Flowing Through the Wound: Radical Mothering and Natural Realism in Opal Palmer Adisa’s It Begins with Tears

Abstract

This essay reads Opal Palmer Adisa’s It Begins with Tears (1997) as a Caribbean feminist meditation on sexuality, spirituality, and women’s self-recreation under patriarchal and postcolonial pressures. Adisa contests colonial scripts that cast Black women as hypersexual and deviant by foregrounding African-derived practices, rendering sexuality a sacred resource of female agency within Jamaican rural life.
The novel centers communal sisterhood that draws on African-derived healing and repair practices. However, rather than presenting an idealized or sentimental sisterhood, Adisa exposes the psychic residue of patriarchal authority rooted in African social formations. By juxtaposing intrafemale aggression—echoing patriarchal violences—with scenes that stage the afterlives of slavery and coloniality, she reveals Caribbean women’s compounded oppression: sexual predation in predominantly white-male tourist spaces shows how transnational tourism and global capital eroticize and commodify Black women’s bodies. Simultaneously, episodes of intrafemale sexual aggression register how patriarchal lineages can persist within intimate relations, producing a psychic residue sometimes enacted by women themselves.
Yet the narrative also traces a movement from rupture to renewal: bathing rites, midwifery, mourning, storytelling, sexual reciprocity, and cooperative labour operate as practices that metabolize harm into collective repair. Reading this recuperative work through Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s concept of radical mothering, I argue that Adisa reconceives mothering beyond biology and respectability as a praxis of life-sustaining care that resists capitalist, patriarchal, and state prescriptions.
In dialogue with Kamau Brathwaite’s natural realism, the novel fuses waterways, Orisha cosmologies, and ecological forces into technologies of memory and healing. Kristoff Village—Christ-less yet animated by women who bridge spirit and matter—stages womanhood as a spiritual praxis of survival in which eros, pain, and care circulate through land, water, and flesh to produce regenerative communal becoming.