真理的危機：非裔加勒比海女性小說中的創傷與記憶(II)

行政院國家科學委員會補助專題研究計畫成果報告

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※ 真理的危機： ※

※ 非裔加勒比海女性小說中的創傷與記憶(2/2) ※

※ Crisis in Truth : Trauma and Memory in ※

※ Afro-Caribbean Women’s Fiction ※

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計畫類別：

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個別型計畫

□整合型計畫

計畫編號：NSC 89－2411－H－009－017

執行期間：89 年 08 月 01 日至 91 年 01 月 31 日

計畫主持人：馮品佳

本成果報告包括以下應繳交之附件：

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可立即對外提供參考

□一年後可對外提供參考

□兩年後可對外提供參考

(必要時，本會得展延發表時限)

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赴國外出差心得報告

執行單位：國立交通大學外國語文學系

中華民國 91 年 04 月 15 日

行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫成果報告

真理的危機： 非裔加勒比海女性小說中的創傷與記憶(2/2)

Crisis in Truth : Trauma and Memory in Afro-Caribbean

Women’s Fiction

國立交通大學外文系 馮品佳

E-mail: pcfeng@cc.nctu.edu.tw

計畫編號：NSC 89-2411-H-009-017

執行期限：89 年 8 月 1 日至 91 年 1 月 31 日

一、中文摘要 近年來研究創傷與記憶之批評文獻大 多著眼於再現（創傷經驗）的有限性及「虛 構」與「歷史」敘事之間模稜兩可的關係。 誠多阿多諾所言：「在奧舒華茲的事件之 後，任何詩歌都顯得殘酷不仁」。對於文 學創作者與批評者而言，如何書寫無法理 解而且令敘事主體感到有滅頂威脅的極端 經驗，仍然是一大問題。非裔加勒比海女 性作家更特別需要面多重的創傷記憶。其 中最「始源性的創傷」，就是中間航道的 歷史經驗；然而弔詭的是非裔加勒比海人 民漂泊離散的認同也源於此一創傷。因此 本計劃主要研究當代非裔加勒比海女性小 說文本中如何重新思考創傷與記憶以及如 何在藝術創作與歷史紀錄之間達到平衡。 本年度計劃除了整理各種創傷與記憶 的批評理論之外，也研討女作家如何藉非 裔加勒比海宗教來言其不可言。非裔加勒 比海宗教深受非洲本土宗教、基督教與北 美原住民宗教的多重影響，經由劇烈的文 化混語過程而產生。在布洛柏的《魔奧》 及艾迪莎的《由淚水開始》中，非裔加勒 比海的民俗儀式成為解放的工具。兩部小 說中都探討如何經由「再記憶的儀式」得 到心靈與心理的治療。這些儀式根植於加 勒比海地區融合性的信仰系統，可以動員 社群的集體力量，經由同情心的力量使得 蒙受創傷的小說人物再不受制於被壓抑的 記憶，而且也使他們得以向種族、性別與 階級壓迫挑戰。 計劃最終的目的證明布洛柏及艾迪莎 等作家如何藉由非裔加勒比海的民俗宗 教，提出一些解決創傷與記憶再現困難的 途徑。她們的努力，也使得「新世界書寫」 逐漸成形，使得創作家與批評者得以更深 入探討美國與加勒比海地區複雜之新殖民 關係。 關鍵詞: 加勒比海文學，創傷 ，記憶，非 裔加勒比海女作家 二、英文摘要

Recent theoretical works on trauma and memory place special emphasis on the limits of representation and the ambivalent relations between fictional and historical narratives. Theodor Adorno’s famous remark— “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”— still rings true. How to write about extreme experiences that elude immediate understanding and threaten to

destroy the narrating subject remains a question for literary artists and critics. Afro-Caribbean women writers, in particular, need to confront multiple layers of traumatic memories and among them, the “original trauma” of the Middle Passage, in which their diasporic identity is paradoxically originated. This project, aims to study the ways in which how trauma and memory are refigured and how artistic creation and historical documentation reach a certain kind of equilibrium in contemporary Afro-Caribbean women’s fiction.

The project starts with a preliminary research on theories on trauma and memory, and then proceeds to investigate how Afro-Caribbean religions are deployed as a way to speak the unspeakable. Deeply influenced by African religions, Christian and Native American beliefs, Afro-Caribbean religions are created out of a vigorous process of cultural creolization in the Caribbean. In texts by two Afro-Jamaican women writers, Erna Brodber’s Myal (1988)

and Opal Palmer Adisa’s It Begins with Tears (1997), Afro-Caribbean folk rituals are

regarded as a strategy of liberation. Both texts explore the possibility of spiritual and psychological healing through the performance of various “rituals of rememory.” Rooted in the syncretized belief systems of the Caribbean, these rituals mobilize the collective force of the community and through the power of sympathy free traumatized characters from their repressed memories and further empower them to battle against imposed racial, sexual and class oppressions.

Finally with this project, I demonstrate how through the deployment of folk religions and orature, Afro-Caribbean women authors such as Brodber and Adisa provide artistic ways to cope with the difficulties of representing trauma and memory and how these writers also contribute significantly to the creation of a New World writing that addresses the complicated colonial and neocolonial interrelations between the United States and

the Caribbean.

Keywor ds：Caribbean literature, trauma,

“Ou libéré!”: Trauma and Memory in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory

Pin-chia Feng

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures National Chiao-Tung University

Hsin-chu, Taiwan ROC

pcfeng@cc.nctu.edu.tw

At the beginning of Part III of Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat’s

Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), the first-person narrator Sophie Caco returns to her

grandmother’s village in rural Haiti after eight years of immigration to the United States and comes upon a group of female vendors. Danticat describes a moment of camaraderie among the women through the perspective of Sophie:

When one merchant dropped her heavy basket, another called out of concern, “Ou libéré?” Are you free from your heavy load?

