Danticat, Edwidge 1969–
Edwidge Danticat 1969-
Haitian-born American novelist, essayist, editor, short story writer, and children's book author.
INTRODUCTION
Danticat has emerged as one of the most important Caribbean-American authors in contemporary literature. Her novels and short fiction explore Haiti's violent and troubled past as well as her own ambivalent experience as a Haitian exile living in Brooklyn. Critics have praised her lyrical language, skillful storytelling, and sharp insights into the issues faced by Haitians in their homeland and in the United States.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Danticat was born in 1969 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She was very young when her parents emigrated to New York City, leaving her in Haiti to be raised by surrogate parents. At that time, Haiti was ruled by President "Baby Doc" Duvalier and the ruthless Tonton Macoutes, who tortured and killed many Haitians. Danticat joined her parents in Brooklyn in 1981, but had a difficult time adjusting to her new home—she was lonely and felt dislocated, and in response, she began to write fiction and drama set in her homeland of Haiti. As a young woman, Danticat attended Barnard College, earning a degree in French. After graduation from Barnard, she pursued graduate studies at Brown University, eventually earning an M.F.A. degree. During her years at Brown, she also wrote two plays that were produced at the Brown University New Plays Festival. Her master's thesis later evolved into her novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, which was published in 1994. A year later, her first collection of short stories, Krik? Krak! was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award. In 1998 her second novel, The Farming of Bones, received the American Book Award and the Pushcart Prize for short fiction. She was awarded a Story Prize for her short story collection The Dew Breaker (2004). That same year Danticat received a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her stories have been published in the New Yorker, Callaloo, and other periodicals. Danticat lives in Miami.
MAJOR WORKS OF SHORT FICTION
Breath, Eyes, Memory chronicles the story of Sophie Caco, who travels from Haiti to New York to be reunited with her mother, Martine. Alienated from the only home she has ever known, Sophie struggles to deal with her mother's abusive behavior and her own sense of identity. She eventually marries, has a child, and returns to Haiti to confront her family's past. Danticat's next novel, The Farming of Bones, takes an historical event as its basis: the 1937 slaughter of thousands of Haitian sugar cane cutters ordered by Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo. Danticat tells the story through the character of Amabelle Desir, who as a young girl witnesses her parents' drowning while trying to cross the river back into Haiti. She is rescued by Don Ignacio, who takes her into his house, where she lives as the companion and servant to Ignacio's daughter, Valencia. Years later, the Dominican government began a campaign to massacre any Haitians or citizens of mixed blood. No longer safe in Valencia's home, Amabelle is forced to undertake a dangerous journey back to Haiti, along with thousands of other Haitians.
In After the Dance: A Walk through the Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (2002), Danticat describes the various cultural and historic influences on Carnival and offers insight into the deep and diverse roots of Haitian culture represented in the colorful celebration. Danticat has also written two novels for young adults, Behind the Mountains (2002) and Anacaona, Golden Flower (2005).
In her short story collections Krik? Krak! and The Dew Breaker, Danticat explores the challenges of the immigrant experience as well as the reality of Haitian life, focusing on the courage and fortitude of Haitian women struggling to express themselves within a patriarchal culture. Her first collection, Krik? Krak! is comprised of nine stories, many of them written during her college years. The volume's title is taken from a Haitian storytelling ritual: when a storyteller asks "Krik?," the audience enthusiastically responds "Krak!" to signal their readiness for a story. The tales are not only deeply personal but touch on Haiti's troubled and violent past. Assimilation is a major theme in several of the stories, as Danticat's immigrant characters, haunted by their past, struggle to find a place in their new surroundings. Her next collection, The Dew Breaker, has been variously described as short fiction or as a novel. The stories center on an enigmatic man known as the Dew Breaker, who was a torturer and jailor in Haiti for the dictator Papa Doc Duvalier many years ago and now works as a barber in Brooklyn. The pieces are told from the perspective of the man's wife and daughter, other immigrants, and survivors who think they recognize him.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Danticat is considered a talented and insightful Haitian-American author. Critics have commended her complex characters and her perceptive observations of the diasporic experience as well as the political, socioeconomic, and cultural realities of life in Haiti and the United States. Although some critics have found her fiction uneven, most reviewers have praised her lyrical language and use of imagery culled from Haitian folkloric traditions. In stylistic analyses of her work, commentators have examined how the links between stories, characters, and events—through the repetition of names, cultural experiences, and historical events—function to create a richly textured narrative. They have also lauded the way Danticat reconstitutes the experiences of her Haitian ancestors as well as Caribbean folklore to revisit events in Haitian history. Throughout her career, she has mined a rich personal and cultural history to produce works that critics value for their artistry as well as for the light they shed on the labyrinthine issues faced by Haitians.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
The Creation of Adam (play) 1992
Dreams Like Me (play) 1993
Breath, Eyes, Memory (novel) 1994
Krik? Krak! (short stories) 1995
Children of the Sea (play) 1997
The Farming of Bones (novel) 1998
After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (nonfiction) 2002
Behind the Mountains (novel) 2002
The Dew Breaker (short stories) 2004
Anacaona, Golden Flower: Haiti, 1490 (juvenilia) 2005
CRITICISM
Eileen Burchell (essay date 2003)
SOURCE: Burchell, Eileen. "As My Mother's Daughter: Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat (1994)." In Women in Literature: Reading through the Lens of Gender, edited by Jerilyn Fisher and Ellen S. Silber, pp. 60-2. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003.
[In the following essay, Burchell elucidates the central themes of Breath, Eyes, Memory.]
This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.
This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.
Patrick Samway (essay date winter 2003-04)
SOURCE: Samway, Patrick. "A Homeward Journey: Edwidge Danticat's Fictional Landscapes, Mindscapes, Genescapes, and Signscapes in Breath, Eyes, Memory." Mississippi Quarterly 57, no. 1 (winter 2003-04): 75-83.
[In the following essay, Samway asserts that in Breath, Eyes, Memory Danticat creates a complex pattern of sign-images that reveals both the Haitian feminine psyche and Danticat's immigrant experiences.]
A number of summers ago, while acting as the summer replacement pastor of Sen Elèn, the Catholic parish in Carice, Haiti, a town hidden in the mountains about an hour's drive from Ouanaminthe in the country's northeast sector, I read the series of small booklets used in all the schools to teach the history of Haitian literature. In a country where paper is scarce, these booklets preserve Haiti's valuable literary heritage, including snippets of works in French and Creole, as well as a mixture of the two languages—now professionally anthologized by Jean-Claude Bajeux in his bilingual Mosochwazi Pawòl Ki Ekri an Kreyòl Ayisyen.1 As I witnessed on numerous occasions, Haitian students memorize some pertinent facts concerning an author's biography in order to be able to cite the author's major literary work, having usually read at most a page or two of it. As Bajeux notes, "Nou ta bezwen yon bon diksyonè lang kreyòl la, pou l ta di nou ki kote tout pawòl kreyòl la yo sòti. Nou ta bezwen tou yo ranmase nan tout peyi a tout kont k ap sikile, ki nan memwa yon pakèt moun men ki poko mete sou papye" (p. iii).2 In a country where approximately ninety percent of the population speak and comprehend only Creole, it is not surprising that contemporary Haitian writers, whether they write in Creole, as does Maude Heurtelou, or in French, as do Gary Victor and Margaret Papillon, look to their indigenous linguistic and cultural roots, unlike many of their predecessors who imitated, decade after decade, French belles lettres. Curiously, American fiction and nonfiction writers, from George Washington Cable (The Creoles of Louisiana [1884]) to James Weldon Johnson in his essays on Haiti in The Nation (1920)3 to William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom! [1936]) to Zora Neal Hurston (Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica [1938]) to Madison Smartt Bell (All Souls' Rising [1995]), have looked to Haiti for source material. Somewhere in between lies Edwidge Danticat, a naturalized American citizen of Haitian descent who moved to Brooklyn at age twelve and who went on to earn degrees at both Hunter College (B.A.) and Brown University (M.F.A.).4
Though Danticat feels comfortable living in Brooklyn, as she once told me, Haiti is both her "country" and her "home."5 The simple, disarming plot of Breath, Eyes, Memory, three of whose protagonists travel between Brooklyn and Haiti, belies an intricate and, at times, backlooping depiction of the distaff side of the Caco family, a proper name that aptly refers to both a flamboyant red bird and Haitian revolutionary heroes. Since the protagonist, Sophie Caco, shares one essential fact with Danticat herself—both left Haiti at age twelve to travel to Brooklyn—the assumption is that the novel is a roman-à-clef. In a radically unprecedented way, Danticat addresses Sophie directly in the novel's "Afterword," acknowledging that Sophie's story is hers alone and should be read that way to emphasize the singularity of Sophie's experience, along with its own peculiarities, inconsistencies, and voice. At the same time, she implies an autobiographical kinship, something not uncharacteristic of first novels, if only from a retrospective point of view, when she states that both she and Sophie have been through the journey together.
Like Thoreau performing a phrenological analysis of Walden Pond, discovering that this small parcel of earth not only reflects but actually embodies the transcendental depths of the heavens above—suggestive in its own way of Wessex or Yoknapatawpha—so too Danticat's homeland contains all the essential elements that nurture life. Above all, through the confluence of apparently ordinary situations, like the rivulets feeding Walden Pond, which, in turn, resemble the veins of a leaf or the veins of a human hand, Danticat has created an intricate pattern of sign-images, some of which focus on birth, growth, testing, love, death, that at times bifurcate or trifurcate, leading to other sign-images—all of which emanate from personal sources but lead to unlimited possibilities and beyond that to more heartwrenching limited probabilities and so create a progressive type of semiotics concerning the open-endedness of language.
