• 1 Erna Brodber, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, New Beacon Books (London, 1980).

1The novel Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home gives a female version of the search for personal and cultural identity articulated in the narrative context of the novel.1 This is expressed by means of psychological regeneration after a trauma and linguistic variation. For the female protagonists of Annie John and Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, childhood evokes images of warmth, security, belonging; it is represented textually as a ‘paradise lost’ of relatively ungendered life as a child in nature. For Nellie in Brodber’s novel, the loss of the ‘beautiful garden’ coincides with a forced encounter with her femaleness as socially determined. Nellie’s socialization into adulthood is a complex initiation into hierarchies of race and class, as well as gender.

• 2 The kumbla is a Jamaican term meaning literary calabash, a symbolically enclosed space, carrying th (...)

5Another alternative is to ignore the whole sordid issue of female sexuality and adopt the mask of the cerebral intellectual, the committed student of progressive thought: the emotionally sterile ‘cracked doll’ kumbla that Nellie assumes for a time.2 From the bewildering range of roles and hierarchical alliances in her society, Nellie is taught to use sexual repression and social exclusiveness as defences against ‘those people’ who ‘will drag you down’ (p. 17) if they can.

• 3 Erna Brodber, Perceptions of Caribbean Women: Towards a Documentation of Stereotypes, ISER (Cave Hi (...)
• 4 Erna Brodber, Perceptions of Caribbean Women, p. 83.

6The novel also dramatizes the cost of being so rigidly classed and gendered, through the representation of Nellie’s fragmentation and collapse. Brodber3 has explained that Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home originated as a case study of the ‘dissociative personality’ for her abnormal psychology students in Jamaica. As with the dub version’s lack of respect for coherence, there is an initially fractured narrative structure which begins to come together as the putative patient re-lives the traumatic events which led to psychic collapse, and begins the reconstructive process. Thus, as Nellie ‘reconnects’ herself, the narrative operates like a ‘moving camera’ film, coherently relating the familial and social history that has produced her. As Brodber explains in Perceptions of Caribbean Women, it is very important for adolescents to be aware of their origins and come to terms with them if they want to achieve ‘a new life’ that can just ‘be forged out of the past.’4

• 5 Merle Hodge, Crick, Crack, Monkey, Heinemann (London, 1988).
• 6 Crick, Crack, Monkey, p. 62.
• 7 Linda Hutcheon, ‘‘Circling the Downspout of Empire’: Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism’, Ariel 20 (...)
• 8 Erna Brodber, ‘Fiction in the Scientific Procedure’, in Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Caribbean Women Writers: (...)

7Textually, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home evokes a personality, indeed a society, fragmented by contending discourses. For Nellie, as for Tee in Crick Crack Monkey,5 ‘doubleness, or this particular kind of doubleness, was a thing to be taken for granted. Why, the whole of life was like a piece of cloth, with a right side and a wrong side’.6 Linda Hutcheon has noted the sense of duality which marks the colonial,7 and it is to such ‘doubleness’ that Brodber refers in describing imperial discourse in post-independence Jamaica as ‘a ghost that talked through black faces’.8 This notion of doubleness, of contending discourses, is reflected in the novel’s complex web of linguistic variation.

• 9 The Anancy stories belong to the tradition of story-telling in the Caribbean. Anancy is the spider- (...)

10Speakers are very rarely limited to one single lect and, particularly in the urban environment where social mobility and class interaction are more common, verbal adaptability is a useful skill, as is code-switching and role playing. Tia’s advice to her ‘khakhi’ – mixed race – children concerning their language – ‘you mustn’t say bway, you must say bai. Talk like your father’ (p. 138) – is an injunction to identify themselves with his privileged status. Assumption of identity through choice of speech register is a valuable camouflage. This is reflected in Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (pp. 123-30) in the parable of Anancy’s escape from Dryhead’s kingdom through role playing.9 Assuming the pose of a humble, broken man, who has no option but to deliver his children to the tyrant, Anancy says: ‘I broke, I los’, I bow to you. You is King. I just can’t make it, can’t mek it at all. I bring the children them. All of them’ (pp. 125-6). He has been caught poaching, but explains the fishy smell in his boat as the result of his heartbroken children overturning it in an attempt to stop their father. And, verbally gifted as he is, Anancy is quick to seize on and manipulate the weaknesses of others. Firefly’s inability to distinguish linguistically between the singular and plural tense means that he is visually confused as to whether Anancy has brought one child or many. This leads to Anancy’s master-stroke: the double meaning behind his public vilification of his child / children, ‘Go eena kumbla:’ ‘To Dryhead and his court, this was a bad word that only a man so torn with grief could utter to his child. To Tacuma, it meant: find yourself a camouflage and get back into the store house’ (p. 128). By role play and linguistic skills, Anancy manages to erect a deceptive facade for his captors, and then to escape through it.

