SOURCE: Gafoor, Ameena. “The Image of the Indo-Caribbean Woman in Olive Senior's ‘The Arrival of the Snake-Woman.’” Callaloo 16, no. 1 (winter 1993): 34-43.

In the following essay, Gafoor elucidates Senior's depiction of the Caribbean female experience in her story “The Arrival of the Snake-Woman,” contending that the story “seems to present a culmination of all the phases of readjustment and accommodation inherent in migration and displacement.”

This paper looks at the portrayal of the Indian woman in the contemporary literature of the anglophone Caribbean. It attempts to examine the processes of readjustment and accommodation, acculturation, interculturation and indigenization in its attempt to explore Indo-Caribbean female experience: the psychosocial and spiritual growth and the quest for identity within the context of the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean. It explores the Indian woman's claim to a place as home in the multiracial, multicultural Caribbean vis à vis a tradition of colonial discourse which...