• 1 Scott, Lawrence, Witchbroom, re-ed. (London & Trafalgar, Dominica, Papillote Press, 2017), p.14
• 2 For example, in ‘The Tale of the House in the Cocoa’, the reader is made privy to the downfall of t (...)
• 3 See Darral, Tate, ‘The Anti-Panopticon: Rethinking the Architecture of Surveillance’, (2019). Bache (...)

1In Caribbean literature, scopic power is often part of a larger design of imperial governance, conquest and appropriation, whereby surveillance–and counter-surveillance–is constant and omnipresent. This is particularly true of texts that centre on life on the plantation or are set within the colonial house itself, where members and descendants of the plantocracy can keep an all-seeing eye on their property–in other words on their estate, but also on their labour force, initially composed of enslaved and indentured labourers, and subsequently traditionally made up of the latter’s descendants. In his novel Witchbroom (1993), Trinidadian writer Lawrence Scott recounts the story of the Monagas de los Macajuelos family, from the arrival of the first descendant, Old-Man Monagas, back in the sixteenth century, to the present-day generation. The family saga is told by the last surviving member of the family, Lavren, a hermaphrodite, trickster-narrator, who is further introduced as follows: ‘S/he was born in the waters of the New World a hermaphrodite, a young boy who might have been mistaken for a girl. […] S/he levitated between worlds. S/he hung between genders. S/he trembled between loves and desires. S/he was pigmented between races.’1 Lavren’s account, or rather his/her ‘Carnival Tales’, are divided into two main sections titled ‘THE HOUSES OF KAIRI’, which are in turn composed of three chapters that all bear the name of a house that epitomizes the fortunes and misfortunes of each generation.2 One room in particular allows to connect all the generations together, the turret room, whose name, configuration, location and vantage point all contribute to conveying a sense of constant (colonial) surveillance, whilst imposing forms of containment and constraint on its (female) occupiers. As this article will suggest, the turret room therefore functions at once as the Panopticon’s inspection tower and as an anti-Panopticon of sorts in Scott’s novel.3 In fact, as will be argued, the turret room can be identified, on the one hand, as a site of gendered confinement, be it forced or voluntary, that comes to represent the paradoxes of the (post)colonial patriarchal model, and, on the other, as a potential, yet limited site of female (re)empowerment and rehabilitation, as this mainly concerns white creole women. In that sense, the turret room will be studied as an ambiguous Caribbean gynaeceum in which (white creole) women both partake in and undermine masculine (post)colonial surveillance.

• 4 See Foucault, Michel, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16:1 (Spring 1986), p (...)

2But the turret room in Witchbroom is also a site where the narrator comes and goes as s/he wishes. As such, it not only serves as a place where scopic power can be exercised, it also becomes a carnivalesque site where the mundane and the dramatic converge as we follow Lavren’s movements in and out of the room, in and out of the great house, and more generally in and out of space and time. In that sense, the turret room will also be studied as a heterotopic space inasmuch as it gives rise to ‘a sort of mixed, joint experience’ whereby one is neither totally in one place or another.4 To illustrate what he calls heterotopias, Foucault gives the example of the mirror, which he defines as follows:

• 5 Ibid.

3The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it takes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.5

• 6 The Demerara window is described as ‘a louvered window, hinged at the top and pushed up and held wi (...)
• 7 Ibid., p.25
• 8 The phrase ‘dark sousveillance’ is borrowed from Simone Browne and will be explained further down.

4Interestingly, however, the mirror is not the most arresting feature of the turret room as described by Scott in Witchbroom. As we will see, the window might well be the most striking attribute of the turret room in the novel, alongside the telescope and the lorgnettes, which will also be examined. Furthermore, since the window is repeatedly described as a ‘Demerara window’, it constitutes what may be the most Caribbean architectural feature of the room, which will allow us to analyse the themes of gazing and surveillance within the specific context of life on a Caribbean plantation.6 In particular, the turret room will be presented as a ‘heterotopia of deviation’, a space where ‘individuals whose behavio[u]r is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm’ can be found, as Foucault reminds us.7 This definition certainly befits the character of Lavren, the liminal, trickster-narrator who not only gets to choose what s/he wishes to observe, monitor and record, but can also feel free to cross-dress and even redress the narrative at liberty within the confines of the turret room and the diegesis. By focusing more particularly on the carnivalesque, metafictional dimensions of the novel, this article will seek to examine iterations of authorial control and reader manipulation as literary reassessments of panopticism. It will further ask whether a form of counter-surveillance or ‘dark sousveillance’ may emerge from other spaces in an attempt to expose the well-kept secrets of the turret room.8

• 10 Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch (Leeds, Peepal Tress Pres, 2020) and LawrenceScott’s mo (...)
• 11 OED definition, see <https://0-www-oed-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/view/Entry/93161860?redirectedFrom=witchbroom#eid [consult (...)

