ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters I discussed the work of individual Caribbean women poets in relation to a variety of issues, including the quest for literary models, and literary mothers, gendered debates about the aesthetics and politics of Creole poetry, and the connections between textuality and sexuality. This final chapter has a much broader remit in that it shifts away from a focus on the individual poet to interrogate the category ‘Caribbean women’s writing’ itself. Using a range of anthologies of Caribbean women’s prose and poetry, as well as collections of critical essays about this writing, I want to explore how ‘the’ Caribbean woman writer has come to be defined and read. What characterizes the archetypal Caribbean woman writer? Who qualifies? What gets left out? Beginning with a comparison of two anthologies of Caribbean women’s poetry – Jamaica Woman, published in 1980, and Creation Fire, published in 1990 – the discussion which
follows is more concerned with what these anthologies represent as publications which have signposted Caribbean women’s poetry as a distinct field of writing than with detailed discussion of the poems included in these anthologies.
