba had settled me in with my

people,” the ‘common folk’ whom Nellie had previously regarded as “aliens” (77; 70).

Strongly emphasizing his symbolic dimension, Roberts reads Baba as a

Rastafarian hero and an “authentic” ideal for Nellie to follow (Roberts 96). xv Roberts

casts Baba as a savior who represents the ideal identity of the novel: “Baba, the shaman,

Rasta, myal manreligious syncretism and political pluralism personifiedcompletely

grounded in folk ethos and secure in his vernacular identity, provides the recuperative

kumbla that returns Nellie to mental and physical health” (130). Despite helping her

feeling part of her ‘people,’ however, Nellie’s retrospective narration maintains an

immanent critique, realizing that her kumbla is still a locus of contradictions. Along with

her gratitude for his help, Nellie sees that Baba also unwaveringly offers a limited,

absolutist notion of a ‘people’ as he persuades her that her healing process involves

psychological reintegration within the problematic terms of ‘authentic’ black identity:

“The chocolate tree was the hospital whether you agreed or not. And you let him lead

though the mulatto companion tree was much shadier and had far more gadgets. The

chocolate tree it had to be. He never moved” (59). When talking about the lack of clutter

in his room, Baba’s comments likewise imply an underlying essentialist assumption

about race and culture within a frozen taxonomy: “There is no point to clutter. Take the

essence and throw away the chaff” (64). But what could essence mean here, though?

As a critical counterpoint, Jane and Louisa uses the images of trees and criss-

crosses to juxtapose Baba’s untenable version of authentic black ‘purity’ within a

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discourse of cultural pluralism versus the intersections of interracial, intercultural

histories and the macroscopic kumbla of the Black Atlantic. As she describes Baba,

Nellie quips that “even the criss-crosses which most of us blacks have indelibly in our

palms were missing from his” (Brodber 63). He does help Nellie recover, but the lack of

lines on his skin implies Nellie’s critique of essence as a dubious proposition within the

physical, cultural and racial criss-crossings of history.

Akin to palm-lines, this question of finding and holding hands with one’s ‘people’

amidst the “clutter” of criss-crossing branches of history and race resonates with Nellie’s

return from university in the USA and contrasts both Robin’s cultural pluralism and

Baba’s conceptions of racial authenticity. Universities are strong purveyors of their own

regulative frameworks and narratives, and through her university experience, Nellie

becomes a defamiliarized spectator of Jamaica as she repeats the phrase “I came home”

throughout the novel’s MY DEAR WILL YOU ALLOW ME section (such as pages 34,

40-4). The question of home takes on a perpetual movement, implied by the textual

returns and the novel’s title as a reference to a dance and the image of the kaleidoscope.

‘Home’ is a constantly-shifting relationship within the web of history and memory, both

individual and cultural. As she returns to the village in which she grew up, Nellie

realizes she has become estranged from her ‘people’ through education and travel.

Through the figurative mediatization of various visual technologies, Nellie reflects upon

what ‘home’ means as she views herself as both a locus and a spectator within the web of

her community. Nellie’s un-homing from her ‘people’ is not simply negative, as Roberts

argues, since Nellie’s journey to America expands the scope of her imaginative

geography. The return home defamiliarizes her routinized patterns of perception as she
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tries to find her place within her family lineage and the “beautiful garden” of her rural

community. Combining the metaphor of the kaleidoscope and viewmaster, she

comments that “Well I am flowers too. I am home to find my place in this changing

emerging mass of crystals. Yes. When I look through that penny peep hole of that view

master at another school fair, I must see me in Philadelphia, USA, right here in my own

back yard” (34). Here Nellie’s perspective shifts to connect Philadelphia and her own

back yard, a larger sociocultural frame that brings together the near and the far in both

space and time within the kaleidoscopic Gestalt of her kumbla.

In is fractal-like replication at various scales, Nellie’s kumbla collapses various

cultural-historical moments into the ‘here and now’ of the text as a form of critical self-

spectatorship. xvi Nellie’s kumbla is not her center within static networks but, rather, a

locus of navigation within continuous lines of flight in motion. The kaleidoscope, spying

glass and view master act as three examples of media technology in constant movement

that filter Nellie’s perceptions of herself in relation to her ‘home’ across distances of

space-time. The term “view master” literally refers both to large coin-operated

binoculars often found at tourist viewing areas or fairs and a plastic children’s toy

whereby the viewer can scroll through a small wheel of slide photographs. The phrase

also connotes issues of control and influence in the subject’s frames of reference: who is

the ‘master’ of one’s view, a question rendered more poignant amidst histories of slavery

and colonialism in Jamaica. Emphasizing repetition, relationality, multiple perspectives

and fractal elaboration rather than linear development or frozen authenticity, the

kaleidoscope metaphor explores in detail the immanently critical self-spectatorship

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involved in ‘coming home’ as involving not merely a scene observed but also the

viewer’s relationship and participation in that multi-colored scene.

One effect of the kaleidoscope motif is to connect ways of seeing with the

constantly-shifting possibilities of how Nellie views herself in relation to her ancestors

and community. When she returns home to Jamaica from school in the U.S., Nellie tries

to find a place in a “changing emerging mass of crystals,” the kaleidoscope of her local,

national, and global culture (Brodber 34). In her search for communal roots and the

various shades of blackspace, Nellie parallels the colored crystals of the “spying glass”

with her community of past and present. The variegated forms and colors of this

‘people,’ like the boiling house and rhizomes, have “neither exit nor entrance,” and

would change in colour and in shape but never in its locus. I saw too the
myriad pieces of crystal littered round this base — those bits of glass
which change their colours, shapes and positions to form now green, now
yellow petals in the kaleidoscope. I saw them stand still. They were
people. I had sensed them but I could still not discern faces or limbs.
(Brodber 76)

By connecting the boiling house to the kaleidoscope/spying glass metaphor, the

collectivity that Nellie envisions here is not an ontological security of self-image but an

imaginary and chimerical space of stillness formed by converging and criss-crossing

histories of “people” in constant motion and transformation. “The amalgam,” Nellie

explains, is “a thrashing moving thing”an echo of Du Bois’ description of race as a

“group of contradictory forces, facts, and tendencies” and his own attempts to articulate

through his “life and action” a vision of a “whirlpool of social entanglement and inner

psychological paradox” (132-3, 3). Indeed, Nellie description of the boiling house, with

its widely spaced round sticks and roof, implies both a concrete location central to the
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social field of her home village and a figure for collective identity as an unbounded,

uncontainable, interactive space with “neither exit nor entrance” (75-6).

The kaleidoscope/spying glass metaphor likewise explores various permutations

of how an ‘I’ becomes embedded in transindividual cultural-historical narratives of a

‘people,’ ‘I=We’ through a process of continuous and a never-ending negotiation of

imagination, knowledge and attitudes rather than as a movement towards a fully self-

aware Hegelian Absolute. In chapter ten of the TO WALTZ WITH YOU section, Nellie

recalls an incident when (seemingly the ghost of) her great Aunt Alice, her “father’s

mother’s sister,” “was sitting with me at the watering hole” and urged Nellie to close her

eyes and imagine herself as “a passage, a clean rubber tube” (75; 78). Nellie remarks that

“I was a rubber tube floating evenly, deeply, falling through layers of atmosphere, cool

and mossy, no cobwebs” (78). As she closes her eyes, Nellie is overtaken by a lucid

vision of her dead ancestors and living relatives coming out of the rocks. She connects to

a sense of the past and her ancestors as she imagines that her “kinsmen came out of the

rocks, tall, proud and happy to meet” her, and they all join together to form a choir (78).

She listens to them as they burst into song and play various musical instruments, such as

drums, organs, and the bamboo sax: a musicality to the voices of the intersubjective webs

of history—both the “questions and answers” (80).

In this call and answer, the word “rocks” here invokes not merely the large rocks

surrounding the watering hole but the multi-colored and jagged bits of glass or plastic in

Nellie’s spying glass/kaleidoscope. In fact, a memory of accidentally sitting on her

spying glass brings to mind the watering hole scene, linking the endlessly variegated and

changing patterns of the kaleidoscope to Nellie’s constantly-shifting relationships to the

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networks of her ancestry and history as both a spectator and a participant. Describing the

watering hole scene, Nellie recalls that “It was art from any angle. . .music, shape,

production, performance, colour scheme, blending of colours, a pageant. . .They weren’t

just putting on a performance for me. They were trying to communicate” (78-9). By the

end of the scene, Nellie shifts from passive spectator to active participant in this web of

ancestry and community as they sing “a song of unity” (81).

