In this chapter, I examine two short stories by two female writers spanning fifteen years in time and two different postcolonial locations: Jamaica and Cyprus. More specifically, I look at Alecia McKenzie’s story “Satellite City” (1992) and Nora Nadjarian’s “Okay, Daisy, Finish” (2006). Set in countries that share a common (albeit not identical) history of colonization, the stories, I argue, can be regarded as representative literary responses to the postcolonial nations’ ongoing “nervous condition” (Sartre 20) following emancipation. Though originating in different space and time continuums, the narratives discussed here are centrally concerned with the manifestation of postcolonial violence stemming from inherited violent colonial power structures in relation to class, gender, and race, and their damaging effects on the human body and psyche. While Jamaica suffered through several centuries of colonization by European powers and, most importantly, slavery, Cyprus was colonized by the British for a comparatively short time (1925–60); it was then partitioned into Greek and Turkish territories in 1974. In crossing temporal, geographic, and socio-cultural borders, this comparative study wishes to highlight the link that ties McKenzie’s and Nadjarian’s narratives together in a shared history of colonization and violence, so as to initiate a conversation between national histories, on the one hand, and their fictionalization and imaginative representations, on the other. In keeping with Robert C. Young’s observation that “the new states … succumbed to the greed of the bourgeois elites who appropriated the machinery of colonial power” (382), I argue that one of the key concerns that emerges in both McKenzie’s and Nadjarian’s stories is the social divide between the haves and the have nots in postcolonial nations, a separation that is reinforced by spatial divisions along the lines of class and race. Indeed, the privileged dwell in prosperous areas while the disadvantaged live in shanty towns, rural areas, or in basements—and are thus relegated to the margins and even rendered invisible. When addressing colonial and postcolonial violence, it is thus important to acknowledge the extent to which colonialism initiated a climate of violence that persists to this day: in the contemporary world, those who were once themselves victims of colonial domination may also inflict physical and psychological violence on others. Apart from the manifestation of violence in relation to class, the narratives explore how anxieties about the materiality of the body and the body’s inviolability become dominant in societies built on colonial rule. In particular, the stories explore the ways in which (post)colonial violence takes the form of (sexual) violence against women. Based on Young’s idea that emancipated nations “appropriated the machinery of colonial power,” sexual violence against women as depicted in the two short stories emerges as a significant component of the culture of violence perpetuated in postcolonial times. As Lorna Milne puts it in her introduction to the volume Postcolonial Violence, Culture and Identity in Francophone Africa and the Antilles: “This brutalised (post)colonial body is the site of a violence shaped by a particular history, culture and identity” (24). It is, therefore, not surprising that there is a large amount of literature coming out of formerly colonized spaces that has explored this particular form of violence. Milne further notes that “violence by men against women—and therefore sexual violence—is an especially prominent and fascinating preoccupation, for both male and female artists” (25). She subsequently enumerates a number of African and Caribbean writers who, “in order to condemn violence, … perform a critique of unacceptable practices in postcolonial societies” (26, 27).¹ In my discussion of McKenzie’s and Nadjarian’s short stories I will show that, in the depiction of violent encounters, these fictional texts establish a direct link from colonial times—and more specifically from slavery in the Caribbean context—to the troubled postcolonial present of the nation.

