Collages of the Environment in Caribbean Literature

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<<if $visitedDream1>>"Sometimes it was as if I were back there and as if England were a <span class='flower-link'>[[dream|Savernake-Forest-VITD]]</span>. At other times England was the real thing and out there was the <span class='ecosystem-link'>[[dream|Morgans-Rest-VITD]]</span>, but I could never fit them together." Jean Rhys, //Voyage in the Dark.// 1934. Penguin Classics, 2019, p. 4. <<else>><<type 100ms>>\//"Sometimes it was as if I were back there and as if England were a <span class='flower-link'>[[dream|Savernake-Forest-VITD]]</span>. At other times England was the real thing and out there was the <span class='ecosystem-link'>[[dream|Morgans-Rest-VITD]]</span>, but I could never fit them together."// \<</type>> <<timed 20s t8n>>Jean Rhys, //Voyage in the Dark.// 1934. Penguin Classics, 2019, p. 4.<</timed>><</if>><<set $visitedDream1 to true>>

"In the clearings there were quantities of <span class='flower-link'>[[little flowers|Daffodils-Lucy]]</span> in the grass, red, yellow, blue and white, so many that it looked all colours. Walter said, 'Have you got flowers like these in your island? These <span class='flower-link'>[[little bright things|Peonies-Lucy]]</span> are rather sweet, don't you think?' I said, 'Not quite like these.' But when I began to talk about the flowers out there I got that <span class='dream-link'>[[feeling of a dream|Dream2-VITD]]</span>, of two things that I couldn't fit together, and it was as if I were making up the names. Stephanotis, hibiscus, yellow-bell, jasmine, frangipani, corolita." Jean Rhys, //Voyage in the Dark.// 1934. Penguin Classics, 2019, p. 62.

"I was always dreaming about <span class='ecosystem-link'>[[that pool|The-River-NTTH]]</span>, too. It was clear just beyond where the waterfall fell, but the shallow parts were very muddy. Those big white flowers that open at night grew round it. Pop-flowers, we call them. They are shaped like lilies and they smell heavy-sweet, very strong. You can smell them a long way off. Hester couldn't bear the scent, it made her faint. There were crabs under the rocks by the river. I used to splash when I bathed beacuse of them. They have small eyes at the end of long feelers, and when you throw stones at them their shells smash and soft, white stuff bubbles out. I was always dreaming about this pool and seeing the green-brown water in <span class='dream-link'>[[my dream|Dream2-VITD]]</span>." Jean Rhys, //Voyage in the Dark.// 1934. Penguin Classics, 2019, p. 73.

!Close Reading Ecosystems The writing of the Caribbean landscape in //Voyage in the Dark// and //No Telephone to Heaven// in particular is richly textured, engaging all senses. There is a synesthesia here, a mixing, mingling, a hybridization of this sensory experience: <span class='reference-link'><<link "\"the smell of green,\" \"the feeling of the hills.\"">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "reference"); Dialog.wikiPassage("VITD-Pg125"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>></span> Anna Morgan remembers that it was nearly impossible to imagine a night <<link "devoid of any sort of sensory input">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "ecosystem"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Still-Night-VITD"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>> when she lived on the island, surrounded by a forest teeming with life. The island forest is described as overwhelming and totalizing, <span class='reference-link'><<link "\"the chaos of the green.\"">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "reference"); Dialog.wikiPassage("NTTH-Pg172"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>></span> But look closely enough, for long enough, and details <span class='ecosystem-link'>[[materialize in the corners|Moth-NTTH]]</span> of these protagonists’ visions. Tiny beings emerge from the crevices of memory. Crabs. Crayfish. Buzzing insects. Rats seeking shelter in coconuts. River rocks of infinite surface variation: lacy moss, hairline cracks. These descriptions capture a practice of attention that can be understood as a kind of <<link "ecological close reading">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "ecosystem"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Thinking-Small"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>>, borrowing from scholar Hannah Freed-Thall’s writing on the connections between close reading and environmental observation. It is also an orientation of non-domination toward the natural environment. The characters’ close “re-writing” in memory of their homes, sensitive to surfaces, subtle differences, ephemerality, and non-human relationships, is a refusal to let the earth be how the colonial power looks upon it, with the desire to possess it. In the writing of these non-human <<link "networks of survival and sanctuary">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "ecosystem"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Rats-NTTH"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>>, there is a rejection of the colonial, imperial notion of <<link "land as territory">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "ecosystem"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Poetics-of-Relation"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>> to be conquered, tamed, and cultivated, as an ecosystem to be displaced. And, looking closely reveals <span class='history-link'>[[layers of alternative histories|Arrival-NTTH]]</span> in the environment.

