The Hills of Hebron:

Sylvia Wynters Disruption of the

Narrative of the Nation
Shirley Toland-Dix

Abstract: Sylvia Wynters 1962 novel, The Hills of Hebron, is both a narrative of the nation and
critique of the extant vision of the nation. Writing her novel from the perspective of a theorist,
Wynter introduces insights and concepts that she has since developed in her extensive body of
theoretical essays. This article looks particularly at the strategies she uses to incorporate gender
issues into her novel.

In a 2000 Small Axe interview with David Scott, Jamaican critical theorist, cultural critic,
playwright, and novelist Sylvia Wynter reminisces about growing up in Jamaica in the 1940s,
in the midst of the anticolonial struggle: You cannot imagine today how total a system colonialism was. ... How could it ever have occurred to you then, before the struggles erupted,
that you as a native subject could take any action on your own? Describing the impact of
attending high school while a wave of social protest movements went on all around her,
she exclaims: It was as if you were suddenly in a different dimension ... the whole sense of
activity, of a self-initiated new beginningI would say that movement determined everything
I was going to be or have been (emphasis added).1 Wynter explicitly provides a generational
context for her body of work when she returns to this point throughout the interview, repeatedly emphasizing the lifelong impact of experiencing her own political awakening during the
anticolonial struggles.2 Tellingly, she adds: where I think there is a great distance between

1. David Scott, The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter, Small Axe no. 8 (September
2000): 125.
2. Ibid., 168.
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todays feminists and myself is that then we knew that it was as a populationmen, women,
and childrenthat we had thought we could not do anything.3 Over a period of almost
fifty years, Wynters engagement with feminism has been complex but consistent. Despite
contemporary challenges, she continues to present feminism and womens rights as issues that
are subsets within her analysis of Western humanism and the consequences of its racially based
definition of man.4 Factoring in her generational perspective provides additional insight
into both the strengths and the impasses in Wynters approach to the particular issues facing
African and African-descended women.
With The Hills of Hebron, a narrative of the emerging nation published in 1962, the year
Jamaica became independent of British colonial rule, Wynter audaciously inserts herself into
a discourse generated almost exclusively by Caribbean male authors and dares to envision the
Caribbean nation. Not content to merely discuss what the West Indian novel should do from
a detached and prescriptive space, Wynter creates a narrative of the nation, experimenting
with the possibilities of the genre, experiencing frustration with the genres limitations. Wynter
approaches writing a novel from the perspective of a theorist, introducing insights and concepts that she later develops in stunningly brilliant and erudite theoretical essays. Among the
theoretical inquiries she incorporates into the novel: an interrogation of the role of the artist
and the intellectual in emerging nations, her rejection of mono-conceptual frameworks, her
engagement with the role of groups most marginalized or liminal within societies, and a suggestive investigation of gender dynamics within the black community. The Hills of Hebron is
experimental, complex, and paradoxical, both epic narrative of the nation and critique of the
extant vision of the nation. Moving beyond a celebratory approach, Wynter is concerned with
exploring how newly independent Jamaica could become a viable, cohesive, and progressive
society. Through her depiction of the Revivalist counter-community of Hebron, she examines
the challenges the new nation will face and queries how a society responsive to the needs of
all of the citizenry can be created.
In The National Longing for Form, Timothy Brennan observes that historically a direct
link has existed between the novel and the nation, for nations are imaginary constructs that
depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature
plays a decisive role. ... the rise of European nationalism coincides especially with one form of
literaturethe novel. However, Brennan continues, since the Second World War, the fictional
3. Ibid., 138.
4. In the above-referenced interview, Scott summarizes Wynters engagement with the question of gender as not so
much a strategic question of the subordinate place of the concept of gender but that race has a fundamental priority
because of the place of race in the epistemic break that you point to. ... there is a foundational epistemological
priority of race vis--vis gender. To this statement Wynter replies: Exactly. Ibid., 183.