Conclusion

Radical Gossip

Idle Talk, Deadly Talk is a book about gossip in the literature of the Caribbean, and about a strand of adversarialism and narrative conflict that I take to be especially palpable therein. This is not to say that all Caribbean gossip is marked by such tensions: as I have stressed, the region’s gossip can also be as idle, harmless, or salutary as the “good gossip” that Spacks and other scholars trace in Anglo-American literature. So, too, of course, can the gossip of England or the United States (or any other place) contain latent or overt adversarialism, narrative struggle, and even violence. My contention in this book is not that adversarial gossip is unique to the Caribbean, but only that it is often foregrounded in the region’s literature because of specific historical and political challenges that make narrative conflict and social division pressing concerns for the region’s inhabitants. Many other places in the world—including subaltern regions, of course, but also, increasingly, the old and new colonial powers, and the centers of cultural production—are similarly marked by conflict and by unresolved questions of power and identity; it should not surprise us, then, if writers from such places use gossip in ways similar to those described in this book. Such gossip may be particularly easy to spot in the contemporary Caribbean, but if we care to look, we should expect to find gossip similarly deployed in the literature of many other periods and places.

Nonetheless, my focus in this study has been squarely upon the Caribbean, where gossip has played, and continues to play, a critical role in the region’s narratives. Gossip’s ubiquity and evident narrative significance in the Caribbean admits a number of plausible explanations, perhaps the most obvious of which is that gossip is prototypically oral, and the Caribbean is a region steeped in oral traditions. The sung or spoken word constitutes a thread—frayed, but not severed—that links the region’s peoples back to Africa, and has often served as a battleground between slave and master, colonizer and colonized, in ways that mirror the tensions I have here mapped through gossip. The role of orality in the Caribbean and the connections between this orality and the broader Caribbean drive to gossip are easy to comprehend and hard to deny. Writers who seek to capture the oral cadences of the Caribbean will, quite naturally, frequently find themselves depicting acts of gossip.

Beyond this, one might also suspect that there exists a kind of Caribbean sensibility that makes gossip a readily available and appropriate means of expressing culturally or personally significant ideas. The “comic principle” and “élan of the raconteur” that Walcott identifies, grudgingly, as the “assigned role” of the Caribbean writer resonates, one might suppose, with the effervescent mischievousness of gossip (130). How better to give voice to this aspect of the Caribbean character than through delightful, ribald, pretension-skewering, and altogether unauthorized gossip?

Such claims, however, skew too close for comfort to the exoticizing, othering supposition that the gossip of the Caribbean stems from some specific peculiarity of the peoples of the Caribbean. In this study, I have sought to suggest the opposite: that gossip is not an emergent phenomenon springing from some quintessentially “Caribbean” trait or sensibility, but rather a malleable tool used in different ways and to different ends in different times and places. It thus admits uses in the literature of the contemporary Caribbean that vary significantly in form and emphasis from its uses in texts from, for instance, nineteenth-century Britain or mid-twentieth-century America—or, for that matter, the Caribbean of the early colonial period. The gossip of the Caribbean, I argue, must be read not as speaking to some intrinsic quality of the Caribbean peoples but rather as a response to the historicized contexts in which such gossip occurs.

Throughout this book I have sought to characterize some of these responses, offering a vision of gossip as a narrative practice prevalent in Caribbean literature and essential to a full understanding of the Caribbean more generally. I have emphasized both gossip’s complexity and its potentiality, which lie in its resistance to easy categorization. But I have also stressed a deeper radicalism that I take to lie at the heart of gossip: a sense not just of individual stories being reframed or revised, but also of a deeper and more insidious destabilization that seeps into and subverts our understandings and constructions of the world around us. To gossip is to challenge not just a specific previous account of the world but also, in so doing, to acknowledge the fragility of discourse itself: what once was certain and stable must, in the face of gossip, give way to a discomfiting but inescapable doubtfulness.

