Images of the sea in three Carribean women's texts : Jamaica Kincaid’s <i>At the Bottom of the River</i>, Grace Nichols’s <i>I Have Crossed an Ocean</i> and Olive Senior’s <i>Hurricane Watch</i>
- Authors
- Publication Date
- Jun 15, 2023
- Source
- HAL-Descartes
- Keywords
- Language
- English
- License
- Unknown
- External links
Abstract
This dissertation draws on Derek Walcott's poem "The Sea is History" to explore oceanic imageries through Caribbean literature, and more specifically through a female corpus that includes a collection of short stories by Jamaica Kincaid, <i>At the Bottom of the River</i> (1983), and two poetry collections, Grace Nichols’s <i>I Have Crossed an Ocean</i> (2010) and <i>Hurricane Watch</i> (2022) by Olive Senior. In the wake of Oceanic Studies and the emergence of the Blue Humanities, this paper analyzes the Atlantic Ocean as a palimpsest saturated by the memories of colonization and slavery. In keeping with Édouard Glissant’s notion of Relation and Paul Gilroy’s <i>Black Atlantic</i>, the image of the sea in the Caribbean context is caught between the idea of a vault and that of a space of creation. This thesis interrogates both poetic and pictorial representations of the sea by placing the literary corpus in dialogue with three visual works: Howardena Pindell's painting <i>Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts</i> (1988), Isaac Julien's film installation <i>Paradise Omeros</i> (2002) and Ellen Gallagher's watercolor series <i>Watery Ecstatic</i> (2004-2020).