Analysis

​

Grace Nichols’ ‘My Children Are Movers’ engages with the journey of a parent, specifically a mother, in watching her progeny move from the country in which they were born to countries elsewhere to seek a new life. This essay shall adopt Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial theories of ambivalence, mimicry and hybridity to critique the poem and its message of a mother’s unwavering love for her children, regardless of where they are.

​

The theory of ambivalence posits the liminality of the postcolonial subject placed in a foreign and unknown culture. In this case, the speaker is a mother who envisions herself being inserted or placed within this foreign culture by imagining the experiences of her children. Commencing the poem with the conjunction ‘and’, and the combination of the two words ‘Caribbean’ and ‘Woman’ to form ‘Cariwoma’, in addition to the first-person pronoun ‘I’, clearly indicates the indeterminate nature of the speaker as she ‘watches her children’ depart to new worlds to seek new lives, tinged with undercurrents of emotions and wistfulness in the immediacy of the first-person. The speaker utilises the specific image of a ‘spider-bird’ to denote both the spread and connection of a spider’s web and the flight of her children to suggest the link she still palpably feels to her children despite the distance between them. The diction of the word ‘new’ and ‘enmeshing’ suggests that this is a novel experience for her speaker, one to which she is uncertain how to respond or react. ‘Enmeshing’ in particular suggests a forceful coming together between two subjects – in this case the speaker having to grapple with the sudden reality of her children’s departure from home in order to seek a new life elsewhere. Necessarily, the reader sympathises with the speaker as she appeals to the universal experiences of the relationship shared between mother and child, engendering pathos. Further, the parallelism of lines 11-13 and their repetitive syntactical structure suggests the strength of emotion she experiences as she thinks of her children, and the end-rhyme of ‘here’, ‘there’ and ‘somewhere’ allows the appreciation of her confused and frazzled state of mind, or rather the ambivalence and liminality she experiences at watching her children depart for foreign lands. This is cemented in the following line a she lists two geographical regions – ‘Europe’ and ‘North America’ – in the form of questions, suggesting confusion perhaps of what these regions entail or where her children actually are within the expanse of these two lands. The speaker’s use of the terms ‘Cariwoma’ and ‘spider-bird’, both intimating an organic coming together of subjects which may not necessarily fit or combine nicely, coupled with the repeated questioning and parallelism of lines 11-13, suggests an ambivalent state of mind.

​

What follows then is the concept of mimicry, where the postcolonial subject attempts to conform to the foreign and unknown culture. The first segment of the poem ends on a rather terse and determined tone, where the speaker asserts that she has to ‘keep green’ and that her children are ‘movers’, with both lines ending with a full stop. Prior to this conviction, the speaker discovers her desire to participate in her children’s new lives by envisioning ‘grands and greatgrands / I’ve never seen’, presumably new families that her children have now become a part of, through the creation of a dreamscape, which is a running motif throughout Nichols’ poetry. There is a certain sadness in the indeterminate and ambivalent nature of the line ‘I’ve never seen’, which when combined with lines 18-20, could suggest that the speaker has not engaged with or communicated with her children for a prolonged period of time. This thus triggers her desire to remain ‘green’, that is to continually evolve or be organic in response to these changes in the conditions of her life and her children’s lives. The first segment thus concludes with the first-person possessive ‘my’, which confirms the speaker’s desire to reclaim the lost part of her identity which is closely interwoven to herself – her children. The speaker’s attempt to negotiate with and respond to the foreignness of watching one’s children move to a foreign culture in adapting accordingly is representative of the attempt at mimicry.

​

Finally, the concept of hybridity suggests the creation of a unique and individual identity as a result of this attempt at mimicry, of responding and adapting to a foreign culture. In the second segment of the poem, a volta is observed through the use of the word ‘yet’, and the reader experiences a shift in the poem’s tone, mood and atmosphere. There is an image of giving and receiving in the first stanza of the second segment, as the speaker laments that with ‘each decade / something in them / is lost to us’, and that ‘something…is gained to their places / of adoption.’ There is a sense of alienation here as the speaker, a mother, attempts to reconcile with the realisation that her children are not the same person they knew anymore with the passing of time. The creation of a tableaux in the second segment of her children returning on a ‘shoestring’ and complaining about ‘streams dried up/ and horizons too narrow’ is joyless, which contrasts sharply with her determined nature to remain ‘green’ for her children at the end of the first segment, and the presumed happiness she would experience at seeing her children again. The final two stanzas intimate the existence of dialogue through words that suggest speech, such as ‘whine’ and ‘astonished’. Yet, there is an absence of embedded dialogue, which strikingly suggests the unrecognisable voice of her children now returned, with their ‘eyes’ new circumspect’. Life has come full circle, but the speaker is left grappling with the novel, hybridised culture and identity which her children have now adopted. 

​

In conclusion, through Homi K. Bhabha’s theories of ambivalence, mimicry and hybridity, the speaker and her children as postcolonial subjects are shown to confront and negotiate a foreign and novel culture and identity through the relationship shared between mother and progeny, and the heartache the former experiences at not being able to recognise them anymore.

​

Bibliography

​

Nichols, Grace. I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2010.

​