In Breath, Eyes, Memory, four generations interact with one another in both predictable and unpredictable ways; even if one or other female character is absent from a particular scene, the truth is otherwise. "Isn't it a miracle," Grandmother Ifé states while looking at her great-granddaughter Brigitte, "that we can visit with all our kin, simply by looking into this face" (p. 105). Her statement likewise recalls another significant one, when Sophie's Tante Atie instructs her as they visit a local cemetery: "Walk straight, you are in the presence of family" (p. 149). These ghostly ancestors have all returned to "Guinea," heaven, the spirit-world beyond, a locale accepted by Catholics and Voodooists alike, since neither tradition, in Danticat's spiritual economy, has precedence over the other. Erzulie, the Haitian goddess of love, and the Virgin Mary are but two incarnations of the same person.
Guinea is the place, Sophie states, "where all the women in my family hoped to eventually meet one another, at the very end of each of our journeys" (p. 174). Yet no two journeys to Guinea are the same. Sophie's therapist, a Santeria priestess, tells her she has a Madonna-image of her mother Martine—a not-so-accurate evaluation, as it turns out, since Martine commits suicide by stabbing her stomach seventeen times with an old rusty knife and killing her unwanted fetus, reminiscent of the time she tried to abort the developing Sophie in her womb. Martine is buried in a vibrant red, two-piece suit, which, in turn, recalls the bloodied warrior image embodied in her family name. Sophie returns to Haiti to attend her mother's funeral in Dame Marie, itself a maternal sign-name, the town we learn where she herself was born. "It was as if I had lived here all my life," she says (p. 229). Like the word Guinea, Grandmother Ifé's name points in a specific direction, back to a city and civilization in Nigeria, where black men and women were seized to be sold into slavery. Sophie's name is derived from the Greek, meaning wisdom. Atie's name points in two directions at once: toward the Greek word for folly or bewilderment (???) and the Haitian word for earth (atè), a word tangentially related to Sophie's married name, Woods, likewise carried by her husband and daughter. What should one make of the names of two women whose first names begin with "Man," except to say that the implied referential and evocative nature of these names, like all the others, must be held in suspension until the fullness of what they imply or suggest can gather, throughout the telling of the story, their appropriate weight and import.
These sign-images, when taken together, do not remain static but participate in, and are revelatory of, not only the totality of the Haitian feminine psyche—its loveliness, pain, endurance, dignity—which has been with Danticat since her earliest days in Haiti, as poignantly witnessed too in her moving "Foreword" to Beverly Bell's powerful accounts of the stories of survival and resistance of Haitian women in Walking on Fire (2001), but of the process of emotional, familial, social, historical, linguistic, and cultural transference as she evaluates the pang and tether of Haitian society from changing dynamics of her life in Brooklyn. Living in two worlds at once, one physically (the United States) and the other through mental imaging and recall (Haiti), which reverse themselves when she travels to Haiti, Danticat's natural artistic impulse is to look to private and public Haitian sources, as found particularly in folklore, proverbs, and the ordinary events of everyday life, and translate these into English both to herself as writer and to her English-reading audience. Aware that the Haitian communal psyche has been formed by myriad factors, including an endless line of dictators and the concomitant suppression of the populace; the presence of the American Marines during approximately fifteen years of U.S. occupation; relentless struggles with fellow islanders, the Dominicans; subjugation by both the Spanish and French, and the total annihilation of the original stock of Haitians, often referred to as Arawaks, the task of translating complicated simultaneously concurrent Haitian relationships in a manner reflecting the simple stories that Haitians habitually tell one another in Creole demands, if it is to have international credence, an imagination rooted in the written literature of disparate nationalities and the specific oral tradition of a country Danticat has only sporadically visited since her earliest teens. Could Danticat, one might well ask, ever separate mal du pays (homesickness) from mal du pays (evils suffered by her homeland), or are they inextricably linked forever within her heart?
Although, from the perspective of some in the community, Martine is considered the scarlet whore who cannot endure the trauma of having another child ("Mwin pa kapab enkò" [p. 224], she says to the ambulance people), even if this one is fathered by her lover, Marc, and not, like Sophie's father, a rapist. Yet Sophie's initial, poetic memory of her mother suggests—much in the spirit of Vardaman Bundren in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying that "My mother is a fish"6—a different sort of woman, one both fragile and strong, though not in the way she could have ever envisioned as a child:
My mother is a daffodil,
Limber and strong as one.
My mother is a daffodil,
But in the wind, iron strong.
(p. 24)
Martine's totally nihilistic unwillingness to begin again with the draining responsibilities of motherhood comments upon and stands in stark contrast to Sophie's loving desire to bring her daughter Brigitte into the welcoming arms of the Haitian community of Croix-des-Rosets and Dame Marie, where, even if she cannot now comprehend the interconnected dynamics enveloping her, she will nevertheless have stories of her own to tell that originate from significant, familial, female Haitian sources. Brigitte will undoubtedly be told, at some point in her life, as Sophie had learned by age twelve, of Martine's rape and the way some women react in a society where they have too long been terrorized by the Tonton Macoutes, though others, like Tante Atie, carefully and calmly plan their final journeys. Sophie, like her mother, went through a period of hating her body, ashamed to show it to anyone, including her husband. As she says, "men were as mysterious to me as white people," though there is every indication that she loves her musician-husband (p. 67). Brigitte, likewise, had difficulty saying "Daddy," but that too passed.
Tante Atie's insistence that the young Father Lavalas preside at her funeral not so subtly enfolds a political dimension into the novel, given that the Reverend Jean-Bertrand Aristide founded Haiti's dominant political party, Lavalas. More than any other Haitian at the time of the composition of this novel, Aristide, twice President of Haiti, had the power to evoke aspirations of political, economic, and spiritual liberation among his people. Sophie's own quest for freedom began with her elopement with Joseph and the rupture of her maidenhead with a pestle, similar to, as she says, "the breaking of manacles, an act of freedom" (p. 130). The essential question reverberating among the Haitian women in the novel, "Ou libéré?" ("Are you free?"), impels the novel steadily forward (p. 233). All the sign-images spring from and return to this fundamental human desire for freedom. A young Haitian woman, even today, as portrayed in this novel, is not given freedom as an outright gift but must pursue it, especially by undergoing a rite of initiation, of being tested digitally in the vagina, so that each elder in the family—and, by extension, the entire community—can know whether their younger sisters have lived up to the expectations, essential in their minds, of a proper and fitting marriage, reflective no doubt of their communal desire to see children born of parents whose love bond has been accepted by society, itself a sign that one can achieve more and more freedom to the degree that one is not psychologically handicapped or socially stigmatized from birth. Sophie wells knows about stigmas: HBO, Haitian Body Odor, is the code among American teenagers, particularly those in Brooklyn, for HIV.
Sophie's struggle to answer "Ou libéré?" partially involves leaving the comfort of Providence, Rhode Island, like Ifé another sign-name, to rediscover her home, Haiti. (In Krik? Krak!, home is Ville Rose, derived from Danticat's mother's first name and based on her native town of Léogane. Sophie, herself, believes she "was born out of the petals of roses" [p. 47].) Sophie repeats in Breath, Eyes, Memory African and Haitian Voodoo tales, sayings, and proverbs, the latter often impenetrable to the mind of a blan (that is, a white person or tourist), but which express the accumulated and accepted wisdom of Haitian society. They allow her access to the mysteries only one's heart can hear and one's spirit can guess. Much like Tante Atie found new freedom in learning to read, so too Sophie answers "Ou libéré?" by listening to the stories of the past and incorporating them into her own life, knowing that she will then pass them on to her daughter. Martine, it should be noted, communicated to her mother by use of cassettes, believing as a representative of her generation more in the reliability of the spoken word than that of the written one. Above all Sophie allows what is to be, knowing that while stories have shapes and forms their contents cannot be manipulated or predetermined, as exemplified in Martine's statement, "We come from a place … where in one instant, you can lose your father and all your other dreams" (p. 165). One particular proverb sums it up for Sophie: "Paròl gen pié zèl" ("Words give your feet wings" [p. 234]).
Sophie has no agenda that entails joining a political movement or fighting for a cause, which is not to say she lacks a rebellious streak. Rather, like the desperate boatpeople, she knows that freedom first of all demands survival and secondly the burning desire to repeat and fabricate life-sustaining stories. Creative narratology provides the means for a type of understanding that leads to other types of asymptotical awareness as one generation seeks to strengthen the next. As Myriam Chancy correctly states about this novel, "The language of the ancestors, which grows increasingly difficult to access, is the key to each woman's freedom."7 The survival of words through translation into an acceptable postcolonial idiom insures the survival of the race. Danticat's genius is that she has gone beyond the borders of Haiti, to the United States, where stories can be preserved on paper, published, and disseminated to a vast audience, an impossible task in a desolate country where a paper industry is just about non-existent since Haiti's mountains are almost denuded of trees. In effect, Danticat had done in her own way what Jean-Claude Bajeux sees as essential to Haiti's intellectual growth as a country: "Nou ta bezwen tou yo ranmase nan tout peyi a tout kont k ap sikile." More than any other writer I can think of, Danticat has advanced the feminist movement, at least from a Haitian perspective, not only by writing a novel that focuses on the transmission of traditional stories in a contemporary setting but by actually having them published by Random House in New York and thus made available globally, especially as Breath, Eyes, Memory has been translated into French and soon will be into Creole. In short, this novel has revolutionized Haitian literature by giving a new sense of empowerment to the feminist literary liberation movement there. Rather than being displaced, Danticat/Sophie live in two places at once, the byplay of which, like systole and diastole, feeds the creative imagination. Had Danticat written her novel in French, her major field of studies at Hunter College, she would have lost something of the immediacy and drama afforded only by one's own native language. And while the translation of a French text into English might have made the experience of reading this novel less authoritatively congenial, it might have assisted in its translation into Creole. As will happen, in any case, the fact that the Creole version will be based on both the original En- glish and the French translation provides linguistic safeguards that potentially allow suitable and approximate renderings of the original.