6Contemporary Caribbean fiction is replete with works that focus on the colonial house as a site of scopic power and surveillance.10 Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom is no exception. The colonial house is also often associated with the former glory of white (creole) families that belonged to the plantocracy and are now run down, decrepit or altogether abandoned. As the ominous title of Scott’s novel suggests, witchbroom–‘an abnormal, dense cluster of shoots growing from a plant, resulting from infection with various fungi, bacteria, or viruses, or from infestation with certain mites or insects’11–gradually propagates on the plantation, ultimately causing the Monagas’ decline, as symbolized by the state of their last house at the end of the novel:

• 13 The expression is borrowed from The Mermaid of Black Conch, in which Monique Roffey describes the f (...)

7Yet, despite adverse climate conditions, the colonial house remains standing and still is a ‘helluva place’, haunted as it were by the ghosts of generations of Monagas and their unfree labour.13 Within the house, one room in particular is presented by Scott as steeped in colonial trauma and history–the turret room. At first, the room is introduced in the overture of the novel as benefitting from an ideal central location that not only grants its occupiers an unparalleled panoramic view on the estate, but also gives ‘them’ (Lavren, chiefly) an all-powerful omniscience:

• 16 Scott, L., Witchbroom, p.67
• 17 In the preceding chapter, ‘The Tale of the House on the Plains’, Elena and her husband Georges Phil (...)

9The main character involved in an act of surveillance here is Elena Elena, Lavren’s grandmother. Although this passage places Elena Elena in the position of the all-seeing ward according to Bentham’s panopticon model, her position within the family and her location within the turret room reveal a much more ambivalent character. Married to the Englishman, Elena Elena is first presented as ‘the last of child brides’ in ‘The Tale of the House in the Cocoa’.16 As a child bride, Elena Elena, like Elena, her predecessor from the previous generation of Monagas women, is doubly reduced to the status of girl/doll sent off by her husband to the turret room as she would be to the playroom/doll-house: 17

• 19 On the complex role of white creole women in the novel and their complicity in the ‘broader injusti (...)

10In that regard, the turret room functions both as the inspection tower, the central structure of the Panopticon elaborated by Bentham, and as one of the many cells in which the female descendants of the Monagas family become at once wards and inmates. In short, the turret room simultaneously operates as a site of gendered subjugation, whereby women are infantilized and kept under watch–if not lock and key–and of complicit colonial scopophilia, inasmuch as the white (creole) women have internalized their spouses’ objectifying, somewhat lascivious gaze which they reproduce through their own voyeuristic tendencies.19 The turret room therefore becomes a site of forced and voluntary confinement, where the Monagas women enjoy having a room of their own, whose access they can regulate at will, regardless of their maternal duties:

• 22 The etymology of lorgnette is telling in that regard, as it comes from the French ‘lorgner’, to squ (...)

13If the telescope allows the occupiers of the turret room to have a clear view of what goes on in the distance, and, therefore, to foresee potential trouble and ill-fortunes–such as the cocoa crisis and the inevitable collapse of the whole plantation system–, it does not necessarily give them clairvoyance–at least not as far as the white creole women of the family are concerned. In fact, the other instrument used in the turret room, the lorgnettes, contributes to magnifying certain details and events at the expense of others. In that sense, both the telescope and the lorgnettes can be seen as instruments of short-sightedness for the Monagas women who might either stay stuck in the distant past or become too engrossed in the future, resulting in their limited, altered vision of the present.22 In ‘The Tale of the Last House’, this is how Lavren’s mother is described:

• 24 ‘This became a traditional afternoon pantomime that no one could put a stop to. ‘The mother mad, so (...)

