POSTCOLONIAL METAMORPHOSES OF MATERNITY IN CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN BRITISH POETRY
POSTCOLONIAL METAMORPHOSES OF MATERNITY IN CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN BRITISH POETRY

Summary/Abstract: Caribbean literature is said to be replete with metaphors of motherhood: dead women ancestors, haunting the contemporary postcolonial writing, and a host of black women, mulattas and white women, who represent sources of self-identification or the muses and the abuses existing in the shadow of the literary text. Apart from the excessive tone of such representations, there is an insistence on what cultural critic Stuart Hall considered as “metaphors of transformation”, in which the tenor is the idea of transformation itself and which is meant to instrument otherness as a means of cultural production. Drawing on the work of several authors of Caribbean origin, on psychoanalytical theory focused on the mother/child relationship and on contemporary cultural criticism of diaspora, ethnicity and transnationality, this essay demonstrates that the concept of maternity has been rethought, so that queer and father nature can be regarded as fertile as mother nature.

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