Michelle Cliff opens //No Telephone to Heaven// with a definition of "ruinate" from B. Floyd's //Jamaica: An Island Microcosm//: "This distinctive Jamaican term is used to describe lands which were once cleared for agricultural purposes and have now lapsed back into ... '<span class='ecosystem-link'>[[bush|Bush-NTTH]]</span>.' An impressive variety of herbaceous shrubs and woody types of vegetation appears in succession, becoming thicker and taller over the years until 'high ruinate' <span class='history-link'>[[forest|The-House-NTTH]]</span> may emerge...." Michelle Cliff, //No Telephone to Heaven//. 1987. Vintage International, 1989, p. 2.

"Beneath the bush was a <span class='ecosystem-link'>[[network of shelters|Flora-and-Fauna]]</span> where small animals hid themselves. They didn't take kindly to these intruders. Like the birds in the dripping valley, the animals wondered who these people were and what was their purpose in this place. The animals knew this only as a wild, uhumaned place. In the tops of coconut trees, far above the ribbon of river which split the land, rats had burrowed into the coconuts, living inside the nut and licking the jelly off the walls for sustenance. When one home dried out, the rat had only to leap to another pattern of fronds, for the trees had grown quickly during the rampage of the forest, and find a fresh and green unopened coconut." Michelle Cliff, //No Telephone to Heaven//. 1987. Vintage International, 1989, p. 9.

!Collages of History There is a <<link "non-linearity">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "history"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Small-Place-Time"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>>, a circularity, to each of the three narratives. The end of //Voyage in the Dark// finds Anna drifting in and out of consciousness, her abortion gone horribly wrong, floating through memories of home. The novel ends with her wish for a <<link "new beginning">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "history"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Ending-VITD"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>>. Lucy only reveals her name (and that her mother named her for Lucifer), along with specific details of the <<link "island where she was born">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "history"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Island-Lucy"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>>, in the last few pages of the novel. This declaration reads like the beginning of a story, rather than the end of one. However, //No Telephone to Heaven// is the only novel of the three with a story of return. After living in America, England, and throughout Europe, Clare Savage returns to what was once her grandmother’s house in Jamaica to join a group of militant revolutionaries. The novel’s opening scene of this group hiding in the Jamaica bush repeats itself as the violent, chronological end to the narrative. There is a collage-like layering to the way that these novels are structured, juxtaposing past and present, memory and reality. History is mapped onto the environment of the Jamaican bush in a very literal way at the end of //No Telephone to Heaven// when film crews making a historical movie about the <span class="reference-link"><<link "Windward Maroons">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "reference"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Maroons"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>></span> <<link "converge on the militia’s hiding spot">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "history"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Filming-NTTH"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>>. The Caribbean environment—the forest and the sea—is a site for the <<link "layering of history">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "history"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Caribbean-Discourse-Landscape"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>>, stretching back to before Christopher Columbus “discovered” the islands, artificially imposing a “start” to Caribbean history. Clare crosses the Atlantic and re-lives the journey of her ancestors, both slaves and slaveholders, who traced the same path over the water. The green of the forest holds memories of pre-conquest flora and fauna. Even though the forest has gone from wild, to cultivated land, and circled back to bush, <<link "traces">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "history"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Orange-Trees-NTTH"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>> of these <<link "histories">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "history"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Riverwater-NTTH"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>> remain. The land does not tell a linear narrative. There is <<link "no single history">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "history"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Caribbean-Discourse-History"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>>, no single colonial story of straightforward progress among the rocks and pools of the <span class='dream-link'>[[river|Sea-Dream-VITD]]</span>.