Gossip’s resistance to categorization, then, must be understood as one of its defining traits—and if I have not sought to reduce gossip to a simple category or label (be that narrative strategy, social phenomenon, source of information, or epistemological method), it is because gossip encompasses or slips between all such categories. Gossip is fascinating precisely because it admits so many uses; to explore it most fruitfully, we must read it in context, embrace its nuances, and recognize the impossibility of reducing it to a single universally applicable definition. This being the case, it should go without saying that the foregoing chapters are not an exhaustive accounting of gossip’s uses, nor even of gossip’s uses in the contemporary Caribbean. Rather, I have highlighted aspects of gossip that I take to be especially significant in the literature of the Caribbean, and to have been generally overlooked by scholars exploring gossip’s role in the Anglo-American and European traditions.

In general, I have sought to make the case that gossip deserves to be taken seriously—which is not to say that all gossip is serious. Much gossip is ostensibly trivial, marked by gaiety and good humor, and playfully mischievous rather than openly antagonistic. There is, as Rosario Ferré notes, joy to be found in such gossip: “A good bit of Puerto Rican gossip has more entertainment potential than twenty Mexican or Venezuelan telenovelas, especially when it is seasoned with a little truth, which, like pepper in stew, brings out the lie’s subtlest flavors,” she writes (“Clara y Julia” 999). In Caribbean literature, gossip is often used in this way. Caribbean gossip is not always deadly or divisive; oftentimes, it is used to strengthen intimate bonds and neighborly relations, with its adversarial aspects downplayed or harnessed to reinforce communal ties. Still, even in these moments, writers use gossip to reflect and interrogate both tensions within their communities, and the viewpoints that are asserted or suppressed in the forging of group memberships. As Barthes recognizes, gossip’s ludic quality depends upon the transformation of the other into an object of amusement: gossip’s exuberance, in other words, comes at someone else’s expense. Even in its playful or lighthearted manifestations, gossip is weaponized—albeit with widely varying degrees of actual malice—and even jocular or breezy gossip typically has an agenda, and seeks to increase the social capital of the person who gossips by positioning them as a well-connected informant.

Caribbean writers who stress gossip’s more intimate and communitarian aspects typically still recognize the adversarialism at its core, an aspect that becomes more apparent in contemporary Caribbean narratives because of the social divisions that persist in the region, born variously of colonialism, slavery, globalization, migration, and authoritarianism. Caribbean history is defined, after all, by collisions—cultural, political, linguistic—that often give way to entrenched inequalities and the domination of one group by another. This fraught history has created social fractures, and fostered mistrust and adversarialism. It is this, more than anything, that makes gossip such a fertile narrative form for the region’s writers. As these struggles play out in Caribbean narratives, gossip—itself a discourse of collision, defined by the domination of one narrative by another—is often marshaled as a uniquely effective form of counterdiscourse, or embraced as a means of staging and highlighting the tensions that persist in the region. Recognizing gossip’s role in mediating such struggles helps us to understand how narratives are constructed and deployed in the Caribbean, and illuminates key aspects of Caribbean cultural dynamics: the relationships between the public and the private, between the center and the periphery, between the written and the spoken word, and between the writer and her society. It likewise sheds important light on the political uses of literature in the Caribbean, on the region’s troubled epistemologies, and on the struggles faced by communities seeking to assert and sustain themselves in colonial or postcolonial settings.

Such gossip can be empowering. For Arenas and Kincaid, for instance, gossip is a valuable narrative form precisely because it provides catharsis and allows official narratives to be challenged and corrected. But adversarialism is a two-way street: gossip is not used exclusively by underdogs seeking to subvert or undermine established narratives, nor by marginalized peoples seeking to establish counterpublics in opposition to spaces from which they are excluded. Gossip can and does fill this role, as I have shown, and is frequently deployed as a form of resistance, though more often as a critique of power than as a remedy to its abuses. But gossip is also readily co-opted by those in authority: it can serve as a rebuke to the excesses of the powerful, but can just as readily be used to reinforce narratives of power and to suppress alternative or unauthorized narratives. In texts by Veloz Maggiolo, Díaz, or Mars, gossip is a weapon deployed both by and against those in power—and if these writers present a more favorable view of gossip when it is used by underdogs and rebels, they still frame gossip as essentially violent, and present it with palpable ambivalence. Indeed, many of the works examined in Idle Talk, Deadly Talk offer a view of gossip from the perspective of its victims, foregrounding the vulnerabilities of individuals and communities in thrall to gossip’s seductive power. In so doing, such texts foreground gossip’s power but also the risks inherent in its use.

