Written by St Lucian Garth St. Omer in the 1980s, Prisnms is a novella that was only published by Peepal Tree Press in August 2015. Its protagonist, Eugene Coard, is a psychiatrist from an unnamed Caribbean island, who reflects, after learning about the death of an old friend, on his journey as a migrant first to the UK then to the US. Coard reviews his own transformations – from purposely impregnating a white British upper-class woman and later on marrying another woman (American this time) who he then rapes. As a psychiatrist, he exploits the American obsession with race to his advantage by undermining his white patients’ sense of security and by also influencing one of his female patients to kill someone. The reader follows Coard’s shape-shifting, whose purpose is to fit in a society to which he feels he does not belong. However, Eugene loses himself in these transitions and eventually does not belong anywhere; he is eternally imprisoned in his own performance.

The title of the fiction has a number of connotations that all seem to point to the plight of the protagonist. Prisnms is a combination of the words prisns (prisons) and prisms: the former implies imprisonment and the latter refers to glass objects that are able to bend and transform light. Although prisms are able to redirect light, the fact that they are made of glass suggests fragility, transparency and even emptiness. It can therefore be argued that Eugene imposes a sense of imprisonment upon himself as he bends and distorts himself and the truth in order to appear to be something that he is not. This many-faced identity makes the character hollow, hinting at his impending brokenness. St. Omer’s title is an invention, a false representation. Although it implies certain notions, it is not a word in itself. It means nothing at all, which foreshadows a protagonist who appears to be many things and, as a consequence, renders himself meaningless.  

St. Omer’s main interest as a writer is to explore the difficulty of Caribbean subjects after colonialism. His past narratives have mostly focused on the colonial subject within various Caribbean spaces. However, Prisnms is the author’s first novella that can be, in a sense, identified as diasporic literature because the narrative follows a Caribbean migrant’s journey abroad. In many of his novellas, specifically J-, Black Bam and the Masqueraders (1972), which was recently republished by Peepal Tree Press. St. Omer exposes Caribbean colonial subjects’ need to masquerade as something other than who and what they are in order to pacify their unrelenting feelings of inferiority as well as their sense of exile, at once psychological and physical. This is plainly depicted in Prisnms where the protagonist assumes a number of accents and personalities in order to abate his inferiority complex. In the process, he loses his Caribbean distinctiveness in the sense that he forgets the accent he had used before arriving in the metropolis. Eugene Coard admits to ‘sedulously aping’ the speech of the white British upper class and when he moves to America, he decides to imitate the accent of white Americans because it had never occurred to him to mimic ‘the despised in America’, that is, the black citizens of the United States. When he does adopt the speech of black Americans, he is forced into silence after he realizes that to sound like a black American is to be recognized as part of a race that is totally abhorred. Thus, Eugene’s constant masquerading literally imprisons him and forces him to become voiceless.

A pertinent scene in the fiction is when Eugene uses his white British upper-class accent to entice Janice, an American bank employee with whom he forms a relationship over the phone. When they decide to meet, they each describe their attire in order to recognize one another. Ironically, when Eugene enters the cafeteria, Janice does not acknowledge him as the British man she is expecting:

I […] smiled and waved. Janice’s eyes flitted over me. She seemed not to recognize the brown suit, the brown-and-white striped tie and the tan raincoat I had described to her. […] I walked towards [her] confidently, the smile still on my face. Janice […] continued to look expectantly at the entrance, speaking all the while to her friend, as if the man I had carefully described had not just entered the room. (24)

Eugene has so effectively imitated this white aristocratic accent that what he appears as and what he sounds like are at odds with each other and this scene exemplifies a character that will perpetually be in conflict with himself due to his need to constantly masquerade. Frantz Fanon, the Martinican-born psychiatrist, posits that colonials’ inferiority complex is so acute that they tend to willfully repress the identities that they have known their entire lives in order to appear ‘superior’ and more ‘civilised’, and it seems that Eugene suffers from such a condition. A person’s need to repress their previous self depersonalizes and dehumanizes them and this is clearly portrayed by the protagonist who has been identified by critics as a ‘despicable’ character, one who embodies the disadvantages of assuming what George Lamming, the Barbadian novelist, terms a chameleon-like persona. 

Giulia Mascoli et Malica S. Willie
Mai 2016

Giulia Mascoli est doctorante au sein du CEREP (Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherche en Études Postcoloniales), dans le département de langues et littératures modernes de l’Université de Liège. Ses recherches portent sur la musique et la musicalité dans l’œuvre romanesque de Caryl Phillips, un auteur britannique contemporain d’origine caribéenne.

Malica S. Willie vient de terminer son doctorat à l’University of the West Indies à la Barbade. Elle effectue actuellement un séjour à l’Université de Liège dans le cadre du programme Erasmus Mundus. Ses recherches portent principalement sur la nature existentialiste de la fiction de Garth St. Omer, romancier originaire de Sainte-Lucie.