Under the Silk Cotton Tree: A Healing Narrative for Grenada

In Under the Silk Cotton Tree, Jean Buffong tries to recreate a prelapsarian, pristine, pre-communist, 1950s or 60s picture of Grenada that can heal Grenadian society after its violent history. What stands out in this novel is that, even though Grenada has had such a violent political history, it does not even mention politics. It is as if Buffong has given up on politics; so much so that she does not even bother to critique it any more. Yet she does critique corrupt religious figures, from obeah practitioners to those of the higher echelons of the Roman Catholic Church. This suggests that Buffong sets her hopes on a return to an African-based spirituality in harmony with nature and community, illustrated by the novel’s nature symbolism and African-Caribbean religions and folklore. In Healing Narratives, Gay Wilentz develops the idea that “cultures themselves can be[come] ill” from a brutal history of colonial conquest and slavery (1). The colonists’ violent disruption and dislocation of African communities were compounded by the psychological violence caused by the repression of the root culture and the imposition of the dominant culture; conditions which laid the foundation for sick Caribbean communities. Members of these communities suffer from the identity crises caused by the conflict between Western materialism and African spirituality. Although the enslaved Africans clung to their culture to maintain an identity in opposition to that of the colonizer, their descendants were lured into assimilation by promises of material wellbeing and social mobility under the condition that they submerge their traditional African worldview. However in the context of the traditional African worldview, the spiritual cannot be submerged without causing serious psychological or physical harm. Physical and