Barrelhouse Reviews: Elektrik
Reviewed by Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal
Two Lines Press / September 2023 / 166 pp
“So, has the Caribbean existed? Does it exist? Could it exist? Can poetry, in an increasingly virtual world, shore up the borders of our Caribbean?” Near the beginning of Elektric, Mireille Jean-Gilles poses these questions in her essay “In the Unwearied Heart of the Sea.” Her questions inquire about definitions, identity, the feminine act of creation, and finding a place for the lyrical to transcend the cacophony of contemporary discourse in an act of agency for the historically silenced. Elektric calls on eight women writers from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, including Jean-Gilles, to attempt answers to these questions.
The Calico series, in which Elektric is the eighth book, publishes translated work around a designated style, topic, or region. Elektric continues the dynamic global storytelling of previous Calico anthologies by collecting translated stories and poems that make audible the voices of Caribbean women. Themes of class difference and feminine expression inhabit every line and sentence to bring to English readers the vibrant and nuanced realities of women living in the Caribbean, giving these women agency in the fictional, yet truthful, constructions of home.
The collection focuses on intersections of class and gender for the women at the hearts of these stories, beginning with a series of short sketches titled “Voracious Street” by Mireille Jean-Gilles and translated by Eric Fishman. In this poem, a flâneuse describes women in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique. One section describes the differences between the dancing of a woman from the urban bourgeoisie and her poor, rural counterpart. Jean-Gilles rejects any monolithic view of women in the Caribbean, acknowledging differences in experiential ethos, yet giving both women a space to dance and express their artistic beauty in full view of the flaneur. In doing so, the speaker romanticizes the country woman’s dance moves: “the more she ages, the more she dances (unchains herself), the more she moves about, the more you sense she has gathered experience each day, (each night), all year.” The bourgeois woman, by comparison, “seem[s as if] she no longer has any feeling in her body.” Jean-Gilles moves readers away from a simple view of women as a homogenous category, choosing instead to depict an eclectic procession of women who defy singular definition. She adds to the idea that “shor[ing] up the borders” of the Caribbean is far more complicated when considering the human geography of the islands.
The working-class identity of characters manifests throughout the collection. In Fabienne Kanor’s “Plato’s Stars,” translated by Lynn E. Palermo, a waitress lives in fear of defying her employer, despite overhearing his overt misogynistic statements after she shelters a man in her home and drives him to meet with someone in the rain. For a brief moment, she stands still and considers acting in resistance, to “storm out of the toilets to confront them directly,” but she “was not brave. [She] did not come out of her hideout until after the men had left.” She knew that her “boss Lionel Beaufils might not keep [her] on” as “three waitresses on the payroll is too many. Means he makes less money, then loses his temper over a trifle and yells at his wife.” To be working-class and a woman in this region of the world involves tension between financial responsibility and revolution. For this waitress, solitary resistance may carry fatal consequences. This bold, realist depiction of life for working-class women in the Caribbean may not inspire hope in the reader, but it does bring about an intersectional class and gender consciousness in the waitress.
The representation of single motherhood strikes at the heart of a major social issue within Caribbean culture: the failures in accountability for men who cannot keep their libido in check and often leave their children without financial or housing support. Kettly Mars lingers on this issue, exploring the root causes and consequences of toxic masculinity in “The Patriarch’s Angel,” translated by Lucy Scott. In the story, class plays a role in a woman’s incestuous desire for her half-brother, who has become a law student, after a bourgeois party where he makes out with several women. She asks, “What do they have that I don’t, all those bougie bitches you were groping all night?” in an intoxicated effort to understand her brother’s desire to ascend class structures. The story explores the impact of patriarchal systems where men of power (the brother’s father was a politician who carried on an affair with the sibling’s mother) disappear at the first symptom of fatherhood.
