From Literature of Exile to Migrant Literature

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Modern Language Studies
From Literature of Exile to Migrant Literature
Author(s): Carine M. Mardorossian
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Source:
Modern Language Studies,
Vol. 32, No. 2 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 15-33
Published by: Modern Language Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3252040 .
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From
Literature of
Exile
to
Migrant
Literature
Carine
M.
Mardorossian
[...]
the
whole notion
of
authenticity,
of the authentic
migrant
experience,
is
one
that comes to us constructed
by
hegemonic
voices;
and
so,
what
one
has to tease out
is
what
is
not there.
Spivak,
The
Postcolonial Critic
61
Over the last decade or
so,
some
exiled
postcolonial
writers have
reconfigured
their
identity
by
rejecting
the status of exile for that of
migrant.
Both Salman Rushdie
and
Bharati
Mukherjee,
for
instance, have
adopted
the term
"(im)migrant"
to de-
scribe both their
literary
production
and
their
personal experience
of
transcultur-
ation.
Similarly,
the second
generation
of Caribbean writers
(Caryl Phillips,
Fred
D'Aguiar, Edwidge
Danticat,
Michelle
Cliff,
Jamaica
Kincaid,
Julia
Alvarez)
who
are
increasingly
settling
in the US rather than
in
the "Mother
Country,"
are no
longer
as
consistently
discussed in
relation to the condition of exile as the
earlier
generation
(Samuel
Selvon,
George
Lamming,
etc.).
Neither do
they
thematize
it
as
obsessively.
This
paradigmatic
shift from
exile to
migrant
literature has
important
impli-
cations for the
representational
politics
of
contemporary postcolonial
writings
in-
sofar as it
forces us to
re-examine the
relationship
between the
experience
of exile
and
the
process
of
representing
it.
In
other
words,
it is no
longer possible
to assume
that exile is
just
exile even
when it is called
something
else since the
experience
of
exile
(the referent)
is
itself
affected
by
the
change
in
signifiers.
Writers
might
still
be
undeniably living
"in
exile" from
their native
land,
but the
shift from exile to
migrant
literature
challenges literary
criticism's traditional
reliance on that
expe-
Modern
Language
Studies
32.2 @Northeast Modern
Language
Association

16 From Literature
of Exile to
Migrant
Literature
rience
as the "basis"
of
explanation
in
literary
analysis.
Instead,
it makes us look
at
exile
as
a
condition
that itself
requires
explanation
and
ideological
analysis.
It
used to be-and
too often still is-the
case
that the mere mention of
a
writ-
er's
condition
of
exile
was sufficient to
imply
certain
foundational
premises
about
his or
her work. Exiled
writers,
for
instance,
are often
seen
as better
equipped
to
provide
an
"objective"
view of the two
worlds
they
are
straddling
by
virtue
of their
alienation.
They
are
ascribed
the status
of neutral
observers,
a
detachment on
which-according
to the
high
modernist tradition
that still dictates the
discourse
of exile-their
literary
authority
is based.'
Their
"privileged"
status
as in-be-
tweens,
mediators
between
two cultures
thus often
becomes
the cue that
grounds
interpretation
and constructs a
binary
logic
between
an
alienating
"here"
and a ro-
manticized
"homeland"
(or,
as
in
the case
of V.S.
Naipaul,
between
a romanticized
"here/England"
and an
alienating
"there/Caribbean").
The shift from exile to
migrant challenges
this
binary
logic
by
emphasizing
movement, rootlessness,
and the
mixing
of
cultures,
races,
and
languages.
The
world
inhabited
by
the characters is
no
longer
conceptualized
as
"here"
and
"there."
Because
of
her
displacement,
the
migrant's
identity
undergoes
radical
shifts that alter her
self-perception
and
often
result in
her ambivalence towards
both
her old
and new
existence. She
can
no
longer
simply
or
nostalgically
remem-
ber
the
past
as
a
fixed
and
comforting
anchor in her
life,
since
its
contours
move
with the
present
rather
than in
opposition
to
it. Her
identity
is
no
longer
to do with
being
but
with
becoming. Migration
is thus
not a mere interval between fixed
points
of
departure
and
arrival,
but
a
mode of
being
in the
world-"migrancy."
[...]
The
migrant
voice
tells us what
it is
like to
feel a
stranger
and
yet
at
home,
to live
simultaneously
inside and outside one's im-
mediate
situation,
to be
permanently
on the
run,
to
think of
returning
but to re-
alize at
the
same time
the
impossibility
of
doing
so,
since the
past
is
not
only
another
country
but also another
time,
out
of
the
present.
It tells us
what it
is
like
to
traverse borders like the
Rio
Grande,
or
"Fortress
Europe,"
and
by
doing
so
suddenly
become an
illegal
person,
an "other."
(King
et al.
xv)
In
other
words,
rather than
entrenching
identities
such
as
"illegal
immigrant"
in
the
very process
of
examining
their
effects,
the shift
from exile to
migrant
literature
helps
expose
these identities as
constructed
by highlighting
the
ways
in
which
they
come into
being. Similarly,
the
opposition
between the
country
of
origin
and
the
adopted
country
which
typically
structures
interpretations
of
postcolonial
novels
is now invoked and
exposed
as an
ideologically
motivated
configuration
rather
See
Edmondson's "Return of the Native"
for
a discussion
of the coincidence between the
ideal of
objectivity
in
the literature of exile and the rise
of modernism
in
early
twentieth-
century
England.
See Caren
Kaplan's
Questions
of
Travel for a
study
of
Euro-American
modernist aesthetic
tropes
of exile.

Carine
M. Mardorossian 17
than as a
representation
of
the "real."
In its
stead,
migrant
art offers
a
transnational,
cosmopolitan,
multilingual
and
hybrid
map
of the
world that redraws
boundaries
by building bridges
between
Third and First
Worlds.2
In other
words,
as
Hamid
Naficy
explains
in his
study
of Iranian
immigrant
communities
in
Los
Angeles,
this
new
migrancy
is about
"ambivalences,
resistances,
slippages,
dissimulations,
dou-
bling,
and
even subversions of the cultural codes
of both the
home
and
host
soci-
eties"
(xvi).
Interestingly, contemporary
Euro-American criticism's
deployment
of
mi-
grancy
and exile has
not
only
resulted in
redefining
these
metaphors
of
displace-
ment
in
opposition
to each
other,
but it
has in the
process
also contributed to
shifting
the
meaning
of each
away
from its
original
connotations.
For
instance,
"exile"
commonly suggested
an
unwilled
expulsion
from
a
nation,
such that no
re-
turn is
possible
unless
it be under the shadow of
imprisonment,
execution,
or
some other coercive
physical
response,
while
"migrant" suggested
a
relatively
vol-
untary
departure
with
the
possibility
of return.3
For
contemporary
Euro-Ameri-
can critics, however,
migrant
literature
emphasizes
the
dynamic
relationship
between the
past
and
present
and
the
impossibility of
return
whereas the discourse
of
exile tends to
focus on what
was left behind
and
the
possibility
of
return
(inde-
pendently
of how
improbable
that return
is).
This revised
conceptualization
thus
downplays
the relative
freedom that
accompanies migrancy
to
discuss
the
experi-
ence as a
matter of the
cultural
construction
by
the
migrant
writer
("[...] to think
of
returning
but to realize at
the same time the
impossibility
of
doing
so").
Inverse-
ly,
the
coercive
circumstances that
usually
characterize "exile" are also
de-empha-
sized in favor or
a view
that
foregrounds
the renewed
perspective
and
hope
the
experience
brings
the writer. It
is
therefore
possible
to
argue
that
at
the same
time
as
the
movement from
"exile" to
"migrant"
literature has
the
potential
to
make us
examine
the
assumptions
that
ground
our critical
practices,
its
particular
recon-
figuration
of
these
metaphors
of
displacement
also
runs
the
risk of
obscuring
the
change
from an
epoch
of
revolutionary
nationalism
and
militant
anticommunism
2 For
a lucid
account of
how this
intensively
hybridized
and transnational
aesthetic has
achieved a
position
of
prominence
in
Western
literary
circles and
universities,
see Boeh-
mer
(233-243).
As
Boehmer
points
out,
migrant
writings
are
increasingly
hailed as
the
model of
anti-imperialist
literature,
and
their
tales
of
straddling
different cultural
worlds
as
the
culmination of
the
postcolonial.
Recently,
however,
some critics
have
argued
that
the
success of
migrant
literature
is
not
a
sign
of the West's
increasing engagement
with
alternative
perspectives
and
aesthetic
criteria so much as a
celebration
of
cultural forms
that
come closest
to Western
ideas of
high
art.
3 For
instance,
migrant
workers
depart
and
typically
move back and forth
between two na-
tions not
through necessity,
but
through
a
voluntary
search
for
an
improved
life,
etc.