"She had arrived in Kingston with a high fever, in pain, entering the city on the sea as her ancestors had once done. Some concealed below. Some pacing above, bonnets protecting their finely complected faces from the brutal sun. Windward Passage. Spanish Main. Contrary images. The noises of the kin below breaking the breezes of the tropical night. Crux bright above them, dark nebula invisible within. Lying on the polished deck while men from Goa cleaned around her, she drifted in and out, thinking, If Jamaica has nothing else, she has at least <span class='history-link'>[[her beauty|The-House-NTTH]]</span>." Michelle Cliff, //No Telephone to Heaven//. 1987. Vintage International, 1989, p. 168-169.

"The house could not be seen at all. The house so hidden it seemed to exist no longer. Once the center of their life in this place. The structure which held her grandmother's stern church. Her grandfather's senility. Her mother's schoolbooks, wormed, yellow, handed down. The building where it was, where she remembered it as being, screened by green. Nothing but the chaos of the green--reaching across space, <span class='history-link'>[[time too it seemed|Collaging-History]]</span>. When only Arawaks and iguanas and birds and crocodiles and snakes dwelt here." Michelle Cliff, //No Telephone to Heaven//. 1987. Vintage International, 1989, p. 172.

"It was a big area with lots of thick-trunked, tall trees along winding paths. Along the paths and underneath the trees were many, many yellow flowers the size and shape of play teacups, or fairy skirts. They looked like something to eat and something to wear at the same time; they looked beautiful; they looked simple, as if made to erase a complicated and unnecessary idea. I did not know what these flowers were, and so <span class='flower-link'>[[it was a mystery to me why I wanted to kill them|Flowers]]</span>. I wished that I had an enormous scythe; I would just walk down the path, dragging it alongside me, and I would cut these flowers down at the place where they emerged from the ground." Jamaica Kincaid, //Lucy//. 1990. Picador, 2025, p. 29.

"You ride in a sort of dream, the saddle creaks sometimes, and you smell the sea and the good smell of the horse. And then - wait a minute. Then do you turn the the right or the left? To the left, of course. You turn to the left and the sea is at your back, and the road goes zigzag upwards. The feeling of the hills comes to you - cool and hot at the same time. <span class='ecosystem-link'>[[Everything is green, everywhere things are growing|Ruinate-in-NTTH]]</span>. There is never one moment of stillness - always something buzzing. And then dark cliffs and ravines and the smell of rotten leaves and damp. That's how the road to Constance is - green, and the smell of green, and then the smell of water and dark earth and rotting leaves and damp." Jean Rhys, //Voyage in the Dark.// 1934. Penguin Classics, 2019, p. 125.

"I dreamt that I was on a <span class='history-link'>[[ship|Arrival-NTTH]]</span>. From the deck you could see small islands - dolls of islands - and the ship was sailing in a dolls' sea, transparent as glass. Somebody said in my ear. 'That's your island that you talk such a lot about.' And the ship was sailing very close to an island, which was home except that the trees were all wrong. These were <span class='temperate-link'>[[English trees|Damp-Trees-VITD]]</span>, their leaves trailing in the water. I tried to catch hold of a branch and step ashore, but the deck of the ship expanded. Somebody had fallen overboard." Jean Rhys, //Voyage in the Dark.// 1934. Penguin Classics, 2019, p. 136.

"I hated walking through the woods; it was gloomy and damp, for the sun could hardly shine through the tops of the trees. Without wanting to, I could imagine that there was someone or something where there was nothing. I was reminded of home. I was reminded that I came from a place where there was no such thing as a "real" thing, because often what seemed to be <<link "one thing">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "temperate"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Small-Place-Antigua"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>> turned out to be <span class='dream-link'>[[altogether different|Dream2-VITD]]</span>." Jamaica Kincaid, //Lucy//. 1990. Picador, 2025, p. 53-54.

"Mariah, now mistaking my intense study of her for curiosity about the flowers, held them up in the crystal vase in which they were arranged and said, "Peonies--aren't they gorgeous?" I agreed that they were and said I did not know a <span class ='temperate-link'>[[climate like this|Damp-Trees-VITD]]</span> could produce flowers that bloomed like that, bloomed with such abandon, as if there were no tomorrow." Jamaica Kincaid, //Lucy//. 1990. Picador, 2025, p. 59-60.