The woman with the load would answer yes, if she had unloaded her freight without hurting herself. (96)

The question of whether one can unload physical and spiritual burden without hurting oneself is indeed central to this novel in which personal traumas, such as rape and female genital mutilation, and the pain of separation and immigration are intricately interwoven with national memory of violence and bloodshed. The setting of the scene— Sophie’s homecoming— is also important in that it places her story within a diasporic discourse in which transnational and transcultural experience is highlighted. This key question that comes out of the language of market place further exemplifies how Danticat’s lyrical writing in English vividly captures the texture of life in the Francophone Haiti and is indicative of the importance of folk culture in the novel.1 Moreover, the representation of a group underclass women struggling with life’s heavy burden yet supported by mutual sympathy distinctly echoes the homage to female endurance in the dedication in which Danticat devotes her first novel to “the brave women of Haiti” who “have stumbled but… will not fall.” While rooted within Haitian folk culture and female sympathy, this celebratory narrative is nevertheless heavily accentuated with ambivalence, especially towards maternity in which the

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According to Dash, Danticat’s choice of language is liberating: “Writing the novel in English, the language of the other, affords an eloquent taciturn defiance of a traditional Haitian literary rhetoric which can be identified with a kind of masculine audibility and copiousness. If French is the language of political authority and literary tradition, then English has become, for Danticat, the code of genuine feeling” (161). At the same time, Danticat is very happy having her book translated into French (as Le Cri de L’Osieau Rogue by Nicole Tisserand), which has been nominated for a Francophone Caribbean literary prize (Shea 387).

boundary between self-identity and the (m)other becomes problematic. To maintain her sanity, the protagonist Sophie is faced with the challenge of self-liberation through confronting the “horror” in her life, which in the novel is represented as the inevitable separation and eternal bonding with her mother Martine. To fully understand the complexity of the novel, it is imperative that the related web of trauma and memory must be intricately understood within a transcultural context and a cultural specificity befitted Haitian American imagination. This paper therefore aims to examine the ways in which Danticat utilizes culturally specific issue of “testing” and voodoo legends of blood and double to depict trauma and memory that are closely related to a problematic of boundary within the mother-daughter relationship.

To mirror Danticat’s insistence on rootedness, a brief overview of Haiti is needed here to contextualize the novel socially and historically. The Haitians in the late eighteenth century were anti-colonists, “the black Jacobins” in C. L. R. James’s terms, who inaugurated the first revolution in the “Third World.” Although Haiti became the first black republic of Americas in 1804, it is now one of the poorest countries in the world due to political instability and foreign invasions. The period of American Occupation from 1915 to 1934 has also left its permanent mark on Haitian national memory and literary representations. The reign of terror and superstition by François “Doc” Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude from 1957 to 1986 further plunged the country into abject poverty. The arrival of Haitian “boat people” in Florida in 1971 shocked the consciousness of the world. As in many other poor areas in the Caribbean, Haitian workers move into Euro-American metropolises to look for better opportunities in life and to support their families back home. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, for instance, as a young child Sophie is made aware how “the New York

money” allows she and her Tante Atie to have a house of their own. But the price of a better living standard is high since many Haitian immigrants leave their young children behind in Haiti and only send for the children when they can afford it. Such a pattern of separation and reunion becomes characteristic of many Haitian immigrant families and the major structural principle of Danticat’s novel.

Breath, Eyes, Memory is in fact emplotted as a series of separations and reunions:

In Part I twelve-year-old Sophie Caco is summoned by her mother, a rape victim who works in the United States as a nursing aid. In Part II the life of the eighteen-year-old Sophie is turning into a nightmare when her mother starts to “test” her to safeguard her virginity. Sophie chooses to elope with her African American boy friend Joseph after inserting a pestle into her body to stop the testing. Sophie returns to Haiti with her baby daughter Brigitte to search for ways to re-member her traumatized body and spirit in Part III. Finally in Part IV Sophie again makes the passage back to her home village to bury the mother who commits suicide during her second pregnancy.

With an apparent narrative lineality that depicts the first-person narrator’s progress from her childhood, Breath, Eyes, Memory can easily be categorized as a

typical developmental narrative. Yet such a linear development is constantly subverted by an insistence on repetition and a critical question of whether the female speaking voice is issued out of a unified subject. This kind of repetition and fragmentation has everything to do with the memory work in the novel. The novel in fact suggests two ways to read the meaning of memory. In a general context, memory is the key to personal and collective identity in modernity, as Michael S. Roth suggests (8). Whether one can achieve liberation in the novel is dependant upon the use and abuse of the past. As Roth points out in his discussion of Freud, “We are not the victims of our pasts, nor are we simply their (guilty) survivors. We do not only undergo trauma, we are capable of making meaning and direction out of our past… . An interpretation of the signs of the past still legible in the present helps us to achieve this” (193). Roth also contends in his discussion of narrative memory that “[a] trauma is a part of one’s past that seems to demand inclusion in any narrative of development of the present but that makes any narrative seem painfully inadequate” (205). Reading within this Freudian psychoanalytic paradigm, Sophie’s chance to achieve subjectivity depends on whether she can manage to achieve a “reconnection to the present via an acknowledgement of the past” (Roth 193). That is, Sophie needs to come to the awareness that she cannot afford a melancholic indulgence in the traumatic past at the expense of the present, and her hope in the present is to create an American family with Joseph and Brigitte through a reconciliation with her Haitian past. Otherwise, like her mother Martine she is doomed to remain suspended in a liminal state of what Julia Kristeva terms abjection.

