Resilience of Caribbean women

This film by Trinidadian Frances- Anne Solomon is one of the most evocative to emerge from the Anglophone Caribbean and as a documentary uses many of the elements of the other arts to speak to the continuing problems that women face in both Caribbean and diasporic societies. It is based on a collection of poems by Grace Nichols from the book entitled I Is a Long Memoried Woman.

The idea behind this work is not victimage, but strength and a collective will to triumph over adversity.

The film suggests that this will is carried in the memory and in the body over generations.

Listening and looking at these performances which speak of the strategies of survival women have used over hundreds of years, it seemed to me that the resilience that women have needed to survive in the Caribbean and in diasporic communities has really not abated.

We create communities to support each other. But sometimes as women we also perpetuate stereotypes that go a long way in continuing the discrimination that women still endure.

Women in this collection are seen as the transmitters of culture and of its stories. However, as Horace Ov?’s film Pressure also notes, sometimes women can transmit false values.

So it cuts both ways. Ov?’s powerful work of racism in Britain concerns the generation who were born in Britain and who see themselves as British. Yet they still carry the memories of the Caribbean and also the value systems of these islands.

Part of this is a belief that the culture of Europe and the UK is somehow superior. So the film demands that we recognise that we are not in any way inferior, and also that we now have a very complex set of memories.

There are the histories that came from Africa and from the First Peoples, but these are now overlain by memories of sights, tastes and smells that come from the Caribbean and mix with new experiences in the metropolis.

If we refuse to attribute value to our Caribbean memories, then we are breeding self-contempt and giving permission to others to adopt superior and often abusive attitudes.

Of course, the generation who went to Britain in the fifties and sixties were also facing discrimination in their own islands. In that day, colour and gender determined the kind of job available to people of African and Asian origin, and the pay.

The fact is that as Caribbean peoples we were trapped in our ideologies and we carried our narratives across the Atlantic.

Those who went with hope and optimism after World War II to work in Britain experienced intense racism. Many travelled from the Caribbean because they were indoctrinated into the belief that the British way of life and British culture were superior to the Caribbean. Grace Nichols also speaks of Britain in her film and shows how ideas are carried across continents.

I Is a Long Memoried woman gives the lie to the idea that women simply tolerate such discrimination.

It shows through several vehicles, including movement and camera angle, that women have found extraordinary ways to counteract physical and psychological trauma and abuse.

She records through dance and archival footage, the idea that there is a line of continuity between women who were Amerindian, African, and warriors as, for example, Nanny the Maroon. Their combined memories speak to layers of experience carried in traditions and stories.

Many of these can be found in traditions of what Nichols calls sorcery in one of the interviews in this documentary.

But acts of sorcery were only some of the ways that women traditionally counteracted abuse and exploitation over time. They also used stories and even dance to show that despite their suffering they simply did not succumb to power structures.

The woman in this film and book acted as nurse and mother; as such she had the resources to transfer attitudes and ideas.

Women as figures who have had to bear rape and sexual abuse have found ways to survive and to resist.

This film shows that historically the plantation system, colonialism, exile and enslavement have marked the bodies of the Caribbean in quite indelible ways. Both women and men bear these marks.

In the poem Cane, Nichols creates images of young Caribbean men from both here and elsewhere.

She suggests that their attitudes and behaviour may be the result of ingrained feelings of self-hate. History and its residue are seen to be both cyclical and evident in the interactions between men and women.

Nonetheless, for both Nichols and Solomon, the Caribbean woman has found enduring, sometimes near invisible, methods to keep the memory of her strength and her resourcefulness alive. These are to be seen even in how women use words, and how we communicate and the stories we tell.

The very simple truth of this film and this book is that hundreds of years of inbuilt attitudes to human relationships have actually left their mark in our daily encounters.

History has left an indelible trace on our v e r y way of b e i n g a n d this is visible in what we do, how we act and how we move.