Caribbean Women Writers and Globalization

Fictions of Independence

Helen C. Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317169680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Caribbean Women Writers and Globalization offers a fresh reading of contemporary literature by Caribbean women in the context of global and local economic forces, providing a valuable corrective to much Caribbean feminist literary criticism. Departing from the trend towards thematic diasporic studies, Helen Scott considers each text in light of its national historical and cultural origins while also acknowledging regional and international patterns. Though the work of Caribbean women writers is apparently less political than the male-dominated literature of national liberation, Scott argues that these women nonetheless express the sociopolitical realities of the postindependent Caribbean, providing insight into the dynamics of imperialism that survive the demise of formal colonialism. In addition, she identifies the specific aesthetic qualities that reach beyond the confines of geography and history in the work of such writers as Oonya Kempadoo, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Pauline Melville, and Janice Shinebourne. Throughout, Scott's persuasive and accessible study sustains the dialectical principle that art is inseparable from social forces and yet always strains against the limits they impose. Her book will be an indispensable resource for literature and women's studies scholars, as well as for those interested in postcolonial, cultural, and globalization studies.

Chapter 1

Land of Mountains

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce, Ulysses

There is always a place where nightmares are passed on through generations like heirlooms.

Edwidge Danticat, Breath Eyes Memory

The Scars of History

When we are first introduced to the title character of Edwidge Danticat’s Dew Breaker he has gone missing during a trip to Tampa, Florida from his current home in Brooklyn. His daughter Ka, the story’s narrator, recounts the description of him she gives to the police:

‘Sixty-five, five feet eight inches, one hundred and eighty pounds, with a widow’s peak, thinning salt-and-pepper hair, and velvet-brown eyes—’ . . . My father has had partial frontal dentures since he fell off his and my mother’s bed and landed on his face ten years ago when he was having one of his prison nightmares. I mention that too. Just the dentures, not the nightmares. I also bring up the blunt, ropelike scar that runs from my father’s right cheek down to the corner of his mouth, the only visible reminder of the year he spent in prison in Haiti. (DB 4–5)

We are thus introduced to two of the central tropes of the book, both suggesting the inescapable weight of the past as it bears down upon people in the present: nightmares and scarring. Like his daughter not yet knowing the truth, the reader initially assumes that in his past her father had been a victim of the Duvalier regime, and that memories of his imprisonment continue to torture him. Later in the collection we meet many other characters who carry the physical marks and manifestations of past trauma: the soles of a woman’s feet are ‘thin and sheer like an albino baby’s skin’ because they were whipped as punishment when she refused to dance with a shoukèt laroze (dew breaker) (131–2); another woman has been blind since agents of the dictatorship set fire to her home (95); and yet another stammers in fear decades after being tortured (198). We are soon dispossessed of the misapprehension that Ka’s father is such a victim, however, when he returns to his daughter and confesses that he ‘was the hunter, he was not the prey’ (20).1 Far from bearing the marks of torture, he inflicted wounds like those felt by the other characters; his own scar is the result of the last desperate act of resistance from an activist priest, his final victim. As the collection continues we are given many more descriptions of this man that, despite superficial differences, match up with this first one, and he is remembered variously by survivors as a wanton sadist, by his wife as one who has undergone a miraculous transfiguration, by himself as both hunter and prey.

Many times we witness cases of mistaken identity, and despite the recurrent descriptive details proving that Ka’s father was a shoukèt laroze, enough doubt is planted to make us sporadically question whether this is indeed the infamous dew breaker, and to look beyond surfaces to a possibly more complicated truth. One could conclude that the text wants us to reject such simple formulae as ‘hunter and prey’ in favor of complexity and indeterminacy: every story can be told from more than one perspective; every truth is relative; even torturers may be loving fathers and were once vulnerable children. In this way Danticat’s fiction seems to conform to the critical generalizations about Caribbean women writers sketched in the introduction. In extension, like Breath, Eyes, Memory, Krik? Krak!, and Farming of Bones—texts that also deploy intertextuality, fragmentation, plural narrative voices—The Dew Breaker concentrates on the particular experiences of women, and is concerned with gender, sexuality, and familial relationships.

But these elements are interwoven with others shared by earlier Haitian writers (in French and kreyòl), including the Indigénistes of the 1920s and the revolutionary writers such as René Depestre and Jacques Stephen Alexis of the post-World War Two period:2 Consciousness of history and the immense gulf between Haitian (and global) elites and the impoverished majority (‘men and women whose tremendous agonies filled every blank space in their lives’ [DB 137]); opposition to imperialism and domestic dictatorships; a commitment to justice and the struggle for liberation. Danticat helped translate one of Alexis’ novels, L’espace d’un Cillement in to In the Flicker of an Eye (Shea 14). Alexis also wrote a novel, Compère Général Soleil, about Trujillo’s 1937 massacre of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, which Danticat treats in her short story ‘1937’ and novel, Farming of Bones. Danticat’s fiction is always aware of the continuing dynamics of imperialism that combine with domestic forces to thwart Haitians’ periodic mass revolts. Writing in the shadow of the end of dechoukaj,3 the defeat of the Lavalas movement, and renewed repression and economic crisis, Danticat transforms these realities in to emotionally and visually powerful fiction laced with motifs of suicide, dead infants, breech and still births, scars and nightmares, all of which symbolize lost hope and political despair, but also those of fire, flight, transformation, and resurrection that suggest continued hope for social change and renewal.

Sugar, Slaves, and Occupation

In ‘Monkey Tails’ in late 1980s Haiti a student quotes the words of Voltaire to his younger friend: ‘“C’est a ce prix qu’ils mangent du sucre en Europe . . . in Europe they eat sugar with our blood in it’” (153). This moment typifies the way Haiti’s history of slavery and sugar production, and that of revolutionary heroism, find their way into Danticat’s narratives. In Breath, Eyes, Memory the narrator’s Tante Atie ‘would talk about the sugar cane fields, where she and my mother practically lived’ (4) while retelling tales of Guineans—‘the people of creation’—who were appointed the task of carrying the sky due to their immense strength (24–5); in ‘Wall of Fire Rising’ the child Guy learns by heart the lines of slave revolutionary Boukman while living in a shantytown ‘under the shadow’ of a sugar mill (66). Danticat’s works thus illustrate how ‘a living history’ is ‘powerfully embodied in Haitian culture’ (Renda 45). The past continues to weigh on the present in very literal ways—sugar production continues to be central to the economy long after slavery ends, semi-feudal conditions persist in rural areas—as well as in folklore handed down across the generations. Most importantly, imperialism continues to circumscribe the lives of Haitians 200 years after their successful revolution gave birth to the world’s first independent black nation.

Many historians of Haiti see in this nation’s development what Paul Farmer has called a ‘template of colony:’ Relations and events that become central to the Caribbean (and often the entire colonized world) happen earlier and in starker form here. In After the Dance, her tribute to Jacmel’s carnival, Danticat tells of the myths of Anacaona, the Arawak high priestess, that survived the post-Columbus decimation of her people and subsequent division, in 1697, of the island into the French Saint Domingue, now Haiti, and the Spanish Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic: ‘Anacaona [has had] schools and shops named after her . . . [and] has inspired a well-known play by Jacmel-born novelist Jean Metellus, along with countless poems and songs on both sides of the island’ (AD 41). While the ensuing plantation economy and slave trade mirrored those of much of the Caribbean, Saint Domingue was exceptional in that it ‘became France’s richest colony, the brightest jewel of the French crown, as was often said in the 1700s’ (41). Maroon resistance against slavery was also common to other plantation societies, but Haiti’s was again the only one to defeat the combined armies of Spain, Britain and France and overcome the divisions between slaves, mulattoes, and free blacks in order to become ‘the first—and for some long decades the only—independent nation in the American hemisphere, where the notion of Liberty applied equally to all citizens’ (Haiti: State Against Nation Trouillot 44).

But if this remarkable success anticipated the mass realization of independence region-wide in the second half of the twentieth century, so too did it usher in the structural contradictions of the postcolonial era. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot asserts, Haiti was ‘the first testing ground of neocolonialism’ (57), as noncolonial forms of imperialist domination quickly moved in to replace the colonial system: ‘No longer a colony, yet a country standing outside the international political order conceived by the West, Haiti could not fully benefit from its hard-gained independence in a world that was not ready to accept the implications of its existence’ (58). The powers of the world ostracized Haiti, refusing to respect its sovereignty and repeatedly invading its waters: France extended recognition in 1825 only in return for 150 million francs as compensation for the planters who lost their ‘property’ in the revolution, saddling Haiti with a crippling debt; the U.S.A. did not formalize relationships until 1862. This global pariah status ensured that terms of trade were against Haiti while ‘the foreign trader has always operated in Haiti with the assurance that he can call in a foreign power if necessary’ (67). The constraints of the post-colonial era—debt, unfair trade, foreign military invasion, and continuing economic dependence—thus hampered Haiti’s development one 150 years earlier than the other nations considered here.

American imperialism also supplanted European colonialism earlier in Haiti: the 19-year-long occupation beginning in 1915 was the climax of decades of gunboat diplomacy designed to establish U.S. supremacy and displace Germany, the primary rival in the region. The narrator of Danticat’s ‘1937’ says that ‘[t]he Americans taught us how to build prisons. By the end of the 1915 occupation, the police in the city really knew how to hold human beings trapped in cages’ (KK 35). Mary Renda’s account of the occupation fleshes out this passing comment:

While in Haiti, marines installed a puppet president, dissolved the legislature at gunpoint, denied freedom of speech, and forced a new constitution on the Caribbean nation—one more favorable to foreign investment. With the help of the marines, U.S. officials seized the customshouses, took control of Haitian finances . . . Meanwhile, marines waged war against insurgents (called Cacos) who for several years maintained an armed resistance in the countryside, and imposed a brutal system of forced labor that engendered even more fierce Haitian resistance. By official U.S. estimates, more than 3,000 Haitians were killed during this period; a more thorough accounting reveals that the death toll may have reached 11,500. The occupation also reorganized and strengthened the Haitian military. (10)

Haiti played an important role for the U.S. in its early imperialist plan for the region: Trouillot explains that the occupation paved the way for the Duvalier dictatorships of the second half of the twentieth century, both by heightening latent socioeconomic contradictions and by prefiguring methods of repression. In turn, the regimes of François, ‘Papa Doc,’ and then his son, Jean-Claude, ‘Baby Doc,’ Duvalier continued to serve the needs of U.S. imperialism: the former importantly became an unconditional ally of American capitalism and an ‘anti-communist’ counterweight to Cuba during the cold war;4 the latter was a willing champion of the ‘Puerto Rican’ model of economic development, offering up Haiti’s poor as a cheap, nonunionized workforce for foreign-owned offshore manufacture. Between 1970 and 1976 the U.S. installed 230 new industrial plants as investors eagerly exploited the cheap labor created through dispossession, immiseration, and political repression (Haiti Films).5

Hunter and Prey

Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak! illustrate the impact of Duvalierism’s relentless regime of terror. In the novel the narrator is herself the product of her mother’s rape by an anonymous Macoute, the memory of which forces her to leave her home country for New York City, where she is haunted by nightmares and eventually kills herself. In the Haitian scenes we see the casual brutality of the Macoutes, whose presence is overtly sexualized and intimidating. A gang gather close to the food stand of Tante Atie’s friend Louise when Sophie is passing with her grandmother: ‘One of them was staring at me . . . He stood on the tip of his boots and shoved an old man aside to get a better look. I walked faster. He grabbed his crotch with one hand, blew me a kiss, then turned back to the others’ (Breath, Eyes, Memory 117). Moments later this Macoute accuses the coal vendor, ironically called Dessalines, of stepping on his foot, and pounds his gun butt into the man. As her grandmother fearfully pulls her away, Sophie looks back: ‘The coal vendor was curled in a fetal position on the ground. He was spitting blood. The other Macoutes joined in, pounding their boots on the coal seller’s head. Every one watched in shocked silence, but no one said anything’ (118). After we learn of Dessalines’ death at their hands, Sophie reflects on the myth and reality of the Tonton Macoutes and her mother’s brutal rape as a sixteen year old (138–140). In the course of this passage Sophie reflects on a common saying: ‘Who invented the Macoutes? The devil didn’t do it and God didn’t do it’ (138). The novel does not answer this question directly, but it allows us to see that state terror has its roots in Haiti’s history, which has always been embedded in global relations.

In Krik? Krak! Macoutes loom over the characters in stories set before and after the ouster of Duvalier: in the latter the coup regime reimposes the climate of terror under which everyone was a potential victim and ‘women were sometimes treated the same as men, often worse’ (Haiti: State Against Nation Trouillot 167). In ‘The Missing Peace’ we meet a young boy and girl prematurely aged by social forces: the narrator, 14-year- old Lamort, so named because her mother died in childbirth; and teenage Raymond, a khaki-uniformed guard who somehow survived the transition between ‘old’ and ‘new’ regimes with only a leg wound. The title refers to the password—incongruously ‘peace’ for a while—that could be the difference between life and death for one caught out after curfew by a trigger-happy teenage guard. Lamort’s grandmother makes a little money by renting a room to foreign journalists who come to view the mass grave in a nearby churchyard and take home decontextualized images of chaos and violence. The current tenant, though, tells Lamort that she is not a journalist, but a Haitian American, Emilie, in search of her mother who she fears is dead: ‘“My mother was old regime”’ she tells Lamort, ‘“She was a journalist. For a newspaper called Libèté in Port-au-Prince”’ (111). When she persuades Lamort to break curfew and take her to the churchyard to look for her mother’s corpse the two narrowly escape being shot by Raymond and his fellow guard. As they stand pleading with them, the narrator describes this scene:

Two soldiers passed us on their way to the field. They were dragging the blood-soaked body of a bearded man with an old election slogan written on a T-shirt across his chest: ALONE WE ARE WEAK. TOGETHER WE ARE A FLOOD. The guards were carrying him, feet first, like a breech birth. (117)

The blood-soaked body and the vulnerability of the girl and woman who bear witness are in painful contrast to the image of strength and unity evoked by the slogan.

Dew Breaker pursues the question, posed in Krik? Krak!, of what produces and motivates the Macoutes. By the 1950s the conflicts exacerbated by the occupation came to a head, as the peasantry, already drained to such an extent that it was at or below subsistence level, was hard hit by another collapse in the international coffee market. A series of short-lived governments were unable to offer any solution other than increased taxation and repression. In 1957 a campaign of military terror was unleashed on the suffering population: ‘[T]he totalitarian response … was the brainchild of the army trained by the Marines, and particularly of the cadets of the graduating class of 1930–31, which included Magloire, Cantave, and Kébreau’ (148). That year a decree banned ‘drawings, prints, paintings, writings, or any other mode of expression of thought aimed at undermining the authority of the state’ (151), and another outlawed the wearing of khaki ‘or any other cloth of that shade’—the army was instructed to open fire on anyone wearing light brown or olive green.

In this context, François Duvalier won an election, in September 1957, using the rhetoric of noirisme—black nationalism—and promising to redistribute the wealth out of the hands of the light-skinned elite to the black majority. Once in power he favored the very elite he claimed to despise, and made sure that the share of coffee profits would grow for the merchants and middlemen, and fall for the peasants; Duvalierism thus increased the already extreme social polarization between an amazingly wealthy minority on the one hand, and the impoverished bulk of the population on the other.6 The only we...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction Caribbean Women Writers and Postcolonial Imperialism
• 1 Land of Mountains
• 2 Gateway to the Caribbean
• 3 Land of Waters
• 4 The Spice Isle
• Afterword A Dream Deferred
• Bibliography
• Index