Diaspora and Hybridity: Jewish and Crypto-Jewish Women Write the Caribbean

This paper examines how Jewish and crypto-Jewish women writers use an imagined or historical Sephardic Caribbean experience to construct postcolonial and diasporic identities. They raise issues that are common to Caribbean literature such as creolization and hybridity, but their Jewish or crypto-Jewish protagonists are especially challenged in forming their own mixed racial, sexual and religious identities. The strong female protagonists grapple with patriarchy in searching for their roots and their ancestors. In their search, they reflect a need to return to “imaginary homelands” (to use Salman Rushdie’s phrase). These homelands are never the original homes of their ancestors, in Spain or Africa, or the ancient Jewish homeland in Israel, but, rather, the diaspora to which their ancestors fled and found temporary havens. Like the second-generation Black British immigrant Faith Jackson who returns to Jamaica in Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon (2007), the Cuban American writer Achy Obejas, in Days of Awe (2002), returns to Cuba. Similarly, in Alice Hoffman’s story of a nineteenth-century Jewish woman’s marriages in The Marriage of Opposites (2015) Rachel, who in her vicarious return to France, a country she never visited, writes herself into history as the mother of Camille Pissarro. These narratives fit in to what Yael Halevi Wise has termed “Sephardism,” the construction of a historical past that seeks an alternate story to the Zionist or Ashkenazic master narratives and that explores de-essentialized or multiple identities within a globalized network of ethnic, racial, and sexual alternatives.