Rewriting the Caribbean Female Body: A Conversation with Opal Palmer Adisa

Abstract

An interview-conversation between Elisa Serna Martínez and Jamaican writer Opal Palmer Adisa (held in Granada in 2011 and published in Atlantis 38.1, 2016) in which Adisa reframes the “Caribbean female body” through agency rather than victimhood. She discusses how race and gender operate both as socially produced identities and as creative force, and reflects on family life, Afro-Caribbean spirituality, and motherhood as ethical and political power. The dialogue also explores popular culture and orality (dancehall, performance, theatre, reggae) as embodied pedagogies and as practical routes to local audiences in contexts where books are expensive, imported, and often coded as a middle-class luxury. Within this frame, Adisa reads practices such as wining and certain dancehall aesthetics as ambiguous yet productive spaces where desire, pleasure, and power are negotiated.