Offspring of a virgin’s womb

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.2.0081
• Published date: 22 December 2022
• Date: 22 December 2022
• Pages: 81-104
• Author: Michael Mitchell
• Subject Matter: Black madonna,Caribbean,sexuality,religion, Ramayana ,repetition,Gilles Deleuze,creative imagination,Wilson Harris

Journal of Indentureship 2.2 December 2022

Offspring of a virgin’s womb

Up to monkey business in Robert Antoni’s

Divina Trace

Michael Mitchell

Michael Mitchell is an honorary visiting professor at the Yesu

Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick,

and lecturer in English at the University of Paderborn, Germany.

ABSTRACT

Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace has not yet found the wide reader-

ship that might be expected of the winner of the Commonwealth

Writers’ Prize, perhaps because it does not conform to its readers’

expectations of a Caribbean novel. And yet it is of particular rele-

vance to the legacy of indentureship and the East Indian presence in

Trinidad and to the relationships among the different ethnic groups

on the island through its central concern with a black madonna on

a ctional island unmistakeably resembling the Divina Siparia wor-

shipped by Catholics or the Hindu Siparia Mai. This essay examines

the author’s postmodern techniques with particular reference to

his treatment of sexuality, stereotypes, the grotesque and religious

themes to discover what could be the signicance of the idea of

the Virgin and her representation in the black madonna. In doing

so it engages with Deleuze’s ideas on repetition to investigate the

relationship between storytelling and reality, and the nature of the

creative imagination.

KEYWORDS

Black madonna, Caribbean, sexuality, religion, Ramayana, repeti-

tion, Gilles Deleuze, creative imagination, Wilson Harris

DOI:10.13169/jofstudindentleg.2.2.0081

82 MICHAEL MITCHELL

Journal of Indentureship 2.2 December 2022

‘Beyond the lover and beyond the mother, coexistent with the one and con-

temporary with the other, lies the never-lived reality of the Virgin.’ Gilles

Deleuze

‘The bottle was big and obzockee. I was having a hard time toting

it.’ So begins Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace, and it’s not surprising

the bottle is giving him a hard time. Johnny Domingo, scion of the

Caribbean ‘masters’, whether Spanish, British or American, is

only a 13-year-old boy, a go-between like L. P. Hartley’s (1953)

Leo. The narrator at this point, he feels charged to shuttle between

the incompatible narratives of his incestuous family along the

‘divine’ trace, or path, through the sacred body of his island of

Corpus Christi, a sensual and haunting evocation of Trinidad. The

bottle is the womb of his pregnancy, and the foetus it contains, the

‘crapochild’ – half male potency, half frog1 – is to be born into the

swamp of the unconscious which mothers destruction and crea-

tion, from where, as an amphibian, he will swim up to tame or be

tamed by that most fearful of goddesses, the Virgin. That Virgin is

also Akambo-Mah of the Amerindians, African Mamma Latay and

Indian Kali Mai. She is also Magdalena, Mary Magdalene, pur-

ported whore and disciple, maddeningly present on the margins

of European orthodoxy.

Before moving on to address some of the issues raised here in

more detail, I would like to say a word about the background and

nature of Antoni’s novel and its reception; Divina Trace has a par-

ticular relevance in the context of the legacy of indenture, because

the Virgin described here, Magdalena Divina, bears an uncanny

resemblance to the Divina Pastora of Siparia, in southern Trinidad,

also known as Sipari Mai, one of approximately 400 black madon-

nas in the world. Once an Amerindian settlement, Siparia came

under the control of Spanish Capuchin monks and is still con-

nected to the family of the last royalist general of Venezuela.2

When the first indentured East Indian labourers reached Siparia

soon after the arrival of the Fatel Razack, they identified the black