Pandering Caribbean Spice: The Strategic Exoticism of Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales

Abstract

Now translated into nearly half a dozen languages, Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (2001) has eclipsed in sales his previous two novels,1 the first of which, Divina Trace, was awarded the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and is now hailed as a landmark achievement in contemporary Caribbean fiction. In fact, an upcoming US edition of Divina Trace gestures toward the considerable international success of the more popularly accessible Folktales by featuring not the familiar black Madonna and child of the Overlook paperback edition, but a sensual female nude, recalling the (dubious) eroticism of the latter novel. Thus, critics of Folktales’ mainstream success have accused Antoni of abandoning the high literary aspirations of his prior novels and pandering to western tastes through an appeal to Caribbean exoticism. One internet reviewer charges that Folktales has, in fact, “none of the dignity and grace” of Antoni’s previous books and that this “long-awaited third book comes as a bit of a surprise and a disappointment”.2 The implication that Antoni’s latest book is somehow a sell-out, however, invites us to look more closely at the way exoticism functions as a discourse in Folktales. I offer that Antoni’s latest book might be profitably read alongside the concept of what Graham Huggan has termed “strategic exoticism”, in which exoticist codes of representation are appropriated by the postcolonial writer and then cunningly redeployed as either a means of subverting those codes or laying bare inequities of power.3 With My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, Antoni certainly stages a conspicuously Pandering Caribbean Spice