Alecia McKenzie’s “Satellite City,” the title story of the anthology that won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Canada and the Caribbean) in 1992, is set in a Jamaican location resembling Kingston, and which is divided into the wealthy suburb referred to as “Satellite City,” and “Renk Town,” the shanty town where “outsiders were either shot on sight or shortly afterwards” (86). Satellite City acquired its name from the many satellite dishes found in the area, which function not only as a signifier of wealth and cosmopolitanism but also as an implicit critique of the moneyed elite’s neo-colonialist affiliations, reinforced by “the three Vs”: “video, Volvo and visa to America” (88). The story revolves around the rocky relationship between its protagonist Clinton, a failed fine artist who became wealthy in the black greeting cards business, and his girlfriend Pearl (notice how the name reinforces her social status), a successful businesswoman who acquired her riches following two divorce cases. From the outset, the story plunges into violence when Clinton remembers the two murdered women he saw lying by the roadside on the stretch of highway bypassing Renk Town on his way to work in the morning. Following this initial act of witnessing, references to the dead women’s bodies run through the story like a red thread and function as the text’s central leitmotif, the significance of which will be explained in what follows. However, prior to proceeding with a detailed discussion of the story, it is necessary to firmly locate the text in its historical context and outline its cultural specificities. It is indeed of paramount importance to my argument to recall that black Caribbean people were not merely colonized but that they were also enslaved, a condition that led to a profound and lasting effect on the population in the region. In her essay about Patrick Chamoiseau’s Biblique des derniers gestes, Maeve McCusker discusses slavery and the Middle Passage precisely as the “foundational moment in Caribbean history” (4). Following this “historical trauma … violence assumed a structural and epistemic centrality … deeply repressed in the collective unconscious” (4). Due to this, “the Caribbean is … explicitly distinguished from other postcolonial cultures, in that the violence from which it has emerged cannot be contained, quantified or measured” (4). Based on these remarks, I argue that what resurfaces in the form of the murdered women’s violated bodies represents the repressed collective memory of the Caribbean’s cultural trauma. In other words, the bodies and the constant references to them throughout the text trigger the painful memory of the Caribbean’s violent colonial and, more specifically, its slavery past. Following this reading, the haunting memory of the dead women—and Clinton’s deferred response at the end of the story—may be regarded as the consequence of a belated witnessing of colonial violence, and in that way its symptoms resemble those that trauma theorists describe as typical of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The memory of the women indeed haunts Clinton at a number of moments in the story. At one point, he finds himself inadvertently “drawing the women on the roadside” (94) and keeps asking himself why he was so upset about the women (94, 95). In another instance, “he remembered the women, their blood-stained clothes, and the curry-goat rose up in his throat” (102)—a bodily response whose significance will be discussed in more detail below.

On the surface, such symptoms are primarily pathological, but the deep-seated association of PTSD with the historical is emphasized by Cathy Caruth in her definition of the condition:

If PTSD must be understood as a pathological symptom, then it is not so much the symptom of the unconscious, as it is a symptom of history. The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess. (5)

In even more specific terms, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson refers to what Joy DeGruy Leary has called post-traumatic slave syndrome (PTSS), and what others have termed post-traumatic slave disorder (PTSlaveryD), to describe “the wounding at the ‘primal scene’ of slavery” that “becomes imprinted on black bodies, internalized in the black psyche, and passed down to subsequent generations” (173). Evidently, it is of prime importance that the violated bodies are female. As McCusker notes in her essay on Chamoiseau, “it is primarily the female body which continues to bear the memory of slavery” (13), a claim that she supports with reference to the “enduring obsession” with the topic in a vast array of literature (e.g. Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Hortense Spiller), and which recent studies such as Véronique Maisier’s Violence in Caribbean Literature (2015) seem to confirm. Not only does this fact point towards the specifically gendered nature of trauma, but it further recalls the association of the violated female body with that of the violated land—namely, the topos of woman-as-landscape as representative of a body that could be exploited and abused.

It is initially through the graphic portrayal, the public display, the brutalization, and the subsequent disposal of the women’s bodies that associations with the lingering effect of slavery are suggested by McKenzie’s text. Even though the exact nature of the crime is never mentioned, the blood that “stained the front of their dresses” (85) records abuse; thus, the use of force to take possession of the (black) female body that was started in the past is perpetuated in the present. More precisely, the fact that members of their own community presumably perpetrate the violence against the women can be regarded as yet another manifestation of inherited and subsequently internalized colonial power structures. Indeed, following Frantz Fanon, the violence suffered at the hand of colonialism turned the colonized against each other: “The colonized man will first manifest his aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people” (Wretched 52).² In his book In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong (2003), Amin Maalouf compellingly problematizes precisely the complicity of the formerly colonized with colonial forms of violence:

When people have suffered under colonial arrogance, racism, xenophobia, we forgive them the excesses of their own nationalist arrogance, their own racism and their own xenophobia, thereby detaching ourselves from the fate of their victims, at least as long as there is no great spillage of blood. The thing is, we never know where legitimate assertion of identity ends, and the trampling of other people’s rights begins! (41)

Applied to McKenzie’s story, the ideas outlined by Fanon and Maalouf reinforce a reading that sees contemporary violence as symptomatic of, and thus intimately linked to, the collective, intergenerational trauma of colonialism.