"(nothing but the <span class='temperate-link'>[[damp trees|Woods-Lucy]]</span> and the soggy grass and the sad, slow-moving clouds - it's funny how it makes you feel that there's not anything else anywhere, that <span class='dream-link'>[[it's all made up|Dream-VITD]]</span> that there is anything else)." Jean Rhys, //Voyage in the Dark.// 1934. Penguin Classics, 2019, p. 74.

<<if $visitedDream2>>"Sometimes not being able to get over the feeling that it was a <span class='dream-link'>[[dream|Ship-Dream-VITD]]</span>. The light and sky and the shadows and the houses and the people - all parts of the <span class='ecosystem-link'>[[dream|Constance-Estate-VITD]]</span>, all fitting in and all against me." Jean Rhys, //Voyage in the Dark.// 1934. Penguin Classics, 2019, p. 130. <<else>><<type 100ms>>\//"Sometimes not being able to get over the feeling that it was a <span class='dream-link'>[[dream|Ship-Dream-VITD]]</span>. The light and sky and the shadows and the houses and the people - all parts of the <span class='ecosystem-link'>[[dream|Constance-Estate-VITD]]</span>, all fitting in and all against me"//\<</type>> <<timed 20s t8n>>Jean Rhys, //Voyage in the Dark.// 1934. Penguin Classics, 2019, p. 130.<</timed>><</if>><<set $visitedDream2 to true>>

!Flowers The memorization and recitation of English poetry was an <span class='reference-link'><<link "educational practice throughout the British Empire">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "reference"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Tiffin"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>></span>, one that resulted in the colonized subject <<link "absorbing and embodying the language, values, and priorities of the colonizer.">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "flower"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Garden-Book"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>> William Wordsworth’s <span class='flower-link'>[[“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”|Cloud-Wordsworth]]</span> brought daffodils to a climate where they could not grow, to children who had never and <<link "likely would never see one.">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "flower"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Abeng-Daffodils"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>> Sitting amongst the tiny wildflowers of Savernake Forest, west of London, Anna Morgan remembers the once-familiar tropical flowers growing at home as alien and strange. And indeed, many of the flowers that do grow in the Caribbean did not originate there. Rather, they arrived from around the world, part of the transatlantic exchange of plants, people, animals, and disease. <span class='reference-link'><<link "Jasmine is native to Central and South Asia">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "reference"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Jasmine"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>></span>, but it was popularized in Europe in the fifteenth century before making its way to the Caribbean. <span class='reference-link'><<link "Hibiscus is now the national flower of Haiti">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "reference"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Hibiscus"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>></span>, but it is native to Africa and Southeast Asia. Hibiscus species arrived in the Caribbean along with African slaves indentured Indian laborers. The peony that Lucy is surprised to see growing in a temperate climate is native to China. <span class='reference-link'><<link "In 1789, the British naturalist Sir Joseph Banks acquired a peony tree from Canton China, which was planted in the Kew Royal Botanic Garden.">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "reference"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Peony"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>></span> European and American horticulturists began <<link "breeding ornamental peonies">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "flower"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Caribbean-Discourse-Flowers"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>>, and the flower remains one of the most popular ornamental flowers in the world. Flowers are symbols of migration and displacement; the transplanted flower is a metonym for the violence of conquest. <span class='reference-link'><<link "Caribbean landscapes were replanted so quickly post-conquest, that it became impossible to tell what flora grew there before Columbus arrived.">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "reference"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Tinsley"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>></span> Colonial gardens on the islands represented European settlers’ domination of a “wild” landscape. Flowers also represent a hybridity of culture, and <<link "the garden">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "flower"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Garden-NTTH"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>> is a complex site of encounter and interaction. The way that the characters in these novels hold the <span class='ecosystem-link'>[[complexity of their home landscapes|Constance-Estate-VITD]]</span> in memory while navigating an <span class='temperate-link'>[[unfamiliar and uncomfortable climate|Cold-Lucy]]</span> is a rejection of the totalizing force of colonization.

