Performativity, Power Plays And The Postcolonial Body

Performativity, Power Plays and the Postcolonial Body: applying Butler s consideration of materiality and identity to Kincaid, Cliff and Dangarembga s novels.

You know, darling, castration ain t de main t ing not a-tall, a-tall (Cliff: 2013, 168). Harry/Harriet s assertion in Michelle Cliff s No Telephone to Heaven is simultaneously an incredibly simple and an incredibly complex take on gender identity. The character s belief that the materiality of the body, in terms of genitalia, is irrelevant to her identification as a woman, is the question which forms the basis of Judith Butler s theoretical work in Bodies That Matter. Butler explicitly asks in the very opening line whether there is a way to link the question of the materiality of the body to the performativity of gender (2011: xi). This question can be expanded to also include the performativity of identity more generally, (which Butler does to some extent in her discussion of sexual identity,) and productively applied to the linking of the body and performances of personal identity under postcolonial conditions in Jamaica Kincaid s The Autobiography of My Mother, Tsitsi Dangarembga s Nervous Conditions, and Michelle Cliff s No Telephone to Heaven. By virtue of their genre as postcolonial bildungsroman, these novels offer expositions of identity which are inherently grounded in the socio-political settings which give rise to them. Such grounding of literary identities provides an example of Butler s intention to develop an understanding of performativity not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains (2011: xii). For instance, Harry/Harriet s naming of castration as irrelevant is inherently linked to the discourse of her Jamaican identity, both verbally with Cliff utilising the dialect in her presentation of the thought ( ain t , t ing , a-tall ) and ideologically, in the rejection of what appears to be a prevalent societal belief that to be a woman, one must not have a penis. This explains Claire s immediate response you have it done? (castration) to Harry/Harriet s request that she now be called only Harriet , assuming that with a different gender identity comes a different materiality of the body.

Harry/Harriet s recognition and rejection of the prevalent discourse linking genitalia to gender identity is a phenomena which Butler explores at length on a more general level in Bodies. She argues that identification is implicated in what it excludes (2011: 119). This is a summation of the idea that in response to someone else s performed identity, one may choose not to accept their performance and therefore to exclude them from our own views on how identity should be performed. This asserts the identity of the excluder, reinforcing their own notions of identity and its ideal performativity. Just such an example comes in Harriet s family s response to her transition once I tell them my choice, them nuh cut off me water? (Cliff, 2013: 168.) This is a particularly dark rejection of another s identity given the novel s earlier comment that unless [his family] protect him, because he is also one of them, though apart from them, reminding them of their wholeness he will end up in some back-o -wall alley in Raetown, fucked to death (2013: 21). The family know that cutting Harry/Harriet off because of her identity endangers her life here, the performativity of gender is indeed linked to the materiality of the body, where other peoples response to one dictates the safety of the other. Acutely pertinent is the family s measuring their normalness against his strangeness , reminding them of their wholeness (2013: 21). Whilst Harriet was always strange (2013: 21), her decision to transition was clearly one strange step too far the collective identity of the family was no longer able to accept Harriet s performed identity, choosing to exclude and endanger her rather than to challenge their own ideas of acceptable performance.

The rejection of others is therefore formative to the positioning of self. In Autobiography, Xuela is shown to have an awareness of how her gendered sexual identity may be rejected by others and utilises this she chooses to wear the clothes of a dead man to work each day and cut off the two plaits of hair on my head , so that I did not look like a man, I did not look like a woman (Kincaid, 1996: 98-99). This is a performative act which sufficiently confuses her presentation of gendered identity to ensure that she is left alone. As Roland Barthes notes in his seminal work The Fashion System, by playing the game of clothing, the garment itself substitutes for the person (Barthes, 1990: 220). At this point in the novel, Xuela is no longer performing a person but a concept she is performing freedom, living alone for the first time and coming to know myself (Kincaid, 1996: 99). However, this performed freedom is a freedom from the only gendered identity that she has ever known, relegating it to a performance regulated by the social discourse which dictates that the postcolonial woman s body is the site of least freedom.[1] Guillermina DeFerrari recognises this discourse, but sees it as an opportunity for the advancement of agency rather than the removal of it. She postulates that due to the high social and political investments made on the native female body during [the colonial project], it is possible to imagine that such a traditionally devalued entity may also, however paradoxically, become a strategic site of empowerment (DeFerrari, 2012: 146). In this particular elucidation, DeFerrari is speaking of Caribbean women s bodies specifically. Certainly, there is empowerment in Kincaid s decision to alter the materiality of (hair) and upon (clothing) her body in order to present as neither man nor woman she frees herself from the consignment of others to a binary gendered identity.

