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THE EMERGENCE in the last twenty years of yet a new generation of Caribbean writers who have "discovered" the literary possibilities of the vernacular has drawn attention to a pattern: a gendering in the use of the vernacular. Analyzing the French Caribbean socio-linguistic situation, Ellen Schnepel writes: "Creole is considered the special domain of the Antillean male, with an important role in the exchange of jokes, insults, and pithy remarks, and the code used to mark group solidarity or to vent anger; in contrast, French is perceived as more refined, worthy of polite conversation and thus more feminine."1 Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature seems to echo this gendered use of Creole. Comparing the emerging (French-Creole) code-shifting in Francophone Caribbean writing, like that of such male creolist writers as the Martinicans Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, to the more established code-shifting in Anglophone Caribbean writing, James Arnold writes: "Male creolist writers such as Confiant have made their stock in trade a highly sexualized and masculinist idiom [or code-shifting] that is not unlike the sociolect of the Bad Johns one finds in Earl Lovelace's Trinidadian fiction."2 Showing how Creole has become part of the persona of the male Francophone Caribbean writer, Richard Burton has pointed out that masculinist creolist novelists even depict women as "an objective force of decreolization."3 Maryse Conde, a Guadeloupean novelist and a critic of male creolist writing, has perceived the creolists' campaign for the use of Creole in literature as "a declaration of war" against writers, like those in exile, who are less likely to use Creole.4 In reading together the autobiographical writing of a male francophone creolist writer, the Martinican-French Patrick Chamoiseau, and that of a female anglophone writer who avoids Creole in her writing, the Antiguan-American emigrant Jamaica Kincaid, I hope to suggest new ways of discussing gender and poetics in Caribbean literature.
Born in 1949, Kincaid grew up on Antigua speaking English and hearing (if not fluently speaking) Antiguan Creole as well as her mother's Dominican French-lexicon patois before she emigrated to the United States in 1965. From her first collection of fragments and stories, At the Bottom of the River (1978), Kincaid chronicles the blissful union with, and and the earth-shattering separation from, the mother.5 Yet even as she...