!I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud !!By William Wordsworth I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the <span class='flower-link'>[[daffodils|Flowers]]</span>.

"After their bath, they <<link "lay together">> <<script>> Dialog.create("", "ecosystem"); Dialog.wikiPassage("Abeng-Bath"); Dialog.open(); <</script>> <</link>> on the rocks, and Clare let herself drift further. Each bend in the river came <span class='history-link'>[[back|Collaging-History]]</span> to her. <span class='ecosystem-link'>[[The special rocks where crayfish slept underneath|Flora-and-Fauna]]</span>. The deep places you could dive without harm. The pool named for a man who suffered from fits. The pool name for a girl made pregnant by an uncle. The dam made by a man who kept hogs. The five croton trees--dragon's blood--marking off the burial place of slaves, at the side of the river, on a slight rise." Michelle Cliff, //No Telephone to Heaven//. 1987. Vintage International, 1989, p. 174.

"A witch-moth slept in a corner of the room, against the ceiling above the doctor's head. Clare concentrated on the moth, drawing herself to it--huge, quiet, black--a being her people called a bat. Short-lived--how long was it? She could not remember. With life so short, why should she sleep it away, on high in that hot room? Why not swoop, wildly, her wingspan glancing at the doctor's straightened hair, knocking his glasses askew? Then Clare remembered the <span class='ecosystem-link'>[[delicacy of moths|Flora-and-Fauna]]</span>, their wings as fine and flimsy as a bougainvillea. She thought of touching her, the grain of her pattern black on black." Michelle Cliff, //No Telephone to Heaven//. 1987. Vintage International, 1989, p. 170.

<<if $visitedSeaDream>>"It was funny how, after that, I kept on <span class='dream-link'>[[dreaming|Dream-VITD]]</span> about the sea." Jean Rhys, //Voyage in the Dark.// 1934. Penguin Classics, 2019, p. 137. <<else>><<type 100ms>>\//"It was funny how, after that, I kept on <span class='dream-link'>[[dreaming|Dream-VITD]]</span> about the sea."// \<</type>> <<timed 8s t8n>>Jean Rhys, //Voyage in the Dark.// 1934. Penguin Classics, 2019, p. 137.<</timed>><</if>><<set $visitedSeaDream to true>>

"This ignorance of the botany of the place I am from (and am of) really only reflects the fact that when I lived there, I was of the conquered class and living in a conquered place; a principle of this condition is that nothing about you is of any interest unless the conqueror deems it so. For instance, there was a botanical garden not far from where I lived, and in it were plants from various parts of the then British Empire, places that had the same climate as my own; but as I remember, none of the plants were native to Antigua." Jamaica Kincaid, //My Garden (Book)//. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999, p. 120.

"Probably there were a million children who could recite “Daffodils,” and a million who had never actually seen the flower, only the drawing, and so did not know why the poet had been stunned." Michelle Cliff, //Abeng//. The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1984, p. 85.

"The flowers that grow today are cultivated for export. Sculptured, spotless, striking in precision and quality. But they are heavy also, full, lasting. You can keep them for two weeks in a vase. Arum or anthurium, bunches of which adorn our airport. The porcelain rose, which is so durable. The heliconia, its amazing shaft multiplying infinitely. The King of Kings, or the red ginger lily, whose very heart is festooned with dark red. These flowers delight us. But they have no fragrance. They are nothing but shape and color." Edouard Glissant, "The Known, the Uncertain." //Caribbean Discourse//, The University Press of Virginia, 1989, p. 52.

"To the people in a small place, the division of Time into the Past, the Present, and the Future does not exist. An event that occurred one hundred years ago might be as vivid to them as if it were happening at this very moment. And then, an event that is occurring at this very moment might pass before them with such dimness that it is as if it had happened one hundred years ago." Jamaica Kincaid, //A Small Place//. 1988. Picador, 2025, p. 54.

"I have already said that this landscape is more powerful in our literature than the physical size of countries would lead us to believe. The fact is that it is not saturated with a single History but effervescent with intermingled histories, spread around, rushing to fuse without destroying or reducing each other." Edouard Glissant, "Cross-Cultural Poetics." //Caribbean Discourse//, The University Press of Virginia, 1989, p. 154.