Danticat's novel provides transnational accessibility because of its publication in English and French; in the near future, educated Haitians—men and women—will be able to read the dramatic beauty of the story in Creole. And because of the American literary awards she has received (and undoubtedly will continue to receive), Danticat's publishers are willing to spend the necessary funds to promote her work, something that would be highly unlikely, nay impossible, if the novel had been written originally in Creole, which Danticat might not have been able to do in the first place, due in large measure to her lack of experience of writing in Creole, and less so if it had been written in French and published in France, precisely because of the novel's American-Haitian storyline. The publishing history of this novel and the markets to which it will be distributed—first to the Anglophone world, then to the Francophone world, and lastly to the Creoleophone world—facilitates a dramatic international crescendo of the question "Ou libéré?" Through transference and translation, Danticat has exported her story, and those who sympathize with Sophie's predicaments will be led back to her Haitian sisters and brothers who, because of the novel's anticipated translation into Creole, can evaluate its literary authenticity and build in their own ways on its heartfelt truths.
By reshaping the categories of feminism, power, liberation, resistance, culture, marriage, and identity, Danticat mediates the global in and through the local and vice versa, not by dramatizing paradigms but by locating unfolding stories between two specific cultures and by building up imaginative national alliances of transnational verisimilitude between them. The two-and-a-half-hour flight between JFK and l'Aéroport Maïs Gaté does not break down borders but facilitates the transport of one cultural heritage to another locale. Breath, Eyes, Memory, in effect, occurs in the inter-stices of two societies, their back-and-forth byplay; this accounts for the newness of what Danticat has discovered. She does not draw lines or delineate differences so much as she melds the essential dimensions of her specifically cultured-based artistic talents. In doing so, she has found a new land within herself that she can explore ("colonize" would not be the fitting word here), a land not unsimilar to what African Americans or Chinese Americans or Pakistani Americans have located.
To return to a Thoreauvian image, Danticat is not so much a sojourner—someone, as the French word séjourner implies—who can cover a particular area in one day—but a saunterer (from the French sainte terre)—someone who makes a pilgrimage from a particular country to the Holy Land, la sainte terre d'Haiti. Her repeated visits to this sacred place will not only bring to the surface what has been there for centuries but will prompt her to continue to create imaginative works of art, potentially yielding a plethora of cognate literary ventures.
Notes
1. Jean-Claude Bajeux, ed., Mosochwazi Pawòl Ki Ekri an Kreyòl Ayisyen: Anthologie de la Littérature Créole Haïtienne (Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Editions Antilia, 1999).
2. "We would need a good Creole dictionary that would indicate the origin of Creole words. We would likewise need to have a collection of [Haitian] stories that have circulated in the country. There are groups of people who remember these stories, but they have not yet written them out" (my translation).
3. "Self-Determining Haiti," Nation, 111 (August 28, 1920); "What the United States Has Accomplished," Nation, 111 (September 4, 1920); "Government of, by, and for the National City Bank," Nation, 111 (September 11, 1920); "The Haitian People," Nation, 111 (September 25, 1920).
4. More than any other works of fiction, Edwidge Danticat's collection of stories and two novels, Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Soho Press, 1994), Krik? Krak! (New York: Soho Press, 1995), and The Farming of Bones (New York: Soho Press, 1998), plus her first novel for young readers, Behind the Mountains (New York: Orchard Books, 2002), have brought, for the first time in history, fiction written by an indigenous Haitian into popular international prominence. In addition, an anthology she has edited, The Butterfly's Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (New York: Soho Press, 2001), and her lyrical travelogue-memoir entitled After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel (New York: Crown Publishers, 2002) allow us to look through both ends of the Haitian literary telescope: first, giving a larger picture of the origins of Haitian literature and how it has translated itself into a more cosmopolitan setting, and second, describing the life of a particular city as Danticat relates its carnivalesque landscape and mindscape. For her efforts, she has received a number of notable honors, from being an American Book Award finalist (1995) to receiving the Pushcart Short Story Prize (1995).
5. Interview, September 27, 2002. See also Danticat's interview with Rachel Holmes, "Legacy to Life" <http://www.haitiglobalvillage.com/sd-marassa1-cd/d-conversations.htm>.
6. For an interpretation of this Faulkner phrase see my essay "Addie's Continued Presence in As I Lay Dying," in Southern Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Jefferson Humphries (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 284-299.
7. Myriam J. A. Chancy, Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p 121.
Amy Novak (essay date winter 2006)
SOURCE: Novak, Amy. "‘A Marred Testament’: Cultural Trauma and Narrative in Danticat's The Farming of Bones." Arizona Quarterly 62, no. 4 (winter 2006): 93-120.
[In the following essay, Novak examines Danticat's depiction of cultural trauma in The Farming of Bones, asserting that she attempts "to translate the silences of trauma through the shifting fragmentary voice of memory."]
It is perhaps the great discomfort of those trying to silence the world to discover that we have voices sealed inside our heads, voices that with each passing day, grow even louder than the clamor of the world outside.
The slaughter is the only thing that is mine enough to pass on. All I want to do is find a place to lay it down now and again, a safe nest where it will neither be scattered by the winds, nor remain forever buried beneath the sod.
—Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones
Edwidge Danticat's 1998 novel, The Farming of Bones, confronts the paradoxical process of remembering and forgetting in the narration of individual and cultural trauma. The story tells of a young Haitian woman, Amabelle, living and working in the Dominican Republic at the time of the 1937 massacre of Haitian laborers known as El Corte. Barely escaping across the border into Haiti, Amabelle is beaten, separated from her fiancé, whom she never hears from again, and witness to the butcher of numerous other Haitians attempting to flee across the Massacre River. In the aftermath of the killing, this trauma is repeated at the symbolic level as its history goes mostly unrecorded by national and international leaders who see the Haitians as a faceless, ignorant labor force, not as subjects of history. In the act of this symbolic or cultural trauma, the story is repressed and silenced. And yet, as Amabelle indicates in the passage cited above, silence should not be equated with the lack or nonexistence of an event, for inside silence voices clamor to be heard; repression is not forgetting.
Narrating the experience of trauma so that it "will neither be scattered by the winds, nor remain forever buried beneath the sod," Danticat's novel probes the struggle to work through the past on both individual and national levels (266). However, as Barbara Chester, a psychiatrist experienced in treating victims of political torture, points out, these two different acts of working through, the personal and the public, are at times in conflict: "The need to remember, name, validate, grieve, and receive compensation for unjust suffering, for example, is opposed to the societal need to forget and put an end to both the past terror of repression and the future threat of renewed military takeover, should prosecution of war crimes occur" (241). While Amabelle's story centers around her personal struggle for survival in the aftermath of slaughter, the novel as a whole engages questions of how to construct larger cultural narratives of historical violence: How does the present listen to marginal voices in writing histories of national trauma? How do the silenced testify to trauma? With what voice and to whom?
Recounting the story of this genocidal execution, The Farming of Bones is situated at the intersection between recent novels of historical trauma and a renewed interest in trauma theory. Examining issues that confront contemporary societies as they grapple with how to narrate proliferating histories of ethnic prejudice and international slaughter, such novels illuminate the process of trauma as well as examine the ability of literature to represent or know trauma.1 The contemporary awareness of trauma, evident in this literature and in the growing field of trauma studies, comes from what Shoshana Felman identifies as a "crisis in witnessing": "our era [is] an age of testimony, an age in which witnessing itself has undergone a major trauma" (206).2 Such a characterization underscores how in the act of writing about catastrophic history a second trauma, a symbolic one, occurs. And this "collapse of witnessing" arises, so Felman argues, because of the witness's failure or inability to testify to and understand the traumatic event. The effort to narrate the supposed "unrepresentability" of trauma fragments and contorts the narrative movement in contemporary novels of historical trauma, such as in Danticat's The Farming of Bones (or Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues, Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces or Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, to name a few). According to Cathy Caruth, a leading scholar in the field of trauma theory, "trauma opens up and challenges us to a new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely, of impossibility" (Trauma 10). The necessarily experimental structures of these novels ask the reader to think about what it would mean for a cultural narrative to witness to the impossibility of trauma.
With its attempt to voice undocumented stories and to redress injustice by communicating on a personal level to its listener or reader, testimony and testimonial literature remain a powerful narrative form; however, Amabelle's narrative and Danticat's novel as a whole continue to be troubled by the problem of address for no one hears her story. So while Danticat conceives of her work as an act of memory, as an attempt to remember a forgotten history (Shea 21), The Farming of Bones undertakes this endeavor not by clarifying or rendering the past transparent, but instead by taking the more difficult route of attempting to translate the silences of trauma through the shifting, fragmentary voice of memory. In particular, both the story and narrative organization of The Farming of Bones suggest how closed, singular narrative structures might settle and pin down the past in ways that hide it. The novel unfolds through two narrative lines, a first-person account of the trauma and a collection of bold print fragments of memories or dreams, which weave together as point/counterpoint. Amabelle's first-person, linear testimony emphasizes the significance of testimony and witnessing, and yet the inclusion of the fragments, of what I call "spectral memory," disrupts her account, questioning this method of cultural historiography. Staging the contrast between voice and voicelessness, the ambiguity of the novel's narrative form urges readers to consider silence and to embrace the unsettling of what they might like to be authoritative. This essay investigates the place of narrative in the act of working through the past. Probing the novel's narrative structure, I argue that The Farming of Bones examines the past through what I call a spectral narrative economy that claims memory as a site of radical possibility. This narrative economy conceives of a model of historiography that embraces rather than denies the ambiguity and spectral nature of traumatic memory and demonstrates the necessity of doing so.