18 From Literature
of Exile to
Migrant
Literature
which
produced
exiles
to
an
epoch
of
capitalist
triumphalism
which
makes
various
migrant
experiences
possible.
In
this
paper,
I
examine the
change
in critical
vocabulary
from exile to
migrant
by
focusing
on two
contemporary
Caribbean novels whose writers have been
liv-
ing
"in
exile"
in the United
States since
their
childhood,
Julia
Alvarez
from the
His-
panophone
Dominican
Republic
and
Edwige
Danticat
from
the
Francophone
Haiti.
Alvarez's
Yo! and
Danticat's
Breath,
Eyes,
Memory
are
particularly
suited
to
serve as
a
template
for
my
discussion
of the
representational
outcomes of the
mi-
grant
condition,
precisely
because
there
are
striking
commonalities
between
the
two authors'
and
their
protagonists'
exilic
experiences.
Both novels focus on
the
individual circumstances
of their
protagonists
as
an
allegory
for the
racial
and
gen-
der dislocations attendant
on the
migrant
condition.
And both novels are
"fiction-
al
autobiographies"
insofar as
they
draw on the
authors' own
experience
of exile
to
depict
the
heroines'
tribulations.
They
center
around
girls
who moved
from
their
native island
of
Hispaniola
to the
United States
at
a
relatively young
age.
Breath,
Eyes,
Memory
begins
in Haiti
which
through
the
young
protagonist
Sophie
Caco's
eyes appears
as a
paradise
of colorful
flowers,
warmth
and
the
loving
care of
her
Tante Atie. The
story
unravels as the
twelve-year
old
Sophie
is then
sent for
from
New York
City by
a mother she has
only
known from
a
photograph
and
tape
re-
cordings. Similarly,
Yo!s
protagonist
Yolanda
Garcia is taken to
Queens,
NY
when
she is ten
years
old. Her immediate
family
had to leave the
Dominican
Republic
to
escape
the
tyrannical
regime
in
place.
For both
characters,
Yolanda
and
Sophie,
the
transplantation
to
North America and immersion
in a
completely
new
language
leads to
a
sense
of
dislocation
and
identity
anxieties
that land them
in
therapy.
Both
of them are
haunted
by ghosts
from the
past
and return to their
homeland as
adults
in
order to
cope
with them.
And most
importantly,
both
of
them have
prob-
lems with
sexuality
and
intimacy
and must confront
aspects
of their
past
sexual
identity
and
integrate
them with their
present.
As
a
result of such
commonalities,
both Alvarez
and Danticat are often
taught
and
discussed as
"migrant"
writers.
By
virtue
of their
transplantation,
they
share
with writers like
Rushdie and
Mukherjee
a
transnational
experience
which is lib-
erally
invoked in
criticism as
a
means of
grounding
the
analysis
of their work. It is
thus ironic
that while the shift from exile to
migrant
literature
helped challenge
an
unproblematical
reliance
on
the
category
of
experience
as the basis of
explanation
in
literary
criticism,
the same kind of undertheorized relation
to
experience
seems
to have resurfaced
in
critical
approaches
to the
new
migrant
aesthetics. The
differ-
ence is that
contemporary
writers
living
in exile are now more
likely
to
be
catego-
rized as
producers
of
"migrant"
rather than "exile"
literature,
thus
reducing
to
a
taxonomic
change
what I
began
this
paper
by
identifying
as
a
paradigmatic
one.
As
my comparative
analysis
of Yo! and
Breath,
Eyes,
Memory
will
show,
immi-
grant
writers are not all
unproblematically embracing
a
transnational
migrant
aes-
thetic
simply
because
they
no
longer envisage
physically returning
to their native

Carine
M. Mardorossian 19
land. The term
"migrant"
has
gained
such
currency
in Western academic circles
to-
day
that
it
is,
I
argue,
too
often
indiscriminately
applied
to
works whose authors
share
a common exilic
experience
they
choose to dramatize it in their fiction.
I
show
that
despite
remarkable
parallels
in Alvarez's
and Danticat's as well as their
protagonists'
"experience"
of
exile,
the
two novels
do not
generate
a
similar
repre-
sentation of
identity
and ambivalence
resulting
from cultural encounter. While
Julia
Alvarez's
Yo!
embodies
the
syncretic
and transnational
aesthetic of
migrant
literature,
Danticat's
Breath,
Eyes,
Memory
retains
a nationalist focus
that belies the
Haitian writer's
classification
as
"transnational"
and
"migrant."4
The distinction in
sensibilities
and worldviews that
separate
these two writers is also
reflected,
I ar-
gue,
in the
diametrically
opposed
narrative
techniques
through
which the
protag-
onists' stories
are told.
In
other
words,
the similarities
between
the
planes
of
experience
in Alvarez's
and Danticat's as well as
in their
protagonists'
lives chal-
lenge
the critical
reliance
on
experience
(and
plot)
as
the
determining
factors
in
shaping
the text's aesthetics
and
highlight
what is at stake
in the
reconfiguration
of
"exile"
as
migrancy.
In
many postcolonial
novels
today,
the
country
of destination
to
which
the
pro-
tagonist
moves is
no
longer,
as
it used to
be,
the old colonial
metropole
(London
or
Paris)
but
the new world
power,
the United States.
This is
especially
true for
West Indian
immigrants
who,
in
the
post-W.W.II
era,
went
to
England
or
France
(the
"mother
country")
in search
of a
better
life,
education
or
publication oppor-
tunities,
but who are
now
migrating
to
the US. For Belinda
Edmondson,
this dif-
ference in
destination
is precisely
what
distinguishes
the
first
generation
of
predominantly
male
Caribbean writers "in exile" from the second
generation
of
predominantly
female
"immigrant"
writers. The
prior generation,
she
argues,
mi-
grated
to
England
in search
of the kind
of
literary
authority
associated with Cam-
bridge
and
Oxford,
while the
heavily
female
contemporary migration
to
the US
is
economically
motivated,
"associated with
physical,
not
intellectual,
labor"
(13).
For
Edmondson,
the conditions of women
writers'
journey
to the US
rather than
"the
fact
of
actually being
there"
(141)
ultimately
leads them
to
revise the
opposition
be-
tween
modernization
and
tradition that animated the first
generation's writings:
4 In his
essay
"Three Words Toward
Creolization,'
Antonio
Benitez-Rojo,
singles
out Dan-
ticat,
along
with
Caryl Phillips
and Fred
D'Aguiar,
as an
example
of
the new
generation
of
diaspora
writers
who
embody
"creolization,"'
i.e. the
process
of
crossmixing
and unre-
stricted mutation that characterizes the New
World.
He
states
that
"according
to the
silly
labels that we use in
the United
States,
Danticat
is
a
Haitian-American;
in
fact,
her iden-
tity
is
in the
hyphen,
that
is,
in
neither
place:
Danticat
is a
Caribbean
writer"
(60o).
By
con-
trast,
I
argue
that while her
personal
identity might very
well be
located
in
the
hyphen,
this does
not
justify eliding
the
very important
differences between her
and
Phillips's rep-
resentations of
Caribbean
difference;
nor does it
necessarily
make her write
in
the
vein
of
a transnational
aesthetics.

