Years ago, I sat in a course on African American Lit. and discussed Nella Larsen's act of literary theft, which more or less ended her writing career, and I wondered why she did it? As time passes, the theories about why she did it get more and more spectacular and tend to fit the popular literary theories of the current period. But why is ultimately of far secondary importance to the fact that she did. She used another writer's work without attribution or credit of any sort, published it as her own, and that is essentially literary theft.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I read "The Bridge Stories," one of the collection of stories in Tiphanie Yanique's How to Escape from a Leper Colony, and it reminded me of a story I had read (and written on) by Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw in her 2006 collection titled Four Taxis Facing North. At first I was struck by the similarity in each story's major themes--abandonment and alienation--and the similar way they were constructed by both authors--a telling of seemingly unrelated stories during a journey of some kind, and the narrators' attempts to connect the stories in some way or to infer connections for the reader. Then, the characters and their storylines started to look similar, so I paused my reading of Yanique's story to check for an acknowledgment of Walcott-Hackshaw's work, and found none. But I was still reluctant to call it what it appeared to be.
To prove I wasn't seeing things though, I started to make comparative notes...
In the Walcott-Hackshaw story a woman in Trinidad struggles with the decision to send her daughter to Miami to spend the summer with her father, who she is divorcing. She appears to have lost the battle to keep the child from going to visit him despite the success of her argument that he'd "walked out, like a deserter, a coward," and had abandoned her and their daughter. Among other things, she worries about color issues that may affect her daughter in America: her daughter may look light-skinned in Trinidad, but will be considered black in America, and her daughter's father who looks white, Cuban, may be involved with a "magazine-pretty," blond Miss Miami. The woman makes several observations as she travels along the highway to the airport (a highway they have been fixing "since I was a child," she muses).
She observes and makes or infers connections between and among related and seemingly unrelated people, occurrences past and present, and still scenes: three boys walking along the highway recall a memory of three males she saw in a hut some time ago; the contrast of green grass and white mosque with the billboard "Islam, The Fastest Growing Religion In The World"; her feelings of abandonment by her husband, by her father, and by her mother, as well as other familial abandonment. And she recalls how the day of her father's funeral was made much easier mainly because she was hungry, having starved herself for weeks before his death.
She contemplates driving off Sans Souci Hill (suicide) as she heads towards the airport, and notes the incongruity of the hill's name with the troubled lives of the people who live there. She doesn't drive off the hill, though arguably, her choice not to send her daughter to Miami is akin to something of a suicidal act. There's more (see my post on it here).
In Yanique's story there are several types of bridges, both figurative and literal depending on how far one is willing to stretch the fantasy genre in which the story can be placed. But most important for comparative purposes is that there is an "actual" bridge, which is described as "delicate and pretty, but not able to bear weight," and that it stretches "from Guyana--the place in the world most south--to Miami--the place in the world most north."
Then there are the characters and their stories, which all share elements with those in the Walcott-Hackshaw story.
A Muslim woman who had abandoned her marriage journeys back to her husband who lives in a house "at the very top of the island [St.Thomas], at the tip of the highest peak." The house is "so ornate when there were so many poor people in St. Thomas," that it fills her with indignity. When the woman arrives at the top of the hill, she discovers her husband is not at home, so she walks back down the hill, and heads towards the bridge. Along the way she reflects on her marriage, her children, her mother, all in a manner very similar to the woman driving on the highway and over Sans Souci Hill in the Walcott-Hackshaw story.
In another story in Yanique's bridge collection, a woman abandons her marriage, and leaves her husband and son to deal with her absence, and in a third story, a light-skinned beauty queen (Puerto Rican) wins the biggest title in St. Croix and overcome with feelings about being a fraud, she takes off running towards the bridge where she discovers several truths about herself, including (notably) "when you don't eat or drink for a whole day you forget to be hungry. That hunger doesn't matter..." In a succession of coincidences, the beauty queen, the Muslim woman, and the father and son encounter each other on the bridge. The Muslim woman jumps off, and the bridge collapses.
When read alongside each other, the Walcott-Hackshaw story seems like the template for Yanique's story, from which she selects the details and characters for her story. And in some instances (my reading of it) her story appears to be written as a "talk-back" to the Walcott-Hackshaw story. Could she have done it deliberately? Or is it all just a strange coincidence? Is it a case where one island story just happens to resemble another? Is it possible that Yanique never met Walcott-Hackshaw or ever read her book? Is the story some kind of folklore that can be considered belonging to no one (as Nella Larsen argued in her case)?
And let's say it can be proven that they met, and that Yanique had to have come across Walcott-Hackshaw's story (maybe while she was in Trinidad on her Fulbright?), why is there no attribution, no acknowledgment, no mention of the Walcott-Hackshaw story in her book? Would she allow a student of hers to do the same thing?
Two final questions, which may or may not have to do with geographic / literary space: Is it possible that Yanique expects that Caribbean readers would read her story and recognize her nod or her "talk-back" to Walcott-Hackshaw, as a reader might if the elements are from the work of a recognizable, established writer? And if so does it matter that many of Yanique's readers--the majority, perhaps--may not be familiar with Walcott-Hackshaw's work and will then most likely not catch the nod?
Whatever the case of why may be, I, and I'm sure others, certainly recognize Yanique's use of / nod to Walcott-Hackshaw's text, and still find the absence of formal attribution very troubling.
