Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Specters of Home in Two Caribbean Memoirs

2018; Project MUSE; Volume: 61; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/caj.2018.0024

2766-0265

Melva Persico,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

CLA JOURNAL 207 Specters of Home in Two Caribbean Memoirs Melva Persico “Writing is what remains when everything else has been stripped away. To write the other is to recognize him as separate from yourself, but also, in a tangible way, to memorialize him as someone deeply and intimately connected to you.” (Baker 225-6) Can we really say good-bye to those we love? Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat provide unequivocal responses to this otherwise rhetorical question in their use of the memoir to mourn the loss of loved ones. Family members, deceased and sometimes living, personify the ever-present, presumedlost homespace. Kincaid’s and Danticat’s acts of mourning family members and loss of their Caribbean homespaces can be read as extended good-byes in their respective works My Brother (Kincaid 1997) and Brother, I’m Dying (Danticat 2007). But what or where is home for these diasporic writers, and how does its specter haunt their lives? To find answers, I explore connections between the treatment of home in diaspora theory and the absence-presence inherent in the concept of hauntology. As I examine this connection and discuss ways in which the autobiographical genre of the memoir breathes continued life into the Caribbean homespace, I also pay close attention to important post-colonial and neo-colonial issues they raise and their implications for the future. The concept of home in the writing of Kincaid and Danticat has engaged the attention of a number of critics.1 Some critical works have looked at their works comparatively, examining ways in which they treat the themes of home, exile and diaspora. Gerise Herndon’s “Return to native lands, reclaiming the other’s language” treats homelessness and liminality in Danticat’s The Farming of Bones” (1998) and Kincaid’s My Brother (1997). The tensions between the diasporic home and the Caribbean homespace as seen through botanical tropes is the focus of Jana Evan Braziel’s analysis of these writers’ bildungsromans, Lucy (Kincaid 1990) and Breath, Eyes, Memory (Danticat 1994). The themes of the diasporic writer and writers in exile (or ex/isle) are concerns that Ifoena Fulani raises in the context of 1 Numerous critical works treat the theme of home in Kincaid and Danticat’s works. See Barnwell, Kattian,“Motherlands and Other lands: Home and Exile in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Paule Marshall’s “Praisesong for the Widow” Caribbean Studies, vol. 27, no. 3/4, Jul - Dec 1994, pp. 451454 ; Danticat. Liverpool UP, 2007; Samway, Patrick.“A Homeward Journey: Edwidge Danticat’s Fictional Landscapes, Mindscapes, Genescapes, and Signscapes in Breath, Eyes, Memory” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 1, 2003. pp. 75-84; and Saunders, James Robert.“Jamaica Kincaid: The Long Road from Antigua to Vermont.” Hollins Critic, vol. 50, no. 1, Feb 2013, p 1+. 208 CLA JOURNAL the challenges Caribbean women writers face in their attempts to find success in the US publishing industry.2 In “Caribbean Women Writers and the Politics of Style: A Case for Literary Anancyism,” this critic examines closely different trickster-like textual and non-textual strategies that Kincaid and Danticat have employed to progress and succeed in the US literary publishing market. In the present article, my focus on home and diaspora treats some of the tensions these critics have raised albeit through bringing together an aspect of diaspora theory with hauntology. Home is a presence that is not always welcome, and it looms large in the works under consideration. Nevertheless, for the diasporic writer, home is not a singular place or concept. James Clifford states, “Diaspora cultures [...] mediate, in a lived tension, the experiences of separation and entanglement, of living here and remembering/desiring another place” (453). The concept of separation from a place, while still bound to or entangled in it, relates to the way I treat the concept of hauntology in this article. In Spectres of Marx (1994), Jacques Derrida uses the term hauntology in reference to Europe’s socio-political situation after the fall of Communism. Derrida agrees with Marx’s assertion that the specter of Communism constantly haunts Europe. He contends that proclamations of its demise are misplaced since this specter still manifests itself in various ways. This...