20 From Literature
of Exile
to
Migrant
Literature
[W]hile
[Paule]
Marshall's text traverses the route first established
by
Bita
Plant
in
McKay's
folk
romance,
she does not
finally
renounce
modernity altogether.
In-
stead,
the folk and the modern become
mutually
constituting
categories.
The
ide-
al of modernization is effectively
deconstructed
as a masculine act
and
reconstructed as
something
that can
encompass
a
black,
female,
immigrant
expe-
rience
without a
corollary
rejection
of folk
origins.
(166)
In
other
words,
what women writers'
narrative
stages
is
a
dissolution of the
oppo-
sition
between the cultural
remnants of the Afro-Caribbean
space
on the
one
hand,
and
the
industrialization and cultural
changes
that define
contemporary
Western
society
on the
other.
Edmondson
implies
that
since the authors them-
selves
migrated
to the
States to better their
lives,
it makes sense that
they
should
depict
characters who succeed in
preserving
their cultural
heritage
without
sacri-
ficing
the
economic
aspirations
that are associated with
modernization.
Their
fe-
male
protagonists
carve out
a
space
that
successfully renegotiates
the
relationship
between
progress
and
tradition,
written and oral
modes,
individualism and
com-
munitarianism.
Edmondson's model
thus
effectively
reverses
postcolonial
criti-
cism's
usual
association of the
migrant
aesthetic
with its writers'
economic
and
social
privilege.5
Edmondson
limits her
analysis
to
the
anglophone
tradition of
Caribbean
writ-
ing.
Yet in
light
of the
historical
parallels
between
the ex-British
colonies and the
territories
appropriated
by
other colonial
powers,
it is
important
to
investigate
the
ways
in
which her
paradigm
resonates with the
experiences
of the recent
waves of
migrants
from the
hispanophone
and
francophone
Caribbean. Like their
younger
anglophone
counterparts
in
Edmondson's
model,
Danticat and
Alvarez
developed
literary aspirations
subsequent
to
rather than
as
a
condition
for their
migration
to
the
States.
Their
families,
which
belong
to
very
different class and
ethnic back-
grounds,
also
moved
to North
America in
search of
a
"better"
life,
although
in Al-
varez's case,
the
move
entailed
loss
rather than
gain
of
status and
privilege
(her
family
left to
escape
political
repression).
In
other
words,
according
to
Edmond-
son's
model,
Danticat's
background
makes
her the
most
likely
candidate
for the
production
of a
migrant
novel,
while a
more
traditional
postcolonial
tenet would
single
out
Alvarez
by
virtue of her
privileged
class and
ethnic
background.
Indeed,
when
Alvarez's
first
novel How the
Garcia
Girls Lost their
Accents
gained
acclaim,
5 In her
discussion of
migrant
literature,
for
instance,
Boehmer states that
"in
making
this
move
[to
less
repressive
and
richer
places
in
the
world],
writers
have been much
advan-
taged
by
the
class,
political,
and
educational
connections
with
Europe
and
America which
in
may
cases
they
enjoyed. They
have
developed
what
was
anyway
a
cosmopolitan
ten-
dency,
often
picked
up
as
part
of an l1ite
upbringing
in
their home
countries
[...]
But
as
the
compounded
privilege,
if
nothing
else,
of
the
writers
suggests,
their
work
remains a
part
and
also an
expression
of the
neo-colonial
world"
(238).

Carine
M. Mardorossian 21
she
was
surprised by
the
impulsive response
in the US to racialize and
classify
her
as
a
"woman
writer of color." She
had neither
thought
of herself or been
described
as
"colored"
in the Dominican
Republic
where
her
family
in fact identified
with
the
dominant
racial
caste.6
But whether it be Alvarez's
privilege
or
Danticat's
"blackness"
which
justifies
their
status as
migrant
writers,
what
is
striking
is
pre-
cisely
criticism's
contemporary
investment in the
migrant
aesthetic.
The
writings
of the
new
generation
of
transplanted
authors
is
seen as
necessarily belonging
to
it
no
matter
what
aspect
of these authors'
experiences
is
drawn
on
to claim
a
migrant
status
for
their
fiction.
Contrasting
two Caribbean writers
like Danticat and
Alvarez,
however,
shows
that
migrant writing
cannot be reducible
to
any
single
dimension
of the author's
crosscultural
experiences,
be it economic or
otherwise.
The
juxtaposition
of these
two
novels,
both of which
emerge
out of and
depict
a similar exilic
condition,
gives
the lie
to a model that bases the
migrant
quality
of a work on
the writer's
"experi-
ence"
or on her reason
for
traveling
to North
America. Danticat
and Alvarez
might
be
living
"border lives"
on
the
margins
of the
nation
(Bhabha 2),
but this does
not
necessarily
result in
a similar
restaging
of
the
past
or
refashioning
of communal
and individual identities. While Yo! offers the
kind
of
cosmopolitan,
transnational,
and
hybrid
vision
of
social life
we have
come
to
expect
from
migrant
literature,
Danticat's
writing
remains
anchored in a nationalist ethos
which consolidates even
as
it revises the
opposition
between tradition
and
modernization.
Alvarez's mode of
representation
in Yo! embodies
a
migrant
aesthetics
insofar
as
it
challenges
the kind of
opposition
between
the modern
and
the
traditional,
the
country
of
destination
and the
country
of
origiti
which
motivates
the discourse of
exile. The
protagonist
Yolanda Garcia's relation
to
both
the Dominican
Republic
(her "homeland")
and
the host
country
(the States)
is characterized
by
ambiva-
lence.
She
belongs
neither here
nor
there. She
is
perceived
as "americanized"
by
her
island relatives
and
as
"a Latin
lady" by
her
American
boyfriend.
The model of
identity
that
emerges
is
a hybrid
one in
which
the
protagonist
occupies
the
posi-
tion
of the
"in-between."
Despite
her
repeated
efforts
at
belonging,
she never man-
ages
to feel
rooted
in
the culture of the
island she left behind
and
the narrative
distances
itself
from the
protagonist's
own
repeated
and vain
attempts
at
retracing
her lost
roots.7
And
although
she now
lives in the
States,
the
legacy
of her
island's
culture
prevents
her from ever
quite feeling
at
home
away
from the Dominican Re-
public.
Her
conception
of home
never matches her actual
experience
of
it.
Throughout
the
narrative,
the static definitions of home and
belonging
as ei-
ther/or
which
had
previously
driven
Yo's
actions are thus
reconfigured
as
dynamic
6 That
race
operates
differently
in the
US than
in
the Caribbean
is
also
highlighted by
the
genealogy
with which her
first novel
opens
and which situates the
Garcia
girls
as descen-
dants
of
the
Spanish conquistadors.
i.e. as
Europeans.

