Transnational Narratives from the Caribbean

Diasporic Literature and the Human Experience

Elvira Pulitano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138998773
• eBook ISBN: 9781317331278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book offers a timely intervention in current debates on diaspora and diasporic identity by affirming the importance of narrative as a discursive mode to understand the human face of contemporary migrations and dislocations. Focusing on the Caribbean double-diaspora, Pulitano offers a close-reading of a range of popular works by four well-known writers currently living in the United States: Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, and Caryl Phillips. Navigating the map of fictional characters, testimonial accounts, and autobiographical experiences, Pulitano draws attention to the lived experience of contemporary diasporic formations. The book offers a provocative re-thinking of socio-scientific analyses of diaspora by discussing the embodied experience of contemporary diasporic communities, drawing on disciplines such as Caribbean, Postcolonial, Diaspora, and Indigenous Studies along with theories on "border thinking" and coloniality/modernity. Contesting restrictive, national, and linguistic boundaries when discussing literature originating from the Caribbean, Pulitano situates the transnational location of Caribbean-born writers within current debates of Transnational American Studies and investigates the role of immigrant writers in discourses of race, ethnicity, citizenship, and belonging. Exploring the multifarious intersections between home, exile, migration and displacement, the book makes a significant contribution to memory and trauma studies, human rights debates, and international law, aiming at a wide range of scholars and specialized agents beyond the strictly literary circle. This volume affirms the humanity of personal stories and experiences against the invisibility of immigrant subjects in most theoretical accounts of diaspora and migration.

Part I
Diasporic Homelands

But can’t you even imagine what it must feel like to have a true home?

—Toni Morrison, Paradise

In Cartographies of Diaspora, Avtar Brah argues that “the concept of diaspora places the discourse of ‘home’ and ‘dispersion’ in creative tension, inscribing a homing desire while simultaneously critiquing discourses of fixed origins” (192–3). When does a place become home for diasporic peoples forced for one reason of another to leave their original homelands? What does it mean to feel at home as opposed to be at home or have a true home, as the group of African Americans in Toni Morrison’s Paradise poignantly reminds us? Descended from freed slaves, driven from their home in Haven, wandering across America in a sort of ironic reversal of the pioneering journey, this group of displaced Black Americans epitomize the ambivalence of home for the descendants of the African diaspora as a result of the loss of the ancestral homeland. “To lose your mother,” Saidiya Hartman argues as she reflects on the effects of slavery on African and African American histories, “was to be denied your kin, country, and identity” (Lose Your Mother 85).

Recent theoretical investigations of diaspora have drawn attention to the creative, enriching aspect of a diasporic, transnational identity, which often results in individuals shifting to and from multiple homes. Diasporic subjects live a liminal existence in constant tension between “where you’re from and where you’re at”—to use the tile of one of Paul Gilroy’s provocative essays (Small Acts 120)—while continuously re-mapping the boundaries of home at a time when contemporary critical discourse tends to favor the “the instability of ‘home’ as a referent” both globally and locally (Bammer, “Editorial” vii).

For Danticat, Phillips, Kincaid, and Cliff, the notion of home bears all the complexities of the double diaspora theorized by Hall when describing the Caribbean situation. As descendants of diasporic communities first and migrant subjectivities second, these writers inhabit a home that is vexed with ambiguity and contradiction, a locality whose boundaries are not clearly defined and/or definable, but a home that nonetheless they attempt to claim in the discursive space of their fictions. From their characterization, far is the myth of an original homeland as a space providing some kind of ontological security. Haiti, Jamaica, Antigua, Africa, England become instead locales through which to interrogate the construction of home when home is a painful reminder of the horrors of slavery and colonialism whose legacy continues into contemporary manifestations of sexual violence, dictatorship, and homophobia.

