Marvelous & Impossible Poetics: Silence, Kinship, and Blood: Astrid Roemer’s Off White
by TIKKUN BAMBARA
in Spring 2025
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Astrid Roemer’s new novel Off White is her latest portal into Suriname after almost twenty years of silence and it arrives this time in Paramaribo, its capital city, where it “isn’t just what you can see; most of all, it’s what stays hidden.”[1] Through Roemer we are reminded of anti-colonial theorist Suzanne Césaire’s surrealist provocation of le Grand Camouflage (The Great Camouflage), a term that describes the blinding beauty of the Caribbean at the expense of colonial and intra-communal phantoms haunting the tropics.
Through depictions of blood, faint murmurings, erotic encounters, and silence, we are tasked to commune with the living world of Grandma Bee. Inside her world, we witness what is both marvelous and kept at a whisper in the Vanta family. We also witness Surinamese women carving out crevices of care despite institutions that sit at the end of the world, like Kolera, the name of an asylum for the mentally ill, where “women were mostly quiet. They polished off the food they were served and lingered in the hall […] as if they, like her, wanted to see the impossible happen (221).
Roemer greets us through threads of light between those we call kin. Heli, the exiled daughter, visits Laura, the unruly would-be wife of Suriname: “I heard her friends shouting that I was on my way. Arms spread like a happy bird, she came up to me and gave me a hug. She took the food container, insisting, ‘Come with me!’” (363).
And yes, we follow—as if exiled ourselves—beckoned into the labyrinth of a yellow house. From the outset, the stage is set. Grandma Bee is dying. Blood is the threshold all these relations must pass. Through blood and various silences, care. Yet we encounter harm from what lingers, from what remains unspoken and unnamed. Harm by the negation of an utterance. We see daughters deciding when to call one’s family on their proverbial BS, like when Imker, the granddaughter of the Vanta family prods Grandma Bee for answers as to her knowledge of the intrafamilial abuse that has been occurring over the years:
Grandma Bee, do you believe your brother Léon abused your daughter Laura?” No answer. “Imker, I can’t help Laura.” Then Imker leaned her head against her grandmother’s forehead. “Grandma, are you in pain?” Her grandmother rasped, “Yes. My Laura was such a cheerful little thing. (218)
Roemer’s novel brings forth a litany of inquiries. What is one to do with the prodigal granddaughter Heli, in the muck of a scandalous affair with a married man and an unsettling age difference? Heli, our ousted exile who knows during her first Sunday morning in the Netherlands that: “Crying is what you do when blood pours from your body, because you may be in mortal danger. But sometimes a woman bleeds and no one can see it” (25-26). At first glance, Heli's connection to Surinamese identity is dislocated and unromantic. “I don’t want to live with other people from our country on some kind of Surinamibo reservation; I want to sample the Dutch way of life, understand it and absorb it” (301). Roemer’s labyrinth also asks us what we might do about the daughter Laura, a Surinamese woman who:
[. . .] lost the will to do the things considered normal for women in Paramaribo. A woman who had once biked briskly to her school each morning with a bundle of notebooks tied to the cargo rack had turned into a loaded gun: menacing, unapproachable. (47)
Laura reminds the reader of a kind of biblical “Hagar in the wilderness.” Now residing in the asylum Kolera, Laura is visited by Grandma Bee who asks “why she had to cry after every visit. ‘Because you love me’ was the answer. And her daughter kept repeating it, as if she wanted to make clear what mattered to her. ‘Because you love me, Mama’” (72). This scene, one of many encounters of Surinamese kinship between women, works as a microcosm of a larger parable in the novel. In the wake of intimate family and communal abuse, what human behaviors take shape if we are to reinvent love?[2]
Indeed, within Roemer’s new work, the cartography of love and the intricate attention the characters map out display the interiority of family dynamics where elderhood and childhood require the same amount of bodily care and laughter. This care is displayed in one poignant scene in the novel during the home visit of Father Teloor when we realize Grandma Bee’s health is deteriorating to the point that she could no longer shower on her own. Roemer’s narrator tells us: “she’d never been naked in front of her children before, and except during her pregnancies, she’d never shown anyone but her husband Anton the most intimate parts of her body” (288). Despite this:
It was Imker herself who offered to be more involved in dressing and bathing her. “And in the toilet, too, if you need help with that.” She said, “I feel so ashamed.” And her granddaughter said, “Me, too, Grandma.” And then they couldn’t help but laugh. But she felt so relieved after the first shower, because Imker was as naked as she was, splashing water in every direction. […] Afterward, there was no shame and no hopeless longing for death [...] and the thought that God was palpable in everything others did for her. (289)
At other times in the novel, cartography serves as a descriptor for these kinships, particularly when frustration rears its head at unmet expectations when the Vanta family doesn’t show up. “Daily contact with Grandma was opening her up like an unfurling map, revealing some spots whose existence she'd forgotten.” (124)
In Off White, Roemer’s philosopher’s stone is precisely that inclination that those we call kin are worthy of revisiting, protecting, and questing for, wherever they are in the universe, be it inside an asylum, missing halfway across the world, or forged within our own fading memories. Even if the thing that binds us comes, in part, by way of violence. With such a vision, a “surname like Vanta that was coined by a racist” can be reimagined anew, for “nothing blacker than Vanta exists; that’s a necessary condition of the universe. And no one can escape it” (198).