The devaluing of the female body by the colonial project and, latterly, the female body as a site of empowerment, is the main concern in Ayo Coly s recent article, in which she explores the covering and uncovering of the African female body, and how this exposes an anxiety within postcolonial patriarchy (2015: 12). She notices the use of the African female body as a rhetorical element of colonialism then postcolonialism (2015: 13). The symbolic reference to Africa as a women stems, in Coly s opinion, from colonial discourses which inscribed the African woman as sexually deviant and in need of the colonising nation s morality, placing them within a colonial discourse of clothing that led to the African female body being singled out as a symbol (2015: 13). This has created a specific anxiety in postcolonial discourses, as the woman-Africa symbol is reconfigured and women s bodies become politically symbolic in doing so for instance, Coly references the proposed anti-nudity bill in Nigeria in 2008, and the proposed mini-skirt ban in Uganda of the same year (2015: 12). These pieces of legislation were both created in an attempt to present the African female body and therefore, symbolically, the postcolonial African subject as modest, in what appears to be a direct response to the colonial inscri ption of sexual deviance and immorality. Materiality of women s bodies is here linked, unfairly and impossibly, to the performing of a whole postcolonial nation-state s identity. This anxiety surfaces in Dangarembga s Nervous Conditions, as Tambu s extended family return to Zimbabwe after living in England:

Dressed in flat brown shoes and a pleated polyester dress [Maiguru] did not look as though she had been to England. My cousin Nyasha, pretty bright Nyasha, on the other hand, obviously had. There was no other explanation for the tiny little dress she wore, hardly enough of it to cover her thighs I could not condone her lack of decorum. I would not give my approval. I turned away. (2004: 37.)

Tambu assesses the practical, plain aesthetic of her aunt s flat brown shoes and polyester dress as being in line with how a woman from Zimbabwe should look, whilst Nyasha s revealing mini dress makes it obvious that foreign culture has influenced her. In Tambu s eyes, Nyasha s lack of decorum sets her apart from Zimbabwean women. Women s bodies are therefore operating as political symbols on this level as well as on the legislative level cited by Coly, with the postcolonial anxiety regarding a presented collective identity of morality informing the way in which Tambu responds to her cousin. Just as Harry/Harriet s family were measuring their normalness against his strangeness (Cliff, 2013: 21), Tambu measures her cultural identity against Nyasha s, and chooses to exclude her from it I turned away (Dangarembga, 2004: 37).

This is perhaps why Xuela s use of clothing to remove her gendered sexuality makes her body such a prominent example of DeFerrari s strategic site of empowerment (2012: 146). Xuela is not only enacting a personal freedom, but a collective freedom, in her rejection of her postcolonial society s ideals around how women should dress. Taking agency over her own sexuality and perceived sexual identity is a symbolic move against a society which would inscribe sexuality upon her, within the regulations and constraints of its particular discourse. Xuela feels this empowerment tangibly: I had gained such authority over my own ability to be that I could cause my own demise with complete calm (Kincaid, 1996: 99). Her ability to be is an ability to exist outside expectations and the inscri ptions of others, an ability to perform outside the reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains (Butler, 2011: xii). This is particularly pertinent when we consider the scene s location within the novel Xuela has left the LaBatte s home, where she chose an abortion over becoming a mother, and knew then that this refusal would be complete. I would never become a mother, but that would not be the same as never bearing children (Kincaid, 1996: 97). She refuses to perform within her society s sexual and reproductive expectations she rejects the societal definition of mother, and redefines what it is to bear children within the parameters of her own experience and ideology. With her rejection of traditional motherhood comes a rejection of traditional womanhood, presenting as neither a woman nor a man.

