Sexuality and Identity in the Caribbean Poetry of Opal Palmer Adisa

Abstract

This chapter analyzes how Opal Palmer Adisa’s poetry reclaims sexuality and redefines Afro-Caribbean female identity by turning patriarchal insults into sites of meaning-making and resistance. Focusing on the poem “Bumbu Clat,” it traces the term’s semantic drift from an original sense linked to women’s solidarity to its later misogynistic use, and shows how Adisa’s writing performs a deliberate deconstruction of the word’s derogatory charge. The chapter reads Adisa’s strategy through postcolonial debates on language and power (Nation Language/Creole vs. standard English), and through theoretical lenses drawn from deconstruction and feminist/poststructuralist thought. By foregrounding the female body as lived experience rather than object of study, Adisa’s poetic voice dismantles cultural taboos around menstruation and sexuality, reconnects the Caribbean present to African linguistic and oral traditions (including Anansi stories and reggae invocations), and opens an alternative epistemology in which voice, body, and history co-produce agency.