Home and Exile

Two recent publications that have made a mark within the young adult (YA) genre in Caribbean literature are Home Home, a novella by Lisa Allen-Agostini, and Viviana Prado-Núñez’s novel The Art of White Roses. From the anglophone and Hispanic Caribbean regions, respectively, both were recognized by the Burt Award for Caribbean Young Adult Literature in 2017, with Home Home taking third place and The Art of White Roses receiving the honor of being chosen the winner. There are several canonical novels in Caribbean literature within the genre of the bildungsroman, and with their child and teenage narrators and protagonists, these books are testament to the presence of a well-established niche of children’s and YA literature in the region to which Allen-Agostini’s and Prado-Núñez’s writings belong. Like various of their antecedents, these two authors address common tropes of identity, parent-child relationships, fosterage, migration, voluntary exile, alienation, and unbelonging, to name a few. And Home Home also tackles the subject of lesbianism, which is still considered taboo in the Caribbean, as well as the frequent stigmatization of persons who suffer from mental illness—uncommon preoccupations in Caribbean literary texts targeted to nonadult audiences—particularly in relation to adult same-sex cohabitation and the first-person account of fourteen-year-old Kayla suffering from and receiving medical treatment and therapy for mental health instabilities. While family conflict is a parallel concern in both books, The Art of White Roses gives a defining focus, also from the ideological and psychological perspectives of a young girl, the thirteen-year-old Adela, on how political rebellion and armed revolution impact family and community life.

Home Home and The Art of White Roses both include a stylistic device typical of Caribbean writing, particularly the growing-up stories by both male and female authors such as George Lamming (Barbados), Merle Hodge and Michael Anthony (Trinidad and Tobago), Zee Edgell (Belize), Ian McDonald (Guyana), and Olive Senior (Jamaica), among others. This is the child narrator-protagonist, as well as the “tween” and the teenaged one, whose voice and perspective are purposefully and skillfully used by the writer to depict, tackle, and particularly to satirize societal plights and errors—especially those committed by adults. These are in addition to the depiction of expected age-related issues surrounding family and school life, friendship, puberty, “puppy love,” and so on.

The titles of both novels successfully convey thematic foci and factors that impact the identity formation of each narrator-protagonist. The reduplication in the title Home Home not only conveys an emphasis on what home should mean—love, acceptance and belonging, for example—but also the notion of the two actual homes, in terms of country: Trinidad, Kayla’s homeland and where her mother resides, and Canada, her “temporary home” (48), where she has joined Jillian her maternal aunt who cohabits with her same-sex partner Julie. Here is a YA novel addressing the common trope of exile found in the Caribbean literary tradition, but this voluntary exile by the teenage narrator-protagonist—she describes herself as “a Caribbean hermit in exile” (21)—is due to relational and psychological reasons. As has been represented in Caribbean literature regarding the queer diaspora, the adopted home in the metropolis is considered a safer space than the island homeland.

Prado-Núñez’s The Art of White Roses—self-published in 2016, before being published two years later by Papillote Press, like Allen-Agostini’s Home Home—draws its title from the last verse of the Cuban poet José Martí’s poem “Cultivo una rosa blanca,” which serves as an epigraph to the novel:

I Grow a White Rose

I grow a white rose,
in July as in January,
for the sincere friend who gives me his honest hand.

And for the cruel one who tears
from me the heart with which I live,
thorn nor thistle do I grow;
I grow the white rose.

Prado-Núñez provides both the entire Spanish version of this poem by Martí and her English translation (with italicized titles). This literary allusion, an intertextual link between poem and novel, underscores the parallels between the consequences of national and familial strife and a thematic concern in each text—poetic and prose—regarding Cuban revolutionary politics, albeit in different time periods. While in Adela’s dream in the chapter “The White Rose” (176–79) the red rose symbolizes bloodshed from political violence and murder, as well as betrayal within community leading to the disappearances, torture, and killing of political adversaries, and within family in the form of marital infidelity, the white rose is a symbol of forgiveness, magnanimity, and reconciliation, for instance. This latter is achieved in The Art of White Roses as the narrator-protagonist learns lessons about human frailty, dealing with heartache and anger, and forgiving others. “Even after everything,” she declares, “I would do as José Martí did once. I would grow my own white roses.” She has come to acknowledge an awareness, foregrounded by the author’s use of rhetorical anaphora: “Sometimes people were twisted and human. Sometimes those people were presidents and sometimes they were rebels and sometimes they were family. Sometimes they meant to be horrible and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes I was one of those people too. That was the red-rose way of life” (179).