Fittingly, Butler suggests that a radical refusal to identify with a given position suggests that on some level an identification has already taken place, an identification that is made and disavowed (2011: 75). Not only does Xuela s rejection of traditional gendered identities operate in this way, but so does the rejection by characters across all three novels Nervous Condidtions, No Telephone, and Autobiography of the remnants of colonialism within their cultures. This denial of certain aspects of identity which are outside culturally accepted classifications of bodies fits into Anna Gething s consideration of the abject as a means of protection (2010: 270). Abjection I shall return to, as the understanding of denial as offering protection is productive in the discussion of rejections of colonial remnants. Repeatedly, we see Kincaid, Dangarembga and Cliff s characters making an identification and disavowing it, denying the original identification as a means of protecting their own identity. Xuela and traditional motherhood, as discussed Claire and her rejection of patrilineal progression (Cliff) Nyasha and the rejection of colonial history (Dangarembga). For Claire, the rejection of her original identification comes with age. She recalls Miss Naomi, the butcher s wife washing tripe in the river, and how she screamed at a dark woman older than her mother, This is my grandmother s river! You have no right ! (Cliff, 2013: 172-3). The memory of her rudeness makes her blush, as her older, more aware, self, recognises the arrogance of her younger self. This younger self followed her father s example Claire s sister notes that the reason their mother left Claire in America with their father, but took the sister back to Jamaica with her, is because you favour backra, and fe you daddy (Cliff, 2013: 105). Claire s father, Boy Savage, was desperate to identify as a white American when enrolling Claire for secondary school, he answers the question of race? with white of course , stating that my wife and I are separated and wondering if Kitty s blood [would] now be erased from Claire s heritage (Cliff, 2013: 98-99). Boy s rejection of his own and his daughter s non-white heritage is internalised by Claire, who later has to take pains to un-learn it. Her identification with an initial rejection is eventually rejected itself in order to identify with an acceptance of her own history, which she has learned rather, recognised since my return to Jamaica many years later (Cliff: 2013, 196). This rejection of the remnants of Jamaica s colonialism the idea of whiteness as an inherently better identity and history is Claire s way of protecting the identity which she ultimately feels closer to (that of her mother s non-white heritage). Claire qualifies her rejection, that I m not outside this history it s a matter of recognition (Cliff, 2013: 194). She has recognised herself as part of it, and now wishes for others to do the same.

Claire s overt recognition of her own history and rejection of colonial history is echoed in Nervous Conditions. Throughout the novel, Nyasha never quite meets her parents expectations, never quite performs the traditional identities of good daughter, student and member of society they wish her to have. The pressure which she feels herself to be under from these expectations of societally accepted performances of identity come to a head in the novel s final pages. She has clearly identified and disavowed these expectations earlier in the novel to have reached the point where repressing her disavowal manifests in a psychotic episode. Nyasha rampaged, shredding her history book between her teeth ( Their history. Fucking liars. Their bloody lies. ), breaking mirrors and jabbing the fragments into her flesh , whilst asking do you see what they ve done? They ve taken us away All of us. They ve deprived you of you, him of him, ourselves of each other (Dangarembga, 2004: 204-205). Nyasha s recognition of the colonial regime s erasure of Zimbabwean identity and history is violently enacted here, with her inability to continue disavowing the societal expectations which have been shaped by this regime. Her desperation is apparent as she reiterates the violence of the erasure of identity upon her own body, jabbing fragments into her flesh as she destroys the commodities which her parents have attained by performing these colonially infected societal expectations. The materiality of her own body becomes a site for the rejection of the colonial identity and history to which she, too, is supposed to perform. In this way, disavowal does not necessarily protect her body, but it does give a chance for the protection of her own identity and history.

