The Trauma of History in Evelyne Trouillot’s Rosalie l’infame and Maryse Conde’s La migration des coeurs.

Brinda J Mehta (Mills College Oakland CA)

Trauma and memory constitute defining tropes in Caribbean women’s literature as a result of the violence of history and the brutality of diasporic wounds. Both Evelyne Trouillot and Maryse Conde resurrect the horror of African slavery and East Indian indenture through violated characters and their traumatic experiences to demonstrate how trauma becomes a complex site of abjection and resistance as the human will struggles to survive amid adversity, dehumanization, and death. I raise the following questions in this paper: How is trauma inscribed on the body as a “corporeal” text reflecting a tortured history of slavery and indenture? How does the body chart a graphic cartography of pain through the physical markings of torture imposed on the enslaved in Trouillot’s novel and the psychological symptoms of alienation and non-representation experienced by Conde’s mixed race Indian-African or dougla protagonist Razye? Both Trouillot and Conde script the language of trauma in their respective work to uncover history’s hidden traces. In their work, diaspora writing becomes a commemorative act to remember the horror of slavery, indenture and other diasporic passages. Trouillot’s novel Rosalie l’infâme frames the original diasporic configuration of the New World colony of Saint-Domingue (colonial Haiti) in terms of slavery’s historical wounds. On the other hand, in Conde’s 20^th century reworking of Bronte’s classic Wuthering Heights, the character Razye highlights the ambiguous positionality of dougla men to demonstrate how these characters are born into a traumatic exilic condition. This condition reduces them to stereotypes of bestiality and monstrosity when they resist categorization in reductive colonial paradigms of Caribbean identity. The dougla further complicates Caribbean identity through his ‘ominous’ sexuality and the insertion of Indian-ness in the colonial power play to disrupt traditional framings of the Caribbean in a simplistic black-white binary.