Bearing Witness: Memory, Trauma and Recovery in Francophone Caribbean Literature

Simone A. James Alexander (Seton Hall University)

Recent studies on memory and trauma offer revealing ways of thinking about the representability of inaccessible events. Even so, Judith Herman reminds us that the study of psychological trauma not only necessitates bearing witness to horrible events, but it also has a “curious history of episodic amnesia” (7). This amnesic expectation or erasure is poignantly articulated by Paul Gilroy. He writes: “Slavery is the site of black victimage and thus of tradition’s intended erasure. When the emphasis shifts towards the elements of invariant tradition that heroically survive slavery, any desire to remember slavery itself becomes something of an obstacle. It seems as if the complexity of slavery and its location within modernity has to be actively forgotten if a clear orientation to tradition and thus to the present circumstances of blacks is to be acquired” (189). Caribbean women novelists, Edwidge Danticat, Maryse Condé and Marie-Celie Agnant’s unrelenting engagement with slavery (and forms of enslavement) not only emphasizes the heroic shift and resistance--bearing witness--to slavery, but it also interrogates the notion of slavery and modernity being at odds. The protagonists of the novels (Breath, Eyes, Memory, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and The Book of Emma) are inflicted by the “hunger to tell,” to bear witness, an act that demands action, engagement, and remembering. Their respective registering of women’s traumatic (slave) experiences—by means of abortions, suicides, poisonings, marronage and murder through which they manifested their rebellion against slavery--signals the desire to return to slavery, albeit discursively, to restage a confrontation and acknowledgement of this horrible past. The paper establishes how memory, both personal and collective, aids in the reconstruction and recuperation of the female self, and of this ruptured and turbulent past.

Simone A. James Alexander - Seton Hall University

Simone A. James Alexander is Chair and Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Seton Hall University, NJ, where she teaches courses in Russian, Caribbean, African, and African American Literature. She is the author of Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (University of Missouri Press, 2001); she has also authored “Walking on Thin Ice: The Il/legitimacy of Race and Racial Issues in the Classroom” (SUNY 2003), and “Caribbean Women Writers and Activism: Amy Jacques Garvey, Claudia Jones, and Audre Lorde,” which appeared in Sparks of Resistance, Flames of Change: Black Communities and Activism. Her articles have appeared in the journals African Literature Association Bulletin, Langston Hughes Colloquy, Middle Atlantic Writers Association Review, Revista Interamericana. Forthcoming are articles in Black Praxis and African American Review and two book chapters. She has presented her research at numerous national and international conferences and was an invited speaker at various universities, including NYU, Columbia, and Wittenberg University. Her current manuscript is titled Migrating Bodies: Women Writers Narrating Diasporic Subjects.