Mixed Race Studies

Jamette Carnival and Afro-Caribbean Influences on the Work of Jean Rhys

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 3, Issue 2 (Fall 2005)
22 paragraphs
ISSN 1547-7150

Cynthia Davis

Most art critics would agree that since the Universal Exhibition of 1900 in Paris, African aesthetics have profoundly influenced twentieth century sculpture and painting. Literary critics have paid less attention to ways in which West African culture and rhetorical patterns have shaped twentieth century writing. A case in point is the Dominican writer Jean Rhys (1890-1979) who has been located within the discursive spaces of formalism and feminism and, in the case of Wide Sargasso Sea, postcolonialism. Aside from Caribbeanists who, as Kamau Brathwaite points out in “A Post-Cautionary Tale,” bat Rhys back and forth as “The Helen of Our Wars,” critical response to Rhys’ work usually privileges its European modernism and concern with form over its Caribbean cultural context. Even though Ford Madox Ford trumpets her Antillean origin in the introduction to her first book, The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927), critics of Rhys’ first four novels rarely mention her West Indian identity. Such an oversight is puzzling, considering that every text, European setting notwithstanding, includes such identifiable Afrocentric elements as parody, satire, masquerade, hybridity, heteroglossia, and the rhetorical technique of call-and-response. Critics who do acknowledge the culture of the Black Atlantic in all of Rhys’ work include Kenneth Ramchand and Elaine Savory. Ramchand contextualizes her style, “essentially image and rhythm,” as part of the Negritude movement of the 1930’s (Ramchand 134), while Savory contends that Rhys’ texts “conduct important conversations between gender, national, racial and class positions” (198). Janette Martin further asserts that Afrocentric spirituality provides all of Rhys’ protagonists with an “alternative epistemology” (5), “to transcend or, more important, to transgress conventional modes of knowing and behaving” (4). It is surprising that even after the publication of her specifically West Indian novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), A. Alvarez hailed her as “the best living English novelist,” and Carole Angier, her British biographer, never visited Dominica as part of her research. Annette Gilson, however, maintains that Rhys’ Afrocentric identity is always present in her European texts, albeit coded and manifested as presence-as-absence (654).

Like Picasso and Modigliani, to whose art she alluded in her novels, Jean Rhys drew on African sources, mediated in her case through the culture of her Dominican homeland. Just as visual artists learned, from West African masks and sacred artifacts, to streamline and stylize form, so Rhys borrowed cultural and oral tropes from the Yoruba and other West African peoples. These cultural markers had crossed the Atlantic with the slave ships and evolved into the trickster tales, ghost stories, obeah spells, talismans, satirical calypso songs and carnival street performances of Dominica and the other Caribbean islands. In privileging Afro-Caribbean orality, heteroglossia, hybridity, and satire, Rhys stands as a foremother to Anglophone writers such as Olive Senior, Michelle Cliff, Rambai Espinet, Jamaica Kincaid, Pauline Melville, Velma Pollard, Erna Brodber, and Opal Palmer Adisa. Like the Martinican novelist Mayotte Capecia (Lucette Combette), Rhys writes against the racist travelogues of “local colorists” like Lafcadio Hearn and subverts the stereotype of the guiablesse (female demon) in both West Indian and European sites (Carter 446). Rhys’ protagonists, like Capecia’s, have been dismissed as apolitical and Eurocentric when in fact the reverse is true. Rhys’ interrogation of power relations across racial, sexual and economic lines is subversive, and she approaches her subject in the indirect, elliptical style of Afrocentric social criticism.

This paper contextualizes Rhys within Afro-Dominican culture and argues that the texts set in Paris and London are deeply informed by the culture, specifically by the rhetorical device of call-and-response and by the persona of the female carnival street performer, or jamette. Jamette is Trinidadian Creole, from the French diametre, the name given to the working class women who took part in carnival (Liverpool 3). The term is used in a broader sense here to include the transgressive, parodic style of the Dominican female street performers of Rhys’ childhood. I would argue that for Rhys, the jamette signifies an opposition to the legal and cultural “limitations … that seek to close women and to enclose [them] ‘safely’” (Fayad 451). Rhetorically, Rhys uses Afrocentric “forms of verbal artistry such as calypso that require economy and highly developed verbal play [and] permit a depth of signification without many words” (Savory 153). Rhys thus indirectly interrogates colonial and metropolitan power structures. In combining modernism and African aesthetics with the hybridity and heteroglossia of her own background, she shapes the satirical tone and parodic structure of her work.