The ‘watering hole choir’ flashback appears just after Nellie’s comment that “I

was no longer alone. Baba had settle me in with my people” and associatively links to a

reconciliation with all of her kin. As she imaginatively listens to and sees her ancestry

singing and playing instruments, she comments: “I saw [. . .] I had to know them to know

what I was about; that I could no how [sic] wear my rightful Easter dress, sit in my

granny’s parlour, eat my cane nor walk in my beautiful garden unless I walked with

them, the black and squat, the thin and wizened, all of them” (77; 80). Despite this

communal feeling here, however, Nellie is still both critically-detached and somewhat

confused as to her role as more than merely a passive spectator of history:

It was then that I accused them in my mind of contradictory behaviour: of

singing a song of unity yet masterminding our drift apart and in the finale,
all blending, they sang:
-We did our part. Blessing on yours.-
I wanted to ask how but they had left and I was covered from head to toe
with dripping water, hot and cold in perspiration, my hair grey and those
funny stripes on my behind. (80-1)

The community thus not only includes the living and the dead but is never “settled” since

it is a constant, active production of the imagination that is historically contingent and

provisional, replicating itself through iterations that open up spaces for transformation.

Nellie’s kumbla is a locus of contradictions where she continually negotiates her

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interdependent relationship to collectivities in a reciprocal fashion, including an

immanent critique that denaturalizes the assumptions about class, race, community and

education that form spaces of possibilities for spectatorial positions of/in history.

III. The Enlightenment of the Race and ‘Culture Become Nature’: Class,

Education, and Racialization

In The Field of Cultural Production, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu interrogates

bourgeois class reproduction through a phenomenon of “culture becoming natural” or

“culture become nature” (234). Bourdieu describes how, “unable to invoke the right of

birth,” the bourgeoisie generates a “sociodocy,” justifying their class privilege through

acquired culture that elides its cultivated acquisition, such as “taste,” to appear as a

natural “grace or a gift” and therefore “deserved” (234). Likewise, race in the ‘colonial

contest’ appears as a naturalized marker of social subordination developed through

systems such as education to produce ‘naturally’ superior or inferior subjects. To

interrogate and develop various naturalized conceptions of progress, Nellie opens up for

inspection various conceptions of racial ‘lightening,’ solidarity and mobility as well as

formulations of class consciousness formed in a bifurcated desire for or rejection of

European culture and language. In particular, Nellie’s movement through various

educational regulative frameworks in Jamaica and the United States amplifies schismatic

tensions between race and class, helping her to denaturalize both.

Breaking Bad Habitus: Race, Class, Space and Cultural Progress

Nellie’s critical negotiation with larger cultural imaginations of progress place her in

between the Scylla of difference and the Charybdis of universalism. While cultural
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pluralism emphasizes the respect for difference in the maintenance of ‘unique’ and

‘authentic’ racial, ethnic, religious or cultural identities, narratives of racial uplift

emphasize collective responsibility in the fight for one identity’s rightful place within

universal History. Both risk promulgating a frozen taxonomy of identities that elides

tensions, difference and conflict within each ‘people.’ Nellie’s quandary is how to

critique colonial formulations of a telos of progress in a universal framework of History

and imagine tactical collectivities without simply reversing the Eurocentric polarity to

myopically fetishize blackness. Part of Nellie’s strategy, and that of the novel, is to

formulate timespaces as relational webs in continuous motion and transformation rather

than the developmental gradualism of the trunk-and-branches paradigm of History. This

latter version of time constructs a linear narrative and taxonomy of universal History and

development that encompasses the globe, placing everything within a hierarchical

scheme of cultures and races supposedly coming of age and ‘evolving’ towards the space

that the more advanced white, Euro-American culture already inhabits.

While time may only be a function of phenomenological perspectives, Jane and

Louisa’s spatialization of time radically contrasts the colonial spatialization of time,

which invokes a supposedly (and impossibly) neutral spectatorship of history as the

arbiter of cultural progress. xvii Alluding to Foucault’s discussions of the Panopticon,

Heather McClintock in Imperial Leather usefully labels late nineteenth century historical

schemas as “Panoptical time”: “the image of a global history consumed—at a glance—in

a single spectacle from a point of privileged invisibility” (37). Many imperial travelers

saw journeys to certain parts of the globe as going backwards in time to a more

‘primitive’ age, into what McClintock calls “anachronistic space,” wherein “imperial
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progress across the space of empire is figured as a journey backward in time to an

anachronistic moment of prehistory” (40). This well-known and oft-lambasted

conceptualization of Universal historical time also links to a naturalized hierarchicization

of race to culture within colonialism’s self-definition as the location of advanced

civilization and culture: “a three-dimensional map of social difference had emerged, in

which minute shadings of racial, class and gender hierarchy could be putatively measured

across space: the measurable space of the empirical body” (37-8, 51). xviii In Bourdieuian

terms, this empirical body operates in a habitus—the routinized set of behaviors,

attitudes, dispositions and expectations that reproduce class structure—within the spaces

of possibility of social fields. Jane and Louisa nuances Bourdieu’s concept of the

habitus by exploring how the embodied subjectivity is where the macroscopic and

microscopy narratives becomes mapped and naturalized through racialization. Race acts

like class as it produces expectations that compartmentalize social mobility or

transformation and works at odds with class in ways that open up immanent critique.

In Brodber’s Bildungsroman, race establishes a space of possibilities for the self-

narrativization of class positions that subjects feel they could reasonably inhabit, spaces

that become experienced in terms of feudal-like boundaries and architecture. Nellie’s

father, Alexander Richmond, for instance, “grew up with the pale faces. He learnt from

them that a man is worthy of his hire only after he has served well in his station; that he

should stick to principles and know his limitations: the rich man in his castle, the poor

man at his gate” (Brodber 30). However, larger cultural assumptions about a proper

“station” change over time along with shifts in larger cultural-historical networks of

power, in a manner akin to literary or artistic possibilities within authorship. Bourdieu

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remarks that “change in the space of literary or artistic possibilities is the result of change

in the power relation which constitutes the space of positions” (32). Assumptions about

“limitations” in relation to transindividual narratives of social positioning shift and open

up within sociocultural tensions since iteration produces the naturalization of power.

As Nellie questions the equivocation of socioeconomic class position and race,

she interrogates two forms of social advancement offered to her as options: racial

‘lightening’ across generations and cultural enlightenment via education. Nellie’s

paternal great grandfather is the upwardly mobile William Alexander Whiting, “the pale

one”—a (mostly) Caucasian and Anglican son of Jamaican colonists involved with

tobacco and cattle. With his last name as a play on the process of ‘whiting’ or

‘whitening,’ William embodies a racial skew towards whiteness: “he represented lines

and generations of the watering down of the stock. Still this was one more white to

correct the one to ten skew” (134). While William’s parents, Albert and Elizabeth

Whiting, are initially “poor white,” they view themselves as progressing economically

and teleologically towards a social status inscribed by the entitlement of their specific

racial mixture, especially with William as the hope of the future: “This was their first

fruit, chubby and as intelligent as number eleven mango with a purpose. His purpose was

to help them take another step towards their rightful place” (134, my emphasis).

Eventually, Albert gains a reputation as an up-and-comer in terms of socioeconomic

status, “fast becoming big massa, hirer or labour, lender of money, powerful miller to the

little colony of hillside blacks seeking to grow their way out of their thatched cottages

and into the soil” (135). After his wife dies, Albert gives his children to his Jamaican-

born Nanny Madame Faith, a “kindly old negress,” to be raised. When his parents die,
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William becomes involved in a relationship with Tia Maria, Faith’s goddaughter. Tia

knows herself to be a “lucky little girl who missed the slavery days by a hair’s breadth”

(137). William is a “happy sinner” who is not ashamed of his miscegenation nor his

‘mixed-race’ offspring: “though men have sired khaki children, and left bequests to them,

they do not expect to see them playing on their father’s knees” (Brodber 137, 138).

