Creating dangerously: literature as an instrument of resistance in the works of Edwidge Danticat

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to discuss the place Literature may occupy in the process of resistance to hegemonic power. The literary works chosen to illustrate my main argument were the historical novel The Farming of Bones (1998) and the autobiographical narrative Brother, I m Dying (2007), both written by the Haitian-American woman author Edwidge Danticat. In The Farming of Bones, Danticat fictionalizes the tragic, and rather obscure, Parsley Massacre, which took place in the border side of the Dominican Republic in 1937. As both countries have remained silent about this act of State terrorism, the publication of Danticat s historical novel 61 years after the event is exemplary of how literary acts may fill the gap left by historiography. In Brother, I m Dying Danticat narrates the story of the life and the death of her two father figures: her father Andre (Mira) Danticat and her uncle Joseph Dantica (who raised her for 8 years). Joseph, a throat cancer survivor and a pastor who founded both a church and a school in his neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, dies while he was under the care of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, after requesting political asylum in the US. Her father Mira, who migrated in the first years of François Duvalier s regime to the US and worked there as a cab driver, dies a few months after his older brother. Danticat finds out that she is pregnant of her first daughter the same day that she hears that her father s pulmonary fibrosis is in a terminal stage. In Brother, I m Dying, which encompasses the narrative of the self and the other and of public and private spheres, Danticat merges auto/biographical practices with questions related to diaspora, cultural identity, and the politics of memory. The essays in Create Dangerously (2010) as well as various interviews given by the author help reinforce my argument that Edwidge Danticat is an engaged artist who uses her art mainly, but not exclusively by means of her writings as an instrument of resistance to the hegemonic discourse present both in her place of origin and in her country of residence