Kei Miller’s, The Last Warner Woman, was published in the year 2012 in Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota. The story begins in a leper colony in Jamaica in 1914. However, the story continues in England. In this novel, the Warner Women – Adamine Bustamante – tries to tell her story at the same time when Mr. Writer Man is trying to document her tale. Throughout the book, both narrators focus on the life journey of the Jamaican woman who strives to warn others as she discovers that she had the gift of foretelling tragic events. The novel captures how the Western world and the Jamaican one have two different ways of looking at and understanding the world around us.
The Last Worner Women is a postmodern novel since there are several themes and techniques presented in the novel that characterize it as a postmodern work. Metafiction, for instance, is used by making the fictionality of the novel ostensible to its reader. Adamine who is the protagonist of the story and a second narrator calls into question the fictionality of the story by questioning the way the story is told by Mr. Writer Man and how this might carry a distortion of facts, which makes it a unique story told in a unique way. Questioning the reliability of the narrator, which is this case reciprocal since we cannot trust Adamine’s narrations as well, also adds to the postmodern characterization of the novel.
According to Mr. Writer Man, Pearline Portious was seventeen years old in 1941 which means she was born in 1924, and Mother Lazarus was over 85 when Mr. Dennis was 65 in 1941. He also mentioned that in 1941 Mother Lazurus had not slept for eighty years after her shock which happened when she was twelve. He also confirms that on March 18, 1942 Ada was born. According to Ada, Mother Lazarus died after 15 years of her birth year, that is to say, she died in 1957 at the age of 105, which means that her birth year was 1852. Adamin became a woman when Mother Lazarus died at her fifteenth birthday in 1957. One simple conclusion we can have after that is that even though both narrators are speaking from more or less a similar timestamp, Adamine wants to tell her own story differently from how Mr. Writer Man is stating it, who she is accusing of meandering her words for his own book. Yet, it is never one person who owns a story, or who has the right to tell it.
There is one important question that keeps repeating itself since the very beginning of the story. It is about the relationship between the writer man and the main character of the novel, Ada. The first chapter does intentionally keep the relationship very ambiguous, and this actually keeps the reader wondering about when, where, and how they met and also why is the writer man writing about her in particular. Her accusations towards his way of telling the story also raise suspicion and pose the question of who has the truth and how much important that is.