What Is Heritable: Power, Magic and Spirit in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable

Abstract

In Marie-Elena John’s 2006 novel Unburnable, Lillian Baptiste returns to Dominica from the United States intending to confront the secrets and traumas of her maternal family line. The novel structures Lillian’s developing apprehension of who her mother and grandmother were and what they endured in late-colonial Dominica around a series of revelations regarding each woman’s imbrication within the realm of the magico-spiritual, which includes magic, Obeah and their cognates; Catholicism; spells and curses; ghosts and other spirit manifestations; and extra-sensory perception. The reader comes to understand Lillian as (and sometimes before) Lillian comes to understand herself: the last in a line of magico-spiritually powerful women whose encounters with colonial catastrophe and its heteropatriarchal, racist–classist machinations are both figured through and navigated by way of that power. Where socioeconomic and political power may conventionally be regarded as the proper subject of realist fiction and social-science inquiry, and magico-spiritual power as within the ambit of magical-realist fiction and folklore studies, Unburnable proposes worldly and magico-spiritual power as inhabiting the same material, political and psycho-social plane of Caribbean reality: as mutually entangled, co-constituting, reciprocally illuminating and, above all, dually heritable forces. In this way, the novel issues an invitation to rethink questions of power in the shadow of the Caribbean plantation and consider anew the ways in which it is, on the one hand, hoarded, bequeathed and weaponized against the vulnerable and, on the other, fluid, arcane in its sources and workings, and susceptible to insurgent counter-deployments.

“The emphasis on spiritual agency [for women]

is a direct response to the reality of [male] violence”

- Marouan, Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits p. 8. (Marouan 2013)

“At this historical moment… heteropatriarchy is

useful in continuing to perpetuate a colonial inheritance”

- Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing p. 24. (Alexander 2005)

In Marie-Elena John’s 2006 family saga Unburnable, Lillian Baptiste returns to Dominica (her birthplace) from the United States intending to confront the secrets and traumas of her maternal family line.1 The novel structures Lillian’s developing apprehension of who her mother and grandmother were and what they endured around a series of revelations regarding each woman’s imbrication within the realm of the magico-spiritual, which includes magic, Obeah and their cognates; Catholicism; spells and curses; supernatural manifestations; and extra-sensory perception. The reader comes to understand Lillian as Lillian learns to understand herself: the last in a line of magico-spiritually powerful women whose encounters with colonial catastrophe and its heteropatriarchal, racist–classist machinations are navigated by way of that power, as it circulates and pools around issues of gender and sexual autonomy. Where socioeconomic and political power may conventionally be regarded as the proper subject of realist fiction and social-science inquiry, and magico-spiritual power as within the ambit of magical-realist fiction and folklore studies, Unburnable proposes worldly and magico-spiritual power as inhabiting the same material, political and psycho-social plane of Caribbean reality: as mutually entangled, co-constituting, reciprocally illuminating and similarly heritable forces. In this way, the novel issues an invitation to rethink questions of power in the shadow of the Caribbean plantation: to consider anew the ways in which power is, on the one hand, hoarded, bequeathed and weaponized against the vulnerable and, on the other, fluid, arcane in its sources and workings, and susceptible to insurgent counter-deployments.

Magico-spiritual practice is such a central feature of Caribbean lifeways that literary engagements with that theme date back to European colonial texts such as William Earle’s Obi; Or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800) and are threaded continuously throughout the region’s multiple literary traditions in the centuries since. The body of literature is too extensive to map comprehensively; attending only to fiction, notable texts such as H.G. de Lisser’s The White Witch of Rose Hall (1929), Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (1949) and Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute (1955) stand out among early and mid-twentieth-century examples. Other authors including René Depestre, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Wilson Harris, Édouard Glissant, Erna Brodber, Leonardo Padura, Yanick Lahens and Maryse Condé have treated the theme extensively, mining it for its aesthetic, epistemological and political affordances.2 Scholars have taken note of this thematic trajectory: this article is in discussion with the work of Matthew Cutter, Paul Humphrey and Janelle Rodriques, and especially with that of Giselle Anatol and Maha Marouan, whose arguments about the feminist affordances of the magico-spiritual I have found particularly generative (Cutter 2016; Humphrey 2019; Rodriques 2017, 2021, 2022; Anatol 2015; Marouan 2013). My argument in this article therefore locates John within a broader field of Caribbean and African diasporic women writers that includes (in addition to the names mentioned above) Gisèle Pineau, Toni Morrison, Tiphanie Yanique, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Cristina García, Rosario Ferré, Mayra Santos-Febres and more.

In theorizing the entanglements of magic and power in Unburnable, I am also drawing on the work of Diana Paton and Maarit Forde; as they note,

Obeah and the other powers analyzed [in their collection Obeah and Other Powers] were formed, from the start, in the context of the relationships that produced the Caribbean in its modern, post-1492 form. They were produced by the power of capital and colonialism to transport millions of Africans across oceans against their will, and then set them down as enslaved people who had to rework their existing knowledge to provide some protection in a new, terror-filled setting.

