Taming the Tempest:
 Locating Bermuda on the Literary Map

 Kim Dismont Robinson

 he challenge for Caribbean women writers, historically shut out

 of master discourses and excluded from critical discussion, has
 been to chart a path out of speechlessness; to learn not only
how to speak, as Michelle Cliff has suggested, but how to reveal as
well.' This path out of speechlessness has been, and continues to be,
a particularly challenging journey for Bermudian women and
Bermudian women writers for a number of reasons, both historic and
cultural.
 Consider this essay as a kind of critical buoy a marker in the middle
of an ocean of literary silence, functioning both as a historical reminder
of Bermudian presence in a Caribbean literary ocean as well as a
mooring which can be used and revisited during the course of a
Bermudian journey out of speechlessness. Beginning with a brief and
unlikely juxtaposition of two rather well-known texts The History of
Mary Prince and The Tempest- before concluding with a discussion of
literature produced by and about Bermudian women in the twentieth
century, this essay will provide a sketch of a particular historical
continuum in regards to literary production in Bermuda. Such a sketch
will illuminate the rupture between how Bermudian women have been
"written" by others versus how they are attempting to "write"
themselves. Although many quiet ripples have been swallowed by the
distance which separates Bermudian women from their sisters on the
other islands of the Americas, a slowly developing tradition links


 Cliff, Michelle. "A Journey into Speech." The GraywolfAnnual Five: Multi-Cultural
Literacy. Rick Simonson and Scott Walker, eds. St Paul: Graywolf Press, 1988. 57-81.