In the Caribbean, these risks are real, and gossip can be literally deadly: reputations matter, and casual speech can have lethal consequences. Though clearly true for texts grappling with the region’s authoritarian regimes, this is a more general point; in the texts of Rhys, Sánchez, and Sylvain, for instance, idle yet malicious gossip swiftly leads to bloodshed. Still, gossip does not usually threaten violence directly, offering instead a more subtle means of negotiating conflicts and power struggles. Often gossip exerts power by privately undermining its subjects, who are diminished (at least in the eyes of its participants) without necessarily realizing that they have been targeted. Indeed, by thematizing discrepancy and doubt, gossip frequently offers a way to rethink or recalibrate existing discourses without the need for direct confrontation: it typically corrects public narratives privately, without allowing the challenged party to immediately rebut its claims.

Gossip emerges as a resource for the marginalized, allowing them to challenge or comment on existing narratives, but also as a transgressive practice that questions the boundaries between the public and the private and that, like voyeurism, suggests a desire to take possession of something held privately by another. Yet it is also, despite or because of this veiled violence, a powerful means of knowledge production, and one especially well suited to the uncertainties and contested narratives of the Caribbean. This collision of the private and public spheres (or of the public and counterpublic) is made more vivid by the fact that those in power have repeatedly appropriated private spaces, and the discourses or registers associated with them, in the service of their own public narratives. The power of small, intimate interactions, and the intersection of such private spaces with public ones, is thus explicitly a part of Caribbean political and public life.

This is true in large part because the narratives of the Caribbean are deeply inscribed with questions of doubt and suspicion. Behind every shared story lies a constellation of private interpretations and analyses intended to ascertain the true facts of the matter. This process of testing and questioning is often mediated through gossip, which is, after all, an exercise in faith and uncertainty: a challenging of established narratives and a test of the listener’s willingness to give credence to an alternate version of events. This is an especially critical process in the Caribbean, where so many narratives are contested and so many truths have been silenced by history’s victors. It is telling, in this sense, that the texts examined in this book tend to sidestep the question of gossip’s truth status or even its reliability. Sometimes gossip is true, sometimes it isn’t, and sometimes it’s impossible to tell; despite this, gossip remains a key aspect of knowledge production in the Caribbean.

In ducking the thorny question of gossip’s epistemological validity, the texts discussed herein suggest that gossip in the Caribbean is more an act of faith than a rigorous means of approaching or discovering definitive truths. It is an assertion, not of certainty but of plausibility, that feeds upon skepticism about purportedly truthful accounts. This applies, certainly, to official narratives, with news heard through the grapevine being taken as valid precisely because it is unauthorized, unverified, and exists at a remove from untrustworthy official versions of events. But it also admits a more radical doubtfulness: the corrosion of faith in established narratives leads to a profusion of voices, a hubbub in which all stories are open to question, and therefore all are potentially true. Knowledge production, in such circumstances, is not a positivist progression toward objective fact but rather a messier process of deliberating between countless plausible yet contradictory accounts—precisely the kind of operation, in fact, at which gossip excels.

Gossip is powerful because it exists in relation to other versions of events; it is revisionary, and always itself at risk of being revised or corrected. What we gain in reading Caribbean texts in terms of gossip, then, is a sense of narrative struggles as narrative struggles: gossip contextualizes and reveals the conflicts underpinning the fragile, contested narratives of the Caribbean. Gossip both stages and helps to navigate these struggles, but in the process brings risks of its own. The gossip of the Caribbean is grounded upon narrative skepticism, but demands a faith in its claims that is not always well founded, with fabricated or distorted gossip often taken as accurate and accepted as such because it is compelling rather than because it is true. For both participants and subjects, such gossip—such belief, marked by narrative paranoia and unmoored from verifiable fact—can be a dangerous and even deadly thing.