(Paton and Forde 2012, p. 5)

As Forde and Paton usefully instruct us, magico-spiritual formations in the Caribbean must be contextually considered as expressions of and responses to the perdurable catastrophe of colonialism, genocide and enslavement and—crucially—the relationships it instantiated. Guided by this insight and by the work of others such as Stephan Palmié, I regard the magico-spiritual in Unburnable not as a figure for power but as power itself, existing in (often but not exclusively) antagonistic relation with equally intangible but more commonly legible versions of power such as elite socioeconomic status.3 The novel itself insists on this interpretive approach, rooting us in an African-diasporic cultural framework and showing us how magic is power, how it both colludes with and opposes (worldly) power, and how (like magic) power is a forcefield that shapes lives, circumstances and relationships: overweening, unevenly distributed, arcane in its workings and heritable. Dynamic and diffuse, power shifts, ebbs and flows—pooling in one place and then another. Yet, in some of its aspects (particularly those deriving from race, color, class, gender and nation), it remains a durable, and heritable, asset.

The notion that magico-spiritual power is heritable permeates both literary and pop-cultural engagements with the theme: texts as disparate as Édouard Glissant’s novel The Fourth Century and the US television series Charmed spring to mind here, among many other examples. What is noteworthy about John’s treatment of this trope is how she uses it to force reflection on the nature of inheritance and heritability: foundational principles of the system of property law that defines modernity and underpins capitalism. In the shadow of the Caribbean plantation—a context in which, for centuries, the ancestors of most contemporary Caribbean people were themselves heritable property—what does it mean to inherit? What are its political and ethical implications? And what might be treated as heritable between generations of people who (as the juridical regimes of slave colonies would have it) did not own themselves or the children they gave birth to? John proposes that the immanence of magico-spiritual power, inhering in people regardless of their status under law, and its heritable nature, forging a chain of lineage between ancestors and descendants, offers some ground from which to address—but more critically, from which to contemplate the implications of—these questions.

Magico-spiritual and other uncanny powers are exercised in a range of ways by a range of women in Unburnable, from Obeah practitioners to nuns and society matrons: some reinforcing colonialist heteropatriarchy, some resisting it and some doing a bit of each. Three factors are consistent. First, power’s heritable nature. Second, the pole to which it is attracted: questions of gender, women’s agency and sexual autonomy. And finally, its equivocal, bivalent quality; as I will demonstrate, with very few exceptions, the examples of power offered in the novel manifest as both beneficial and burdensome to those wielding them. Through charting the articulations of these characteristics of magico-spiritual power, John constructs a screen upon which can be projected, in sharp focus, the intertwining depredations of colonialism and heteropatriarchy, their violences limned at multiple sites and on multiple scales—and offers an instructive portrait of what it means to seek, hold, deploy and bequeath power within that ideological context.

Unburnable presents as being about trauma and secrets—as Kelly Baker Josephs has it, about “a mix of studied ‘not-telling’ and willed forgetting across half a century and three generations” (Josephs 2013, p. 153). When Lillian returns to Dominica after many years away, she is hoping to answer questions about her familial history and, in particular, find support for her conviction that her maternal grandmother Matilda, famously hanged for murder, was in fact innocent. Resolving this mystery offers the hope of alleviating the post-traumatic symptoms from which Lillian has suffered since discovering (as a young girl) her genealogical relationship to Matilda through Iris (Lillian’s mother and Matilda’s daughter) who is also notorious in Dominica for a sexual scandal involving an elite Roseau family and for her subsequent life as a sex worker; Iris eventually dies in jail. Lillian takes with her Theodore Morgan (“Teddy”), her long-time friend and now lover, an African American historian famous for clearing the names of wrongfully convicted “boys” in a case strongly reminiscent of the Central Park Five (John 2006, p. 15). Lillian allows Teddy to believe that she wants emotional support, but she primarily wants him to use his research skills and legal acumen to investigate the matter of her grandmother’s guilt or innocence: “she just wanted him to think on her behalf… If anyone could help her to figure out what was making her believe that her grandmother had been hanged for a crime she had not committed, it would be this man” (John 2006, p. 99).

In the reader’s first encounter with Lillian, as she prepares to visit Teddy’s apartment and persuade him to accompany her to Dominica, she falls to the floor of her room in the grip of a panic attack: “she stayed curled on the hardwood until there was no longer any danger of recalling exactly what she had found the night … when, long ago, she had done six feet worth of digging all by herself” (John 2006, p. 9). Many pages pass before the reader learns what Lillian found that night—her mother Iris’s burial site, as portended by “six feet worth of digging”—and what else happened: the suicide attempt that prompted Lillian’s move from Dominica to the United States. But even in light of this information, the question of what, exactly, produces Lillian’s traumatic symptoms remains a complicated one: there is the fact of having been removed from her mother at a young age, and of having grown up enveloped in a conspiracy of silence (to protect her from knowing her family’s infamous history) that isolated her from other children. Alongside these explanations, the novel explicitly proposes that Lillian is traumatized by learning that Matilda was—as popular discourse in Dominica has it—a murderer and an Obeahwoman, and that she herself is the product of Matilda’s “evil” (that is, magico-spiritual) practices: “The rest of the island looked at [Lillian] and saw something conceived by unnatural and craven appetites, conceived by the power of a dead woman still avenging her daughter, showing her might, proving that in death she was even more powerful, because as a living woman she could only kill, but dead she could make life” (John 2006, p. 184).