Nyasha s recognition of her own heritage as having been denied by colonially-set cultural norms brings us back to a consideration of abjection. Butler remarks that:

The exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet subjects, but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject.

(2011: xiii.)

The abject, then, is necessary to the production and maintenance of the norm. Vincent Leitch defines the abject as what the subject`s consciousness has to expel or disregard in order to create the proper separation between subject and object (Leitch, 2001: 2167). When this is applied to other beings, the abject becomes a domain, with those in it consigned to the status of object bodies which are unthinkable and outside those of the subject. The colonial abjection of bodies such as Nyasha s is what led to the creation of damaging cultural norms discussed earlier from Coly s article such as the use of African women s bodies as political symbols of collective identity. In the three novels I am discussing, there are repeated instances of abject beings trying to redefine such norms. We might return to Xuela s rejection of traditional gendered and sexual identities with the way that she defines herself against the first wife of Philip, a white man whom she later marries. Philip s first wife views herself as a lady , whilst Xuela describes herself as a woman . Xuela makes a distinction here:

A lady is a combination of elaborate fabrications, a collection of externals, facial arrangements, and body parts, distortions, lies, and empty effort. I was a woman and as that I had a brief definition: two breasts, a small opening between my legs, one womb it never varies and they are always in the same place. [Philip s first wife] would never describe herself in this way, she would shrink from such a descri ption.

(Kincaid, 1996: 159.)

This is a perfect example of abjection. The formation of the lady s identity is managed by the disavowal of the woman s ( she would never describe herself in this way ). Of course, this formation is paradoxical because the lady in this instance is also formed of breasts, vagina, and womb, meaning that the lady is trying to deny not only herself (in the separation of herself from woman ), but the very materiality of her body. This is a violent formation of identity which throws the lady into crisis, abjecting the woman who is also part of her. The lady is also performed externally comprised of facial arrangements, and body parts, distortion, lies, and empty vessels whilst the woman is a pre-existing set of bodily parts which never varies and are always in the same place . Butler states that certain forms of disavowal do reappear as external and externalized figures of abjection who receive the repudiation of the subject time and again (2011: 76). In this line of thinking, the abject body can become a symbolic form of disavowal. The norm disavows the abject because it is formed by a disavowal of the norm we see this in Harry/Harriet s family disavowing her because of her disavowal of the gendered identity which she is expected to perform due to the materiality of her body being gendered as male.

This complex relation of disavowals also complicates power, as discussed by Butler:

To the extent that subject-positions are produced in and through a logic of repudiation and abjection, the specificity of identity is purchased through the loss and degradation of connection, and the map of power which produces and divides identities differentially can no longer be read.

(2011: 760.)

Insofar as subjects are formed by rejection and abjection, the specificity of the subject s identity comes about through being separate by their own choice or by others choices from others. Power therefore becomes difficult to read in this formation. Does the individual have power in rejecting, or being rejected? Does the non-abject have power in abjecting, or being wilfully denied by, the abject? How can the effect of the one upon the other be traced? Butler suggests that we cannot tell who is making the power plays in this scenario I would suggest that with consideration of the context which produces the subjects, we can. An illuminative textual moment comes again with Xuela s subversion of the norm, as she abject Philip through descri ption of him:

His hair was thin and yellow like an animal s his skin was thin and pink and transparent, as if it were on its way to being skin but had not yet reached that state that real skin is it was not the skin of anyone I have loved yet and not the skin I dreamed of his nose was narrow and thin . . . not like a nose I was used to being fond of.

(Kincaid, 1996: 152.)