More importantly, memory in the novel carries with it a specific cultural significance. The title of the novel suggests a trinity between spirit, body, and memory that is rooted in Haitian culture; as Sophie confesses: “I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head” (234). Memory in the Haitian context is tangible and an integral part of the Haitian existence that corresponds to vaudou practices in which the

mysterious loas or deities manifest their presence by mounting the “horses” or priests and priestess.2 Memory for the Haitians, like the living gods of vaudou, is alive and

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There is a lack of agreement upon the spelling of the Haitian folk religion. As Desmangles states, “The common term voodoo, a distortion of the Dahomean (or Beninois) word vodu (meaning ‘god’ or ‘spirit’), has been used by many scholars (Daren, Laguerre). But unfortunately, in popular literature and films the term voodoo has been misconstrued as sorcery, witchcraft, and in some cases cannibalistic practices… . Other scholars have used the term vodun or vodoun (Leyburn, Mintz, Davis, Courlander) in order to dispel popular misconceptions about the religion” (xi). In this paper I follow Danticat’s Francophone spelling of vaudou.

will return to interfere with human affairs and therefore demands recognition. This tenuous hold onto memory is partly a residue of African ancestral worship and a reaction to the experience of slavery in which all kinds of practices— the change of name and enforcement of Catholic baptism, to name a few— are mobilized to induce the transplanted and enslaved African population to forget about their home in Guinea. While there is no description of vaudou possession in the novel, vaudou loas such as

the goddess of love Erzulie and the twin gods Marassas are alluded to as part of Haitian folk memory. From the title and the allusion to the folk religion, clearly Danticat is suggesting a Haitian context for understanding memory besides the western paradigm.

Although Sophie’s memory is scarred with traumas, Danticat makes it clear that it is the forced immigration that starts the whole cycle of nightmares. The konbit

potluck dinner in Part I and Atie’s warm embrace seem to provide a glimpse of Sophie’s sense of prelapsarian security before she is forced to acknowledge the existence of an absentee mother and the necessity of her to join the mother. In spite that the experience of Haitian diaspora is limited to part II within the quadripartite structure of the novel, in which we are offered a condensed narrative of six years of Sophie’s development, the description of multiple transnational passages in the novel indicates that it needs to be situated within a framework of immigration. Indeed the novel is typically analyzed as a moving piece of immigrant literature. Marie-José N’Zengo-Tayo, for instance, focuses on the representation of immigrant children and observes that a significant issue in the novel is “the impact of migration on the mother-daughter relationship” (97) since this migratory experience “increases the gap between parents and children in terms of culture clash” (99). Reading the novel within the context of relations between Haiti and the United States in his brief analysis, Michael Dash places the characters in a conflict of shifting values between the parochial and the cosmopolitan as they “are caught between the nightmare of patriarchal, authoritarian Haiti and the liberating anonymity offered by the American city” (160). While I think N’Zengo-Tayo’s thesis is valid but tends to be too generalized, I also disagree with Dash for the dichotomous treatment of the two cultures. In fact, Danticat definitely places Haiti higher up on the cultural hierarchy, if there exists one in the novel. Instead of pitting Sophie’s American experience against the Haitian one, therefore, I propose to read them together as different representations of Sophie as a subject-in-progress. Here Kristeva’s theory of abjection provides a useful lens with which we can examine the state of liminality of Haitian immigrants in New York and the problematic of boundary as embodied by Martine’s and Sophie’s symptoms of sexual phobia.

Kristeva’s greatest contribution to the psychoanalytical theory is that she adds on to the Lacanian mirror stage and symbolic order by introducing the preoedipal stage

that is dominated by the abject. In The Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection,

Kristeva characterizes the abject as someone suspended in a liminal state that is neither subject nor object— “The abject has only one quality of the object— that of being opposed to I” (1). For Kristeva, abjection is something that “disturbs identity,

system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). In her expounding of Kristeva, Kelly Oliver suggests, “On the level of personal archaeology, abjection shows up as the struggle to separate from the maternal body… . The child tries to separate but feels that separation is impossible” (56). The issue of boundary between mother and child is therefore at the center of abjection. Furthermore, as John Lechte observes, for Kristeva phobia and loathing “are two fundamental forms of abjection resulting from an instability in the symbolic/paternal function and thus an imperfect separation from the mother” (161). In Breath, Eyes, Memory there are many cases of phobia and

self-loathing because of the problematic of boundary. The female body represents the abject and women act out their self-loathing by traumatizing their own bodies.

In Part II we see the most direct description of the Haitian American community in New York and the prejudices against Haitian Americans. This period can be characterized by a state of what I call “Haitian abjection.” Adopting Kristeva’s concept of abjection, David Liwei Li uses the term “Asian abjection” to describe the dilemma of Asian Americans who are legally citizens but in fact cannot “enjoy the subject status of citizens in a registered and recognized participation of American democracy” (6). The abjection of Haitian Americans operates both internally and externally. Danticat addresses the issue of internal colonization in which black skin is devalued by people of African descent themselves. There is an apparent racial dimension to Martine’s self-loathing since she seeks to whiten her skin with a special kind of lotion. At the external level, Danticat reveals how Haitian immigrants in New York appear to be such abjects within American national discourse. In particular, she shows the ways that the language of disease and degeneration is turned into a racist apparatus to ab-ject Haitian Americans. Through Martine’s motherly advice to Sophie, for instance, we learn about how Haitian has been stereotyped in a biological discourse with terms like HBO, “Haitian Body Odor,” and “the ‘Four Hs,’” “Heroine addicts, Hemophiliacs, Homosexuals, and Haitians” who are regarded as immanent AIDS carriers (51). Thus the dominant society redirects its attack on the Haitian minority by labeling the group as something filthy and contagious that posts a threat to national health. Here we are reminded by what Susan Sontag states in her essay on AIDS, “Epidemics of particularly dreaded illness always provoke an outcry against leniency or tolerance— now identified as laxity, weakness, disorder, corruption: unhealthiness” (168). Despite that the Haitian Americans in the novel have successfully crossed the national boundary, they appear to be trapped in a liminal state

when it comes to racial identity.

