THE UNMAKING OF THE WORLD

Abstract

Abstract This article reads Edouard Glissant's notion of a Caribbean nonhistory through the lens of the Haitian slave revolution of 1791 and its subsequent disappearance from, or distortion in, various intellectual discourses. It argues that the historical and political dislocations produced by the slave trade and subsequent histories of violence and rupture have resulted in a Haitian history centred on a central notion of absence and disappearance. This has produced a crisis in the ability to render traumatic experience into narrative, as history is only able to be experienced as a latent symptomatic injury. Reading Edwige Danticat's novel Breath, Eyes, Memory and its representation of the transgenerational transmission of sexual trauma from mother to daughter, the article suggests that the novel adopts Glissant's idea of a “tormented chronology” in order to narrate the history of violence for Haitian women. The reading of Glissant and Danticat uses both the insights of trauma theory and the work of Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain in which she observes that intense pain or trauma has the effect of unmaking the world of the sufferer and destroys the relationship between language and body. Danticat's novel considers this broken relationship through women's experiences at the “edges of history” and in doing so addresses Glissant's problematic of the “dislocation of the continuum.”