To the extent that Lillian’s torment proceeds from believing that she is tainted by the deeds of her foremothers, Matilda in particular, this notion proceeds from and is entirely coherent with her Catholic religious formation; she prays for “forgiveness of whatever terrible sins she had inherited, because it was there in scripture, that the sins of the father would be visited on the son, and hadn’t she been marked by whatever her grandmother had done, whatever her grandmother had been?” (John 2006, p. 110).4 It originates in religious rituals that are standard experiences for Catholic children but that in Lillian’s case take dramatic turns. At her first communion, which seven-year-old Lillian had hoped would yield the “miracle” (John 2006, p. 51) of alleviating her isolation, the host falls out of her mouth and lands on the floor, producing “hissings, breaths drawn in too fast and then held…. Someone began a whispered recitation of the Hail Mary” (John 2006, p. 52). Everyone in attendance, Lillian above all, takes this as confirmation of her mysterious, inherent stain: “Lillian understood that for some yet unknown reason, she was so polluted that the body of Christ himself would not dare enter into hers” (John 2006, p. 53).

This perception—that Matilda’s powers have left an imprint on the grandchild she never met—is reinforced by an improvised baptism ceremony, a week after the first communion debacle (although 150 pages separate the two scenes) and organized by Lillian’s adoptive mother Icilma with the help of Mary-Alice, a former Catholic nun from the United States who has married a Dominican fisherman. The ceremony they create together involves “‘in just a small way’ … the participation of an Obeahman” (John 2006, p. 201), in a syncretic integration of Obeah with Catholic rite. It ends equally dramatically when Lillian (who, remember, is seven years old and has been denied any knowledge of her family history) spies in the Obeahman’s mirror a vision of Matilda hanging: “Unattended for just the few seconds, Lillian went up to the mirror, which was propped up against the front pew, and she looked. [para break] ‘Mummy’, she said without removing her eyes from the mirror. ‘Why is that woman swinging by her neck?’” (John 2006, p. 206). This apparition only reinforces in everyone’s eyes, Lillian’s most of all, the conviction of her inherent wrongness. The scene also harks back to an earlier moment in the novel when, in describing Matilda’s magico-spiritual practice, the narrator comments, “[Matilda] didn’t doubt that she held the psychological power to have any of [her clients] gaze into a mirror and see whatever they most wanted, needed, or feared, but she had no desire for that” (John 2006, p. 12). Thus, evoking revelatory visions in a mirror is a mark of Matilda’s power, while seeing them is a manifestation of Lillian’s: the gift of second sight, which reveals to her a painful truth about her family history that no one in the material world has shared with her. It is simultaneously and equivocally evidence of both gift and curse, both power and taint—and, unequivocally, Lillian’s inheritance.

Whatever epistemic position one takes on the novel’s plot points, all explanations lead back to Matilda as the source of Lillian’s gift and burden.5 She is introduced as a healer (the first detail mentioned about her powers is that they include “the power to heal at will”), and the exercise of that healing power clusters largely around matters of sex and reproduction:

People along the length and breadth of Dominica came to find Matilda for her to set their bones, usually the broken ribs of women whose current lovers believed or at least claimed to believe that they had no better way to show their love than to fly into a fit of jealousy, anger, or general irritation. She drew teas … effective against the symptoms of gonorrhea… She boiled roots that helped women to conceive, and brewed teas to wash away a fetus.

(John 2006, p. 10)

The description goes on to list other ailments treated by Matilda, but these are the first. Matilda’s falling-out with her husband Simon sets the stage for the thematic entanglement between sex, gender and power that the novel develops throughout. Their shared Obeah practice (and their marriage) ends when Matilda discovers that Simon has been violating her protocol regarding aphrodisiacs: any man requesting them must bring his primary sexual partner with him so that the woman can attest that she is in favor of the intervention (John 2006, pp. 35–36). Enacting a principle she learned as a young practitioner, Matilda is “hypersensitive to the power of sexual dynamics between couples” (John 2006, p. 36) and, it is fair to say, also to the power dynamics of sex between couples. The conflict that results when Simon ignores her policy illustrates the very real dangers faced by women in their interactions with men: she throws him out of the house whereupon he beats her with “a length of pipe while she slept… such that she was confined to bed for three days” (John 2006, p. 36). That Matilda ultimately takes her revenge and Simon disappears speaks of her surfeit of metaphysical power, but this does not erase the potent reminder that patriarchy has its way in even the most apparently equitable of heterosexual relationships, and extracts its toll on the safety and wellbeing of women.

The thematic association between sex, gender and power and the symbolic clustering of Matilda’s magico-spiritual power around sexual matters position her as the ancestral source of the power that suffuses both of her descendants, Iris and Lillian, in the form of uncanny beauty and sexual magnetism. Iris’s character is introduced on the very first page along these lines:

Lillian’s mother, Iris, was known throughout the island for a number of distinct characteristics: the women would say that chief among them were her uncommon beauty, the fact that her skin was reputed to actually glow in the dark…. Men, though, would laugh and say that it was the quality of the sex Iris offered that was the thing… The men … were astounded by the passion of their encounters with Iris.