In the afterlife of Dutch colonialism, delights seep in, as do erotic encounters. Against a backdrop of abuse and hushed scars, Roemer posits life. Through what Kevin Quashie calls black aliveness, Roemer resets the stage.[3] The smell of almonds. The texture of dark cake on the tongue. How to preserve the learning of a Surinamese family recipe when its keeper’s throat is aflame with cancer and can no longer speak? A matriarch now assigned to transcribing longings, a granddaughter tasked with learning how to oblige, offers us an answer:
She went to the kitchen, grabbed a notepad and pencil, and wrote, Imker, I’ll teach you how to bake a fiadu. It’s not easy, but it’s my favorite kind of cake […] “My fiadu should be as brown as my daughter Louise.” (228-229)
Through Surinamese cake and family gatherings orchestrated to celebrate new life, Roemer paints a picture of a Surinamese family articulating their various outlooks on skin color and varying shades of blackness.
We also see relatives remaining, tending to Surinamese kinships. We see siblings guiding each other through adolescence, naming parts of their bodies and modes of description for new adulthoods. This new offering centers a household of daughters, granddaughters, and beloved sons who are fully alive and breathing Surinamese evening air. Laura. Louise. Babs. Audi. Heli. Imker. Winston. We may first notice the distance. Cascades of silence invoke the intertextual fabric of these relations. Yet we are tasked to resolve the quagmire. What is one to do with Anton? The grandfather of Laura and Heli, who protects his children at all costs, and who believes that: “We must redeem ourselves from the shortcomings of the place called Suriname” (140). How are we to respond to Babs Vanta? His granddaughter who “poked her nose into Mama’s most intimate stories” (128). How are we to come to terms with the reality that a precious daughter named Ethel, who was shipped off by Anton in an act to salvage a possible future for her? How do we recover from the carnage of silence?
Silence is also a threshold, an arched beam, forever present in their bright yellow house. Silence colors the impasse that kinship brings forth. Yet apace our disquiet are budding Surinamese girls and boys discovering who they are and who they want to be, who they want to touch and who absolutely will not be touching them. Throughout the novel, Roemer depicts blood, whether it takes shape as menstruation, the results of pleasure, or the symptoms of cancer. Blood is a conduit for modes of relation to come into view. A sister provides clarity to a younger sibling:
“What’s this?” He’d once heard Heli say to Umar that she’d do everything in her power to help make a good man of her little brother Audi. She picked up the package and said in a friendly tone, “They’re pads for older girls and women, to absorb their monthly blood flow; yes, they put it in their underwear, and the bleeding has to do with making babies.” He nodded. “Can you die from it?” Heli rewrapped the pack in the newspaper he’d brought it in. “Bleed to death, you mean?’” (54)
At other points in the novel, blood is an occasion to express the limits of pleasure as seen by our exiled Heli. “I want to fuck him in the dark, to the point of bleeding if that’s what it takes” (322). Roemer foregrounds the innermost knowledge of Surinamese women whether through scenes of pleasure or scenes that center elders fully engaging their inner bodily intuition. For example, we can see this through the opening sentence of the novel “Grandma knew right away something horrible was happening. The blood was bright red with small dark clots.” (1). Despite this misery, Grandma Bee uses blood as a descriptor that will trace her kin back to her:
“May my blood start to flow on this very spot and not stop until I’m found.” The figure of Christ looked down on her. Blood on his torso. Drops of blood on his feet. Bleeding wounds in his palms. To keep from dissolving into tears again, she moved on to the figure of Saint Anthony of Padua through whose intercession all lost things are found again.” (1)[4]
Inside Off White we are also onlookers at various rituals of preparation, like a mother, Louise, preparing her son, Audi, a young Surinamese boy and a blooming scientist and poet with a keen interest in reproductive organs. This ritual is facilitated through a haircut in the living room as a small gesture to prepare Audi for a world in which the displays of violence from men are taken as self-evident. Heli’s mother Louise desires a different kind of being to emerge from her son Audi:
“I’ll shape you into a good brother to your sisters, Audi, and a good father to your children.” He laughed a little and glanced at the big book next to her. She went on, “And what’s left will be pure gold for the woman you love.” (210)
This potent image of a human being as pure gold invokes sentiments akin to Suzanne Césaire’s conception of “the domain of the marvelous” published in her pathbreaking essay “Alain and Esthetics.” For Césaire, the marvelous is made flesh by way of West Antillean art and by extension a human experience that is a conduit for overwhelming beauty: “A new art which leaves humankind in its true condition, fragile and dependent [. . .], a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming.”[5] Themes of the marvelous bubble up in the novel at various intervals in ways that are complicated. Particularly for our heroine Heli Vanta, who attempts to self-emancipate to the mountains in the Netherlands with her lover, only to be abandoned by him when he brings his wife and children:
Cate looks pale from the rough weather and grimly takes off her gloves. “So, tell me.” It comes out in a seamless screech: “Derik has left his family to continue his relationship with me, and I have to pick him up at Schiphol soon so we can fly off together!” Cate sighs, clearly relieved, gets up to order two bowls of peanut soup, comes back, sits, and takes the hat off her head. “What can I do to help, sweetie?” (342)
Attempting to link themes of the marvelous[6] to Heli Vanta is complicated further because Heli doesn’t actually situate her experience of the marvelous in the Caribbean but in her new dwelling, the Netherlands. Arriving in the mountainous town originally reserved for Heli and her Derik, she is:
overwhelmed by the feeling that my experiences in the tropics were mere dreams and now, finally, reality is shining before me. It’s clear why Derik wanted to bring me to this virgin landscape high above sea level. When I enter our room and discover the view of the mountain range, I know my mother’s God has intervened. Cate comes up beside me and stares, too. “We’re up high,” I say. She doesn’t see my tears. Everything is frozen in place. ( 359)
Roemer writes a world where an ousted Surinamese exile is not, in turn, ousted from a kind of marvelous experience, even if that experience comes through a Surinamese woman who has a complicated relationship with the Caribbean.
The marvelous also creeps in through other doorways, by way of African rituals. Grandma Bee’s hallucinogenic memory invites us there, when she recalls time spent during a Surinamese spiritual gathering called a Winti séance. As the morphine does its work, the cancer announces itself more profusely. Her granddaughter Imker assures her that she will stay, as Bernadette wishes: “Until I’m completely covered with sand” (359).
she could fearlessly tumble back to the Winti séance, which had not disappeared from her thoughts since the morphine. […] Adults in colorful shawls, men with bare torsos next to wooden drums, women with headscarves carrying sloshing buckets of water with fragrant herbs. The master of ceremonies, wearing a European-style suit. He assured them that Anton’s ancestors had something to say and [...] everyone else was in a flurry of movement. […] For them, it was a way of mourning. For the others, a party. Everything got louder—the singing, the handclapping, the foot-stomping, the drumming. […] a woman brought a gourd filled with a reddish drink, which the dancer sucked in then spit out. And returned to dancing, but more and more wildly, until she screamed, the dancer did, and everything held still. […] Strangers were also looking on, the light in their eyes like jewels in their faces. The Winti séance seemed to have been forgotten until, years and years later, the dancer’s gibberish began to look like a premonition. Laura, a grown woman, living at Kolera? (327-329)
Roemer shows that it is precisely this site of communal African ritual where Grandma Bee is able to use her almost disintegrating mind to formulate inquiries around her loved ones—her kin. The language of the dancer conjures up clarity about what needs to be asked. Roemer writes characters who in the midst of anguish still have subjectivity, who can consider the shaping of their worlds, undeterred by their foreshowed decay. Roemer continuously frames moments of pain where our elder, Grandma Bee, still has agency: “Speaking so many words in one breath had become an effort. She gulped down a clot of blood. She was in pain. She was losing weight. But she really wasn’t interested in bleeding to death” (60).