14In this extract, the character’s short-sightedness is underlined alongside her inability to literarily move out of her bed and of the turret room, which turns the latter into an ivory tower where the women of the family live at once in seclusion and in denial. Consequently, the women’s behaviour becomes an object of derision as other characters in the novel–especially servants–make fun of them and as their narrative is further contested by the narrator him/herself.24 For instance, even as the women try to regain control of the turret room and of the narrative by reclaiming their observation point by the Demerara window, their position is occasionally undermined by Lavren. This is the case in a scene from ‘The Tale of the House in Town’, in which Lavren’s mother, presented as a devout woman, wishes to tell her version of her youth and her son’s conception:

• 26 It should also be noted, however, that, to some extent, Lavren’s own knowledge depends on the infor (...)
• 27 Ibid., p.55

15As the excerpt shows, Marie Elena’s narrative is repeatedly interrupted by Lavren who wishes to know more about the unauthorized version of the family history and somehow manages to highjack his/her mother’s tale, insofar as s/he ends up finding some of the answers s/he was looking for inside him/herself and by looking into the Caribbean Sea after having carefully cleared the turret room of its unwanted left-overs and cancelled his/her mother’s attempts at providing a more sanitized version of the past.26 Earlier in the novel, when the character of Marie Jeanne, a relatively distant cousin, is introduced to the reader, she is presented as ‘scarred by a plague that was to infect many Monagas women and some of their sons. The plague was called scruples […]’.27 Lavren’s mother proves, in turn, that the curse befalling the various generations of Monagas women finds a venue in the very location of the turret room as it eventually becomes a shrine of sorts. This is particularly apparent in the last of the tales, as Marie Elena’s death becomes imminent:

• 29 See the distinction established by Foucault in that regard: ‘There are also, probably in every cult (...)
• 30 This is how Lavren is introduced to his mother by the doctor who helps deliver him. See Scott, L., (...)
• 31 Ibid., p.237

17Although the turret room is a self-enclosed space within the colonial house, which, as previously argued, participates in the imperial design of (in)voluntary isolation and surveillance, it also literally opens a window into the New World and its intricate past, present and future implications for the Monagas family. As such, the turret room can be interpreted as a heterotopic space, inasmuch as it is at once a real space within the diegesis–it is, after all, one of the many rooms that constitute the Great House–and a symbolic space conducive to time, space and narrative disruptions. In that sense, the turret room could hardly be described as a utopia.29 Rather, it displays the characteristics of a carnivalesque site where Lavren, the very embodiment of postcolonial contradictions through his/her biological condition as both male and female–‘the best of two worlds’30– is at liberty to transgress heteronormativity through his repeated acts of cross-dressing. As a child, Lavren is seen playing with a rag doll and dressed as a girl.31 As an adult, s/he continues to express him/herself as a hermaphrodite by wearing the maternal black lace dress s/he used to put on as a child and that now allows him/her to gain further insight into the family history whilst assuming the role of seer:

• 33 I am drawing on Maria Cristina Fumagalli’s monograph on modernity seen from various Caribbean angle (...)
• 34 Ibid., p.10
• 35 Scott, L., Witchbroom, p.169
• 36 In Trinidad and Tobago, ‘j’ouvert’ or ‘jouvay’, from the French ‘le jour est ouvert’ (literally, ‘t (...)

18Nevertheless, Lavren’s visions are less divinely inspired than they are informed by the rather worldly, yet restorative powers of a transcultural Caribbean modernity.33 In that regard, Lavren’s ability to travel through time and space partakes in the rejection of a North Atlantic/Eurocentric modernity–metaphorized by Maria Cristina Fumagalli as ‘Medusa’s gaze’ –that fundamentally ‘relies on linear progression and territorialization’, unlike a more multifocal Caribbean modernity that adopts a decentring vision, relying on techniques of ‘delinearization and deterritorialization, both as writing and reading practices.’34 In Witchbroom, this is epitomized in the time-traveling, to-and-froing and metamorphosing that Lavren constantly undergoes. At some point, s/he is even described as a ‘Tiresias of the New World, who from the beginning of these tales has been sitting at the foot of the bed in the turret room or at the Demerara window, […] overlooking the Gulf of Sadness and retrospectively and clairvoyantly spanning the centuries, writing down his Carnival Tales.’35 Here, the turret room functions as a heterotopia of textual deviation as it creates a space for the professed trickster-narrator-turned-soothsayer to not only record and refashion the family narrative at will, but also disrupt narratological conventions by assuming the part of a hermaphrodite Caribbean storyteller. This is most manifest in the opening section of the novel, ‘An Overture – Fugues, Fragments of Tale’ and in the penultimate section of the novel, ‘J’ouvert’, which, as its title indicates, sets the scene during Carnival.36 In the opening section, a series of call and response techniques is used alongside various narratological caesuras to anchor the novel in the extraordinary world of Caribbean storytelling:

• 38 ‘I chose Lavren, or did he choose me, did she choose me, or did we choose each other, or was he or (...)
• 39 Ibid., p.300
• 40 Ibid., p.301
• 41 Ibid., p.297

19In this particular instance, readers are made complicit in Lavren’s tale, as they are directly addressed and called upon by the implied author who seems to be in charge of the whole narrative, including Lavren’s version of events.38 In ‘J’Ouvert’, however, the reader is tricked by the first-person authorial voice who introduces themselves as Lavren’s follower (‘Lavren took my hand and led me into the darkness of the city’),39 but will eventually reveal that they and Lavren are one and the same narrative I/eye: ‘I left town the next morning, leaving King Carnival’s magic blown by the wind through the streets. […] I had taken off the black lace dress belonging to Marie Elena and I realised that, all along, I was Lavren Monagas de los Macajuelos, the great storyteller.’40 Although – or perhaps precisely because – this scene is not set within the confines of the turret room but outside, in the streets of the city, during Carnival, this ultimate disclosure of the narrator’s doppelgänger could be identified as yet another instance of optical maneuvering in the novel. In that sense, the city as it is depicted at the end of Witchbroom functions as yet another heterotopic site of deviation where the traditional social order of the New World is reversed – if only for a limited period of time – and the colonial house itself, together with its emblematic turret room, eventually torn down. Within that carnivalesque time/space, all hierarchies are abolished, as the narrator reminds us: ‘no colour, no class, no race, no gender: all may cross over and inhabit the other.’41 For a new social order to emerge and live on, however, the subjugating gaze of those occupying the turret room would then need to be confronted, if not altogether returned by those dwelling in the margins of society and of the text.

• 42 Browne, Simone, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham and London, Duke University (...)
• 43 Ibid., p.21
• 44 Scott, L., Witchbroom, p.2
• 45 This is the reason why she appears at this point in the article. For contributions that deal more a (...)
• 46 Scott, L., Witchbroom, p.251

20Such form of counter-surveillance, in the context of the novel and of (post)slavery societies, has been identified by Simone Browne as ‘dark sousveillance’. In her study, Browne refers to Steve Mann’s definition of sousveillance ‘as a way of naming an active inversion of the power relations that surveillance entails’.42 She resituates Mann’s concept within the specific context of race-based surveillance practices inherited from transatlantic slavery, whereby those exposed to such practices–non-white people–respond to and challenge the all-encompassing white gaze.43 In Witchbroom, several marginalized figures can be identified as practitioners of this dark sousveillance, although their voices are ultimately filtered through the eyes of Lavren and his/her alter ego, the implied author. Perhaps one of the most important characters among those marginal, yet central figures in the novel would be Josephine, the black ‘cook, housekeeper, servant, nanny, nurse [and] doer of all tasks’.44 Josephine rarely enters the turret room,45 but her influence on Lavren’s tales can be felt throughout the novel, as she is the one who introduces him/her to African storytelling and will eventually reveal some of the darkest secrets of the Monagas household. Acting as a conduit for Lavren’s discovery and experience of life outside the confines of the turret room, she contributes to his/her liberated vision, teaching him/her, in the end, how to outgaze Medusa from below: ‘While change was marching through the land, Lavren was marching in its ranks below the windowsills of the Demerara window and him/herself looking up at the house to blow it down.’46 Then and only then does it seem that living on the edge, in a world composed of both margin and centre, can ultimately disrupt and negate forms of imperial design, among which panopticism, to challenge instead surveillance from below. Such oppositional practices of dark sousveillance certainly deserve closer academic scrutiny, particularly in bodies of work such as Lawrence Scott’s, which not only question scopic power from below, but from askance, inviting us to further think disruptive gazing in non-binary terms.