In the Caribbean context, as mentioned above, this trauma is more specifically connected to slavery. In an undignified spectacle reminiscent of public lynchings during the time of slavery, the women’s bodies are exposed for public viewing for the benefit of passing cars as “no one had even thought of covering” them (85–86). This display of the murdered women’s bodies adds an element of disgrace and defilement to the violation. Descriptions of the dead women, of whom “neither was beautiful” (85), are rendered in terms of disposable garbage: the women have been “dumped on the roadside” (93) and are surrounded by “mango skin, bits of old newspaper and other litter” (85). Robbed of their human dignity, personhood, and lives, their bodies are ultimately reduced to abject corpses; that is, to objects that according to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the “abject” produce horror and disgust in the observer.

Similar to what Eric Morales-Franceschini has explored in a recent essay titled “Tropics of Abjection: Figures of Violence and the Afro-Caribbean Semiotic” (2019), we also find in McKenzie’s story “a curious resonance with how Kristeva speaks of the abject and how Caribbean thinkers and writers … have evocatively figured alterity and violence in their works” (513). Through the decidedly corporeal representation of the women in terms of refuse and the corpse, McKenzie has indeed employed two “salient tropes in the Afro-Caribbean imaginary” (Morales-Franceschini 523) which, in line with Morales-Franceschini’s argumentation, firmly locates her in a tradition of Caribbean writing in which such figures are “resignified to denounce … colonial violence” (513).

Before discussing the notion of the “abject” in more detail, it must be first emphasized, however, that the depiction of the women as “abject” corpses shows how central the politics of portrayal are to the responses to the dead women’s bodies. They indeed receive further violation through the various responses to the crime. Pearl’s reaction is to deny the women any human value on the basis of social class, by dismissing them as “prostitutes” (85), an assessment that is reinforced by the onlookers’ reflection that “the women must have done something to deserve their deaths. Drugs? Politics? Prostitution?” (86). With the enumeration of this unholy triad of illegal drug trafficking, corruption, and human trafficking, McKenzie offers an implicit critique of the three most prominent ills plaguing contemporary Caribbean societies—ills which simultaneously constitute the most profitable sources of income and the most likely causes for a violent death.

Besides Pearl’s dismissive categorization of the women, the most obvious attempt at constructing a “suitable” version of the events occurs in the form of a newspaper article in The Gleaner suggesting that the victims had been loose women who had been seen leaving a discotheque (92–93). Through the classification of the women as prostitutes or loose women, their bodies are discursively constructed in an attempt to control and contain the narrative of violence in which they are involved, and in order to assert their difference from the passers-by in their “nice cars” (86).³ The women’s bodies are thus exiled and effectively turned into what Sara Ahmed calls “strange bodies.” As such, they are “already read and recognisable through the histories of determination in which such bodies are associated with dirt and danger” (Ahmed 50). Thus, it appears that the abundance of negative depictions of the women in the story that attempt to erase their humanity—or indeed rob them of their dignity—draws the reader’s attention to the fact that “representations have political implications” (Demmers 29). More than this, these representations are an integral part of the violence inflicted upon the women, as they add discursive violence to the already experienced physical violation. As Jolle Demmers argues, “Discourses always are exercises of power” (30) that, importantly, give some actors “greater ‘powers to define’ than others” (30). The act of “othering” and framing the women can therefore also be regarded as a practice inherited from colonial discourse, here used to explain and thus to legitimize the violence perpetrated against the victims who, as mentioned above, “must have done something to deserve their deaths” (86). Hence, Demmers’ statement that “framing implies claiming” is useful for the current discussion since “by framing … one … puts moral claims on, for instance, the (il)legitimacy of an act of violence” (29). In other words, framings “actively construct a version of … things. They do not describe things, they do things” (Jabri 95, qtd. in Demmers 29, italics in original).