In the classical Western tradition, home has always been thought of as a safe haven, a fixed point of reference, a concept symbolic of the universality of representations of place. In Physics, Aristotle (Book IV, Part I) reminds us that each thing exists in place and each thing is described by place. Consequently, to have a home means to be in place, to be rooted, to belong. The Oxford English Dictionary provides among others the following definition of the term home: “a place, region, or state to which one properly belongs, on which one’s affections centre, or where one finds refuge, rest, or satisfaction.” Popular proverbs and sayings tell stories of home as a point of reference and an anchor through which individuals secure a solid sense of belonging: “Home is where the heart is,” “there is no place like home,” “every man’s home is his castle,” “every dog is a lion at home,” the last one suggesting how territorial principles grant us power and security, clearly drawing the line between home and not-home, the familiar and the unknown (Porteous 387).

Blurring the distinction between home and house, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in his classic study of the psychological affects of domestic space, argues that to describe a place as “home” is to acknowledge its relationship to ourselves and to create a mutual sense of belonging. Often envisioned as a sanctuary, a refuge from outside sources, “the house,” as Bachelard posits in his book, The Poetics of Space, “allows one to dream in peace” (6). Yet, for Caribbean diasporic subjects living outside their native homelands, such a mutual sense of belonging cannot be contained within the positive discursive Western framework of home and hominess. The ruptured history of the archipelago, which began with the genocide of the Indigenous Peoples and the brutal dislocation of the slave trade to be followed in the subsequent centuries by additional layers of displacement and exile from India, China, the Middle East, and Europe, makes it impossible to look at the Caribbean as the exceptional home place where individuals feel free “to dream in peace.” Adding to such historical complexity, the contemporary condition of Caribbean migrations to the North, with perilous journeys at sea, violently fracture the comfort and sense of belonging usually associated with the concept of home. In other contexts, migration also entails deprivation of home and loss of citizenship.¹

In Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women, the editors provide a significant revision of the commonly held assumption of home as a safe haven: “Home is where you’re safe. / Home is where you’re scared to be. / Home is a place of mind./ Home is a foreign land. Home is homelands” (Grewal et al. 9). Translated into a literary context, these remarks eloquently attest to the ambivalence of home for writers such as Danticat, Cliff, Kincaid, and Phillips. Within their individualized history of diaspora and ancestral displacement, these writers negotiate a home space that is both repulsive and attractive, a space where they feel “safe” and “scared” at the same time.

Danticat’s fictionalized stories are set in her beloved Haiti, but home is often associated with violence on women’s bodies as a result of state-sponsored terror and/or traditional ritualistic practices. Kincaid and Cliff depict a problematic relationship with their homelands, a relation in which issues of gender and sexuality inevitably intersect (and complicate) their personal and cultural displacement. Phillips’s obsessive search for a home along transatlantic routes results in an endless journey along the multiple locales of the African diaspora, including the slave castles of Ghana, which he describes as “strangely familiar” places (Rice 365). The subtext of home embodied in the diasporic experience of these writers cuts across geographical, cultural, and psychic boundaries. In a strange sort of reversal of the triangular journeys that charted the spatial trajectories of the slave trade. Phillips, Danticat, Kincaid and Cliff have all “crossed” the Atlantic, gradually forging transnational connections and forcefully demystifying essentialist definitions of rooted identity and authenticity.² Halfway between the familiar and the strange, the comforting and the alienating, home for such writers is, in bell hooks’s terms, “no longer just one place. It is locations” (“Choosing the Margins” 149), which in most cases translate as states of mind.

In Against Race (2000), Gilroy turns to the concept of diaspora as a valuable tool to reassess essential and absolute conceptions of identity. Diaspora, he writes, “makes the spatialization of identity problematic and interrupts the ontologization of place” (122). My approach in this section is somehow in-between Gilroy’s position and the recognition of a homeland location, as ambivalent as it might be. While I argue that the diasporic condition from which Kincaid, Cliff, Danticat, and Phillips write does allow them to perform “an interruption of the ontologization of place,” I do not intend to discard the notion of place and/or the importance of home altogether in order to affirm a theoretical homelessness along the lines suggested by contemporary discourse on nomadism and travel. Mine is not a theoretical stance along the lines suggested, for instance, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whom I discuss in passing in my analysis of Phillips’s The Atlantic Sound at the end of Part I (Diasporic Homelands). My argument instead builds on the principles advanced by Wendy Walters in her provocative study of black international writing. She writes: “I want to ask in what sense we might think of the diaspora itself as home, thereby uniting the two terms, which are typically viewed as mutually exclusive” (xvi; my emphasis).