DeFerrari picks up on this moment, noting that Xuela s descri ption addresses traditional marks of racial difference (2012: 155). Xuela places Philip in the category of both animal and human, comparing his hair to an animal s and comparing his body to the bodies of people I have loved . Differentiating him from past lovers, but taking him as a present one, definitively places Philip in the category of human the relation of him to an animal, then, is the aspect here which is worth further scrutiny. Consigning someone as animalistic quite literally dehumanises them, placing them as separate from you however, Xuela has firmly recognised him as human by taking him as a lover. Therefore, Xuela is making a power play in both confirming his humanity yet marking Philip as entirely different from her, and as a lesser, animalistic, being, Xuela shows a contempt for and refusal to identify with Philip, whilst asserting herself as the norm, the more human. Here, the being which colonialism would have abjected instead abjects the being colonialism would have recognised.

In Cliff s novel, we see the opposite, and expected, play of power, though at a more general level. Christopher is a character abjected throughout No Telephone, repeatedly and by various characters. The ideological rejection of him is preceded by a geographical one as a boy, he lives in the Dungle, the dung heap jungle where people squirmed across mountains of garbage (Cliff, 2013: 32). Writing in their voice through free indirect discourse, Cliff s descri ption of the Dungle gives a clear indication as to how the slum and its inhabitants were viewed by Kingston s residents as rubbish, as insects, as unclean. In her influential work on abjection, Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva notes that:

Refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.

(1982: 3 italics in original.)

Members of Kingston s society are continually reminded, by the presence of the refuse of the Dungle, that other Jamaicans are being thrust aside in order for them to live as they do. The uneasy crossing of the border of inside and outside these bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit validates this thrusting aside. For instance, Cliff makes a visceral descri ption of a scene in which Christopher is not thrust aside, by quite literally picked up by his mother s old employers, Mas Charles and his wife. In de cyar de woman complain dat him stink him fraid fe ask dem to stop de cyar, so him peepee pon himself. She complain about de stink again (Cliff, 2013: 42). The stench of the boy s body and his urination is framed as unacceptable only to the wife to Christopher, these are the condition in which he is used to living, and the sudden entrance into markedly luxurious conditions the interior of a car scare him . To the wife, the stench of Christopher is a reminder that she is better than him, her body is more acceptable, and she keeps her bodily functions private. As he grows up, Christopher continues to be kept at arm s length from the societal norm. People he worked for spoke to him only when they wanted something done The bus conductors asked only for his fare. The shopkeepers only sought payment (Cliff, 2013: 44). Like Xuela s figuration of Philip, the general figuration of Christopher is as an abject, animalistic being, human and yet not quite as human as those who abject him. The culmination of this comes in the novel s final chapter, when Christopher has been figured as less than human for so long that he has lost his name, known only as De Watchman . He is scouted by Hollywood film directors to play the forest god, Sasabonsam, asked only to howl and told that your hair, the look in your eyes I don t want you to change a thing (Cliff, 2013: 205). The materiality of of De Watchman s body is, to the white film directors, the materiality of a monstrous character, rather than that of another human being. Cliff, however, reminds us that this is not the case when in costume, she clarifies that his human body [was] covered in a suit of long red hair (2013: 207). Cliff is careful to separate the monstrous from the human in the materiality of De Watchman s body, prompting the reader s understanding that the reception of his performance literally in the case of the film, and sociologically in the case of other characters responses to him throughout the novel is what makes him monstrous, rather than some inherent quality about himself. If we return to Butler s quote at this juncture, we can see that the sociological reception of De Watchman s performance is grounded in the societal discourse which consigned him to the Dungle as a child and then led to his continual abjection. In Christopher s transition to De Watchman, we can glean an understanding of performativity not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains (Butler, 2011: xii). Christopher performs the phenomena which the discourse of Jamaican society tells him he is we are able to track how the societal constraints upon his life leads him into the role of De Watchman.