"One of the most disturbing consequences of colonization could well be this notion of a single History, and therefore of power, which has been imposed on others by the West. The struggles for power and the wild assertion of power in South America in the nineteenth century and in Africa today (after decolonization) are the result of this. We begin to realize that as much as the stages of the class struggle or the growth of nations, the profound transformation of mentalities in this regard creates the possibility of changing the world order. The struggle against a single History for the cross-fertilization of histories means repossessing both a true sense of one's time and identity: proposing in an unprecedented way a revaluation of power." Edouard Glissant, "The Known, the Uncertain." //Caribbean Discourse//, The University Press of Virginia, 1989, p. 93.

"This practice is not exclusively directed at literary texts. Rather, it is a way of seeing that takes a wide variety of phenomena—from a poem to a fiddler crab—as life-worlds to be read. Close reading, understood in this manner, is less a specific strategy than an ethical relation: it names a willingness to suspend what Roland Barthes calls the ‘will to possess’ in order to recognize the indeterminacy and variability of the world around us. Sensitive to valences of difference, alert to elisions and silences, the close reader cultivates patience as she learns to listen for the intermittent and the unexpected. Her attention is oriented toward the small—toward minute objects and ephemeral patterns of existence." Freed-Thall, Hannah. <a class="reference-link" href="https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0012" target="_blank">“Thinking Small: Ecologies of Close Reading.”</a> //Modernism and Close Reading//, Oxford University Press, 2020, p. 228.

"Because that is the crux of it, and almost everything is said in pointing out that under no circumstances could it ever be a question of transforming land into territory again. Territory is the basis for conquest. Territory requires that filiation be planted and legitimized. Territory is defined by its limits, and they must be expanded. A land henceforth has no limits. That is the reason it is worth defending against every form of alienation." Edouard Glissant, //Poetics of Relation//. The University of Michigan Press, 1990, p. 151.

"Antigua is beautiful. Antigua is too beautiful. Sometimes the beauty of it seems unreal. Sometimes the beauty of it seems as if it were stage sets for a play, for no real sunset could look like that; no real seawater could strike that many shades of blue at once; no real sky could be that shade of blue—another shade of blue, completely different from the shades of blue seen in the sea—and no real cloud could be that white and float just that way in that blue sky; no real day could be that sort of sunny and bright, making everything seem transparent and shallow; and no real night could be that sort of black, making everything seem thick and deep and bottomless." Jamaica Kincaid, //A Small Place//. 1988. Picador, 2025, p. 77.

"After their bath, the two girls lay back. Their bodies stretched against each other, supported by grey and ancient rock. [...] In other places the gray of the rock was covered by small growths of dark green moss, which concealed cracks where water had collected and small animals lived--tiny crabs walking beneath green, black bugs skimming the surface of the water and getting tangled in the mosses." Michelle Cliff, //Abeng//. The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1984, p. 120.

"When their voices stopped the ray of light came in again under the door like the last thrust of remembering before everything is blotted out. I lay and watched it and thought about starting all over again. And about being new and fresh. And about mornings, and misty days, when anything might happen. And about starting all over again, all over again…” Jean Rhys, //Voyage in the Dark.// 1934. Penguin Classics, 2019, p. 155.

Tiffin, Helen. <a class='reference-link' href="https://doi.org/10.2307/2932217" target="_blank">"Cold Hearts and (Foreign) Tongues: Recitation and the Reclamation of the Female Body in the Works of Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid.”</a> Callaloo, vol. 16, no. 4, 1993, p. 913.

Triana Solórzano, Andrés. <a class='reference-link' href="https://daily.jstor.org/plant-of-the-month-hibiscus/" target="_blank">“Plant of the Month: Hibiscus.”</a> //JSTOR Daily//, 28 Apr. 2023.

Ballinger, Adriana, and Tori Champion. <a class='reference-link' href="https://lab.plant-humanities.org/jasmine" target="_blank">"Jasmine: The Sensual and the Sacred."</a> //Plant Humanities Lab//, Dumbarton Oaks.

