Claiming an Identity

Abstract

Several English-speaking Caribbean women writers stress the importance of knowing one's history. The interrelationship leads to the formation of female identity. All write about mothers as vehicles of culture and history. Once this function is removed from biological mothers, the daughters become confused about their history and place in it. From the slave narrative to two contemporary novels, we see a slide from the nurturing mother to two surrogate mothers that plummets to an emotionally absent one. This fall results in the need for the daughters to claim and reclaim their historical and cultural identity. In 1831, Mary Prince of Bermuda finished writing The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (Prince, 1831/1987). Published simultaneously in London and Edinburgh in 1831, this is the first known book and slave narrative by an English-speaking Caribbean woman writer. Its value lies in the details that it gives of the British-Caribbean slave trade and the rarely documented recollections of an enslaved Caribbean woman. Prince identifies specific roles played by African women both on sugarcane plantations and in the salt fields. She recounts sufferings, humiliations, psychological trauma, and constant physical abuses rained on her by her various European masters and mistresses in their attempts to tame her emergent rebellious nature. Although The History of Mary Prince was structured and edited for use as propaganda for the Anti-Slavery Movement in Britain, Prince attempts to assert herself and to reflect her presence and her place. She speaks the truth about slavery and retraces her plight as

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