22 From Literature
of Exile to
Migrant
Literature
and vital. The
novel
reconceptualizes
the notion
of "home"
from the
pre-existing
meanings
it
represents
in
the discourse
of
exile
(stability,
comfort,
identity,
or in-
versely, oppression,
poverty,
etc.)
to
a
transformative
site of
constant
renegotiation
of the
migrant's
identity.
In this
context,
the
act
of
returning
to the
Caribbean
does
not
produce
a
fixed
outcome,
since the
migrant's
re-experience
of home
is defined
by
her
fluctuating
idea
of it. The
origin
community
is
revealed as
a
dynamic
and
changing
world which cannot be reclaimed
intact
and can
only
be envisioned
through
a
fragmented
memory.' Alternatively,
the host
country
also fails
to
func-
tion as
a new or
substitute
"home,"
whether it
is
because
of the racism Yolanda
and
her
sisters
encounter in the US or because
of the cultural
baggage
they bring
with
them.
Both
countries are thus
represented
as
dynamic
entities,
while
the
tradition-
al
notion
of
"home" as
belonging
and
community
is
exposed
as a
myth.
If
the Do-
minican
Republic
continues to be referred
to as "home"
in
the
novel,
it is
only
with
the
understanding
that
the
reader's conventional idea
of home needs
to be revised
to include
a more
complex
conceptualization,
one
which
foregrounds
ambiva-
lence,
fragmentation,
and
plurality
as a new
way
of
thinking
about
space
and iden-
tity.
North American students are often inclined to
read the
migrant protagonist's
arrival in
the States as
a narrative of
progress
from
oppression
to
freedom. This
reading
is of course
compounded by
their
knowledge
of the
sexual
oppressiveness
and often
volatile
political
situation that
immigrant
authors
leave
behind
in
their
home
country. Inevitably
then,
the
writings
of
the
new Caribbean
diaspora,
and
Yo! is no
exception,
run
the risk of
turning
the
West Indies
into
the alter
ego against
which
Americanness is measured and
unconditionally
valorized.9
In
Alvarez's
nov-
How
the Garcia Girls Lost
Their
Accents,
the
prequel
to
Yo!,
opens
with Yolanda Garcia's
decision to move back to
the island: "Let this turn out
to be
my
home"
(11).
The
novel
then
proceeds
to
go
backwards
in
time and to narrate
the events that
preceded
this
day.
Thus,
Yolanda's
"permanent"
return is
chronologically
what we were
left with when we
begin
the
sequel
Yo!. Insofar as
Yo!,
however,
reopens
in
the States
years
after
the
attempt
to
go
back "home"
obviously
failed,
it
ironically
and
retroactively
redefines its
prequel
as
a
migrant
novel that also
highlights
the
impossibility
of return.
8 In
his
essay
"Imaginary
Homelands,"
Salman
Rushdie
similarly explains
that Indian mi-
grants' "physical
alienation from
India almost
inevitably
means that
we will not be
capa-
ble of
reclaiming precisely
the
thing
that
was
lost;
that we
will,
in
short,
create
fictions,
not
actual cities or
villages,
but invisible
ones,
imaginary
homelands,
Indias
of
the
mind"
(lo).
Also see Madan
Sarup's
discussion of the
politics
of
place
and the
shifting meanings
of home in his book
Identity,
Culture, and
the
Postmodern
World.
9 What
is
deeply
ironic
about
this
response
is
of course
that students
engage
in
a fierce
cri-
tique
of
the
legacy
of
Spanish
or French
imperialism depicted
in these novels
yet,
in em-
phasizing
American
superiority, they unwittingly
reproduce
the
same
patterns
of
perception
they
have
just
been
criticizing.

Carine
M. Mardorossian 23
el,
the
temptation
to associate the Caribbean
with
repressive
sexual
mores
and
North
America with
a liberating
narrative is checked
through
the
ways
in
which
the various sections
dynamically
comment
on each other.
In Part One
of the
novel,
a
Dominican
peasant
woman's
internalization
of
patriarchal
values as she is
shown
naturalizing
her
daughter's
victimization echoes
the American
landlady's resigna-
tion
to
oppressive
gender
norms
and domestic violence
in Part Two.
Conversely,
the liberated sexual behavior of
American women
is
exposed
as
a
fear
of
intimacy
with
men,
i.e. as
merely
another form of enslavement rather than as
a
genuine
sign
of freedom. Yo
forces her
"promiscuous"
best
friend
Maria to
recognize
this
para-
dox: "You're
running away
from men
just
as
fast
as
I am"
(141).
This
kind
of
decon-
structive
gesture
in
the novel is
strongly
reminiscent of
Gayatri Spivak's striking
conclusion
in
"French Feminism
in
an
International
Frame,"
which
juxtaposes
the
practice
of
clitoridectomy
in
non-Western countries with women's "sexual libera-
tion"
in
the West to
"promote
a
sense of
our
common
yet history-specific
lot."
Spi-
vak
further
explains
that this
work "ties
together
the terrified child held down
by
her
grand-mother
as the
blood runs down her
groin
and
the 'liberated'
heterosex-
ual
woman
who,
in
spite
of
Mary
Jane
Sherfey
and the famous
page
53
of
Our Bod-
ies,
Ourselves,
in
bed with a
casual
lover-engaged,
in
other
words,
in the
'freest'
of
'free'
activities-confronts,
at
worst,
the
'shame' of
admitting
to
the
'abnormality'
of her
orgasm:
at
best,
the
acceptance
of
such
a
'special'
need"
(153).
Furthermore,
the
supposed
repressiveness
of
Yolanda's Dominican island
rela-
tives which
prompts
her to
hide her
sexual
relationship
from
them is also blown
out
of
the
water
when
her
boyfriend
comes out to her uncle as her
companero
and
is met not with
rage
but with
a sympathetic
chuckle.
Dominican male
characters
who
are
supposedly
representatives
of
the kind of
rigid
patriarchal
framework that
is absent
from the
States are
instead
shown
undergoing
a transformation
which
challenges any simplified
interpretation
of that
country's
sexual
politics.
In
the last
section of
the
novel,
Yolanda's
repentant
father
embraces her
daughter's
storytell-
ing
as crucial to
the
future
generations
of
the Garcia
family.
The
fact
that
his
con-
ciliatory
words are
juxtaposed
to
the
point
of
view of Yolanda's
American
stalker
reminds us
that
sexism
is no
one
nation's
prerogative.
At
the
conclusion
of
the nar-
rative,
we
are left
wondering
whether
Yolanda
has
actually
survived
her
American
stalker's
attack.
In
keeping
with the
migrant
aesthetics'
dissolution
of
boundaries,
the alterna-
tive to
oppressive
sexual
norms in
Yo! is a function of
a syncretism
that derives
from
both
Caribbean
and
North
American
values. It
is,
for
example,
through
the
empowering
combination of
written
language
and
oral
culture that
gender
vio-
lence is
effectively
countered in
the
narrative. In
the
section
entitled
"The
Strang-
er,"
Yo (who
is
"the
stranger")
meets
Consuelo,
the
illiterate
Dominican
peasant
woman,
who,
loyal
to
the
cultural
tradition
that
preaches
women's
subservience to
their
husband,
sees
the
domestic
violence
that
victimizes
her
daughter
as
the abus-
er's
prerogative.
Yolanda
accepts
to write
the
letter
Consuelo has
been
wanting
to