Nevertheless, William’s dark-skinned Jamaican lover Tia Maria clearly

understands the link between race and power, and she steers her family towards

whiteness: “There were his people and there were her people and she knew who had the

power” (Brodber 138). Drawing attention to how a ‘people’ is constructed through

available cultural categories, Tia’s analysis is both a practical assessment of her social

field and a tragic perpetuation of the legacy of slavery through psychological schemas.

Hence, as a form of self-erasure, Tia wants her “mulatto” children to pattern themselves

after their father and relishes the annihilation of her own language and culture—the

increase of social and historical distance from her:

In truth, the more she denied herself, the more things around her grew.
The lesson was clear: the things she loved would prosper in inverse ratio
to her disappearance. Tia wanted it so that with a snap of her fingers she
could disappear and her children would loom large in their place in the
sun. The stranger the words her children spoke, the happier she felt. The
fewer their experiences she could share, the more progress they had made.
The more they turned their backs on her, the more her smile widened into
the classic cheshire grin. (Brodber 139, my emphasis)

Tia’s model of racial and cultural progress aligns itself with colonial models of education,

class and racial hierarchy as a form of adaptation at the cost of self-erasure. Her attitudes

are another permutation of her kumbla as a regulative cultural framework within which

she dwells and experiences herself as a spectator of/in history in relation to other

regulative frameworks. Master narratives coordinate the overlap of regulative

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frameworks and inform the idiosyncratic subject’s experience within collectivities. To

her, blackness and black culture are positioned ideologically within a colonially informed

schema as ‘before’ and ‘below’ while whiteness is ‘above’ and ‘the future.’

Tia Maria therefore relishes the growing distance between her own ‘outdated’

regulative framework of black culture and the “progress” of her descendants towards

white, Euro-American culture and epidermal lightening. She aligns her hope for her

descendants’ social advancement with William’s white “world” of bourgeois aspiration:

The more their kumblas billowed out and hardened into white steel
helmets separating her from each and each from each, the more peacefully
she rested, the more sure she was that they had found their places in the
established world to which William belonged, a world that was foreign to
her, a world that was safe and successful. (139)

Because of an unbounded hope for her descendents’ racial and cultural advancement, Tia

eventually lapses into madness, triggered when her daughter Kitty, who “liked the music,

not of the piano, but of the drums, of tramping feet, steel drum and bamboo fifes,” “got

pregnant and decided to marry the [dark-skinned] Pattoo” Puppa Richmond, Nellie’s

paternal grandfather—hence undoing some of the racial “progress” (139, 141).

Meanwhile, William, who “had no head for business,” also undoes economic

progress when he eventually loses his fortunesa denaturalization of the relationship

between race and class. Whatever land and money he did retain is not inherited by

Nellie’s family because Will did not legally marry Tia and had not made a will. Will’s

brothers, instead, “took what was lawfully theirs” and “Great grandfather Will willed us

nothing but his abstract self and what cocoons we could make out of it” (141). Thus, the

novel not only details how colonial subjects can emerge within Eurocentric world-

historical ‘masterplots’ with a sense of racial, economic and cultural inferiority but also
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how the Law encodes distributions of property and social positioning that reinscribe the

relationship between race and class. Laws governing marriage and property inheritance

also embed idiosyncratic subjects into larger cultural narratives about what is and is not

recognized as a ‘proper relationship’ by the authority of both the nation state and the

imagined collective community. The Law is not merely a set of rules governing behavior

in a culture but a regulatory framework that maps idiosyncratic subjects’ social positions

and insertions into larger cultural stories, how they find “their places” (139).

The Lump of Anger: Education and Racialization

Along with the Law and conceptualization of racial inheritance connected to culture, the

education system also propagates naturalized cultural ideals of ‘naturally gifted,’ even

though acquired cultural training, such as ‘taste,’ has hidden itself to appear ‘naturally

different.’ This “culture become nature,” as Bourdieu puts it, seems to inform the social

positioning within the “global allegory of ‘natural’ social difference” that McClintock

describes; in other words, Panoptical time maps outs race and culture within a space of

possibilities for social location (Bourdieu 235; McClintock 37). Without an ability to

invoke a ready-made inherited aristocratic privilege, the bourgeoisie “can resort to

cultivated nature and culture become nature,” a faux-inheritance, “to what is sometimes

called ‘class,’ through a tell-tale slip, to ‘education,’ in the sense of a product of

education, to distinction, grace which is merit and merit which is grace, an unacquired

merit which justifies unmerited acquisitions, that is to say, inheritance” (Bourdieu 235).

By examining the interchange of race and education as interrelated but distinct categories

of social positioning, Jane and Louisa dissects the logic of inheritance in this

naturalization process, which slips between acquired cultivation and ‘natural’ superiority.
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In particular, Brodber’s novel interrogates the naturalized connections and ‘tell-

tale’ slips between skin color, education and social advancement. Having been marked

out as ‘one to watch’ because of her light skin and social background, Nellie’s

outstanding performance in school allows her progress to a difference “class,” which

implies both classroom groupings of students and models of social hierarchy. Nellie

explains that she skipped over grades in school partially due to her ‘brightness’: “I am six

and little for my age yet inspector says I should be skipped to middle division, to a class

of children at least five years older than I” (35). Jane and Louisa opens with a statement

of a constriction imagination for possibilities: “Papa’s grandfather and Mama’s mother

were the upper reaches of our world” (7). However, this condition of possibilities seems

to have an implied progressive movement, which Nellie sarcastically details: “So we

were brown, intellectual, better and apart, two generations of lightening blue-blacks and

gracing elementary schools with brightness. The cream of the earth, isolated, quadroon,

mulatto, Anglican” (7). Connecting race and education, “brightness” here is a pun on

having both light skin and being intellectually gifted. Brodber’s novel complicates and

extends Bourdieu’s investigations of bourgeois class reproduction by considering how

cultural constructions of race become equivocated with a ‘natural’ difference of merit

visible in skin color. The ‘distinction’ appears to be an inherited racial quality that is

only fulfilled, rather than acquired, through cultural capital. At the same time, the novel

draws attention to the transplanting of a Euro-American regulative framework of class

and education onto non-European soil with non-European subjects. Thus, with both

“cream” as white in color and that which rises to the top, racial lineage and education
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become two forms of ‘heritage’ that slip into each other to create systems of naturalized

and visible markers of class hierarchy within the colonial system.

The phrase “lightening blue-blacks” here echoes not only a link between

Enlightenment narratives of progress and freedom through reason and skin lightening

across generations but also “blue-bloods.” Obfuscating the process of culturally-acquired

distinction, difference and hierarchy, the status of “blue-blood” denotes a category of

aristocratic social positioning where social superiority and elite status appear genetic,

biological and natural. Class reproduction amongst an elite group takes on the

appearance of a naturalized superiority based entirely on the ‘pedigree’ of bloodlines. As

Michael Quinion explains, the phrase “blue blood” derives from the Spanish “sangre

azul,” where “many of the oldest and proudest families of Castile used to boast that they

were pure bred, having no link with the Moors who had for so long controlled the

country, or indeed any other group” (World Wide Words). As evidence for their pure

breeding, these “blue-bloods” pointed to their skin, which merely showed blue-tinted

venous blood more because it was lighter. The English took over the term in the 1830s,

and thus the resonance between “blue blood” and the color “blue black” recalls the

imbrication of race and the cultural elite within the British Empire.

However, Nellie does not simply eschew the British education system in favor of

a myopic fetishization of folk communalism, though. Her kumbla is a locus of historical

contradictions that grounds itself in an ambivalence that sees both the restrictive and

expansive potentiality of all education and belief. Nellie’s paternal “great grandfather

Will was romance,” and he embodies the hope of travel and change, both in terms of

status and geography, that European-based education can bring: “At school he gave us
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Maths, Latin and French and told us pranks at Cambridge where we would surely go if

we did well. . .across the sea, always across something with great-grandfather Will”

(Brodber 30-1). As a key marker of social capital within Jamaica’s British-based system,

education aligns individual Bildung to larger cultural narratives of development and

freedom that establish a central core or ‘trunk’ of social evolution and various peripheral

‘branches’ of culture. Meanwhile, Nellie’s maternal Granny Tucker seems to only

connect slavery with the lack of education rather than ideological constructions of race or

a pernicious socioeconomic system: “You never could get Granny Tucker to admit that

her grandfather had been a slave. No Sir. He was a brown man who could read and

write” (31). Despite Granny Tucker’s willful denial of her ancestor’s place within

slavery, her understanding implies a freedom of the mind, even if not body, that expands

spaces of possibility via learning.