Having established the key role played by the politics of portrayal in McKenzie’s story, I can now return to the previously mentioned idea that the depiction of the women’s bodies and the witnesses’ responses to seeing them recall Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, on which she elaborates in the Powers of Horror (1982). The abject, according to Kristeva, refers to the horror and fear caused in the observer by the threat of a breakdown of the boundary between subject and object, or between self and other. Significantly, the primary example chosen by Kristeva to illustrate this response is the human corpse, which reminds us of our own materiality and mortality. She writes:

The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.

It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. (4)

Hence, to confront a corpse of someone that we recognize as human, something that should be alive but is not, is to confront the reality that we are capable of existing in the same state, to confront our own mortality. Following from this, the women’s corpses in the story can be identified as a site of abjection that reminds the passers-by not only of their own mortality, but more specifically of the possibility of becoming victims of violent crime. I argue, therefore, that in the context of a postcolonial and post-slavery society, the sight of the dead women is an inherently traumatic experience that mobilizes the transgenerational trauma of slavery, which in turn triggers a split response in the onlookers. People have become numb to the ubiquity of crime: “Another two people killed. Oh well” (86), which is one of the most common coping mechanisms observed in trauma victims. Yet simultaneously they feel compelled to “have a good look” (86): people “wanted to see them … . Parents taking their children to school slowed down so that their daughters and sons could witness this island scene” (86). This illustrates Sara Ahmed’s claim that “the abject holds an uncanny fascination for the subject” (51). The compulsive need for witnessing cannot, however, be equated with a simple act of voyeurism, but speaks precisely of the possibility and thus of the fear of similarity with the victims as pointed out above, of the capability of existing in the same state. This is echoed in Clinton’s challenge to Pearl: “What make you think only prostitute get killed?” (85). Clinton’s reminder and implicit warning is supported by brief references to other incidents in which residents from the wealthier part of town have also become victims of violent crime. These victims include Clinton’s mother who, after a fatal accident, was left lying on the road and robbed of her belongings (93), in a way bound to remind readers of the fate suffered by the two women and to invalidate the women’s portrayal as prostitutes.

If the story focuses on crimes committed against women and the specific forms of sexual and discursive violence exercised on and over their bodies, it also draws attention to the pervasiveness of crime in an episode about a man who was shot at a gas station during the 1980s elections. The scene again attracted a crowd, “women, men, children” (94), watching the man die “like little boys watching a lizard die” (94). The shocking representation of the dying man in animalistic terms and the passivity of the observers again recalls the notion of the abject, of that from which one needs to separate oneself, that of which one needs to cleanse oneself. In the case of the murdered man the text points specifically to the possibility of a drug-related or political cause (as it occurred during election time). The story thus clearly depicts the omnipresence of forms of violence from which nobody is safe. Yet, again, in the case of the murdered man as in that of the murdered women, people need reassurance that it could not happen to them, and they are quick to fabricate a reason for the man’s death:

One woman said, ‘Is drugs-killing, man.’

The dead man deserved it, was what she meant. But Clinton couldn’t blame her. So many people had been senselessly killed already that year that people had to find a reason why it couldn’t happen to them. After a while, everyone got used to the murders. (95)

In other words, in an attempt to dispel the fear of the randomness and the lurking possibility of one’s own risk of becoming a victim of homicide, the rhetoric of abjection is employed in the construction of a narrative about murder victims in order to disassociate oneself from them. Consequently, the portrayals of the women as “other” and the reassurance that they “must have done something to deserve their deaths” (86) function as a defence mechanism, and thus as an additional technique for self-protection identified in people suffering from trauma.