Suzanne Dracius subverts this patriarchal system in “The Macho’s Marathon, the Major’s Martyrology, and the Coquer’s Calvary,” translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson and Maigret Kellogg, where women listen to a documentary as it explores the intertwining histories of class oppression and sexism in Port-au-Prince. Dracius weaves in her own theory, which transforms the inherently masculine Holy Trinity into one that more fully represents machismo in action. She draws connections between the masculine ownership of both Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day—men seek sex during one, while the other reflects the consequences of that coupling—while encouraging women, through metaphor, to seize the systems of power that enable misogyny and infidelity sans accountability. The story boldly points to binary feminism as enabling patriarchal structures; the documentary’s narrator deems praise of the woman who raises a child on her own irresponsible, as this common praise may justify the actions of men who impregnate women and immediately leave them. Dracius introduces a deeper discourse of feminine complicity within toxic structures and what the narrator feels is misplaced value in matrifocal family systems.
The anthology provides an answer to, in Dracius’s view, a problematic approach to feminism—the celebration of matrifocality—in the form of an unapologetic femininity within the working-class settings of these stories. This type of femininity shapes a confrontational feminist response to patriarchy. Octavia Gaël’s “African Mask,” translated by Kaiama L. Glover, follows a young woman named Frédérique with strong sexual desire for a married Nigerian actor visiting her home. She feels overshadowed by her sister, who has preceded her in blossoming into puberty. Her sexual awakening and initial experience of pleasure comes via memory of the actor’s appeal, and she returns to this memory to achieve orgasm, even into adulthood. Her assertion of sexuality and the “peculiar energy spreading through her calves and her thighs, and then exploding, radiating throughout her entire body” that she first feels in the presence of the actor is emblematic of feminine agency within the liminal space between childhood and womanhood. Even when Frédérique sees the actor later in life, engaging in philandering, it is her desire and action on which the narrative centers, refusing any masculine dictation of Frédérique’s behavior or sexuality. This defiant gesture shifts the narration to a woman and away from the familiar machismo of many Caribbean works.
The anthology ends on a meta note of feminine creation in Gerty Dambury’s “Defiant Islands,” translated by Judith Miller and Dambury herself. If Jean-Gilles seeks to define the Caribbean and its poetry, Dambury seeks the answers to narrower, but equally profound questions: What does it mean to be a Caribbean woman writer? To create an invisible land and dare to speak of it? To exit the subaltern position by generating agency through art? The writers in this anthology are conscious of their intersectionality; the scars of their oppression rake through the line breaks and white space of every story and poem included here. But, as Dambury points out, there is a complicated optimism in agency and art:
I am in exile from an unborn country.
I choose to stride across a fiction.
The island I hope for is a hidden dream.
In the refrain of “So sorry, it just slipped out,” Dambury emphasizes resistance in expression and in the overflowing hunger to create, a hunger that may never be sated. While the poem’s speaker points out that the words of the oppressor “are in [her] head,” she still chooses to “open [her] mouth and… unleash torrents.”
The Caribbean depicted in this anthology is one envisioned and defined by its authors, carrying with it a bright future simply through the act of feminine production. The presence of femininity within the text subverts masculine depictions of the islands. For the women highlighted in this collection, the act of writing is one of critical defiance that gives voice to voiceless women and, further, engages in the creation of a redefined Caribbean femininity that defies patriarchal or colonial coercion.
Every translator in this collection has managed to retain the brightness and lyricism of the varied French creoles that form the original texts of these stories. In doing so, they have amplified the voices of Caribbean women writers for a broad audience. Lyricism in the translations hit beat after beat of dancing prose and audacious poetry. Voices refuse simple categorization and definition. Intersectional modes of writing present oppressive realities and ascendent futures.
Elektrik is translation operating as good translation should: as a megaphone for writers who might otherwise remain unheard in the Western canon. To answer Jean-Gilles’ question, the poetry and stories within Elektrik give space for Caribbean women to define, to “shore up,” the borders of their own world.
Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal (he/they) is a queer, previously unhoused veteran who writes queer, working-class magical realism. Their work can be found in or is forthcoming from Fairy Tale Review; F(r)iction; Green Mountains Review; Collateral; War, Literature, and the Arts; and elsewhere. They have published reviews in The Rumpus, Consequence, and other places.