• 10 Erna Brodber, Perceptions of Caribbean Women, p. 90.

12For a time she retreats into her kumbla. Nellie’s emergence involves recognition of the diversity of Creole society, where she need not choose between polarized gender, class or racial extremes. Psychic and emotional reintegration becoming a ‘walking-talking human being’ instead of a role-playing zombie – necessitates acceptance of her plural heritage. By moving fluidly between speech registers and literary styles, the form of Brodber’s text implicitly encodes this regenerative strategy. So, when Nellie screams Creole expletives at Baba, he congratulates her on having found her language (having recuperated that part of the continuum previously repressed in her playing out a scripted role) and says ‘Next thing you’ll be telling me where I come from and that would really be telling as you know’ (p. 71). There is double meaning here, too. To tell someone where they come from is part of the abusive ritual of ‘tracing’, in Jamaica, as elsewhere in the Caribbean, entailing a graphic and insulting description of sexual origin. For Nellie ‘to come down to this level’, to re-acknowledge the earthly aspect of sexuality in general and her own in particular, is something of a breakthrough in the ‘coming together’ of her dissociated self. Baba’s statement operates also on a more standard level and, in the final section of the novel, Nellie does tell of their shared origins. In this association of personal and political therapy, Brodber explains the necessity of acknowledging one’s origins in order to look to the future – a future of a heterogeneous cultural identity. This process includes acknowledging and accepting the history of one’s homeland, destroying familiar and therefore reassuring myths and accepting uncomfortable realities.10

• 11 Carolyn Cooper, ‘Afro-American Folk Elements in Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home’, in (...)

13Like the dub version, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home demonstrates the need to explore all options without being bound by any one definition; in postcolonial terms, the binary oppositions within which the colonial subject is written are rejected, in favour of plurality – a context which may fragment the subject, but out of which creative futures can be made. In the end, the text articulates a political theory. Tolerance, even espousal of the continuum – of language / gender, roles / ancestral affiliation – is necessary for a meaningful representation of a Creole reality. Nellie may, of course, choose to identify for a time with one register rather than another, but acknowledging that her heritage is as hybrid as Jamaican Creole is her key discovery and the source of her new strength. Brodber’s use of the central framing device of the creolized English quadrille dance, and the children’s ring game derived from it (the ‘Jane and Louisa will soon come home’ refrain of this game gives the title to the novel) suggests the adaptive capacity of neo-African folk culture in Jamaica, its conscription of English folk traditions for its own enrichment: fiddling with their dance!11 This is a typical postcolonial dub version appropriation.

• 12 Lorna Goodison, ‘How I Became a Writer’, in Cudjoe, p. 290.
• 13 Michelle Cliff, ‘Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character’, in Cudjoe, p. 264.
• 14 John D’Costa, ‘Bra Rabbit Meets Peter rabbit: Genre, Audience and the Artistic Imagination: Problem (...)
• 15 Velma Pollard, ‘Mothertongue Voices in the Writing of Olive Senior and Lorna Goodison’, in Nasta, e (...)
• 16 See, for example, Carolyn Cooper, ‘Writing Oral History: SISTREN Theatre Collective’s Lionheart Gal(...)
• 17 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, Routledge (London, 1989), (...)

14Other West Indian women writers explicitly note the coexistence of multiple traditions as the source of their creativity. Lorna Goodison feels that the ‘double language, which is part of my (Jamaican) heritage, is one of the main influences on my work...’12 Similarly, Michelle Cliff speaks of ‘inventing my own peculiar speech, one that attempts to draw together everything I am and have been, both Caliban and Ariel and a liberated and synthesized version of each.’13 The urge for multiplicity, for replacing notions of ‘our language’ versus ‘their language’ with a recognition of a range of linguistic and cultural options, is widespread among Caribbean women writers. For John D’Costa, the ‘fusion of differing linguistic and generic codes... [is] the primary challenge to the new writer.’14 Velma Pollard is particularly astute in demonstrating how exploitation of linguistic tensions in West Indian texts by women serves to dramatize the variant social and cultural determinants, the ‘contending discourses’ at work in their societies.15 A careful study of how her own fiction and poetry enact this variation to telling effect, is overdue. This debate reflects the continuing oral / scribal debate in women’s writing within the region.16 And, as noted, in fiction a playful irreverence operates with respect to variation. If, as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin maintain, ‘in writing out of the condition of Otherness’, postcolonial texts assert the complex of intersecting ‘peripheries’ as the actual substance of experience, such a perspective is even more integral to reading West Indian female-authored fictions.17