Creolizing science in Mayra Montero's Palm of Darkness

Through a discussion of Mayra Montero's In the Palm of Darkness, this chapter examines and challenges what Caribbean novelist Wilson Harris identified as "the break which occurred between science and art, science and an imaginative psychological, even magical apprehension of the universe" (41). The novel reveals that it is in the violent subjugation of women that the costs of such a break are most visibly articulated. Montero's narrative represents an Afro-Caribbean cosmology that is more open to enfolding other realities and knowledges (including a scientific one) in contrast to a Western and hierarchical worldview that defines itself through its dismissal of otherness and alternative epistemologies. At the same time, both approaches are taken to task for the triangulating structures through which they may seek to project their own authority via an erasure of femininity. As such, the novel schematizes a form of "creolizing science" that recognizes usually opposed dimensions of human existence as compatible, creolized forms of knowledge and identity that do not undo difference so much as "enfold the spirit of those who ignore your glory" (In the Palm of Darkness 181).