Naturalizing identity, politicizing nature: Metaphors of identification in the writing of Caribbean women writers (Gisele Pineau, Maryse Conde, Guadeloupe, Erna Brodber, Jamaica, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Trinidad and Tobago)

Images drawn from nature and biology abound in Caribbean writing as metaphors for cultural identity. These metaphors have evolved, since Aimé Césaire's inaugural work, as writers dialogue with each other and with literary and cultural critics who believe that natural images convey an essentialist notion of identity. This dissertation provides a critical account of their dialogue by comparing the work of James Clifford, Paul Gilroy, Césaire, and Édouard Glissant, and shows that natural elements can be used as metaphors for non-essentialist forms of identification. I then analyze the metaphors that four women writers use to convey the complex identities and histories of their protagonists (two come from the Francophone, and two from the Anglophone Caribbean).; Each writer selects certain natural elements and then constructs them as metaphors of identity that are intricately woven into the narrative or poetic economy of the text. Gisèle Pineau's two novels, L'Esérance-macadam and L'Exil selon Julia, weave together natural and textual images into “imbricated metaphors,” thus undoing the binary opposition between natural and cultural elements that subtends the work of Clifford and Gilroy. In Myal, Erna Brodber's configuration of cultural growth and alienation in terms of spirit possession and phantom pregnancy allows me to revise the relationship between essentialism and physicality. My analysis of Marlene Nourbese Philip's poetic and critical work shows how natural images function as “mythic and intertextual transplants,” that is, how the meaning of metaphors is produced both in relation to specific conceptions of nature, as well as to other texts. Finally, I argue that Maryse Condé's two novels, La Vie scélérate and Desirada, reflect on the consequences of metaphorically representing identities, and show that metaphors are narratives of identification that are always partially blind to certain aspects of identity.; The strength of these women writers' work, I suggest, is their ability to stage the consequences of this partial blindness, and to propose metaphors and narratives of identity that, through devices such as polyphony, irony and imbrication, make room for less reductive, more open and complex ways of imagining identity.