Archipelagic Poetics: Village Weavers by Myriam J. A. Chancy

The most powerful element—the force that pulls this novel like a hidden river beneath stones—is its way of entwining the spiritual and the real. Without exoticism. The mythical is not marginal; it is the text itself.

In my study Hyperglossia and the Novel: The Production of (Non) Space, I contend that the future of the novel is not situated within the traditional centers of Western literary production but rather unfolds on the plural, palimpsestic shores of the Caribbean. This assertion is grounded not merely in a critique of hegemonic narrative structures but in a broader epistemological reorientation: decolonization, I argue, is enacted not only through the rupture of dominant discourses but also through the generative reinvention of narrative forms. In this context, language ceases to function as transparent signification; instead, it becomes rhythm, residue, and reverberation—words that do not assert, but float, words that yield to the current rather than anchoring meaning. This aesthetic of fluidity, of textual drift, is exemplified in Myriam J. A. Chancy’s Village Weavers (Tin House, 2024), a novel that does not conform to narrative linearity but rather performs a poetics of undulation.

Recipient of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Village Weavers constitutes what might be described as a liminal estuary—a site where myth, memory, affect, silence, and history converge without dissolving into synthesis. Rather than privileging teleological plot structures, Chancy embraces what Hélène Cixous names tissage, a feminine mode of weaving in which the literal, the symbolic, and the spiritual interlace in non-hierarchical ways. Although the novel’s title references the African Ploceus cucullatus—the “village weaver”—the birds themselves are never directly anthropomorphized as characters. Instead, they operate metaphorically, signifying dispersed collectivity and poetic resilience in the face of displacement.

Set in Port-au-Prince during the 1940s, the narrative enacts a kind of temporal displacement, eschewing historical realism in favor of an atemporal sensibility. The novel reads, in effect, as though composed by a water deity whose touch remains moist on the page; it displaces the novel as genre and reclaims it as ritual. The act of reading itself becomes an immersive gesture, a submission to the flow of the Simbi—spirits of water in Haitian Vodou cosmology. These invisible agents dislocate temporal and corporeal boundaries.

This invocation of the sea recalls Derek Walcott’s well-known assertion: “The sea is history.” Chancy’s novel affirms this proposition, not by representing history, but by weaving it. The protagonists—Sisi, Gertie, Momo, and Margie—function as weavers of affective and communal fabrics. In their hands, intimacy is decoupled from genealogical bloodlines and reassembled through care, reciprocity, and chosen kinship. Sisi, living in exile in Arizona, adopts a daughter and reconstructs an affective genealogy that transcends biological reproduction. Gertie, rendered infertile by hysterectomy, cares for her cats as embodiments of elective kinship. Meanwhile, Momo safeguards and transmits an oral archive—a repository of mythic memory belonging to an invisible, unmapped village that resists colonial cartographies.

This narrative is less a progression than a sedimentation. Memory emerges not as stored data but as tidal movement. Each narrative fragment—each silence, each return—operates as a palimpsest. The textual surface itself resembles skin: porous, scarred, folded. The novel is a map without coordinates, a score composed of repetitions, ruptures, and migrations. Among its most recurring motifs are blood, the sea, birds, and thread—elements that function not merely symbolically but materially, indexing diasporic memory and the psychic residue of historical trauma. In this sense, the novel resists linearity because it reflects a subjectivity that is diasporically dispersed and affectively refracted.

Avian imagery—village weavers, swallows, seabirds—appears not as ornament but as migratory trace. Margie’s promise to return as a yellow bird is fulfilled not through physical resurrection, but as vibration, as chromatic presence, as atmospheric intensity. These birds do not represent migration; they enact its aesthetic logic. They signal the possibility—and impossibility—of return, staging a tension between flight and fragility. Such figures echo Édouard Glissant’s concept of Relation: a poetics of the errant, the opaque, the non-totalizable.

