The Complicated Legacies of a Comrade Sister

This essay responds to the essays by Belinda Deneen Wallace and Randi Gill-Sadler on the author’s Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (2020). It uses the concepts of pushing-into-consciousness and narrative dulling, introduced by Wallace and Gill-Sadler, respectively, to inform a close reading of Phyllis Coard’s memoir Unchained: A Caribbean Woman’s Journey through Invasion, Incarceration, and Liberation (2019). The author argues that Coard’s representation of her body under incarceration serves to push her humanity into the consciousness of her readers. It also revisits how the author pushed Coard out of consciousness in order to write about the Grenada Revolution. Theorizing the different valences of omission that characterize certain writings on Grenada, the essay examines how this book discussion affords the opportunity to push beyond an earlier silence to situate Coard among the Caribbean feminists who helped shape the Revolution.