(John 2006, p. 1)6

The women and other children of the Maroon community of Up There/Noah/Noir7 (where Matilda lives and where Iris was raised until moving to Roseau as a teenager) treat Iris as special because of her looks (John 2006, p. 55); later, the mother superior of the Roseau convent to which her care is entrusted “looked at Iris’s glowing skin, the pliability of her adolescent limbs, the remarkable features of her face… [and] knew that, as a boarder in any of the elite homes that took in such children, Iris would be pregnant within a few months—either by the husband of the household or by a son” (John 2006, p. 57). Of course, this fate is hardly exceptional among the super-exploited young women who labor as domestic workers in elite households everywhere, but the assessment is nevertheless congruent with and adds to the broader depiction of Iris’s remarkable looks, which are given their own paragraph:

The underlying red hue from her father’s Carib blood made Iris glow. Matilda’s West African features melded with those of the indigenous Caribbean people to give her a mouth wider than they thought possible; slits for eyes that slanted upward at almost half of a right angle, and cheekbones that slashed high across her face. The nose, however, was the thing….

(John 2006, pp. 3–4)

The paragraph continues here with a detailed description of Iris’s nose, “a replica of the one on Matilda’s face”, and concludes, “Her singular, iridescent looks convinced [the people of Up There] that there had been some kind of other-worldly intervention in her conception, and they took this to be confirmation of Matilda’s powers” (John 2006, p. 4). What is notable here is the intermingling of genetic and metaphysical inheritances as explanatory factors: Iris’s looks resemble her parents’ physical features, signaling the specific ethnic provenance of each, while her beauty betokens her mother’s magico-spiritual power. Lillian is similarly beautiful, and her appearance (extensively detailed only a few pages later) likewise connects her to her maternal line both biologically (her “jet-black, dead-straight hair … was her only inheritance from her mother, Iris” [John 2006, p. 9]) and metaphysically: “The eyes … gave further credence to the story of how Lillian came to be born” through the exercise of Matilda’s Obeah powers (John 2006, p. 8). Further, despite living a life very different from her mother’s, Lillian, too, is famed for her sexual prowess—most notably among the Black men at the university where she first meets Teddy (John 2006, p. 42).

For both women, their beauty and sex appeal are deeply equivocal, both power and vulnerability. If Iris’s looks draw both nurturing and predatory attention to her, Lillian takes pains to minimize her body’s visibility and manage its effects on others. The novel’s entire second chapter recounts Lillian’s preparations for her visit to Teddy’s apartment, meticulously detailing every decision of dress, makeup, jewelry and coiffure. The dress that clings to her body is rejected as making her look “whorish” (John 2006, p. 6); she puts only Vaseline on her lips rather than the rich red lipstick she had “braved” once as a younger woman and which had produced “unsolicited comments all day, mostly from men she did not know” (John 2006, p. 8); no eye makeup because “she would never emphasize her eyes … their yellow-brown cast was called various exotic and complimentary names: hazel, tawny, gold-flecked” (John 2006, p. 8); her hair, when worn loose, “sometimes made men follow her” (John 2006, p. 9); and so on. The chapter—especially as it ends with Lillian curled on the floor in a panic attack—clearly communicates her sense of her own physicality as dangerous excess to be managed while simultaneously iterating a kind of textual fixation on her beauty, offering up her face and body as a collection of visual delights.

That Lillian relates to her body in large part through the matrix of her traumatic family history and—particularly—her mother’s notoriety is signaled by the rejection of the “whorish” dress; after Iris’s affair with the elite man John Baptiste scandalously implodes, she spends the remainder of her life as a sex worker on the outskirts of Roseau. Everything about Lillian’s life as a modestly dressed, highly educated professional bespeaks a desire to distance herself from Iris—and yet she does not “have the courage” to cut her hair because it marks her genetic connection to her mother (John 2006, p. 9). And, like her mother, Lillian is both powerfully compelling and entirely opaque to men in sexual encounters. The narrator informs us that the men who celebrate Iris’s sexual attractions fundamentally misunderstand her intensity, which “was actually the aggression of an otherwise powerless, disappointed, and very angry woman, who was, in fact, molesting them with her body as she threw them onto their backs and attacked them brutally” (John 2006, p. 2). This dynamic, in which female desperation is misread as exuberant passion, repeats itself with Lillian, who learns in the face of geographical illiteracy and diasporic misrecognition on the part of African-American men that “opening her legs was much easier than opening her mind, and that rough, hard sex was an easy language to speak” (John 2006, p. 181). Toward the end of the novel—driven into an increasingly precarious emotional state by the return to Dominica and confrontation with her family history—she engages in more and more passionate sex with Teddy, culminating in one night whose lovemaking “held desperation[,]… spoke of destruction” and implicitly of Lillian’s death-drive (“her spine … bent backward over the [balcony] railing and down, her head … hung suspended above the river’s boulders”), but which Teddy “just remembered… as the fuck of his life” (John 2006, p. 257).

