Greg Mullins (Evergreen State College)
Key texts of contemporary fiction from disparate Caribbean diasporas coalesce around trauma and the recollection of trauma. The gravity of memories of political violence and atrocity creates a center of gravity that organizes writing from places as diverse as Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba, and Haiti. This paper considers Thomas Glave, The Torturer’s Wife; Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker; Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies; Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not Here; and Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls.
My analysis focuses on the conditions of modernity that render violence and atrocity a central feature of political life. As Agamben argues, “our age is nothing but the implacable and methodical attempt… to eliminate radically the people that is excluded” from the body politic. In this context, I make reference also to a new phenomenon in “Caribbean writing” that confounds our expectations of how and why literature might emerge from the islands: poems written by 17 prisoners subjected to “enhanced interrogation” while detained by the United States at Guantánamo Bay. These poems, both rooted and rootless, written in the Caribbean but not of the Caribbean, provoke a disconcerting resonance with the images of violence and atrocity imagined and remembered by Caribbean diasporic authors.
Tracing patterns through this group of texts, the paper focuses on what I characterize as Thomas Glave’s reply to Agamben’s analysis. Glave offers a meditation on the capacity of desire not to redress violence but to reorganize its effects. The frequency with which memories of trauma appear in recent Caribbean fiction is, in this reading, not so much a sign of the vulnerability of particular bodies as it is a critique of the structures that underwrite political violence.
