“A revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past”: literary constellations as decolonial strategies in contemporary fiction by afro-caribbean woman writers

Abstract

Literary writing has an important role when it comes to revisiting the past and brushing history against the grain, bringing to light voices and stories that very often were erased. The specific stylistic features of this discourse make it a complementary element to historiography and testimonials, especially when it is used to talk about events that cause traumatic experiences in a nation, such as periods of dictatorship, a state of emergency, civil wars… moments that seem to persist in Latin American and Caribbean countries. The task to represent the traumatic past is accomplished in the four novels which comprise the literary corpora of this dissertation. The four Caribbean woman writers recreate in fiction turbulent periods in their countries of origin and, through the fictional categories of their novels, they manage to have access to the gaps opened by history and memory, alleviating, to some extent, the pain of the past. In Song of the Water Saints, Nelly Rosario creates a protagonist who is in constant movement as she attempts to transgress and transcend her condition of poverty in the Dominican Republic, which is under international occupation. In The Dew Breaker, Edwidge Danticat intertwines stories about people, including a former torturer, who try to overcome the traumatic past, the terrible legacy from the Duvalier dictatorship.. In The True History of Paradise, Margaret Cezair-Thompson opens the archive that contains stories that her protagonist has listened to since childhood and uses them to create a fictional historiography about her homeland, Jamaica. Finally, in The Loneliness of Angels, Myriam J.A. Chancy brings to life characters whose spiritual connection makes them guardians of the stories lived by victims of the Haitian dictatorial regime. The analysis of the novels in this dissertation was based on Walter Benjamin’s concept of constellation as a means to find an element capable of articulating and unifying the fictional structure, thus, giving cohesion to the poetic element in the novels. This analysis focuses on two specific elements through which the novels reconstruct the past and revisit its ruins: movement and the living archive. Thus, it is through the simulation of truth and as an aesthetic mechanism that the novels chosen to comprise the corpora of this dissertation contribute to the process of revisiting the past and overcoming trauma. The present dissertation is also guided by the concept of decoloniality and the poetics of postmemory. As this is a research in the field of literary studies, the adopted method is the exploratory one, involving the mapping of theoretical sources both relevant and related to the theme in order to analyze the fictional corpora, finding theoretical and critical answers