The text further exposes that these responses function to uphold social divisions when, in a passage drenched in sarcasm, the narrator says: “The onlookers were sure it wouldn’t have happened to them, especially the ones with their nice cars, nice children and nice houses in decent areas” (86). This social divide is also poignantly captured, as I will now discuss, in the spatial signifiers of Satellite City and the ghetto Renk Town, in a perpetuation of the “divisive territorial consequences of colonialism” (McLeod 2).

Considering that “renk” means “the stink of piss” in Jamaican patois, the discourse of the abject is again employed in the depiction of the ghetto as a space of abjection inhabited by abject things and beings that elicits repulsion and disgust. Significantly, the slum area that runs past the highway is comfortably hidden from view, “flanked by trees that hid the zinc and cardboard houses” (87). The highway is one of the only routes that links the otherwise segregated suburbs; that is, the two areas are only superficially divided and they are, in fact, dependent on and closely bound to each other. Hence, the highway can be conceptualized as an artery connecting the two polar spaces and suggesting a bond on a deeper and more profound level, which remains invisible on the surface, but nevertheless runs under the skin, and is thus suggestive of one “body” or one organism that cannot be separated. Based on this discussion, this intimate relationship between the two parts of town can be read as a representation of the shared historical traumatic memories of slavery. Through his sighting of the dead women, Clinton gradually wakes up to the existence of this connection and to the fact that rich and poor share the same history, that their lives are built on the same foundations.

Clinton’s realization is supported by an incident with a Dutch writer, who is characterized as a predator reminiscent of the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood” with “big teeth” (100) and a “wide grin” (102)—with an obvious sexual interest in Clinton’s girlfriend Pearl—and as a neo-colonialist, who significantly offers to pay Clinton in American dollars to take him into Renk Town to see “the real island” (100).⁴ The various layers of sexual and economic exploitation, paired with a replication of colonial hierarchies in which the locals are recruited as servants and subjected to the European gaze, triggers Clinton’s memory of the women, and “the curry-goat rose up in his throat” (102). Clinton cleanses himself through the act of vomiting, an action through which the rhetorics of abjection are again mobilized; according to Kristeva, “food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection” (2). Sara Ahmed, in her discussion of the abject, more specifically notes that “the abject is expelled—like vomit—and the process of expulsion serves to establish the boundary line of the subject” (51). Considering the (neo)colonial implications of the encounter between Clinton and the Dutchman, the former’s response can also be conceptualized as drawing the boundary of his subjecthood in terms of the dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized. This reading, then, brings to mind a passage from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, in which the response of the formerly colonized subject is precisely likened to the act of vomiting:

In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values. In the period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them, and vomit them up. (43)

In a further gesture of purification, Clinton later destroys the greeting cards, his means to financial security and access to wealth, which represent a powerful signifier of his complicity in perpetuating neo-colonial structures of violence: “The words on the cards mocked him … . ‘Merry Christmas, Mom’. (When his mother was alive, he had not once called her ‘Mom’. Who on the island called his mother ‘Mom’?)” (102).

At the end of the story, in a dramatic show-down, Clinton leaves behind his past phony existence: “he drove slowly down the hill, past the satellite dishes … . Even in the dark you could see the damn things. He swung out on to the highway. And drove into Renk Town” (103). In light of the cathartic incidents described above, Clinton’s decision to plunge himself into Renk Town emerges as the ultimate form of cleansing, yet also as an ambivalent act. The open ending remains suspended between catharsis and self-annihilation, for it suggests either that Clinton faces historical trauma by delving deep into the island’s “heart of darkness” to initiate a recovery, or that he consciously jeopardizes his safety and ultimately seeks his own death. Both scenarios are possible responses to the pressures of a trauma induced by the legacies of colonialism and slavery. These reactions can lead to either an inherently curative process or an act of self-destruction.⁵

