On women's bonds and diaspora rearrangements: aspects of Makeda Silvera's "The heart does not bend"

• Autores: Isabel Alonso Breto
• Localización: Proceedings of the 30th International AEDEAN Conference: [electronic resource] / María Losada Friend (ed. lit.), Pilar Ron Vaz (ed. lit.), Sonia Hernández Santano (ed. lit.), Jorge Casanova García (ed. lit.), 2007, ISBN 978-84-96826-31-1
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • "The Heart Does Not Bend" (2003) was the first novel published by Caribbean-Canadian author Makeda Silvera (Jamaica 1955), and in it the author pays homage to the much celebrated figure of the West-Indian grandmother. In the Caribbean area, older women have traditionally been in charge of raising their grandchildren when mothers emigrated north in search of better conditions of life. This is the situation depicted in this novel, where the narrator tells of her childhood years under her grandmother's tutelage before moving on to account for the latter years spent in Canada, once she and her grandmother ("Mama") join the rest of the family there. Mama's proven strength and resilience is again tested in the new, diasporic environment, but she manages to find her own ways out. The paper will thus comment on the relationships among different generations of Caribbean women, as well as between women and men, and on aspects of the Caribbean diaspora as reflected in the novel.