ABSTRACT
The epigraphs above indicate some of the critical contexts relevant to my discussion of representations of women’s bodies in the work of four Caribbean women poets. The previous chapter focused on women poets whose use of Creole involved a diverse range of choices with regard to the embodiment of poetic identity. This choice of Creole signalled a preference for working within the performative and oral modes, though I argued that these modes were being refashioned, in response to limitations which relate both to gender and to the poets’ shifting geo-cultural locations. Although the poets discussed in this chapter make use of Creole in their work, they do so much less extensively and in ways which do not necessarily foreground the performative and oral modes. If, as I have argued above, the body image for women involved in performative Creole poetry requires a ‘pruning’ of their explicitly ‘sexual selves’ and that diasporic relocations often result in more internalized performative voices, then in this chapter I want to explore the ways in which the woman’s body and sexuality are handled – or avoided – on the page, as opposed to the stage. Does the printed word afford a greater range of possibilities for writing about women’s bodies? Indeed, is there any evidence of writing the body, French feminist style? Is the woman’s body righted, written or written out of the text?
