SOURCE: Welsh, Sarah Lawson. “Pauline Melville's Shape-Shifting Fictions.” In Caribbean Women Writers, edited by Mary Condè and Thorunn Lonsdale, pp. 144-71. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1999.

In the following essay, Welsh cogitates Pauline Melville's particular status as a Guyanese of mixed-race ancestry through a theoretically informed examination of her collection of stories, Shape-shifter.

Cross-cultural texts of such societies as Guyana … continually inscribe difference and transformation on landscape and on human form, literally … in the features and voices of man, woman and child.¹

Gareth Griffiths

The trickster. The effect of a command and the effect of transformation meet within him, and the essence of freedom can be gleaned from him as from no other human figure … he shakes everyone off, he destroys custom, obedience … he can talk to all creatures and things. He … is bent purely on his own transformations. … He imitates everything badly, cannot orient himself anywhere...