This is the paradox of gossip: it can be a democratizing force, but also a dangerous one that frequently leaves individuals disempowered or in the sway of larger social and political currents. Gossip is ubiquitous because it places a measure of narrative self-assertion within reach of man and woman, rich and poor, powerful and subjugated. But gossip enacts and performs narrative battles that crystallize other resentments, other power struggles, and in which facts are often secondary to the speaker’s agenda and allegiances. Gossip, in short, is a weapon available to all, and one frequently used to brutal effect in a region marked and marred by division, struggle, betrayals, and violence. In its ubiquity, moreover, gossip threatens not simply to allow the weak to challenge the narratives of the powerful, but to foster a kind of narrative nihilism in which notions of truth and falsehood are subsumed by a deeper current of suspicion and unanswerable doubt. Gossip is not merely difficult to categorize: it is a discourse that challenges the very notion of categorization, for in its radical uncertainty it undermines, revolutionizes, and threatens to destroy every other discourse that it touches.

This ontological instability, or destabilization, is fundamental to gossip and fundamental to its place in Caribbean literature and culture. Edward Kamau Brathwaite argues that to understand the Caribbean’s catastrophic history requires a “literature of catastrophe”—a broken mirror to reflect the Caribbean’s broken reality and to account “for our persisting literary characteristic (which is also our persisting cultural characteristic), the contradiction, the dichotomy, the paradox” that leaves innocents obsessed with corruption, islanders dreaming of the wider world, and exiles dreaming of home (“Metaphors” 457, 459). The gossip studied in this book is a product of this same historic and still-unfolding Caribbean catastrophe, and marked by much the same fraught and paradoxical obsessions. It is far from the only such response to the historical phenomena that Brathwaite describes; still, it is a potent one. The gossip of the Caribbean is revisionary yet frequently powerfully conservative; obsessed with truth, yet seldom entirely reliable; demanding of intimacy and trust, yet serving to foster suspicions and equivocacy; refractive and plural, yet driven by the will to narrative domination. It is, in short, a charged and fundamentally conflicted discourse—a reflection of, as much as a solution to, the region’s troubled reality.

This study is only a first look at gossip’s role and uses in the contemporary Caribbean, and much remains to be explored. Questions of periodization and geographical variation remain to be answered, the gossip of earlier periods remains to be studied, and many other instances of gossip in the region’s literature, culture, and politics remain to be considered, especially with regard to the way that globalization and new technologies are facilitating new, less geographically bounded forms of gossip. As this book has illustrated, the uses of gossip are seldom distinct: this messy, organic practice invites deployments that overlap, crisscross, and interact with or resist one another in complex and subtle ways. Critically, too, it remains to be seen how the gossip of the Caribbean can inform the study of gossip’s role in other regions—including but not limited to the Anglo-American tradition on which most scholarship has hitherto focused. Armed with a better understanding of gossip’s epistemological challenges and possibilities, or of its totalitarian and conservative aspects, how might we read the gossip of Proust or James, Austen or Atwood?

Such questions lie beyond the scope of this book, in which I have sought simply to show that contemporary Caribbean texts and writers use gossip in rich and interesting ways, and thereby reveal an overarching preoccupation with gossip’s role in their societies. Gossip is an essential part of the stories we tell in the Caribbean, and of the way we tell them: it is entwined with what we know, how we know, and the ways in which we speak about and evaluate knowledge. To overlook the gossip of the Caribbean is thus to miss a vital component of the region’s culture and thought. The study of narrative in the Caribbean necessitates an engagement with the gossip that shapes and informs it, for only by recognizing gossip’s place as a prevalent and potent narrative form can we hope to fully understand the peoples and literatures of the Caribbean.