24 From Literature
of
Exile
to
Migrant
Literature
send
her
battered
daughter concerning
this matter.
When
she transcribes
into
writing
the
peasant
woman's
words, however,
she leads the old woman
to
condemn
rather
than rationalize
domestic violence
and
to write
an
empowering
rather
than
an
accusatory
letter
to her
daughter.
Yet
the
feminist
rephrasing
of the old
woman's
initial
message
is
not
merely
an
outcome
of Yolanda's
persuasiveness
since,
as
the
peasant
woman tells
us,
it
actually
represents
the
dream she had been
trying
to
re-
member all
along:
As
the
lady
spoke
and wrote
these
words,
Consuelo could
feel her dream
rising
to
the
surface
of
her
memory.
And it seemed to her that these were the
very
words
she
had
spoken
that Ruth had been so
moved to
hear. "Yes"'
she
kept
urging
the
lady,
"Yes,
that
is so."
(lo09)
Yolanda's
influence is thus
represented
as
catalytic.
She is
not
imposing
her Euro-
American
interpretive
grid
on
the illiterate woman's values so much as
helping
re-
lease the
message
of
Consuelo's "secret heart."
Ironically,
rather than
implying
her-
oism,
Yolanda's
repeated
interventions
as a feminist crusader
in lower-class
Dominican
women's lives
ultimately
highlight
her blindness to the
gender
dynam-
ics that underlie
her own
identity
crisis.
She is unable
to
locate the source of
her
own
problems
as a
writer and
as
a
woman. Patriarchal
violence
which,
in her
case,
takes the
shape
of
a severe
beating by
her
father for
telling
stories/storytelling
is
partly responsible
for her
fractured
identity
and tortured
relationship
to
writing.
Yet,
she
is as
unaware of
the
legacy
of
violence that defines her
relation to her ori-
gins
as
she is lucid
about it
in
other
women's lives. It is
only
the
concluding
section
devoted to her
father's
testimony
that
retrospectively
clarifies the
reasons behind
her
inability
to
write or
her
insistence on
becoming
celibate.
As
my
wife
held
her,
I
brought
down that
belt over
and
over,
not with all
my
strength
or
I
could
have
killed
her,
but with
enough
force to leave marks on
her
backside and
legs.
It
was as
if
I
had
forgotten
that she was
a
child,
my
child,
and
all I
could think was
that
I
had to
silence
our
betrayer.
"This
should teach
you
a
lesson,"'
I
kept
saying.
"You
must never
ever tell
stories!"
(307)
We
are thus
far from
the
model of
identity
offered
by
autobiographical
novels
of
exile in
which
the
protagonist's
(re)constitution
of
a
coherent sense of self
takes
center
stage.
In
Yo!
this
model of
identity gives
way
to
fragmentation
and
ambiva-
lence,
all
the
more so since the
protagonist's
uneven
development
is
related
by any-
one but herself.
Our
only
access to Yo's
voice is
through
the
narratives
of
relatives,
friends,
acquaintances,
servants and
even enemies
(e.g.
her
stalker)
who
relate
their
conflicting impressions
of
her
character and behavior.
She herself never
gets
to
tell her
story
in
her own
voice.
This
absence is
all
the
more
remarkable in
a
novel
which is
unequivocally
centered
around
the
protagonist's
attempts
at
"finding
a
voice." In
stark
contrast to
Breath,
Eyes,
Memory
which
adopts
it,
Yo!
completely
subverts
the
traditional
form of
the
Bildungsroman
(which
relates the
protagonist's

Carine
M.
Mardorossian 25
process
of
achieving
a coherent sense of self
in
her own
voice).
The
novel's
relent-
less
challenge
to
traditional
notions
of
form,
identity,
home,
and nationalism thus
associate
it
with a
migrant
aesthetic
in
a
way
which
Breath,
Eyes, Memory's repre-
sentational
politics
does not.
Instead,
I
argue
that Danticat's
novel offers and
revis-
es
a
nationalist rather than transnational narrative
of
legacy
which
represents
the
fragmentation
of
identity
as an
obstacle
that can be overcome
rather than
as a
giv-
en.
Unlike
Yolanda,
Sophie
Caco,
the heroine
of
Breath,
Eyes,
Memory,
does
tell
her
story
in her own
voice.
And unlike
Yo!,
Breath,
Eyes,
Memory
arrives
at a final
point
of rest with
the
triumph
of the central
narrating
subject
whose narrative voice
be-
comes
a
trope
of
individuality
and
power.
In
other
words,
the
first
person
narra-
tion
in
this novel
converges
with
the
feminist
emphasis
on
narrative voice as a
metaphor
for female
agency
and
"coming
to voice." We follow the
process through
which
Sophie
Caco undergoes
an inner
transformation
that
culminates
in
her
achieving
self-understanding
and full
autonomous
subjectivity.
In
keeping
with
the modernist "discourse of
exile,"
Sophie's
account is
detached,
as
if
she
were
a
neutral observer of her own life.
Furthermore,
the
opposition
between
tradition
and
modernization,
between the
country
of
origin
and
the
country
of destination
that
also characterizes exile
literature is
upheld
and
revalorized
in a way
that
is
reminiscent
of
the nationalist
writings
of the
first
generation
of Caribbean
exiles
like
Claude
McKay.
Indeed,
whether the
opposition
is consolidated
(by
Caribbean
writers from
McKay's generation)
or
reconfigured
(as
it is
by
exile writers from
Danticat's
generation),
the side of the
binary
tradition/modernity
which
undeni-
ably
assumes
a
positive
valence is
"tradition" and the values associated with
it.
This is not
to
say,
however,
that the values associated with
(folk)
tradition and
Caribbeanness are
unproblematically
embraced
in
the novel.
In
fact,
aspects
of the
traditional
way
of life
depicted
in
Breath,
Eyes, Memory
are
represented
as un-
equivocally
oppressive,
so
much so that
they
caused a major controversy
in
the
Haitian-American
community. Specifically,
Haitian-American women
strongly
disapproved
of
the
novel's
representation
of
the
practice
of
"testing,"
a
Haitian cul-
tural
practice
they
have for
the most
part
abandoned and
which consists of
prob-
ing
the
vagina
to
check that
the
hymen
is
still
intact. It is
performed
by
the mother
to insure
that her
daughter's
chastity
is
preserved
before
marriage,
often
leaving
in-
delible
emotional
and
psychological
scars
as its victim can no
longer distinguish
between maternal
nurture
and maternal torture. In the
novel,
this
aspect
of the
"virginity
cult"
is
passed
on "like
heirlooms"
through
the
generations
of
women,
who
having intensely
suffered from it
themselves,
go
on
nonetheless
performing
it
on their
own
daughter.
Martine does
it
to
Sophie
even
though
testing
was such
a
source
of
self-loathing
and shame
to her that she could
not
help
but see
her
rape
experience
as a nightmare
that freed her from it.
Testing
is also
deeply
damaging
to
Sophie
who finds
herself
unable
to
have a healthy
sexual
relationship
with her
husband. When
years
later,
Sophie
confronts her
mother about the
practice,
Mar-

