When Spirits Talk: Reading Erna Brodber's Louisiana for Affect

Abstract

Slavery is a specter that haunts the circum-Caribbean region. 1 In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot likens the invisible yet felt presence of slavery long after the institution has ended to a ghost."Slavery here is a ghost," he writes, "both the past and a living presence; and the problem of historical representation is how to represent that ghost, something that is and yet is not." 2 The idea of slavery as a ghostly presence was popularized with the publication of Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved.The spiteful spirit haunting house 124 belongs to a baby girl who was killed by her runaway slave mother to prevent her from being returned to slavery.Ella, a minor character who is versed in folk healing, leads the community in an exorcism of the house.3 When she says of the ghost, "people who die bad don't stay in the ground," she is alluding to an African-derived belief that the spirits of those who die an unnatural death or do not receive proper burial rites remain on earth to do mischief.4 In the Americas, restless spirits often manifest the violent deaths so many people of African descent suffered.Yet, as 1 Including the slave-holding states of the United States as part of the Caribbean region, Joseph Roach characterizes New Orleans as a "circum-Caribbean cosmopolis" and a circum-Atlantic memory as addressing "the centrality of the diasporic and genocidal histories of Africa and the Americas, North and South, in the creation of the culture of modernity."Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 179. 2 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 147.3 Ella is described as a "practical woman who believed there was a root either to chew or avoid for every ailment."Toni

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