Along with these connections between race and education, the imagination of

distinctions within a ‘people’ and one’s ‘people’ in relation to others becomes coded

through a connection between identity and culture, including eating habits and linguistic

codes for food. Implying a spatialization of distinctions within culture and language,

Nellie’s mother remarks to Nellie that names for things exists along the Creole

Continuumfrom the acrolect of Jamaican Standard English to mesolectal intermediate

registers and, finally, the basilect of broad Creoleto map out the qualities of one’s

imagined ‘world’: “those people live in a different world from we. This poach egg and

toast bread and cornflakes when I must have yam and pear and bammy [a pancake-

shaped deep-fried cassava bread] for breakfast. Even the names change my dear. Pear

don’t name pear and bammy don’t name bammy; is avocado and cassava wafers” (40).
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The shifting of the language world thus creates an implied spatial mapping of

sociocultural distinction common in Jamaica that Brodber’s novel itself disrupts.

As Nellie navigates her idiosyncratic relationship to collective identities through

her kumbla as a locus of historical tensions, her return from university in Philadelphia

also brings into collision various regulative frameworks operating through cultural

narratives of ‘progress’ and its interrelationship with a social matrix of race, class,

education and culture. Race and class spatially map colonial subjects through the

figurative language of a ‘proper place’ in the world and create routinized expectations,

vocations and aspirations within the regulative frameworks through the organization not

simply of language and culture but of physical environments as well. For instance, after

the fire that kills Robin, Nellie seems to live in one of the identical rooms at 25, 5th street

houses—one of a series of identical government yards built “for the people” (49).

Architecturally, the government yard embodies the possible danger of homogenization

and submersion in a collective identity of a ‘people,’ and Nellie in this moment sees a

need for evaluative compartmentalization in ways that echo the government’s social

compartmentalization of the population. In her activist work upon returning to Jamaica,

Nellie shifts away the bourgeois value of “brightness” from her elementary school days,

which she ironically recounts at the start of the novel, towards neo-Marxist conceptions

of transformative praxis and commitment within a Rodney-esque pan-Africanism.

Despite her interrogation of class consciousness and its relationship to race, though, she

nevertheless reinscribes hierarchical distinctions based on a spatialized conception of the

collective project of ‘our people.’ Nellie reconstructs class-like distinctions within

collective identity by distinguishing between those who align their aspirations with the
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cultural, economic and political ‘progress’ of the collective and those who do not: “There

are some of us who don’t try at all. No Need to hide it. We have unfortunately to make a

distinction between them and us. Those people throw dice, slam dominoes and give-

laugh-for-peasoup all day long” (51).

In this rhetoric of uplift, Nellie reinstates a hierarchy of cultural distinctions based

on degrees of commitmentactive versus passive spectatorship of historywhere she

annihilates the cultural identity of the uncommitted. “They have no culture,” Nellie

explains, “no sense of identity, no shame or respect for themselves. No interest in

helping their leaders keep their heads up high. […] We get no co-operation from them.

How will we ever lead them out in the right and proper way, through the front gate, past

the turnstile, past Miss D, proud, skilled, cultured and tall?” (Brodber 51). Miss D is

“bad” but “knows who is who” and “leadership when she sees it” (51). Echoing her Aunt

Becca’s conception of “those people” except now in the regulatory frame of pan-African

neo-Marxism, Nellie’s language of distinction takes on the form of physical structures:

“Those people would climb through the barbed-wire fence, mingle shamelessly with the

people beyond, beg them rum and cigarettes and creep back into the compound” (51).

Thus, “those people” traverse both physical and social barriers in a shameless manner and

mingle with those “beyond” who do not even register in Nellie’s purview at the time.

Zain A. Muse describes Nellie’s initial “classist pretension” and “demeaning practice of

anthropomorphizing her own culture” in the “pseudo-intellectual liberation group

dedicated to meaningless theorizing” (241). Indeed, despite her neo-Marxist pretensions,

this spatialized cultural spectatorship risks merely replicating the bourgeois regulatory

ideals of class within colonial discourse and its tropes of cultural architecture.
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Yet, Nellie’s eventual maturation and increased self-awareness do not involve an

abandonment of the ‘Western’ tradition and theorizing in favor of a wholesale embrace of

the “Afrofemcenric” culture that Muse and Roberts laud, though, but a navigation of both

Afro-Caribbean culture and ‘Western’ modes of thought and bodies of knowledge, art,

literature, music and so forth. An uncritical fetishization of communal folk culture would

be just as myopic, though Nellie’s felt affinity for folk culture nevertheless helps her to

develop an immanent critique of the Rodney-esque regulative framework of her activist

work via ambivalence. Nellie interrogates the dangers of massification in all forms of

collective identity, especially the self-policing and ostracization of the anomaly. In her

activist group, she explains that “I was suddenly strongly aware that I wanted a grave

beneath the earth with the flowers and the sound of raucous singing” even though her

activist friends considered such thoughts as “subversive,” making her “a loner” (53). She

is simultaneously attracted to the idea that “the masses […] too were the architects of our

freedom” and holds this in tension with nagging doubt that a “people” based purely on

skin color and a “common enemy” is problematic (55; 33). Even though values the

masses, she realizes there is a danger submerging one’s idiosyncratic doubts for “the

good of the whole” or becoming as “all alike” as the government yard houses (58; 49).

As forms of kumblas that are loci of historical contradictions, collective identities

are paradoxically both potentially liberatory and overly restrictive, an insight that Nellie

gains from her time in the United States. She experiences racism while at school in

“Sam’s country”—Philadelphia in the United States, a.k.a. Uncle Sam. Nellie finds it to

be “beautiful” and a “romantic country” until she says that she hears others talking about

her behind her back: “Shushing at my approach but I had already heard that ‘Negroes in
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the Central Areas were ungrateful considering that our people were the first to let them fit

clothes in department stores’” (32). She searches for a language with which to describe

this experience of racialization within desegregation and express the “big frozen lump [of

anger] in [her] throat” in a way that will reach others: “No language, no public language

of politeness, no communion rails now to separate the communicant and the celebrant. It

is a brand new nigger war and I must find the language of abuse with which to reach

them” (32). She dissects both her anger and the frozen taxonomies of race, creating a

trope of intermingling between the priest and flock in the spectacle of the Catholic mass.

Nellie never quite feels at peace with this American blackspace, and she finds

herself “reaching for Corpie’s hand to find that I am not home” (33). Corpie, Nellie’s

maternal grandfather, fought in the one of the Boer Wars and died before Sarah, Nellie’s

mother, was born. xix The Germans called Corpie “monkey,” and he “hated them with all

his gall” because they interpellated him as culturally ‘primitive’ or ‘less evolved’

biologically on the evolutionary tree (Brodber 30). In his life, Corpie experienced both

overt and unspoken racism: the “English were hypocrites and worse than Americans who

at least told you plainly to your face that they didn’t like you” (30). Converse to Corpie,

who “was angry all right,” Nellie sarcastically remarks that “displays of anger must be

trained out of the new generation. It is an Adam’s apple, an indelicate bulge which

appears in the throat” (30-1). The Adam’s apple implies both the knowledge of good and

evil that cast out Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the sins and traumas of the

past infiltrating the present, and hope for the future in finding a language-not-yet-made.

