Trauma and Testimony: Embodied Memory in Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home

Trauma, by its very nature, resists articulation. While the effects of trauma silence and banish the offending experience from consciousness, bodily evidence remains. Consequently the event, never processed by the survivor because of its overwhelming magnitude and intensity, reveals itself in a bodily acting out. This article explores how Loida Maritza Pérez narrates the inherent violence of poverty and racism experienced by a dislocated Dominican family in New York City in her novel of family trauma, Geographies of Home (1999).

Drawing upon the insights of trauma and gender studies, this article focuses on the body, to show how its representation in Pérez’s novel addresses silence, trauma’s hallmark, to give voice to previously unclaimed experiences. The bleeding, mutilated and oppressed female body becomes a figure that disrupts the silencing effects of trauma and gives witness to the political violence that is devastating the nation (the body politic) in its personal connection to the material effects experienced by the body at home. Geographies of Home, therefore, performs the dialectic of trauma and testimony by configuring the personal as inseparable from the public terrain of national traumas. The personal turns political in this text in ways that not only intersect these two categories, but also collapse them in dramatic fashion. Pérez’s work thus testifies to experienced realities—working class and immigrant experiences—that would otherwise be erased, and it shows the creativity and resilience of those women who resist silencing.