It would be a stretch to argue that Iris and Lillian are empowered in or by these sexual encounters, but both women are entirely beyond the ken of men who arrogantly presume to understand them—whether these men know them casually and transactionally (Iris’s clients), or intimately over a long period (Teddy). This opacity works in a couple of ways. First, it registers Iris and Lillian’s sexual energies as belonging to the sphere of the mysterious; second, it elucidates that those uncanny sexual energies cannot provide any avenue of escape from (and are indeed sites for the actuation of) the patriarchal colonialist regime that humiliates, brutalizes and traumatizes both women, albeit in different ways. Their sexual magnetism is therefore both power and burden, both gift and curse: neither of them is able to feel safe or happy in their sexual encounters despite the influence that they wield over men. If their power is drawn from Matilda as the ancestral source, their experience of its equivocal workings in their lives is prefigured by her own life experience and how it shapes her magico-spiritual practice. Yet, this rendering of sex as a site of female vulnerability is carefully nuanced. Iris’s affair with John Baptiste, although it begins with his regarding her as “that bold little slut … [who] would get what she was asking for” (John 2006, p. 73) and ends with his abandoning her to marry a woman of his own class, nevertheless also reveals the extent of her influence over him. He furnishes her little cabin with the trappings—“new bedspreads and linens” (John 2006, p. 118)—of bourgeois domesticity that Iris insists upon and, when she demands it, gives her a family heirloom: a pair of earrings inherited from his mother and intended for his future wife (John 2006, p. 119). Thus, while it would be foolish to imagine this a liaison between equals, nevertheless Iris is not without agency and power in her dealings with her elite lover.

While I cannot wholly agree with Jennifer Thorington Springer that Lillian eventually comes to regard her mother as “sexually empowered”, I find Springer’s assessment of “the progressive nature of Iris’s character” interesting for its assertion that Iris experiences a degree of psychic self-reclamation through her sexual expression (Springer 2021, p. 220). Iris is a deeply layered figure, pathetic and devastated but also entirely self-directed. While her sex work makes her infamous and a pariah among “the high-class town people from Roseau” (who would in any case never have allowed her to transcend her origins in the rural lower class), it provides for her a status and a role within the larger community who

exhibited a sophistication beyond their time and place… and … understood the practicality of what is today called … the sex industry. The women, in particular … had a definite appreciation for Iris: she kept their men from bothering them when they were too occupied with raising their children to be concerned with the effort of sex; and especially in the areas around her house, she kept their young boys from experimenting on their young girls, thereby keeping down underage pregnancy.

(John 2006, p. 2)

I depart significantly from Amy K. King’s interpretation of this moment—specifically, of the narrator’s attribution of sophistication to ordinary Dominicans—as “irony” that “effectively conveys that Iris is devalued in this hierarchical society, one that does not permit her to have a voice” (King 2015, p. 202). I see no irony at work; the narrator is distinguishing between the elite factions of the society whose allegiance to patriarchal-colonialist hierarchies is absolute and who cannot see a sex worker as deserving any social or moral consideration, and those with broader sensibilities and a more pragmatic approach to life’s exigencies. My reading aligns more closely with Gisele Anatol’s: “In markedly different depictions of city folk and rural islanders, John contrasts the ‘high-class town people’ of Roseau with rural communities that are more understanding and flexible in their perception of women’s nonmatrimonial, nonreproductive sexuality” (Anatol 2015, pp. 163–64). I also see here an echo of Matilda’s vocation, with Iris following in her mother’s footsteps by using her preternatural powers in the service of community and particularly of women and girls, who are systematically disempowered by heteropatriarchy and other colonialist ideologies.

This oscillation of the novel’s thematic interests in sex, gender and power comes to a head in two scenes that occur during successive annual Masquerade celebrations.8 During the first, Iris inserts herself into the elite space of John Baptiste’s Masquerade band in the wake of Baptiste’s abandonment of her and publicly humiliates his wife Cecile by grinding on Baptiste, wining in front of Cecile and ripping Cecile’s clothes off (John 2006, pp. 115–16).9 In retaliation for what everyone understands as an assault on Cecile’s dignity, Cecile’s mother beats and brutally rapes Iris with a broken bottle a few days later. This results in the second Masquerade scene, the following year, in which a band of masqueraders/masked warriors from Up There engages in a ritualized public confrontation with Baptiste’s band that (although no one touches him) ends in Baptiste’s death and that (although no one sees her face) is widely acknowledged as Matilda’s vengeance for the violence inflicted on Iris. I am interested in the parallels and contrasts that Lorna Down points out between these two clash-at-carnival scenes, particularly in how Iris’s scene expresses her preternatural (sexual) power through her body’s public erotic performance, and Matilda’s her preternatural (spiritual, martial and even political) power, materializing her will without her body ever appearing. It is, rather, transmuted into “the thing that broke free of the three sets of rope… [and] flew three times around John Baptiste… in a circle at the level of his head” (John 2006, p. 141).10

Further, it is worth lingering on the detail that Matilda strikes at John Baptiste rather than his mother-in-law, Mrs. Richard. At one level, this suggests that the assault is punishment for Baptiste’s refusal to fulfill what Matilda understands as his obligation: to acknowledge and provide for Iris as a second wife.11 Yet there is more to say. The bodily harm done to Iris by Mrs. Richard was horrific and merited response—but had Matilda moved solely and directly against Mrs. Richard it would have been entirely an affair of women and entirely a matter of avenging physical violence. By attacking Baptiste, Matilda is not only looping the specific male malefactor back into the cycle of injury and retaliation but also symbolically re-centering the figure (the elite man) whose unfettered right to do anything he wants is the lynchpin of colonialist heteropatriarchy, and thereby assailing the system itself.12

The reader may see Matilda as a mother-witch, using her magico-spiritual power to avenge her child in the Masquerade scene, having already used it to heal Iris after Mrs. Richard’s attack:

It was the punctured heart that would have killed her daughter, and it was the resulting infection that Matilda fought as if it were a personal enemy, not only with medical science but with the fresh blood of white chickens spilled up and down her child’s body, with oils and pig fat, with the lighting of black candles and the incantation of unintelligible words.

