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...the sea or the detention centers at Guantanamo Bay for those intercepted at sea by U.S. Coast Guards and detained there. Danticat's literary texts rethink national boundaries, specifically Haiti's borders of nanchon (nation) and dyaspora (diaspora), and her narratives suggest transnational flows across the Atlantic and the Caribbean in which Haiti's dyaspora informs its nanchon. Danticat intimates that citizenship needs to be thought of as diasporic and transnational rather than merely as national category of identification, and her literary texts also have significant parallels with theorizations by Carolle Charles (1) and Myriam J. A. Chancy (2) for a transnational Haitian feminist politics (3) and poetics. (4) In her migratory texts, Danticat explores the ambivalent diasporizations that annihilate definitive national belonging, noting how the parameters of the national persist and are refigured in the diasporic; like Charles and Chancy, Danticat suggests a transnational feminist politics to address the struggles of women in Haiti and in its dyaspora and to chart cross-national alliances between them.
In this article, I analyze Danticat's literary preoccupations with maternity (embodied, failed, and refused) in her story collection Krik? Krak! (1995) as emblematic of Ayiti (Haiti), nanchon, and dyaspora. The stories in Danticat's Krik? Krak! are interwoven narratives of suffering and violence but also of survival and endurance in Haiti and in its dyaspora, or "tenth department." (5) I also analyze Danticat's feminist "poetics of relation" (6) and her diasporic storytelling about Ayiti through the revolutionary figures of Defilee-la-Folle and Sor Rose in the stories "Nineteen Thirty-Seven" and "Between the Pool and the Gardenias." (7) While Danticat's historical points of reference in Krik? Krak! traverse the boundaries of past and present from an African Creole origin evoked in the folkloric and legendary historical figures of Defilee and Sot Rose to present-day Haiti and her refugee migrations, I will focus more narrowly here on Danticat's transnational feminist re-visioning of Haiti's history through the figures of Sot Rose and Defilee. (8) Danticat uses these heroic maternal figures from the colonial (Sor Rose) and revolutionary (Defilee) periods to underscore the necessity of thinking of nanchon and dyaspora as racialized, gendered, and sexualized terrains.
I. LIEUX (FEMININES ET HAITIENNES) DE MEMOIRE: DEFILEE-LA-FOLLE AND SOR ROSE
French historian Pierre Nora defines lieux de memoire ("places of memory") as "moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded" (289). The French historian further explains that
lieux de memoire are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it. They make their appearance by virtue of the deritualization of our world--producing, manifesting, establishing, constructing, decreeing, and maintaining by artifice and by will a society deeply absorbed in its own transformation and renewal, one that inherently values the new over the ancient, the young over the old, the future over the past. (289)
For Nora, lieux de memoire emerge at that moment when history separates from memory, when history gives an account of its own historiography. Lieux de memoire are fragments of historical memory, separate from history proper or historiography. Nora writes,
One simple but decisive trait of lieux de memoire sets them apart from every type of history to which we have become accustomed, ancient or modern. Every previous historical or scientific approach to memory, whether national or social, has concerned itself with realia, with things in themselves and in their immediate reality. Contrary to historical objects, however, lieux de memoire have no referent in reality; or, rather, they are their own referent: pure, exclusively self-referential signs. This is not to say that they are without content, physical presence, or history; it is to suggest that what makes them lieux de memoire is precisely that by which they escape from history. (299-300)
Once the sense of a totality of history has been swept away by historiography, Nora reasons, lieux de memoire are the fragments of historical memory that remain. We should remember, however, Edouard Glissant's incisive postcolonial critiques of "History" with a capital H as a violent and totalizing Western myth in his provocative Le Discour antillais (Caribbean Discourse), which complicate Nora's own (de-)evolutionary and postmodernist accounts of history and memory. Compare also Joan Dayan's notion of a "vodou history" as articulated in Haiti, History, and the Gods:
A vodou history might be composed from materials such as oral accounts of the possession of Dessalines and his emergence as Iwa, god, or spirit, and equally ambivalent accounts of figures like Ezili, Jean Zombi, or Defilee. Sinkholes of excess, these crystallizations of unwritten history force us to acknowledge inventions of mind and memory that destroy the illusions of mastery that circumvent and confound any master narrative. (54)
Dedee Bazile and Sor Rose are two such lieux (feminines et haitiennes) de memoire, storehoused in the collective memory of Ayiti within the repositories of folklore, legend, chante (songs), pwoveb (proverbs), and other oral histories of vodou.
Sor Rose, according to Ayiti's folklore, was the negresse, or black African slave woman, who was raped by her French master and gave birth to the Repiblik dAyiti (Republique d'Haiti, or Haitian Republic). In Danticat's revisions of Sor Rose as the dead baby Rose in "Between the Pool and the Gardenias," the violence of rape breeds death at the heart of the republic. According to legend, Dedee Bazile--also known in popular folklore as Defilee-la-Folle ("Defilee the Madwoman")--was born to slave parents near Cap Francais. She later followed the revolutionary troops of Dessalines as a peddler; after Dessalines's death and dismemberment, the slave girl gathered together and buried the remaining parts of his body (the corps de Dessalines). In her reading of the revolutionary legend, Dayan writes:
Defilee became the embodiment of the Haitian nation.... Defilee, who presided over Dessalines's battles for independence as his sutler and sometime-partner, is the first to stand by him after his dismemberment. Dessalines, turned into pieces of meat, gets reassembled by the woman who used to sell meat to him and his soldiers. She touches the befouled remains. Like Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary," and varying unnamed women who appear in the resurrection scenes in the Gospels (later known in medieval tradition as the "two Marys" or the "three Marys"), Defilee mourns and cares for the body of the Liberator.... If Defilee summons the tale of a republic, fallen and then resurrected through transformative love, she also remains an image that goes beyond this blessed conversion. Not only does Dedee Bazile ... flesh out the sacred in popular incarnations that intermingle promiscuity and power, sex and sacrament, but her drive to collect Dessalines's body parts has more to do with preventing resurrection than enhancing or witnessing it. (45)
Examining the West African roots of ancestor cults in Haiti through the work of Maya Deren, Dayan explains that unburied body parts were believed to be used as corporeal fragments for bringing the dead back to haunt and commit evil against the living; within this hybrid tradition, Defilee acts like an "oungan or manbo who prevents the dead from returning to life to harm the living" (45). Defilee "transposes," as Dayan phrases it, "apparently contradictory traditions with fluent and convincing ease" (45). Danticat's refigurations of Defilee--in her namesake descendant Defile in the story "Nineteen Thirty-Seven"--ritualize and memorialize this revolutionary woman, as Defilee did the remains of Jean-Jacques Dessalines.
By placing historical allusions to Sor Rose and Defilee within the stories "Nineteen Thirty-Seven" and "Between the Pool and the Gardenias" and by juxtaposing these legendary Haitian myths against more contemporary historical references--the Trujillo Massacres of 1937 and...
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