To link the materiality of the body back to such performativity, we may dwell further on Kristeva s evocation of these bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit (1982: 3). Building on Kristeva s definitions of abjection, Butler suggests that it is at those boundaries the boundaries of the inside and the outside, the public and the private, that which appals and that which is acceptable of bodily life where abjected or deligitimated bodies fail to count as bodies , and the abject is therefore at its most visible (2011: 15). Gething, on the other hand, works from the view that the abject appears most pertinently at stages of physical transition, seeping and leaking into subjectivity at the landmarks of birth, adolescence, ageing and death (2010: 268). In terms of the three novels under discussion here, Gething s proposal seems to be correct. The times at which boundaries between the inside and the outside of the material body are most complicated are times related to birth, adolescence, ageing, and death. In Kincaid, Xuela s abortion I could smell the wetness it was blood, fresh and old (1996, 91) in Dangarembga, Tambu s first period washing those rags in Maiguru s white bathroom making a mess in the toilet bowl before I flushed it away, the business became nasty and nauseating (2004, 97) and particularly in Cliff, the way that ageing bodies are written as entirely unacceptable in Jamaican society. Interestingly, in the example of Cliff, the abjection of ageing bodies does not only appear due to a bodily transition, but also due to a societal one. The descri ption of Jamaica s aged women symbolised in the character of the Magnanimous Warrior which I will discuss is wonderfully foregrounded by Kristeva, who states that fear of the archaic mother turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power. It is this power, a dreaded one, that patrilineal filiation has the burden of subduing (1982: 77). With this in mind, let us consider Cliff s reflection upon a historical event in Jamaica s recent history the 1980 alms house fire which killed 187 aged women.[2] The women are treated badly in Cliff s depiction of the hospitals which took them in she lies in bed in a public hospital with sores across her buttocks. No one swabs her wounds. Flies gather. No one turns her in her bed (2013: 164). Given that the ageing body is more reliant on others to look after it, the boundaries of the public and private body and its functions are blurred in the symbolic character of the Magnanimous Warrior. More interestingly than the materiality of the Magnanimous Warrior s body, though, is all that she represents. The denial of matrilineal progression is manifest within her, and the forgetting of Jamaica s traditional identity, protected and raised by mothers, is inscribed upon her body by Cliff. She has been burned up she has starved to death. She wanders with swollen feet. She has cancer (2013: 164). The Magnanimous Warrior has protected the community she treats cholera with bitterbush. She burns the canefields but the community does not protect her (2013: 163). This exemplifies the way in which societal discourse affects the reception and response of identity Magnanimous Warrior, once powerful, now abjected. Her body is the only connection to the past and it does not survive the present. Not only does it not survive, but her identity, located in the traditional past, is removed from her as they have taken away her bag of magic. Her teeth. Her goat s horn , the items which are key to the practice of Obeah (2013: 164). Cliff says we have forgotten her I say that her identity has been recognised and rejected by a developing society focussed on the patrilineal progression (which the novel follows Clare having to consciously unlearn).

In the face of this discussion around bodies, performativity and power in the postcolonial settings of Cliff, Dangarembga and Kincaid s novels, how may we respond? How may Butler s theories of the links between performativity and the material body, as well as performativity being the power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains (2011: xii), be furthered? In response to her own discussion in Bodies, Butler believes that an economy of difference is in order in which the matrices, the crossroads at which various identifications are formed and displaced, force a reworking of that logic of non-contradiction by which one identification is always and only purchased at the expense of another (2011: 79). There is an implicit belief here that identity shouldn t necessarily be denied, but that the formation of identity as a consequence of disavowal, abjection and exploitation is problematic, in that giving it space is allowing for the violence of its formation. In the above quote, Butler postulates that to combat this, matrices of identity formation must be altered in order to allow for identity formation which does not rely on exclusion. She also advocates for a reading and response to the identity of others which takes time to consider the formation of that identity, asking which exclusions by societal regulations and constraints have created it. These are all admirable suggestions, but they do not offer a real alternative to the violence inherent in the formation of identity by the disavowal, rejection and abjection of others. What Butler s suggestions do offer is a method by which we may respond more compassionately to the presentation of identity. Whilst arguing that matrices need to be altered to force a reworking of that logic of non-contradiction , she does not suggest how this may be done, and in asking for thoughtful empathy in the reading of identities by considering the exclusions which gave rise to them, the exclusionary formation of identity remains an operative paradigm. Butler seems, in fact, to accept this paradigm as inevitable, proposing that the trajectory of response from this point will be a matter of tracing the ways in which identification is implicated in what it excludes, and to follow the lines of that implication for the map of future community that it might yield (2011: 80).