The current condition of another postcolonial nation space, the island of Cyprus, is depicted in several short stories from Nora Nadjarian’s collection Ledra Street (2006). In the wake of major global demographic and geopolitical shifts, Cyprus today has become a harbour to peoples of various ethnic backgrounds seeking political or economic refuge. Over the last few decades, Cyprus has thus effectively turned into a contemporary multicultural space that, while still battling the legacies of colonization and partition, is now struggling to negotiate the challenges of cosmopolitan conviviality that Paul Gilroy usefully defines as “the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life … in postcolonial cities” (xv). As in other formerly colonized territories and now partitioned nations (such as Ireland and Palestine), one can also observe in Cyprus how “colonial-capitalist ideologies … used to legitimate the division and stratification of peoples during the colonial period” (Cleary 94) are reinforced in the independent state. In other words, the same discursive system employed by the colonizers to justify their mission and subjugate peoples on the basis of their perceived racial and cultural inferiority is now directed by Cypriots towards asylum-seekers, illegal immigrants, domestic helpers, and other foreign workers predominantly from Middle Eastern, Asian, and African backgrounds. As Paul Gilroy puts it:

Old colonial issues come back into play when geopolitical conflicts are specified as a battle between homogeneous civilizations … . Today’s civilisationism shamelessly represents the primary lines of antagonism in global politics as essentially cultural in character. (22)

More specifically in relation to the treatment of Asian trans-migrant women, predominately from Sri Lanka and the Philippines, the “largest population of migrant workers in Cyprus” (Sainsbury 25), Cypriot anthropologist Spyros Spyrou notes that “Asian domestic workers in Cyprus provide a suitable target for the nationalist imagination, which always seeks some kind of ‘other’ to direct its gaze and to construct a sense of identity” (159). In other words, we can observe a replay of the colonizer/colonized dynamics in the relationship between Cypriot employers and Asian housemaids. In her comprehensive study titled “The Silent Presence: Asian Female Domestic Workers and Cyprus in the New Europe” (2009), Sondra C. Sainsbury specifically points out the connection between Cyprus’s former colonial status and its still relatively recent membership of the EU (since 2004) when she writes that the country’s “postcolonial status affects its relationship with its citizens as well as its guestworkers and … shapes every facet of life, particularly in relation to migrants as unwanted ‘outsiders’” (17). In a European context, the case of Cyprus is indeed special, in that—similar to Ireland—it combines colonial memory and global encounters in one and the same space.⁶ In terms of its complex identity politics, the nation is struggling to negotiate between the legacy of its colonial history and its relatively new status as a European nation state. Again following Sainsbury, to a large extent this tension plays itself out on the bodies of female Asian workers: “The presence of visibly-different, non-Europeans laboring in the physically demanding, low-skill positions in society not wanted by Cypriots, is a reminder of an achieved European status for many Cypriots” (34).

This fact is of crucial importance when examining one of the most powerful texts in Nadjarian’s collection Ledra Street, the story titled “Okay, Daisy, Finish.” The narrative focuses on the life of the Sri Lankan domestic helper called Daisy and simultaneously exposes the vacuity of the contemporary nouveau riche Cypriot “high” society embodied by her “Madam” Maria Stephanides and her philandering painter husband Mr Andreas Stephanides, who openly betrays his wife by having sex with his Russian female models. Through its focus on Daisy, the story depicts female immigrants, who in the new globalized order, according to Saskia Sassen, “emerge as the labor supply that facilitates the imposition of low wages and powerlessness under conditions of high demand for those workers” (86). Indeed, in the 1990s, economic development and increasingly high levels of education in Cyprus left a vacuum in certain areas of the job market, which in turn created the need to import workers to fill the demand for low-skilled and low-paid jobs that the Cypriots would not take, in sectors including private domestic work (Sainsbury 20). In her study of migrants in Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey, political scientist Anna Agathangelou has shown how, as a result, “some women and men are free to desire and exploit the labor of women and men as a sign of freedom whereas migrant women who sell it are just trying to survive in a world economy that depends on accumulation of profits and wealth” (ix). This situation finds echoes in Nadjarian’s story, in which Daisy is abused daily by “Madam,” who bosses her around and belittles her through name-calling; additionally, Mr Stephanides is totally oblivious to her existence when she comes to clean his studio and he merely acknowledges her presence by dismissing her with the words “Okay, Daisy, Finish” (148). With the Stephanides’ poor treatment of Daisy, standard tropes of colonial discourse are reproduced in the Cypriot context as, according to Sainsbury, Asian migrant women are stereotyped as “women from ‘the Orient’ [and] are also perceived as objects of pity, as well as distrust, or as objects which can be easily taken advantage of—sexually, overworked, or otherwise” (28).

