ABSTRACT |
The
Heart Does Not Bend
(2003) was the first novel published by Caribbean-Canadian author Makeda
Silvera (Jamaica 1955), and in it the author pays homage to the much
celebrated figure of the West-Indian grandmother. In the Caribbean area,
older women have traditionally been in charge of raising their
grandchildren when mothers emigrated north in search of better
conditions of life. This is the situation depicted in this novel, where
the narrator tells of her childhood years under her grandmother’s
tutelage before moving on to account for the latter years spent in
Canada, once she and her grandmother (“Mama”) join the rest of the
family there. Mama’s proven strength and resilience is again tested in
the new, diasporic environment, but she manages to find her own ways
out. The paper will thus comment on the relationships among different
generations of Caribbean women, as well as between women and men, and on
aspects of the Caribbean diaspora as reflected in the novel.
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