ABSTRACT
The mobility of stories from ancient archives comes from their being drawn into other narratives through citation, revisioning, or passing reference. This chapter explores how texts and tropes which travel over time and across oceans can generate conversations between texts that provide alternative frames for interpreting the local. The three di erently situated texts from Haiti, Australia, and South Africa that are the focus of this discussion are informed by powerful images from a translated ancient archive. These images and tropes travel synchronically and diachronically and provide ways of speaking about the traumatic legacy of violence within and between local communities. As suggested by the epigraphs to this chapter, this has two immediate implications: on the one hand, there is the problem of translating historical memory into text, since in the retelling it becomes “their story” and “not yours.” On the other hand, the traditional narratives are themselves revisioned, “turned inside out,”’ when retold in new contexts. By adopting a comparative focus in looking at Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998), David Malouf’s Ransom (2009), and Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom’s play Relativity: Township Stories (2006), I will explore how the traces of an ancient archive not only connect past and present in a common preoccupation with trauma, abandonment, and
orphanhood, but can project the past into the future, and this can be productive for imagining alternative ways of “being” in the present.
