Colonial Archives in Austin Clarke’s <i>The Polished Hoe</i>: In and on the Body of Mary-Mathilda

This article explores narratives of sexual violence, commodification, and objectification of the Black female body in the patriarchal context through the intersectionality of the vectors of race, class, and gender. The notion of performativity is central to this context. This article addresses the way that, in Austin Clarke’s novel The Polished Hoe, Mary-Mathilda assumes radical agency by resisting sexual victimization and reaches a complex understanding of the self by occupying various subject positions simultaneously: that of the field labourer, of the mother, of the mistress, of the sex worker, and of the murderer. A lot of emphasis has been placed on the dialectic of trauma inflicted on the Caribbean community, but little attention has been given to the attainment of Black female radical agency. I explore the question of positionality within the structure of a power hierarchy in a specific geographical space through phenomenology. This theory will shed light on the complexity of sexual relations in that system. Mary-Mathilda is a liminal subject whose transition to agency is marked by the spatiality of the plantation and by the temporality of the night. I argue that she falls into a third identitarian space. This new space is a discursive formation that functions as a locus where multiple subjectivities exist and where the subject can exist in its most authentic form in a cross-cultural framework similar to the one outlined by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic. By employing the term “third identitarian space,” I provide a fresh outlook in relation to the spatial dimension of the work of Frantz Fanon. The existence of a third identitarian space signals the existence of a third space of thinking, a way of thinking that deviates from the dialectical thought of postcolonial theorists who recognize this space only in relation to the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. Ultimately, through her final act of mutilating Bellfeels, Mary-Mathilda rewrites the fabric of patriarchy.

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