In addition to her relegation to the basement—“Daisy lives below ground” (152)—she is effectively turned into an invisible presence. This invisibility is one day transformed into exoticism when Mr Andreas, satiated by all the “pale bodies” (154), is looking for “a different kind of woman—who asks for nothing in return” (155) and persuades Daisy to sit for him. If the painting titled “Dark Woman” gives Daisy presence and visibility, it is nevertheless of an ambiguous sort. One could argue that her humanity and womanhood receive recognition, but at the same time, she has been exoticized and objectified only to aggrandize the painter, an act of violence that is poignantly captured in the description of the painting as “primitive. A bit like Gauguin and those girls in Tahiti” (158). Mrs Stephanides, who has quietly endured her husband’s quick sexual encounters with the Russian women, now bursts out: “The maid, now? The filthy, fucking Sri Lankan?” (159). While “Maria Madam” (151) accepted the perceived racial superiority of the white(r) women, the possibility of her husband touching the maid’s “filthy black skin” (159) is unbearable. Again this element in the story echoes a sociological reality: whereas Russian women are frequently envied in Cyprus because of their “attractiveness, blond hair, slim figures and light skin, qualities [which] will almost guarantee the infidelity of their [Cypriot women’s] husbands” (Sainsbury 202), Asian women, based on their dark complexion, are “assumed to be ‘safe bets’ to have around their [Cypriot women’s] husbands” (203).⁷ Thus, condensed in the wife’s reaction of outrage and vitriolic abuse are the multiple layers of discrimination on the levels of race, class, and gender directed at the Sri Lankan woman. In a perpetuation of colonial assumptions, the “natural” inferiority of Asian women is thus “justified” on the basis of their non-Western status, their poor background, and their racial “otherness.” The specific expression of disgust uttered by Mrs Stephanides about Daisy’s “filthy black skin” (159) also recalls the notion of the abject, discussed above. The Cypriot woman expresses horror and disgust at the black body (equating it with “filth”), which brings about a “crisis posed by abjection [which] threaten[s] to undermine the integrity of the subject” (Ahmed 51). In that sense, the maid’s abject body is, to echo Frantz Fanon, “sealed into that crushing objecthood” (Black Skin 77).

Hence, Daisy’s story can be regarded as a literary illustration of the condition of immigrants, whom Saskia Sassen refers to as “an invisible and disempowered class of workers in the service of the strategic sectors constituting the global economy” (88). Indeed, as the Cyprus economy continues to grow and as Cypriots increasingly strive to identify as European, “cheap domestic labor has become more and more a necessity rather than a privilege for the average Greek-Cypriot household” (Sainsbury 207).⁸