Instead of a solution to the violence of exclusionary identity formation, then, Butler leaves her readers with a method of predicting the future of identity formation based on the understanding that identity formation will continue violently, through abjection, disavowal and exclusion. Perhaps we, too, should embrace this in order to consider the map of future community (Butler, 2011: 80). Kristeva certainly does she seems to view a promotion of matrilineal progression as the solution to violent identity formation. I return to her earlier quote with this in mind: fear of the archaic mother turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power. It is this power, a dreaded one, that patrilineal filiation has the burden of subduing (1982: 77). There is a power of creation in matrilineal progression which does not exist in the patrilineal, which is what gives rise to the patrilineal anxiety over formation of identity as we have seen time and again in Kincaid, Cliff and Dangarembga s novels. To the abjection of the matrilineal the recognition of it, and rejection of it as outside the patrilineal societal norm we may add Gething s belief that Kristeva s consideration of the abject is a consideration of subjectivity, with the abject refusing to acknowledge borders and rules (Gething, 2010: 269). Perhaps, in an expansion to Kristeva s answer of matrilineal progression, abjection of bodies and identities is the solution to further exclusionary identity formation. A resetting of borders and rules by those who the patrilineal regulations and constraints do not serve will create a new societal discourse, which will still (as Butler notes, and as quotes in this essay s opening) produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains , but will do so in a way which gives space to those who have previously been abjected. In the novels, such attempts are shown to fail in Cliff, Claire s armed resistance ends with her death in Dangarembga, Nyasha s resistance ends with her consignment to a psychiatric unit but these arguably only fail because action was taken before the discourse was changed. Change the discourse to one of matrilineal progression, and the anxieties of the patrilineal become assuaged.

Abbreviations

No Telephone No Telephone to Heaven, Michelle Cliff (2013)

Autobiography The Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid (1996)

Bodies Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler (2011)

Bibliography

Primary

Cliff, Michelle, No Telephone to Heaven, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).

Dangarembga, Tsitsi, Nervous Conditions, (Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd, 2004).

Kincaid, Jamaica, The Autobiography of my Mother, (London: Vintage, 1996).

Secondary

Barthes, Roland, The Fashion System, trans. by Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (California: University of California Press, 1990).

Butler, Judith, Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of "sex" (Oxon: Routledge, 2011).

Coly, Ayo A., Un/clothing African womanhood: colonial statements and postcolonial discourses of the African female body (2015), in Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 33:1, pp.12-26.

De Ferrari, Guillermina, Erotic Interventions: The Political and the Intimate in Jamaica Kincaid s The Autobiography of My Mother in Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction, ed. by A. James Arnold, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012) pp.144-180.

Gething, Anna, Menstrual Metamorphosis and `the Foreign Country of Femaleness`: Kate Grenville and Jamaica Kincaid in Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women s Writing, ed. By Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo and Gina Wisker, (New York: Rodopi, 2010) pp.267-282.

Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

Leitch, Vincent B. ed, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2001).

Morgan, Robin ed., Sisterhood is Global: The International Women`s Movement Anthology (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1984).

Rich, Adrienne, Notes Toward a Politics of Location in, Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader ed. by Reina Lewis and Sarah Mills, (New York: Routledge, 2003) pp.29-42.

[1] My discussion here is informed by Reina Lewis and Sarah Mills eds. Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, particularly Adrienne Rich s chapter Notes Toward a Politics of Location .

[2] This information is recorded and commented upon on page 113 of Robin Morgan s Sisterhood is Global: The International Women`s Movement Anthology.