…Rhys’ Afrocentric belief system may be grounded in her own ambiguous ethnicity. “Who’s white?” the Rhysian father expostulates whenever the question of people’s “colored blood” on Dominica comes up, “damn few!” (Rhys, “The Day They Burned the Books,” Short Stories 156). While Rhys’ father may have warned his family that the racial identity of all West Indians was suspect, he may also have encouraged his daughter to embrace her mixed heritage. Gilson writes that in the metropolis “she was subject to disparagement reserved by the English for West Indian colonials whose racial identity was suspect and whose social position was questionable at best” (636). In 1959, Francis Wyndham reported on the BBC that Rhys was “Welsh and Scottish.” She immediately wrote: “I am not a Scot at all. My father was Welsh … my mother’s family was Creole …As far as I know I am white but I have no country really…” (Rhys, Letters 172; my italics). Her great-grandfather Lockhart had married a “pretty Cuban countess … with dark curls and an intelligent face,” who never fully assimilated the language and mores of the British plantocracy. Lockhart was “jealous and suspicious not only of other men but of her possible attempts to get in touch with Catholicism again” (Rhys, Smile Please 26). In “Elsa” the narrator suspects that she is of mixed race: “my grandfather and his beautiful Spanish wife. Spanish. I wonder …” (Jean Rhys Collection [Series I, Box, 1, Folder 1a] McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa). While one must be careful of conflating excessively, as Angier does, Rhys’ fiction and her history, Aunt Hester’s insinuations to Anna in Voyage that her mother is racially mixed and that her father was pressured into the marriage may be grounded in Rees Williams’ family history. Rhys recalls that Aunt Clarice, the “real” Hester, made similar remarks. Clarice claimed that her brother was “continually brooding over his exile in a small Caribbean island … ‘Poor Willy,’ she would say meaningfully, ‘poor, poor Willy’” (Rhys, Smile Please 55).

Although Rhys was considered white in Dominica, English people, including her biographer, routinely questioned her race. Adrian Allinson, a painter for whom Rhys once modeled and on whom she in turn based Marston in “Till September, Petronella,” criticized her “drawling” West Indian voice and suggested that she was of mixed race (Dorothy Miller Richardson Collection [Series II, Box 1, Folder 11] McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa). Ford Madox Ford and his common-law wife Stella Bowen both claimed that Rhys was passing for white (Angier 656), and described her as such in their books. Bowen justified her complicity in “l’affaire Ford” by othering Rhys as “savage” and “cannibal,” while asserting her own “superior” Anglo-Saxon values (Thomas 4). The sinister Lola Porter (read “Ella Lenglet,” Rhys’ name at the time) in Ford’s turgid potboiler When the Wicked Man (1931)is modeled on Rhys. Lola is a Creole from the West Indies and, like Rhys, is tall and thin. Lola has a “soft, stealthy voice” and “gipsy blood” (Ford 157). She is “a seductive blackamoor”(249); her breath “pours in and out of her large nostrils”(Ford 183). Lola frequents Harlem nightclubs, is an expert on “Negro music,” and tells “fantastic and horrible details of obi and the voodoo practices of the coloured people of her childhood home” (Ford 175). The scenes in which Lola alternates between kissing the protagonist’s hands “continuously, as if she had been a slave” (162) and threatening him with death by obeah (259), are very similar to Rhys’ description of Marya’s behavior toward Heidler (Ford) in Quartet. A milder version of Rhys inspires another character in Ford’s novel. Henrietta Faulkner Felise is an American, of Spanish descent. Henrietta is from the “Deep South” (“Missouri or Tennessee” as Ford puts it) and has “a slightly dusky accent” (Ford 78). Like Rhys, Henrietta has an unusual intonation and the protagonist “experience(s) a singular revulsion … at her voice” (78). Henrietta is ostensibly white but Ford makes a Carib/cannibal association with her necklace of pink coral, her sharp little white teeth, her “very full and pouted lips,” high cheek bones, and “extremely large-pupilled eyes” (78). Like Rhys, both Lola and Henrietta are expert horsewomen and “spent their childhood on horseback”(Ford 183). Lola, dressed in riding clothes, inspires lurid dominatrix fantasies in the hapless protagonist. Although Rhys and Ford both said their novels, Quartet and When the Wicked Man, were not autobiographical, there are remarkable similarities in the racial othering of the Lola/Marya/Henrietta characters…

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