While in the U.S., Nellie experiences an ambivalent critical self-spectatorship of

the collective identification and self-definition formed through shared racialization. At

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the Philadelphia institution where she studies for a Ph.D. in sociology, most of the

janitorial staff who are “pushing mops, pushing pails, [and] straightening here and there”

are black: “Every evening after five, those who look most like me surface to take over the

institution” (Brodber 32). As the word “straightening” plays upon the process of

straightening hair or smoothing out the tangled mess of racial history, Nellie sees herself

in the mirror of their spectatorship of her; she makes them proud because she is “a doctor

and their own” (33). Despite her experiences of civil rights and Black Power movements

in the US in the 1960s and 1970s, though, Nellie immanently critiques formulations of

collective identity and advancement based on the commonality of skin color. Deeply

ambivalent, Nellie remarks that it is bizarre how the notion of a unity of race, an artificial

“shared blackness” of “pseudo-solidarity” as Gilroy calls it, comes into being through

societal-historical homogenization and massification. As Nellie comments, “Strange how

a common enemy tightens bonds so that we are people where once we had been men,

women, carpenters, cooks, nurse’s aides, doctors, light-skinned-curley-haired, black-too-

dark-to-make- the TV screen” (33). Part of her defamiliarizing un-homing is from the

American regulative framework of early desegregation while another part is from her

critical distance from an assumed and automatic racial solidarity that emerges in the

contrast and comparison between Jamaica and the United States. While Nellie’s anger

temporarily subsides as she claims to feel “submerged in [her] people,” she experiences a

melancholic ambivalence here at the “surgery” that removes the “lump in her throat”

since she has found voice and catharsis only in the abstraction of differences and

idiosyncrasies of collective massification: “thawed into four hours of tears on my

bathroom and I emerged from this surgery, black, taken now for an African, now for a
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negro, a nigger” (33). In the USA, her experience of black identity thus becomes

uncanny [unheimlich] in the Freudian sense—something familiar, commonplace and

‘home’ rendered unfamiliar, estranged, ‘un-homed.’ xx Part of the ‘return of the

repressed’ here is Nellie’s awakening to the larger historical conditions for identity

formation emerging out of slavery and colonialism. As she returns to Jamaica, her

homeland also becomes uncanny.

IV. The Movie Camera, Self-Overcoming and Global Kumblas: Nellie’s Tangled

Family History and Jamaica’s Self-Overcoming

You higher men, the worst about you is that all of you have not learned to
dance as one must dance  dancing away over yourselves! ...learn to
laugh away over yourselves! Lift up your hearts, you good dancers, high,
higher! And do not forget good laughter. This crown of him who laughs,
this rose-wreath crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown. Laughter
I have pronounced holy; you higher men, learn to laugh!
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The repetition of the ‘returning home’ motif involves both Nellie’s literal return to

Jamaica after being at university in the USA and her figurative navigation within various

regulative frameworks of family, social history and community. When Nellie comments

“I am home to find my place in this changing emerging mass of crystals,” various

spectatorial technologies become imbricated with and collapsed into each other (34).

Linking the spying glass, kaleidoscope, viewmaster, slide show and movie camera with

her search for “home” in this passage, she finally remarks: “When I look through another

movie camera, I must see me in my Granny’s front parlour, right here. That still going

move man! Ah Oh” (34). Here the “movie camera” is a metaphor for how Nellie opens

up to a more critically engaged and dense spectatorship of history in motion: not a

complete picture of a mythic total cinema but a fuller sense of her own place within her
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own family genealogies and their place within the sociohistorical networks of slavery and

colonialism. As a guide and teacher, Alice helps Nellie to experience herself within

tangled narratives of family history and heritage.

In the expansion of Nellie’s frameworks of understanding, her critical dilation

forges links between her kumbla and the global kumbla of history, which can never be

whole or an Absolute but perpetually remains a complex weave-in-motion of

interconnectedness. Critics such as Walk-Johnson and Roberts read Jane and Louisa as a

national allegory, a common post-colonial exegetical mode which is perfectly reasonable

but risks being reductive. However, the novel’s play upon the metaphor of dance implies

a network of literal-figurative connections that involves constant movement,

transformation and exchange rather than the conventional sense of allegory: a sustained

correspondence between literal and figurative layers of meaning in the text (narration of x

as a means to understand y, as in Plato’s allegory of the cave, Dante’s Divine Comedy or

Art Spiegelman’s Maus). Rather than allegory per se, a consideration of Nellie’s kumbla

and its “infinite expansion” in terms of narrativized scales, levels, perspectives and

modes, “pebble into parable,” suggests a fractal-like correspondence between Nellie’s

idiosyncratic regulative framework and the underlying dynamics of the macroscopic

kumblas of which she is a partincluding the past, present and future.

Akin to how Alice Whiting prompted Nellie to have a vision of her ancestors and

current family singing and playing music together at the watering hole, Alice teaches

Nellie about her ancestry, family networks and interconnected community through

various media technologies. In addition to Sarah Richmond, Nellie’s mother, who

remarks that it “is a good thing you have me to educate you my chile,” Alice bolsters
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Nellie’s education, equal in importance to her formal schooling (40). Once again,

technology serves as both a literal plot device and as a metaphor for modes of ambivalent

spectatorship in relation to history at various scales. Near the end of the novel, for

instance, Nellie’s great Aunt Alice Whiting, her “father’s mother’s sister,” performs a

slide show presentation. In “the Spying Glass,” Nellie describes some of this process of

edification, which informs Nellie about local Afro-Caribbean culture and family

relations: “Aunt Alice took out her projector again as if the true purpose of life was to

show films. It was a lantern slide this time” (132). Much Nellie’s father’s Anancy

stories and “playing just for” her bring her into folklore, Alice’s narrative hails Nellie

into family history (36). For instance, during a slide photograph of “Rebecca Pinnock,

nee Richmond,” Alice comments “Look at her face. See how she throws her head back.

She is proud” (132). Alice, who is the daughter of William Whiting, explains that Becca

does not live in William Whiting’s house because “her mother fell. You’ve listened to

enough key holes to know that. […] Fell for the wrong man” (132). Again, Becca’s

mother, Kitty, married a dark-skinned “pattoo,” Puppa Richmond, and was disowned by

her mother, Tia Maria. At the end of the slide show, Alice remarks “The moving camera

next time. Beware. But in any case. . .Jane and Louisa will soon come home,”; the next

chapter, “The Moving Camera,” begins “Name this child. William Alexander Whiting”

and narrates the story of Nellie’s very light-skinned paternal great grandfather, as I have

previously discussed (133-4). There is no point of origin but one must still begin.

Throughout Jane and Louisa, Nellie meditates upon her place in mysteriously-

entangled family connections in her community, where “everybody is related,” and traces

of the past slowly come to light (11). These relationships and intrigues form a kind of
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puzzle in the novel, such as the enigma surrounding the relationship between Aunt Becca,

Mass Tanny and Mass Stanley: “Any scrap of news about Aunt Becca and Mass Tanny,

Mass Stanley and how and why they were related to us, was tucked away in our

unconscious waiting for the other pieces to fit the jigsaw puzzle” (97). xxi While not the

‘whole picture,’ Alice’s narration of the story of William clears up a lot of mysteries for

Nellie, generating an increase in her awareness that provides a source of psychological

reintegration as she better understands her place within ancestry and community. In an

interview with Evelyn O’Callaghan, Brodber describes the therapeutic mode of the

“Moving Camera” chapter, which appears late in the book: “if someone is going to give

you the moving picture, they are going to give you the whole of your past and you are

just going to have to look at it and deal with it” (62). O’Callaghan concludes that

“although community pressures are responsible for Nellie’s fragmented identity, […] it is

within the power of the community that her cure lies,” and she labels this chapter as the

“final stage of reintegration” because the “film is allowed to run smoothly, unedited,

recounting the family history that has produced Nellie” (62).

Rather than a telos of ‘wholeness’ or ‘integration’ as a ‘cure’ for Nellie’s

fragmentation, though, Jane and Louisa complicates the relationship between

assumptions about the possibility for a unified subject or culture. Brodber’s novel

implies a social psychology where the ‘cure’ for dissociation is not wholeness but a self-

conscious insertion of one’s fragmented subjectivity into messy cultural-historical

interconnections of the present, past and future: a “jigsaw puzzle” that the young Nellie

believes could be complete but later discover that it perpetually continues like the “hard”

“brown woman” in the government yard: “intricate patterns she must be crocheting
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because it never ends” (97, 49). Hence, Jane and Louisa critically interrogates both the

experience of subjectivity as degrees of coherence, which is dominant in ego psychology

and humanistic conceptions of the ‘self,’ and structuralist and post-structuralist

orthodoxy, where the subject is ineluctably split and dispersed within discourse.

