ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I examine what I refer to as a biopoetics of refugee health in three Caribbean narratives. First, I explore how through the use of the literary device of interior monologue, Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés’ “El Loco” portrays how the refugee patient's internal dialogue disrupts the medical establishment's biopolitical interpretation of him. I then look to Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones, which portrays the difficulties that ill health and injured bodies pose to testifying Haitian refugees who were targeted in the state-sponsored 1937 massacre in the Dominican Republic. In the final section of the chapter, I examine the juxtaposition of health and an African refugee in England in Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore. I demonstrate how the trope of health is pervasive in Caribbean refugee narratives, resulting in the creation of a biopoetics as an alternative to the biopolitics that seeks to constrain refugee lifeworlds.