Recording Cultural Trauma
The massacre of Haitian immigrants recounted in The Farming of Bones occurs early in the thirty-one-year dictatorship of Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo. Trained and educated by US Marines during their occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916-1924, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina rose from the rank of second lieutenant to head of the army in less than a decade. After President Horacio Vásquez was overthrown in 1930, Trujillo ran unopposed (due to coercion of his rivals) and was elected president. As the new leader of the Dominican Republic, he set out to eradicate opposition and to consolidate totalitarian control over the nation through physical and psychological means.3 The self-named "Era of Trujillo, Benefactor of the Fatherland" (Roorda 95) inaugurated an age of military build-up meant to secure national independence, a renewed foreign image, and "the whitening of the population to make it increasingly distinguishable from neighboring Haiti" (Wiarda 110). Ernesto Sagás, scholar of political science and Latin American specialist, reports that Trujillo's national myth "concocted the hitherto loose and unorganized ideas of antihaitianismo into a full-fledged ideology that perceived Haitians as inferior beings and enemies of the Dominican nation" (45). This acute nationalism fueled xenophobia and racism already existing in the Dominican Republic, leaving the darker, Creole-speaking Haitians open to attack.
Ongoing economic and political crises in Haiti brought thousands of workers across the border into the Dominican Republic. Some remained for generations, marrying Dominicans and raising their families. The political tensions of this period though had their roots in centuries of conflict between the two nations and were confounded by the dissimilarity of the two cultures residing in close proximity to one another: the Dominicans a predominantly mestizo, Spanish speaking, Catholic population, and the Haitians a largely black, Creole-speaking, Voodoo practicing people governed by a light skinned, French-speaking upper class. Thus, Dominican dictator Trujillo's scapegoating of the Haitian workers tapped into longstanding racism and prejudice directed against the poverty stricken Haitians. On the night of October 2, 1937, at a social event in his honor in Dajabón, the President spoke of his desire to eliminate his nation of this foreign contaminant. In the ensuing week, the Dominican army rounded up and butchered 12,000-25,000 Haitians, including those living in the country for years, those born there, and even Dominicans whose dark skin mis-identified them as Haitians (Hicks 112). Thousands of others escaped to Haiti after having witnessed the murder of their family and friends.
In the months that followed response to the massacre was limited. Roorda reports that while the event did initially garner international attention in such journals as The Nation, The New Republic, Collier's, and even Life magazine, ultimately the event was dismissed (127-43). In the name of Franklin Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor policy" and maintaining peace in the Western Hemisphere, the United States, as well as Haiti, allowed the butcher of the Haitian laborers to elude censure: "In the case of the Haitian massacre, Good Neighbor diplomacy meant not protesting the destruction of what one Dominican diplomat labeled as the ‘miserable proletariat’ of dark-skinned ‘pariahs’" (Roorda 141). Ultimately, Trujillo offered Haiti financial remuneration, which president Vincent accepted, but refused to acknowledge the massacre (Roorda 128). Instead, Sagás reports, Trujillo created a national myth about the threat of Haitian contamination to the order and security of the Dominican Republic to justify the massacre and, finally, expunge it from the historical register: "No docu- mentation with direct references to the massacre—before, during, or after it—has been found in Dominican archives" (47). The narration of this trauma in official histories of the Dominican Republic did not include a confrontation with or working through of the past, but instead entailed a justification of the event in order to consolidate Trujillo's faction authority. And while at the national level the victor's history omitted all reference to the event, at the international level acknowledgement and remembering of the event was veiled due to political expediency and an inability to recognize as one's own trauma the trauma of the other. Thus, a cultural or collective working through of the past as a path out of or away from trauma was passed over, abbreviated, or lacked self-critical rigor. A narrative was created that supported political and cultural hegemony, rather than one that sought out the voice of the silenced. And with no one to listen, this act of working through even in Haiti was forestalled. The event slipped from history, unspoken by the governments on both sides of the Massacre River.
The Farming of Bones examines the narrative methods available to a culture to tell of and work through trauma. Throughout the novel, in references to and representations of history-making, the text probes the political significance of how governments, historians and authors structure and compile narratives. The novel shows how, even before the massacre, Trujillo begins to mobilize the tools of official history: "‘Tradition shows as a fatal fact,’ the Generalissimo continued, ‘that under the protection of rivers, the enemies of peace, who are also the enemies of work and prosperity, found an ambush in which they might do their work, keeping the nation in fear and menacing stability’" (97). In this instance, Trujillo responds to the Dominican Republic's economic crisis by imagining a traumatic event. Although no actual violence has occurred, Trujillo reacts as if the people of the nation have been threatened, and in response he constructs a history that shores up national identity by excluding foreign elements, whether they be people or alternative versions of the past. This narrative model is common to what is often called "official history," meaning the singular, authoritative, and thus non-contradictory, story dispersed through the dominant cultural mediums and institutions of a community or nation. Appealing to "tradition" and evoking an image of the "enemies" of "the nation" who are out to "ambush" the security of "the nation," this official history deploys an exclusionary logic that pits light-skinned, peaceful Dominican against darker-skinned, contaminating Haitian. The expulsion and massacre of the Haitians demonstrate that history constructed along these lines contributes to racism, hatred, and oppression as it is motivated by a hierarchical and dualistic structure that must be defended even at the cost of violence. It does not so much record history as it calls upon the inflammatory, romantic rhetoric of an imagined past to solidify the fractured identity and symbolic order of the nation. Such a historiography is unlikely to accommodate the silence of traumatic experience, seeking, as it does, to support hegemonic cultural identity and power by drawing upon the known rather than delving into and probing the unreadable.
Not only is the novel skeptical about the exclusionary logic of official history, but also the motivation of such a record is questioned. How possible is it for such narratives to recount the horrors of a massacre experienced by those already positioned as enemies of the nation or as disenfranchised citizens? Exploring the response of both Dominican and Haitian governments to the massacre, Danticat's novel illustrates that the blindness of "official history" is found on both sides of the border. When Amabelle returns to Haiti, she finds the leaders of her own country complicit in the silencing of events: "In all this, our so-called president says nothing, our Papa Vincent—our poet—he says nothing at all to this affront to the children of Dessalines, the children of Toussaint, the children of Henry; he shouts nothing across this river of our blood" (212). The traumatic memories of the survivors are at odds with the economic and political interests of ruling elites and thus silence is heard instead of a call for justice. And in the wake of the violence, when the Haitian government does offer a space for victims to tell their stories, the novel contests the purpose of such depositions. Amabelle asks Yves why the government is listening to stories and giving out money: "‘To erase bad feelings,’ he said, as if he were no longer linked to the slaughter" (231). Yves' dispassionate statement exposes a significant point: the witnessing of the victims' testimonies will "erase bad feelings"—not the pain of the suffering, but the guilt of governments. Reflecting upon the efforts of the late twentieth century to confront and deal with a different traumatic past, that of National Socialism, philosopher and cultural critic Theodor Adorno critiques efforts to work through the past merely to forget: "In this usage ‘working through the past’ does not mean seriously working upon the past, that is through a lucid consciousness breaking its power to fascinate. On the contrary, its intention is to close the books on the past and, if possible, even remove it from memory" (89). The motivation for listening is not justice but forgetting. Danticat's novel shows how both governments appear to acknowledge the past, not in order to understand it but to prevent challenges to the social and political status quo.
Additionally, official narratives cannot accommodate this traumatic experience because without written documents or papers the historical gaze sees only absence. When Amabelle states her desire to give her testimony, Yves warns, "I don't know if you'll be given the money…. The authorities might try to keep it all for themselves. They ask you to bring papers. They ask you to bring proof" (231). An epistemology that grounds history only according to proof and facts—verifiable documents—is evidenced here. Amabelle and other survivors instead bring their bodies and their memories. Such testaments remain historically unreadable within a framework of knowledge whose scope of signification remains limited. Hence, the national narrative of the massacre does not bring accountability or justice, but turns away from it. These responses to the massacre foreground problems faced when historicizing cultural trauma: When those who write the history are the victors, how can the history of the slaughtered be heard? How can a nation or a culture work through a past event that they choose to not recognize or wish to forget? How to prevent historicizing, in the sense of recording and remembering an event, from entailing an act of erasure or forgetting encouraged by forces in social power? How does working through the past not become forgetting?
The Farming of Bones reveals significant obstacles in remembering or recording national trauma that must be examined when constructing and reading such cultural accounts. Both Trujillo's and Vincent's responses to the massacre show that what gets recorded is historically motivated. As Barbara Zelizer sums up:
Unlike personal memory, whose authority fades with time, the authority of collective memories increases as time passes, taking on new complications, nuances, and interests. Collective memories allow for the fabrication, rearrangement, elaboration, and omission of details about the past, often pushing aside accuracy and authenticity so as to accommodate broader issues of identity formation, power and authority, and political affiliation.
(3)
Cultural trauma refers not only to an experiential crisis in the lives of some, if not all, of a nation or community, but also registers a disruption in the symbolic order. "Cultural trauma" becomes a metaphor for the damage or wounding to the complex system of representations and meanings that the society weaves around itself to record and understand the experience. The response to this breach in the collective fantasy that mediates the nation's identity and reality, then, is to garner the forces of cultural representation to position the event within a causal narrative that would redefine the community and restore its sense of agency.
