ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at two works by Edwidge Danticat: Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones, and how the author marks parallels between the pillaging of land and the sexual violence silently perpetuated against Haitian women in the building of the twentieth century. Through their respective narratives, both novels powerfully reveal the inevitably violent consequences of the colonial and patriarchal “errand” into the feminized subaltern space of the Caribbean. The incursive becomes connective where the colonialist/capitalist/patriarchal errand into the world’s wilderness invites comparison, where it seeks to dominate simultaneously environmental and individual reproductive space. In both novels, the representation of women and nature thereby creates an agential narrative space for the recording of a neglected history of subjugation and domination upon the person but also upon the land. The author’s exposure of these intersections enables a silenced culture to emerge: readers see how the exploitations and violence against the female body are by and for the West’s civilizing mission and the constant reinvigoration of a white, American masculinist ethos. In both novels, Danticat juxtaposes the violence of white masculinity’s psychical void against its privileges. Ultimately, this reading of these two texts allows Danticat to reconstruct a Haitian history necessary to ending various cycles of transgenerational trauma.
