Matriarchal Influences Over Identity

In many colonial and post-colonial societies, the influence of maternal figures over identity formation is a topic of some significance. These influences are explicated in the four novels to be discussed in this report. These novels are George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb, Earl Lovelace's Salt, and Caryl Phillips' Crossing the River. Though these novels are substantially different in many ways, they share a common concern with determining how identity among oppressed people is formed and shaped not only by external or societal forces but by familial variables as well.

Lamming (15) creates in the mother of his narrator a woman who "don't like to see you crya. She talk and talk but she seldom hit you." She is a woman determined that her son will have a decent life but she is only one of the women who influenced the young boy. The women of the village are women whose "consciousness had never been quickened by the fact of life (Lamming, 18)." Unlike men who often leave, these women of the villages of Barbados are women who remain with their children and grandchildren and care for them. They are the models that help young children learn the difference between right and wrong.

The character of Ma is a woman who believes that "the works o' the Lord is really wondrous (Lamming, 79)." While Ma does not understand politics, she understands the difference between right and wrong and lives a

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d. Her identity is that of a slave who refuses to accept slavery and who is nevertheless willing to die rather than submit to the treatment that she is given. Bereft of her child and separated from her own mother, she echoes the voice of another unnamed woman who argues "men are at their best in pursuit (Phillips, 133)." Earl Lovelace's novel, Salt, is set in Trinidad and describes the ways in which the emancipated people of Trinidad struggle to make sense of their lives in a country that continues to reel from the influence of slavery. It is a place where "Blackpeople children (are) doomed to suffer: their own parents refuse to pass on the knowledge that they know to them (Lovelace, 3)." Women in this story are, like the Barbadian women found in Lamming's novel, important and instrumental in maintaining the culture and traditions of enslaved peoples. Florence is a woman "with a sense of the past she has left behind her (Lovelace, 247)." She is a woman searching for a man who would be "somebody to help her hold on to that self (Lovelace, 248)" she had gained through political action. Florence is "the origin of the discomfort of the males (Lovelace, 49)." Nevertheless, she and Vera are women whose presence in society

Category: Literature - M