Both Haitian and Dominican official accounts of the massacre illuminate how the narrative of cultural trauma, like the representation of any history, is not a transparent, objective record. Traumatic history foregrounds the way in which the real always eludes historicization. The politics of historical remembering are epitomized in a tourist guide's statement overheard by Amabelle: "‘Famous men never truly die,’ he added. ‘It is only those nameless and faceless who vanish like smoke into the early morning air’" (280). While the know world—its facts, figures, and evidence—are documented and remembered, history also performs a "vanishing" of those without names and faces. The official documents and records of Dominican and Haitian history become what Felman calls "anti-testimony" by performing "the extinction of the subject of the signature and … the objectification of the victim's voice" (276). These accounts mask the historical, subjective positioning of the historian and transform into a silent and invisible monument the very voice to which it supposedly witnesses.
The Materiality of Trauma
The difficulty in narrating historical traumas like the massacre of the Haitians grows out of the way such events break with frames of reference and as such cannot be situated easily within existing narrative structures. Current trauma theory, which draws heavily on nineteenth-and twentieth-century psychoanalytic theories, emphasizes trauma as a psychic wounding, an encounter of the mind with violence and the crisis of meaning. According to Caruth, trauma "brings us to the limits of our understanding" (Trauma 4). This characterization identifies trauma as a problem of signification, of knowledge, and thus a crisis or pathology of the psyche. In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth points out that although the Greek etymology of the English and German word trauma referred to a bodily wound, now "in its later usage, particularly in the medical and psychiatric literature, and most centrally in Freud's text, the term trauma is understood as a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind" (3). This equating of trauma with psychic wounding is evident in Freud's early definition of traumatic neurosis as "the effects produced on the organ of the mind by the breach in the shield against stimuli and by the problems that follow in its train" (Beyond 31). Trauma is registered through an apparent forgetting that occurs because the mind is unable to absorb the shock of the traumatic event. The subject does not experience the trauma at the moment it occurs, but only belatedly as the psyche re-experiences the event through flashbacks and dreams. Freud states, "the patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it…. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past" (18). As such, trauma is constituted by the seemingly opposing forces of remembering and forgetting. Memory of the event, rather than a reflection of a distant past, comes back in ambiguous and fragmentary forms, causing traumatic symptoms to occur that disrupt and torment the present.
Consequently, the process of working through the past is supposed to conjure forth the event, make present prior incidents, in order to help the patient construct a narrative in which the memory of trauma is positioned firmly in the past. Freud states that the physician must get the patient to "re-experience some portion of his forgotten life, but must see to it, on the other hand, that the patient retains some degree of aloofness, which will enable him, in spite of everything to recognize that what appears to be reality is in fact only a reflection of a forgotten past" (Beyond 19). What is evident here I argue is a pathology of memory. According to the understanding of trauma as a wound to the mind, working through the traumatic past means confronting and placing in the past the experience that is forgotten, but that returns through the act of repetition. In this Freudian paradigm there is a distinction drawn between memory that "repeats" and memory that is "remembered," memory that reoccurs in the present and memory that simply belongs to the past. The former, what I call radical or "spectral memory," is found to be a sign of abnormality or illness, and thus the process of working through is either to return it to the past, or, as Freud's contemporary Pierre Janet proposes, for it to be "vanished" or "liquidated" (663). Breuer and Freud's famous diagnosis of traumatized hysterics posits that they "suffer mainly from reminiscences" (Studies 7). "Working through," then, would entail containing the memory within that closed off portion of a linear narrative designated as "past" so that it is forgotten and no longer torments.
Amabelle's testimony in The Farming of Bones witnesses to the physicality of trauma and suggests the need to rethink the very possibility of "working through" by demonstrating that the obstacle in comprehending the event is not simply a cognitive one. Her narrative attests to how trauma is inscribed not only on her body, but also in her body, producing a spectral memory that continues to haunt the present.4 Describing her body as "a map of scars and bruises, a marred testament," Amabelle anchors together the physical pain of her body with the act of testifying. It is her body that bears the record of the past, and the story it tells is not seamless but disfigured, flawed, even imperfect. When Amabelle comes to the climactic moment of the attack on Haitians in the Dominican border town of Dajabón, her testimony turns visceral:
A sharp blow to my side nearly stopped my breath. The pain was like a stab from a knife or an ice pick, but when I reached down I felt no blood. Rolling myself into a ball, I tried to get away from the worst of the kicking horde. I screamed, thinking I was going to die. My screams slowed them a bit. But after a while I had less and less strength with which to make a sound. My ears were ringing; I tried to cover my head with my hands. My whole body was numbing; I sensed the vibration of the blows, but no longer the pain. My mouth filled with blood.
(194)
In the moment of violence she loses language and the ability to mentally register pain, and yet she still "senses the vibration of the blows." At the time, the physical assault escapes articulation, registering in screams on the border between silence and speech. The body's materiality, an excess uncontained by signification, is nonetheless evoked in the act of screaming, until this too is quashed by the body's pain. It is this painful physicality, which resists narrativization and knowing, that produces the "marred testament" of trauma.
The novel figures trauma through an economy of the body—the body experiencing trauma, the body remembering trauma, the body living trauma. Amabelle's description returns the body to the concept of trauma and in doing so suggests that what might be taken as an initial forgetting is instead an aporia in language created by the materiality of the body overwhelming the process of signification. Her testimony dispels ideas of trauma as "a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind." This corporeal figuring reminds readers that the apparent element of latency in trauma is not because the event did not register, but because the body upon which it is written evades the narrow limits of language and representation. Amabelle describes how her "chipped and cracked teeth kept snapping against the mush of open flesh inside [her] mouth. All the pain of first being struck came back to [her]" (197). In the aftermath of violence, the text continues to locate the event of trauma in this liminal space between voice and voicelessness. Because of the state of her body, she is unable to express herself: "I tried to explain. I wanted to go to the fortaleza where I thought they might be holding Mimi and Sebastien. My words ran together, blurred and incomprehensible" (199). The body becomes the site of both enunciation and its absence. It is from this site that language originates and, in the case of trauma, that a wound arises that consumes language. The text emphasizes the body's place in signification, reminding that the psyche, commonly seen as the repository of physical feelings and senses, is not the transcendent entity of a degraded physicality, but is also itself always embodied. Thus, while Caruth and others might be accurate in formulating trauma as an experience that "brings us to the limits of our understanding," the assertion "that the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time" shifts attention away from the (silent) materiality of trauma and emphasizes instead the cognitive framing and understanding of it (Trauma 4, 9).
The startling image of Amabelle's body as "a marred testament" of distorted evidence, vividly figures for the reader how remembering and forgetting, testimony and silence are simultaneously inscribed on her body. The material witnessing of the wounded body, which cannot or is not allowed to give testimony, generates an aporia—a fissure in meaning that reveals absence and produces doubt—in the nation's representation of the past. Both illuminating and concealing trauma, the body's silent testimony at once unsettles what the present or the nation knows about the event and draws them towards it. It is this physicality of trauma—markers on the flesh and wounded bodies—that encapsulates both the horror and fascination, the impulse to both turn away and to know. The survivors of the massacre, like Amabelle, confront the Dominican Republic and Haiti with a silent, but disruptive corporeal testimony that draws attention to a reality that has been buried and enciphered in the historical record. The spectral memories conjured by the scarred and tortured body produce a fissure in meaning that can't be filled, but that calls for comprehension.
The disfigurement of Amabelle's own body and those of others remind the present of a past that historical narratives have evaded. Walking the streets in Haiti, Amabelle finds the massacre called to mind again and again: "I strolled like a ghost through the waking life of the Cap, wondering whenever I saw people with deformities—anything from a broken nose to crippled legs—had they been there?" (243). These physical reminders raise once more the question of the unexamined past. Jacques Lacan, in his elucidation of Freud, theorizes trauma as a missed encounter with the real: "the function of the tuché, of the real as encounter—the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter—first presented itself in the history of psycho-analysis in a form that was in itself already enough to arouse our attention, that of the trauma" (55). In the return of the body to the testament of violence, the present is confronted again with the missed encounter of trauma, of what is in effect the real of history. Our relationship to the real Lacan proposes is always that of a "missed encounter" and this first became apparent in the context of trauma, as that which is "unassimilable" to the real (55). With the wounded body, the historical materiality of the real returns, confronting the present with a past that is unknowable and that escapes meaning, but that returns the present to the act of signification again and again. The scars of the past forged on Amabelle's body become a physical reminder of a history of violence and demonstrate the impossibility of forgetting. This apparition of the disfigured, injured body summons a spectral memory that unsettles understandings of the past as closed and over.
The novel's signification of violence according to an economy of the body moves beyond the division of mind and body that has predominated theories of trauma. The enduring silence of the body's pain questions what it would mean to work through the past. Toward the end of the novel, when Trujillo dies more than two decades after the massacre, Amabelle's body remains a living reminder of trauma:
There were times when I shut myself in those two rooms that were mine and took to bed for months, times when I had too much lint in my throat, or an aching arm that prevented me from sewing, when the joint of my knee would throb, and the ringing in my ears would chime without stop. Other than those moments, the Generalissimo's death was the only reprieve from my routine of sewing and sleeping and having the same dreams every night.
(269, emphasis added)
The physical traces of violence occupy and shape her present. Every movement—activities as simple as walking, sewing, and talking—remind her of the massacre. In fact, this past possesses her and is a "reprieve" from the sameness of the present. The past is not simply written on her body but, as the insistent use of the preposition "in" and the description of pain within bones and joints suggest, it has penetrated her flesh. Crossing the line of the visible and the invisible, becoming internal, the past becomes an unverifiable document, but this undecideability does not remain settled. When each movement brings pain, the past can never become something simply remembered.
