“I Could Turn Viper Tomorrow”: Challenging Reproductive Futurism in Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting

Grenadian author Merle Collins has talked in an interview about the collective optimism felt about the future after the Grenadian Revolution of 1979, when the Grenada United Labour Party government was overthrown by the New Jewel Movement (NJM), a Black Power organization that turned into a Marxist political party. This event was seen as a turning point, cementing Grenada’s status as an independent postcolonial country after Britain relinquished the territory in 1974. Collins describes the affection felt for the new Prime Minister, a young revolutionary called Maurice Bishop, in terms of his rapport across generations of ordinary Grenadians, epitomized by a famous photograph of an older woman touching the young Premier’s face (Scott, “Fragility of Memory” 105). The image symbolizes the confection of youth and old age as a postcolonial political stratagem wherein a beneficent grandmother figure nurtures the hope that revolutionary black youth represents.

Collins reflects on the popular perception that Bishop was an approachable and sympathetic agent of change: “‘De boy nice, he nice, all behind he head nice!’ [Everything is nice, good or attractive about him] Dah’s ting you hear. So you think about the body, and how people view the man, the individual” (Scott, “Fragility of Memory” 105). Collins draws on her memories of collective utterance to link revolutionary legitimacy and masculine youthfulness. Bishop is called a ‘boy’ – instead of the British university-educated, Marxist activist he was – implying that his political appeal was accentuated by his youthfulness. Throughout the rest of the interview Collins repeatedly references how young people and students were at the forefront of the NJM movement in resistance to the former Prime Minister Eric Gairy’s ancien régime, which was characterized by longstanding incumbents, corruption, and violent suppression of opposition both before and after Grenada was granted independence (Scott, “Fragility of Memory” 99, 102; also see Meeks 138–48). According to Collins’s testimony, Bishop’s youth and masculine vigour propelled the New Jewel Movement’s popularity. He seems to embody the NJM’s motto, devised by the Grenadian Carnival calypsonian Lord Melody, of “forward ever and backward never.” The interview subtly delineates a distinction between gendered and aged bodies within Grenada’s postcolonial politics.