Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature

Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317818205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory and belonging. In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are in-process and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and inter-subjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interest students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity.

Part I
Return as Memory Reconstructed

1Migration, Exclusion, and “Home” in Edwidge Danticat’s Narratives of Return

Valerie Kaussen

Edwidge Danticat’s novels, short stories, essays, and memoires represent the Haitian experience of immigration and exile with almost ethnographic precision. A Haitian American born in Haiti, Danticat writes stories of immigrants, exiles, and their children that inevitably meditate upon the meaning of home and homeland as both a psychic and geographic process which entails the crossing of borders that are at once legal, emotional, ideological, and cultural. The context of Danticat’s stories of Haitian immigration is often the violent geopolitics of Haitian-US relations, the long history of invasions, occupations, economic exploitation, puppet governments, and support of murderous dictators.¹ The neocolonialism of Haiti’s relationship with the United States indeed explains why so many Haitians have chosen in the first place to make the journey from their island birthplace to the urban centers of the United States: New York, Boston, and Miami. In this article, though, I will focus on a particular type of migrant, one that I term the “ghostly migrant,” who populates so much of Danticat’s fiction. Deportees, illegal aliens, boat people, perpetrators, and victims of political violence, their stories, as Danticat shows, demonstrate most vividly how the violent relationship between the United States and Haiti is internalized as personal, subjective history.² It is that very violence, both structural and political, that turns the migrant subject into a ghost, who searches for home, often in vain.

In addition to the ideological, cultural, and linguistic borders that all migrants must negotiate as they move back and forth between the homeland and the adopted home, Danticat’s “ghosts,” while remaining “invisible,” must also cross and re-cross borders that are policed by coast guards, border patrols, and other institutions of surveillance. Psychic and material violence for these wandering ghosts, then, is ongoing. As she shows, the Haitian migrant’s exclusion from “home,” from security and legitimacy, is repeatedly renewed, reproduced and reinforced by technologies of power that are both external and internalized. For the Haitian migrant subject, having a place to call “home,” then, is a sign of social status and legitimacy, inseparable from legal forms of recognition and the right to belong to a nation, a society, a people.

The ghostly migrant’s loss and exclusion can be explained as the condition that Orlando Patterson has described as the loss of personhood, or “social death.” In a groundbreaking study on the world history of slavery, Patterson writes an ontology of the enslaved. He argues that the slave is a “socially dead person” because s/he is “alienated from all ‘rights’ or claims of birth” (1985, 7). The slave’s relationship to the master is one of submission, which requires that the slave lose personal status, future aspirations, and communal ties. The slave is thus a “genealogical isolate” (Patterson 1985). In addition to being denied the legitimacy or belonging bestowed through filiation or connections to past and future generations, the slave is also excluded from the institutions that grant rights, personal legitimacy, or official recognition of subjectivity.

We can indeed read Haitian history though the category of the slave’s social death, if we apply “social death” metaphorically to refer to the exclusion of whole populations, states, and regions. The nation of Haiti was founded in 1804 on the ashes of the French colony of St. Domingue following the only successful slave revolt in world history. A major blow to both the French colonial project in the Americas and the global slave trade more generally, this example of a population demanding its right to nationhood and freedom did not entail the integration of Haiti as a member of the world community. The United States and Europe, especially France, were slow to grant diplomatic recognition, erecting around the island nation what Sybille Fischer (2004) has termed a “cordon sanitaire,” as the example of a successful slave revolt and black nation-building threatened existing systems of racialized inequality, including chattel slavery. Diplomatic isolation of this “pariah nation” did not prevent the world powers from exploiting Haiti economically and commercially, resulting in a country that never fully recovered from the destruction wrought by the protracted revolution and war of independence.³

Furthermore, while St. Domingue’s slaves liberated themselves, the colonial organization of social life and capital persisted post-independence: the class of affranchies (free people of color) as well as military leaders took over the plantations and the government. Early leaders made hard labor in the fields mandatory and militarized the labor process. By the mid-nineteenth century, they permitted the former slaves and their descendants, the majority of the population, to settle into a system of subsistence farming. Nonetheless, the Haitian peasants never escaped the social death of their enslaved ancestors. Separated from the urban elite by religion (vodou / Catholicism), language (Kreyòl / French), and culture (African-derived / European), for most of its history the peasant majority has existed in a state of quasi-apartheid; required to carry identity papers stamped with their status as “peasants,” a condition of exclusion that was inherited and perpetual, they were excluded from education, legal rights, and other benefits of citizenship.

The peasantry’s social death was the condition that allowed the Haitian elite to exploit their productivity, and that elite was, in turn, exploited by the international community, whose trade with Haiti was based on highly unequal terms. With the end of the Spanish-American war, the United States’ long-standing economic exploitation of Haiti culminated in a fullfledged military occupation that lasted for nineteen years (1915–34) and that initiated intimate US involvement in Haitian political and economic affairs. During the Cold War, the United States supported the murderous Duvalier dictatorship—François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and later his son Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”)—as a bulwark against Cuba, despite the dictatorship’s killing and torture of thousands through its private militia known as the ton-tons macoutes. Haitian history, though, is also a history of resistance, and resistance to the Duvaliers was ongoing. A democratic movement, which gained ground through grassroots organizations and church groups during the late seventies and early eighties, finally succeeded in toppling Baby Doc in 1986. A series of military dictatorships followed until 1990, when Haiti finally had its first fair and open election, bringing Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the National Palace. What was heralded as a new day in Haiti’s history was short-lived, however: deposed in a military coup nine months after taking office, Aristide went into exile for three years, during which time thousands were killed and tortured under the coup leadership, some of whom were trained by the US military. Aristide was re-elected in 2000, deposed again in 2004 by US-backed insurrectionists and members of the army that he had disbanded. Aristide’s supporters were brutally hunted down and killed during the interim government of Gérard Latortue. With the presidency of René Préval beginning in 2006, Haiti settled into some kind of tentative stability, one tragically broken in January of 2010 by the devastating earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince and took the lives of at least 250,000 people. The country is only now beginning to recover.

Indeed, the category of social death has continuing relevance in contemporary Haiti, a post-plantation society that is still enmeshed in global “relations of domination” that deny personhood. To supplement Patterson, we can understand the condition of social death in the contemporary global economy through Manuel Castells’ analysis of what he terms the “network society” and the creation of the Fourth World. Castells offers a spatial model of global capitalism in which global “networks of capital, labor, information, and markets [are] linked up through technology, valuable functions, people, and localities around the world” (2000, 368). What I have termed “social death” is defined by Castells in terms of populations and regions that are “socially excluded” from these networks and thus “deprived of value and interest for the dynamics of global capitalism” (Castells 2000). The “Fourth World” is not restricted to areas like sub-Saharan Africa and much of Latin America and the Caribbean, where the socially excluded represent the majority of the population; we also find the Fourth World, according to Castells, in the ghettoized neighborhoods of US inner cities, the banlieues and the enclaves of jobless youth in European capitals, and the shantytowns of Asia’s prosperous cities (168). On the individual level, social exclusion is defined by Castells as a “process,” in which, for a variety of reasons—including mental illness, homelessness, physical disability, illiteracy, etc.—people are unable to work or support their lives. With his language echoing that of Patterson’s, Castells writes that all of these factors can “send … a person (and his or her family very often) drifting toward the outer regions of society, inhabited by the wreckage of failed humanity” (72).

On a spatial level, according to Castells, territories become “locked in” to marginality through a variety of causes, such as oppressive dictatorships, the decision of police forces to abandon neighborhoods to drug traffickers, devaluation of the agricultural products of a particular area, etc. (167). Again evoking the language of social death, Castells terms these outer regions of the world economy “black holes,” which he describes as populated by millions of “homeless, incarcerated, prostituted, criminalized, brutalized, stigmatized, sick and illiterate persons” (168), whose numbers grow as informational capitalism continues to develop and concentrate value in particular zones. Castells’ model of the uneven distribution of informational capitalism and thus the creation of the Fourth World’s socially excluded zones replaces the Cold War binary of First and Third World. Indeed, the weakening of nation-states in the post-Cold War era has meant that the traditional forms of democratic representation, citizenship rights, and welfare state benefits, which were unevenly extended in the past to Third World populations, today offer less and less protection to the global poor. In a legal sense then, too, the socially excluded are also the socially dead.

My analysis of Danticat’s ghostly migrants assumes that the spaces through which they migrate do not conform to the traditional ideas of bordered nation-states or the First World vs. the Third World. Indeed, if we apply Castells’ definition of global space to the transnational contexts of her work, then the meanings of migration, border crossing, and homeland appear altered. For example, as Danticat shows, when Haitian migrants leave Haiti to settle in the excluded zones of American inner cities, their movement over national borders does not signal a movement to the center. Rather they remain in the Fourth World, carrying their excluded status with them. Similarly, exile can take place within the borders of nation-states like Haiti. This is the case when Haitian subjects cross the heavily policed borders that separate slums, like Cité Soleil and La Saline, from the hillside enclaves above Port-au-Prince, zones connected to the privileged networks of informational capitalism.

While I base my definition of Danticat’s ghostly migrants and the territories through which they travel on Patterson’s and Castells’ analyses of exclusion, these sociological models do not provide terms for analyzing the subjectivity of the migrant ghost, the ways that subjects psychically internalize the structural violence of being marginalized and exiled. Danticat’s work indeed seeks to represent the life worlds of these subjects and the ways that violent exclusion transforms commonly held notions of individual personhood, home, and security. In order to analyze Danticat’s literary representations of the psychic dimensions of social death, migrancy, and violence, i.e., the loss of personhood as a loss of self, we must turn to theories of trauma. Importantly, trauma theories, in describing how trauma is remembered and narrated, emphasize the blurring of borders between life and death, and thus recall the idea of the ghostly.⁴ In The Body in Pain, an exploration of the ways torture “unmakes” the subject, Elaine Scarry states that “whenever death can be designated as ‘soon’ the dying has already begun” (1985, 33). Thus, the trauma of torture and physical pain is partly that “one experiences the body that will end … life, the body that can be killed” (33). This brush with non-being, according to Scarry, “disintegrates” language just as it “disintegrates” the self (33); in torture, as in social death, the prisoner and his/her language is “discredited,” and “destroyed” (35).

For Scarry the imagination has the capacity to “remake” the world of the disintegrated victim of violence. Similarly, Cathy Caruth, focusing more on language and psychic as well as physical trauma, argues that trauma resists language, and in order to comprehend its narration we must maintain the kernel of unknowability. The latter is related to the traumatized subject’s brush with non-being, and thus stories of trauma “oscillate … between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life” (1996, 6–7). While Scarry cites imagination as the vehicle for remaking the traumatized self, Caruth focuses on the intersubjective scene of narrating and listening, which permits a kind of reintegration of the traumatized: “not as the story of the individual in relation to the events of his own past, but as the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another” (8).

Danticat’s short story “Ghosts” indeed meditates upon trauma as an experience of death-in-life that renders the subject a ghost, homeless and haunting the excluded terrain of the Fourth World. “Ghosts” tells the story of a family, the Doriens, who live in a “mid-level” slum of Port-au-Prince called Bel-Air. Despite the increasing violence in their neighborhood, the family continues to serve its new clientele of drug-addled gangsters—the “Ghosts” of the title—because the considerable income they receive allows them to pay for school for their sons, Pascal and Jules. At school, the sons have made contacts that “might one day help them get good jobs and marriages. In order for their children to leave one day without ever having to look back, the Doriens had to stay” (Danticat 2008, 1). Danticat shows social exclusion to indeed be what Castells describes as a “process,” and not a “condition;” a process whose “boundaries shift, and … may vary over time, depending on education, demographic characteristics, social prejudices, business practices, and public policies” (Castells 2000, 72).

The Doriens are indeed threatened by this “drift” toward exclusion, and the decision to profit from the chimès’ patronage of their restaurant—they had “[taken] over the entire establishment” (Danticat 2008, 1)—is a desperate attempt to keep their own children from falling into the ranks of the excluded, the ghostly. Escaping that fate means migration to a zone that permits social mobility and economic recognition. Jules migrates to North America, while Pascal attempts to enter into the networks of capitalism that are available to a few lucky souls in Port-au-Prince. Jules leaves Bel-Air sooner than he expects, because he is a wanted man. Having taken a job as a policeman (“the government had overturned again and the United Nations had come to train another police force” [1]), Jules is targeted by the gangs, and he has indeed “never looked back.”

The term “Ghosts” is the English translation of the Kreyòl word, chimè, the name that the political opposition gave to the poor young militants (some gangsters) that gained media visibility especially following the US military’s 2004 forced removal of Aristide, who was supported by many chimè. Danticat describes the chimè with economy, precision, and great sensitivity to the political contexts of their infamy:

The gang members … were, for the most part, former street children who couldn’t remember ever having lived in a house, boys whose parents had died or been murdered during the dictatorship, leaving them alone in a lawless and overpopulated city. Later, these young men were joined by deportees from the United States and Canada and by some older men from the neighborhood, aspiring-rap-musician types. The older local men were “connected”—that is, ambitious businessmen and politicians used them to swell the ranks of political demonstrations, giving them guns to shoot when a crisis was needed and having them withdraw when calm was required...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Roots and Routes in American Literature about Return
• PART I Return as Memory Reconstructed
• PART II Restorative Nostalgias: Return as Emotional Re-Attachment
• PART III Impossible Returns
• List of Contributors
• Index