Amabelle's disfigured body draws the reader's attention to a gap through which they may glimpse the traumatic event even as it is missed. The spectral memories conjured by the wounded human form resist a working through the past via narrativization. Psychiatrist Dori Laub, whose work has centered around listening to the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, proposes that "to undo this entrapment in a fate that cannot be known, cannot be told, but can only be repeated, a therapeutic process—a process of constructing a narrative, of reconstructing a history and essentially of reexternalizating the event—has to be set in motion" (69). But in Amabelle's testimony the pain of the past has worked into her bones, into her very being, making the extraction of this physical reality difficult through a cognitive act. Such narrative working through, which for Laub entails the ability to "articulate and transmit the story, literally transfer it to another outside oneself and then take it back again, inside," is frustrated by the limits of language and the cultural frames of reference that are unable to signify the body's experiences (69). Instead, the (dis)figuring of her body, of this "marred testament," exposes the gap between the real and reality, between the missed encounter with trauma and the historical narrations of that event. And what one finds in this gap, which for Lacan is the gap of the unconscious, is "something of the order of the non-realized" and "of the unborn" (22-23).
Testimony and Narrating Cultural Trauma
Traditional relationships of narrative to history have changed through the historical necessity of involving literature in action, of creating a new form of narrative as testimony not merely to record, but to rethink and, in the act of its rethinking, in effect transform history.
—Shoshana Felman, Testimony
The Farming of Bones probes what it would mean to narrate trauma in such a way as to glimpse those events and experiences that remain "unborn" in the narratives of history. Although the novel's economy of the body portrays traumatic testimony's fall into silence, The Farming of Bones as a whole does transmit Amabelle's account, giving voice to the silent past she cannot express or to which history will not listen. As such, the novel belongs to the contemporary genre of testimonial novels: fictional works that draw upon the form of the testimonio. Where the "official" national narrative of the past adheres to homogeneity and verifiability in its narration of history, testimonio writing is premised on the desire to unearth and to represent marginalized and silenced histories. Typically such works present a first-person, non-fiction account of the narrator's survival and witness to traumatic events and political oppression that affect not simply their own life but that of their community, culture, or nation.5 The narrator is often a member of a marginalized cultural group and as such the testimonio is frequently narrated to a writer or journalist who then composes the story aimed at an audience in the developed, so-called first world. Popularized in the 1960s and '70s, such writing responds to the silence of history to acts of oppression and violence and thus possesses an ethical call to justice. It appeals to readers, John Beverley maintains, through a process of identification "by engaging their standards of ethics and justice in a speech-act situation that requires response" (78).
Testimonial novels, like The Farming of Bones, aim to bear witness to actual historical events, but through the eyes of a fictional narrator, such as Amabelle. Unlike the non-fiction testimonio, which may mask the way that its story is mediated through a secondary witness who is recording and constructing it, Danticat's novel reminds the reader of its existence as a shaped, literary object. Danticat says that at moments in the novel, "I was purposely questioning myself and what I was doing—writing this story in English, stealing it, if you will, from the true survivors who were not able or allowed to tell their stories" (Shea 17-18). As a literary work, the reader must remember that choices and decisions have been made by an author, thus limiting what is seen and known. The fictional text becomes a means to examine not only the past event, but also the very act of narration, including the way that narrative selection (the choices made about what to include and in what order) shapes how and what we know of the past.
Danticat's novel problematizes the appeal and address of testimony, even as it is itself a testimony. In the wake of the violence, after the Haitian government's aborted taking of testimony, the priests adopt the role of external witness. Unlike the government's chronicle of the event, the testimonials recorded by the priests do seem to seek out alternative voices. The priests write down the stories for journalists, presumably foreign ones, but even these only occur as long as there is outside interest: "To all those who tell us of lost relations, we can offer nothing save for our prayers and perhaps a piece of bread. So we have stopped letting them tell us these terrible stories. It was taking all our time, and there is so much other work to be done" (254). This statement depicts the problem of address inherent in testimonial writing: it depends upon a willing and interested listener. The power of the testimonio exists only as long as it captures the imagination and interest of its audience, which is primarily an external world that may easily turn away, preoccupied by other matters. Contrary to Beverley's claim that the testimonio is "a fundamentally democratic and egalitarian form of narrative" (75), The Farming of Bones expresses the failure of testimonials if one is "nameless and faceless" (Danticat 280). The genre of political testimony, like official history, is built upon the foundation of the visibly, recognized subject. If those occupying institutions of power do not recognize the anonymous subjects of violence and trauma, then their history may be neither heard nor recorded.
The novel argues that the potential of testimony for social change is severely limited. Proposing that the testimonies written on the survivor's bodies are significantly compromised, April Shemak finds that "The Farming of Bones is far more ambivalent about the transformative or recuperative potential of testimonial narrative. It is significant that once she fully comes into her consciousness after returning to the Dominican Republic, Amabelle chooses not to tell her story" (106). According to my analysis, however, while the novel is ambivalent about the liberatory potential of individual testimony, Amabelle actually does choose to narrate her experience. In an interview published in 1999, Danticat states, "The goddess of this story is the Metrès Dlo, the female spirit of the river, to whom Amabelle dedicates and tells the story" (Shea 19). Referring to the dedication, Danticat's statement, when read alongside Amabelle's immersion in the river at the end of the novel, suggests that when she enters the river, she takes up the narrative that becomes her tale (the tale the reader is reading). After finding no one outside her community who will listen to or acknowledge her story, Amabelle—seeking someone else to bear her pain for a while—lies down and narrates it to the river. Still, while Amabelle may seek testimony as a means for working through the past, the silent address of this testimony asks the reader to rethink its larger cultural potential.
Amabelle's physical experience of trauma is reflected in the structure of the novel. Like her wounded body, the narrative before the reader is a scarred and haunted one. Working in counterpoint to the linear storyline that is Amabelle's first person testimonial of the massacre are the brief fragmentary sections that appear in bold print. Amabelle's eyewitness report focuses on the world of public events; it is also linear and, even if skipping over years, causal. Her testimonial is all recounted in the past tense. Told from some present moment, it looks back upon events that are now behind her. This portion of the narrative concludes the text, leaving Amabelle lying in the river "looking for the dawn" (310). In contrast, the bold print sections of the text are more difficult to understand. These sections are told in present tense, but possess an atemporal quality, as if they have been cut loose of the ties that bind them to a linear narrative. They are comprised of dreams and memories of Amabelle's missing lover and dead parents, and they demonstrate, Danticat says, "that these are people with interior lives" (qtd. in Francis 170). In other words, they provide a textual performance of a silent discourse, a literary representation of the unsaid. With the tension created between these passages and the primary narrative line, the novel does not simply recount the traumatic event that would resist representation anyway; rather, as Laub proposes, "knowledge in the testimony is … not simply a factual given that is reproduced and replicated by the testifier, but a genuine event in its own right" (62). Narrated in the present tense these isolated, voiceless fragments of the past disrupt Amabelle's account of the massacre and produce a traumatized text. They stage or rather repeat again a trauma that Amabelle's testimony and the novel conceal and illuminate, drawing the reader's attention to what remains hidden and unseen.
As Amabelle's linear narrative seeks to put the past in order, the memories in the bold print sections—by entering the novel and making the past present—demonstrate the impossibility of doing so by entering the novel and making the past present. If the novel is read as a narrative act begun by Amabelle at the end of the linear narrative when she enters the river, then the story does not lead to closure of the past. Rather, the narrative act is ongoing: arriving at the end the reader arrives back at the beginning. The present tense narration of these sections contributes to this reading. This present tense unhinges these fragments from time. When reading them one gets the sense that they are reoccurring and that what one is reading is an act of haunting. For example, after the invocation to "Metrès Dlo, Mother of the Rivers," the novel opens in the following manner:
His name is Sebastien Onius.
He comes most nights to put an end to my nightmare, the one I have all the time, of my parents drowning.
(1)
There is no clear sense here of when Sebastien Onius comes to her, for while he physically came to her room at Señora Valencia's in the days before the massacre, it is clear also that he still comes to her in memories and in dreams in the many years afterwards: "Sometimes I can make myself dream him out of the void to listen" (282). These fragments of traumatic dreams and memories undercut the sense of telos in the novel, shaping its cultural narrative of remembrance as ongoing rather than closed and over.
The first five fragments all directly discuss the dead—Sebastien, Amabelle's parents, Sebastien's father. These sections are filled with grief and loss, and yet through them these people live again, at least textually. While the primary testimonial storyline recounts Señora Valencia giving birth to her children, the early death of one, and the building up of tensions in the Dominican Republic, the bold print sections tell another story of joy, intimacy, and family life, now all lost. Just as the traumatic experience of Amabelle's body remains at times beneath the level of signification, so too these "spectral memories" are entombed within her testimony of the massacre, their meaning not fully manifest. As a result, the novel presents not simply a linear narrative, but a layered one as well. If Amabelle's testimonial represents the historicizing impulse—it is told within the language of the symbolic order and seeks to make the event part of public history—then the bold print sections are what do not register within that signifying order. This narrative economy can be further explored by considering Abraham and Torok's theory of incorporation, which they conceive as one (pathological) response to trauma and loss. The act of incorporation refuses mourning. Unlike "introjection," which performs a "broadening of the ego" (112) that works through the past by adoption of the event and transformation of the psychological landscape, incorporation "erects a secret tomb inside the subject. Reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes, and affects, the objectal correlative of the loss is buried alive in the crypt as a full-fledged person, complete with its own topography…. A whole world of unconscious fantasy is created, one that leads its own separate and concealed existence" (130). The "spectral memory" of the bold print fragments appears buried within the testimonial that the novel allows Amabelle to narrate. They represent an unconscious language that the symbolic order of the novel and of history cannot fully signify.
