Irline François (Goucher College, Maryland)
Panel with: Marie Hélène Laforest, Johana X. K. Garvey, Brinda J. Mehta, H. Adlai Murdoch
The traumatized […] carry an impossible history with them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.” (Caruth, 231). Perhaps, more than their Caribbean counterparts, Haiti and the Dominican Republic have suffered (and continue to suffer) the anxieties and traumas of the post-colony, at a harrowing pitch hence the repetitive and disordering forces of violation, rupture, dislocation and dis-placement. Both Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz’s chart and illustrate “being Caribbean” in their works, the devastating consequences of Hispaniola’s twin national histories, US imperialist domination and the ensuing trauma wrought on the lives of their characters in The Dew Breaker, Brother, I’m dying and the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Even after a generation or more, families can remain suspended between two places, two languages (or three, in the case of Haiti) and the claims of two discordant histories continue to haunt generations of Haitians and Dominicans in ex-isle. This “haunting”, I argue, produces a re-memory scored through with stories, tales and memories that struggle to find a narrative that would allow characters to be passed on without the repetition of trauma passed from generation to generation. Danticat and Diaz’ narratives are to be read as moving and powerful new Diasporic histories of migration that touches on a number of themes: filial relationships, love, history, circular migration, re-memory underpinned by a sense of danger, of lives disrupted by horror by their nations’ history, of women and men whose tremendous agonies fill every blank in their lives, chasing fragments of themselves, long lost to others. Their brilliantly crafted stories trace the trajectory for their characters of a psychological and historical landscape that emanates from political terror, characters haunted by their fractured families, broken bodies and dashed hopes, palpable ghosts, felt presences in their lives. Both authors also explore the limits of a new exogenous consciousness in their roles as cultural mediators. Concurrently, they echo profound feelings of estrangement and alienation within one’s adopted culture and a nagging sense of homelessness and dispossession.
