Vienna Working Papers in Canadian Studies Vol. 3 (2019) Tegan Zimmerman 1 ‘BETWEEN THE SPECTERS’: CARIBBEAN NEO-SLAVE NOVELS BY CANADIAN WOMEN Tegan Zimmerman Stephens College, Columbia MO Bola dipped her head into the water and came up. She had to come out now, light a fire, make some food. It was becoming breezy. A spray of sand along the beach obscured the children for a moment. She could hear their voices in surprise, the laughter and astonishment. She swam back to shore to hear their complaints and have them hover at her dress tail for the rest of the day. Her dress lost its sail, it clung to her hips as she came out of the water and the crowd of them clutched her wet body. … “Boto bayena mama …” “Why do you leave me?” “Quiet!” she sang out above the sea noise. “Or I’ll go back in the sea.” –Dionne Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon: A Novel Back on the beach in Martinique. The island of her grandmother, the island of flowers, white sand and bending palms, the country of those who return. A child danced at the edge of the water. He splashed and laughed. His voice echoed as he called, Mama! Eleanor took his hand and they entered the water, warm, vast. They swam. … A voice said, lay it down now, Child. A long sailboat scuttled over the water, leaving a wake like the undulating veil o a bride. Lay it all down” (Jaeckel, 299). –Jenny Jaeckel, House of Rougeaux: A Novel By pairing Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon: A Novel with Jenny Jaeckel’s House of Rougeaux: A Novel, I aim to create a literary space, a ‘between the specters,’ if you will, and in doing so I re-interpret well-established, and typically male-dominated, “root theory” in the Caribbean from a postcolonial feminist perspective. In the first part of this paper, I argue that this postcolonial feminist rootedness contests and transforms traditional male- and colonial-dominated master narratives and discourses by the centralizing of Afro-maternal genealogies, voices, and figures in both novels. In the second part of this paper, I claim that