(John 2006, pp. 128–29)

What is less intuitive, but nevertheless very plausible, is to see Mrs. Richard’s counter-actions—first against Iris and later against Matilda—as evidence of her own uncanny powers. She is another version of a mother-witch, upon whom the colonialist hierarchy confers heritable power in the form of the socioeconomic privilege that makes things happen that would not otherwise occur. She sends the police to Up There in pursuit of Matilda after the second Masquerade incident, despite Baptiste’s death being ruled the result of “a massive heart attack” and there being no evidence against Matilda (John 2006, p. 151). (This police raid on Matilda’s community yields the murder charges that result in her execution; she is, however, not eventually convicted of Baptiste’s murder, but rather of the mass murder of people whose skeletons the police find in the environs of Up There). Further, the novel explicitly couches Mrs. Richard’s actions in a metaphysical register: when she goes to exact revenge on Iris the washerwomen who are Iris’s neighbors are unsurprised, but

when [the washerwomen] heard the animal sound that replaced the screaming, they went rigid. They began rubbing their arms, holding down the backs of their necks against their crawling flesh. They shuffled backward, fear on their faces. What kind of Obeah, their eyes asked one another, was being done in there?

(John 2006, p. 120, emphasis added)

Mrs. Richard carries out these actions in her role as mother, but to pinpoint their beneficiary is complicated. Cecile hates her husband and feels trapped in her marriage (John 2006, p. 132); it is her reputation rather than her feelings that Iris wounds. Amy K. King’s reading of the novel through the figure of the “imperial mother” (“a woman of a higher class who uses her social position to–by all means necessary–keep her rank intact” [(King 2015, p. 196)]) makes this point persuasively; King construes the violence wrought by Mrs. Richard on Iris as ultimately having nothing to do with the child (Cecile) she is purportedly avenging, and everything to do with reinforcing her own color-and-class supremacy. That this supremacy is the source of her uncanny powers is signaled by the novel’s use of magico-spiritual language: Mrs. Richard’s attack is “a bloodletting, a sacrifice” in order to “placate the gods of social order and the gods of class distinction and the gods that allowed a man to have as many women as he so pleased” (John 2006, p. 117).

Matilda and Mrs. Richard are therefore foils of each other, mother-witches deriving their power from almost diametrically opposed sources and using it to different ends. Ironically, Matilda’s action against John Baptiste saves Mrs. Richard’s child, freeing Cecile from marriage to a man she hates. Further, marriage is more broadly understood to be the end of female autonomy and for that reason analogized to slavery: “These society girls cried [before their weddings] because they knew they were about to become a servant: worse, in fact, because servants were paid and could leave when they wanted. They were crying because they were about to become somebody’s slave” (John 2006, p. 71). Thus, symbolically, Matilda liberates Cecile from slavery, and the critique of heteropatriarchy (rendered synecdochically via marriage) is also inextricably a critique of the shadow of the plantation. Moreover, the fact that Cecile needs Matilda to save her offers an ironic comment upon the nature of Mrs. Richard’s considerable and presumably heritable power, which straddles the line between the material and metaphysical realms but affords her daughter no capacity to redress her own intolerable circumstances. Perhaps this reminds us of a limitation of that which is heritable: it can only be owned and wielded by one person at a time.

The second Masquerade scene also serves to foreground Lillian’s inheritance from Matilda in its multifaceted aspects of gift/taint/power/curse. The drumbeat that forms the sonic backdrop to the Masquerade ritual, and is transmuted into the speaking rhythm from Matilda’s band that warns (for those who can interpret it) that the stylized clash is about to become actual conflict, resounds across time and generations, becoming simultaneously the symptom of and the coping mechanism deployed against Lillian’s trauma. When Lillian feels most at risk of having a traumatic flashback, she instrumentalizes sound and, in particular, rhythm as a defense strategy:

She was good at it, pulling rhythms out of whatever noise she could find in the air… She had saved herself by drowning out everything but thoughts of the human heart and what it might have sounded like… And then, once the drums had entered her head, she would add the shield of a prayer, an impenetrable layer of protective, chanted words.

(John 2006, p. 97)

Later, when Lillian is reviewing her family history in Dominica with Teddy, Icilma and Mary-Alice, Teddy takes this practice (which he has observed) as purely symptom: “You get flashbacks… When it’s like you’re listening to something” (John 2006, p. 197). Lillian resists his interpretation, saying that her sonic episodes are not the symptom but the defense: “That’s what keeps them out. It’s what I do to stop them. A kind of wall” (John 2006, p. 197). Yet the reader understands Lillian’s relationship to rhythm and her experience of sound within the painful context of their origins: “She had been doing it since she understood the story of Matilda, not just that her grandmother had killed so senselessly, not just that Matilda had made a man’s heart beat loud like a drum, but all the other implications of Obeah and of evil” (John 2006, p. 97).

