ACADEMIC JOURNAL ARTICLE Caribbean Quarterly

Aunt Jen
By Forbes, Curdella

Article excerpt
Paulette Ramsay. Aunt Jen. Oxford: Heinemann, 2002. Pb. 105 pages.

Paulette Ramsay's deceptive novella tells the story of Sunshine, a young girl growing up in rural Jamaica
in the 1960s to 70s.

'Deceptive'-because the simple prose of Ramsay's child narrator (Sunshine herself, writing her story in
the form of letters to a mother in England who never answers) masks and reveals several layers of
reality that make for a complex, finely nuanced story. Aunt Jen is a sophisticated exploration of the
issues of migration, exile and diaspora from a point of intersection between Caribbean migration in the
early days and the present. Ramsay's narrative specifically explores the effect of these issues on
children, a group given scant if any attention both in our traditional readings of the Caribbean
bildungsroman, and in the current preoccupation with adult gender and cross border identity in
diaspora studies. Aunt Jen is an important work, as it is children who suffer the greatest fallout from
new migration trends between the Caribbean and the North American and European metropoles.

Ramsay's careful modulation of the child narrator's voice exploits the familiar strengths of the
bildungsroman. On the one hand, there is the irony created in the interplay between the child's naïve
response to inconsistent adult behaviour and the evidential detail that allows the reader to assess and
judge that behaviour. On the other hand, there is the searing critique that is generated as the child
grows older and is able to make her own appropriate judgements. In Ramsay's treatment the
circumstances of the child's loss of innocence infuse the narrative with a heartbreaking poignancy that
barely skirts the edges of tragedy. In the end, Sunshine's resilience, nurtured by family and community
support, rescues her from a tragic fate and speaks of the refusal of tragedy that is pointed in the
Caribbean mode of carnival.

One haunting example is seen where Sunshine begins to apprehend that her mother, 'Aunt Jen', is
probably never going to answer her letters, and does not in fact care much for her. The child's grief,
anger and sense of violation express themselves in a series of rewritings of the same letter. The rewrites
show her struggle between these emotions, a kind of despairing hope that she may yet be wrong, and
the good manners that she has been taught and which dictate that one's elders should be respected.
Here 'respect' in Jamaican/Caribbean cultural terms means keeping silent about one's true feelings
where their expression might not show the adult in a good light. Much later we learn that Sunshine has
not in fact sent the letters, and they remain primarily an index of her growth into the experience of loss
that accomplishes maturity.

Sunshine's withholding of several letters links to ideas of vocality and silence, which are the basis on the
young girl's maturation takes place. The progression of the novel as a series of unanswered letters in
which she tells of her upbringing nurtured by the taciturn but strong and supportive presence of her
grandfather, and the voices of church, community and grandmother (Ma), creates Sunshine as the
product of a liminal space between these opposites: silence and vocality -and between absence,
presence, exile and community. If her struggle to come to terms with her mother's silence forces her to
discover a strength she had not known herself capable of, it is the community that gives her the sure
foundation from which that strength springs. The interplay is marked by her increasingly frequent
quotation of Ma's pithy (biblical and proverbial) sayings as a way of battling the enigma of Jen, side by
side with increasing assertions of her independence of Ma's worldview as she grows towards adulthood.
It is marked too in the inversion of power by which she keeps Aunt Jen on tenterhooks when the latter
(it seems) finally writes back: she makes Jen wait upon her own silence, while she decides whether she
will accept the invitation to come to England after Ma's death. …