This psychological model is productive for a discussion of traumatic narratology in that it depicts how a narrative (either a literary or historical one) may be created so as to hide a wound that would disrupt its very foundations. As Abraham and Torok point out, "the goal of this type of construction is to disguise the wound because it is unspeakable, because to state it openly would prove fatal to the entire topography" (142). This "unborn" or "non-realized" history, in its very status as unconscious, threatens the rest of the text's drive to signification. In this way, the symbolic order of the novel and of history shapes Amabelle's testimony. Her story is not unmediated, but shaped by preexisting frameworks of meaning. However, by including these fragmentary sections, the novel reminds the reader of how an unheard history accompanies any traumatic discourse, vibrating just below the level of signification.
The mourning and loss of the narrative fragments testify not to the events narrated in Amabelle's testimony, but to a deeper, unspoken trauma. Rather than order and contain the traumatic memories so that they are "remembered" instead of "repeating," the narrative unleashes them, refuses to narrativize them. In one segment that appears shortly before narration of the massacre in the testimonial, Amabelle dreams of the sugar woman: a woman "dressed in a long, three-tiered ruffled gown inflated like a balloon. Around her face, she wears a shiny silver muzzle, and on her neck there is a collar with a clasped lock dangling from it" and as she moves "the chains on her ankles cymbal a rattled melody" (132). When asked why she is there, this woman, a figure out of the slave past of Haiti, speaks the same words to Amabelle that she dreams her mother says, "You, my eternity" (133). Who exactly this woman represents—an anonymous slave woman, a manifestation of the vodou lwa Ezili, Amabelle's mother—is never identified, but what is evoked is a history of trauma and loss.6 This figure establishes a connection between the traumatic past, Amabelle's present, and their "eternity" or future. Immediately following this image, the linear narrative continues with the Dominicans preparing themselves for attack/defense. Amabelle barely misses being hit by a stray bullet as her mistress and master, Valencia and Pico, take target practice. If, as Walter Benjamin attests, the past lays claim to the present—then how might the relationship between these two moments be read?7 The dream of the sugar woman reminds readers that the present violence has its roots in past trauma. The narrative economy of the novel asks us not to understand the events of Trujillo and the Dominicans in isolation, but within a context of centuries of racism, colonization and prejudice.
The narrative of The Farming of Bones creates a point/counterpoint pattern between the testimonial of the massacre and the spectral fragments of other violent pasts. This narrative economy illustrates how the Dominican desire to eradicate the Haitians belongs to the same dynamics of repression as the poverty and border policing that led Amabelle's parents years earlier to cross into the Dominican Republic illegally by wading the Massacre River (a dangerous crossing where the young Amabelle sees them drown). Nor is it apart from the poverty that sends other Haitians illegally into the Dominican Republic looking for work. In the fragment following the appearance of the sugar woman, Amabelle dreams of dust storms and remembers her parents walking with her: "I see my mother and father and myself. I am with them, a child who still must hold a hand to walk, a child who must look up to talk, to see all the faces. After the storm has cleared, I find myself with my hands raised up, in motionless prayer, as though some invisible giants were guiding me forward" (139). This last section before the start of the massacre invokes the looming darkness of a coming storm and the lingering figures of her drowned parents who lead Amabelle forward. Alone, this brief half-page fragment introduces a spectral textuality that lingers in the minds of readers as they resume reading the narrative of the massacre. The passage cannot be situated firmly or interpreted definitively; instead, it recalls the past, placing pressure on the reader's interpretation of present events, as if the dead are there, too, in the scene with Amabelle as she is drawn into the violence. This narrative economy demonstrates that the exclusionary logic of the border and the poverty that denies the Haitians political agency and a life in their own country are directly connected to the Dominicans' view of the laborers as a contaminating element that is unable to resist their attacks.
While Amabelle recounts her story, the novel's narrative schools the reader in understanding testimony not just within a framework of what is visible and known, but in relation to voicelessness and absence. The bold print sections appear as wounds in the narrative, drawing the reader's attention to a disruptive silence that cannot be ignored. Repeated imagery throughout the narrative emphasizes the meaningfulness of sound that doesn't quite communicate, of a voice that tries to speak: pigeons whose "moan is the same way ghosts cry when they are too lonely or too sad, when they have been dead so long that they have forgotten how to speak their own names" (25) or "a laugh out of sadness, a sadness that made the laughter deeper and louder still, like the echo of a scream from the bottom of a well" (224). In each case a silence is attached to speech, an "echo" that shadows signification. This "echoing" is mirrored in the narrative economy with the bold sections repeating events and phrases found in the "voiced" linear narrative. Such textual wounds in this narrative of the past threaten the very possibility of historical discourse. They evoke experiences and events that official narrative and its epistemology, grounded in causality, progress, and evidence, cannot contain. This traumatic or "spectral" memory—memory that "repeats" rather than is merely "remembered"—becomes not simply a pathology, but in the novel's cultural narrative of trauma is itself the site of an impossibility from which historical understanding might begin.
Staging the necessity of listening, impossibly, for silence in the play between the bold print sections and the linear narrative, the novel structures the present's relationship to the traumatic past according to a spectral narrative economy, one that produces an understanding of the past in the play of meaning between the radical memory of trauma that resists narration and the closed linear narrative of events. To speak of the narrative economy in the context of the novel is to examine the production of meaning. To contemplate this as a process of exchange rather than a static structure is to consider how the trajectory of the text through an exchange of fragments, plotlines, and representations generates meaning. This plotting denies the work full pres- ence, and, as the text moves forward, what the reader knows and understands is constantly submitted to silence, to the loss of meaning before further events and segments are introduced and with them another frail and partial understanding of the past.
* * *The Farming of Bones seeks in fiction to find a path to witnessing other than through official history within which it is not structurally possible to witness the ambiguity and fragmentary experience of cultural trauma. The novel's experiments with narrative form depict for the reader the urgency of seeking out and listening to "spectral memory." Such a conjuring of the past is necessary because too often the cultural "working through" has abbreviated the process of listening to trauma in favor of pinning down its meaning through narrativization. While Amabelle's story offers testimony to the traumatic event, the construction of the novel introduces silence and ambiguity into the text with the bold print sections that interrupt her linear narrative. Amabelle tells her story so as to offer witness of her memories and to relieve the pressure of this past; however, the novel's act of cultural narration resists simple testimony for unsettling ambiguity and in doing so situates Amabelle's experiences within a larger history of multiple stories, repeated traumas, and lingering silences.
The spectral narrative economy of the text insists upon the necessity of memory's radical power to rupture official or closed narratives by returning before the eyes of the present an indecipherable past. This narrative movement that weaves Amabelle's personal memories together with a more conventional narrative of the past, emphasizing linearity, causality, and the larger world of historical events, presents a traumatic narratology that listens for the uncertainty of memory. The narrative economy of The Farming of Bones does not simply give testimony to the massacre of Haitian laborers in 1937, but explores the historiographic impulse upon which testimonial literature is founded. In doing so, the narrative organization asks the reader to see the massacre as one symptom of a deeper, longer lasting trauma of race and violence with roots in the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere. The novel's demand that the present trauma be read together with the silences of past traumas is emphasized in the repeated references to King Henri Christophe, the former slave who became king of Haiti in 1804.8 This motif evokes a legacy of slavery and revolution that continues to haunt and shape the cultural consciousness and identity of Haiti: "I could almost hear the king giving orders to tired ghosts who had to remind him that it was a different time—a different century—and that we had become a different people" (46). The unconscious language of Amabelle's dreams and memories in the bold print sections draw attention to this other spectral history circulating throughout the novel. The specter of this past reminds us that Haiti's isolated international status and economic poverty in the twentieth century rises out of its history centuries before when the Haitian revolution cut it off from its European colonizer and made it an anathema in the Western hemisphere where other slaveholding cultures feared its successful slave revolt would be contagious.
In questioning the political efficacy of testimony and testimonial literature, its ability to bring about social change, The Farming of Bones does not celebrate silence as possessing some enviable epistemological privilege. Instead, the novel asks the reader, the citizen, and the historian to seek significance in silence. The literary text does not presume to provide unmediated access to the traumatic past, but rather, drawing upon Lacan, I argue that the novel's bold print spectral memories "awaken" the reader to trauma even as they conceal it. Exploring the process of working through, Lacan rereads Freud's analysis of the father's dream of the burning boy.9 Where Freud finds in the father's dream of his dead child calling out to him that he is burning a testament to how dreams serve as wish fulfillment, Lacan locates evidence of how the dream, as evasion of trauma (of the child's death), also awakens the father to trauma again (the child's death and his burning). It is from within the dream that the father is awoken once more to the missed encounter with the real: "But the terrible vision of the dead son taking the father by the arm designates a beyond that makes itself heard in the dream" (59). The narrative economy of Danticat's novel points outside what is known, to "the dead whose absence trailed us as did the dust of their bones in the wind" (271). Such a process for encountering trauma draws the reader towards silence, to what cannot be accommodated or contained within the system of meaning that organizes historical discourse and its literary representations.
