| In this study examining thematological theories of revision in novels by African, African-American and Caribbean women writers, I argue that Toni Morrison, Cynthia James, Mariama Ba, Gloria Naylor and Alice Walker go beyond revision to re-visualizing underdeveloped female characters in black male-authored canonical texts. Through inter-textuality and gendered "signifyin'(g)," the African Diaspora women authors examined provide a sacred space for their characters, dedicating entire novels to their plight rather than the paucity of pages to which they were previously confined. More than raising the characters from bas-reliefs to three-dimensional sculptures, they deliver living, breathing, speaking and undeniably visible entities; broadening motifs into themes, actions into situations, types into characters, traits into complex personalities, and topos into discourse.;Morrison's The Bluest Eye is read as a revisualization of the incestuously violated Matty Lou in the Trueblood episode of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. In her short-story "Soothe Me, Music, Soothe Me" James de-romanticizes the Calypso in Earl Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance by giving voice to a rape victim within Trinidadian Carnival. The co-wives in Ousmane Sembene's Xala are rewritten in Ba's So Long A Letter, focusing on their subjugation in polygamous marriages while examining the political impotence of the post-colonial African bourgeoisie. The poetically inscribed and fetishized women in Jean Toomer's Cane are overtly re-figured as prostitutes in Naylor's Bailey's Cafe. Supporting Western feminist arguments against female circumcision, Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy reveals her problematized social position as she revises Ngugi's The River Between.;The African Diaspora women authors analyzed insist on an examination of the complexity of black women with often compromised, integrated or homogenized identities as they explore and define their positionality as warriors against and survivors of oppression globally. By carrying their black female characters beyond the confines of stereotypes and the, at times, unintentional neglect or even erasure enacted by black male authors, these women authors are engaged in the invention of multidimensional protagonists in polyphonic counter-narratives. Without ignoring the black woman writer's originality and creative longitude, I conclude that the rescuing revisualizations of black female characters are necessary corrective efforts by exquisitely cunning cannibals. |