One problem about Li’s description of “Asian abjection” is that as a general model it overlooks the gender factor in the formation of ethnic subjectivity. Similarly, “Haitian abjection” is also a generic term that needs to be redefined in a gendered way. Since Danticat is more interested in unraveling the experience of immigrant women, she chooses to explore the issue of immigration within the dynamics of separation and reunion of mothers and daughters. In Breath, Eyes, Memory she undertakes to investigate the impact of the absence of mothers and what

comes after the reunion for Haitian women. As Danticat states in her interview with Renee H. Shea,

For me, the most fascinating thing is the absence and then the recovery from that absence. People who grew up without their mothers for one reason or another and then find themselves reunited with them— this is a very strong themes in the lives of Haitian women my age who were separated from their mothers early on… . What interests me most is the separation and healing: recovering or not recovering: Becoming a woman and defining what means in terms of a mother who may have been there in fragments, who was first a wonderful memory that represents absence. (382)

As shown in the novel, being removed to the United Sates at the critical age of twelve seriously undermines Sophie’s sense of identity both as a Haitian and a daughter. The novel starts with a description of how Sophie is forced to acknowledge that she is the daughter of a mother who has left her only child behind; importantly, it is Atie, the aunt who raises her, dutifully opens Sophie’s eyes to that fact when Sophie tries to present the aunt with a Mother’s Day card decorated with a daffodil. Sophie’s psychological reaction to Atie’s enforcement of separation is embodied in her nightmare about being suffocated by the mother and her crashing of the daffodil. The implicit violence indicates that Sophie is experiencing a metaphorical “birth trauma” for leaving the surrogate mother and the motherland behind.

If the experience of immigration recreates the birth trauma of separation for Sophie, what traumatizes her more is that upon arrival in the United States Sophie becomes aware that her mother Martine is unconsciously afraid of her because Sophie is the physical evidence of rape, “the living memory from the past” (56). As a rape victim, Martine sees the daughter as an embodiment of the rapist, whose face she has never seen and could never imagine. Just like being cast as “the ‘Four Hs’,” Sophie’s birth is posited as a result of tainted blood. Seeing the fear in the mother’s eyes places Sophie in the realm of the unknown and unconscious. Martin’s nightmares further plunge Sophie into guilt feelings that both undermine the mother-daughter bonding and alienate Sophie from her self. Compounded with her sense of alienation resulted from geographical and cultural transplantation, the

mother’s fear starts the whole process of Sophie’s self-abjection.

What further increases Sophie’s sense of abjection is when Martine starts “testing” her, a Haitian custom in which the mother inserts a finger into the daughter’s private part to make sure about the latter’s “purity.” Through the description of testing, Danticat reveals that the apex of abjection of women in Haitian society is to turn maternity into an instrument of oppression against daughters. For generations, Haitian mothers have been testing their daughters out of maternal obligations without acknowledging that this practice ab-jects the daughter’s body and pushes the latter into self-loathing. Originated in the cult for the Virgin Mother in Catholicism, this custom of testing, which is obviously collusive to patriarchal authority, uncovers a trace of Haitian colonial history. Kelly Oliver spells out the embedded paternal control behind the cult for the Virgin while explicating Kristeva’s concept of the abject mother: “The Virgin has no jouissance; and her body is marked with the Name

of the Father. There is no mistake about paternity here in spite of the fact that in the Christian story Joseph becomes Mary’s husband (51). On a masochistic note, Haitian mothers faithfully carry out the duty entrusted to them by performing the function of safeguarding the purity of paternal line.3 They are thus paradoxically agents of patriarchy without autonomous agency. By presenting how the daughters are psychologically and physically scarred, Danticat crusades into the heart of darkness of this maternal practice, which remains unquestioned and continues to be reproduced.

When Sophie takes Martine to task for testing her, Martine admits that she has no better excuse than it is a usual maternal practice:

“I did it,” she said, “because my mother had done it to me. I have no greater excuse. I realize standing here that the two greatest pains of my life are very much related. The one good thing about my being raped was that it made the testing stop. The testing and the rape. I live both every day.”

(170)

Matine’s simultaneous mourning for/ rejoicing over the lost hymen shows how women are suffering from multiple oppressions. The testing cannot protect the daughter from rape. And just like the rape, the testing violates the daughter’s somatic boundary when the mother goes “inside” the daughter’s body to carry on the order of patriarchal control.

This violation of physical boundary leads to Sophie’s sexual phobia and abhorrence against her own body. These sentiments finally climaxes in Sophie’s self-mutilation, which is an act that embodies her self-abjection. In the novel, in a

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Oliver further states, “The power of the mother in a matrilinear society, the power of the child’s primary relation/identification with the mother, and the power of the mother as the authority over the child’s body are all condensed into the symbol of the Virgin Mother. The mother’s power is brought under paternal control. It is domesticated” (51).

very corporeal sense the female body represents the abject and women act out their self-abjection by traumatizing their own bodies. Sophie’s self-abjection brings about the formal separation from the mother. Kristeva’s theory of abjection posits that the mother must become the abject prior to the child’s entrance into the symbolic order. And Danticat literally presents the reader with a mother’s corpse near the end of the novel.

In developing the thematic of testing, Danticat relies on the imagery of blood. She depicts Sophie’s self-mutilation in a matter-of-the-fact fashion:

My flesh ripped apart as I pressed the pestle into it. I could see the blood slowly dripping onto the bed sheet. I took the pestle and the bloody sheet and stuffed into a bag. It was gone, the veil that always held my mother’s finger back every time she tested me. (88)

Immediately before this violent act of self-mutilation Danticat inserts into the narrative a folk legend about a woman who cannot stop bleeding until the goddess Erzulie changes her into a butterfly (87-88). This story of transformation teaches Sophie that she needs to change her own body in exchange for freedom. Here Sophie’s self-abjection marks an attempt at demolishing her own corporeality to set up a boundary between the demanding mother and her withering selfhood. Thus Sophie frees herself from the nightly testing that dehumanizes her in her own eyes. The image of the bloody sheet recurs with another legend when Sophie and Grandmother Ifé are listening to how a village girl is being tested. As opposed to the previous story, this time the legend is about a virgin who does not bleed on her wedding night and her husband is obliged to cut her, which consequently leads to her death. Yet the honor of her husband is preserved when he parades at the head of the funeral procession with blood-soaked sheets (154-5). The story is permeated with a sacrificial sense: women’s blood is spilt to maintain male honor and family pride. Together these three tales of blood exposes the unspeakable nature of violence in this maternal practice.

