Gender Discrimination and Colonial Power Structures in Marlon James's The Book of Night Women

Abstract

The Book of Night Women is viewed through Marlon James’ eyes as a narrative that depicts gender inequalities not merely as an effect or by-product of colonial slavery; instead, they are one of its most intimate and long-lasting legacies and therefore have deep roots within the narrative. Furthermore, the Book of Night Women does not visualize violence against enslaved women simply as an epiphenomenon or to be symptomatic of larger conditions of racial domination, but instead it seeks to show a more complex relationship between the ways in which colonial domination operates through eighteenth century Jamaica; not simply in monolithic terms, but as a gender economy that places women’s bodies as sites for reproduction, punishment and symbolic subordination. The plantation functions not only as a racially constructed space, but also as a space of production/disarticulation of gender and within the plantation, resistance to power becomes both diffused/fragmented characterizes the process of re-calibrating power between enslaved peoples themselves. Using a postcolonial feminist lens that draws upon Black feminist theory, colonial history, and narrative analysis I’d like to suggest another way of thinking about the Night Women. Specifically, I will argue that instead of viewing Night Women as an unified feminist body, we need to examine them as conflicted space where colonial logic has been internalized by these women. Using the figure of Lilith, this article strives to demonstrate the way in which sexual violence, forced maternity, and patriarchy among enslaved peoples operate interdependently in order to discipline women while also shaping types of resistant acts that do not quite fit into models of heroic or redemptive resistance. James's linguistic decisions, including Creole-tinged narrative and silence as well, challenge colonial epistemology and its habit of effacing enslaved women's knowledge. In foregrounding gender as, rather than a related aftermath of, the inner logic of colonial power, this study makes yet another important queer intervention in Marlon James scholarship: that The Book of Night Women demands to be read as a novel in which it is women’s bodies and voices that are most palpably managed by colonial power regimes; their past and future pried open for inspection.