Speaking and performing the Creole word: the work of

This chapter continues the discussion of Creole-use, taking it into the 1980s and beyond to ask questions about the degree to which contemporary Caribbean women poets have followed the trajectory established by Louise Bennett, to explore the poetic uses to which Creole is put in the work of a selection of poets and to interrogate further the gendered implications of such use. The epigraphs above indicate the broad discursive parameters within which the discussion is framed as I foregound some of the contradictions, ambivalences and complications which proliferate under the sign of ‘orality’. Before discussing the work of

the four poets in question, it is necessary to return to the literary history which informed my argument in the previous chapter in order to make explicit the gendered implications involved when women poets lay claim to ‘the oral’ and choose to engage actively with the performative dimensions of the Creole word. I argued in the previous chapter that Creole-use has often been seen as most succinctly embodied in the ‘Tantie’ figure, consolidated in Louise Bennett’s performances in Creole. The kind of ebullience and excess involved in Bennett’s Creole performativity generally signals maternal rather than sexual largesse, and it is part of this chapter’s focus to explore the degree to which contemporary poets have followed this trajectory or not.