26 From
Literature of Exile to
Migrant
Literature
tine
simply
retorts
"because
my
mother had
done it to me.
I
have
no other
excuse"
(170).
Grandma's
response
is
no less
frustrating:
"You must know
that
everything
a
mother
does,
she does for
her child's
own
good
[...] My
heart,
it
weeps
like a
river
[...] for
the
pain
we have
caused
you"
(157).
In
representing
the
history
of
violation
perpetrated
against
women's
bodies
through
testing,
Breath,
Eyes,
Memory
thus
highlights
the
negative
valence
as-
sumed
by
traditional
practices
in
Haitian
society.
Yet,
even as
this
particular
cul-
tural
heritage
is
denounced,
its
oppressiveness
is
also
immediately
transcended
from
within
tradition
itself.
It
is
striking,
for
instance,
that the
very
same
women
who are
perpetrators
of this
shocking
violence
are also
the most
lucid as
to its
de-
structive
effects
in
their
daughters'
lives. When
Grandma
learns
about
Sophie's
lack of
sexual
desire,
she
immediately
(and
unprompted)
links her
granddaugh-
ter's
"trouble with
marital
duties" with
"testing."
"Your
mother?"
she
asks,
"Did
she
ever
test
you?"
(123).
Similarly,
Martine
cannot
help
but
subject
her
own
daughter
to
testing,
even
though
she
is ultra
aware of the
suffering
it
causes.
This
self-con-
sciousness has
the
interesting
effect
of
separating
the
agent
from
the
disturbing
act
they
are
performing
in
the
novel. It
is as
if
the
characters
are
watching
themselves
perpetuate
a
cultural
practice
they
know to
be
problematic
and
can
comment on
it but
not
stop
it.
They
are
cultural
transmitters
independently
of
their
own
voli-
tion.
Remarkably,
the
resistance to
the
sexual
oppressiveness
of
testing
emerges
and
gets
enacted in
very
much
the
same
way
in
the
novel. It
too is
found
in
the
tradi-
tional
way
of
life
represented
and
transmitted
by
the
matriarchal
line.
It
is
indeed
Grandma's folk
tales of
the
"bleeding
woman,"
"the
lark,"'
and
the
"flying
woman"
that
ultimately
provide
the
narrator-protagonist
with
models of
resistance to
pa-
triarchal
ideology
(rather
than,
for
instance,
Sophie's
assimilation
of
more
modern
or
so-called
rational
values).
Significantly,
when
Sophie
puts
an
end
to her
moth-
er's
"testing"
by
breaking
her
hymen
with a
pestle,
she
remembers and
relates
the
first
tale
she
heard
her
grandmother
If6 tell.
The
story
is
about a
"bleeding
woman"
who
chose to
become a
butterfly
rather
than
go
on
bleeding
"out
of
her
unbroken
skin,
sometimes from
her
arms,
sometimes
from
her
legs,
sometimes
from
her
face
and
chest
[...] soaking
her
clothes a
bright
red on
very special
occasions-wed-
dings
and
funerals"
(87).
It
embodies
Haitian
culture's
obsession
with
female vir-
ginity,
and
the
blood
symbolizes
the
blood
of
every
Haitian
woman
who
has
suffered
the
humiliation
of
testing.
Sophie
recalls
the
liberating
conclusion
of
the
tale
"the
woman
was
transformed
[into
a
butterfly]
and
never
bled
again"
even
as
she
tears
apart
her
vaginal
skin in
a symbolic
break
from
her
colonized
gender
identity:
"My
flesh
ripped apart
as
I
pressed
the
pestle
into it. I
could
see
the
blood
slowly
dripping
onto
the
bed
sheet"
(88).
This
act
frees
her from
the
history
of vi-
olence
passed
on
by
her
mother
by
invoking
the
very
cultural
heritage
from
which
testing
derives.
The
reader
can
trust
that
she will
not
carry
on
the
tradition
of
test-
ing
with
her
own
daughter
Brigitte.
Sophie's
resistance is
thus
ironically
grounded

Carine
M. Mardorossian 27
in
the
empowering
tales told
by
Grandma
IfW,
the
very
same woman with
whom
testing
originates
in
the
narrative. Haiti
and its
cultural traditions
thus
become
both a
site of
oppression
and
freedom
in
the
novel.
Notwithstanding
the
history
of
violence with
which cultural
tradition is
asso-
ciated,
the
narrative
paradoxically
ends
with
a
sense of
cultural
wholeness and
au-
thenticity.
At
her
mother's
funeral,
we
watch as
Sophie
reconstitutes
her sense
of
self
by
unearthing
the
buried
cultural
language
her
grandmother
embodies
and
which,
the novel
suggests,
still
animates the Haitian
consciousness.
Breath,
Eyes,
Memory ultimately
celebrates
the
storyteller
Grandma
IfU,
the
repository
of
Hai-
tian
culture
and the link
to
the
ancestral
home of
Africa,
who
fittingly
also
gets
the
last
word
in
the
narrative:
I
come from a
place
where
breath,
eyes,
memory
are
one,
a
place
from
which
you
carry your
past
like
the hair
on
your
head.
Where women
return to
their
children
as
butterflies or
as
tears
in
the
eyes
of the
statues
that their
daughters pray
to.
My
mother
was
as brave
as
stars at
dawn.
She too
was from
this
place.
My
mother
was
like
that
woman
who
could
never
bleed
and then
could never
stop
bleeding,
the
one
who
gave
in
to her
pain,
to
live as a
butterfly.
Yes,
my
mother
was
like me...
My
grandmother
walked
over
and
put
her
hand on
my
shoulder..."
There is a
place
where
women
are
buried
in
clothes
in
the
color of
flames,
where we
drop
coffee on
the
ground
for
those
who
went
ahead,
where
the
daughter
is never
fully
a
woman
until
her
mother
has
passed
on
before
here. There
is
always
a place
where,
if
you
listen,
closely
in
the
night, you
will
hear
your
mother
telling
a
story
and at
the
end of
the
tale,
she
will
ask
you
this
question:'Ou
libe're'?'
Are
you
free,
my
daughter?"
My
grandmother
quickly pressed
her
fingers
over
my lips:
"Now,"
she
said,
"
you
will
know
how to
answer."(234)
Sophie's
tribute
to
the
women in
her
family
echoes
Danticat's own
words
in
a
note
distributed
by
her
publisher:
"I look
to the
past-to Haiti-hoping
that
the
ex-
traordinary
female
storytellers
I
grew
up
with-the
ones that
have
passed
on-will
choose to
tell
their
story
through my
voice. For
those
of us
who
have a
voice
must
speak
to
the
present
and to
the
past.
For
we
may
very
well
be
Haiti's last
surviving
breath,
eyes,
and
memory"
(qtd.
in
Casey
527).
Danticat's
nostalgia
for
the Haitian
past
can
thus
also
be seen
as a yearning
for an
African
past
Sophie
repeatedly
evokes
when
she
speaks
of
Guinea
as
the
"place
where all
the
women in
my
family
hoped
to
eventually
meet
one
another,
at
the
very
end
of
each of
our
journeys"
(174);
it
is
where
her
dead
mother
"is
going
to be a star
[...] a
butterfly
or a lark in
a tree
[...] free"
(228).
In
her
celebration
of
Haitian
indigenous practices
and
storytelling,
Danticat
reveals
herself
the
rightful
heir
of
black
consciousness
movements
whose
genesis
can
be
traced
back
to
movements
like
N6gritude
and
Haitian
"Indigenism." Indi-
genism
emerged
in
reaction
to
the
American
occupation
of
1915,
when
in a spirit
of
resistance,
Haitian
intellectuals
turned
to
folk
culture
and
native
traditions
to
instigate
a
literary
renewal.
They
championed
this
ancestral
heritage
as
Haiti's
re-

