Traumatic Realism in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat

Abstract

say we 're crud at bottom of pot. They say some people don't belong anywhere and that's us -Farming of Bones (56) In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick La Capra uses expression realism to describe literature that somehow attempts to come to terms, affectively and cognitively, with limiting experiences involving trauma and its aftereffects (26). The thesis of this paper is that fiction of Edwidge Danticat offers a view of trauma as a dominant motif of Haitian experience, a pervasive and prevailing occurrence that defines rather than defies culture and identity. As such, her vision contradicts cultural critics who view trauma as an anomaly, an aberration in history, a gap or rip in cultural fabric that shatters meaning (Berger 24, Herman 1992, 51). Placing Danticat's fiction in context of recent theory, this study will create an overview of trauma as a clinical symptom and a cultural trope in Krik? Krack! (1996), Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), The Farming of Bones (1998), and The Dew Breaker (2004). The topics isolated for analysis are Danticat's description of traumatic event and its impact on psyche, cultural dimensions of her characters' efforts to transcend catastrophic loss and embrace life, and implications of their access to closure and recovery. Krik? Krak!, a collection of short stories or vignettes related to town of Ville Rose, is considered first because many of stories were published independently between 1991 and 1994. In book, Danticat sets tone and themes of Haitian experience that are developed in her novels. A chorus of voices gives testimony to omnipresence of trauma, defined by Greeks to be an injury inflicted on a body and revised by Freud to mean a wound inflicted upon mind (Caruth 1996,4). In these stories, overwhelming presence of physical threat to life or body integrity does not shatter cognitive memory but is remembered and reported with frank and unmitigated detail that explicitly demands a place in personal and national consciousness.1 The threat of catastrophe spans a wide range of time and space to create a post-traumatic account of Haitian history that juxtaposes advent of slavery with a Biblical loss of paradise. In Danticat's fiction, however, existence of golden or paradisiac age is too vague and distant to be meaningful. The resulting view coincides with one in which the anxiety attendant upon absence may never be entirely eliminated or overcome but must be lived with in various ways (LaCapra 2001, 57). of Sea opens collection with a context of pervasive adversity for Haitians on and off island. The narrative juxtaposes unsent letters of two young lovers who are separated by violence of Duvalier regime. Danticat contrasts Biblical faith of refugees on a flimsy raft who see themselves as Job or Children of Israel, with an image of metaphysical alienation through words written by young dissident in their midst: say Lord gives and takes away. I have never been given very much. What is there to take away? (KK 7). Abandoned by God and country, he and his companions are also pariahs to neighboring islanders who treat Haitians like dogs. A fellow refugee claims, To them we are not human (KK 14). Their fate is echoed in words of young man's lover, who remains in Haiti to be doomed in other ways. She is left behind to suffer his absence and to live under constant threat of violence that is occurring within earshot and has happened before all over country (KK 17). This young woman considers herself dead already (KK 16) and views hope as the biggest weapon of all to use against us (KK 19). The plot of next story, Nineteen Thirty-Seven, continues historical chain of violence with imprisonment and death of a woman unjustly accused of witchcraft. …

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