In this sense, the village weavers of Chancy’s novel are not solely characters but narrative agents of reconstruction. Like birds who build nests with dispersed detritus, the protagonists assemble meaning from the fragments left behind by colonial violence and diasporic dislocation. Weaving, whether of textiles, communities, or narratives, becomes an epistemological act—a refusal of archival erasure and a reclamation of embodied knowledge transmitted across generations of women.

Motherhood in Village Weavers is similarly redefined. Rather than operating as a biological category, maternity is reimagined as an ethical praxis. The maternal figure is not the one who gives birth, but the one who names, who nurtures, who cares. Thus, Sisi, Gertie, Momo, and Margie each occupy maternal positions without conforming to reproductive mandates. Even the sea assumes the role of mother—rocking, rending, and ultimately returning what history has cast adrift. In this cosmology, the domestic space is not trivial; it becomes the stage for the cosmic. Home is not possession—it is practice. The logic of inheritance gives way to an ethics of care.

Nevertheless, the material body remains central. Gertie’s hysterectomy, Sisi’s infertility, the shared experience of menopause—all are situated not as medical events but as political inscriptions. The female body becomes a site where illness and sovereignty converge, where the gynecological becomes geopolitical. The uterus—present or absent—serves as an allegorical proxy for colonized territories. Without didacticism, Chancy demonstrates how biography may be read as microhistory, how personal narratives carry the sediment of imperial regimes.

One of the novel’s most profound achievements lies in its refusal to relegate the spiritual to the symbolic. The Simbi are not narrative embellishments; they are mythopoetic agents, epistemic structures, and ontological disruptions. They constitute a gravitational force that binds body, land, and memory. Myth, in this context, is not fantasy but method. As in the works of Kamau Brathwaite and Edwidge Danticat, myth operates as a counter-epistemology—a means to articulate what Western logos cannot apprehend: the ancestral, the spectral, the ecstatic, the synesthetic.

Chancy’s prose enacts this epistemology. It unfolds in incantatory rhythm, marked by syntactic pauses, silences, and half-finished utterances. Her sentences do not always conclude; they hover, suggesting meaning through absence. Here, silence is not mere omission—it is structure. It functions as a grammar of interruption, a syntax of haunting. The novel does not confess because it does not assume guilt; rather, it reveals how guilt itself sutures the historical wound.

History, accordingly, is not positioned as backdrop. It is not the setting against which personal stories unfold, but the very medium in which these stories are constituted. The U.S. occupation of Haiti, systemic colorism, colonial inheritances, and the psychic violence of exile—all manifest not as expository content but as affective undercurrents. These forces are encoded in garments, in architecture, in unanswered telephone calls, in opened bodies and post-bleeding wounds. History is neither archived nor explained; it is made felt.

To ask whether Village Weavers represents the future of the novel is, perhaps, to misframe the question. It is not a prognostication—it is already a displacement. Chancy’s novel does not illustrate the Caribbean; it reconstitutes it through excess, through resonance, through overflow. It does not seek to represent but to resound.

In this regard, the Caribbean novel, as configured by Chancy, is no longer a colonial inheritance retrofitted to local concerns. Rather, it is a radical dispositif through which memory is inscribed not genealogically but rhizomatically. It is an archive without center—fractal, spectral, affective. Each fragment—a song, an animal, a silence, a dress—serves as a point of entry into a possible counter-narrative. Within this structure, hyperglossia emerges not as decorative surplus but as methodological principle: the proliferation of semiotic, linguistic, and affective registers that cannot be unified or translated.

Hyperglossia, in Village Weavers, is not content—it is form. It is the novel itself: a rhizomatic apparatus that radiates meaning in all directions without closure or hierarchy. The novel no longer seeks to inform; that function has been outsourced to digital platforms and journalistic media. The novel now exists to touch, to haunt, to enchant.

Ultimately, Village Weavers is not simply a literary text. It is a conjuration. Chancy writes with fingers steeped in Simbi waters, crafting a narrative that is simultaneously intimate and planetary. It is not merely read—it is inhabited. Like the tide, it returns to the shore what time, empire, and exile have scattered.

A novel as body. As shore. As offering. As wound.

As woman. As wave. As Simbi.