Unlike in “Satellite City,” in Nadjarian’s story violence does not manifest in terms of brutal, physical force, but is displayed through several other forms of violence. This violence is, first of all, discursive, through the numerous interpellations Daisy endures from Mrs Stephanides. At various moments in the text, she refers to Daisy as “you FOOL” (151), “the filthy, fucking Sri Lankan,” “that filthy slut” (158), “that filthy whore … that dirty bitch” (159). In addition to invoking the discourse of abjection through name-calling and establishing a clear hierarchical structure of power relations, Mrs Stephanides’ abuse also serves as a reminder of women’s capacity to inflict violence on other women. A second form of violence is the exercise of legal power which lies exclusively with the Cypriot couple and allows them, at the end of the story, to have Daisy deported like a piece of cargo—for reasons left unclear in the text—and, as a consequence, lose her source of income. The third and most prominent form of violence perpetrated against this brown woman is the abuse she suffers as a result of Mr Stephanides’ exploitation of her body to serve his own interests and establish his reputation as an artist. As an integral part of the power relations at play, one could thus argue that Daisy’s body is subjected to the colonizing/objectifying gaze of the local viewers—much as the female bodies in McKenzie’s narrative. Responses to the painting vary from racially inflected rejection (“This is a little different. Dark Woman … . A little too dark for me,” 156) to dubiously motivated approval (“I just love this one. It’s just so—kind of—primitive,” 158). In Nadjarian’s story, the painted and aestheticized brown female body is thus identified with primitiveness, savagery, and sexual allure, encouraging both sexual and colonial subjugation. The brown female body hence serves as a site of commodification and fetishization and draws attention to the place that such bodies occupy in commerce as objects of desire. Similarly to McKenzie’s story, in which the women experienced various discursive (mis)representations, Nadjarian’s text invites a reading that reminds us that “representations have political implications” (Demmers 29). The critique of such representations occurs as much within the narrative—here through the presence of Mr Stephanides’ painting titled “Dark Woman” (157)—as on the meta-level through the author’s very representation of the violence inflicted upon its female protagonist.

If the story itself draws a parallel to Gauguin’s famous paintings of native women in Tahiti, in a European context, this depiction of a woman with a dark complexion is even more apparently reminiscent of the paintings and the actual display as a human oddity of Saartje Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus” in nineteenth-century London. In other words, in consideration of Cyprus’ ambivalent location as a postcolonial and at the same time as a European space, such a representation is rife with colonial legacies of violence and postcolonial melancholia superimposing each other. Nadjarian’s story thus speaks of an ambivalence that results in a complex network of anxieties around the Cypriot couple’s own fear of inferiority as formerly colonized subjects and around assertions of their newly achieved Western identity and superiority over non-European “others.” “Okay, Daisy, Finish” hence emerges as a powerful exploration of ongoing structures of exploitation and poverty in a fraught postcolonial context characterized by a profound inequality between the formerly colonized and the new underclass of disadvantaged global subjects. The story specifically indicts systems of violence directed at migrant women and, in doing so, provides a strong criticism of gender ideologies that place these female subjects in particularly vulnerable positions.

To conclude, this chapter has established a dialogue between two short stories that, though originating from different postcolonial locations and separated by almost two decades, are defined by representations of ongoing violent power structures inherited from colonial domination. As the discussion has demonstrated, the particular representations of violence in the text are directly linked to the distinctive colonial histories of these two island nations in which the stories are set. The current status of Cyprus is further complicated by its partitioned condition and its status as a member state of the European Union. As a result of the distinctive paths taken by the Caribbean and Cyprus prior to and following independence, the two texts present different depictions of violence: in McKenzie’s story, the replay of the colonizer/colonized dynamics with its concomitant violence operates within the local community and through neo-colonial affiliations; in Nadjarian’s story the violence is directed at ethnic and racial “others.” Thus, whereas the link to the colonial past in McKenzie’s story is established primarily with regard to the transmission and resurfacing of the transgenerational trauma of slavery, Nadjarian’s text explores the continuity of colonial exploitative structures directed at migrant subjects in the age of globalization. In their exploration of the legacies of colonial rule, both women writers primarily foreground the impact of the lingering colonial power structures on the integrity of the female body and psyche in relation to class, race, and gender. While “Satellite City” portrays brutal physical force and discursive modes of violence inflicted against local Caribbean women, “Okay, Daisy, Finish” formulates a strong indictment of exploitative and sexist forms of violence manifested against female Asian domestic helpers in the “new” Cyprus. However, as this discussion has sought to show, the dissimilarities in the particular manifestations of violence portrayed in the two stories emerge as mere symptoms of the specificities of the historical and cultural experience of colonization and subsequent emancipation. What ultimately binds the two texts together is their powerful critical engagement with the climate of violence that is one of the most destructive lasting effects of Empire. Crucially, the two stories do not merely include violence as a theme, but they also broach the issue of its representation, thus paradoxically emerging as instances of textual resistance to violence through its very depiction as a lingering legacy of colonization.