28 From Literature
of Exile to
Migrant
Literature
discovered national
culture
and
foregrounded
their African
origins
as the
bedrock
of Haitian
identity.
The
representation
of
Haitianness
in
Breath,
Eyes, Memory
of-
fers
a
similar
reevaluation of Haitian
identity
even as
it corrects the
Indigenous
Movement's masculinist
focus
by
making
visible women's
contributions
to
the
heritage
and traditions of the nation's
culture.
Belinda
Jack's
definition
of
Indi-
genism strongly
resonates with the novel's textual
politics:
Responding
to a sense of
rootlessness,
dislocation,
loss of
identity,
and absence
of
cultural
homogeneity, Indigenism
involved
a
"rooting"
of
consciousness
and
an
attempt
to reinstate the
potential
of art
by reestablishing
the artist as the voice of
the
community
[...].
The
Indigenists
presented
Africa
as the
embodiment
of
a
quintessential
cultural wholeness and
authenticity.
[Carl]
Brouard was one of
the
first to celebrate his
Africanness
and
to
advocate
a
return to the freedom
of Afri-
can
traditions,
traces of which
remained
in
Haitian culture. The
obvious
corollary
of this
was,
of
course,
opposition
to
European
tradition and the
rejection
of
ra-
tionalism,
in
particular.
(36)
In
"hoping
that the
extraordinary
female
storytellers
[she]
grew
up
with
[...]
will
choose to
tell their
story
through
[her]
voice,"
Danticat
similarly
seeks to
play
the
role of
artist as'the
voice of the
community."
She
champions
the cultural inherit-
ance of the
past,
and
her concern
for cultural
identity
entails a
rejection
of ratio-
nalism
(Sophie's
self-awareness and understanding
of the causes of her
psychological problems
does not
help
her overcome
them,
only
her intuitive mo-
bilization of
inherited
culture
does).
The Haitian
island's
centrality
to
Danticat's narrative is another
aspect
which
associates it
to black
nationalist
movements. Haiti
is the
setting
for the
longest
of
the four
sections
in
the
novel,
even
though
it
covers
only
a
few
days
in
a
story
that
spans
years.
The section
is
tellingly
filled with a
joyful
imagery
of
daffodils,
sun-
shine,
vibrant
colors and
bright yellows
which
sharply
contrast with the
deep
reds
with
which
Sophie
and her
mother are
surrounded
in
New York: "The tablecloth
was
shielded with a
red
plastic
cover,
the
same blush red as the sofa in
the
living
room"
(44).
On the
one
hand,
the
image
of the daffodil
associated with the island
is that of a
flower
which
was
successfully transplanted
from
Europe
to
a
new land
by
adapting
through
a
darker hue.
On the other
hand,
the red
imagery
associated
with
New York
anticipates
Martine's failed
transplantation
and her
gruesome
sui-
cide at
the
end of the
narrative.
Although
the
novel's
plot
is about
Sophie's
exile to North
America,
the States
or
the
fact that
her exile is
set
in
the
States,
is
remarkably
inconsequential
to the
story.
What
matters is not
what
America is but Haiti's
absence. What
grounds
Sophie's
and her
mother's
identity
crises is the
country
and traditions
they
left
be-
hind.
Where
they
landed
only
plays
a secondary
role as the
opposite
term in
the
Haiti/US
dyad.
New York
is
where the
lasting
effects of
oppressive
cultural
and so-
cial
pressures
(such
as
Martine's
testing
and
rape)
that
originated
in
Haiti become

Carine M. Mardorossian 29
visible.
Thus,
far from
representing
liberation
from
oppressive
Haitian
practices,
it
is
actually
the site where abuse and
death
converge.
It is also
a world
in
which
boundaries between black and
white
remain
impregnable
and where
Sophie's
in-
teractions
are limited to
"black"
people.
Moreover,
the African-Americans
Sophie
encounters
(Joseph,
the
therapist
Rena)
are
interestingly
represented
not
as
Amer-
icans but
as extensions of the black
world
that characterizes
Haiti.
Joseph,
a
"Cre-
ole" from Louisiana
(70),
insists
that
he
is
"not
American" but
"African-American"
which
means that
"you
and
I,
we
are
already part
of each other"
(72);
Rena
is
"a
gorgeous
black woman
who was
an
initiated Santeria
priestess
[...and]
had
done
two
years
in
the
Dominican
Republic"
(206).
She is
the
person
who
suggests
that
to feel whole
again, Sophie
should
go
back to
Haiti and confront the
ghosts
of
her
past.
In
other
words,
the novel
encourages
us to see
African-American
culture
within the
context of
a
world-wide
black
ethos
rather than as the
sign
of
an
inter-
mixed
and
hybridized
North America. It
constructs
a diasporic
black
identity
based on a common
link
to
Africa and
the
history
of
slavery
and
opposes
this
in-
clusive
notion of
blackness to white
America's racist and
purist ways.
This model
of
identity
thus
ultimately
works to
reproduce
a
Caribbean/US
binary.
The novel
reifies the
opposition
between the modern
and
the traditional even
as it
paradoxically
revises
the
concept
of Haitian tradition to
signify
a
hybrid
and
changing space
that is
open
to
incorporating
aspects
of the
other
culture.
Haiti
is
the
space,
for
instance,
where the
European
daffodil has
successfully adapted
to
its
tropical
surroundings by
assuming
a
darker coloration.
It
is also the
place
where
Sophie
can
dress her mother's
corpse
in
red,
i.e. the color which
is
otherwise
asso-
ciated with
North
America
throughout
the
narrative
and is "too
loud
a color for
burial"
(227)
in
the
traditional
context
of Haiti. And
although
this
transgressive
act
first
makes
Grandma
almost "fall
down,
in
shock"
(231),
it
is soon
recuperated
by
the
matriarch as a sign
of
Haitian
female
rebelliousness which she
transmits to
younger generations
through
her
storytelling:
"There is a
place
where
women are
buried in
clothes in
the
color of
flames,
where we
drop
coffee
on
the
ground
for
those
who
went
ahead,
where the
daughter
is
never
fully
a
woman until her
mother
has
passed
on
before here
[...]." (234)
In
other
words,
the novel
represents
the traditional
culture
of
the
past
as
open
to
reinterpretation
rather
than as an
inert and
immutable
condition
awaiting
to be
unearthed.
It
is
in
this
sense
reminiscent of
Frantz
Fanon's
conception
of
national
culture
according
to
which
oral
traditions
should be
dynamic
in
order
to
ground
a
successful
national
consciousness:
On
another
level,
the
oral
tradition-stories,
epics,
and
songs
of the
people-
which
formerly
were filed
away
as
set
pieces
are now
beginning
to
change.
The
story
tellers who
used to relate
inert
episodes
now
bring
them
alive and
introduce
into
them
modifications which
are
increasingly
fundamental. There is a
tendency
to
bring
conflicts
up
to
date and
to modernise
the kinds
of
struggle
which
the sto-
ries evoke
[...].(240)1o

30 From Literature
of Exile to
Migrant
Literature
Breath,
Eyes, Memory
thus revises
decolonizing
nationalisms'
typical
alignment
of
women with
a
pure
and stable
precolonial
past.
In
her
study
of race and
gender
in
colonial
contexts,
Anne
McClintock writes that
most nationalist discourses
equate
women with
an
"authentic
body
of national
tradition
(inert,
backward-looking
and
natural),
embodying
nationalism's conservative
principle
of
continuity,"
and
by identifying
men as "the
progressive
agent[s]
of national
modernity
(forward-
thrusting,
potent,
and
historic)"
(359).
By
contrast,
women
and their
storytelling
practices
in
Breath,
Eyes,
Memory embody
a more transitional
space
between
change
and
stability.
Grandma Fe
herself,
the
repository
of the traditional
past,
is
aligned
with the nation's "betweenness"
vis-a-vis
modernity
and tradition. Cultur-
al
heritage
thus
becomes
a
site of interaction between cultures that cannot be
ac-
counted for
in
simple
terms.
Nevertheless,
while
reworking
Haitian cultural
patterns,
this
syncretic process
does not
ultimately
threaten the
oppositional
stance of
the
text.
In
fact,
the disso-
lution
of
boundaries in the
Haitian context
paradoxically
becomes fodder for
up-
holding
the
opposition
between
a
fluid
and
spiritual
Caribbean
and an
alienating
because
hermetic
US.
While
Haiti is characterized
by
a vital and
dynamic
culture,
North America
remains the
impervious
and
static site
where
the
characters'
strug-
gle
with their
Haitian
identity
is
enacted.
Breath,
Eyes,
Memory
is thus
not a
mi-
grant
novel
precisely
because it maintains a
strict
opposition
between
the
country
of
origin
and
the
country
of
destination.
The
values
associated
with
modernity
and
Americanness are
opposed
to
the
dynamic
traditions of
the
heroine's
native island.
Even
education,
which
Sophie,
Martine
and Tante
Atie embrace
at
various
points
and which was a source of
syncretism
in
Yo!,
fails
to become
the
site of
cultural
mixing
in
the
States.
In
New
York,
Sophie goes
to
a
Haitian
Adventist school where
all
the
lessons are
in
French. It
was,
she
comments,
"as
if
I had
never
left
Haiti"
(66).
The two
worlds
between which
Sophie
is
divided thus remain
separate,
and
as a
result,
she
does
not share
migrant
literature's ambivalence
about
the
protago-
nist's
relation
to the
two
countries. Haiti is
unequivocally
the
place
where
the her-
oine
needs to
return
both
physically
and
spiritually
in
order to find and
empower
herself."
It
is
the
source
of
her
resistance as
when,
"following
in
the vaudou tradi-
tion"
(156),
she
learns
"to
double,"
i.e.
to have
her mind leave
her
body
during pain-
ful
episodes
such as
testing
or
sex.
Haiti is
also where both
Sophie
and the
novel as
10
In her
essay
"Resistance
Theory/Theorizing
Resistance or Two
Cheers
for
Nativism,'
Be-
nita
Parry
similarly
discusses
contemporary
writers such as
Wilson Harris or
tdouard
Glissant who
recuperate
figures
of colonial
resistance in oral
traditions and
popular
memory
without
"enacting
a
regressive
search for an
aboriginal
and intact
condition/tra-
dition
from which a
proper
sense of
historicity
is occluded"
(173).
" In
Danticat's
latest
novel The
Farming
of
Bones
(1998),
however,
the Haiti to
which the
heroine
needs to return
is
configured
as a cultural
space only.