As with Allen-Agostini’s Kayla, Adela learns these lessons in great part from her observations of and experiences with the adults in her life, particularly framed within the simultaneity of national and familial upheavals brought on in 1950s Cuba by the American-backed dictatorship of the Fulgencio Batista regime, Fidel Castro’s armed revolutionary resistance, and the trouble in her parents’ marriage because of her father’s affair. When a tearful neighbor tells Adela and her ten-year old brother, Pingüino, “Adults are supposed to be okay, aren’t they?” (52), the irony in this rhetorical question encapsulates what Adela, in this narrative about growing up, comes to realize about appearance versus reality and the travails and challenges of adulthood. She witnesses the murder of this neighbor’s son, Luis, a young adult who is a rebel in Castro’s resistance movement, by another neighbor who is Adela’s uncle, a member of the police force and a torturer of political prisoners. Later, when Adela’s father retaliates against an American mobster who had assaulted the father’s mistress, Celia—a prostitute who had had the mobster as a client—Adela and her family, including her uncle and his family, must flee from their home to avoid being killed by the mobster, who has murdered Celia. These, in addition to the disappearance and killing of another neighbor who was Adela’s former babysitter, are examples of the dangerous world she is growing up in; as she had told twenty-one-year-old Luis when he asked her to remind him what it felt like to be thirteen, “It’s . . . hard. Probably easier than other things. But still hard” (93).

Typical of the effects of a first-person narrative technique, with a teenaged girl as the focalizer and filter of the action to address the sociopolitical problems of Cuban society ruled by a dictator, a poignancy of voice and perspective is achieved. The actions, decisions, and the failings of adults and how they impact children and youths is therefore highlighted as a foci concern in The Art of White Roses. The same applies to Home Home, since there are various parallelisms between the two novels. Examples include family secrets; island versus metropole; importance of place (Edmonton, Marianao, and Havana, with the symbolism of mountainscape and cityscape in the latter); how the protagonists are affected by place/space; Trinidadian and Cuban viewpoints, respectively, on Canadians and Americans; people from different physical, ideological, and cultural worlds not knowing each other’s true realities, such as they relate to race and class in The Art of White Roses (see 47) and sexuality and mothering in Home Home.

Importantly, other parallels include parents whose dreams were curtailed because of pregnancies (teenage pregnancy, in respect to Kayla’s mother); the protagonists’ feelings of loneliness; their sense of unbelonging at school (both Kayla and Adela feel they learn little there and both have few friends, while Adela’s brother and older cousin do not like school); grappling with mental health (Kayla and Luis); and emotional support from family (Adela’s maternal grandfather, and Kayla’s maternal aunt and her lesbian partner). Both narratives also deal with issues expected of the preoccupations of teenage girls, such as body image and infatuation. In addition, while in The Art of White Roses Adela has feelings of “dissolving” (93), in Home Home Kayla prefers to be “invisible” (28). This sense of invisibility evokes the “invisibleness” of sexual minorities in the forms of prejudice, discrimination, and the withholding of sexual citizenship and other civil rights that, akin to literary activism, Allen-Agostini challenges by publishing a novel with two lesbian characters who are portrayed as substitute mother figures and are integral in Kayla’s emotional and mental healing. In one of the standout scenes in Home Home, which directly addresses the themes of lesbianism and advocacy, the typical parallels among sexual minorities and other marginalized and disadvantaged peoples are outlined during Aunt Jillian’s explanation of what it means to be a “good lesbian” when the issue about animal rights arises in a conversation with Kayla:

“Like any good lesbian I have to believe in a cause.” . . .
“What does that mean?”

“Well,” she said, resting her cheek on my head, “lots of gay people identify with causes—animal rights, the environment, homeless people, immigrant rights, the poor.” She thought about it for a second. “I guess, because we know what it’s like be in the minority and the underclass. We know what it’s like to have no voice so we try to speak for those who don’t either.” (46)

Notably, because of her “troubles” (44; italics in original) Kayla needs to be in an exilic environment to receive the medical treatment—and the more so the familial support—required to deal with her mental health. With her mother epitomizing the lack of understanding and empathy she encountered in her island, Home Home depicts Jillian’s observation of how this is one way the Caribbean has remained the same since she was a girl, before migrating to Canada. Kayla, who at first expresses a level of discomfort with the term lesbian, sex changes, and transgenderism, ultimately ponders not feeling comfortable in one’s own body, and she therefore makes an explicit link between gender dysphoria and those like herself suffering from clinical depression, anxiety, and panic attacks (23). Suggested in this novel, too, is a paradigmatic link among society’s perceptions of left-handedness, mental illness, and nonheterosexuality—of difference and otherness. However, when Kayla contemplates, “People can be different, right?” (18; italics in original), she implies that there is no one way of being or looking “normal” (24).

Allen-Agostini’s Kayla and Prado-Núñez’s Adela are metonymic characters who address commonplace—as well as unsilence previously unspoken—concerns of growing up, both within the storyworld and our real world. While one novel is set in the 1950s and the other in more contemporary times, both parallel each other in equally representing the insecurities and angst but also the triumphs of teenagers navigating home, the maturation process, identity formation, and societal conflict, norms, and prejudices.

Geraldine Elizabeth Skeete is a Lecturer of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. She is a coeditor of The Child and the Caribbean Imagination (University of the West Indies Press, 2012), and her research interests are in the areas of Caribbean literature, literary linguistics, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.