SOURCE: Renk, Kathleen J. “Reinscribing the Garden: Female Tricksters at the Crossroads.” In Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts: Woman's Writing and Decolonization, pp. 121-50. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Renk discusses the protagonist of “Arrival of the Snake-Woman” as a trickster figure.

According to Ramabai Espinet, Mama Glo is a “benign and powerful” figure in Trinidadian folklore represented as a combination of a woman and a watersnake (48). In Espinet's poem “Mama Glo,” this figure is presented as the harbinger of the “womanvoice” that “breaks the ascendancy darkness with crystal light.” Mama Glo, like Kincaid's Lucy and Senior's snake-woman, is a female trickster who reinvests the “demonic” mythic characteristics of the snake and the female derived from the garden myth. Drawing on the positive representation of the snake as the rainbow serpent god, Da in Dahomean myth, the god whose figure “shapes” the globe,¹ and...