Cultural Appropriation
Windward Heights is a novel inspired by Wuthering Heights which relocates Bronte’s story from the chilly Moors of England to the humid islands of Caribbean. Were things to be reversed and a story about black characters written by a black author reimagined by a white author in England featuring white characters, it is inconceivable that there not be an expression of outrage somewhere by somebody over the issue of cultural appropriation. The inescapable fact is that the term would be justified either way, but the outrage not so much. What Windward Heights subtly reveals is a much larger theme applicable to the very act of writing fiction in general: some stories—if not most—cannot be culturally locked down. Bronte’s tragic romance inspired a song by white British singer Kate Bush as well as this novel and neither does harm to the original story.
The Minority Experience
Bronte’s Wuthering Heights has long been a permanent member of the literary canon, unlikely to be usurped from its position any time soon. Alongside it within the canon are stories comprised overwhelmingly of the white experience in western culture. Those books that do reveal the minority experience usually are told through the perspective of the relationship of blacks to whites: they are about slavery. What Windward Heights successful proves is that here nothing inherently “white” about the story that Bronte tells. The relocation to a black milieu neither a challenge to the ideological substructure of Wuthering Heights nor an attempt to impose an outsider perspective upon white society. It exists entirely within the black experience of its setting as a story living both outside its inspiration as well as inside it.
Forces of Social Division
The obstruction to true love charting its natural course in Bronte’s original story is economic inequality. Economics is centered as the driving force of social relations in the England of the early 1800’s. Racism transplants that force in this rewrite with the added complication that it is “black on black” racism. Ultimately, the text proposes that it is not the forces of division which really matter, but the reluctance to fight against the conventions of tradition and the status quo. Both “Heights” are revelations of the ways in which external forces of conformity profoundly impact individuals to create a self-sustained systemic replication which feeds from one generation to the next.
