The Affective Politics of Resistance in the Work of Opal Palmer Adisa

Abstract

This article interprets Opal Palmer Adisa’s symbolization of the knee-scraper – a Caribbean woman whose suffering, sometimes unrealized and often unexpressed, gives way to the author’s emphasis on voicing the collective trauma of the region. Scraping one’s knee, in Adisa’s terms, is about recovering the past stories of pain and violence – rather than forgetting them – an act that offers the Afro-Caribbean community the possibility of healing from the symptomatic history of colonialism. Because “the past lives in the very wounds that remain open in the present,” it could be affirmed that Adisa reads her people’s history from their body language and translates it into text. By doing so, Adisa deflates the myth of the angry black woman, which according to Melissa Victoria Harris-Perry, assumes anger as an essential characteristic of black femininity. This essentialist stereotype has for long kept black women from showing their anger. In response, black and postcolonial feminist criticism (i.e., Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Sara Ahmed) promotes the exploration of anger, thus enabling black women’s pain to be recognized. Anger, according to Lorde, far from being stuck in the past, opens up the future, guiding life forward like a visionary. Adisa uncovers the source of this anger and then transforms it into narratives of reconciliation and hope. Drawing upon theories on textual embodiment, pain, scars, and anger, I read Adisa’s writings as illustrating pain’s inscription in cultural politics, and as resistance to structural relations of power.