By taking away the hymen that the mother is desperately trying to protect, Sophie at once liberates and punishes herself. Significantly, Sophie’s instrument of “deflowering” is a pestle, a culinary utensil for crashing spices that signifies their cultural roots and a curious phallic substitute for that of her rapist father. By this self-inflicted mutilation, Sophie at once acknowledges her connection with the maternal and unconsciously punishes the body that reminds the mother of the rape. Later on, the mother repeats this kind of self-mutilation by committing suicide. The way that Martine stabs herself seventeen times shows the extent of her self-loathing. I would argue that both Sophie’s and Martine’s self-mutilations are unconscious attempts to replicate the original traumas, the testing and the rape. This obsessive desire of return to the unspeakable past bespeaks a mimetic impulse. Both mother

and daughter attempt to liberate themselves with phallic instruments. However, Danticat makes it clear that this mimicking will not bring true liberation for victims of masculine aggression and maternal complicity.

Sophie’s self-mutilation fails to be truly liberating, which is evinced in her psychosomatic symptoms of fear of sex and eating disorder. Her bulimia is another symptom of her self-abjection. As Kristeva points out, “Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection” (2). Danticat also makes Sophie’s disease of eating disorder part of her maternal inheritance as Martine confesses that the scarcity of food in Haiti makes her overeat and gain sixty pounds during her first year in the United States. Sophie also confesses to Martine, “I hate my body. I am ashamed to show it to anybody, including my husband” (123). Sophie’s sexual phobia can be regarded as a condensation of all her nameable and unnamable fears. As Kristeva argues, “It will fall upon analysis to give back a memory, hence a language, to the unnamable and namable states of fear, while emphasizing the former, which make up what is most unapproachable in the unconscious. It will also fall upon it, within the same temporality and the same logic, to make the analysand see the void upon which rests the play within the signifier and

primary process” (37). The brief appearance of Sophie’s therapist, Rena, who is also an initiated Santeria priestess, becomes pivotal in Sophie’s struggle with memory and trauma. The advices coming from Rena, to reclaim mother line, to give a face to the rapist/father and to visit the spot where Martine was raped, combine professional psychoanalytical language and African folk wisdom. What is important is the creolized nature of this healing practice. Separately neither psychoanalysis nor folk wisdom can effectuate a cure.

Here we must pause and consider an important political issue about Danticat’s emphasis on the thematic of testing in the novel. There are important questions that we need to address within the general framework of multicultural literature: Is it necessary to highlight the practice of testing in the Haitian culture? Is the testing an example of cultural specificity or it is inserted in the novel as a target for voyeuristic investigation by (primarily white) readers and critics? There are no easy answers to these loaded questions. I believe this horrific practice is used in the text to exemplify how Haitian women are suffering from multiple oppressions resultant from colonial and patriarchal authoritarianism.

In terms of gender politics, in the novel the testing is represented as a source of trauma that demands acknowledgement and comprehension. After her self-mutilation and consequently rejected/expelled by the mother, Sophie tries to justify her self-defilement with a forced sense of jouissance by investing a hope of

normality on Providence, a prototypical New England town— “I was bound to be happy in a place called Providence. A place that destiny was calling me to. Fate!

A town named after the Creator, the Almighty” (89). The interpellative power of the supposedly utopian space rests on the biblical allusion in which the Name of the Father is invoked. For the posttraumatic Sophie, Joseph’s house in Providence represents an imaginary postoedipal stability that can rescue her out of the state of liminality. However, she has to carry out her project of liberation and regeneration back in the Haitian hilly village, which represents a Kristevan chora, the place in

which Sophie’s identity and the maternal practice are originated. This homecoming can be read a sign of embracing maternal/native values. Nevertheless it is also a necessary journey for Sophie to confront the source of her sexual phobia and to query the grandmother and the mother who have passed on this tradition. Sophie’s return to Haiti in part III, therefore, is not simply a journey of search for roots but an epistemological one.

Danticat clearly indicates that the end of Part II demarcates a watershed in Sophie’s life. What comes after is how to deal with the formal separation from the mother or the possibility of a second reunion. Yet the novel does not end with Sophie’s return to the United States with Martine after the mother and daughter reconciles. Obviously, there is more to be resolved than the mother-daughter conflict. The novel also makes it clear that acknowledgement and comprehension is not sufficient to overcome the traumatic experience. The trapped green balloon in Sophie’s healing ritual is an eloquent symbol of the impossibility of any miracle cure. Sophie still needs to take another step— to confront the past as represented by the spot of the mother’s rape and the place of her origin— in order to be fully liberated. Martine’s death catalyzes this final confrontation and her suicide, in this sense, becomes sacrificial. Her spilt blood enables the daughter to reconnect with the present.

The novel evinces an ambivalent reaction toward maternal discourse. On the one hand, mother-daughter bonding is described as fundamental to female existence. On the other hand, mothers are also victimizers who collude with the patriarchal violence, which again presents a nuanced picture of patriarchal practices. A paradoxical demand in the novel is the need to continue the semiotic order of female heritage and a need to stop the meaningless reproduction of suffering women. Ambivalence or paradox nonetheless, Danticat is faced with a challenge of a feminist demand to contain and curb the sense of resentment within the narrative since it is supposedly a celebration of Haitian womanhood. To resolve the conflict between the demand of narrative containment and the oscillating sentiments towards maternity, Danticat resorts to the appropriation of culturally specific allusions which are exemplified by the references to the vaudou loa Erzulie and cult of twins in Marassas.

In Danticat’s portrayal of Grandmother Ifé we see a good example of the ambivalence towards the maternal: she is the African Caribbean ancestress figure

who safeguards family heritage; at the same time, she is collusive in sexual oppression against women. It is therefore highly symbolic when she offers Sophie a statue of Erzulie, the vaudou “goddess of love who doubled over… as