In a similar literary labyrinth as Martinican surrealist, René Ménil, Roemer also depicts the marvelous, among other avenues, by way of the erotic and the orgasmic, as terra communis and landscape. In Introduction to the Marvelous, René Ménil underscores:
Through a sort of magical incantation, stories and poems transport us into an extraordinary world: The land of the marvelous. It is the land which (unlike the world of real life) finally responds to our fundamental desires that ordinarily do not dare to be confessed. [. . .] Here is a world governed only by the pleasure principle. Man sees the intolerable limits of everyday life [. . .]. He can transgress his spatial boundaries [. . .]. He transforms himself into a tree.[7]
Particularly concerning the erotic, Roemer takes Ménil’s conception of the pleasure principle further and shows Surinamese women and girls governing their lives under the auspice of pleasure with gust and agency. Heli, despite knowing her status as an exile living in Holland, has a scandalous affair. She unabashedly indulges in pleasure with a local tennis instructor:
The lust in my womb has not been sated. I want to feel more everywhere he can touch me, melt with desire [...] He lets the mailman out, locks the door, draws close to me, takes my left hand, presses it to his crotch. I grip it, fondle it, and he pushes his tongue into my mouth. With both hands, I hold him by the balls, saying, “I need you to fuck me!” He lifts me off my feet. Lya and Winston are watching the news when I let them know I’m home. “Were you with him?” Winston calls out. “Yes,” I call back, adding, “It took a long time, my Dutch dinner, delicious, though!” (322)
These erotic encounters are rooted in sensual acts of refusal, precisely because Surinamese women are not allowed to talk about desire so explicitly in public, either in the context of the erotic or their desires for a fulfilled life: “Everyone in the family knew Grandmother Bee had been married off. Because she never had the chance to choose a life partner for herself” (98). Indeed, Cate, a friend of Heli, says: “My mother claims that a woman must learn to adapt if she wants a good marriage, but who can have a good life with a man who keeps walking out, Heli?” “I don’t know. I have no understanding of Men...” (240). Conversations revolving around the erotic usually take place quietly, as in another scene where Cate
whispers in a staccato voice, “I broke up with that bastard I was dating because he couldn’t understand that a woman like me wants marriage, kids, a nice house, and a long life together, and not him screwing around like the cock of the walk.” I don’t crack a smile, even though she’s trying to make me laugh. I know how much that bastard really meant to her. After spending the night with him, she’d tell me the next morning at school, “He has a short penis, but so thick, it’s addictive, Heli, I’m staying with him until I drop dead!” […] As we get off the bus, she says, “Heli, you know what rhymes with ‘thick penis’?” Just like at school in Paramaribo, I respond, “Hot Venus!” She offers me her arm, and we venture into the unknown. (136)
These delights proliferate throughout the novel. We see friends trying to make each other laugh despite recognizing their heartache. We see heartache become recovered by humorous foolishness. Roemer posits friendship as the qualifier for company into the “unknown,” which functions both as a way to describe the Surinamese immigrant’s experience traversing the Netherlands, and as a metaphor for Grandma Bee’s edging toward the abyss of death and what that unknown moment of surrender occasions for her children.
Further, writing the erotic in such a way provides space for female protagonists to articulate their desires in a world where their pleasures are deemed non-existent. This is shown in part when Heli takes her little sister Imker, along with Heli’s co-worker, to a conference held by The First Association for the Rights of the Surinamese Woman where a workshop instructor sets out to teach the young women in attendance:
The woman who comes in with a Dutch lady looks familiar to me. She doesn’t say her own name, but immediately introduces the white woman, who begins her talk. Right away we’re all on the edge of our seats. […] I don’t miss a single word. We’re shown a big color illustration of the vulva and vagina. Eleven pairs of women’s eyes stare at the thing. […] The moderator has a question for each of us: “Are you in a relationship and how old is your partner?” She doesn’t ask who’s still a virgin and who is having sex. She obviously isn’t interested in lies. I say I have a boyfriend and give his age. She blinks. She even smiles. She says, “Best not to get stuck in that type of relationship, no matter how romantic it is, because by the time you get a handle on what your body needs, he’ll be too old to satisfy you and get you pregnant.” (120)
In a social sphere where the female body is on full scientific display, where partners are assumed to be men and women are assumed to eventually get pregnant, Roemer posits encounters of Surinamese sisterhood. This is particularly shown a few moments after the conference workshop where we catch the awkwardness of how a close-knit community handles the scandals that are produced in that community.
