I Know Who I Am: A Caribbean Woman's Identity in Canada.

Barrero, Patricia Diaz

I KNOW WHO I AM: A Caribbean Woman's Identity in Canada

Yvonne Bobb-Smith Toronto: CSPI/Women's Press, 2003; 250 pp.

In I Know Who I Am: A Caribbean Woman's Identity in Canada Yvonne Bobb-Smith is particularly interested in reminding us that many of us, as immigrants, and particularly as immigrant women, need to rethink how we use the experiences that have brought us from an objectivity of oppression to a subjectivity of change with responsibility. Immigrant women in general, and Caribbean women in particular, are generally constructed either as victims of an oppressive system or as looters of a well-intended and benevolent Canadian state. Yet it is often forgotten that immigrant and Caribbean women refuse to give in to these categorizations by becoming agents of resistance and by building alternative spaces of resistance where they and people "like them" feel at home. Specifically, many of these women have created an alternative women's movement outside white mainstream feminism. Bobb-Smith's book demonstrates how Caribbean-Canadian women seek to develop their own feminist spaces while at the same time working with men in their community in wider struggles.

In order to resolve questions of home, resistance, identity, networking and independence Bobb-Smith uses a couple of different methodologies. In one, she interviews 45 women who emigrated to Canada from the Caribbean, and have been in Canada for more than 25 years, and uses their experiences--and her own--to look at how they have constructed their identities in Canada. Using long citations from the women in their own voices, she let us hear how they see themselves, how they have experienced, and what the consequences are of, racism and sexism and how they have resisted. In another, she explores Caribbean women's identity throughout feminist research studies and creative writing. In analysing the writings of Jean Rhys, Joan Riley, Afua Cooper, Mahadi Das, Jamaica Kincaid, Ramabai Espinet, Dionne Brand, and Claire Harris--Caribbean women who are in Diaspora either in Canada, England or The United States--the author discovers what she calls the ethic of independence. This combination of interviews, feminist research and creative writing provides us with an integrative picture of Caribbean women's identity moving out of the victimization and oppression discourse to one of proactive resistance.

Through this subjectivity, Bobb-Smith investigates how the 45 women see themselves as subjects and how notions of themselves are constructed as agents of social change. According to Bobb-Smith these notions of themselves are initially shaped at home. Home, then, becomes a primary place where Caribbean women learn to resist, where they learn independence as an ethic and where networking becomes fundamental. It is at home where women learn to resist and survive, skills that become handy when they migrate and are faced with racism, sexism and the challenge of having to make home somewhere else. Resisting, for Caribbean women, is not new, as the author points out. Caribbean women have a long history of resistance. However, resisting is not enough--survival is, in the end, the objective. And learning to survive also happens at home. Furthermore, surviving is connected to histories of oppressions and to the ways in which subordinated communities are sustained. According to the author, Caribbean women in Canada have an understanding of survival that produces a culture of resistance from which their identities emerge. For Bobb-Smith, survival and resistance are intrinsically linked, in the areas of education, networking and community activism. As she points out, the women engage in the work of survival by using an "ethic of independence." The author identifies this ethic as the catalyst that enables women to transform their identities to survive using various forms of resistance, for example, by renaming themselves as able survivors. Independence is understood, in this book, as containing a moral value that enhances self-esteem, assertiveness and self-reliance. Thus, it is using this "ethic of independence" that women transform their traditional identity. It is through this "ethic of independence" that Caribbean women assert how they are and who they want to be.

I Know Who I Am: A Caribbean Woman's Identity in Canada is an excellent resource for all those interested in confronting the discourse of victimization, for all those interested in questions of identity and identity formation, and for all those trying to organize within their own communities around issues of racial discrimination. I Know Who I Am calls on all immigrant women to resist the mainstream discourse of victim or plunderer. This book helps us understand how some Caribbean women residing in Canada have built their identities, especially in relation to their communities. Books like Bobb-Smith's make us realize that as diasporic women we have to resist homogenizing nationalist discourses in order to make Canada home.

Patricia Diaz Barrero

Social and Political Thought

York University

Toronto, Ontario