Brodber, Erna

April 20, 1940

Jamaican writer Erna May Brodber was born in the village of Woodside, St. Mary, to parents Ernest and Lucy Brodber, a farmer and a teacher. Among her earliest influences were the rich cultural life, social activism, and deep community involvement cultivated by her parents. Brodber brings to her craft a wealth of expertise honed in various fields: She has worked as a teacher, scholar, researcher, civil servant, and community activist. Her writing and prodigious scholarship span the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, and literature. Firmly refusing the ruling concept of the Caribbean as Creole, mixed, or hybrid, she reflects in her oeuvre a preoccupation with Africans in the diaspora. This enterprise is part of what Brodber calls "the re-engineering of blackspace" (Brodber, 1999/2000, p. 153), a spiritual and cultural ground from which people of African ancestry reflect upon and reconstruct their place in the world. The range and depth of Brodber's intellectual and activist work derive from her insistence on "completing the emancipation process. [T]he part of the task awaiting the intellectual worker is the development of a philosophy, of creeds, of myths, of ideologies, of pegs on which to hang social and spiritual life, the construction of frames of reference" (p. 157). An important component of this task is an engagement with the past through what can be defined as a critical remembrance.

Even as Brodber consciously looks to the past for fresh moral insights, her body of work establishes new coordinates of memory, history, and of knowledge itself. In the field of social history she starts from the premise that the mental and imaginative powers of those "from below" are important to an understanding of their own lives and of society more broadly. Brodber therefore incorporates their language and thought in the conceptual world of her scholarship. Crucial texts include Life in Jamaica in the Early Twentieth Century: A Presentation of Ninety Oral Accounts (1980), "Oral Sources and the Creation of a Social History in the Caribbean" (1983), and "Afro-Jamaican Women at the Turn of the Century" (1986). Her fiction reveals that she also sees as urgent the task of infiltrating the dominant narratives whose roots are to be found in colonial slavery and whose tentacles continue to shape the present. For example, Brodber's critical analysis and reconstruction of European accounts of the African-derived religious system of Myal is an important dimension of her 1988 novel of the same name. In Louisiana (1994) the socalled native informant captures the academically trained anthropologist and her equipment, transforming both observer and her methods into instruments that tell the collective history. Combining the use of oral sources with a willful reading of written history, Brodber brings to book its power and assumed morality, challenging it on its own terms and questioning conventional notions of reality.

The construction of black West Indian womanhood is yet another significant strand of Brodber's fiction and nonfiction. She pays particular attention to the social framework from which various aspects of female identity take their shape. The form of her first novel, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980), both weaves and unweaves the historical and linguistic conditions that create, entrap, and finally provide the sources of liberation for the story's protagonist. In Perceptions of Caribbean Women: Towards a Documentation of Stereotypes (1982), Brodber searches the colonial chronicles as well as postslavery and postindependence documents to unearth the formation of key ideas about West Indian women. Erna Brodber's wide-ranging literary, intellectual, and social efforts make a distinctive contribution to the understanding of the black experience in the Americas.

See also Women Writers of the Caribbean and Latin America

Bibliography

Brodber, Erna. Abandonment of Children in Jamaica. Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1974.

Brodber, Erna. A Study of Yards in the City of Kingston. Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1975.

Brodber, Erna. Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. London: New Beacon, 1980.

Brodber, Erna. Life in Jamaica in the Early Twentieth Century: A Presentation of Ninety Oral Accounts. Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 1980.

Brodber, Erna. Perceptions of Caribbean Women: Towards a Documentation of Stereotypes. Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1982.

Brodber, Erna. Afro-Jamaican Women and Their Men in the Late Nineteenth and First Half of the Twentieth Century. Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research (Eastern Caribbean), University of the West Indies, 1982.

Brodber, Erna. "Oral Sources and the Creation of A Social History in the Caribbean." Jamaica Journal 16, no. 4 (1983): 2–11.

Brodber, Erna. "Afro-Jamaican Women at the Turn of the Century." Social and Economic Studies 35, no. 3 (1986): 23–50.

Brodber, Erna. "The Pioneering Miss Bailey." Jamaica Journal 19, no. 2 (May 1986): 9–14.

Brodber, Erna. Myal. London: New Beacon, 1988.

Brodber, Erna. Louisiana. London: New Beacon, 1994.

Brodber, Erna. "Re-Engineering Blackspace." Caribbean Quarterly 43, nos. 1 and 2 (March–June 1997): 70–81. Reprinted in Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 2, no. 3 (Winter 1999/2000): 153–170.

Brodber, Erna. "Crossing Borders: An Interview with Writer, Scholar, and Activist Erna Brodber." Nadia Ellis Russell. May 7, 2001. Available from http://inthefray.com.

Brodber, Erna. The Continent of Black Consciousness: On the History of the African Diaspora from Slavery to the Present Day. London: New Beacon, 2003.

Brodber, Erna. The Second Generation of Freemen in Jamaica, 1907–1944. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004.

Cooper, Carolyn. "Afro-Jamaican Folk Elements in Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. " In Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990.

Dance, Daryl Cumber. "'Go Eena Kumbla': A Comparison of Erna Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home and Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters. " In Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe. Wellesley, Mass.: Calaloux Publications, University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.

Walker-Johnson, Joynce. "Myal : Text and Context." Journal of West Indian Literature 5 (1992): 48–64.

Webb, Barbara. "Erna Brodber." In Twentieth Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, third series, edited by Bernth Lindfors and Reinhard Sander. Detroit, Mich.: Gale, 1996.

Wilson, Harris. "The Life of Myth and its Possible Bearing on Erna Brodber's Fictions Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home and Myal." Kunapipi 12, no. 3 (1990): 86–92.

veronica marie gregg (2005)