Hell and grace: Palimpsestic belonging in The True History of Paradise and Crossing the Mangrove

Abstract

The Caribbean has been characterized as paradise, yet the region’s story is a more complicated one. A means of accessing stories that move beyond the tourist brochure representations is to engage with regional fiction. This essay employs the idea of palimpsestic belonging, which highlights the layers of each generation’s negotiation with colonial legacies, as a tool to explore familial and community attachment in the novels The True History of Paradise (1999) and Crossing the Mangrove (1995). Burial rituals and haunting are mechanisms to engage with the multiple disruptions of an imaginary and unified postcolonial nation. By highlighting the collisions of history, gender, sexuality, and class, these novels navigate national (un)belonging in two distinct Caribbean spaces—Jamaica and Guadeloupe.