Aftermaths Without End

Abstract

“This poem cannot find words / this poem repeats itself,” begins the Trinidadborn Canadian writer Dionne Brand in her poem titled “October 19th, 1983.” This self-reflexive opening is underwritten by shock, confusion, and even trauma. The poem goes on to list a series of names in a repetitive refrain that suggests disbelief: “Maurice is dead / Jackie is dead.” Laurie Lambert argues in Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution that Brand’s stuttering attempt to come to terms, through poetry, with the violence of what transpired in the Caribbean island country of Grenada on October 19, 1983, speaks to how writing functions as a “certain structure of healing” in the aftermath of revolutionary struggle and defeat (Lambert 139). In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel movement (NJM) under Maurice Bishop overthrew the government of Grenada. While the anti-imperialist, social democratic vision of the NJM transformed Grenadian infrastructure, agriculture, and education for the better, “a thread of violence” too often ran through the everyday lives of those in whose name revolutionary change was being sought (Lambert 10). This culminated in the fratricidal outcome of which Brand writes—or rather, “cannot find words” to write—wherein a combination of internal party conflicts and external destabilization turned the revolution murderous of its own. The US military invasion that followed, which included aerial bombing and the deliberate erasure of evidence, was retraumatizing and further complicated the revolution’s legacy. Comrade Sister turns to women’s perspectives in order to grapple with the conflicting realities of this period of Grenadian history, itself part of a longue durée of radical political struggle in the Caribbean that dates back to the genocide of its indigenous peoples and plantation slavery. Lambert’s study rests on two productive and urgent (re-)conceptualizations. One is recognizing the “queer temporality” of revolution, wherein “ideas of revolution as a chronological project of achievement” must be disrupted in order to understand, in full, how the Grenadian Revolution is imagined and remembered (127). The second is an expansion of what constitutes everyday resistance, political struggle, and revolutionary history-making—even and especially where those engaged in these everyday struggles feel ambivalent toward the revolutionary state, even if they