Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper invokes Caribbean women’s “rememory” (Morrison 1987) through the trope of the sea and readings of Dionne Brand’s novel, At the Full and Change of the Moon (2000) and Ramabai Espinet’s novel The Swinging Bridge (2003). Specifically, the paper intervenes into Black Diaspora Studies’ use of water as primarily a metaphor of Black displacement (Jackson 2019) by bringing into conversation the intersecting memories of African and Indian women in the Caribbean. In their portrayal of the rememory of the traumatic histories of chattel slavery and indentureship, the two novels allow us to examine the ways in which the sea functions as a deep repository of shared memory, as well as to re/imagine patriarchal national accountings of the past through matrilineal oceanic histories that lead to diasporic futures. The paper fits within the 2020 special focus on transcultural humanities in a global world. It also contributes to two of the conference’s themes: literary humanities, and civic, political and community studies.