Titled At Home in Diaspora, Walters’s study is concerned with late twentieth century African diasporic narratives in the attempt to chart a sort of home space performed within the boundaries of the literary text. In what follows, I expand on Walter’s conception of “home in diaspora” in order to problematize and hopefully revise the notions of home and homeland as essentially linked to a singular putative place—e.g., the island space—to which Danticat, Phillips, Kincaid, and Cliff may or may not ultimately return. More significantly, I want to challenge the idea of home as a construct inevitably bound to a physical space to embrace instead a notion of home perceived, as suggested by Angelika Bammer, as “an amalgam, a pastiche, a performance” (“Editorial” ix). Bammer maintains that home is becoming more and more “an enacted space within which we try on and play out roles and relationships of both belonging and foreignness” (ix). I investigate how Danticat, Phillips, Kincaid, and Cliff “perform” such space in their writing from within the diasporic sites of their lived experience. In performing a diasporan home space, Danticat, Phillips, Kincaid, and Cliff re-imagine home into what Homi Bhabha calls “a mode of living made into a metaphor of survival” (“Halfway House” 11), a way to grapple with the process of finding a home for themselves in the world.

1 When Home Hurts

Edwidge Danticat’s Journeys of Healing

Even though Danticat has been living in the United States for almost three decades, she has remained deeply connected with her native Haiti to the point that the island-nation continues to provide the raw material of her literary inspiration. While living in New York, she said: “Brooklyn is my home, but my heart is in Haiti. I like the rhythms of New York and its diversity which has allowed me to remain Haitian” (Laforest 229). In the summer of 2002 Danticat married and moved to Miami, the city with the largest Haitian population and the closest place to Haiti one can get to in the United States. Danticat says: “Sometimes it startles us. Every once in a while we’ll see a tap-tap—very colorfully painted public transportation buses-just like in Haiti” (Lyons 184). For subjects inhabiting the ambivalent space of the diaspora condition, home becomes more a locus of transportable cultural ideas and values than a fixed physical space. Straddling between the United States and Haiti, Danticat’s fiction and non-fiction reveal the centrality of Haiti and Haitian culture in her entrenched diasporan dis/location. But even when home is associated with culture and tradition, Danticat is far from making any attempt to romanticize a nostalgic past to which her characters can safely return. On the contrary, home often carries within it the visible signs of a history of trauma and violence that continues to follow the migrating subjects in the diaspora space of the elsewhere.

“I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head,” says Sophie, the young protagonist of Danticat’s first and most acclaimed novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (234). The novel portrays Sophie’s journey from the Haitian village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York in order to join her mother, Martine, who, like many immigrants before her, left Haiti for the American metropolis to escape the memory of a violent past. Breath, Eyes, Memory has been read as a coming-of-age story, a bildungroman celebrating the “past-present of the new immigrant woman in her quest for the self between the U.S. and her country of origin” (Laforest 230).³ In Haiti, however, Sophie’s life is also connected to the ancestral village of Dame Marie, the place where her grandmother lives, the same place from which her mother escaped.⁴ And it will be to this village that Sophie, as an adult, will return in order to confront the demons of her mother’s past, which in New York have become her own.

A victim of the Duvalier’s regime, Martine carries the signs of violence perpetrated as political terror deep inside her own body. Raped by one of the Tonton Macoutes, Martine chose exile as a way to maintain her sanity. She moved to New York leaving Sophie, the product of that rape, under the care of her beloved sister, Tante Atie, who will move to Croix-des-Rosets in order for Sophie to attend school. In New York, Martine holds two jobs to support the family back in Haiti and seems to have found some stability in the love of a caring and compassionate man, Marc Chevalier, a Haitian lawyer who has all the traits of the assimilated immigrant but who also suffers from the dislocation that exile entails. According to Martine, “Marc is one of those men who will never recover from not eating his manman’s cooking (Breath, Eyes, Memory 53). The very first night of Sophie’s new life in New York, she is awakened by her mother’s screaming: “I heard that same voice screaming as though someone was trying to kill her” (48). Martine’s trauma does not heal with migration. In New York, nightmares disrupt her sleep. More important, the memory of her rape renders her inarticulate. In the attempt to tell Sophie the story of her birth, Martine relies on the most salient facts: “The details are too much … but it happened like this. A man grabbed me from the side of the road, pulled me into a cane field, and put you in my body. I was still a young girl then, just barely older than you” (61). The cane field, the same locus associated with slave labor and the violence of colonialism, and the place where Martine’s own father had died of sunstroke, is the theatre of the violence that will destroy Martine.

