Paper short abstract:

In Painting Away Regrets (2011), Jamaican writer Opal Palmer Adisa adds a spiritual insight to issues of community formation and family bonding which are of great relevance in the processes of individual and collective identities in the continuum of the African diaspora.

Paper long abstract:

The specificities of the African diaspora in Painting Away Regrets are portrayed through Christine, a young Caribbean mother settled in America. Adisa's narrative gives account of the linguistic varieties created by Africans as migrant subjects by remarking the existence of a British-African accent, or the use of Jamaican patois in the voice of her characters. Following the line of argument of Carol Boyce Davies in Black Women, Writing and Identity, Black women's writing must be regarded from a conscious state of "expansiveness and the dialogics of movement and community" (1994: 4). Drawing upon cross-cultural perspectives, this novel rethinks concepts and values found in Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American representations of community and self. Additionally, foregrounding the significant role of ancestors in Jamaican communities, Adisa's narrative takes resource not only from historical facts, but also and just as noteworthy, from the voice of the elder ones in the community and from her extraordinary understanding of the mythological and ritual assets of the Yoruba tradition.

As Weir-Soley maintains in Eroticism, Spirituality and Resistance in Black Women's Writings, in Adisa's production we can find Caribbean women who are "at once agents of Eurocentric modernity's nihilism and formidable forces of spiritual and cultural resistance against its destructive potentiality" (2009: 181). Adisa's work proves that black women's writings are redefining identity outside the realms of marginality and exclusion. This piece openly suggests a more comprehensive value system that balances the relationship between African and Eurocentric cosmologies, thus providing the ground for self-realization and social transformation.