The elephant in the room is Heli’s affair with her previous teacher, an older married man named Derik. Heli’s sister Imker informs us who the woman who chose not to introduce herself, but looks familiar, actually is:
Imker and my co-worker Cate and I walk arm in arm behind the other women in silence. Then Imker says softly, “The woman who introduced us to the doctor is Derik’s wife: she’s straightened and dyed her hair, but I know her from the training program; she teaches arts and crafts.” I don’t respond. “Are you taking one of her classes?” my co-worker Cate asks sweetly. “Yes,” my sister whispers. “You poor thing,” Cate says, giving my arm a hard, painful pinch. I should say something to Imker, but I don’t know what. And suddenly my sister declares in a loud voice, “I’ll love you just the same, Heli, whatever you do!” I pull free and hug her in the middle of the street. I promise to share everything I have with her for as long as I live. (120-121)
In a conversation with Jamaica Kincaid and Kaiama L. Glover at Barnard College, Tiphanie Yanique foregrounds the treatment of women and girls as a dialectic between agency and subjectivity where we might come to notice who is allowed agency in Caribbean literature and who isn’t. Yanique argues that women and girls in Caribbean fiction:
[. . .] get to act [. . .]. They get to move. They get to make decisions and act on their own decisions. Then maybe after that they get to have adventures, which boys always get [. . .] I feel like that has always been the condition that girls and women are up against in Caribbean literature [. . .] we were always doing stuff, we were always active, but it wasn’t always clear in the literature why and what personhood was behind that action.
Roemer speaks to this desire, she distills fully fleshed subjectivity and gives us a world that responds to Surinamese women attempting to enchant their lives. In another scene, Laura represents this desire.
“I’ve waited for flowers for so long,” Laura said softly, adding, “You can go back to your house.” But how could she do that, under the circumstances? “What are you going to do with the flowers?” Laura’s response was very simple [...] “I’ll go see my friends now and give each of them a flower.” (186)
The Vantas and the Surinamese women that comprise their household buck up against the archetype of the romantic revolutionary of the Antilles. Laura reminds us of Toni Cade Bambara’s Velma Henry from her 1980 novel The Salt Eaters—Velma, who lived in Claybourne, a town which was “getting to resemble the backwards of the asylum more every day.”[8] Velma, the unassuming organizer, clustered among the disenchanted, a flickering light in the wake of 1960s revolutionary fervor, who attempts to take her own life in a final attempt to wash away despair and ventures into a journey of psychic renewal. Similarly, we see Laura, also a grassroots activist, search her own psyche to make sense of how her world has come to be its current shape:
She searched her mind for a landmark to organize her memories around. Elections. Green People’s Party. The whole city littered with pamphlets. “Laura joined a young politician who was campaigning for a presidential candidate known to his adoring followers as Jopie. She formed a club with other young women that provided entertainment throughout the campaign, performing songs about the country, its party politics, and, of course, love. The politician lost the support of his party. He turned to alcohol. Threw tantrums. Put pressure on her to binge drink with him after his failure. Then something must have happened that made her snap. A rape? Did he beat her? She returned home from her job as a teacher in Saramacca a broken woman. Never wanted to see him again. Insisted on pressing charges against him. Gave us a hard time because her brother and sister were so enthusiastic about the new party. (325-326)
Roemer’s novel tasks us to consider the options of lived adventures available to Surinamese women under conditions of duress, not only from the state and the aftershocks of colonialism, but from the Surinamese women we call kin. Moreover, to sit with the intensity of our urge to hold judgment over their lives. In addition, Roemer shows Surinamese women taking care of other Surinamese women through moments of tenderness and friendship. Cate, upon hearing that her friend Heli, after the mayhem of having a scandalous affair with a prominent man in the community, responds in the only way she knew how: “Cate takes a white napkin from the napkin holder, grabs a marker from her purse, and writes in red letters: Fine, I’ll help you escape into happiness” (342).
Roemer is a relentless pursuer. She welcomes us. In being welcomed, we are engulfed by modes of relation that are frankly impossible. However, those conditions of impossibility offer occasions for intimate encounters of relation. Roemer pursues this impossibility with vigor, desire, and gusto. Some of the consequences reinforce trauma, others provide a path toward what surrealist traditions refer to as “the heart of the forest”[9] where love may be reinvented.