the Virgin Mother” (113) to solace the latter’s painful memory of testing.4 Before she is reunited with Martine, Sophie entertains a projection of the mother as the goddess: “As a child, the mother I had imagined for myself was like Erzulie, the lavish Virgin Mother. She was the healer of all women and the desire of all men” (59). In her path-breaking study of Voudoun practices in Haiti, Maya Deren points out the significance of this female loa: “… Voudoun has given woman, in the figure of Erzulie, exclusive title to that which distinguishes humans from all other forms: their capacity to conceive beyond reality, to desire beyond adequacy, to create beyond need. In Erzulie, Voudoun salutes woman as the divinity of their dream, the Goddess of Love, the muse of beauty” (138). Deren nevertheless observes a paradox in this celebration of the great female principle: “It is upon this diminutive feminine figure that man has placed the burden of the most divine paradox… . Erzulie is the loa of the impossible perfection which must remain unattainable” (144). When the image of the Virgin Mother is no longer valid, Martine takes on another characteristic of Erzulie when she commits suicide. Sophie chooses to bury the mother in a bright red suit as a final gesture of rebellion against the virginity cult and an attempt at empowerment and liberation: “It was too loud a color for a burial. I knew it. She would look like a Jezebel, hot-blooded Erzulie who feared no men, but rather made them her slaves, raped them, and killed them. She was the only

woman with that power” (227). The crimson red, which is both a color of love and passion in Haitian cosmology and that of redemption in Christian theology, represents female sexuality and ancestral identity since the color is correlative to the family name Caco, a scarlet bird.5 Hence Sophie again identifies Martine with Erzulie, which symbolically reroots the mother’s spirit, her éspirit, with the

motherland. In this final act of “courageous daughtering,”6 Sophie acts out her

____________________________________

4

As a creolized religion, vaudou maintains a symbiotic relationship with Roman Catholicism.

Desmangles sees the symbiosis in two ways: “first as symbiosis by ecology; and second as the system of identification by which Catholic saints are identified with Vodou laws [loas]” (136).

5

Atie explains the family name to Sophie during their walk around the family cemetery: “Our family name, Caco, it is the name of a scarlet bird. A bird so crimson, it makes the reddest hibiscus or the brightest flame trees seem white. The Caco bird, when it dies, there is always a rush of blood that rises to its neck and the wings, they look so bright, you would think them on fire” (150). The symbolic meaning of the scarlet bird is important to the novel, thus the title of the French translation is based upon this bird imagery.

6

piety towards the past and discovers her own liberation.

However, the reason for Martine’s testing of Sophie goes deeper than the virginity cult. Martine tells the story of Marassas, the inseparable lovers, to Sophie

during a testing: “The love between a mother and daughter is deeper than the sea. You would leave me for an old man who you didn’t know the year before. You and I we could be like Marassas. You are giving up a lifetime with me. Do you

understand?” (85). Danticat somehow changes the meaning of Marassas, which

represents a worship of twins in Haitian culture, into one that stresses the oneness in two entities. It also represents her fear of separation and resentment against the daughter’s “betrayal” of the mother-daughter symbiosis for the sake of entrance into the symbolic order as represented by Joseph, whose name is reminiscent of the Christian myth of fatherhood. Ironically, Martine’s fixation on the preoedipal symbiosis is always already determined by the symbolic order as she ritualistically practices testing on Sophie according to patriarchal mandate. In Martine’s desire of doubling with the daughter there is a strong sense of possessiveness. Besides nightmares and suicide, therefore, Martine’s way of “narrating” her memory is possessiveness. Her insistence on the complete mother-daughter identification can also be regarded as a symptom of melancholia since Sophie is used as the substitute of a love object. Martine’s fixation on eliminating the boundary between the mother and the daughter is depicted as a symptom of her madness. On the other hand, this insistence on mother-daughter doubleness is culturally specific as Sophie finally realizes that starting from the folk tradition they are all “daughters of this land.”

Another meaning of doubling refers to a state of two in one in which a unified identity becomes impossible. Danticat uses it in an ironic mode as a critique of the inhuman cruelty of politicians:

There were many cases in our history where our ancestors had

doubled. Following in the vaudou tradition, most of our presidents

were actually one body split into two: part flesh and part shadow. That was the only way they could murder and rape so many people and still go home to play with their children and make love to their wives. (156)

More important to our context is how Martine and Sophie both adopt this kind of doubling during sexual acts. It is obvious from the text that the purpose of their doubling originates in a fear of abandonment since both mother and daughter confess that they feel obligated to faking sexual pleasure in order to keep their men.

Ferraro revises Adrienne Rich’s concept of “courageous mothering” and argues that the daughter should have courage to speak against her heritage and clan and also the resourcefulness to identify the mother’s silent dissent in the interstices of tradition and family history (159).

To avoid stereotyping, however, Danticat takes pains to illustrate that sexual phobia is not limited to Haitian women alone. In Sophie’s sexual phobia group, there is an Ethiopian woman Buki, who is a victim of female genital mutilation, and a Chicana woman Davina, who has been raped by her own grandfather for ten years. What the three women have in common is that they all suffer from sexual violence inflicted by their own kinsmen who either represent or act out of the mandate of patriarchal authoritarianism. The ritual of burning the names of their abusers signals a symbolic revenge against their victimizers. At issue here is not about asserting a victim’s moral superiority. Rather the object lesson is to stop the senseless circulation of victimization. As Sophie states, “It was up to me to avoid my turn in the fire. It was up to me to make sure that my daughter never slept with ghosts, never lived with nightmares, and never had her name burnt in the flames” (203). Here Danticat allows Sophie to invest hope on her own daughter. Because of her mother’s maturity, Bridgette Ifé, as the youngest generation of the Caco women, will be exempted from the cycle of hurt and trauma.

At the very end of the novel and after the mother’s burial, Grandmother Ifé queries Sophie with the key question again in a rhetorical way: “There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: ‘Ou libéré?’ Are you free, my

daughter?” (234). In Breath, Eyes, Memory Danticat offers a vision of

mother-daughter bonding that bases upon biological connection and spiritual identification through the images of blood and double. While stressing the importance of female heritage, however, Danticat also sees the danger of entrapment within a biological discourse of bloodline and the necessary separation in order for the daughter to develop into full subjectivity. Through the interrogation of mother-daughter boundary, Danticat passes on these messages with her novelistic discourse: The daughter must reconcile to the fact that the good mother and the bad mother are one and the same; and she must not reproduce the cycle of trauma so that the daughters in the future will not suffer. Thus when Martine chooses to be subsumed by a melancholic negation of self, Sophie learns to move beyond the liminal state of abjection. Sophie’s multiple passages manifest an epistemological desire to understand the cause of her own trauma so that the horrific practice will not be repeated and reproduced. This brave confrontation with her own memory helps Danticat’s daughter protagonist break out of the biologically determined cycle of victimization, reconnect with the present, and is finally able to reach a state of true liberation.

Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Dash, J. Michael. Haiti and the United Stares: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1997.

Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. 1953. New York:

McPherson & Company, 1983.

Desmangles, Leslie G. The Faces of Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti.

Chapel Hill, NC: The U of North Carolina P, 1994.

Ferraro, Thomas. “Changing the Rituals: Courageous Daughtering and the Mystique of The Woman Warrior.” Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993, 154-90.

James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 1963. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horrors: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S.

Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Lechte, John. Julia Kristeva. London: Routledge, 1990.

Li, David Leiwei. Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Construct. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.

Métraux, Alfred. Voodoo in Haiti. 1959. Trans. Hogo Charteris. New York:

Schocken Books, 1972.

N’Zengo-Tayo, Marie-José. “Children in Haitian Popular Migration as Seen by Maryse Condé and Edwidge Danticat.” Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. Eds. Adele S. Newson and

Linda Strong-Leek. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. 93-100.

Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind. Bloomington:

Indian UP, 1993.

Roth, Michael S. The Ironist’s Cage: Memory, Trauma, and the Construction of History. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.

Shea, Renne H. “The Dangerous Job of Edwidge Danticat: An Interview.”

Callaloo 19.2 (1996): 382-9.

Sontag, Susan. Illness and Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York:

大專學生參與專題研究計畫成果報告

沃克的成長小說：《掌握喜悅的秘密》

Alice Walker’s

Bildungsroman: Possessing the Secret of Joy

學生: 陳詩琪

指導教授: 馮品佳 教授

Alice Walker’s

Bildungsroman: Possessing the Secret of Joy

Shih-chi Chen

Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker, a story of a severely traumatized woman, is also a story of her maturing process. The main character Tashi, who appears shortly in Walker’s other novel The Color Purple, is traumatized by her experiences of the circumcision tradition. However, as going through horrible pain and mental suffering, she gradually gains her self-consciousness and grows into her well being by defining her identity instead of putting herself into a mental disaster of total misery and hatred. The maturing process can be observed not only through the genre of Bildungsroman but also Walker’s general writing styles.

This work of trauma in literature is not merely a presentation of wounds that simply record a traumatized experience, but it is a different kind of Bildungsroman.

The editors of The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development explain the patterns of female Bildungsroman, which Pin-chia Feng mentions in her book, The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston:

The editors also deduce two predominant narrative patterns of the female

Bildungsroman: the first is an essentially chronological apprenticeship, which

adapts the linear structure of the male Bildungsroman; the second is the

awakening, which generally occurs later in the heroine’s life and consists of brief, internal epiphanic moments (11-2). (11)

The narrative pattern of Possessing the Secret of Joy can be considered the second type of female Bildungsroman since the story is not about her development of social

adequacy and success, but it is about the awakening and healing which make her complete in her later life. The main character Tashi hides from the trauma of her sister’s death from circumcision and chooses to believe what she is taught about believing in the Olinkan traditions and values. She tells stories and lies to avoid and hide away from the truth. Yet she believes that her identity – being an Olinkan – can be further affirmed by her later circumcision, and that this can differentiate her from her friend Olivia who is an African American. However, she is further traumatized through this experience, which, instead of making the whole of her, ironically breaks her apart. She starts to live without a soul until her death - the death that comes after others’ help and her self-healing by dealing with her trauma and brings her final liberation. The healing and recovering of Tashi transform her suffering into the awakening of her self-consciousness.

However as a story on a black woman and by a black woman, this work may constantly be studied and focused on the context of race and gender struggles rather than personal development as the genre of Bildungsroman. Therefore, Feng argues

common context of struggle” among all people. She then defines ethnic women’s

works as the following:

I regard any writing by an ethnic woman about the identity formation of an ethnic woman, whether fictional or autobiographical in form, chronologically or retrospectively in plot, as a Bildungsroman. (15)

This issue is not just personal in racial or gender issues, but it is of universal concerns. To sum up all, I would like to study and analyze this work based on the same

arguments of Feng’s in order to have better understanding on the issues of identity formation and on the interrelationship with the healing process from trauma, on which the novel has strong messages.

The use and interaction of names at the top of each passage in the novel is one of the most direct clues that show Tashi’s separate and incomplete personalities and the status of her development of her self-consciousness. First her identities are separated, then co-existing, interacting, and finally are united, where she gains her

self-consciousness and becomes complete. The Olinkan name Tashi, represents her African identity, which loves Africa and respects the African traditions, has the personality of always trying to hide from the truth - the trauma that she goes through during the death of her sister as well as her own circumcision. The trauma has the effect that Tashi tends to make up stories and lies. Her American name Evelyn, which is the new identity she first believes that can free her from past trauma but later becomes an identity for her to look at the truth honestly. Evelyn is usually brave, honest and expressive. When Tashi and Evelyn meet, these two contradictory characters cause the conflict that enables the healing to take place.

She constantly speaks through these two identities, sometimes (mostly in the beginning) through only one name but later with the combination of two and even different orders such as “Tashi – Evelyn” or “Evelyn – Tashi.” These appearances of names having different mechanisms can be studied as two conflicting identities existing at the same time. The order of the names represent in a form of this model -“Thinking – Reaction.” For instance, on page 70 where the names are shown as “Tashi – Evelyn,” The Old Man plays a film with a picture of a fighting cock which terrorizes Tashi and makes her faint. When she wakes up she does not tell anyone about her fear but “ ...laughed off my condition and said it was caused by too much happiness, sailing in the high altitude,” which is Tashi’s way of thinking – avoiding the truth. However, later Evelyn starts to draw a painting of a cock which reminds her of the unthinkable past. Also when the names appear as “Evelyn – Tashi,” we can also see the struggle of these two identities. The evidence can be seen from the passage after Amy tells Tashi that there is circumcision in Evelyn’s beloved U.S.:

Evelyn – Tashi

I have to, I’ll stop them in their tracks. Just as I stopped Amy. How do you stop someone in their tracks? By not believing them. (164)

Evelyn is brave enough to want to protect her love toward the United States, however, her reaction is shown as Tashi’s, which still hides away from the truth “by not

believing them.” These evidences show that although Tashi and Evelyn are different identities, they can co-exit and be misplaced. The co-exiting and misplacing take place as the interaction with healing purpose during the disruption between two identities. The interaction enables the rupture of these two identities to dissolve into one. The separated identities in her are refined through interactions into an integrated whole of self-consciousness.