Buchanan, Ashley. <a class='reference-link' href="https://lab.plant-humanities.org/peony" target="_blank">"Peony: Pretty and Powerful."</a> //Plant Humanities Lab//, Dumbarton Oaks.

Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. //Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature//. Duke University Press, 2010, p. 39-40.

"Before I came to England I used to try to imagine a night that was quite still. I used to try to imagine it with the crac-cracs going. The verandah long and ghostly - the hammock and three chairs and a table with the telescope on it - and the crac-cracs going all the time. The moon and the darkness and the sound of the trees, and not far away the forest where nobody had ever been - virgin forest. We used to sit on the verandah with the night coming in, huge. And the way it smelt of all flowers." Jean Rhys, //Voyage in the Dark//. 1934. Penguin Classics, 2019, pp. 66-67.

Rhys, Jean. //Voyage in the Dark//. 1934. Penguin Classics, 2019. p. 125.

“The garden the grandmother had planted was gone. Her carefully planned flowers, a devotion of fifty years, a way, she said, of giving something back to the Almighty, as she had given her son to Him, as He had given His son to her—these flowers, chosen for color and texture and how each would set off the next, revealing splendor and glory, her order, her choices, reflecting the order, the choices, of His universe, had been haphazardly supplanted by wilder and brighter ones, exploding disorder into her scheme. A wild design of color was spun through her garden and across her grave, masking the stonecutter’s spare testament to her devotion: S E R V A N T O F G O D. A flame-of-the-forest sparked the disorder, as the heavy jasmine scented the ruination.” Michelle Cliff, //No Telephone to Heaven//. 1987. Vintage International, 1989, p. 8.

“The sun was shining but the air was cold. It was the middle of January, after all. But I did not know that <span class='temperate-link'>[[the sun could shine and the air remain cold|Woods-Lucy]]</span>; no one had ever told me. What a feeling that was! How can I explain?” Jamaica Kincaid, //Lucy//. 1990. Picador, 2025, p. 5.

Cliff, Michelle. //No Telephone to Heaven//. 1987. Vintage International, 1989, p. 172.

“For company, the rats had one another, and the black and yellow swallowtail, who sat on the flat fronds at the tops of the trees warming itself in preparation for flight.” Michelle Cliff, //No Telephone to Heaven//. 1987. Vintage International, 1989, p. 9.

“I was born on an island, a very small island, twelve miles long and eight miles wide; yet when I left it at nineteen years of age I had never set foot on three-quarters of it.” Jamaica Kincaid, //Lucy//. 1990. Picador, 2025, p. 134.

Maroons were escaped slaves throughout the Americas who created their own societies in hiding. Maroon communities in Jamaica still exist today. Brown, Lynn. <a class='reference-link' href="https://daily.jstor.org/maroon-societies-in-jamaica/" target="_blank">“The Obscured History of Jamaica’s Maroon Societies.”</a> //JSTOR Daily//, 31 Aug. 2016.

“As they lay in preparation for their act, hidden by dark and green, separate, silent—as silent as Maroons—they watched the scene below them. The valley was lit by a harsh, unnatural light, sending deep shadows into the hollows of landscape, creating false contrasts. They lay in night, beneath them was day. On a flat, cleared space in this light people mingled in old-fashioned dress. Hovering above these anachronistic people men sat on cranes, shouting directions, advising them, the ones below, the actors, on movement, carriage, how things had been in Jamaica several hundred years before.” Michelle Cliff, //No Telephone to Heaven//. 1987. Vintage International, 1989, p. 206.

“Where the grandmother had grafted the citrus—bitter Seville giving way to sweet Valencia—the graft remained staunch. But higher up the tree, in pursuit of light, the fruit returned to what it was, and sweetness was caught between the bitter and the long-lived.” Michelle Cliff, //No Telephone to Heaven//. 1987. Vintage International, 1989, p. 9.

“The only sound that remained from the grandmother’s time was the rush of the riverwater, but that, which had once sounded clearly through the open grove of citrus, was muffled by the new thick growth and fainter, more distant than before.” Michelle Cliff, //No Telephone to Heaven//. 1987. Vintage International, 1989, p. 9.