Thus, Lillian takes as her psychological defense tactic a re-enactment of the precise phenomenon that (putatively) caused her trauma: the narrative of her grandmother as a powerful and malign Obeahwoman, a magico-spiritual practitioner who could make a man’s heart beat to her rhythm until she chose to stop its beating entirely. During the second Masquerade scene and its aftermath, John Baptiste’s audibly beating heart is the sign not just of Matilda’s power and her personal retribution, but of the broader conflict enjoined by Mrs. Richard with her attack on Iris. The sound of Baptiste’s heart sends the elite back to their houses, “afraid of something that was bigger than death”, while for everyone else,

the celebration had continued outside the hospital room, where they kept time to the beat of John Baptiste’s heart, picking up their feet and putting them back down, hands in the air. And when, early the next morning, Mardi Gras, they knew he had died because they no longer had a beat on which to move, they continued their last day of Masquerade in earnest, with the kind of fervor that kept them on the road through the night.

(John 2006, p. 150, emphasis added)

Here the novel emphasizes that the conflict played out in these two Masquerade scenes is not only an interpersonal drama of sex, jealousy and reputation but also an enactment of the tensions pervading post-plantation Caribbean societies where worldly power is heritable and overweening but not totalizing, and where magico-spiritual power serves as expression and tool of insurgent subaltern energies. It emphasizes, moreover, that the fates of women under colonialist heteropatriarchy constitute the ineluctable core of the whole entrenched yet dynamic system.

So the soundtrack of Lillian’s trauma is also her defense tactic, the war-music of popular anti-elite resistance, sonic evidence of her grandmother’s magico-spiritual power and evocation of Iris’s “permanently damaged” heart, which Matilda’s power could not entirely repair (John 2006, p. 129). All of this is layered behind Lillian’s sonic experiences throughout the novel: the “onslaught of drums” she anticipates as the plane starts its descent into Dominica (John 2006, p. 181); the “instant increase in the intensity of the sounds in her head” that she feels while there (John 2006, p. 208); and, most significantly, the sounds she hears on the mountain when, toward the novel’s end, she and Teddy set out to find Up There:

What she felt when she stood at the start of the bridge was a thickening of the air around her, and the noise in her head was nothing compared with the sounds that were in that air. At first she thought she recognized the tonal sound of talking drums, but soon she realized that she was hearing voices, so many of them, all speaking together, in a language she did not understand, although the urgency and insistence of their calling was clear. She thought, Oh, so I am finally going crazy, but she somehow did not feel as if she were losing her mind; on the contrary, her mind was becoming clear and quiet, and she was in full control of her thoughts.

(John 2006, p. 247, emphasis in original)

This moment is in many ways the emotional and narrative climax of the novel, although the reader is not immediately aware of its full import. When Teddy drags Lillian away from the bridge (fearing that she intends to jump), “the voices in the air stopped calling to her, and the noise in her head began again” (John 2006, p. 248)—emphasizing the extent to which Lillian’s sonic, psychological and metaphysical experiences are intertwined. For Lillian, this moment is a revelation, giving her the key to her tangled family history that has so far resisted all her efforts to find it through conversations and archival searches.13 The reader comes to agree with her because after this moment, Lillian knows what no living person has told her: “that most of the people of Noir, the Maroons, had jumped to their heaven, as people were wont to do when enslavement was not an option” (John 2006, p. 291). Moreover, the experience unearths a childhood memory, of Iris coming to find her at Icilma’s house, to tell her that far from being a murderer of her own people, Matilda was their leader and judge (John 2006, pp. 252–54). In other words, this is the moment that reveals to Lillian that her grandmother was innocent of the crime for which she was executed, the same information that Teddy finally discovers through a conversation with Bird (Mary-Alice’s husband and a former member of the Up There/Noir Maroon community). That Teddy’s and Lillian’s understandings of Matilda’s story—drawn from such different sources—now coincide allows the reader to see Lillian’s experience on the mountain as Lillian herself does: as epiphany and evidence of magico-spiritual power rather than as a symptom of trauma.

The reader is faced at the novel’s end with a question. Why, if Lillian has satisfied her insistent feeling that her grandmother was wrongfully convicted and has unearthed the truth that Matilda was the leader and judge of a latter-day Maroon community; that her putative “confession” before the colonial court was in fact an assumption of responsibility for the workings and outcomes of an anti-colonial, Afro-descendant judicial system;14 and that Iris, as Lillian tells Teddy, “wasn’t crazy. She was destroyed” (John 2006, p. 254)—why, in light of these revelations that rehabilitate the reputations of her foremothers, does the novel end with Lillian on her way back up the mountain intent on suicide? Lillian is planning to jump off the mountain but the novel ends before she does, and the reader knows that Teddy is racing up the mountain behind her to share the fruits of the conversation with Bird that has finally persuaded him of Matilda’s innocence. The significance of the ambiguous ending has preoccupied critics. Manuela Esposito, who reads Unburnable alongside Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, tracking the trope of fire as a figure for survival strategies used in response to the psychological damage wrought by colonialism, proposes that the suicide (which Esposito treats as established fact) is a powerful act of reintegration: “In the very act of killing themselves, [Wide Sargasso Sea’s] Antoinette and Lillian recreate a link with their native island, asserting their belonging to the burning soil where they were born” (Esposito 2014, p. 235). By way of contrast, Amy K. King, who also reads the novel as almost certainly ending with Lillian’s suicide, sees this as a sign of a failed project of psychic recuperation (King 2015, p. 201). John herself, when asked by an interviewer, has it both ways:

Whichever version of the ending the reader chooses, I interpret it as a positive outcome. If Lillian jumped, then that can be seen in a positive light because she was finally able to take control of her life and she opted to go to her ancestors for her answers and her peace. If she changed her mind, or if Teddy reached her before she jumped, then that’s great for the romantic souls who believe they should end up together.15

Given the extent of the misunderstanding and diasporic misrecognition between Teddy and Lillian over the course of the novel, this reader finds it hard to regard a lasting relationship between them as a positive romantic outcome. Setting that aside, I would propose that the most productive way to engage with the novel’s ending is not by settling the question of whether Lillian does or does not jump, but by taking seriously the implications of her intention to do so. On one level, this drive to end her life seems clearly to register the enduring persistence of the shadow of the plantation; if even the truth and attendant psychological ease that Lillian sought do not enable her survival when she secures them, it is reasonable to conclude that the injury from which she suffers is systemic and cannot be assuaged at the level of the individual. Resolving the mysteries of her family history is not sufficient to undo or transcend what has been wrought by centuries of colonialist heteropatriarchy; within this understanding, Lillian in her death is collateral damage from the ongoing predations of the plantation system, or a sacrifice (like her mother and grandmother) to “the gods of social order and the gods of class distinction” of whom Mrs. Richard is high priestess (John 2006, p. 117).

But a great deal may turn on how one defines that verb “transcend”, and making sense of it may require remembering that Matilda welcomes her own death (despite being innocent of any crime) as the transition to her next life and a new familial role: “she reminded herself that on this earth she was only a woman with healing hands, able to do nothing more for her daughter; but as an ancestor, she would finally have the kind of power they’d always believed she owned” (John 2006, p. 273, emphasis added). On her way up the mountain, Lillian frames her intention in a similar mode. She is seeking not death, but communion: “It was not unusual or superstitious for her to believe that in death she would be able to speak with her mother and her grandmother: it was more than a fundamental tenet of her faith, it was logical” (John 2006, p. 290). Beyond that, she sees death as earning her a place within a Caribbean folkloric tradition of powerful supernatural female figures, including “Mama Glo, the West African Mami Wata” (whom she associates with Iris) and “la Diablesse… like Matilda” (John 2006, pp. 291–92, emphasis in original). Rather, Lillian will become a soucouyant: “a woman who takes off her skin at night and flies around in search of victims whose blood she sucks… She would fly through the air for her country people … when they found her she would be exactly what they wanted her to be: their nightmare come true, a soucouyant” (John 2006, p. 292, emphasis in original). Lillian seeking to embody the “nightmare” of “her country people” returns us to contextualizing this moment within the ongoing catastrophe of colonialism, and scholarly work on the soucouyant figure is instructive here. In linking the soucouyant and related figures to plantation violence, Gisele Anatol cites Colin Dayan’s work on vampiric figures in Haitian folklore: “Dayan … interprets these creatures as ‘remnants’ of the institution of slavery” (Anatol 2015, p. 8). Anatol herself argues for “a distinct shift” in the figure in the generations after slavery’s end, “so that the action [of shedding skin and drawing blood] evokes a sense of agency and power…. She [the soucouyant] is a powerful actor, not acted upon” (Anatol 2015, p. 9, emphasis added).

In this, her final moment with the reader, Lillian plots her decampment from the material realm through which the power/burden inherited from her foremothers has both eased and troubled her passage. This impulse might be an admission of irremediable damage, or it might be a choice to transcend, to assume as her birthright a persona constructed by the collective psycho-cultural labors of Caribbean people: expression of and response to the horrors of the plantation. A female persona, moreover, ineluctably defined in terms of power and eroticism, as are the other two folk characters conjured for/by Matilda and Iris—such are Lillian’s inheritances. What this suggests is perhaps not that Lillian is so burdened by intergenerational trauma that she cannot survive in the material world made by colonialism, but rather that the woman-being her lineage has revealed her to be rejects that world’s efforts to contain her. Just as Matilda’s command of the drumbeat/heartbeat of Masquerade became sonic fuel for insurgent popular expression, Lillian seeks union not only with her familial foremothers but also (through transformation into a creature equal parts magico-spiritual power and folk culture) with the larger non-elite community of Dominica, as an embodied accusation against colonialist heteropatriarchy. To see such an ending as triumphant rather than tragic is to take seriously the contention that the heritable systems of worldly power (and property) that define Caribbean realities in the shadow of the plantation are always competing with and under threat from those equally heritable “other powers” of spirit and collective belief: a contention that has fueled Caribbean subaltern survivance and resistance for centuries.