One such occasion takes place when Louise visits Laura in the impossible institution that is Kolrea. Louise does this despite still being confronted with an onslaught of inner turmoil, shame and guilt from her past desires and her children being scattered around the world. Louise greets Laura, Roemer tells us,
maybe that was enough. Her mind was on other matters. She’d been reunited with her sister Laura, in a place where no woman wanted to go: inside the barbed-wire fence at the world’s end. Now it was her duty to lighten her sister’s undeserved suffering by spending time with her, as much as possible, or even if it became impossible (274).
[1] Astrid Roemer, Off White (Two Lines Press, 2024), 97. All other references will be made in-text.
[2] In the spirit of a Caribbean feminist echo of Kaiama L. Glover’s A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being, the women of the Vanta family could themselves easily be seen as equally disorderly: “These self-regarding female characters (come to) believe that they matter and, as such, that to love and be loved is their right. However, like the Haitian goddess Ezili so exquisitely theorized by Colin Dayan, they “demand that the word [love] be reinvented.’” (Duke University Press, 2020), 29.
[3] Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet (Rutgers University Press, 2012).
[4] Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s illuminating Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature speaks to the ways Surinamese women immigrating to the Netherlands is a miniature replica of a larger pattern of Caribbean human movement on the world stage much like the forced exile of our protagonist Heli Vanta: “Many can tell of relatives who have migrated to the Netherlands because while there is so much of the world here in Suriname, there is too little of world capital, and a dyadya uma needs to make a living. This continual stream of migration following Surinamese independence means that mati move to Holland, where their presence begins to Creolize the lesbian community and lesbianize the mati community. It also means that those Surinamese working-class women who stay in Paramaribo without remittances have less community as well as economic power [. . .]” (Duke University Press, 2010), p. 66.
[5] There are multiple translations of “The Domain of The Marvelous.” This particular one comes from Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, ed. Penelope Rosemont (University of Texas Press, 1998), 137.
[6] The meaning of the marvelous in Caribbean belles lettres has been manifold, proliferating in many directions. Some scholars tend to collapse the terms, the marvelous with Hispanophone traditions of magic realism and Alejo Carpentier’s infamous naming of the marvelous real or marvelous realism. It is beyond the scope of this essay to delve into the various contours of the distinctions between them; my intention here is to particularly situate Césaire’s unique conception of the marvelous in relation to the experience Roemer’s protagonists live through. To be sure, Césaire’s articulation of the marvelous doesn’t quite map onto Heli’s experience in the Netherlands. First and foremost, Césaire situated her conception of the marvelous firmly in her hometown of Martinque. As a foremost scholar of Césaire, Annette Joseph-Gabriel reminds us when thinking about what the marvelous meant to Césaire: “The marvelous for her is in part Surrealist and in part Caribbean. The Caribbean was for Césaire a site for all that eludes rational thought. You can see how that is political in two ways: 1) Resistance to the status quo [...] that being colonialism and fascism during the World Wars 2) It's political and subversive to think about the marvelous in the Caribbean as a site for philosophy and cultural and intellectual production, which goes very much against what colonial discourse has said, that there is nothing here that France brings its gift of civilization” (Joseph-Gabriel, Annette, (personal interview, November 1, 2023). Comparing Heli’s experience atop the mountains in the Netherlands alongside Césaire’s conception of the marvelous, rooted in the Caribbean presents an opportunity to ask what we mean by Césaire’s conception of The Domain of The Marvelous and how do we recognize narratives of liberation across islands for the women who inhabit them.
[7] René Ménil, “Introduction to the Marvelous,” in Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijałkowski, eds., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. Verso, 1996, 90-91.
[8] Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (Random House, 1980), 216.
[9] References that link to the expression “in the heart of the forest” include André Breton and André Masson, “Creole Dialogue,” in Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijałkowski, eds., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (Verso, 1996), 189 and André Breton, Fata Morgana (Black Swan Press, 1969).
Tikkun Bambara is pursuing an MFA in Writing at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. His research engages surreal-theoretical paradigms of the Caribbean interwar period particularly Suzanne Césaire's “The Domain of The Marvelous” and Haitian novelist René Depestre’s “Haitian Imaginary Code” to examine the Caribbean Feminist novel. He is working toward completing his first graduate monograph “Marvel Upon Marvel Upon Marvel: Black Study & Feminist Engagements with Caribbean Surrealism.”
