Sun, Sexuality & Power – The Poetics of Domestic Violence in Modern Caribbean Literature

Volume 1 of this thesis undertakes a feminist reading of selected novels from the Anglophone Caribbean, published between 1950 and 2021, to explore the poetics employed by modern Caribbean fiction writers in writing about domestic violence. While an etiological examination of domestic violence is beyond the scope of this thesis, it accepts that domestic violence is grounded in and supported by patriarchal performances of gender, that literature plays a decisive role in social change, and that narratives utilising radical poetics, which subvert and interrogate patriarchal gender positioning, are required to achieve transformative social change in our understanding of and attitudes to domestic violence. The thesis therefore examines how modern Caribbean writers have contributed to the discourse on domestic violence through the poetics employed in the selected texts. Volume 1 also examines the creative process undertaken and the poetics employed in thematically addressing domestic violence in my novel How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, thereby placing this novel within the modern Caribbean literary discourse on violence against women. Volume 2 of the thesis consists of my novel How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House. The critical element of the thesis examines the selected texts within the broad themes of employment of the male gaze and the reflection of the Caribbean oral tradition, including the ‘calypso poetic,’ and evaluates the extent to which the texts surveyed may be said to have employed ‘radical poetics’ within these contexts, in addressing domestic violence. My research reveals a general pre-eminence of themes of nationhood in the novels published in the 1950s and 1960s and subordination of thematic treatment of women’s concerns, including domestic violence. While there is evidence of engagement of radical poetics in novels from this period, their discernible object would generally appear to be concerns of disenfranchisement of a poor, black underclass, and the realisation of a nationhood which mirrors colonial society in its patriarchal structure and resulting subordination of women. This study suggests a prominence in the employment of the male gaze in the earlier novels examined but also reveals a movement towards the employment of alternative ways of looking in later Caribbean literary discourse. It also suggests a continuing oral tradition whose focus has moved away from (only) nationalist concerns of empire to address the role, position and oppression of women through violence. I adopt and modify Kamau Brathwaite’s three-pronged evaluation of Caribbean literature of the 1960s to assess the extent to which modern writers demonstrate in the texts surveyed, an attempt to signpost an alternative reality for Caribbean women as it relates to domestic violence.