Brodber’s novel explores how subjects gain the experience of wholeness both

through the self-regulation of the kumbla and through a freedom of movement gained by

an attainment of degrees of freedom through perpetual self-overcoming. Instead of

positing a unified ‘I’ or dogmatically repeating well-entrenched theoretical formulations

of the unstable ‘I,’ though, Jane and Louisa investigates the process of Nellie’s, and

Jamaica’s, self-determination through a kind of self-overcoming in the Nietzschean

sense. In Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” for instance, Zarathustra discusses the

“three metamorphoses of the spirit.” Akin to the kumbla, the first phase is a necessary

grounding in the culture, where the spirit “kneels down like a camel wanting to be well

loaded” with the values, mirrors and self-definitions offered to it by society that say what

“Thou Shalt” do or be (Portable Nietzsche 138). In the second metamorphosis, the spirit

becomes a lion who fights the dragon named “Thou Shalt” and breaks apart the status

quo to affirm “I will,” not yet to create new values but to subvert normative regulative

frameworks. Nellie’s mental breakdown allows for her reintegration akin to the last

Nietzschean metamorphosis, the child, to “create new values” and critically dissect old

ones (Nietzsche 139). The process then starts over. Whether or not one reads Nellie as a

national allegory for Jamaica, she is, in any case, an idiosyncratic subject who is tiny

fragment of the negotiation within collectivities involved in the desire for a “new
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Jamaica,” who will be able to say yes or no to the versions of itself loaded upon it by

colonialism. As Zarathustra comments:

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-

propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred “Yes.” For the game of
creation, a sacred “Yes” is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and
he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world. (139)

The metamorphosis of the spirit into the child or even the Übermensch is not towards a

Hegelian Absolute of full self-consciousness but nevertheless involves an ongoing

process of change in a river of becoming towards self-mastery and self-overcoming.

In the expansive force within pressures of containment emerging from Nellie’s

kumbla, the process crashes and happens again and again in a continual revaluation of

values through the transformation of the condition of possibilities that the novel figures

through the motif of dance. In “Revisioning Our Kumblas,” Rhonda Cobham finds a

similar dynamic in her reading of Jane and Louisa’s ring-game dynamic: “the spiral

structure of the folk song [and dance] that frames the narrative ensures that each

generation, while going back to square one, does so with a new partner: a new set of

values and inhibitions which are based on an accretion of the past but which constantly

describe a movement onward to new contexts and possibilities” (50). This dynamic is

neither linear not cyclical time; instead, they remain forever in “creative tension,” which I

am linking to a reading of the kumbla as rhizomorphic and would describe in Nietzschean

terms as progressus without linear/teleological progress. Nellie’s birth of the parrot-fish

at the end of the novel signals an ongoing process of continual renaissance or re-birth for

Jamaica as a movement into self-mastery: a ‘thus I willed it.’ The circular ring game

aspect of the novel destabilizes being and implies cycles of becoming that do not produce

a final end or coherent subject-nation but an eternal return as an organic and regulative
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principle of Life: Jane and Louisa will (forever) soon come home. Nellie remarks “It will

come” on the last page of the novel as a liberatory, affirmational principle of active,

iterative transformation in motion (147). As Aunt Becca says, in what may be a

reproduction of an ‘actual’ conversation or Nellie’s imagined conversation with her after

Becca’s death: “So you don’t understand the renaissance. Let’s see. But you can dance!

Imagine that. And you like to walk! Now look at that. We are going to see the

renaissance” (18). Becca assures her “You are safe my girl” and “Don’t worry” if she

wants to expand her kumbla radically, to enlarge the scope of her dance: “Keep spinning

your circles dear; but you’ll see the day when you bind your feet so close that you will

trip on your own pirouette” (18-19).

Even if she is not read allegorically, Nellie as an idiosyncratic subject participates

and plays a part in the “renaissance” (lit. re-birth) for Jamaica that involves a connection

to larger cultural-historical Black Atlantic kumbla beyond the kumbla of self-

spectatorship mediated through the mirror of the colonial gaze. ‘Progress’ for Jamaica is

not an alignment to European grand narratives of history but a movement through

received images towards an assertion of self-definition. This ‘progress’ uncovers the

networks of slavery and colonialism that inform the production of idealized

representations. The un-concealing is a source of freedom, such as the song near the

‘beginning’ of Brodber’s novel: “-There is a lovely island in the Caribbean Sea/ An

island full of coconuts and fine banana trees/ An island where the sugar cane is waving in

the breeze/ Jamaica is its name/ We are out to build a new Jamaica. . . .-” (Brodber 9).

This song reproduces the colonial and tourist image of a tropical paradise yet also

juxtaposes the work to be done nationally on a socio-political level with the natural
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resources (coconuts, bananas, sugar cane) that are normally thought of as the ‘work’ of

the island. Thus, in relation to the novel’s interrogation of slavery and colonialism—such

as sugar, coconut and banana production—the idealized Gestalt becomes defamiliarized

to produce a potential critical distance from Jamaica’s méconnaissance.

Rather than finding ontological security in wholeness, both Nellie and Jamaica

‘move through’ towards an ability to accept or reject various mirrors of identity held up

to them. This ability to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the looking glass self occurs via increased

connections to a kumblatic web of ancestry, community and cultural history in the

process of transformational becoming. As Cobham points out, “the moment of

breakdown is not a moment of isolation but a moment of contact: with the ancestral past,

with the community, and with the self” (58). Instead of formulating a ‘post post-identity’

politics, though, the novel connects the dynamics of singular and collective identity-

formation to larger cultural-historical kumblas that criss-cross social, cultural and

national boundaries throughout the globe. This expansive sense of the kumbla, in critical

conversation with Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, challenges notions of ethnic absolutism and

authenticity that critics such as Roberts seem to posit. As a rhizomorphic pan-African

diaspora, Gilroy’s model of the Black Atlantic opens up ways of thinking about historical

roots/routes and cultural interchange beyond conventional diasporic formulations of core,

dispersal and totality. Brodber’s conception of the kumbla, in turns, explores how

various social forces give shape and form to the idiosyncratic subject within these lines of

flight and cultural-historical intermixture. And by interrogating the process of how

subjects imaginatively engage in self-spectatorship through networks of sociocultural

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mirrors, Jane and Louisa immanently critiques the wholeness, purity or ‘innocence’ of

conventionally othered or essentialized subjects.

In Conclusion, In Medias Res: The Globe is Just Around the Corner

Through various modes of narrative, the kumbla in Jane and Louisa operates at different

scales and degrees of abstraction, “pebble into parable,” and both Nellie and an emergent

Jamaica learn that the “voice belongs to the family group dead and alive. We walk by

their leave, for planted in the soil, we must walk over them to get where we are going”

(12). Part of the movement towards a “new Jamaica” involves Jamaica as an actor rather

than a passive spectator on the world stage of history but also an engagement with the

past in a growing recognition of the intertwining of the local and the global. Since the

kumbla is “capable of infinite expansion,” the phrase “everybody is related” goes well

beyond Nellie’s rural village to encompass not simply Jamaica but the weave-in-motion

of the hubbed network of global interconnectedness, the ‘small world’ and so-called ‘six

degrees of separation’ in complex global systems (Brodber 11).

At the age of sixteen, Nellie asks her Aunt Becca permission to go to the movies

with Baba. However, knowing it “only takes two seconds,” Becca is concerned about

possible sexual involvement and pregnancy that would “turn [Nellie] woman before [her]

time” (17). The name of the theater, The Globe, brings to mind associations of film as a

‘window on the world’ of global culture that includes peak achievements of English

culture, such as Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre. Moreover, Becca’s “two seconds”

comment foregrounds the novel’s engagement with questions of spatiotemporal distance

between the local and the global or between the past and the present. In ‘making her

case’ to go on the date, Nellie argues “But Globe is just around the corner. What could
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happen in that little space of time?” (17). Indeed, instead of a linear chronological

narrative, Jane and Louisa spatializes time within the Bildungsroman genre, constructing

a web of interconnected moments of times-space filtered through Nellie’s consciousness.

