Caribbean Feminism, Language and Translation- “Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature”

Caribbean Feminism and Feminism?

At the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s “Caribbean Feminism on a Page series: Edwidge Danticat In Conversation With Victoria Brown” the conversation was grounded in what feminism meant for each of the authors. More specifically, Caribbean Feminism. From that I made a realization that even in a Feminism that is as specific as Caribbean Feminism, as it should be,there are various approaches, experiences and additives that goes along with saying and living one’s “Caribbean Feminism” because each individual experience.

Edwidge Danticat highlighted and defined the importance of what she called “Homegrown Feminism”, which is/are the feminism(s) that is/are curated to one’s experiences. The necessity to differentiate theorizing and experiencing Feminism(s) is rooted in mapping Caribbean Women’s existence, which Brown and Danticat exemplified through their writing. Though they are both women from the region known as the Caribbean, Danticat from Haiti and Brown from Trinidad, they have experienced subjugation and objectification differently and they have expressed it differently, which ties back to Danticat’s point about the importance of “Homegrown Feminism”.

Language was also a very important component of the conversation, the ways in which each author translates their feminism through their writing and the inability to not translate. For example, Edwidge talked about the difficulty to translate certain phrases between Creole, English, and French, whether it is out of the impossibility or out reverence of the home or “love” language. In “Decolonizing the Mind” Thiong’o, mentions, “In my view language was the most important vehicle through which that power fascinated and held the soul prisoner. The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.” the recognition of the power of language and its translation(s) centralized Victoria Brown’s and Edwidge Danticat’s narratives and made it accessible to the audience. Additionally, Edwidge Danticat spoke about writing in English as opposed to French and accessibility to writing in Creole, which aligns with Thiong’o’s point about using language, a tool that was used by colonizers and imperialists, to express and curate experiences and record histories.