Sunday, November 4, 2012

Pulitano and Caribbean Studies Journal


Elvira Pulitano: Landscape, Memory and Survival in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat      
            Elvira Pulitano brought to light the ideology behind the meaning of landscape as it relates to the memory and perhaps underlying meaning in the fictional writing by author, Edwidge Danticat. Pulitano had an idea to submit a paper for a panel featuring island and ocean representation during a convention in Philadelphia in 2006. Her idea contained the works by Danticat and her descriptive narratives covering discourse of islands and the ocean mainly Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Although Pulitano was turned down on account that Danticat wrote in English and the Francophone writing is done in French. Pulitano asserts her idea that even though Danticat used English for her works, the underlying language of the landscape described and her use of native words familiar to those from the Caribbean was ultimately the true culture representative of the islands and ocean.

            Simple representation of  various languages used to instill richness of culture in Haiti and the Dominican Republic could be found from different cultures which invaded and wreaked havoc over the borders. The Spanish word for parsley is quite symbolic among the Haitian sugar cane cutters, although they pronounced the word differently. There are references of their language also from the French, English and Africa to describe life and landscape in the works by Danticat containing the history of slaves taken from Africa travelled the Atlantic to the Caribbean by European settlers.

            The history of Hispaniola reclaimed by Danticat provided voices to the victims of the 1937 massacre. This event is not only captured in Danticat’s Farming of Bones, she also provides truth behind the underlying narrative story of fiction, depicting the pain and joy experienced by memory of actual people of that era and location permanently engrained in the landscape and waters.

            The river is quite symbolic representing both life and death in Danticat’s Krik?Krak!. In both Haitian folklore and accounts represented in such stories as Nineteen Thirty-Seven and Children of the Sea, water represents both the idea of re-birth and freedom of death. Many parts of the landscape could be dissected in order to provide the collective cultures that blend and make up the landscape for which the discourse of the Caribbean exists.

            Lastly, Pulitano points out that, “According to an ancient Haitian belief, a transnational historical community is powerfully established in the fluid, borderless space of the sea.” (Pulitano, 12) The underlying message behind the works of Danticat is that in order to create a nationalist discourse of island identity, one must recognize the past and provide a voice to those that were not able to provide.

No comments:

Post a Comment