Abstract

In Caribbean literature, being gazed upon is often part of a larger design of imperial governance, conquest and appropriation, where surveillance is constant and omnipresent, particularly in texts that centre on life on the plantation or are set within the colonial house itself. In his first novel Witchbroom, Trinidadian writer Lawrence Scott presents a family saga through the eyes of the family’s last surviving member, Lavren, a hermaphrodite, trickster-narrator who travels through time to write down the record of his/herstory. To tell his/her ‘Carnival Tales’, the narrator sets the scene in the houses of Kairi, in which the turret room features prominently. The room’s shape, location and the vantage point it offers to its privileged entrants allows them to have eyes on everything that goes on on the family estate and to record events accordingly. But the turret room also serves as a place of gendered confinement and seclusion replete with blind spots that the trickster-narrator–or, perhaps, the implied author?–will expose through his/her own supervisory gaze. As such, this contribution proposes to analyse the turret room as a complex and somewhat paradoxical site where scopic power serves at once to hide and reveal, and as a space that concomitantly functions as a ‘heterotopia of deviation’. By focusing on the carnivalesque, metafictional dimensions of the novel more particularly, the article will ultimately seek to examine iterations of authorial control and reader manipulation as literary reassessments of panopticism.