The history of personal violence in Danticat’s characters intersects with Haiti’s violent history and with the island’s contemporary reality of human rights violations such as gender-based violence. A report issued by Human Rights Watch and the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees in 1994, the same year when the novel was published, titled “Rape in Haiti: A Weapon of Terror” states: “the use of rape as a political weapon against women is not a recent development in the Haiti conflict, but, until recently, it has gone largely unreported. Moreover, there exists little likelihood that soldiers will be disciplined” (Human Rights Watch). In her study of Hispaniola’s diaspora memory, Lucia Suárez points out that unfortunately the report did not focus on rape committed “without political motivation,” a crime that has received almost “no attention in recent human rights/political studies” (62).⁵ Since the 2010 devastating earthquake that killed more than 230,000 people and left millions homeless, rape has become an alarming reality in many of Port-au-Prince’s internally displaced camps with very little effort, according to various human rights organizations, on the part of the government of Haiti, the UN, and the international community to effectively respond to the reality of gender-based violence against Haitian women (Schuller and Morales 157).

In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Haiti, and more specifically the rural village of Dame Marie, is also the site of a different kind of violence, violence perpetrated by women upon women’s bodies for the sake of tradition. All the women in Sophie’s family have been subject to the practice of “testing,” through which the mother would insert her finger in the daughter’s vagina “testing” the that hymen was still intact. After Sophie turns eighteen, Martine begins to “test” her. During the testing, she tells the story of the Marassa, the twin spirits and inseparable lovers whose cult goes back to Haitian vodou. Danticat explains:

In the tradition of the Ibegi in Africa, twins are considered very special, in some cases to be very powerful. If one of the twins dies, the other will carry an effigy … Doubling is a similar idea. I started thinking about this because I had often heard the story of our heroes, like Jean-Jacques Dessaline, who is considered the father of our independence. In the folkloric explanation, he was such a strong individual because he was really two people: one part of him could be at home and the other in the battlefield, or two of him could be on the battlefield at once. The idea is that someone is doubly a person but really one person—as opposed to the twins who are really two people.⁶

(Shea, “The Dangerous Job” 385)

During the tests, Sophie “doubles” in order to separate her body from the painful situation she is experiencing. According to Danticat, “Sophie also thinks of doubling as an explanation for cruelty. How could these people who have wives and children they play with murder people” (Shea, “The Dangerous Job” 385)? How could the Tonton Macoutes be responsible for such horrendous crimes? How could the dictator himself? And how could Martine, Sophie’s own mother and all her female ancestors before her, continue the endless cycle of violence on the bodies of their daughters? Sophie narrates that once she passed the test, her mother “walked out of the room with her face buried in her hands” (Breath, Eyes, Memory 85), a gesture that suggests how little control Haitian women have over the power of tradition. Drawing on psychoanalytical approaches, Donette A. Francis reads the act of doubling as “evidence of the psychological state of dissociation” and “a coping mechanism in relation to sex and sexuality that Martine passes on to her daughter” (“Silence” 83...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Caribbean Diasporas and Narrated Lives
• PART I Diasporic Homelands
• PART II Uprooting, Migrancy, Regrounding: Re-writing Exile
• PART III Paradise Islands, Wild Nature, and the Contemporary Tourist Gaze: Re/locating the Caribbean
• Epilogue: Caribbean Diasporic Voices in a Post-9/11 America
• Works Cited
• Index