Revisiting Liminality: Contestation of Abuse and the Politics of Reclamation of Identity in Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe

This paper explores narratives of sexual violence, commodification and objectification of the black female body in the patriarchal context through the intersectionality of the vectors of race, class and gender. The notion of performativity is central in this context. This paper addresses the way that Mary-Mathilda assumes sexual agency by resisting sexual victimization. She reaches a complex understanding of self by simultaneously occupying various subject positions, such as that of the field laborer, the mother, the mistress and the murderer. Previous scholarship has extensively been focusing on the origin and legacy of trauma, inflicted on the black female body of the twentieth century; however, there has been too little, if any criticism in relation to the active construction of black female subjectivity, located at the level of the body. Even though the practices of racial exclusion and dispossession largely differ in each generation, the outcome of racial violence has largely remained the same, as essentially the black subject’s humanity is put into question. Contextualizing this work by connecting it to the present era while exposing the significance of the era in which it emerged, signals at the construction of a larger discourse with political and sociological implications. I explore the question of positionality within the structure of a power hierarchy. Ultimately, Mary-Mathilda with her final act of mutilation of Belfeels, rewrites the fabric of patriarchy and emerges as a radical subject.