Her identities are eventually united at the end of the story where her names are appeared as “Tashi Evelyn Johnson Soul.” (278) The mechanism of the names is pushed further after the dash marks disappear. The names without the dash marks altogether represent one name, which is taken as the united identity. The name “Soul” appears finally indicating the completion of her identity and self-consciousness, for what is veiled undiscovered at all times is her soul, which her husband, Adam, comments in the story “The first thing I noticed was the flatness of her gaze.” (40) Some may argue that the ending is not educative indicating the format of

Bildungsroman because the story ends with her miserable death, which is the killing

of her rather than a suicide. However, in Bettye J. Parker-Smith’s essay “Alice Walker’s women: In Search of Some Peace of Mind,” she argues that death in Walker’s works is a sense of peace signifying a positive possibility:

Of course, death is never lamented. There is no jumping up and shouting and falling out after her deaths. Rather, one feels a calmness, a hush prevailing. And one realizes that her women have already been in their graves long before they die. Her women’s deaths were like sweeping the hulls of butter beans off the porch after the shelling is completed. Once empty, they serve no further purpose. (489)

Tashi at the end also talks about her positive attitude toward the death. She signs her name “Tashi Evelyn Johnson” with the word “Reborn” (277) and says at last, “I am no more. And satisfied.” (279) Tashi’s death is a representation of peace, rebirth and satisfaction. Her death is the ultimate liberation that unites the disruptive names and identities into one.

In spite of the importance of self-growth and self-healing in the story, the process must work within an essential context in Walker’s story - woman community, which is considered to be a necessary element of Walker’s Bildungsroman. While Tashi’s

psychologist The Old Man tells her, “You yourselves are your last hope,” (53) the hope does not rely only on Tashi herself but also on the help from the woman community. Tashi’s friend Olivia, her psychologist Raye, the female protesters and

also even her husband’s mistress Lisette, and almost all the women in the story, are essential helping roles. The importance and function of this community is also shown when Raye is willing to suffer in order to understand Tashi’s pain, which makes Tashi moved and grow to trust Raye:

I realized that though Raye had left Africa hundreds of years before in the persons of her ancestors and studied at the best of the white man’s school, she was intuitively practicing an ageless magic, the foundation of which was the ritualization, or the acting out, of empathy. (131)

This passage does not only mention the power of empathy provided by the community but also indicates the diversity of the community by referring how different Raye is from her. The circumcision is almost impossible for Raye to imagine, but empathy is a mutual instinct shared by all human beings. The similar form already appears in Walker’s other previous works as her general writing style. For instance, in The Color Purple, another traumatized character Celie also goes through her healing and

development process not only through her self-helping but also the help of her sister Nettie, her daughter in law Sophie and even her husband’s mistress, Shug. In Barbara Christian’s essay “Alice Walker: The Black Woman Artist as Wayward,” woman community in The Color Purple is considered to be “the sisterhood they must share with each other in order to liberate themselves.” Walker believes that women have to bond together in order to empower themselves. Although woman community is a necessity in Walker’s works, different from The Color Purple, the community in Possessing the Secret of Joy does not appear as a closed community which has the limitation of gender or race, but an open one that allows differences to a universal extent. In addition to Tashi’s black female company, Tashi’s white psychologist The Old Man, Lisette who is a white French, her husband Adam, and Adam’s illegitimate child Pierre are cross-race or male characters who help her through the healing process. Walker’s Bildungsroman is situated in this kind of community to provide

empathy that is required in the healing. The empathy enables everyone to understand the trauma and participate the healing instead of taking the trauma as an issue that is limited within the self. The Bildungsroman is expanding from within to a social

sphere of community that the self-consciousness can only be awakened of its identity through the healing of the trauma.

Since the story is about the awakening and development of Tashi after a healing process, this story of trauma should be recognized as a universal issue that is

educative to everyone like a Bildungsroman should work, rather than a black woman

novel restricted in a racial or gender context. This concern is brought out disapproving this limitation. When Tashi buys paper to print signs in order to express herself, she changes her mind about choosing white paper and says, “White is not the culprit this time. Bring me out paper of the colors of our flag.” (104) Tashi points out that the

problem is not the color of the complexion and understands that her suffering is not dominated by racial suppression but her trust toward her own blood. Although here it seems that Walker extends this issue into a bigger context of nation, she also broadens it with an approach mentioning the Chinese tradition of footbinding that further relates the trauma in a cross-national connection. Another example is what the American Amy tells Tashi about. This is a fact that Tashi first refuses to believe because she cannot imagine the trauma to happen in other places, especially in the United States which she always admires and imagines to be free and bright. These evidences are represented as a reminder that the trauma is a shared issue that can happen everywhere and should be understood by everyone.

It is evident that Alice Walker’s effort on self-development healing from trauma that is both a private and public matter. Possessing the Secret of Joy reclaims the influence of the works by ethnic women. The influence is expanded to an extent that in spite of the racial and gender contexts of the story, its provoking effect should not be limited in any restricted context but a universal issue without its specificity. Her story is a Bildungsroman not only for the women and the black but also for every

individual that is searching for a way out while facing wounds no matter of their own or others.

Works Cited

Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, eds. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Hanover and London: UP of New England, 1983.

Cristian, Barbara. “Alice Walker: The Black Woman Artist as Wayward.” Black Woman Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans. New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1984. 457-77.

Feng, Pin-chia. The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston: A Postmodern Reading. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1998. Parker-Smith, Bettye J. “Alice Walker’s Women: In Search of Some Peace of

Mind.” Evans 478-93

Walker, Alice. Possessing the Secret of Joy. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.