Carine M.
Mardorossian 31
a
whole achieve
closure as
she
learns to
acknowledge
and come to terms with
the
contradictions
of her cultural
heritage.
It
is
"home,"
the
place
where
she
really
be-
longs,
and the
refuge
that
gives
her
stability
and to which she will
always
return
when
she needs to recollect
herself.
This
(revised)
nationalist
paradigm
which
roots
Sophie
Caco
in
her
homeland
Haiti stands
in
stark
contrast
to Yolanda's transnational
identity.
This contrast
is
nowhere
more salient than in
two
episodes
whose functions
mirror each other
in
the two
novels: Martine's
funeral
in
Breath,
Eyes, Memory
and
Yolanda's
wedding
in
Yo!.
At
the end
of
Breath,
Eyes,
Memory,
the
transformative site for
Sophie
Caco's
self-constitution is her
mother's
funeral,
a
ceremony
whose cultural function
is
ul-
timately
that
of
bringing
the
community
together. Similarly,
in
Yo!,
the site
where
Yolanda
comes to
terms with
her
fragmented
identity
is her own
wedding,
a social
ritual
whose cultural
role
in
relation to the
community
is
comparable
to that
of
a
funeral.
Although
these
social events
are both
turning points
in
the formation
of
each
woman's
sense of
self,
they
each
have
very
different
implications
in
terms of
the
model of
identity they
offer.
The
funeral is
where
Sophie's
concept
of self is
finally
reconciled with her
pub-
lic
identity
as she
confronts
the
past by
yanking
the cane that
concealed her moth-
er's
rape.
Significantly,
it takes
place
in
Haiti
and
amongst
Haitians
(despite
the
fact
that
Martine
had been
living
in
the States for over
ten
years).
By
contrast,
Yolanda's
wedding
is set in
New
Hampshire
amongst
an
eclectic
group
of Domin-
ican
and North
American
guests.
Unlike
Sophie,
Yolanda does not
go
home to lib-
erate
herself
by
hacking
down
the
past
and immersing
herself
in traditional
culture. In
fact,
far
from
being
the
apotheosis
Sophie's
return
to Haiti
becomes at
the end of
Breath,
Eyes,
Memory,
Yolanda's
trips
to the
Dominican
Republic
are
only
stages
in
her
negotiations
of
migrant identity.
What her
experiences
result
in
is not
the
reconstitution
of
a
coherent sense
of self but
an
acceptance
of
fragmen-
tation
as
a constitutive
part
of
the self.
Similarly,
when
she starts
referring
to her
island
as
"home,"
the
reader
knows
better
than
to read
her claim as
the
epiphanic
moment
the
same
speech
act
becomes for
Sophie.
Whereas
"home" for
Sophie
is
associated with
the
feelings
of
belonging
and
rootedness that
the word
tradition-
ally
invokes,
the
notion
of
"home" in
Yo!
forces us to
re-evaluate our
conventional
understanding
of
the term
and
its
meanings.
Like
Yolanda
Garcia,
Sophie
Caco
only
begins
to think
and
speak
of
her native
country
as
"home"
as an
adult,
when
she
goes
back
to the
Caribbean
after
many
years
away.
In
both
novels,
each
woman's
boyfriend
remarks
on the
shift
in
the
way
she relates
to
geographical
space.
In
Yo!,
an
annoyed
Dexter
ridicules Yolanda's
sen-
timental
reference to the
Dominican
Republic
as home:
"She hasn't
lived
there for
a
quarter
of
a century.
She works
here,
makes
love
here,
has
her friends
here,
pays
taxes
here,
will
probably
die
here.
Seems to
him
all she
goes
down there for
is
to
get
confessed or
disowned.
Still,
when
she talks about
the
D.R,
she
gets
all
dewy-eyed
as
if
she
were
crocheting
a little
sweater and
booties for
that
island,
as
if
she had

32 From
Literature
of Exile
to
Migrant
Literature
given
birth to it
herself
out
of the womb
of her
memory"
(193),
while
in
Breath,
Eyes, Memory,
a
surprised Joseph
tells
Sophie
that
"[y]ou
have
never called
[Haiti]
that
since we've been
together.
Home has
always
been
your
mother's
house,
that
you
could never
go
back to"
(195).
While these
passages
both
highlight
the
con-
cept's
constructedness,
Danticat's novel
reifies
the model of home
as
belonging
and rootedness Yo!
questions.
Indeed,
the sense
of
dislocation and
fragmentation
resulting
from
migrancy
is
only
a temporary
setback
which
Sophie
overcomes
as
she rediscovers the
alternative
systems
of
knowledge
that
ground
Haitian
identity.
In Yo!,
however,
the
sense of
displacement
that defines
the heroine's relation to
"home"
remains no matter
where
Yolanda
is. And unlike
Sophie
Caco's,
Yolanda
Garcia's
displaced
position
never
gives way
to restored wholeness and
rootedness.
The
juxtaposition
of
these two
novels,
both of which
emerge
out
of and
evoke
similar
migrant
conditions,
challenges
the traditional model of
reading
that bases
the
migrant
quality
of a
work
on
the writer's
"experience."
This
approach
typically
represents
the
relationship
between the
author's
experiences
and
her
writings
as
transparent
and is
metaleptical,
insofar as it
sees
experience
as
an
elucidating
cause
rather
as an
effect
that
requires
explanation
and
analysis.
It also
homogenizes
the
very
different
ways
in
which the
members
of
the new
Caribbean
diaspora
are
map-
ping
new
literary
and
cultural
spaces.
Julia
Alvarez and
Edwidge
Danticat
are
two
contemporary
authors
living
in
"exile"
in
the
US and
writing
in
English,
a language they
have
both
identified as
their
"home."
Neither
considers
permanently
moving
back
to her
island of
origin.
And both
of
them
subvert
existing
notions
of
identity
and
citizenship
but do
so
by
opting
for
very
different
rewritings
of
their
narrative
of
legacy.
Together they
show
us that in
stories of
cultural
encounter,
difference and the
will to
change
are
wrong-
ly
assumed to
result
either in
assimilation to
the new
home or to
the
vestiges
of the
other
cultural
space
(tradition).
In
this
essay,
I
have
instead
aimed
to make
visible
the
seemingly
inexistant
space
between two
cultures
where,
as
Danticat
and
Alva-
rez
reveal,
resistance
is
often
located.
In
scrutinizing
the distinct
models of
identity
and
place
offered
by
these
two
authors,
I hope
to
have shown
that the
shift
from
exile
to
migrant
literature is a
paradigmatic
change
whose
important
implications
get
obscured
when terms
like
migrant
become
clich6s and
are
indiscriminately
ap-
plied
to
all
contemporary
exiled
writers.
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Julia.
How
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1992.
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