Rather than throwing off history in favor of space, however, Brodber’s text

embodies relationality and juxtaposition akin to Foucault’s conception of a heterotopia—

a counter-site of alternate social ordering in which “all the other real sites that can be

found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted”—by

creating patchwork quilt of spatialized history from Nellie’s mind (Foucault 239). xxii

Nellie’s kumbla is a locus of historical contradictions, and the novel contains an

interlocking web of timespaces that undermines both the maturational narrative arc of the

Bildungsroman and the supposedly linear progression of global history and its “ever-

accumulating past.” Rather than points of origin unfolding and leaving behind the past

within neat schemes of ‘before’ and ‘after,’ the past is co-present as Nellie continuously

takes up positions within a complex and protean matrix of memories and histories, both

personal and collective. The structure of the novel implies that she increases her

connections but is always ‘in the middle’ and never whole. As she connects with her

ancestors, community and self, Nellie’s coming-of-age links her through a network-in-

motion of larger histories of slavery, colonialism and modern migration patterns.

In the Shandean tradition, Jane and Louisa is a Bildungsroman but does not begin

with Nellie’s birth or a clear establishment of lineage; instead Brodber’s novel is a textual

kumbla that mimics the protagonist’s position within an inter-connected matrix of

historical narratives. Her ancestry not only traces to a mixed race couple, but that

coupling is simply a node in the criss-crossing exchanges of colonial history and the slave
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routes/roots of the middle passage. While the mention of a “locus” or “home” may

seem to subvert rhizomorphic conceptions, there need not be a conflict between the

affirmation of local communal centering tendencies that work for harmony and a larger

tapestry of history and global culture and their own hubs. Home is perhaps not a taproot

but what is always ‘in the middle’ of an internalized and romanticized version of one’s

birth place and that of one’s ancestors. The desire for a centre and harmony at the

personal and local community level allows for an engagement with the global geo-

cultural matrix in a way that take Nellie’s kumbla deeper into local history and culture.

Indeed, rather than a novel intended for publication, Brodber originally composed

Jane and Louisa as a case study for her abnormal psychology students as part of a

Völkerpsychologiesocial psychology which analyzes the idiosyncratic subject within

culture and history, including the operations of language, myth and custom. In “Fiction

in the Scientific Procedure,” Brodber explains that fiction writing is part of her

“sociological method,” a preparatory self-critical interrogation before going out into the

field (164). Instead of “disinterested scholars,” Brodber’s goal is a methodology where

the social scientist includes her or his “‘I’ in the work, making this culture-in-personality

study a personal and possibly transforming work for the therapists and through them the

clients with whom they would work” (166). Yet, even in Jane and Louisa’s reception as

a novel, the mutuality here mimics the storytelling dynamic, where even so-called ‘white

Western scholars’ such as myself might find their own ‘I’ in Jane and Louisa. Drawn in

by the complexity and beauty of the text, I have discovered myself as implicated within

the histories of colonialism, slavery, racism and patriarchy in my sympathetic negotiation

with a fellow idiosyncratic subject in a way that is anything but disinterested.

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Notes

i
As Roberts explains, “Rodney, the radical man of the hour in 1968, captured the
political imagination of the first post-independence generation of West Indian
intellectuals with his journal Abeng and later with his monograph Groundings with My
Brothers, in much the same way and in roughly the same historical moment that Che
Guevara captured the imagination of youthful revolutionaries in Latin America and
throughout the world” (13).
ii
Originally inhabited by Arawak Indians, Columbus ‘discovered’ Jamaica in 1494, and
the Spanish colonized the island in 1509. The British captured Jamaica in 1655 and
imported slaves to work on sugar cane plantations—an industry that prospered until
Jamaica was the largest sugar producer in the eighteenth century. The Jamaican economy
faltered when slavery was abolished in 1834, and both racial tension and economic
slumps contributed to widespread riots in the 1930s. However, in 1944 the British
government granted Jamaica universal suffrage and self government. Jamaica was also
one of the founding members of the Federation of the West Indies, though when this
federation collapsed, William A. Bustamante (Jamaican Labor Party) negotiated
independence for the island as a dominion within the Commonwealth of Nations.
Jamaica became an independent country in 1962.
iii
Emerging in the mid eighteenth century as a recognized critical category with
scholarship on German works such as Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774),
Christoph Wieland’s Geschichte des Agathon (1765-6) [History of Agathon, tr. 1773],
and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-6), the literary form of the
Bildungsroman involves a coming-of-age story that traces the education, self-cultivation
and emergence of a consciousness from youth to maturity in a protagonist who eventually
begins to find a place in the larger adult world. Thomas Carlyle’s 1824 translation of
Wilhelm became influential in the Britain, though some notable English language
examples of this novel form predate Wieland, such as Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders
(1722) and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). Other Bildungsroman in the English
language canon include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens’ David
Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1860-1), Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), D.H.
Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man (first published in the Egoist 1914-15, though technically a Künstlerroman or
‘artist novel’). The prototypical European example of a radically non-linear
Bildungsroman is Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century work Tristram Shandy (1759-67,
predating Wieland). Notable African-American examples of the Bildungsroman include:
Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859); Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937); Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945); Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952); James
Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953); Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970);
and Paule Marshall’s Daughters (1991). Caribbean examples include: Tom Redcam’s
Becka’s Buckra Baby (1903, Jamaica); Herbert G. De Lisser’s Jane (1913, Jamaica);
C.L.R. James’s Minty Alley (1936, Trinidad); George Lamming’s In the Castle of My
Skin (1953, Barbados); Peter Kempadoo’s Guyana Boy (1960, Guyana); V.S. Naipaul’s A
House for Mr. Biswas (1961, Trinidad); Orlando Patterson’s The Children of Sisyphus
 180