Danticat's narrative of remembering resists closure and forgetting; it refuses to allow the spectral memory of trauma to be rendered a static object of the past, fully known and forgettable. Examining the relationship between testimony and history, Felman argues that "history is used for the purpose of a historical (ongoing) process of forgetting which, ironically enough, includes the gestures of historiography. Historiography is as much the product of the passion of forgetting as it is the product of the passion of remembering" (214). Instead, The Farming of Bones stages for the reader the act of listening for the unheard, allowing the past to remain open. This textual economy is figured within the story when Amabelle says, "the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children's inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, all are passed along to the next heir" (265-66). The ambiguity and lost record of the past is passed on in the breath between words and the gaps in narration. To identify this spectral narrative economy as inscribing absence within the narrative is to articulate the way in which the traumatic past introduces events and memory that don't fully register at the level of discursive signification or whose meaning exceeds signification, but which nonetheless linger on. Jacques Derrida reflecting on the work of George Bataille articulates the ethical necessity of silence: "We must find a speech which maintains silence. Necessity of the impossible: to say in language—the language of servility—that which is not servile" (262). The fragments of narration that are inserted within the novel make up just such a narrative language, not to encourage silence, but to reveal it in an effort of looking beyond the visible, the heard, the known. The bold print sections of the novel say in the language of narration that which defies narration. They evoke, in the only language available, the undecideability and ambiguity of trauma that disrupts official narratives and ideologies. The cultural narrative of trauma that the novel presents insists upon engaging the disruptive fragments of spectral memory, for only by seeking out what cannot be contained will an expanded understanding of traumatic events be sought. The reading of such a history repudiates the arbitrary closure of narrative; it requires that the reader not persist in erasing contradictions and complications.
Unlike much discourse about historicizing trauma, The Farming of Bones neither pathologizes memory nor attempts to construct a cultural site of commemoration that replaces the radical work of memory with the amnesia of "official" memorializing. The increased presence of violence and historical crises in many peoples' lives around the world is reflected in this growing body of literature considering the narration of cultural trauma. Novels like Danticat's examine the act of historical representation and confront reading practices that are still informed by principles of exclusion and closure. Susan Suleiman, in her short address "Reflections on Memory at the Millennium," speaks to the issue of how to approach the past: "a productive engagement with the past involves not a fixated stare at a ‘single catastrophe’ but the possibility of blinking—forgetting, anticipating, erring, revising" (vi). This vision of history complicates the idea of testimony, which connotes the singularity of truth, evidence, and proof. While the present may desire a single meaning or interpretation of a traumatic event, the spectral narrative economy of Danticat's novel suggests the impossibility of such a cultural narrative cure. Instead, the unsettling nature of traumatic memory directs attention to the silent spaces in the historical record for inside silence are voices waiting to be heard.
Notes
1. Growing out of traditions of ethnic and postcolonial writing, contemporary novels of historical trauma explore events from the margins of history and probe politics of power and cultural hegemony. In addition to Edwidge Danticat, my own research in this diverse field has been informed by the work of such authors as Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ariel Dorfman, Caryl Phillips, Julia Alvarez, Pat Barker, J. M. Coetzee, and Tim O'Brien.
2. Felman asserts that this current "crisis in witnessing" arose as a result of the unique nature of the Holocaust, which sought to prevent the very possibility of a witness. She then applies her argument more generally to the contemporary state of testimony and witnessing as a result of the lingering significance of that event. This world-shattering atrocity recast the present's historical gaze, reframing cultural trauma and terror both before and since. As such, the study of the Holocaust has contributed to the emerging field of trauma studies, which has also drawn on the psychiatric treatment of trauma survivors and new paradigms for approaching the past that have developed out of ethnic and postcolonial studies.
3. For a more extensive discussion of Trujillo's deployment of political, repressive, and symbolic means to preserve his autocratic position see Roorda, "Chapter Four: What will the Neighbors Think? Dictatorship and Diplomacy in the Public Eye" (88-126).
4. Pierre Janet formulates "traumatic memory" as a "fixed idea of a happening" (663) that resists narration in contrast to "memory," which "is the action of telling a story" (661). This popular understanding of "traumatic memory" as "fixed" can be found in the work of Caruth, Laub, and Van Der Kolk (for instance, see their research in Caruth's Trauma). Leading memory researcher and Harvard professor of psychology Schacter asserts that such memories are also "subject to decay and distortion": "that memories are not simply activated pictures in the mind but complex constructions built from multiple contributors—also applies to emotionally traumatic memories" (209). I agree that traumatic memory is neither static nor unchanging; instead, such memory is what unsettles and makes ambiguous the understanding of the past.
5. Some well-known examples of testimonial literature are: Menchu, Cabezas, Timerman, and Barrios de Chungara. For critical discussions of testimonial literature, see Beverley, and Gugelberger.
6. For a further consideration of the place of this lwa in Haitian women's lives, see Brown's chapter on Ezili (220-57).
7. Benjamin writes, "The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that pre- ceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply" (254). In the context of Danticat's novel, I read this passage as articulating the demand that the lost, destroyed, or forgotten past places upon the present to redeem it in the text of history.
8. The Haitian revolution was ignited by a slave uprising in 1791. In the struggle that followed, François Toussaint L'Ouverture organized and led rebel slaves in a battle for freedom and Haitian independence from France. After L'Ouverture was captured and sent to France, Jean Jacques Dessalines led the Haitians to victory against Napoleon's armies in 1804, making Haiti the first black independent nation in the Western hemisphere. Dessalines declared himself emperor for life, but was overthrown in 1807 when Henri became first president and then king (in 1811) of the northern section of Haiti. For further discussion of the Haitian slave revolt and revolution, see James, and Dubois.
9. The dream, told to Freud by a woman who heard it recounted at a lecture, belongs to a father whose son has just died. Leaving an old man to watch over the son's body, the father lays down in a nearby room to sleep. After a while he dreams of the dead son who comes to him and says, "Father, don't you see I'm burning." The startled father awakens to find that a candle has fallen on his son and burnt one of his arms (Interpretation 547-50).
Works Cited
Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Vol. 1. Ed. and Trans. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Adorno, Theodor W. "The Meaning of Working Through the Past." Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 89-103.
Barrios de Chungara, Domitila, with Moema Viezzer. Let Me Speak: Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines. New York, Monthly Review Press, 1978.
Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. 253-67.
Beverley, John. Against Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Breuer, Josef and Sigmund Freud. Studies on Hysteria. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1957.
Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: A Voudou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Cabezas, Omar. Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista. New York: Random House, 1985.
Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
———. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Chester, Barbara. "‘That Which Does Not Destroy Me’: Treating Survivors of Political Torture." Handbook of Post-Traumatic Therapy. Ed. Mary Beth Williams and John F. Sommer Jr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. 240-51.
Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. New York: Penguin, 1998.
Derrida, Jacques. "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve." Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 251-77.
Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2004.
Felman, Shoshana. "The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzman's Shoah." Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, M.D. New York: Routledge, 1992. 204-83.
Francis, Donnette A. "Unsilencing the Past: Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones." Small Axe 5 (1999): 168-75.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and Trans. James Strachey. Vol. 18. New York: Hogarth, 1953-74. 7-64.
———. The Interpretation of Dreams. Ed. and Trans. James Strachey. New York: Avon, 1965.
Gugelberger, George M., ed. The "Real" Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Hicks, Albert C. Blood in the Streets: The Life and Rule of Trujillo. New York: Creative Age Press, 1946.
James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1973.
Laub, Dori. M.D. "Bearing Witness, of the Vicissitudes of Listening." Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, M.D. New York: Routledge, 1992. 57-74.
Menchu. Rigoberto. I, Rigoberto Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Ed. Elizabeth Burgos-Debray. London: Verso, 1984.
Pierre, Janet. Psychological Healing. Vol. 1. Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: MacMillan, 1925.
Roorda, Eric Paul. The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1940-1945. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.
Ságas, Ernesto. Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.
Schacter, Daniel L. Searching for Memory: the Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York, Basic Books, 1996.
Shea, Renée H. "‘The Hunger to Tell’: Edwidge Danticat and The Farming of Bones." MaComère 2 (1999): 12-22.
Shemak, April. "Re-Membering Hispaniola: Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones." Modern Fiction Studies. 48.1 (2002): 83-112.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. "Reflections on Memory at the Millennium" Comparative Literature 51.3 (1999): v-xiii.
Timerman, Jacobo. Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.
Wiarda, Howard J. Dictatorship and Development: The Methods of Control in Trujillo's Dominican Republic. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1968.
Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
FURTHER READING
Criticism
Cowart, David. "Haitian Persephone: Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory." In Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America, pp. 126-37. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Contends that Danticat portrays the immigrant characters of Sophie and Martine as "Haitian Persephones," or characters caught between two worlds.
Danticat, Edwidge, and Sarah Anne Johnson. "You Have to Live Your Characters' Lives with Them." In The Very Telling: Conversations with American Writers, edited by Sarah Anne Johnson, pp. 16-28. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2006.
Danticat discusses her origins as a professional writer, the role of autobiography in her work, and the importance of storytelling in the Haitian culture in an interview with Johnson.
McCormick, Robert H. Review of After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti, by Edwidge Danticat. World Literature Today 77, nos. 3-4 (October-December 2003): 88-9.
Mixed review of After the Dance.
———. Review of The Dew Breaker, by Edwidge Danticat. World Literature Today 79, no. 1 (January-April 2005): 83-4.
Outlines the strengths and weaknesses of The Dew Breaker.
Strehle, Susan. "History and the End of Romance: Danticat's The Farming of Bones." In Doubled Plots: Romance and History, edited by Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden, pp. 24-44. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003.
Maintains that The Farming of Bones "is neither a romantic history nor a historical romance, but rather a new form created at the intersection of history and romance, calling the ideological assumptions of both genres into question and transforming them both in the process."
Additional coverage of Danticat's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 29; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 152, 192, 228; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 73, 129; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 94, 139, 228; Contemporary Novelists, Ed. 7; Exploring Short Stories; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Ed. 1:2; Literature of Developing Nations for Students, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Ed. 2; Major 21st-Century Writers, (e-book) 2005; Short Stories for Students, Vol. 1; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 100; and St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers.