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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2019

The Memory Script of the Diasporic Body in a Selection of Short Stories by Edwidge Danticat

Résumé

This paper will focus on the memory script of the diasporic body, separated on either side of the Atlantic Ocean between the Caribbean and the United States, as it surfaces in the short stories by Edwidge Danticat that stage migrants, refugees, and the dyaspora (Krik? Krak!, 1996, and The Dew Breaker, 2004). The stories hold the migrant body at the center of the text, used and abused, commodified, pulled apart, transformed, tortured, scarred, denied their freedom, or made absent to themselves. Bodies haunt Edwidge Danticat’s narratives and inhabit all its cracks, they bear the mark of the traumatic Haitian past and those of the traumatic American present, one reverberating the other. The very process of remembering and forgetting is physically inscribed in the body as it is assaulted by crises of epilepsy, maimed by laryngectomies, plagued by phantom limb pain, shattered by nightmares, speaking in tongues. The body of the characters in the short stories becomes a historically scripted text where involuntary remembering and forgetting happens, what Brinda Mehta calls a ‘memoryspeak’ (Mehta, Notions of Identity, Diaspora and Gender, 80). Yet, one has to wonder whether the migrating body as a site of dispossession, of memory and forgetting, could also be a site of resistance and one of reclaiming, whether the body as a space of death could become, through the sheer power of text, ‘a space of transformation’ (Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism: A Study in terror and healing, 4). The short stories ‘Children of the Sea’, ‘NY Day Women’, ‘Caroline’s Wedding’ from Krik? Krak!, and ‘The Book of the Dead’, ‘Seven’, ‘Water Child’, ‘Night Talkers’, ‘The Bridal Seamstress’, ‘The Funeral Singer’ from The Dew Breaker, as well as ‘Without Inspection’, recently published in The New Yorker, will be used.

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Littératures
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Dates et versions

hal-04407448 , version 1 (20-01-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04407448 , version 1

Citer

Judith Misrahi-Barak. The Memory Script of the Diasporic Body in a Selection of Short Stories by Edwidge Danticat. Of Remembering and Forgetting: Perspectives on History and Memory, GRS, Delhi University, Mar 2019, Delhi (India), France. ⟨hal-04407448⟩

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