Caribbean Women Writing From Abroad
Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad closely examines Caribbean
women's prose fiction published from 1959 to 2011. This project illustrates the power of the
diasporic voice. This study explores how flight serves as a recurring response to exile in
Caribbean women's writing by transnational authors as diverse as Edwidge Danticat, Pauline
Melville and Michelle Cliff. In the works under study, flight serves as a vehicle for coming to
terms with conflictions of place and identity. While analyzing the transformative power of flight
in novels such as Breath, Eyes, Memory and Abeng, I read women in various states of exile.
Drawing distinctions between literal and figurative, or mental, flight, this project proffers
figurative flight as a form of resuscitation and healing for the protagonists. Moving beyond
traditional understandings of flight, Taking Flight asserts the centrality of figurative flight to the
transformative process for authors as well as the protagonists they depict. Rather than operating
in binary opposition, symbolic flight is facilitated by the most literal of flights, migration.
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