Beyond The Limbo Silence Essay

From a Feminist point of view, Beyond the Limbo Silence is deemed by many critics as a feminist novel that carries out the major preoccupations of immigrant Caribbean women in the United States. Stepping beyond portraying women’s resistance to colonial oppression in her previous novels, Nunez turns her attention to resist clichés of oppressed silenced generally illiterate Caribbean woman. She also hints at the importance of old beliefs and Caribbean cultural heritage in defining the contemporary woman by bridging the gap between culture and spirituality of the native Caribbean culture. She scrutinizes the sociological and cultural concept of womanhood and its relation to roots, racial prejudices and gender conflicts. Susheila Nasta
argues that:” the post-colonial woman writer is not only involved in making herself heard, in changing the architecture of male-cantered ideologies and languages…(s)he also has to subvert and demythologize indigenous male writings and traditions which seek to label her (52). Caribbean women’s writings are usually examined through binary oppositions of native/foreign, oppressor/victim that come at the heart of Caribbean Women resistance to stereotypes and a will to survive and be re-presented anew by local female voices. Being interested in issues of racism, social pressures and patriarchy‘s effects on black immigrant women in diaspora, the second writer of Afro-Caribbean pair Joan Riley consolidates this premise in her novel The Unbelonging.
Joan Riley (1958- ) is a Caribbean immigrant novelist from Jamaica. Having attended British school in her homeland, Riley moved to England in 1976 to pursue her undergraduate and graduate studies at Sussex University and London University. Her first novel, The Unbelonging was published in 1985 and received the attention of critics interested in ethnic studies, Black British writings of exile and diasporic writings of Afro-Caribbean immigrants. Riley continues to examine the reality of Caribbean presence in English society and probes the interaction between colonizer/colonized cultures through shaping examples of immigrants’ status of in-between both for first generation, educated via British norms at schools and those of second generation who were born and raised in England. Those ideas are examined further through the lenses of political identities based on race (Black) and gender (Woman) in the novels that were yet to follow The Unbelonging: Waiting in the Twilight (1987), Romance (1988) and A Kindness to Children
(1992). In The Unbelonging, Riley attempts at giving a realistic image of immigrant women’s hardships, alienation and difficulties of integration in the Western societies especially in the former colonizing country, Britain. She depicts the binary life of Black immigrants, living between two distinct worlds, two antagonizing cultures that the immigrant leads giving some autobiographical accounts of her own experiences as she is herself a Caribbean immigrant. Women of former colonized nations are often regarded as Rosemary puts it “doubly colonized”, she adds that:” so in their experience as expatriates can they be described as doubly other, doubly alienated” (15). The Unbelonging conveys this idea of women’s doubly colonized, Other, alienated through treating primarily the preoccupations subjugated immigrant women being marginalized by racial bias outside, in the Western society and oppressed inside at home by traditional patriarchal practices.