UC Santa Barbara

Secrets of the Bush examines the role of abortion in contemporary literary production by women in the English-speaking Caribbean. In works of fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction by Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Olive Senior, Nalo Hopkinson, Michelle Cliff, Grace Nichols, Lorna Goodison, Loretta Collins Klobah, and the Sistren Theatre Collective, women attempt to terminate pregnancy using bush teas made from abortifacient plants. My central claim is that representations of herbal abortions are a means of imagining how women negotiate reproductive justice in a region controlled by biomedical and neoliberal economic agencies of the Global North. My title plays on the double-signification of “bush” as a wild space of nature as well as slang for women’s pubic hair to underline how the literary texts represent abortion using coded language. This idea is especially resonant in the ambiguity surrounding scenes of abortion in these texts, suggesting unnamed but enduring arts, and a marked reticence about fully revealing these practices.

I employ a historical-materialist approach to draw on existing scholarship on contemporary historical fiction concerning slavery, known as the neo-slave genre, to address texts that pose slavery as a starting point for interrogating reproductive justice in the contemporary Caribbean. I also engage with contemporary feminist activism and theory to explore these issues as they appear in literature. My project makes two key interventions. The first involves rethinking gender and sexuality in the Caribbean region so that it interrogates spatial and geographic modes of belonging. This brings in an ecocritical component to my dissertation, especially because recent ecocriticism has increasingly been concerned with accounting for racial and gender difference in how people relate to the natural world. My study of these literary texts suggests that women are bound together by their knowledge of anti-reproductive agents and their willingness to use them. The land is a site of this communal relationship. Abortions using botanical agents enact an alternative way of interacting with our world, and, paradoxically, a way of sustaining human cultures in an increasingly precarious climate. Second, I explore theorizations of Caribbean nationalization, bringing in a critique of discourses of creolization in history and social science disciplines. “Secrets of the Bush” contributes to African American and Caribbean literary studies of motherhood and nation.