(1964, Jamaica); Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1985, Antigua); and Marlene Nourbesee
Philip’s Harriet’s Daughter (1988, Jamaica).
iv
Johnson describes the narrative arc of Nellie’s character in terms of the plot’s
chronology and the novel’s four main sections: “The first conveys the heroine’s
fragmentary memories of childhood, early adulthood and education, and her separation
from her original village environment. Part Two shows her undergoing and recovering
from a mental breakdown that symbolizes the traumatic experiences of reconnecting with
her past. Having passed through this phase successfully, she is shown in Part Three
revisiting and re-interpreting the village environment. The final section reiterates the
main themes by “embroidering” key motifs in the narrative. [. . .] The highly elliptical
style of the first part gives way to more coherent forms of narrative as Nellie, the central
character, discovers links between her past and her present” (81).
v
Granted, Aunt Alice does say to Nellie in the final section “You are in one piece. You
are together again. As much as anybody else at least,” but it is in within a clipped and
elliptical conversation (131). Complicating Johnson’s scheme, though, section one also
explicitly references Nellie’s madness, triggered when her boyfriend Robin dies, and she
says to herself “You are mad. Walking up and down the asphalt road in your high-heeled
shoes. You are mad” (19). Indeed, as Jones surmises, “critical consensus…allows that
this section is the most confusing, for it reflects Nellie’s dissociated psyche sifting
through fragmented childhood memories” (95). As Johnson argues, the final section does
have slightly more coherent narrative units. However, it is nevertheless still fairly
fragmentary and elliptical, shifting amongst snippets of Nellie’s life, poetic definitions of
the kumbla, Anancy folk tales and a patchwork of family history. At the same time, the
putative account of Nellie’s breakdown in TO WALTZ WITH YOU occurs via the
novel’s most straight forward and chronological narration.
vi
For more on this, see Ross Posnock’s chapter “Black Intellectuals and Other
Oxymorons: Du Bois and Fanon” in Color and Culture.
vii
My sense of the kumbla simply connects it more explicitly to diasporan networks.
Roberts already talks about the “tapestry of diasporan folk civilization” and the fact that
“all diasporans are related” (130, 133). Where I differ from Roberts (and perhaps
Brodber as well) is to place on equal footing all forms of cultural exchange rather than
simply reverse the polarity of hegemony to place folk communities and afrocentrism on
‘top.’
viii
‘Rhizome,’ a botanical term, denotes plants such as bamboo with shallow roots that
can grow into complex tangled networks. Often spanning miles and miles near the
surface in every direction, these diffuse root systems have nodes of increased
connectivity but are without a central Taproot that grows downward (e.g. oak trees). In A
Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari draw upon this botanical term for
alternative ways of thinking about philosophical speculation. Rhizome-as-metaphor
contrasts a figurative Tree or Root that branches out but ultimately grounds itself in unity
and the One—such as Truth, God, The Absolute, or the Total Work. Instead, rhizomal
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modes of thought expose “aborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are” and explore
lines of flight that escape dichotomies, rupture totalities and connect to each other in an
acentric, asymmetrical, non-hierarchical fashion (8-9).
ix
Roberts notes that the Bildungsroman had a particular significance for the Caribbean:
“The novel of maturation is paradigmatic, just as allegorically the rite of passage from
colonialism to neocolonialism, experienced by a generation still living, resonated as the
representational equivalent of their historical and psychic state. The figure of coming of
age, passing into maturity, was their ur-trope” (81).
x
Aside from being an ideologically saturated term that maintains a sense of putative
superiority over the ‘developing’ or ‘Third’ world, the term ‘West’ is particularly
complicated when talking about Jamaica. The first Prime Minister under independence,
Alexander Bustamante (1962-67), stated an “irrevocable decision that Jamaica stands
with the West and the United States,” and this alliance held from 1962-1972. In 1972-80
under Michael Manley and the democratic-socialist People’s National Party (PNP), the
alliance shifted temporarily to the USSR. Thus, during the publication of Jane and
Louisa in 1980, Jamaica was part of the geographical West but allied with the USSR and
Cuba and hence the ‘East’ and ‘Second World’ in the Cold War sense.
xi
On the question of postmodernism, Roberts comments that “Despite innovative literary
stylistics and interdisciplinary postmodernist intertextuality, which dominate both her
fiction and social science, Brodber’s concerns remain largely traditionally Caribbean,
namely, educational indoctrination as a tool of social control in the service of cultural
imperialism. Finally, the most important feature of Brodber’s aesthetic is a developing
awareness of the crucial importance of indigenous folk culture, particularly its religious
values and other customs and practices, as a necessary act of self-reclamation” (64).
xii
While, as with postmodernism, I do not read the ‘post’ in exclusively linear terms
within the chronology of history, there is nevertheless a major shift in the regulative
framework from pre-independence to post-independence in Jamaica that establishes the
space for a more widespread critique of colonialism.
xiii
As an alternative to models that picture a multiplicity of colonies radiating outward
from the central root of the Empire’s metropolis, such as London or Paris, some forms of
postcolonial theory pick up on rhizomorphic metaphors to describe webs of interchange
emerging out of slavery, colonialism and current neo-imperialism. For instance, Bill
Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin note that “structures of power characterize
themselves in terms of unities, hierarchies, binaries and centres” (207). However, instead
of a ‘master plan’ of colonialism, “cultural hegemony operates through an invisible
network of filiative connections, psychological internalizations, and unconsciously
complicit associations” (207). While not negating the assumption that there are
conspicuous loci of power, the post-colonial use of rhizomes is a Foucauldian
counterpoint to the colonial myth of top-down monolithic powerinvolving “the
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analysis of a multiple and mobile field of force relations”that extends to Eurocentric

constructions of linear history and progress (Foucault 102).
xiv
In Color and Culture, Ross Posnock argues that “to recover the intellectual is to
recover a cosmopolitan universalism that has been held under suspicion during the reign
of postmodernism. With its bias towards the local, the particular, and the relative,
postmodernism favored the ‘organic’ (Gramsci) and ‘specific’ (Foucault) intellectual. In
the wake of these prestigious icons, universalism returns not in nostalgic defiance but
chastened, neither positing a ‘view from nowhere’ nor seeking to bleach out ethnicity and
erect a ‘color-blind’ ideal. In other words, many contemporary understandings of
universalism and strikingly reminiscent of Du Bois’s a century earlier,” including the
critical interrogation of the “reductionism of the ideology of ‘authenticity,’ which fixates
upon particularity or difference” (21).
xv
By providing a “safe enclosure of a Rastafarian kumbla,” Roberts argues, Nellie
“achieves a close proximity to and consciousness of her folk community” (96). At times
I would argue, though, Roberts simplifies the text by reading it too strongly through the
didactically allegorical dimension, despite Brodber’s explicitly announced “activist
intentions”: “Baba, symbol of afrocentric healing arts and occult religion, the secret to
and of diasporic survival, shows Nellie that reconnecting with her roots in a rural setting
was an authentic gesture and life path, but that living in the urban ghetto pretending to
defend radically Marxism to people from whom she was divided by class, culture, and
personality had not been. Baba’s anti-consumerism, anti-materialism, and books
demonstrates the life of a fakir and intimates the irrelevance of dialectical materialism.
His life-style shows the potential spiritual beauty of the alternative offered by
Rastafarianism” (96).
xvi
Found in both nature and computer-generated models, a fractal is an often-complex
geometric pattern formed by infinitely repeating a seed image so that each part is similar
to the whole.
xvii
Influential for postcolonial theory, in the Phenomenology of Perception Maurice
Merleau-Ponty critiques the conventional Heraclitean-Newtonian notion of time as a flow
or river, a linear succession of ‘nows.’ Instead, he describes a spatialized field of time-
space experience and relationality: “We must understand time as the subject and the
subject as time” (422). Hence, time only exists when “a subjectivity is there to disrupt
the plenitude of being in itself, to adumbrate a perspective, and introduce non-being into
it” (421). “Now” is only a function of “here,” namely common perspective and point of
view: “not a real process, not an actual succession that I am content to record. It arises
from my relation to things” (412). Time is not an objective context in which things occur,
an arrow or flowing river, but subjectivity experiencing itself as objects in spacea
regulative framework.
xviii
McClintock describes the conception of social history that emerged out of scientific
racism and Darwinian evolution theory: “The axis of time was projected onto the axis of
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space and history became global. With social Darwinism, the taxonomic project, first
applied to nature, was now applied to cultural history. Time became a geography of
social power, a map from which to read a global allegory of ‘natural’ social difference”
(37). Within the false universality imposed by Eurocentric discourse on time and
history, McClintock notes that within the “evolutionary family Tree of Man,” such as
Mantegazza’s “Morphological Tree of the Human Races” [see McClintock, fig. 1.5],
there were mutually constitutive intersections of race, gender and class that mapped the
bourgeois European individual as an autonomous entity at the pinnacle of social
evolution.
xix
Possibly the first one in 1880-1 but most likely the second one in 1899-1902.
xx
In his essay “The Uncanny,” Freud notes that “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or
alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has
become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (217).
xxi
In this “jigsaw puzzle,” if readers ‘connect the dots’ between various fragments in the
text, it seems the light-skinned and “uppity” Aunt Rebecca Richmond, whose “fish eyes
shamed everyone into unworthiness,” was courted by Stanley Ruddock (later father to
David and grandfather to Baba, Harris Ruddock), who is “round and very black” (93;
107; 99). Simultaneously, Becca, the “insipid khaki woman,” as Granny Tucker calls
her, had an affair with Stanley’s brother Mass Tanny Stewart that began when Stanley
was away at war in Cuba and Belgium. According to Granny Tucker, Tanny Stewart
“took that foolish woman from his brother” (86). As Aunt Alice explains to Nellie, this
affair between Tanny and Becca led to pregnancy, abortion and infertility: “She threw
away Tanny’s child and made herself a mule” (133). Becca still has feelings for Stanley
and “woulda give her eye teeth to partner with him in the quadrille but he has never
danced with anyone else but Miss Elsada” (Brodber 95-6; 100). However, after spending
most of his money on Rebecca, and losing his land to his brother Tanny, Stanley marries
Teacher Pinnock’s servant, Elsada, who feels she “would have to build him up from
scratch” (108-9). As a child of eight, Nellie wonders why the bourgeois Becca, who is all
“cleanness and decency,” curiously prays for Tanny “In Mehiah’s bamboo and thatch
church” “surrounded by perspiration, drum beating and moaning” rather than “our church
with its bell and organ” (91-3).
xxii
In “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault remarks that the “great obsession of the nineteenth
century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of
crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of
dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world” (237). In contrast, Foucault
observes that the “present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in
the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and
far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed” (237). Foucault’s comments might at first blush
appear like another grand-narrativization, yet he is primarily describing an epistemic shift
in the conditions for disparate cultural preoccupations and the formation of knowledge.
Perhaps dominant cultural obsessions and grand narratives are unavoidable, despite the
postmodern era’s supposed “incredulity” toward them.